Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 by Cecilia Dominic Page B

the mark of two on you. Plus, your family owes me a debt.”
    My palm where Peter had kissed me that first day and my foot where Max had marked me both stabbed me with pain, and I crumpled to the ground. The monk walked toward me, and he cradled his left arm against his chest. The shadows around him thickened and resolved into a pack of wolves that slinked alongside him.
    “I accepted neither of these marks willingly,” I told him. “And I know of no debt.”
    “It matters not. You were close enough to them for them to have the opportunity, which means you are a weak-willed woman ruled by her passions, especially lust.”
    “If you had any idea how long it’s been,” I grumbled.
    “This is not the time for your insolence!” He towered over me and bared his teeth. “I will end your life now, and then we will be free.
    “Free of what?”

Chapter Eight
      The pain in my foot subsided, and a warm glow suffused the parking lot. The monk covered his eyes with his right hand and revealed his left hand was not human, but rather a wolf’s paw. The shadows that had been circling me fell back when Max appeared beside me. He wore an immaculately tailored dark blue suit and white Oxford shirt open at the collar, and he carried a flaming torch. The light sparked off his reddish-brown hair.
    “Can’t stay out of trouble for one day, can you?” he asked. He slanted his torch toward the monk, who shrank back but watched him with glittering eyes.
    “Get that witchfire out of my face, wizard,” he snarled.
    “Leave this woman alone. Her battle is not ours.”
    “Her family owes me a price. I will collect it, if not now, then later.”
    “You know the rules.”
    “Aye,” the monk said. “But she does not, and it will be her ruin.” He bared his teeth, and then he and the other wolves dissolved into the shadows.
    Max held out his hand, and I took it so he could help me to my feet. The throbbing in my palm ceased with one last little tingle.
    “Thank you,” I said. I tried to stand, but my legs wobbled and I couldn’t find my balance. He supported me with one strong arm around my waist.
    “Encounters with the Benandanti can do that,” he said, “especially when they’re not the nice kind.”
    “Are there nice ones?”  
    He raised an eyebrow at me. “Didn’t you know…” He shook his head. “They reveal themselves in their own time.”
    “Don’t I know what?” I asked and stepped away from him. “I don’t know anything. This whole world of werewolves and wizards and ghostly monks is new to me. I was just barely getting the hang of the werewolf thing when it was stripped away.”
    “As I told you, all you have to do is accept who and what you are, and you’ll get her back.”
    A warm tropical breeze stirred around me, and I smelled the ocean. “As you told me in my dream,” I said. “Seriously, what are you? Why do you keep following me?”
    He looked around. “Let’s go to your aunt’s home. I suspect we’ll find more answers there.” Then he spoke again, but it sounded like he talked to himself. “My superiors didn’t know just how clueless you would be. Otherwise, they would not have limited my orders to watching.”
    We got in the car, and I turned out on to the highway.  
    “What superiors? What are you supposed to be doing?”
    He turned to face me. “You do not know what an exquisite, rare creature you are?”
    Rather than his words being romantic, they sounded more clinical, like I was a specimen to be put under glass. “Gee, do you say that to all the lady werewolves you meet, or just the ones you can get to appear in your dreams in bikinis?”
    He laughed, and I got a glimpse of his very white teeth in the darkness, which seemed determined to swallow up even the minor illumination from the car’s dashboard.
    “That wasn’t my dream, but rather a place I created in the Collective Unconscious to have meetings.” He drummed his fingers on his knee. “Someone found it who