Forbidded Read online

  Forbidden

  Adrienne Woods

  Forbidden© 2018 Adrienne Woods

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  Example Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Introducing Guardians of Monsters

  Natasha

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I would just like to thank my savior. He always blessed me with stories, even if they aren’t of my own world. I’ll be forever grateful to Him.

  To Kristin Ping for letting me borrow her world to get lost in. Guardian of monsters is a fun concept and I hope that I did her Collin and Ru some justice. They are back in the Guardian of monster saga, the Varcolac series.

  To my family for always giving me time to finish a story.

  To my assistant Anika for keeping the fort.

  My partner in crime, Carlyle Labuschagne, that always give her utmost best.

  My two editors, Monique and Jess, who would not have made a writing career possible for me if it wasn’t for their craft in fixing my errors and making my story stronger.

  To Christian from Cover design by Christian, for this incredible cover he created, and to Joemel, my designer for creating this beautiful werewolf to Kristin’s design.

  To the fans. I cannot stop thanking you for reading all my stories and hope you will carry on with the Guardian of Monster Saga. It’s not YA and not something I usually write but it sure was nice to write this one.

  Thank you all. I couldn’t have done any of it without you.

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  Adrienne

  One

  “Ru!” My sister yelled my name. “Ru! RU!”

  I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t even see the forest filled with Dad’s traps ready to spring on the pack we were hunting tonight. Only darkness. A pit of blackness.

  I panicked. Have I gone blind? Sudden blindness during a hunt spelled only one thing: my imminent death.

  “Ru!” Yells reverberated around me. Among them the voices of Uncle Fernus and my father, Huck, more distant than that of my sister.

  My brother and cousin were too far. Both were fantastic snipers, who slayed one wolf after another across great distances with Silver Nitro bullets.

  “Ru!”

  Abruptly my sight came back, so fast it disoriented me. My sister leaped into the air like a prima ballerina, with perfect grace and long limbs. With silver swords clutched in both her hands, she was magnificent to behold.

  I tore my gaze from her and focused on her target—mere inches from me.

  The wolf was snarling and rattling like they always did.

  Most people only thought they were story fillers. But stories got them wrong.

  They didn’t have fur; in fact, there wasn’t a patch of hair on their bodies. They didn’t look like wolves, either, but they hunted in packs, killed in packs.

  Their bodies were covered in a rubbery, silicone-ish substance, shaped in long snakelike tubes on their heads and backs. Oversized ears framed their faces, which sported long, razor-sharp fangs meant to rip humans in half.

  The tubes made a sound that struck fear into one’s soul. They rattled like vipers, only ten times enhanced.

  The tubes on the one near me were going apeshit.

  I did what any human would—though I was far from one—and covered my head with both arms.

  The sound of a sword slashing through a leathery torso cut the rattling off. My sister’s war cries rose into the night.

  More slashing, snarling, screaming, and growling—then nothing, only the sound of my sister’s hard panting.

  If I were to look at the werewolf now, there would be a human in its place. They always shifted back to their human forms with their last breaths.

  A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet.

  “What is wrong with you?” My sister’s eyes were deranged. Fear reflected in those big blue orbs. “Why didn’t you jump out of the way? Why didn’t you use your weapons? What the hell happened? You never freeze.”

  “I don’t know!” The adrenaline pumping through my veins was wearing off, replaced by dismay. What would have happened if Lizzy hadn’t saved my ass? The question weighed heavily in my gut.

  She pulled hard and I smashed into her body. She wrapped her arms around me. She was shaking, and I realized I was too.

  I couldn’t tell her that I’d blacked out, that I’d lost my sight. It would’ve been simpler if I could. But telling her would incite only fear.

  If they knew, they wouldn’t allow me to join the next hunt. Hunting was all we knew. It was in our blood, in our Chaperon lineage. If my father learned what had happened, I would never hunt again. The mere thought made me hunch over and hurl.

  I shook my head to clear it. The memory was still vivid, as if it had happened two hours ago, not two years ago. Two years had passed since my life had irrevocably changed.

  If it had only been a sign of going blind, I would have been able to deal with it. But it wasn’t. It was much worse. My family still had no idea that I had inherited Grandma Marie’s crazy gene.

  I saw things that made no sense. Things that filled me with anxiety. Things that hadn’t happened yet… but impossibly, things that always came to pass.

  It was hard to verbalize. It fell in the same category as magic. I struggle to wrap my mind around that it truly existed. Which was why I didn’t tell anyone. Those who raved about magic got locked away in padded rooms. Like Grandma Marie.

  Now, I wasn’t sure she had been crazy. Like me, she used to zone out. Claimed to see things too. Things that made her burst into tears when she voiced them. And when that happened, we all stared at her with wide eyes filled with sympathy. Poor, crazy Grandma Marie.

  She died in a psychiatric hospital. I was the only one who felt guilty about it.

  She had been my favorite grandmother. Despite her idiosyncrasies and babbling, she’d had a heart of gold, and when she wasn’t seeing things, she epitomized every grandchild’s dream.

  She’d played with me when my sister went to the academy. She’d made me dolls with adorable little outfits. We’d played for hours while Uncle Fernus and Dad hunted with various teams.

  Werewolves were real; they were the reason Dad had pulled us all from public school, from society, as nobody would believe a word if we ever mentioned it.

  My father worried too much as it was. I didn’t want to add to his burdens. If he found out I was experiencing Grandma Marie’s symptoms, it would overwhelm him.

  I found ways to deal with it on my own.
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  Luckily, whenever it was about to happen, there were warning signs. It started with a mild headache, similar to a fatigue-induced headache. Then dizziness.

  I’d trained myself to listen to my body, to use my time wisely. When the headaches started, I rushed to safety and solitude. By the time the dizziness hit, I was already high in a tree during hunts, in my room when we were at home, or pretending to be asleep when we were driving.

  Then I got pulled into a realm that made zero sense.

  In the beginning, I was pulled into visions of hunts. In each one, we died.

  The first time it happened, I found myself around a fire with no recollection of how I’d gotten there. Blinking in the orange light, I was overcome with concern. Was I going blind? Had I passed out? Had Dad had taken me on some trip thinking I was asleep? But why couldn’t I remember waking and sitting on a log in front of a fire? Maybe the blackout was responsible for the memory gap. I felt out of it, but I was there. But why was I blacking out and going blind and losing chunks of memory? It made no sense. Was I coming down with some serious disease?

  Nearby, Will and Theo badgered each other amicably, Lizzy toasted a marshmallow on a stick for a s’more, laughing at my brother and cousin’s jokes. Dad and Uncle Fernus talked about the hunt. None of them paid me any attention.

  I didn’t see the wolf pack watching us.

  It happened so fast.

  They grabbed Theo first and dragged him into the woods. His screams were real. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I shivered.

  Will, with his fast reflexes, leapt to his feet and tried to free my brother. Two other wolves materialized and attacked him. He went down, his screams echoing through the air.

  My sister was already doing her thing. She killed one but struggled with the next.

  My father finally succeeded in grabbing his gun from the tent and fired off Silver Nitro bullets. Some of the pack fled, but others stayed.

  Uncle Fernus knifed one in the abdomen. It was their only vulnerable place and the fastest way to kill them.

  Meanwhile, all I did was stare at the raging battle. I didn’t even move when one of the wolves jumped me.

  I screamed as I woke in my bed.

  Just a nasty nightmare.

  That was the first vision. At the time, it had made no sense. But a week later, we were camping at the exact spot I’d dreamed of. Everything played out exactly as it had in the nightmare—Will and Theo badgering each other, my father and uncle talking about the hunt, Lizzy with her marshmallow.

  I’d never experienced déjà vu. It wasn’t amazing. Far from it. We were going to die.

  For some reason, I couldn’t voice it. Instead, I turned my gaze to the woods.

  They were out there.

  Wordless, I prepared: I positioned the gun beside Dad without him noticing. I made sure Lizzy had an extra sword at hand. I stood and watched where the wolf would come for Theo.

  When it happened, I didn’t freeze. I was ready.

  That night, I realized Grandma Marie hadn’t been crazy. What had she seen in her lifetime? All I knew about her visions was that they freaked her out. They’d left her crying and mumbling incoherently for days. If my visions came true, then hers probably had as well.

  Because of my preparation, we didn’t die that night. No one knew what I had done, but the only reason we’d survived the situation was my vision, not their alertness. I didn’t disabuse them of their notions. I was too scared of the vision.

  I had eight more visions about hunts after that. Every time, I managed to change the outcome.

  In time, the visions changed. They no longer featured hunts. I saw a war—one in which humans weren’t involved. A war of creatures, many unknown to me. A war I didn’t want to be part of. A war with no end.

  As the visions increased, sometimes I tried to ground myself with simple facts that couldn’t change, facts to help me return to reality. In the present, they went something like this: My name is Ru Chaperon. I am the youngest of three siblings. My brother, Theo, is twenty-five. My sister, Elizabeth, just turned twenty-one. I’ll be eighteen in a few months.

  We were members of the Supernatural Hunting Association. The SHA was a large network of hunters who eliminated creatures that didn’t belong in our world.

  Our task in the vast network was to kill a single breed: werewolves. If we stumbled across some other monster, it was guaranteed other hunters were in the area fulfilling their task.

  We honored other hunters’ territories. We didn’t know how to kill creatures beyond the ones we were assigned—stories and myths rarely reflected the truth—so we focused only on werewolves. Almost from infancy, we learned everything we could about them; we honed the skills we needed to stay alive. We graduated from training at sixteen.

  Whereas normal hunters belonged to shooting ranges or hunting clubs, we belonged to the SHA. It was founded in biblical times. Each generation belonged to the Association, keeping the existence of these creatures a secret and protecting humans. Most of the founders had no more descendants. They’d died off; some had never even started their own families as the job was their life.

  Some bloodlines came to be regarded as royalty. Most of the folklore had originated from them. They were not mere fairy tales; they were hidden truths to protect the innocent.

  One such tale was “Beauty and the Beast.” In the real version, the Beast was a werewolf and got no happy ending. Belle Dejaun slaughtered him after she learned what he was. Did she love him? Hell yes. But he was cursed; at every full moon, an uncontrollable demon emerged. Belle had discovered too late that her beloved Christian was a wolf.

  “Hansel and Gretel” were real witch hunters from Germany, brother and sister. Their ordeal with a witch in a gingerbread house was all true. Each bore a line of descendants who went on to be fantastic at hunting witches. They had to be, since most of what witches could do couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” “Rapunzel,” and many others were not true. All fabricated to confuse which stories contained nuggets of truth.

  “Little Red Riding Hood” was where we came in. Eva Chaperon was the real Little Red, or in the original French, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. She existed, and she was no damsel in distress. She didn’t need some lumberjack to rescue her—she was the lumberjack. The closet was an addition; only the villain shifting from human to wolf form.

  The wolf? None other than her own grandmother.

  If one were to reread the story with this in mind, one would discover the truth concealed among the fictional embellishments.

  Some earlier generations of hunters theorized that Eva’s red cloak possessed magic that allowed her to disappear in dangerous situations. Modern hunters scoffed at the notion. Then again, I saw things that hadn’t happened yet, so I couldn’t rule out the magic cloak. The garment had vanished, lost in the sands of time. Rumors persisted for a while that Eva had been buried with it, but she was once exhumed and this had turned out to be a lie. Others speculated it was guarded deep in an SHA vault, but Dad called this bullshit, reasoning that the SHA would’ve handed such a key weapon over to our family as Eva’s direct descendants.

  Liz was a lot like Eva. Fearless, clever, beautiful, brave. The SHA believed she was the reincarnation of Eva.

  Growing up, it was hard to compete with that. You should be more like your sister, Ru. Be as fast as Elizabeth. Think like Lizzy. What would Lizzy do? I’d suffered comments like this throughout my childhood. No wonder I didn’t feel like a true Chaperon hunter.

  Dad had been born into this life. He’d tried to escape it. Tried to give us all a normal life. But once a hunter, always a hunter.

  The monsters had found us. They killed my mother.

  I was two at the time. My brother, sister, and I spent most of our time with our grandmother.

  When Theo came of age, he joined the SHA and went to the academy. A few years later, Liz signed up. Eventually my turn came.


  The SHA taught me about all kinds of monsters—where to find them and how to stay alive. Although the focus for Chaperons was werewolves, we gleaned some basics about other monsters too. For example, vampires existed and were superfast and superstrong. Luckily, the SHA had developed weapons to take them down. All one needed was sharp eyes, quick aim, and the mental agility to think two steps ahead of them.

  At times, I was glad we were stuck with hunting werewolves. Vampires were way scarier. Witches too.

  Both my father and my uncle were renowned among hunters. From time to time, other hunters would come to us for assistance to take down mixed covens. Attacking mixed covens was generally the only time we teamed up.

  My brother and cousin carved out their reputations in the SHA. Will was popular with girls, and Theo was the shy one.

  Theo and I were alike in that regard.

  As for Elizabeth…

  She was the chosen one.

  The Eva Chaperon.

  Sometimes I envied her. She wasn’t merely skilled like Eva—she was stunning, too. She bore our mother’s beauty, where as I had been endowed with Dad’s genes. We were opposites—we didn’t even look like sisters. She was tall and lean, could eat anything she wanted and stay slender. I was short and muscular. Silky blond hair flowed in waves down her back, her blue eyes sparkled, and her skin was flawless and fair. I had brown hair and dark eyes. My hair wasn’t like hers; what I had could hardly be called hair, more like thin feathers that had lost their shine long ago.

  She looked like she belonged on runways, not running around in forests like a mad samurai. The boys of the Association were all over her, though none of them caught her interest.