Moon Dance

Blood Bound Series Book One

Amy Blankenship, RK Melton

Edited byTracy Murray

Copyright © 2012 Amy Blankenship

Second Edition Published by TekTime

All rights reserved.

Prologue

Angeles National Forest is home to the dangerous cougars and imported jaguars that roam the vast forest. Sometimes, on clear nights, their numbers grow for a little while as the LA were-animals, or shifters as folklore has come to know them, roam the untamed land among their distant cousins. It s those nights that the real animals hunker down in their dens while the predators from the city invade their territory long enough to hunt, or on rare occasion, settle fights that can t be settled on human turf.

There s nothing more vicious than when those shifters fight and, if one of them are injured, they become just as dangerous to humans as their animal counterparts. To protect the humans they live among, shifter disputes, when possible, are always done out of the range of those humans and the best place is deep within their native hunting grounds.

Tonight the forest became hauntingly quiet as the two owners of the biggest club within the city enter the untamed land, stripping the clothes from their backs to let their inner beast run free. Tonight they were hunting for the grave of a vampire that could destroy them both.

Deep within the forest where no humans could hear them, Malachi, the leader of a small jaguar clan, sprinted through the darkness toward his adversary a man he should have never trusted over his best friend. His target was another shifter, this one with the blood of the cougar running through his veins, Nathaniel Wilder his business partner for the last 30 years.

Malachi broke into the clearing to find Nathaniel standing there waiting on him in human form. Taking a couple steps forward, it was like walking from one form into another as Malachi reverted back to his human shape. Both of them were lethal no matter which form they shifted into. As humans they were both athletic with steely muscles tensed under soft skin. Shifters were slow to age and both men barely looked past 30 even though they were well into their 50 s.

Had this been a Hollywood movie, it would have taken several minutes to be grossly changed, but this was reality and there were no drooling monsters in this clearing. Nudity was nothing to a shifter and the moon beamed down like a spotlight through a break in the storm clouds above them.

It doesn t have to come t