Free Once Upon a Haunted Moon (The Keeper Saga) by K.R. Thompson Page A

fireman say to another, “It was a matter of time before the old thing fell in or caught fire. Kinda surprised it hadn’t happened before now, really.”
    His partner nodded to us as we passed, “Keep back, kids. We don’t need anyone getting hurt.”
    “Was there anyone in there?” Nikki asked him.
    “No, it’s been vacant for years. No one was crazy enough to go in there,” he said, then turned back to the truck to adjust the flow of water to the hoses as the flames licked higher, mumbling to himself, “…can’t figure out what’s feeding it…it’s not that big a house…”
    I didn’t figure it would do any good to tell him it was bigger than he thought, and that the tons of books it held would probably feed that fire for a really long time.
    “Well, has anybody got any suggestions?” Erik asked as we approached, then he saw Tori, and froze, “Who are you?”
    “My name’s Tori,” she grinned at him, “You guys werewolves, too?”
    “Who’s been breaking the rules?” Erik demanded loudly, glaring at both Ed and me.
    I pointed to Ed, making sure blame would be laid on the right person, “He showed up and changed right in front of her, so she knows everything now.”
    “So much for the first rule,” Tommy sighed, “Adam’s going to have to make up some new ones when we find him.”
    “ If we find him,” Michael said, “We can’t find any trace of him past where he fought her. There was some blood, and we saw where he fell, but then…nothing. It’s like they both just disappeared.”
    “We’ll find him,” I said, as much for their sake as for Nikki, who had paled at the news and looked ready to cry, “I suggest going back into the woods, there’s too many people here. Once we get where we aren’t being watched, we can figure out what to do next.”
    Three tall, muscular Indian boys met us at the edge of the forest. They were all bare-chested, in spite of the chill in the air. “Why does it seem like we always are missing the action around here?”
    They were the Lakotas, a tribe of the Sioux, and they were here to help out with the powwow that was taking place at the end of the month. The powwow was a pretty big event for the county as a whole. Adam and the others had worked on it for months, and most of the work was finished when the Lakotas arrived. The three boys arrived early, leaving someone else to bring up the van with the sound equipment later on. They had been here a few weeks with very little gear, which I thought was sort of weird as they basically lived in the woods as cats. I said something to Adam about it, but he just shrugged, and said they didn’t get the chance to roam the forest much, their reservation was small with no national forest close by, so they considered coming early more a vacation to connect with their inner spirit. I translated his explanation into “mountain lions have extra time to run around the woods wild and free, hunting whatever and whenever they want.”
    Rune, the one who spoke, was the oldest. While all three of the boys had different tribal tattoos and piercing, Rune wore an enormous tattoo of a mountain lion on his chest. It was so lifelike it seemed to come running from inside of him, ready to jump from his body and out into life. What really set it off was the way his muscles rippled, making the cat shimmer and move as if it had come from deep within his spirit, and was ready to pounce on us from its position on his chest.
    “Nice tattoo,” Tori remarked, supposedly looking at the muscles in his upper body solely for the purpose of inspecting the mountain lion.
    “Thanks, he is my na-gi, the spirit of my mountain lion,” the boy, named Rune, smiled politely at her inspection of his torso. Some of the muscles bunched up and flexed. I didn’t think it was coincidence. I rolled my eyes.
    “I guess you’re going to tell me you have magic, too, and that you’re a were-lion,” Tori finally stopped looking at the muscles and grinned