All Hallows' Moon (8 page)

“Sure. Her address is—”

“I know where you live, Rylie,” he said. He looked uncomfortable. “My brother was scoping it out.” Seth’s hand traced a line down her cheek, and she closed her eyes to savor his touch. “What happened to you after that night at camp?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I woke up alone. Where were you?”

Seth’s fingers dropped to her hand. “I looked for you, but I thought you didn’t make it.” A hint of that easy smile curved his lips. “I’ve thought about you every day.”

Footsteps approached, and a man spoke. “Are you going to introduce me, Seth?”

He pulled his hand back quickly, and ice shot through Rylie’s veins. The newcomer looked like Seth, but taller and older, like he might have been in college. His facial scarring wasn’t as scary in the daylight. The shadows of night had twisted his face into something more monstrous.

But even with a smile just like Seth’s, Rylie could remember seeing Abel on the road in the dark, holding a rifle loaded with silver bullets.

“Oh yeah,” Seth said. He sounded totally normal. How could he be so casual standing between a werewolf and a hunter? She felt like she was going crazy. “Rylie, this is my brother, Abel. Abel, this is Rylie. She’s a friend of mine.”

“You make friends fast, little man,” Abel said. It stretched his scar when he smiled.

She could imagine raking her claws down his flesh, leaving him ragged and screaming. That was how he had gotten the scar in the first place, wasn’t it?

Rylie gazed at him mutely, unsure of what to say.

“She’s helping me get around school,” Seth said.

Abel held her gaze, challenging her to keep staring at his scar. “That’s awfully nice of you, Rylie, but I don’t think Seth will need help much longer. We’re going to the doctor to get his cast removed right now.”

She finally dropped her eyes.

“That’s great,” she mumbled.

“Come on, bro,” Abel said, taking Seth’s backpack. “Let’s get going.”

Seth flashed a smile. “See you later, Rylie.”

I know where you live
.

The more she thought about it, the more menacing that sounded.

Rylie’s concentration was wasted for the rest of the day. She could only stare out the windows at the sweeping landscape and think of Seth. What were the odds that a guy she met at summer camp would come to her new school in the same year?

She supposed he odds were actually pretty good, if that guy happened to be a werewolf hunter, and she was a werewolf. It hadn’t occurred to Rylie that people might see the news about the cows and connect the attacks to her.

Rylie had to excuse herself from chemistry. She knelt in the handicapped stall of the girl’s bathroom and pressed her hands to her forehead to hold in the throbbing ache that settled behind her eyes.

The same sentence kept running through her mind over and over again:
They came to kill me. They came to kill me
.

She was lucky it was the day after her transformation, because the werewolf was exhausted and silent. Her adrenaline ran high. On any other day, Rylie was sure it would have come raging out to do damage.

Her eyes burned and hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

They came to kill me
.

It was one thing for him to
tell
her that he hunted werewolves, and another to have him come after her.

Had he been out there last night with Abel? Had they been looking for signs of another attack as they tracked her across the farmlands? If she had gone the wrong way and stumbled across them, would they have shot and skinned her and mounted her head on their wall?

Hysterics rolled through her, and now that she had started crying, she couldn’t stop. Her whole body shook. Rylie smothered her sobs against her arms.

She wanted to be happy to see Seth, but instead, she felt betrayed.

Seven

Family

Rylie didn’t make it back to chemistry. She sat in the bathroom soaking paper towels in water, rolling them into balls, and flinging them at the ceiling hard enough to stick. When a girl came in to use the toilets, Rylie glared at her with fierce golden eyes until she left again.

She managed to compose herself enough to attend her last class, but she still couldn’t focus. The teacher noticed. Rylie saw him whispering with Dean Block at the end of the day.

When she and her aunt got home, there was a message blinking on their answering machine. Rylie knew it had to be about her, but she left the room so she wouldn’t have to listen to it with Gwyn.

“Are you having a hard time adjusting?” her aunt asked later.

Rylie made herself smile. “No. I’m happy. I love it here.” She couldn’t have sounded less enthusiastic if she tried.

“All right. Do you have much homework tonight?” she asked, letting her niece’s obvious lie slide past without remark. Rylie shook her head. “Then I need you to work in the garden. The boys and I are taking some cattle to auction, and the squash are ready. Get the weeds while you’re at it.”

She nodded, happy to have a distraction, and took a trash bag out to the garden.

Rylie put on gloves and tugged at the weeds halfheartedly. It was a beautiful day to work outside, but she couldn’t make herself focus on anything but the memory of Abel’s scarred face stretching into a smile.

A cloud of dust rose on the road. Rylie shielded her eyes against the dropping sun to see who approached. She was just wondering why someone with a motorcycle would visit her aunt when Seth came up the hill and stopped on the other side of the garden.

He took off his helmet as he dismounted. His hair stuck up in the back. “Hey,” Seth said.

Rylie felt a smile growing, and she ducked her head to hide it. How could she be so excited and so scared to see him all at once? “How’s your leg?” she asked.

“Perfect. I’m a fast healer.”

“I didn’t know you can ride motorcycles.” Was that a holster for a shotgun on the back? Rylie wasn’t sure if that was awesome or terrifying.

Seth looked embarrassed. “I don’t have a license. It belongs to my brother. He lets me borrow it sometimes.”

He ran a hand through his rumpled hair as he floundered for words.

They spoke at the same time.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, just as he said, “You have to leave.”

She bit her lip. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. You know why I can’t go back to my mom. This is pretty much all I have left.”

“Then go somewhere else. Somewhere far away. I have a little money, so I can buy you a bus ticket.”

“It’s not a money thing. My dad left plenty of money for me when he died. But I’m only fifteen! I can’t live alone. I can’t even drive a car yet.”

Seth looked serious. Very serious. “You’ll die if you don’t.”

A chill settled over her, and it wasn’t the breeze. Rylie buried her spade in the ground. “Tell them to call off the hunt.”

“Call it off?”

“Yeah. Tell them I’m different and harmless and that you guys can’t hunt me.”

He laughed humorlessly. “Harmless? You killed those cows.”

“So do you think that means I should die?”

“No! Jesus, Rylie.” Seth all but collapsed beside her, pain twisting his face. “I know you’re different. You had the chance to kill me when you first changed, and you didn’t. I’ve never seen a werewolf show mercy. They
can’t
do it. You’re... special...”

Her face felt hot. “Tell them that.”

“They won’t listen to me.” He rubbed the leg that had been in a cast earlier. She wondered if it still hurt. “My mom’s... intense.”

“But you’re going to tell them about me, right?” she pressed.

“If I say you’re a werewolf, they’ll kill you on the next moon. No. I’m not going to tell them. They can’t find out.”

Rylie flung her spade to the ground and walked away from him. “I already hate your stupid family.”

He followed her and grabbed her arm. “Don’t do that.” She didn’t turn around. She was angry, and she could feel the sleepy wolf starting to react to it.

“Why are you here, Seth?” she asked.

“You know why. Look at me, Rylie.” When she didn’t face him, he tugged on her elbow. “Come on.”

It was hard being so close to him. He was even cuter than she remembered. “What?”

“My brother never graduated high school. When he does odd jobs, he has to be a janitor or a road worker or something. My mom didn’t finish third grade. I don’t want to be like them—I want to go to college.”

“Then do it,” she said.

“They’re fighting me about it. They want me to hunt, so they think school is a waste of time. English or computer science or whatever isn’t going to kill werewolves.”

“So what? You’re almost eighteen. You can do whatever you want to do.”

“It’s not that easy. My whole family hunts from the day we can walk. Look at this.” He lifted his shirt to show her his back. Scars striped across his spine. “This one nearly paralyzed me. I was thirteen.”

Rylie flinched. “Seth...”

He rolled up his pant leg. His right calf below the knee was a mess of white tissue, like thick worms frozen in the middle of burrowing through his skin. She realized he had never worn shorts at summer camp, and now she saw why. “This was a year ago.”

“I would never do that to you,” she said.

“I know. But this is what it means to be in my family. So you have to get out of here.”

“There’s got to be an alternative,” Rylie said. “What could I do to make them give up?”

“You have to be dead,” he said flatly.

“Okay,
besides
that. Would they stop looking for me if it seemed like I disappeared? Like, if they couldn’t find me for a few months, would they move away to hunt a different werewolf?”

“They’ll never give up.” But Seth was obviously thinking about it. His eyes went distant. “Unless... maybe... if they thought you left the area. They would look for you somewhere else. But in order to do that, you’d need to stay quiet for months.”

She lifted her chin stubbornly. “I can do that.”

But she wasn’t really so sure. She was as disconnected from the behavior of the wolf as she was from Abel. She couldn’t control herself. She barely even felt human in between moons.

“It might work,” Seth said. “But it’s dangerous. You know what I think you should do.”

A noise in the fields drew Rylie’s attention to the pastures. Her aunt and the workers were moving the truck toward the road. “You should go,” Rylie said.

He reached out like he was going to take her hand again, but then he thought better of it. “Yeah.”

“I guess I’ll see you at school.”

“Okay. Be careful.” Seth got on the motorcycle again, pulling the helmet over his head, and she let herself appreciate the view as he turned it the other way. His arms were really strong, and his back was broad and muscular.

Memories of seeing him swimming shirtless at the lake flitted through her mind. It had been too dark to see his scars. Would she have been as attracted to him if she’d known how damaged he was from the beginning?

The wolf stirred at the thought of his injuries, and Rylie felt ashamed. The truth was that she found him
more
attractive with those scars. But she wasn’t sure if it was love, lust, or a very different kind of craving for flesh.

Life was so much simpler over the summer, before she knew the truth about Seth. All she had to worry about was staying human.

Now she had to worry about getting killed.

He gave a wave as he rode off. Rylie gnawed on her lip. She could tell by the way he turned at the end of the road that he must have been staying in town somewhere, since there was nothing else in that direction but farms.

She knew so little about Seth that she couldn’t resist. Getting to see his family, and where he lived, would be like getting to peek at her presents on Christmas.

Although she didn’t have a car, the road meandered through the hills toward civilization. Rylie could cut straight across the hills and reach town before he did. Gwyn was too busy to pay her any attention, so she shucked her gloves and broke into a run.

Wolves were built for stamina rather than speed, so Rylie had to pace herself. She kept an eye on the road as she ran and spotted him when he took the first exit before town.

Rylie stopped at the turnoff, panting hard and dripping sweat. Her lungs wheezed with the dry air.

His motorcycle had vanished into a gated area marked by a sign: Shady Glen Park. Seth’s family was living in a trailer park. Well, that wasn’t a big deal... was it? They moved around a lot to hunt werewolves, so what did Rylie expect? A mansion in the suburbs?

She had never been in a trailer park before. The worst neighborhood she visited in the city was the art district, where people lived off royalty checks and gallery sales and struggled to make ends meet. It was hardly the ghetto.