Blood on the Moon - serialised EXCLUSIVE for Steemit! - 50

Blood On The Moon Cover

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My third novel was finished and published in time for Halloween 2016 and I had a launch at Waterstone's at Sheffield.

The full book cover, done by the wonderful, talented, brilliant Paul Mudie

Other Images from Pixabay or Google (Free Usage)

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As the decades grew to centuries, the first Wolves learned to control their bloodlust and they began to know the symptoms of the moon’s influence and so they were more able to hide from their hunters and the hunters had to learn new skills on how to flush out a Wolf – or werewolf as the Humes called the species.

The Wolves found mates and soon there were born Wolves as well as those that had been bitten and created. The Wolves that were born were revered as blessed children and for a time, because they don’t change during the Full Moon whilst they are children, they were thought of as the new generation that would deliver the Werewolves back into humanity.

When they too began to change at Full Moon at the onset of puberty, the Wolves were despondent and believed that they were the cursed people and their bane would be to wander the world forever, uncontrollable and uncivilised until eventually Humes would find and kill them all, eradicating them from the world and making it a better and safer place for ‘civilised’ man.

Jessica watched as a young boy began to change. His parents had not been expecting his Wolfing but recognised it and were saddened. He was not the oldest child amongst their group and she saw then that the rest of them realised their fate – they had not escaped it, merely postponed the inevitable.

It tore at her heartstrings to watch them, it was almost as though they mourned the fact that their son was still living.

Perhaps it would have been better if he had died soon after birth – or that they had been merciful and killed him. Jessica wondered how desperate a parent has to be to consider such an option and she turned away from the scene and wept.

Then Wolf found their place alongside Man – as Mercenary in the wars that Hume waged upon Hume. Their strength and stamina were second to none and many legends and myths sprang up around Wolf Warriors and their prowess and fearlessness on the battlefield.

Jessica was terrified as she was herded along with an army of misshapen men dressed in only leather harnesses and she heard one word chanted over and over to drive a stake of ice through the hearts of the opposing army. “Berserker! Berserker!”

As the two factions grew closer and the other side saw the terrors that they faced, some turned to run but their ranks were compacted so that they couldn’t run and they were pressed forward, onto the weapons that the Berserker Wolves wielded – tooth and claw.

Jessica knew that the leather harnesses were for psychological terrorism. The legend of the Berserkers was that they needed the harness to hold together the roiling fury of the warriors and without the harness they would explode because of the pressures inside their own skin from their pure ferocity. The Berserkers were mercenaries and widely used in tribal battles. They were loyal to their warlord only as it suited them.

Jessica realised that the Wolves were high on some substance that enraged them further. She made her way to the back of the ranks and looked for what it could be. What she saw sickened her, there were prisoner’s bodies strewn across the field, they had been crudely opened in a strategic place on their backs and she knew from the extensive studies she had been doing under Selene’s supervision that the adrenal gland was what the Berserkers were high on.

Their payment would be waiting for them as they left the battlefield; the other glands in the prisoners had not been touched.

The Kings and Rulers that wanted nothing more to do with the Wolves after their battle was won used the Throwbacks to sniff out the Wolves wherever they were hiding and they killed them, usually by burning or beheading and sometimes both.

They were terrible times to live through. Wolf turned on one another and cast suspicion and doubt on each other in order to save their own skins and when one Wolf bitch made a pact with a King in order that she be allowed to run free and live her life in exchange for the secrets of Wolf, the species as a whole was doomed to die unless they adapted and made themselves invisible.

Jessica saw the fate of that one traitorous bitch and she saw Lord Grey in the throng of those that set hounds on her. Jessica saw the silver collar on the she-wolf’s neck and realised that they had captured her, forced her to change to wolf form and then placed silver on her throat so as to prevent her from changing to human form again for if she had, the silver collar would have seared through her flesh and beheaded her slowly but surely.

They chased her up to the coast and a wild and windswept outcrop of rocks waited for her as she threw herself off onto the rock-strewn beach. She was still alive when the horse and hounds arrived and they tore her apart.

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