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Boxen Moon began as an online, interactive short story. Created over 10 months from November 2005 through July 2006, it was written by Lori Handeland with "what happens next" input from site visitors. This is the result. Enjoy! Free Download: Boxen Moon Chapter 1As a child I didn’t believe in the bogeyman. There was no monster in the closet. No dragon under the bed. When I was twenty-six I learned differently. The bogeyman was real. The monsters popped up in my own backyard. I haven’t seen a dragon yet, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. I was just a small town cop, doing my job—a little bored, a little lonely. Then the wolves went berserk and the people did, too. Once the dust settled, and I figured out who was good, who was bad and who was a psychotically evil werewolf, I was no longer a cop but a Jager-Sucher. My whole world changed—in more ways than one. I exchanged the relative safety of cop-hood in small town Miniwa, Wisconsin for extreme danger as a member of a secret group of government funded operatives. But the trade off was sleeping with Will Cadotte. The man was a sex god. Oh, not literally. In my new world, you never know. I had to kill my best friend after she turned into a wolf god. It wasn’t too much of a stretch that my boyfriend could be an actual sex god. Stranger things had happened. Watch a person turn into a wolf and back again, then we’ll talk. At any rate, both Will and I became Jager-Suchers, or Hunter-Searchers. I was the hunter, while Will was more the searcher. Though he was accomplished in tai chi and had kicked my ass on occasion, when it came time to kill things, he usually left it to me. When the doorbell rang late one night, not long after the incident with the wolf god, I was uneasy. My mother always said that nothing good happened after midnight. Lately, nothing good happened after sundown. After retrieving my weapon, checking the load—silver from this point forward—then taking a quick peep through the peephole, I opened the door. “Jessie.” The leader of the Jager-Suchers, Edward Mandenauer, stepped inside without being invited. “We must talk.” Will was asleep. He wasn’t a night person. However I’d been working third shift throughout my career as a cop, which worked out well now that I’d taken to hunting werewolves. They tended to come out under the moon and run around until the sun came back. Go figure. “Now?” I asked and followed him down the hall into my living room. The lines in his face deepened on a frown. “What is wrong with now?” “Besides it being—” I glanced at my watch. “One in the morning?” “Monsters do not care about the time.” “I bet they don’t. However I have a life.” Free Download: Boxen Moon (Free Acrobat® Reader® required.) |
