Immortal Moon Read Online Free Page B

and wondering if
my jelly legs would make it upstairs to my bed.
     
     

 
     

    Kissing Anya
Moon had been the wrong thing to do. Saving her had been the right
thing to do. She was, after all, his best friend’s sister. The fact
that he’d wanted to rip to shreds the three assholes who had dared
to chase her and feed them to the fish in the river had everything
to do with protecting his friend, and nothing to do with the
strange possessiveness gripping him the moment he’d recognized her
as she’d ran across the bridge.
    Yep. And his name was Princess Moonbeam.
    Kissing Anya Moon had been the wrong thing
to do because it had brought the memory of her taste and feel to
the forefront of his mind when he thought he’d put their brief
encounter behind him. She had lingered in his thoughts and dreams
over the past six months like no other woman ever had, and just
when she’d faded from his daily thoughts, there she was again. But
mostly, kissing Anya Moon had been the wrong thing to do because
now he wanted nothing more than to go back and kiss her again and
again and again.
    Jarrett groaned to himself and stomped up
the stairs of the Nash City Black Blade Guard headquarters building
to the twenty-fifth floor where he inserted a crystal into a slot
next to the door to unlock it and entered the hallway where his
private room was located. He strode to the last door and repeated
the crystal procedure to enter the large room that served as his
private office and, when he didn’t have other options, his sleeping
quarters whenever he was in Nash City. He rarely used the room
since he was rarely in the city, but he kept a few items of
clothing and some spare weapons in the room, just in case. He
mostly used it for the reason he’d come here today—to contact his
commander in Atlanta with the private scry-crystal.
    It was times like this that he sorely missed
the cell phone age. Even with the privacy vulnerabilities of
technology, with a little added magic, it had been a simple task to
get a secure line to his commander from anywhere in the world.
While portable scry-crystals had taken up some of the slack after
the Cataclysm, they could only be used to contact other
scry-crystals within a couple hundred-mile radius and they were
impossible to secure. When it was time to report in to Atlanta,
Jarrett had to go to the nearest allied city-state with a Black
Blade Guard headquarters building. Each one had a network of large
scry-crystals tuned exclusively to other headquarters. In Nash, he
had a large, wall-mounted crystal in his room that was coded to
connect with only one other crystal, the one in the office of the
Kukri division commander in Atlanta. The crystal was protected with
privacy spells and kept at full power by Blade chargers.
    Sitting at the desk, he placed his hand on
the blank crystal. His personal energy signature activated it, and
the clear, glassy surface turned cloudy as the connection to the
crystal several hundred miles away was made. After a few seconds,
the fog cleared and revealed a vampire who appeared to be in his
mid-thirties with close-cropped blond hair and a close-shaven jaw.
Commander Hugh Westbrook was relatively new to his position as the
leader of the Kukri division. A little over sixty years ago, he
replaced Commander Bonassio who had founded the Kukri as a squad of
spies and assassins in the early years of the Spanish Inquisition.
Over the centuries, the job description had not varied much, though
they did a little less assassinating and more tracking and
apprehending dangerous paranorm criminals.
    “Campbell, good to hear from you. It’s been
a while, any progress?” Westbrook said, offering a tight smile.
    Westbrook was friendly, but direct and to
the point. He didn’t waste time with idle chitchat. Jarrett
appreciated that because he detested these reports. It was the most
tedious part of his job, and this particular report was especially
loathsome.
    “Nothing positive, sir. All