Hunger Moon Rising Read online

  The man at the bar withdrew a little, but his hand was still on my knee. “You going to claim her here and now, buddy?”

  Behind me I could feel Ben stiffen. “We don't plan a public claiming,” he said. “We're waiting for Mabon night, not that it's any of your Goddess-damned business.”

  The man chuckled. “Oh, I think it is my business—see, I like this little lady a lot. Either claim her in front of these witnesses, or make a formal challenge.”

  “I will not claim her here!” Ben answered, his hands tightening painfully on my shoulders.

  My harasser's faded blue eyes narrowed. “Challenge it is then, pup. Unless you're scared?”

  I became suddenly aware that the entire bar had fallen silent and was listening to their tense conversation. All heads were cocked our way, and all eyes glued to our little corner of the bar. It was so quiet that you could actually hear the lyrics to “Free Bird” coming out scratchy and hoarse over the cheap speakers.

  There was a scent in the air like male musk and the same coiled tension I had felt around Ben the night before. I wanted to say something and couldn't. My tongue felt frozen to the roof of my mouth, and when I tried to take a deep breath, my lungs wouldn't expand properly. I was terrified, and I didn't even know exactly why.

  The bartender was the first to break the silence. He came forward to stand in front of our little tableau, his hands flat on the bar. “An offer of challenge has been extended.” His voice was flat, but it filled the entire bar. He looked at Ben. “Do you accept, or will you claim this female as custom dictates?”

  From somewhere in the crowd a low, murmuring chant began. One man started it, and then another took it up, and then another, and another, until the whole bar was repeating it. It took my numb ears a moment to decipher what it was, but finally, I got it. “Fuck or fight…Fuck or fight,” the crowd was chanting. I looked up at Ben, feeling all the blood rush from my cheeks, leaving me white and pale. What would he say? What would he do to me?

  “I choose the challenge,” Ben said, and the bar erupted into cheers. I stared at him and saw a fierce light burning in his brown eyes. He raised a hand for silence, and the entire bar went quiet again, waiting to hear him speak. “I have one condition. This will be a challenge of the first nature, not the second. The first man to change forms forfeits—no deaths.” He looked down at the man with the faded eyes who had finally taken his hand off my knee. “I don't want your blood on my hands,” he snarled, sounding more animal than human.

  With an inarticulate roar, the man rose from his bar stool in one smooth motion. Standing, he was shorter than Ben, but considerably heavier, despite my partner's linebacker build. It was going to be like a Bulldog fighting a German Shepard, I thought, and then wondered why the canine analogy had popped into my mind.

  “You think you can hold off the change better than me? C'mon then, pup. And may the best were win,” the man shouted, striding toward the small area at the end of the bar, which I was beginning to realize was no dance floor. Ben stripped off his jacket and started to follow him. Finally my paralysis broke, and I grabbed his arm and yanked on it until he bent down to look at me.

  “Ben,” I said through numb lips. “Don't do this—you don't have to. Let's just get the hell out of here. Okay?”

  “No, Dani. It's not okay.” The light was back in his eyes, and this time I was sure of it—they were glowing. His voice was low and frightening.

  “I don't…don't understand,” I faltered, looking up into those strange, yet horribly familiar eyes.

  “No,” he said bitterly. “You don't. There's no going back now. You see, Dani, either I fight that son-of-a-bitch and wipe the floor with him, or I have to fuck you in front of all these people. Now which would you prefer?”

  I recoiled from his ugly words, as though he'd slapped me.

  One corner of his mouth twisted violently downward. “That's what I thought,” he said. He stood up and pulled away from me, wading into the crowd to get to the fight.

  I thought someone, maybe the bartender, might referee the fight but no one bothered, and it must have started as soon as Ben stepped onto the floor. From then it seemed to go very quickly. I say “must have,” and “seemed to” because I couldn't actually see what was going on. Even in my three inch heels, there was no way to see over all the broad backs surrounding the fighting floor, and there was no pushing through the solid wall of bodies either. I heard the solid meaty thwack every time either Ben or the other man landed a punch and the roar of the crowd when it happened. One or twice I saw a horrific spray of blood, but I couldn't tell whose it was. I jumped and hopped, trying to get a view, before it finally occurred to me to climb up on a table. But by then it was almost over.

  I stepped up onto a chair, wobbling in the three inch spike heels and was in the act of climbing onto a table when a masculine voice shouted, “First change!” The entire crowd took up the chant as they had earlier. “First change! First change! Forfeit!” I finally managed to balance in the ridiculous heels and look over the heads of the men surrounding the fight floor.

  At first I couldn't understand what I was seeing. Ben was still standing, although his face was bloody and his bare, muscular upper body was splattered with crimson. The other man appeared to be rolling on the ground, writhing in some kind of agony. His skin seemed almost to be bubbling somehow, and he was bloody—so bloody that I wondered if Ben had gone too far. I remembered him saying, “I don't want your blood on my hands.”

  Then Ben looked up and saw me staring. Our eyes met over the crowd and his were glowing brown orbs in a mask of blood. Someone threw him a towel, and he used it to wipe off most of it. He tossed the bloody rag away and waded through the crowd toward me, leaving the other man thrashing on the floor. The crowd murmured in discontent that the fight was over so quickly, but no one put out a hand to stop him.

  Something very strange was going on with the man with the faded eyes. His body seemed to be shifting, changing in a way that seemed subtly wrong. I blinked, trying to make my brain understand it, but I couldn't make sense of the bloody heap twisting over the dirty tiles. I wanted to watch more, but suddenly Ben was there, standing in front of me. He reached up without asking and grabbed me around the waist, pulling me down to the floor to face him.

  The crowd's focus shifted from the man Ben had beaten to a bloody pulp to the two of us standing in the middle of the bar. Slowly, a new chant began to rise from the collective throat of the crowd. “Claim her…Claim her…Claim her…”

  Ben grabbed my upper arms and dragged me up until I was standing on my tip-toes, face to face with him. His expression was unreadable, but there was a hot light in his eyes that scared the hell out of me. The aura of tension that had been following him for the last few days like his own private thundercloud seemed ready to explode. I could feel it jumping between us like electricity between live wires. I was scared to death and yet somehow more excited than I had ever been in my life.

  “Claim her…claim her…” the crowd urged him on.

  “Ben,” I managed to say through trembling lips. “Whatever they're saying, don't do it. Please don't.”

  “I have to.” His voice was so deep I felt it rather than heard it. It was like a pounding in my blood. “I need to, Dani.”

  “You don't have to do anything,” I told him, but he shook his head.

  “I need to at least do this,” he rumbled. He pulled me closer, so close I could see the blood drying in his stiff, black hair and smell the hot, coppery fragrance of violence hanging around him. I put up a hand to stop him, but that was as far as I got before his lips covered mine, taking my mouth in the most brutal, delicious kiss I had ever experienced. He bent me backward over his arm and ran his other hand roughly up my cheek to bury his fingers in my hair and hold me in place. I gasped and his tongue was suddenly there, exploring my mouth, tasting me, owning me in a way I had never known was possible.

  My brain felt numb—could this really be Ben? Sweet, gent