Sometimes By Moonlight
Read Sometimes By Moonlight Online
Authors: Heather Davis
Copyright Info
Sometimes by Moonlight: A Novella
(Book Two of Never Cry Werewolf)
Copyright © 2011 by Heather Davis
Kindle Edition
Cover Art by Asha Hossain
All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not be construed as real. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to the fans of Shelby and Austin. Long may you howl.
Table of Contents
Moonlight is dangerous. Even at a lame Swiss boarding school, where everything is as bland as the morning muesli, the moon’s seductive glow holds danger. Long shadows of poplar trees become shimmering specters on the freshly fallen snow. Stone chimneys rise like dark gargoyles overhead. Familiar surroundings seem strange and foreboding. But maybe the biggest danger of all is that moonlight takes away the privacy of the dark, revealing things that are better left unseen.
On a cold night in November, moonlight found the windows of my dorm room at the Steinfelder Academy for Girls. As I had so often that fall, I stared up at the full moon, worrying about Austin Bridges the III, the most dangerous person I knew, and wondering if he thought about me.
It’s bad enough that most people go through their whole lives searching for their one true love, but when you do meet him and he turns out to be a werewolf—a werewolf who disappears on you—things can get pretty depressing. Especially for me, Shelby Locke, former brat camper turned Swiss boarding school prisoner.
Standing before the window, bathed in the melancholy light, I traced the scar on my arm—the scar I’d earned helping Austin escape Camp Crescent, the place we’d met last June. Assisting him with an exit strategy so that his hairy secret wasn’t revealed had come at a greater price than just a flesh wound—it had meant doing time at Red Canyon Ranch, the desert boot camp where I’d spent the rest of the summer. But just at my lowest point there, Austin had arrived to save me from the boredom and despair of hikes, latrine digging, and endless boot shining.
Unfortunately, when the summer came to an end, Austin jetted back to the never-ending supply of anti-change serum waiting for him in London, and I was packed away to a crappy girls’ school made of stone and surrounded by mountains.
I’m no genius, but I got the message my stepmother, Honeybun, and Dad were sending me:
You will finish out high school in a remote Swiss fortress, far from our mansion in Beverly Hills, far from your original hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and any friends you ever knew. We will keep you out of sight and out of mind. You do not exist in our reality.
Honeybun and Dad couldn’t have picked a worse or more isolated boarding school if they’d tried. High up in an old mountain chateau, Steinfelder Academy for Girls was like a prison for embarrassing daughters of the privileged class. A jail for snobs, nerds, delinquents, and the misunderstood. I put myself in the last category because any rule I’d ever broken had been for what I thought at the time was a good cause. Sadly, helping Austin had, in the end, made me seem a bigger delinquent than I’d ever actually been. I found out the hard way that the world doesn’t give you points for good intentions.
It had almost healed over now, the scar on my arm. It was only a faint red crescent, but often when I thought of Austin, it itched. And sometimes, when I stood in front of the dorm window drinking in moonlight, it almost burned. If I had gotten a tattoo on my arm that said, “Austin” it wouldn’t have been as big a reminder of our night in the forest, the night he almost died saving me. You’d think after going through something like that together we’d be inseparable, that even the stone walls of a remote Swiss chateau couldn’t keep him away. But I hadn’t heard a peep from him since I’d arrived at that castle of crapola.
No letter. No telegram. No pigeon with a message tied to its leg. The last time we’d spoken was when we’d said goodbye in the desert. Since then, it was like he’d fallen off the face of the earth. Or maybe it was just me. I’d fallen off into a snow-filled crevasse named Steinfelder.
In the tradition of other “attitude adjustment” institutions, Steinfelder had confiscated our phones and kept us from e-mail access, so it wasn’t like I could contact Austin. Standing in the moonlight, as weird as that sounds, was the only way I’d found to be close to him. It was the way I remembered what we’d shared during a summer that now seemed so long gone.
“
Tchk, tchk.”
My roommate Marie-Rose made a concerned sound across the room. “Always at the window. Go to bed.” She was bossy for being only five feet tall, but maybe having people call her Rosemary all the time had given her a chip on her shoulder. Well, that and being kicked out of the best ballet schools in Europe.
I drew the lacy curtain, which did very little to shut out the moonlight. “I’m sorry. I can’t sleep.”
“No kidding,” she replied.
Sighting, I switched on the light between our beds.
“
Mon dieu
!” Marie-Rose squealed, throwing a pillow against her eyes.
“What are you, a vampire? Are you going to burn?”
Marie-Rose lowered her light shield. “No, but it’s two a.m. You really want Mrs. Lemmon to find our light on?”
I shuddered. The last thing we needed was that crotchety dorm-mother-slash-history-teacher on our case. I fished a flashlight out of the nightstand drawer. “Sorry. I’ll read a book under the covers.”
“Ah, no,” Marie-Rose said, waving me off. “I can’t sleep now, anyway.” She sat up in bed and rooted around under her pillow. “I’ve been waiting all day to read these magazines my mother sent,” she said, throwing me one of them.
Never having been the most athletic girl in school, I missed the throw and the tabloid fell to the floor, opening to the center spread. A girl with raven hair stared up at me from a glossy paparazzi photograph.
I slipped out of the covers to retrieve the magazine. “
Eva’s petit ami
,
” I said, reading the French headline aloud.
“Eva’s boyfriend,” Marie-Rose translated. “Probably Eva Maleva. You know, the European pop princess?”
I hadn’t heard of her, but there was something captivating about Eva’s eyes. She was definitely pretty. I was about to turn the page when I noticed the guy on her arm—a hood over his face, like he was hiding from the photographers accosting the pair outside Eva’s concert. He had beautiful, full lips, but I could barely make out the rest of his dark features in shadow beneath the hood. And then, amongst all the French gobbledygook beneath the picture, I read a familiar name:
Austin Bridges III
.
“Oh, crap.” I threw the magazine back on the floor and turned off the light. Austin had a new girlfriend! That was why he hadn’t been in touch.
“Excuse me,” Marie-Rose growled. “I was reading over here.”
“Right. Sorry.” I clicked the light back on.