A Cursed Moon: A Weird Girls Novella (A Penguin Special from Signet Eclipse) Read Online Free PDF Page B

little teeth and puncturing their nails through my fur. I bucked and rolled, trying to hang tight to their mom and wrench the creepy shits off me. I would’ve managed if not for the scorching hot pain that shot through my rear. Something ripped through the muscle of my hind leg. And it wasn’t pretty. It seriously wasn’t pretty.
    A little spirit girl about five or six, with—no lie—long writhing centipedes for pigtails, munched on my leg like it was a box of Cracker Jacks. Blood poured out of me like a leaky dam, splattering her dress of beetles and roaches, and making her chew that much faster.
    Son of a bitch.
I released Mommy Dearest and severed one of her daughter’s wrists. The kid’s hair didn’t appreciate that one bit. Seven centipedes snapped from her barrettes and slithered along my fur, searing through my flesh like trickles of boiling water and snaking their way along my back. Her brothers giggled in haunting demonic little spurts, like they were having the time of their undead lives. And because laughing at my royally screwed self wasn’t fun enough, the pint-size ghouls continued to stab their claws into my hide while the insects lining their clothing slid from their bodies to join the swarm crawling across me.
    I growled and snapped at them, only to fill my jowls with a throng of wriggling bugs. The spirits held tight and their insect army scrambled faster. I swore, knowing I was in serious trouble. If these bugs made their way into my brain, they’d devour me from the inside out and use my soul to raise more dead.
Shit
. Where was a can of Raid when a werewolf needed one?
    The centipedes wriggled their way across my thick fur. I felt every damn movement of their tiny legs as they marched across burning my flesh. The first squirmed its way into my ear just as the sound of sloshing water reverberated behind me.
    Celia, my little hell kitty, gasped behind me. She sprinted forward, holding tight to a giant green pail in her hands. The child spirits hissed at her, this time in alarm. Whatever Celia carried was something they obviously feared.
    The contents of her bucket splashed against me, forcing the spooks from my body. The boy who didn’t move fast enough hollered with a mind-numbing wail. His clothing scurried away in a frenzy and tunneled into the earth while his body was eaten away by whatever Celia had doused him with. His ribs cracked, one after the other, exposing his rotting and disintegrating organs.
    Celia gagged from the reek of his dissolving innards. Luckily the leftover centipede rammed up my nose conveniently blocked part of the rancid scent.
    “Oh God.”
She swung her pail, sending the spirit’s remains soaring into the trunk of an old tree. It exploded in a swarm of flying creepy-crawlies that fell to the forest floor and burrowed deep into the earth.
    Back to hell where you belong, asshole.
    I lunged at the two remaining kiddos, biting through the spirit boy’s neck while Celia severed the little girl’s head from her shoulders with a slash of her sharp claws.
    “Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama,”
the decapitated heads cried in garbled and distorted voices before their skulls and bodies caved inward and sank slowly into the earth.
    I
changed
back to human and brushed off the drying shells of the remaining centipedes. My puncture wounds started to fill in. They stung like a mo-fo as they sealed. Still, it didn’t compare to the pain of rebuilding the half-eaten muscle in my thigh. My flesh seared and my nerves bellowed as the power of my beast restored the bulk of the ravaged area. Slowly the ache receded as the skin knitted closed and reformed a new pink layer.
    My wolf’s healing ability was one hell of a gift, but not without its agony when it worked that hard and that fast. I pushed the pain deep within me so no more than a grimace wrinkled my features. Outward displays of pain could mark a
were
as weak and get him killed. I hadn’t survived this long as a
lone
by