03 Long Night Moon - Seasons of the Moon (8 page)

“I love you,” she said impulsively. They weren’t usually affectionate, but it came out before she could stop herself. “Even when you’re embarrassing.”

Gwyn ruffled her hair. “Drive safe, pumpkin.”

It was the nickname Rylie’s dad used to call her before he died of a heart attack, and it made her eyes burn to hear it coming from her aunt. Nobody had called her pumpkin in months.

She made it all the way to the truck before starting to cry.

Long nights made the days fly by. Rylie passed out every night with the sunset and woke up twelve hours later feeling like she hadn’t slept at all, dragging herself through chores and another day of school with heavy limbs.

Seth spent most of his breaks studying in the library or with the team, so Rylie tried to hang out with Tate instead. But Levi seemed to have become his new best friend. He didn’t confront her or anything, but he was always around, thumbing that silver star on his earlobe and staring. Rylie couldn’t stand his smell. It got bad enough that if she saw Tate approaching, she would turn around and head in the opposite direction instead.

“What’s bugging you?” Tate asked in class one day.

She forced a casual shrug. Levi wasn’t there, but his smell was all over Tate’s hair and clothes. “It’s not you. It’s just…”

“Levi.”

“Yeah.” She smiled sheepishly.

Tate chucked her in the shoulder. “He’s cool, but you’re still my best bro. And the weirdest. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

His reassurances didn’t do anything to calm Rylie. In fact, it only made her worry more. She had no idea what a werewolf wanted with her friend, but she had a feeling it wasn’t good.

Seth and Abel weren’t the only ones who could investigate. And she didn’t need their permission to hunt.

Rylie sneaked into her geography teacher’s classroom while he was at lunch. She logged onto his computer using the password on a sticky note under his keyboard.

The student records were accessible through an icon on the desktop shaped like a door. She resisted the urge to check her grades and loaded Levi’s records instead. Everything was there—his history of athletic extracurriculars, his perfect grades, and a list of every school he attended.

She emailed them to herself and jotted down Levi’s address before logging out.

“What are you doing in here?” asked her teacher, entering with a lunch bag under one arm and a mouthful of tuna sandwich pouching his right cheek. It smelled horrible and stale.

“I thought I left my phone in here,” she said.

He watched her leave with a suspicious look, but she hurried down the hall before he could ask more questions.

She felt jittery for the rest of the day, like someone would find out what she had done. She didn’t care if the school caught her—what would one more red mark on her record mean anyway?—but feared what Bekah and Levi might do.

Fortunately, the afternoon passed uneventfully. Seth had practice after school and Tate drove off with Levi, leaving Rylie a whole boring evening on her own.

She turned on her phone to find a message from the tailor saying her dress was ready. Rylie left her car at the high school and wandered downtown, yawning and stretching. Her entire body was sore. Rylie didn’t think she would ever sleep well again.

It was a sunny day, and the streets had been plowed, leaving the pavement damp and steaming. The little bell over the door jingled when Rylie walked into the tailor’s.

He grinned when he recognized her. “You’re going to love this.”

They went into the back room. Her dress hung in a curtained room next to a full length mirror, and it was so big that she needed help getting it over her head.

The tailor laced the hooks up the back and then bustled around to double check his measurements. She stared at herself in the mirror with awe. She couldn’t wait to see Seth’s reaction. “It’s perfect,” she said. “This is great. Thank you so much.”

“It’s better than perfect,” he said with a wink.

Rylie had already paid for the dress at the fitting, so she only had to take it home. He zipped it up in a bag and she carried it slung over her shoulder. It was bulky, but not heavy. Of course, nothing was too heavy for her anymore. She probably could have carried a car over her shoulder if it hadn’t been such an awkward shape.

The wind shifted, and a whiff of something meaty caught her attention as she ambled down the road. She stopped and sniffed.

Something smelled amazing. It wasn’t dinnertime yet, but she was suddenly hungry. She checked the time. Gwyn wouldn’t mind if she was a few more minutes late.

She tracked the smell with her nose to the breeze, keeping an eye out for whatever restaurant was venting such a sweet smell. She hadn’t heard about a new restaurant opening. It was a big deal whenever something opened in town—the lone Starbucks in the grocery store was still the talk of the town, and it had been built the year before.

Rylie stopped in front of a narrow alley between a diner and an antique shop.

Another sniff. That was definitely the source of the smell. But it wasn’t coming from the buildings—it was coming from the trash.

Why would an alley smell so good? Maybe something was rotting in the Dumpster.
Gross
. One of the weirdest parts of becoming a werewolf was that everything smelled interesting, even things that should have been icky.

She couldn’t resist the urge to find out what smelled so strongly. Rylie climbed over a pile of plowed snow and peered into the trash.

A leg was sticking out of the trash bags. A
human
leg.

She gasped and jerked back. Her foot slipped in the snow and she landed hard on her butt, scrambling back on all fours as if she could escape what she had seen. Her dress bag landed on damp sidewalk and she didn’t even care.

Fumbling for her cell phone, she pressed the speed dial for Seth. It picked up on the third ring.

“What?”

“Seth! There’s a body, someone’s dead, it’s in an alley—”

“Who is this? Rylie?”

The voice was too deep and gruff to belong to her boyfriend. She groaned. “What are you doing with this phone, Abel?”

“Seth forgot it at home. Who died? Where’s the body?”

She bit her lower lip. She didn’t want to see Abel—ever again, preferably.

“I’ll just call the cops.”

“Don’t. We’ll lose the chance to collect our own evidence. Tell me where you are.”

Reluctantly, Rylie gave him directions to the alley. She didn’t like having to wait near the body. It smelled delicious—oh my
God
it smelled good, and that was so horrible—but she was afraid it would vanish if she left.

Every time a car passed, she tried not to look nervous. It was hard to believe that everyone else couldn’t smell it.

Abel showed up five minutes later. He brought a cheap digital camera, rubber gloves, and sandwich bags. Her stomach flipped at the sight of him.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to touch that thing,” she said, feeling nauseous.

“Fine. I won’t tell you.”

Abel climbed into the Dumpster like it was a totally normal thing to do and started digging around. Shifting the trash made the smell waft toward her more strongly.

“It’s just like the other ones,” he said. “Her throat’s been ripped out, but there’s no other major injury.”

“I don’t want to know.”

He gave a low whistle. “It’s pretty bad.”

“I said I don’t want to know!”

The camera clicked as Abel took pictures from various angles. He took long enough that curiosity got the better of her, and she edged her way up the pile of snow to give a sideways peek at his shoulders over the rim of the Dumpster.

“Definitely just her throat.” Abel jumped out and peeled off the gloves, dropping them in an empty sandwich bag. He had bits of hair and blood in the other ones. It looked like he had taken some kind of tissue sample.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, covering her nose and mouth with her hands.

“You think this is bad? This is just the start.” Abel grinned. How could he smile like that?

“We have to do something,” Rylie said.

“We could have gotten that Levi kid the other night.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe the woman would have survived if they had finished the job when they had the chance. Rylie could tell her thoughts were showing on her face because Abel gave a grim nod.

“What happens next?” she asked.

He smirked at her. That lopsided smile looked like Seth’s, but so much more sadistic. If Rylie had still been dreaming, she thought his smile would show up in her nightmares.

“You can call the police if you want. I’m taking these home to do a little more research.” He wiggled one of the bags at her. Something slimy and red slid around the inside of it. “Have to put the evidence on ice.”

That was too much for Rylie to handle. The sour taste of bile stung her throat.

Abel’s laugh echoed behind her as she fell to all fours and threw up on the sidewalk.

Seth struggled with self-doubt.

He had done more research on the Riese siblings. He tracked their history back for two years, and found nothing that indicated they were killers. But a big chunk of time was missing. It was like the records for two years had been completely removed.

That was the kind of thing Seth’s mom looked for when searching for damning evidence surrounding a werewolf, but he didn’t know what to do with it.

For the first time since she left, Seth wished his mother was there so they could talk about it. His dad had been a werewolf expert, but he wasn’t sure if they ever killed teenage werewolves. Levi was his age. Bekah was a little younger. Hunting them seemed… wrong.

He knew Bekah Riese was waiting for him to make a move. She was always watching when Seth was with Rylie at school. It made Seth feel like he was the one being hunted instead of doing the hunting for once.

When Seth went for lunchtime practice in the gym on Wednesday, it was no surprise to find Levi warming up with the team. But he
was
surprised to see Rylie waiting for him, too. She was at the top of the stands with her knapsack by her side and her hair in thick braids like Gwyn’s.

He waved at her. She gave him a weak smile.

Seth changed in the locker room and came out to find the guys shooting hoops. There wasn’t enough time for an organized game, but they dribbled the ball up the court and back again, elbowing each other and dodging and laughing.

The ball flew at Seth, and he caught it. He was surprised to see Levi had thrown it.

“You going to play?” he asked.

A group of girls on the bottom row of bleachers giggled and sighed. Rylie had gone pale.

“You’re on,” Seth said.

A skirmish between the two city guys was too exciting to miss. The other athletes backed up with hoots and cheers. He couldn’t tell if they were cheering more for him or Levi.

He bounced the ball a couple times to loosen his shoulders, then went for the hoop.

Levi jumped in front of him. Seth twisted, guarding the ball with his body, and made a wide turn so he could run toward the end of the court.

A hand shot in front of him, knocking the ball out of the way.

People yelled as Levi made a fast lap around the gym. Seth blinked. He’d moved too fast to be seen, using his supernatural werewolf speed to steal the ball.

“Cheating?” he muttered under his breath.

Levi’s eyes glinted. “I’m not holding back. Are you?”

Rylie stared hungrily from the top of the bleachers as Seth took a deep breath, opening up all those special senses that made him the “legendary hunter” Bekah had called him. He ignored it most of the time. He didn’t like to show off.

But now he narrowed his entire focus on Levi and those piercing golden eyes.

The werewolf tried to fake him out by feinting to one side and then darting in the other direction, but Seth saw the move coming. He stole the ball and bolted.

Levi was a blur as he darted in the way. Seth twisted and changed direction.

The ball was stolen. Seth took it back a half second later.

Girls screamed as Seth dribbled across the court. His heart pounded in his ears. He just needed to get across, and then he would be in the clear, and—

Levi flew past him. The ball was gone.

He slam-dunked and hung off the rim. The onlookers roared, stomping their feet and clapping, and Seth felt numb in the center of the court. Levi dropped to his feet, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at him in challenge.

Levi was strong and fast—and definitely better at basketball.

But was he deadlier?

He imagined squeezing his finger on the trigger of his gun and the blood fountaining down Levi Riese’s triumphant expression. He could imagine himself kneeling by the body, snapping off a tooth, and making a matching earring.

Rylie stood in the bleachers, chewing on her thumbnail. She was whiter than the snow outside.

“Rematch?” Levi asked, tossing the ball at him. Seth let it bounce past him.

Soon. Very soon
.

He went back into the locker room without responding.