03 Long Night Moon - Seasons of the Moon (19 page)

He wouldn’t be waiting for her ever again.

Rylie struggled to focus on keeping her bones and muscles from changing. She thought of human things. Walking on two feet. Hands and fingers. Clothes, school, cars, cities.

Pop. Crack
.

The skin of her cheeks stretched as bones pushed out. Her ears ached. Rylie grabbed her face in both hands, and a clump of white-blond hair fell where she touched it.

Groaning, she tried to focus on breathing. Counting numbers.
Anything
.

Gwyn. The ranch. Home.

That was where she needed to go. It was the only place she could be safe and secure, now that her pack was gone.

Rylie needed her aunt.

She dragged herself away from town, which was nothing more than a faint glow of light beyond the hills, and moved toward the smell of cows and chickens. It took everything she had to keep moving—when had she grown paws?—without succumbing to the pain.

Her focus was so strong that she didn’t notice when the wolf’s mind slid over the human’s. And she didn’t notice when her blood dripped on the snow.

Gwyn was settling in for the night when her phone rang. She gathered her robe around herself, stuffed her feet in her slippers, and padded to the place the phone was mounted on the wall. She had been waiting for it to ring all night since she got back from the hospital to find her niece missing.

“Rylie?” she answered.

But it wasn’t a girl on the other end of the line. “Really sorry to bother you, ma’am,” responded a deep voice she recognized as Abel’s.

Her worry sharpened into something close to fear. “Have you seen Rylie? I checked myself out of the hospital, and she’s not at home or picking up her cell phone.”

“You checked out?” he asked. “Why would you do that?”

“I got sick of the hospital and thought it was high time I came home. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Gwyn leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. She had been so sure Rylie was hiding at their apartment. “What’s going on? Is she—?”

He cut her off. “Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Don’t let Rylie in if you see her.”

“
What
?”

“You heard me.”

Not many things made Gwyn worry. The barn at her first ranch had burned down and killed half her cattle, and she still hadn’t lost her cool. She hadn’t even panicked when the doctors gave her diagnosis.

But between Rylie’s demonstration earlier and Abel’s warning, she was suddenly afraid. It was an alien feeling. She didn’t like it.

“Is this a… a
werewolf
thing?” she asked.

Abel went silent. When he spoke again, his voice had a new edge to it. “What do you know?”

Gwyn gave a shuddering laugh. “I don’t know much of anything these days.”

“I’m headed your way right now. I think Rylie might be, too. Don’t let her in.”

He hung up. She clutched the phone to her chest, staring around the dark house.

Gwyn lived in a dull world, and she liked it that way. She didn’t believe in ghosts or God, and all she expected to wait for her after death was a fast rot in the cold ground. In her darkest times, she didn’t turn to Jesus, and nary a prayer passed her lips to ask for help or forgiveness. She didn’t feel a need. Gwyn never had the faith the rest of her family did.

What she knew, she knew well—the earth and the cattle and the satisfaction of honest labor. The kind of things she could see and touch.

The rest of it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

As if to punctuate her thoughts, a shriek fractured the air beyond her walls. It didn’t sound like a coyote.

Her hand shook as she hung the phone in its cradle. Taking a deep breath, Gwyn walked to the window and pushed back the curtain. The porch lights made it hard to see into the night, so she flipped them off and waited for her eyes to adjust.

Another shriek. But this time, she saw what made the noise.

Something climbed her hill—something thin and pale and four-legged.

Cold shock slapped Gwyn like a winter wind.

The sight of her niece crawling through the snow was enough to make Abel’s warning vanish from her mind.

Gwyn flung open the door and plunged outside in slippers. Her weakness was replaced by sheer adrenaline.

“Rylie!”

The girl twitched and shuddered like a sickly dog. There was something wrong with her—something worse than being on her hands and knees in three feet of snow.

She slipped and slid to Rylie. “What are you doing, babe? Get up out of there!”

But then she saw what was wrong.

Her niece—the sweet baby girl who used to ride her pigs like ponies—had grown a long, bare tail, more like a rat than a wolf. Her face was bleeding. Her hair was patchy. She left a trail of crimson in the snow behind her.

“Help me,” Rylie whispered.

And then she collapsed in the snow with a scream.

Her body contorted. Her hands clawed at the sky. Fur slid from her skin like grass growing too fast, and her screams turned to howls.

Don’t let her in
, Abel had said. He’d been onto something there.

“Jesus Christ,” Gwyn breathed.

She didn’t wait for Rylie to finish changing. At the bottom of the hill, she was closer to the fields than home, and she wasn’t sure her legs could carry her up the slope. So instead, she ran for the paddock.

Her legs were sluggish with cold and her slippers had soaked through. She kicked them off at the fence and threw herself over the side.

Every panting breath made pain spike through her lungs. The doctor said she could resume normal activity when she felt up to it, but he probably hadn’t meant running form werewolves.

Rylie’s screams cut off.

Gwyn threw a look over her shoulder as she unlocked the stable door. Whatever moved in the snow wasn’t a girl anymore. It was huge and hulking and faster than anything she’d ever seen.

She ran inside and slammed the door.

Something crashed into the other side and made the latch shudder.

The horses shifted in their stalls, restless and worried. Gwyn threw the bolt on the door and went to the nearest horse—Butch, good old Butch, who didn’t fear anything—and climbed on his back as the monster struck the stable doors again.

He danced on his hooves. She gripped his sides between her knees and hugged his neck.

“Go! Get moving!”

The door cracked on the third blow. On the fourth, the stable was blown wide open.

As a wolf, Rylie was almost as big as Butch. She wasn’t shaking anymore. She looked powerful and inhuman—there was no little girl in those luminous gold eyes.

The horses shrieked. Butch darted out of his stall, and his motion caught the gaze of the wolf.

It lunged.

Butch jumped out of the way, and Gwyn clung to his back as they burst out of the barn into the chilly night air. The wolf roared behind them.

She didn’t need to kick him to get Butch moving. He had somehow forgotten he was old and turned into lightning. He sliced through the snow, Gwyn’s silver braids streaming behind them.

The wolf’s teeth snapped at Butch’s tail. Its paws were thunder pounding against the ground.

They tried to jump the fence. Butch’s hind hoof caught, and he lost his footing. He fell out from under her, and Gwyn cried out as she was flung off his back.

Hitting the ground was like smacking a brick wall face-first. All the breath left her aching lungs.

And the horse screamed.

Gwyn couldn’t get to her feet fast enough. Her body was too cold, too weak. But she got up in time to see jaws close on Butch’s throat.

Blood sprayed. His hooves kicked helplessly.

A distraction was a distraction. Gwyn couldn’t do anything for him—hell, she couldn’t do anything for herself, either.

So she ran and didn’t look back.

Seth dove through the snow, rifle hugged to his chest. The night was pierced by the occasional howl, but he couldn’t tell who it was or what was happening. Was it Bekah and Levi communicating over long distances? Or was Rylie shrieking with fear and pain?

It felt like he made no progress traveling through the vast plains of snow. He ran for an hour without seeing changes. Everything looked identical in the dark, except for the occasional tree or passing car.

But then something moved among the dark shapes of an orchard. For a breathless moment, he hoped it would be Rylie. Then the figure drew closer, and he saw it was a man—terrified and bleeding.

“Hey!” Seth called, intercepting him.

He stopped the hunter by grabbing his shirt, and the older man stared at him with wild eyes as though he didn’t really see anything.

“Let me go!” He wrenched himself free of Seth’s grip and shook a finger at the north. “There’s something out there. It looks human, but—holy mother of God, it tried to eat me!”

“What was it? What did it look like?”

“A naked girl,” the hunter said. “There was a deer—a dead deer—”

Seth clenched his fists. “You’ll miss the road running that direction. Head east. Go!”

He didn’t have to say it twice.

The man fled and Seth headed for the trees.

A dead deer. He hoped that would be the only dead thing he found that night.

A tingle in the back of his mind made him change trajectory before reaching the orchard. He recognized some of the hills now, as well as the iced-over stream that sliced through the land. Gwyn’s property was close, maybe just two miles away.

And the wolf was close.

His heart pounded as he scrambled up a ridge overlooking a valley filled with black, leafless trees.

Something moved on the opposite hills. A pale figure ran through the snow, and he realized with a jolt that it was Gwyn.

A bathrobe flapped behind her. Her feet were bare, and she moved sluggishly.

Seth jumped down the ridge, struggling to get through the snow that had collected at the bottom. It was too thick. He stumbled gracelessly down the slope.

A moment later, Gwyn slipped. Her cry pierced the air as she fell.

Seth froze, holding his breath as she tumbled head over feet. She bounced off a rock and came to a stop at the bottom.

Gwyn’s body didn’t move.

“No,” he muttered as he slid another foot down the ridge. “No, no, no—”

Another form appeared on the opposite hill—a dark patch against the snow. It was moving fast, but not as quickly as a normal werewolf should have.

Rylie circled around her aunt. She was always beautiful and terrible as a wolf, but she looked like a nightmarish echo of her usual self. Her fur stuck up in spikes, blood caked her face, and she shivered with every step. Her eyes rolled. Drool dribbled from her lolling tongue.

All signs of silver poisoning. Seth should have known.

“Please—don’t do this,” Gwyn whispered. It was so quiet that he heard her from the top of the ridge.

The sound of her voice jolted him into motion again. He slipped down as quickly as he could, fighting his way against sliding drifts.

Rylie growled. Golden eyes focused on Gwyn. Werewolves couldn’t resist sickly, weakened prey.

But she should have been different. She should have known not to attack her aunt.

He lost his footing and sank waist-deep into the snow.

The wolf roared and jumped at Gwyn.

“Rylie!”

A honey-gold blur exploded from the trees and barreled into Rylie’s side an instant before she could bite Gwyn.

Both wolves went flying. She leaped to her feet immediately, twisting around to snap at the wolf that attacked—which was Levi, judging by the size—but he darted out of her reach. He swooped in to snap at her legs.

Werewolves were terrifyingly fast when they fought—faster than any human could hope to match. His eyes couldn’t even track them through the valley.

Another wolf appeared. Bekah ran to Gwyn and stood over her body, sticking her nose into the older woman’s face and neck as if to see if she was still alive.

When Levi and Rylie’s fight rolled near, Bekah stood between them, guarding Gwyn’s body.

Levi tore into Rylie, shrieking and snapping.

Bones cracked. Blood spattered.

Werewolves healed fast enough that minor injuries didn’t sway them. But Rylie was mindless and brutal. The fact that Levi changed at will and kept his mind put him at a disadvantage.