Dawn Thompson by Blood Moon Page A

knew what that entailed. Instead, she stalked the creature, busily nibbling at crumbs of bread she’d dropped from the fare Bates had provided at the dinner hour. All sensible thoughts fled her mind. Making matters worse, she could still smell Jon’s blood; she had since he sank his fangs into his forearm.
    All at once, her fangs started to descend. She was the predator now, with eyes only for her prey, the unsuspecting rat. She licked the drool from her lips, crept along on tiptoe, and pounced.

C HAPTER F OUR
    The plan was to return to the woad field, transform, and collect the clothing he’d left there earlier, so he could dress and feed before he returned to the Abbey. Cassandra was safe, now that he had put distance between them, and he was running free. Why did his heart ache so? There was no relief from it. Even as the dire wolf it ached. Ironically, it was his human side—that facet of Jon, the man that lived inside, still untouched by the evil, still untainted by the vampire’s kiss. How long would it live so? If only he knew. When he was the wolf, he saw himself as Jon, the man, through a distortion, as a separate entity. He heard his thoughts as if they were coming from an echo chamber. When he was himself and the feeding frenzy was upon him, it was as if he were two people under the same skin, shadow-selves always together though worlds apart. And when the bloodlust overcame him, the pinging in his brain echoed in his sex, bringing it to life in an unstoppable frenzy, leading him closer and closer to the ultimate climax—a sexual rhapsody of carnaldesire and lust after the very essence of life. The thirst was only to be slaked by sexual consummation at the precise moment of the making ritual.
    Jon didn’t even know how such a ritual would take place, only that when the time came it would be involuntary, like everything else in his strange condition. He also knew he had to fight against it, and against Sebastian’s lust for the same consummation, that passion to “complete” Cassandra.
    Pondering those thoughts on the bleak periphery of his shadow-self deep inside
canis dirus
, Jon failed to see the hunter raise his pistol. He failed to hear the crack and boom of thunder as the ball exploded from the chamber, riding a burst of blood-red flame. It was as if time stood still until the missile impacted, causing him to break his stride, lifting him into the air with a howl that reverberated through man and beast.
    He came down hard with a thud in a cloud of yellow woad spores riding the north wind. The unforgettable pungency spiraled through him to his very core: deeper than the wolf, clear to the memories of his childhood, when the woad field was his secret place, his adolescent escape from the invisibility that was his lot as a second son. That is, until the scythes robbed him of it every Midsummer’s Eve, when the farmers cleared the field. That and the scent of blood—
his blood
—was enough to set him on his feet, albeit scrambling. Where was he hit? In the shock of that terrible instant he couldn’t feel pain, but he could see, through a blood-red haze, the hunter plowing toward him through the woad. The deep-throated rattle of a snarl poured from him as he sprang, driving the man down, sinking his fangs deep into that throat.
    Soon, the hunter’s hands fisted in his fur fell away. Still the wolf drank—not too much, just enough to satisfy his craving without killing the gudgeon. Until that moment, Jon had not known that he could feed in wolf form. Was this a power he had always possessed, or was the condition changing again, heightening, taking him deeper and deeper into darkness? If only he knew what he was facing. That he didn’t, that was the worst of it.
    Having slaked his bloodlust, Jon fell back on his haunches, panting. The man stretched out beside him had lost consciousness. He would wake in a daze, just as Jon had done when Sebastian fed upon him. Raising his head to the heavens, Jon