Grant Campbell sauntered across the dark dance floor of Sudden Death, the nightclub his wolf-shifter clan owned. Only the lights above the emergency exits guided him, but he didn’t need more. He had the preternaturally sharp eyes of a shifter, after all.
He liked these silent, empty moments after the club had closed and the partiers and staff had gone home. Only he remained, to go through every nook and cranny to check that no one had slipped past security, or see whether something needed repairing before the next night.
Everything was in order, as it should be. It had been a busy Friday night for August, but not an unruly one. People were still mindful of the newly renovated interior. After almost a decade of edgy rusty iron, steel scaffolding, and strobe lights, they’d closed the place for June and July and gutted the interior of the Edwardian brown-brick factory back to bare walls and started from scratch.
The walls and ceiling were fitted with LED light panels that ran pink, purple, and blue lights in sequences and geometrical shapes. The scaffolding that had circled the dance floors in four tiers was replaced with a larger dance floor, from which terraced seating areas rose in several tiers, with bars on the lowest level and the top, where the VIP lounge was. There, the corrugated iron booths had been replaced with large comfortable sofas sturdy enough to accommodate even the biggest vampire warriors of the Crimson Circle, who liked to make the place their base.
Grant was satisfied with the change. The patrons seemed happy with it too. Even vampires, who tended to resist change, had expressed their satisfaction. There was more room for people to sit down and drink; the flow between the bars and the dance floor was less congested; and he didn’t have to worry about people falling from the narrow scaffolds anymore. There was also more space underneath the terraced structure for customer loos and staff, which made everyone happier.
It was a good change, but as he reached the back door, his mind was already churning with the next project. Maybe they could renovate the clan’s other club, Reverie, next…
Grant paused before he opened the door to breathe slowly. In this brief moment, no one bothered him, no one demanded anything from him, nothing disturbed his solitude. He was the alpha of White Lodge Clan, and his clan always needed him. He needed them too, but the fleeting moments of solitude were necessary for him to charge his batteries so that he was ready to face whatever waited for him at home.
It used to be the same-old, with a sprinkle of something interesting every now and then. A sprained ankle here, a fight there, a pup skipping school, an adult losing their job. Nothing he hadn’t handled multiple times over ever since the deaths of several alphas in succession almost a century ago had made him, the third in line, the unlikely alpha—the price the Great War had demanded of him.
These days, the problems were more pressing, more severe, and nothing the two-natured had seen before: unprecedented attacks against their kind by an enemy who didn’t seem to have a goal, leadership, or a base. Renegades, as the enemy was called—or demon vampires—had rendered the two-natured helpless, and he didn’t like that feeling. Who could defend against black magic that twisted shifters’ minds and allowed the enemy to butcher them wholesale—or make them butcher each other? The memory of the massacre of an entire clan earlier that year made him squeeze the door handle so hard his knuckles cracked.
He’d taken what action he could. He’d offered their clan grounds as a safe place for smaller shifter clans who couldn’t protect themselves. Three clans would soon move into the new houses being built on the White Lodge clan estate in Richmond, at the edge of the metropolitan London area. The construction company, owned by the Greenwood clan wolf-shifters, had worked tirelessly to build the houses in six short months. The interiors still needed some work, but the houses were liveable now.
About damn time. With construction workers and trucks coming and going at all hours in the past months, security had been a nightmare. Some clans had moved within White Lodge Estate already, living in camper vans and tents. That had required organising sanitation and feeding dozens of new mouths. The renovation of the club had been a much-needed escape for him.
Amazingly enough, no new renegade attacks had taken place since the massacre—not on a similar scale, at any rate—but that only tightened his nerves more. The enemy hadn’t given up, and a new attack could come any day. But he would worry about that later, after he’d gotten home, showered, changed, and had a nap. Maybe he could even eat breakfast before he was needed again.
Shaking himself, Grant activated the building-wide alarm by the back door and stepped out. The predawn light was almost painful after the darkness of the club, and he blinked to adjust his sensitive eyes. His wolf aura peeked out of his chest, as if to protest the intrusion. He smiled in his mind and told it to get back to sleep. The translucent, three-dimensional, full-colour embodiment of his second nature yawned and shook itself as if its silver fur were real in this form. Grant could feel it too, like a phantom sensation on his back.
The wolf aura made to settle down again, but then its ears perked and it cocked its head to listen to something. Grant, too, heard a faint scraping from the row of bins by the side wall.
“Do we have rats?” he asked his wolf aloud, as if it couldn’t perfectly hear him in their shared minds, but he liked to talk to it like it were a companion by his side instead of inside him.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if there were rats. The club was located in Camden Town, and Regent’s Canal was only two short streets down. All sorts of critters lived by it.
The mention of rat made his wolf perk. Hunt, it commanded inside his mind, and for a moment Grant was tempted. Rats weren’t much of a prey, and even less of a meal, but they were vicious enough to fight back against a wolf, and that would cheer them both up. Moreover, he couldn’t really allow the vermin to start making a home here. But he shook his head.
“We can’t hunt in here.”
City foxes were tolerated, even when they were going through people’s trash, but a wolf would cause a huge alarm. As if humans didn’t know shifters existed, he sneered to himself. But humans were good at pretending they were the only kind around. Fox-shifters made a good use of the image of their wild brethren and went around in their fox form whenever they wanted. Wolves didn’t enjoy the same freedom.
Nevertheless, guided by his own curiosity as much as his wolf’s, he approached the bins, stretching his own ear in a useless imitation of his second nature. Nothing scurried outside, so the critter had to be in one of them. Rats could chew through plastic like it was butter, forcing him to replace the trash containers often.
He opened the first one, but it was too full to see if the rat was inside, and he didn’t intend to rummage through the trash. The second one was less full, but he couldn’t see the rat in there either. Or smell it, thanks to the contents of the bin.
He opened the last one—and something hissed at him. He blinked, staring baffled at the occupant.
“You’re not a rat.”
The bin was almost empty save one corner where to his utter bemusement, huddled a leopard cub. Grant blinked again and tilted his head like his wolf to make sure he was seeing right. It was definitely a leopard, a panther so black it almost disappeared in its corner in predawn light. A shifter, undoubtedly, as natural leopards didn’t roam Central London freely all that often, no matter that the London Zoo was a short stretch away. He could sense it through Might, the energy that powered the two-natured, but the sensation was very faint, as if the cub didn’t want to be found.
His wolf aura stretched closer to the cub, sniffing curiously, and it hissed again, its tiny teeth bared and its hackles up as if to appear larger. It only looked adorable.
“How did you get in here?” Grant asked, reaching to pick the cub up. It swatted at him with its claws extended, sharp even that small.
“None of that attitude,” he admonished. His tone was calm and soothing, but he added a bit of his alpha power in his voice, and sent warmth and assurance of safety through Might. They weren’t the same kinds of shifters, and he wasn’t the cub’s alpha, but the intent travelled. The cub went slack.
Grant pressed it—him—against his chest. He was heavier than he looked, though scrawny like he hadn’t eaten in days. He found that odd. A shifter would always find prey even in a city. There were pigeons and rats aplenty.
“Are you a runaway? Have you travelled far?” There was only one leopard-shifter clan in or near London, and the cub didn’t belong to it. He smelled different, and there were no panthers among the Maze Hill leopards. Besides, they would have raised an unholy ruckus if one of them had gone missing.
Moreover, he’d come to know the leopards very well these past months, as they were one of the clans that would be moving into White Lodge Estate. They didn’t have cubs this age.
The cub was shivering in fear, and he held the little one closer, leaning against the bin so that he wouldn’t startle the child. Or maybe not a child anymore, as he had lost most of his baby form. One of the quirks of shifters was that when they shifted for the first time in puberty, they shifted into little cubs and pups, and remained so for several years until the mind and brain of the animal form reached the maturity level of the host and they turned into a gangly adolescent in their early twenties. It was still faster though than with vampires who could take a century to gain control of their second nature. The cub was skinny, but the longer limbs and torso suggested he could be over twenty in his human form already.
“Can you shift back to human so that we can talk?” he asked the cub, but he only shivered more. He decided to leave be. “Come, let’s go home so you can get something to eat.”
Holding the cub close to his heartbeat, he rounded the building to where his car was. He climbed in behind the wheel, but when he made to place the cub on the adjoining seat, he sank his claws into Grant’s shirt and wouldn’t let go. Grant didn’t try to make him.
“Fine, but if the cops stop us, I’m blaming you.”
The cub sighed, pressed his head on the crook of Grant’s arm, where it lay surprisingly heavily, and fell asleep. It would be a long drive to Richmond.
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Verona Sullivan jogged across a meadow between the east wall of the White Lodge wolf-shifter clan estate and the main house, still full of energy even though she’d patrolled the east border the whole night. The nightly solitude charged her batteries. The vast meadow offered as good an illusion of being alone as it was possible this close to Central London, which was essential for her leopard’s mental well-being. The closest human habitation was Roehampton, behind Beverly Brook and a golf course, and barely any sounds reached from there at night. To the west, on the other side of White Lodge Estate, Richmond Park spread several times larger than the clan estate, isolating them from the rest of the world.
Morning dew soaked through her sneakers, and she shivered like a cat, the reaction coming from her leopard aura that was stretching out of her chest, trying to push her into shifting so that it could run too. But now wasn’t the time for that. She needed to remain human so she could make her report to the head of clan security before she went to bed.
The dew was necessary for the parched grass and she shouldn’t complain. The sun was rising. The meadow would dry soon, as would her shoes. It didn’t even matter that the meadow wasn’t as green as it had been in spring, offering a hint of the emerald lushness of her native Ireland—a memory from over a century ago now, from when she’d lived there as a child.
Nothing in England came even close to her memories, definitely not Greenwich, where Maze Hill leopard-shifter clan had their home, despite the name. In summer, the large park by their home turned to dry dead yellow where nothing seemed to grow.
Despite Richmond Park not faring much better when it came to healthy lawn this summer, she liked it here. The air seemed fresher and there were much fewer tourists roaming the public park. There were good hiding places for a leopard, trees to climb on, and even deer that the White Lodge clan was allowed to hunt to a certain extent. Not that there had been hunts recently. The White Lodge alpha wouldn’t risk his people’s safety for a moment of fun.
Not with renegades around.
She approved, even though there hadn’t been any attacks recently. The enemy was still around. There had been small incidents on the construction site throughout the building project, equipment breaking and materials being damaged, as if renegades wanted to make sure other clans couldn’t move into the safety of a larger clan. But they hadn’t been able to catch anyone in the act so far. No one had attacked her clan in Greenwich either, but she wouldn’t feel complacent about that, not while some of the clan still remained there; Robert Horton, their alpha, among them.
She would’ve wanted to stay in town too, but Robert had wanted her here to keep an eye on the construction. She’d been the clan security until Robert had decided to make her his beta. She’d been security much longer than a beta, and couldn’t shake the need to keep everyone safe. She’d even joined the patrol rota here, though the wolves were perfectly capable of keeping their territory safe.
“We’ll be fine without you for a few months,” Robert had assured her. “I’m centuries old. I can resist the black magic of these renegades. And I’ll send as many as I can abroad to visit other clans. They’ll be safe there.”
Foreign visits were always a good plan. There were so few leopard clans in the world, all of them fairly small, that the only way to avoid inbreeding was to have extended visits among other clans in the hopes it would lead to matings. Their clan had three unmarried women and one unmarried man who wanted to find mates for themselves and had been eager to visit other clans, one in France and the other in Italy. Some parents and many other older members had gone with them too, for a chance to see their relatives, having moved to London when they mated into the Maze Hill clan.
Rona herself had ended up in London over a century ago, barely in her twenties, a veritable child in shifter terms. But she hadn’t come as a mate, and she hadn’t moved voluntarily. Her birth clan in Ireland had withered and died for lack of new blood after the Irish famines of the nineteenth century that had ravaged one- and two-natured alike, a great trauma for the long-living two-natured.
The handful of clan members who had been left—none of whom had been blood family to her—had scattered all over Europe. Many one-natured Irish had fled to America, but that hadn’t been an option for the two-natured. Shifters and vampires couldn’t move there, or even visit, thanks to the peace agreement that had ended the Sentient War at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which had granted the new continent for the third two-natured kind, the sentients.
London had been a good option for Rona, the clan welcoming and warm. She had known from the start that they expected her to mate with a member of the clan and bring new blood to it. But there hadn’t been any available males around when she reached shifters’ definition of maturity, and those who had been born since were like little brothers to her. Not very helpful when it came to mating. So, she was still unmated at the prime age of 131. She felt it keenly, even though the clan wouldn’t start to push for her to mate for at least another century.
One of the unmated males, Toby Horton, had followed her to stay with the White Lodge clan, even though at seventy-two he could look for a mate too. He wasn’t expected to mate for offspring though, and he hadn’t been looking for anyone serious, not since he’d broken up with his boyfriend last fall. He would’ve wanted to stay in Greenwich too, to better reach his favourite clubs, but Robert, his grandfather as well as his alpha, had sent him to Richmond with Rona.
“You can commute to work from there with the wolves.”
Toby hadn’t complained. His easy acquiescence had baffled Rona, but he’d told her that his good friend from university, Corynn Sparks, had almost died at the hands of these renegades a year ago. Had died, in fact, but had been brought back to life as a vampire. He knew what they were up against.
His latest round of university, that was. Toby had studied for various degrees, including a PhD in East-Asian languages and another one in art, every decade or so. He said he’d keep studying as long as he looked like a twenty-something. He’d recently graduated with a maths degree and was now working at a company owned by the Crimson Circle vampire warriors, doing who knew what. With his degrees, it could be anything from maintenance to running the place.
Rona had never been interested in learning for learning’s sake. She’d become a nurse when that was practically the only avenue available for women, then later a teacher. When women were accepted into the police force, she’d become one, and had enjoyed the job. But recently, since being selected as beta, she’d concentrated in overseeing the clan’s matters and businesses and hadn’t worked outside.
Rona and Toby were the only leopard clan members currently within the White Lodge walls. Maybe it was for the best. The two wolf-shifter clans who had brought everyone and their uncle here were causing enough security nightmares as it was. Rona didn’t need her clansmen adding to the chaos.
She was happy Toby was here, even if he was busy during the day and she was mostly nocturnal, preferring to run in her leopard form here without fear she would be caught by one-natured. She couldn’t do that in Greenwich Park that wasn’t exclusively theirs. Toby loved running in his human form too, and kept her company whenever she needed to stretch her human legs.
She reached the manor, a large eighteenth-century Palladian limestone surrounded by a formal courtyard on both sides. The elegant building couldn’t be more different from her clan’s rambling gothic revival castle, even though the two were about the same age. White Lodge manor had many later renovations and side buildings too, all currently in use, every last room filled with members of the clans moving in, in addition to those camping on the meadow.
She and Toby shared a two-bedroom guest suite in the main manor. She would’ve preferred camping too, but Toby loved the suite—and the creature comforts that came with the rooms—and hadn’t wanted to move outdoors.
She’d resigned herself to it. She might as well, because she’d be living among the wolves for the next couple of years while the leopard clan updated the gothic monstrosity they called home. They’d been planning the renovation for a couple of years already, with architects and technical and historical experts, and had been ready to act when this forced opportunity came.
If everything went well, the threat to the two-natured would be over by the time the renovation was finished, and they could all return home.
Lauren Walker, the wolf clan head of security, was waiting for the night shift on the round driveway outside the main entrance that faced the meadow. She was a tall and muscular woman, large even for a wolf, with a bleached spiky hair that had earned her the nickname “Spike.” Or it could be her prickly personality, though she didn’t treat Rona any differently for not being a wolf.
“Report,” she said curtly when Rona reached her.
“I think someone tried to intrude last night,” Rona said, her brows knitting. “I can’t give you anything specific though, only a sensation.”
“Black magic?”
Rona’s mouth went dry, but she shook her head. “Like an ill intention, someone up to no good.”
“Do you often sense such intentions?” It wasn’t a dismissive question, only curious, so she shrugged.
“I’m Irish.”
Spike accepted that at face value. “Did you investigate?”
“Yes, but the sensation faded before I was able to find the source. Have others mentioned anything?”
Spike shook her head. “No, but not many have arrived yet.”
Two men on night patrol, Tom Heard and Lou Perkins, were walking towards them from the direction of the construction site. Everyone patrolled alone, but the two mature wolves—about two hundred in actual years—were good friends, and often met up during their patrols to chat, and occasionally patrolled together too.
“Did you feel anything odd tonight?” Spike asked without wasting time on greetings. The men glanced at each other and shook their heads.
“Nothing. Heard nothing and smelled nothing either,” Tom assured her.
Spike turned to Rona: “Could be it was nothing. But if it happens again, let me know immediately. I don’t care what time of day or night it is.”
Rona assured her she would, and turned to round the building. The front door was basically used only by guests. Everyone else used a side entrance on the other side.
A large Land Rover was pulling over by the garages at the back. Recognising the driver, her entire body quivered in anticipation and awareness. She froze, annoyed by the reaction. If there was one thing causing her constant stress living here, it was Grant Campbell, the alpha of White Lodge Clan. It was embarrassing to be constantly reacting to him like a cat in heat.
She could understand the lust though. Who wouldn’t be attracted to a tall, sleek, and broad-shouldered man? His hair was fashionably cut and silver-grey, but not with age like humans so often assumed—it would take more than his two centuries before he started to show signs of aging—but because it matched the fur of his wolf. He shared his extraordinary eyes with his wolf too: light blue with a dark rim around the iris, like those of a husky. He often joked that there had to be a dog-shifter somewhere in his ancestry. Entirely possible, though she’d never seen husky-shifters. His face was narrow and strong, and his voice was a low, pleasant rumble that reminded her of the purr of a very large cat—or a leopard.
Maybe that was what she was reacting to.
But the sexy do, fashionable clothes, and sensual purr paled in comparison with his impact in Might that everyone could feel regardless of their species. He only needed to show up and everyone stood at attention. The car door wasn’t even open yet and she could sense his presence. But instead of fear, it made her panties wet.
He was a good alpha, trusted and loved by his clan. She could respect him. But she had a duty to her clan, and messing around with a wolf didn’t align with that. Even if he would be extraordinary in bed…
The door opened and she braced for the inevitable impact that his long legs in blue jeans had on her. But he didn’t exit immediately. His head was down and he seemed to be talking to himself. It was a bit out of character, so she didn’t disturb him.
Finally, his tall form unfolded out of the car. He flashed her a smile that addled her so badly that it took her a moment to realise he was carrying something. He cocked a questioning silver brow at her.
“Suppose you haven’t lost a leopard cub?”
Return to top Return to booksMagic past the Awakened Moon comes out on March 8. You can preorder it on Amazon, Smashwords, Apple Books, Kobo, and B&N.