Moonlight Medicine: Inoculation by Jen Haeger Page A

reports of strange sightings or animal attacks from the previous lunar cycle.
    Several hours passed in relative silence, so when the land line of the condo rang it startled all three of them. Evelyn stared at the cordless handset in its charging station for three rings before answering, because she didn’t have any idea who would have the number, let alone be calling it, and the caller I.D. was no help, reading only “private”. In the end, she decided that it was more important to answer it in case it was some kind of emergency. Biting the inside of her cheek and with white-knuckled fingers, she picked up the device and pressed the answer button.
    “Hello?”
    Evelyn tried to disguise her voice in a higher tone and sound relaxed and airy, but none of her efforts fooled the person on the other end of the line.
    “Evie, darlin’! It’s good to hear your voice. Roberto tells me that I’ve missed a few things that you would bring mw up to speed on.”
    Evelyn’s bottom lip trembled and she let out a shaky sigh of relief. “Clem.”

11
    Nicolas had only been on American soil for a few hours when the news of the botched assassination attempt at the meeting of the Betas reached him. He shook with fury, not just because it was sloppy and exposed the Vulke and their intentions to the other packs, but because Taras was going to blame him for it despite the fact that he hadn’t even been in the same country when it happened. But that didn’t matter to Taras; all that mattered to him was that he had recently assigned Nicolas head of the American campaign, so any snafus were his fault. The perpetrator had not even been a member of the Vulke, but one of the zealots from the Anubis pack, but Nicolas knew all that was without consequence.
    Even though he hated to be overseas, especially smack dab in the middle of the idiocy and decadence that was the United States, Nicolas knew that Taras had sent him because the Wahya pack, their arrogant sidekicks the Amaruq, and their bastard offshoot the Inali were the only true threats to the Vulke revolution. Even Roberto could not hold the packs together if those packs should fall, and it was an honor to be given the responsibility of destroying them. That there was already a lynchpin in place, ready to topple the entire miserable lot of them, did not diminish that honor.
    Nicolas peered out the window at the drab landscape of factories and billboards. It was his first trip to America, and so far he was not impressed. The training facility he was being taken to was in Gary, Indiana. He understood that it was in an industrial center, so the factories were expected, but it was the cloying, banal ads on the billboards that made Nicolas grind his teeth. Americans had so much, yet they always wanted more, and the rest of the world wanted what America had. He was all too familiar with the way black market Levis jeans and pirated DVDs flew off his shelves back when he had been in the import business. Nicolas was only sorry that he likely wouldn’t live long enough to see the true Vulke revolution when the Vulke would not only dominate the other packs, but the human world as well. It would have to be enough to be a vital part of the beginning, and with luck and skill he would see at least the Vulke’s victory over the other packs.
    When the mind-numbing scenery seemed to go on forever, Nicolas finally turned to the driver. “How long?”
    “We’re about twenty kilometers out, Sir.”
    In the back seat, Nicolas closed his eyes and thought about things that he would have to accomplish in the next few weeks, all of his tasks before the next lunar cycle. Unfortunately, he couldn’t focus solely on what the other packs were doing, so he would have to rely on others to watch them and report back. His main task was to make sure that the training centers were all at or near capacity and functioning as desired to increase the animal instincts of the strays and dampen their human tendencies. Without