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Blood Hunt
Ayla Hammond is taking on Paris. Hoping for a romantic getaway in
the City of Lights with her girlfriend, Shannon, she finds a city under the
dark thrall of Le Monstre. Getting
caught up in mystery and murder was the last thing Ayla and Shannon wanted or
expected, but as the body count grows and tension rises between Parisian
werewolves and humans, they find themselves stalked by an unknown terror.
What is Le Monstre and why does it make Ayla's wolf want to turn tail and run? Can it be stopped before they become its next victims?
“How do you stand
it?” I asked Sun back in the living room. “I mean, when was the last time you
shapeshifted? Isn’t it driving you mad?”
“It did at first,”
she replied, handing me a cup of watery tea. “For like, the first three months
I was just crazy, even with all the herbal supplements they give you. All I
wanted to do was hunt, you know? But then my doctor told me if I shifted in the
first trimester, I’d have to stay as a wolf for the whole pregnancy.” She
sniffed. “Well, that’s fine for ferals, but I need manicures, you know?”
Clémence and I both
laughed. Although checking out Sun’s lime-green nails, I had no doubt she was
deadly serious.
“One of the local alphas, he says it is good
for us to be as wolves when we have cubs,” Clémence said. “He says there would
be more cubs if we lived more like wolves.”
It wasn’t a new
idea. Plenty of wolves and humans alike believed our declining birth rates were
down to us becoming ‘too human’. I’d done Lupine Psychology for a term at
school—until I realized Drama was less work and switched—and I’d read all the
essays on how we’d mentally separated from our wolf side over the past hundred
years or so, to fit in better with humans. How that ‘coming out’ on our part
was the start of our falling numbers. I wasn’t sure how much I believed that
particular theory. We’d been living side-by-side with humans forever, after
all. Just because one day they realized it, didn’t mean we stopped
having cubs.
Clémence and Sun
happily chattered away about pregnancy and cubs, while I sipped my tea and
thought about the secrecy wolves had lived in throughout history. We’d hidden
away, living by night, holding our Lupercali
ceremonies in secret, our hunts in the dead of winter in the
thickest forests where no humans would see us. We walked as men under the sun,
as beasts under the moon. We’d endured witch hunts, Inquisitions and Satanic
panics before our secret existence was revealed to the humans we’d been lying
to for so long. It added up to about two million years or so of living
undetected.
It made me realize
that it wasn’t that much of a stretch to imagine that something else could be
out there, hiding right under our noses.
Available from Evernight Publishing
Naomi
Clark
Naomi
Clark lives in Cambridge and is a mild-mannered office worker by day, but a
slightly crazed writer by night. She has a perfectly healthy obsession with
giant sea creatures and a preference for vodka-based cocktails. When she's not
writing, Naomi is probably either reading or watching 80s cartoon shows, and
sometimes she manages to do all three at once.
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