Luna's Children – Rachel A Brune

Tonight's guest is Rachel A Brune, who's one of the Luna's Children contributors. Her short story "Night Run" is about a retired country werewolf Rick Keller who reluctantly leaves his northern Vermont sanctuary to come to the aid of an old friend, whose work with a NYC church youth group is jeopardized by strange energies gathering in the stone cathedral.

She explains: "The character of Rick first appeared in my 2011 NaNoWriMo project. I love werewolves and Cold War spy novels, and the two kind of collided in my head. While I was revising and editing the novel, Cold Run (Untold Press), I saw the submission call for an urban Green Man anthology and drafted 'Night Run'. I was rejected by that project, and another one, before the story found a home with Luna's Children. Victoria also appears in the novel, as a minor character, and I thought this was a great chance to spend some time with her, and to see how basically the only thing that will motivate Rick to leave his comfortable retirement is a friend in trouble."

Pick up your copy of Stranger Worlds or Full Moon Mayhem.

Excerpt:

The air in the church had a quality to it that I had rarely imbibed outside of old-growth forests. I inhaled deeper, worried. If something out there was wrapping my senses around themselves, I was in trouble. I reached down inside and gently stretched for the change, coaxing it close to the surface, inviting it to tell me the truth of what I saw.
“You feel it?” asked Victoria, whispering.
“Yes,” I said, whispering back. It seemed like the right thing to do. “It’s amazing.”
“You know what it is?” she asked.
“No,” I said. It smelled of dirt and growing things and the midday August sun as it soaked into the deep forest. It called the change out of me, and here on the cusp of the moonrise, I trembled as I forced myself to stay upright.
“Are you going to be able to you get rid of it?” she asked.
“Get rid of it?” I asked. “Why the fu—heck would you want to do that?” I caught myself from swearing just in time. I was in a church.
“Attendance at the Center has gone down continuously the past three months,” she said. “Even the regular masses have been affected.”
“What? Why?”
“The kids can’t explain,” she said. “They just say something’s creepy, and then one day they stop coming.”

Bio:
Rachel A Brune writes short fiction, long fiction, songs, screenplays, poetry and operations orders. A former Army journalist, she lives in North Carolina with her husband, two dogs and three cats. She blogs her adventures, writing and otherwise, at http://www.infamous-scribbler.com.