Read Blood Moon for Free Online Page B

its base, but taller, taller, taller, so the top branches looked ready to fight the cliffs if they came any closer.
    It was only as the floater drew closer that I could see the door at the base, the windows set within the trunk, the flattened lower branches that were presumably rooms and corridors.
    Somewhere back in my past life I’d scrolled data on a building like this: a Newsteel framework that has the Tree cells force-grown around it, so that they eventually swallow the ‘steel and then keep growing to branch out above and around it.
    Someone—or some werewolf—had spent a lot of money to create this—they must have bioengineering contacts too.
    The rest of the werewolves’ valley looked green, even in the drought, though as I grew closer I realised thegreen wasn’t grass at all, but some small-leafed ground cover that Neil would probably have recognised but was foreign to me. Whatever it was, it must have been expensive to seed the whole valley with it. The werewolves were doing well…
    There were no gardens. A few shrubs sat calmly among alien greeness as though they’d wandered out of the bush beyond the valley ridges and decided to stay. There was no sign of deer, or any paddocks or fences for that matter, apart from the tall stone wall that stretched from cliff to cliff.
    Presumably there was a gate somewhere, unless the inhabitants jumped the wall every time they wanted to leave their valley. Perhaps, I thought, that was exactly what they did.
    Not that my floater needed gates either. We rose above the wall then descended again and crept over the close-cropped green towards a floater pad, apparently set on open signal. Without my telling it to, my floater circled around the Tree and landed in a rough courtyard bounded by blank-faced stone sheds.
    I opened the door. The Tree rose above me, its branches casting dappled shadows around my feet. There were steps leading to a door and next to the door, a giant boulder, angled so it caught the afternoon sun.
    A dog lay on the boulder, its head on its paws. It watched me as I crossed the courtyard. Its coat was black and grey and very long. A watch dog, I thought. From its vantage point on the boulder the dog could see the entire valley, as well as a close-up view of anyone arriving across the paddocks or from the floater pad.
    I hesitated. What is the etiquette when you meet a dog in a house of werewolves? Click your fingers and say,‘Here, boy! Good dog!’ Or say ‘Good morning, lovely weather isn’t it?’, then blush when the dog says ‘Woof’ and the human-shaped inhabitants giggle—or worse—are offended, as they peer at you through the window?
    I compromised. ‘Hi,’ I said.
    The dog raised its head, and suddenly and horribly I realised it wasn’t a dog at all.
    The face was human. Human? No, the nose was too long. It was a snout, not a nose at all. The chin was almost nonexistent. The face was hairy too. But the eyes were human. They stared at me, intelligent and amused.
    The dog—wolf—person—stood up stiffly, and suddenly, now it was upright, it became more recognisably human. Yes, long hair covered his legs and body, his shoulders looked too narrow and the joints looked subtly wrong. But now he was standing I could see he wore shorts that the long hair had covered before. He padded over to the floater and held out a hairy paw.
    ‘I don’t bite,’ he said.
    ‘I…I didn’t think you did.’
    He grinned. ‘You wondered,’ he said. ‘Admit it. Could smell your fear.’
    ‘I wasn’t afraid.’
    ‘Don’t lie to a wolf. We’ve expert noses. I’m Dusty.’ He shrugged, which looked odd as well, though it was hard to tell why. Were the arms too long? ‘Uncle Dusty,’ he added.
    ‘Oh…Portia says hello then. She says you have nice hair.’
    Dusty laughed. His teeth were long and white and the tongue looked just a little too flat, too wet, too red…what was the normal colour for a tongue? Somehow I knew it wasn’t