None of their species would ever be able to choose a mate of their own free will, only the Fates could assign them that. So while his children were spared their Apollite curse, the gods gave them a new one. 'I will not allow my children to suffer for your vanity! You can all die for what I care. How dare he, a mere mortal, be contentious enough to thwart their will.īut the king refused. They demanded the king slaughter all the creatures he'd made. From that day forward they would live for centuries, immune from the curse of Apollo. Under the light of the full moon, when their powers were strongest, not even the laws of time or physics would hold sway over them.

From their father's tampering they would live by day as their base form, either human or animal, and at night they would be able to switch to their alternate form. By day, human would be their base form.įrom their mother's Apollite race, they inherited magick and psychic abilities.

Two creatures who held the hearts of an animal and who lived as an animal by the light of day. The experiments turned his two sons into four separate beings. No longer human, no longer Apollite nor animal, they were something else entirely. When his experiments were complete, he'd created an entirely new species. Wolves, jackals, lions, tigers, panthers, jaguars, cheetahs, bears, hawks, leopards, even a rare dragon-those were his chosen few to be the saviors of his children. That very night, he began using the darkest of magick to splice the genes of his wife's people with those of the strongest of animals. He would not stand by and watch his children die.

Unable to bear the injustice, he confronted the gods and told them to screw themselves. Like her, they would die for something none of them had had a part in. Lycaon was devastated by the loss of his love, but worse than that was the haunting knowledge that soon his own sons would join their mother and die every bit as horrifically. In only twenty-four hours she went from a beautiful young woman to a crone, then nothing but scattered dust. It was a secret she kept until the day when she, like all the others of her Apollite kind, began to decay and die. Because of the actions of her forefathers against the Greek god Apollo more than two thousand years before her birth, her people had been damned to die brutally on their twenty-seventh birthday. Little did he know she bore the darkest of all curses. A woman whose very smile was his life's blood. Like so many before and after, he made the mistake of falling in love with the most beautiful woman in his kingdom. One who refused to yield before the wills of the Greek gods who commanded him. Long before recorded history there lived a bold king.

Bad moon rising by sherrilyn kenyon