All Hallows' Moon (7 page)

And it wanted to hunt.

Rylie woke up with feathers stuck to her face.

She sat up. Something itched against her gums, and she picked another feather out of the space between her canines and molars. It was big and red. The last time she had seen that feather, it was attached to a rooster.

The chicken pen was completely silent. She crawled to the door of the henhouse and looked inside.

No wonder it was so quiet.

“I’m going to be in so much trouble,” Rylie muttered.

She managed to get inside before her aunt woke up and took a long, hot shower. Rylie scrubbed at the chicken blood on her face, chest, and arms with a loofah until her skin turned raw and pink.

All the wolf had left inside the chicken coop were bloody stains. When she tried to remember what she had done with them, she could almost recall the sensation of bones cracking in her jaws, and the feeling of fragments scraping down her throat.

Rylie wanted to feel guilty. Chickens were living creatures deserving of compassion as much as any cow, after all. But when she remembered the rooster’s attack on her first morning at the ranch, she felt a little satisfied to have eaten him.

She knew her aunt had woken up when her hot water vanished, and she leaped out of the shower with a yelp. That meant Gwyn was cooking breakfast. Rylie shivered as she toweled off with weak motions. She was drained after the full moon. She couldn’t even make herself fake a smile at the breakfast table.

Rylie picked at her bacon while her aunt read the newspaper. She was still full from the night before, so nothing looked edible.

“I’ve got a lot to do today. I’m going to have to take you into town early,” Gwyn said, offering her the section of the newspaper with the comics. She shook her head. “Suit yourself. Is everything ready for school?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Throw your dishes in the sink and we’ll go.”

Her nerves grew tighter as they walked to Gwyn’s truck with her knapsack over her shoulder. They passed the coop. It was too far away to see what Rylie had done, and the henhouse faced in the wrong direction.

All they needed to do was walk five feet to the truck, shut the doors, and drive. Then she would be safe. Gwyn wouldn’t find out. She might not notice until…

“Have you heard the rooster this morning?” her aunt asked, stopping at the tailgate of the truck.

Rylie’s heart plummeted. “I thought I heard it around sunrise.”

Gwyn tilted her head as she listened. Rylie’s sensitive ears picked up buzzing flies, but her aunt would hear nothing but silence.

“Hang out here a second,” Gwyn said, jogging down the hill. She walked around one side of the coop first, then the other, and then opened the gate to go inside.

Rylie hadn’t realized her aunt knew so many swear words. She hurried down to stand on the other side of the chicken wire, hesitating to go inside. She had seen enough dead birds for one day.

“Jesus,” Gwyn muttered. “Some coyotes.”

She swallowed a burp that tasted like chicken and turned it into an awkward cough. “That’s what I told you the other week. Coyotes are really bad around here.”

Her aunt gave her a hard stare through the fence. “Do you know anything about this?”

“No.”

Even though Rylie didn’t sound convincing, it was ridiculously implausible for any human to have caused the carnage in the henhouse, so Gwyn shook her head.

“Let’s head to town. Looks like I need to buy some new chicks.”

Six

The Newest Student

Rylie didn’t notice the passage of time in terms of days or weeks anymore, but the school did. October snuck up on her, and the school was soon draped in orange streamers and grimacing cardboard pumpkins.

She studied the announcements board—which, in a school so small, mostly involved birthdays and straight A report cards—and was surprised to see there would be a party at the end of the month.

For her last Halloween, Rylie had gone to a huge party at Lance Cunningham’s house. She dressed up as a sexy nurse and glared at anyone who tried to flirt with her. Tyler had gotten so drunk that he barfed orange Jell-o shots everywhere and had to go to the hospital.

It wasn’t her favorite time of year.

This party wouldn’t be anything like that, but there would be a costume contest during the lunch period. She rolled her eyes. Rylie hadn’t had a costume contest in school since fourth grade.

There were murmurs in the halls when she went to her morning class, but this time, nobody was staring at her. Something—or someone—else had gotten everyone talking. Rylie didn’t care. Grateful for the distraction, she took her usual seat with Tate and tried not to doze off on her text book.

“Did you hear? There’s another new student!”

Rylie lifted her head from her paper. She had been doodling a wolf eating a turkey. “Huh?”

“There’s another new student,” Tate repeated. He didn’t bother to whisper even though they were supposed to be taking a quiz. Rylie had gotten three questions done before giving up. “That means two of you in one year. It’s too exciting for the small-minded rabble in this urinal of a school.”

“Is he our age?”

“Naw. He’s a senior.” Tate’s expression went dreamy. “I wonder if he likes to smoke.”

Rylie snorted.

She barely got through the quiz by the time the bell rang. She dropped her packet on the teacher’s desk, and Tate did the same, although his was completely blank other than a drawing of a pot leaf on the first page.

There were clouds on the horizon when they went to eat lunch on the quad. Tate’s friends were already at their usual bench, and Rylie got the impression they had never gone to class. One of them was too busy with his laptop to look up, but the other gave her a nervous smile before going back to his video game magazine.

She half-listened to her idiot friends talking about games while eating lunch. Two new students in a year. That would have been unremarkable back home, but it seemed unlikely in such a small town. Rylie had a bad feeling about it, but she wasn’t sure why.

Someone walking across the quad caught the wolf’s attention. His gait was strange. He was swinging on crutches with one leg in a brace below the knee.

“Who’s that?” she asked, interrupting Tate in the middle of a tirade about evil corporations assimilating small video game developers.

He glanced over. “Oh, him? That’s the new guy. Picked a good time to break his leg, huh?”

She glanced around to make sure nobody was watching before shutting her eyes and taking a deep sniff. Even without her eyesight, she could vividly envision the quad. The two kids leaning against the tree had sex that morning in the locker room. The girl over there was on her period. Half of the people had been eating cafeteria pizza, and the other half were eating leftovers, nachos, Funyuns, cookies, or a dozen other types of junk food. A slight breeze from a passing group tickled the hairs on her arms. She could tell it was the football team by their sweat.

Picking out the smell of the injured boy wasn’t hard. “I’ll see you guys in English,” Rylie said, picking up her knapsack and following the scent trail.

The boy moved fast considering his handicap, but she was faster. He went into the cafeteria, where all the food smells would making tracking harder, so Rylie closed the gap between them.

When he opened the door to the multipurpose room, the blowing air wafted his smell in her direction. Her nose twitched. Rylie smelled something familiar—something she hadn’t expected to ever encounter again.

The boy with the cast kept moving toward the doors on the opposite end of the building. He slowed down as he struggled with his crutches. The sight of such easy prey made the wolf stir, but Rylie suppressed her violent thoughts.

She took another sniff of his trail.

No way
.

She recognized those broad shoulders and that dark hair. Even better, she recognize the smell of gunpowder and leather that always hung around him, even though he wasn’t carrying a gun or wearing his leather jacket.

He stopped at the door and took an arm off one of the crutches to push it open. She stopped behind him and found the strength to speak.

“Seth?”

He turned, and Rylie couldn’t breathe.

It was Seth, just as she remembered him. His hair was shorter now, but nothing else had changed. He wore his usual uniform of a black t-shirt and jeans. She had only seen him wearing something else once or twice.

They looked at each other. A moment of blank confusion flashed across his face, and then he dropped his crutches.

“
Rylie
?”

She didn’t remember crossing the space between them. All of a sudden she found herself wrapping her arms around him, and he was holding her, and for the first time in months Rylie felt right.

Burying her face in his neck, she took deep breaths of his skin without caring how weird it must look to the other students. The smell behind his ear was rich and earthy with the tang of steel around the edges. Rylie wanted to melt into him.

“You’re
alive
,” Seth said, leaning back to search her face.

“Are you hurt? Your leg wasn’t... I mean... I didn’t do anything to you, did I?”

His smile faltered. “You don’t remember?”

“Everything that happens when I change is still kind of hazy. I had no idea what happened to you. I thought you were...” Rylie trailed off, unwilling to finish the sentence.

“It was Jericho,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “You stopped him before he could kill me. I got lucky.”

“Did he bite you?”

“No. He didn’t even break my leg, actually, and I had almost completely healed, but then I was practicing some moves with my brother and... What am I saying? Rylie, what are you doing here?”

“I’m going to school,” she said. “I’ve moved in with my aunt, who has a ranch about fifteen miles out of town. I didn’t think the city would be safe for someone like me. There’s a lot more room in the country. What are
you
doing here?”

Realization dawned in his eyes, and his hands dropped from her shoulders, leaving her cold.

“Oh no. This is bad. This is
really
bad.”

“What?”

Even though it didn’t look like anyone was watching, Seth put a finger to his lips to silence her. “Not here. Follow me.”

Seth picked up his crutches and limped outside to the tree. Its roots sprawled across the ground in thick knots, and leaves showered around them with every gust of wind.

“We came to hunt,” he said in a low voice. His dark eyes glimmered like coals. “Me and my brother and my mom. We keep an eye on the news for signs of werewolves, like weird attacks on livestock. When we saw what happened to the herd here, we jumped on it.”

“You’re here to... oh.” Hunt werewolves.

Hunt
Rylie
.

She remembered Seth telling her about his family, but she had never met them. It made too much sense now. His brother had been attacked by a werewolf and almost transformed. That trespasser with a mangled face was Seth’s brother, that woman was his mom, and they were here to hunt.

Seth’s family wanted to kill her.

He looked grim. “I said it was bad.”

“I’ve only been here for a couple of weeks,” Rylie said.

“But you killed those cows, didn’t you?”

Rylie focused on a line of ants marching across the roots of the tree. She shouldn’t have been so embarrassed. Seth had already seen her at her worst when she slaughtered a deer, but she hated having him know she wasn’t controlled.

“They belonged to my aunt,” she said.

He didn’t reply for so long that she finally met his solemn gaze. She couldn’t read his expression. “You have to leave.”

“No. Your family needs to leave, Seth.”

“This isn’t the right place to have this talk. Why don’t I come see you after school? We’ll talk about it at your aunt’s house.”