Moon Burned (The Wolf Wars Book 1) Read online

  Moon Burned

  The Wolf Wars Series: Book 1

  H. D. Gordon

  Copyright © 2017 H. D. Gordon

  Published by H. D. Gordon Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

  For all the brave & beautiful women of the world.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  The End

  About the Author

  Sneak Peek

  Blood Warrior

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Blood Warrior & Mailing List Sign Up

  Be cool; review

  1

  The summer sun blazed down over Dogshead and the surrounding lands as if it had been personally insulted by the mere existence of the place. I leaned against the squat wood structure that housed a bar and gambling den, stealing some of the shade cast by the wretched building, drawing deeply of the smoke balanced between my first and second fingers.

  The clank and clatter of someone striking a tin bell rang through the square, and people began to emerge from the wooden edifices. The unpaved, dusty street—not having seen a good rain for nearly two weeks—sent up plumes of dirt as children and stray dogs darted here and there. Others gathered under the shade cast by the squat structures, leaned on fence posts, and sat beneath the awnings of hotels, hostels, and various dens of iniquity.

  I remained where I was, smoking my square. It was the first of the month, the time when the new Dogs would be brought in, which was always a spectacle.

  It was also a fight weekend, and I was one of the unlucky Dogs on the roster. When the unforgiving sun set tomorrow evening, I would step into The Ring for the eighteenth time—a number that matched my approximate age. I would be forced to shift into my Wolf form and fight another to the death.

  I knew he was behind me before he spoke, and I tilted my head in the slightest to let him know it was so.

  “You got a fight tomorrow, don’t ya, Rook?” His voice was gravelly and somehow inherently offensive. I turned to see Murphy step out of the shadows cast by the adjacent building like a scarecrow come to life—which was actually an apt description of the male.

  He limped toward me, his broken gait as familiar as the stench that floated off him and carried on the wind. In the dirt square before us, the procession of incoming Dogs had begun. Wagons with large cages full of newly acquired slaves began to roll through, guided and guarded by Hounds and Sellers, whips hanging ever coiled at their hips.

  “You know the roster,” I replied after taking time to drag from my square, my body subconsciously angling away from him. Murphy was the kind of Wolf that females knew well; the kind that set instinctual alarm bells ringing in the stomach.

  But the Masters protected him, so it was best to just ignore him, to keep my mouth shut and opt for being civil.

  Murphy sidled up beside me, the scent of death and fresh-turned earth lingering on him like cheap aftershave, his beady eyes fixing on the procession of wagons. After the fights, Murphy’s job was to take out the dead Dogs and bury them, their bodies nourishing the soil for the crops of the coming seasons. It was a lucky job for a Stray, an easy ride that those like me, who were forced into The Ring, resented.

  In the hierarchy that was Werewolf society, the Gravediggers were a step above the Dogs, but that one step may as well have been a leap.

  Gravediggers didn’t have to fight to survive, after all. Dogs did.

  “You thinkin’ about running?” Murph asked, and I could sense the brown-toothed grin that was tugging up his lips without having to look at him.

  I didn’t respond to this. I drew on my square, held in the smoke, and released it.

  He moved a bit closer, and the hair on the back of my neck went up, the Wolf in me raising its hackles. It would be no large matter for me to sink my teeth into his neck and tear his throat out, no issue I’d lose sleep over.

  But as much as being a Dog taught one to live by violence, it also made it imperative to choose one’s battles wisely.

  “Because you know,” he continued, his warm breath brushing over my cheek, making the rabbit I’d consumed for breakfast gurgle wretchedly in my belly, “they catch every Dog that desserts. You know that? Every. Single. One… Then they bring you back here and make an example outta you. Strip you naked and string you up.” His eyes roamed over me. His voice lowered. “When it’s done, I get your body.” A wet sound as his tongue slithered over his lips. “I get to do what I please before I bury you in the fields.”

  My only response was to inhale deeply of my cigarette, hold it in my lungs for a tic before blowing it coolly into his face. His nose scrunched up, making his nostrils flare, and a little Wolf-Gold lit up his glassy, probing eyes. Werewolves—even those as old and perverted as Murphy—had highly sensitive noses.

  As he waved at the air in front of him, a low growl emanating from his belly, more wagons full of slaves continued past. The sound of whips cracking made my jaw clench. It was a sound every Dog who made it past their fifth year of life knew well.

  A stray Wolf could become a “Dog”—sentenced to a life and death in The Ring—one of two ways. The first way was the most common; they were bred into it. Birthed solely for the purpose of being trained, sold, and fought. They were named “Dogs” after the lesser beasts, as creations meant for nothing but servitude. When we were not fighting and killing, we were working the fields to pay for our “living expenses”

  “Lookie there,” Murphy said, leaning closer to me still, his posture highly hostile while I remained unmoved, leaning carelessly against the wall. He pointed a bony finger at one of the wagons crossing the square.

  “I do believe they call that one the Bear, because she’s the biggest She-Wolf anybody’s ever seen…” He coughed into his hand, phlegm rattling in his chest. When he was finished, he added, “And because I do know the roster, I know that she’s your opponent tomorrow night. How do you like that, R
ook the Rabid?” The laugh that followed was vulgar and insolent.

  My gaze followed his line of sight. The wagon to which Murphy had been referring held only one person, unlike most of the other wagons, which had been stuffed to the brim with as many people as they could hold. The Werewolf they called the Bear stood alone in the center of her own cage, and she was indeed as large as a mountain, even in her human form.

  It had been a while since I had felt real fear, as it was an emotion I had grown mostly numb to, but a bit of it spiraled through my stomach now.

  The Bear was corded with muscle, veins pulsing through her arms and legs like vines crawling up the trunks of sturdy trees. Her skin was smooth ebony, her eyes darker still, like two black holes. Her head had been shaved and it gleamed in the summer sun. The look in her eyes was one I also knew well—that of a Dog finally succumbed to their animalistic side. It was a gaze that lacked faith or reason. The gaze of a hopeless, half-mad slave.

  I’d seen the look in my own reflection on the worst of nights.

  When Murphy lifted his hand to stroke his fingers down my cheek, I snapped.

  It was like the flipping of a switch with me, as it always had been. One moment I was in control, and the next I was… Well, rabid.

  I gripped Murphy’s wrist tight enough to make his bones creak, slapping my other hand over his mouth to cut off his squeal while spinning our bodies so that he was the one with his back against the wall.

  In the following instant, my knee came up and slammed into his most tender spot, and he sputtered a sound that was half gasp and half choke as I shoved him harder against the unforgiving wall of the building, holding up his weight easily with my supernatural strength.

  My eyes glowed Wolf-Gold as I released my hold on his wrist, transferring my grip to his throat. I squeezed just hard enough to make him panic for air.

  As calm now as the countryside moments before a tornado, I leaned in and held the Gravedigger’s gaze so that there could be no mistaking my next words.

  “I will kill you if you ever try to touch me again,” I told him. “I’ll slit your throat and leave your body in a ditch for the carrion to find if you even look at me, and I will gladly take the lashings for it. I’ll smile while they whip me.”

  My grip on his throat tightened a fraction, his pockmarked face turning a sick shade of blue. I asked if he understood me, and he managed an enthusiastic nod while his eyes bulged from his head.

  Shoving Murphy back into the wall for final punctuation, I allowed him to slump down to the ground and cradle his private parts while gasping for air. As he did so, I searched the ground for the half-smoked square that I’d discarded unwittingly in my rage, found it, and dusted off the filter before placing it into the corner of my mouth and striding out into Dogshead square.

  I did not turn around to look at the Gravedigger where I’d left him slumped in the shadows, but I could feel his angry gaze on my back, and I wondered if it would have been wise to just kill him right then and there and take the consequences.

  Choices, after all, always led to consequences…but I’d worry about that after my fight.

  Because whatever retaliation Murphy the Gravedigger might seek was nothing if I couldn’t survive in The Ring tomorrow night against the Bear.

  2

  I allowed the final wagons to finish their procession before crossing the street, eyes fixed on a bar called the Blood Moon. It was a place where many a Dog, Hound, and Stray came to drown their sorrows, lose their earnings, or pay for a roll in the hay with one of the working ladies of Dogshead.

  As the last wagon trundled by, I forcibly kept an apathetic look on my face. The wagon was full of pups ranging in age from three to ten years old, half of them destined for slavery as Dogs, the other half doomed for an early, violent death.

  There was always a demand for a supply of new fighters, because every fight in The Ring was to the death. This was where the Collectors and Sellers (Werewolves who made a living in the capturing, buying, and selling of their own kind—the worst kind of Wolves, in my opinion) came in. They snatched up Strays wherever they could find them, and because the world of a Wolf was a violent one, this left plenty of pups running around without anyone to care for them. Easy prey, as one might call it.

  This was how it had been with me. Fifteen years ago, I had been a pup riding into town in a cage hitched to the back of a horse-drawn wagon.

  As this thought flitted across my mind, my eyes locked with one of the pups in the final wagon. I wanted to look away, but was captured by the gaze of the little Wolf in the cage. The pup’s eyes were a striking shade of hazel—a rainbow of colors, not so different from the shade of my own eyes. In them, I could see the terror I knew so well, masked by a stubborn defiance I also found relation to.

  My ruined heart gave a tug in my chest, and now I really wanted to look away, but still found myself unable. The Wolf pup rested her little brown head between her paws, her gaze holding mine as though unawares of the spell it had cast over me.

  Before I could think better of doing so, I found myself sending a thought to the girl in the telepathic manner Wolf-kind were capable of sharing with one another.

  “Do not be afraid, little one,” I thought.

  I knew I had been heard when the pup in the cage lifted her head, her ears perking and swiveling. Her hazel eyes gleamed with unshed tears as the summer sun beamed brightly down from above, and I wished foolishly that I could offer more than empty words of solace to the child, that I could offer more to the world than a fight on a Friday night that ended in my death or that of another.

  But that was not the way things were. That was not the reality we lived in.

  The wagon continued its slow trundle until it was out of sight.

  The smell of booze, sweat, and Werewolf filled the Blood Moon Bar and Tavern even though most of last night’s customers had left hours before. I suspected the stench had permeated the walls, and no matter how much polish Bernard the bartender rubbed over the bar’s gleaming wooden surface, or lemon-scented cleaner he used to mop the floors, the underlying scents would always be evident to a Wolf’s nose.

  Bernard offered me a smile that revealed his multi-colored, crooked teeth. As always, he wore slacks and a button-up collared shirt tucked tightly into his pants and rolled up at the sleeves. His thick black eyebrows sat low over his dark brown eyes, and his mustache twitched as he breathed through his nose.

  “There’s my favorite fighter,” Bernard said, pouring a glass of apple juice and sliding it down the bar to me before I had to ask.

  I pulled out a stool and sat down before taking a long swig of the sweet juice. “You say that to all the female Dogs,” I said, running the back of my hand over my mouth.

  Bernard held up a finger, his crooked grin stretching up nearly to his ears. “But I only mean it when I say it to you,” he claimed, and winked.

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “What are the numbers looking like tonight, Bernie?”

  He quirked a thick brow, meeting my gaze square. “You’re not gonna like ‘em,” he said.

  I only returned his stare unblinkingly.

  Bernie sighed. “Twenty-to-one you lose to the Bear.”

  I took a swig of my apple juice and considered asking him to add a good shot of moonshine, but decided not to. “So little faith in me,” I mumbled, making sure my tone held no inflection.

  The bartender sucked at his multi-shaded teeth. “It ain’t like that,” he said. “You see her roll by earlier? That bitch is huge. Hell, I wouldn’t even want to fight her.” He let out a chuckle, his mustache twitching. “She’s probably bigger than I am in Wolf form.”

  I did not disagree, but said, “You should be an inspirational speaker. Seriously. I think you’d be great at it.”

  He huffed a tight laugh. “There’s that sense of humor we all love. But, anyway, the odds have been against you before,” he said. “Hell, you’ve been the underdog since you was a pup. They had you slated as a
Bait dog, and you proved them wrong then.” He chuckled again, but there was no humor in it. “I still remember how shocked Lazar was when he came in here that day. Going on and on about the runt that killed his most promising pup.”

  I tapped the edge of my glass with two fingers, reconsidering that shot of moonshine. Bernie uncapped a bottle and obliged, watching me as he poured the amber liquid.

  “And that son of a bitch has hated me ever since,” I mumbled, and downed the glass in one deep gulp. I hated the taste of it, but the alcohol settled warmly in my belly, loosened some of the tension stringing my shoulders.

  “That’s what happens when you’re as lacking as Lazar in all the places that matter,” said a sultry voice behind me.

  I looked over my shoulder to see Goldie, her ginger hair tousled from a long night. She wore the same slip of a dress she always wore. It stopped several inches above her knees and hung over her thin shoulders as if clinging for purchase. Her teeth were straight and white as she grinned at me, her blue eyes twinkling like sapphires and perpetually full of mischief.

  “Morning,” I said, and my eyes caught on the bruises on the girl’s neck. I nodded toward them. “You gonna tell me who did that?”