Alpha Moon (The Cain Chronicles) (Seasons of the Moon) (2 page)

Jessica’s flight would arrive on Friday at seven in the morning, to be precise, which meant that Rylie was going to have to get up early to give her mother a ride. Even though they were in the city now, rather than a few hours of driving away at the ranch, the freeway was hairy at that time of morning. Rush hour traffic was a pain in the butt.

Of
course
Jessica couldn’t do one stupid thing in a way that was convenient for Rylie.

She crumpled the paper in her fist. “No,” she said. “No. Just…no.”

Gwyn’s eyes were pinched at the corners by stress. “Deny it all you want, babe, but she’s coming as sure as a hurricane in spring.”

“Who?” Summer asked.

There was no point in trying to dance around it anymore. Summer deserved to know.

“My mom,” Rylie said with a heavy sigh.

Summer’s eyes brightened. “My grandmother?”

“You already got a Gran,” Gwyn said gruffly. “You don’t need another in your life.”

She squeezed Gwyn tightly. “You’ll always be my Gran. That doesn’t mean I can’t be excited about meeting my mother’s mother.”

“Don’t be excited about this. There’s a reason I don’t talk to my mom,” Rylie said. Her head was throbbing. She didn’t have many headaches as a werewolf, but she could feel a pretty nasty one gathering in her temples right at that moment. “I think I want to lie down for a while.”

Rylie couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was going to explain everything to her mother. It wasn’t even necessarily the werewolf thing—it was also the fact that Rylie had twins that were now twenty years old.

The existence of preternaturals had only gone public last winter, and the country was still adjusting to the existence of magic, demons, angels, and everything in between. Her mom would still be new to the fact that werewolves existed. She didn’t think that Jessica would be prepared to wrap her head around the idea of multiple Earth-like dimensions, much less ones that ran on different timelines.

She ducked into the bathroom, splashing water on her face. It didn’t cool her off. It just made her feel wet and miserable.

Rylie stared at her reflection, imagining that it was Jessica on the other side.

“I didn’t tell you that I was pregnant, Mom, but I was. And I gave birth to twins. Then Aunt Gwyn took them to another dimension called a ‘Haven,’ which angels made centuries ago. One week passed for me, and twenty years passed for them. Summer and Abram are adults now. They’re awesome. Want to meet them?” Her temples throbbed dangerously, and she massaged them with her fingertips. “Oh, and Aunt Gwyn didn’t age during those twenty years because she died and became a zombie.”

Ugh
.

Rylie soaked a towel in water and put it over the back of her neck. Then she staggered into the bedroom, flopping onto the mattress.

Now that werewolves—and all things that went bump in the night—were publicly known, she probably could tell her mom about the werewolf thing. Except that werewolves were generally regarded as monsters. Man-killers. Cannibals.

She could just imagine the look in Jessica’s eyes as it dawned on her that her baby had become one of the things that they warned her about on the eleven o’clock news.

The worst part was that it wasn’t a lie.

Rylie
was
a man-killer, a monster, and a cannibal. She had killed several farmers a couple of years back, including her best friend’s mother. She hadn’t eaten much of them—even crazed by silver poisoning, a twinkle of guilt had somehow remained in the core of her wolf’s furious mind—but somehow, she didn’t think that would make the news any easier to deliver.

She had reformed. She was in control of her beast now. There wasn’t a hint of silver in her veins, she hadn’t killed in a long time. Well… a couple of months, anyway. But the people who had most recently died had deserved it.

Yeah, no way could she explain that to Jessica. Not Jessica Jean Gresham-Kirshner, who lived in a very nice condominium on the east coast with a changing gallery of boyfriends. Not the woman who ran several corporations and hated to get her manicure dirty. The woman who hadn’t let Rylie dress up for Halloween in elementary school because she didn’t want her daughter “getting the wrong ideas.”

Whether or not werewolves were publicly known, she absolutely could not tell her mother
anything
.

Which meant spending Jessica’s entire visit lying through her teeth.

Summer knocked on the door once before entering. She didn’t really have to, since all the lady werewolves were sharing that room. A black puffball curled around her feet as she entered. Summer was used to having her cat, Sir Lumpy, weaving in and out of her legs, so she miraculously didn’t trip.

“Kill me now,” Rylie said as her daughter stretched out in bed, head on the pillow right next to hers, shoulder-to-shoulder. Summer’s feet hung off the end of the mattress. She was much too tall for a twin-sized bed.

“It’s okay,” Summer said. Sir Lumpy jumped onto the mattress between them. He was a black ball of fur the size of a small whale, and he made the bed sink with his weight. “You don’t have to introduce us to your mom, you know. I understand.”

Rylie really didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Her head throbbed dangerously. “It’s not because I don’t
want
you to meet her.”

“I know. It’s hard to explain everything, and I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Gwyn’s more my mom than Jessica is,” Rylie said, as if Summer were trying to argue with her. She felt weirdly defensive. “She’s always been there for me. I don’t even want Jessica in my life. In
our
lives.”

Summer rolled onto her side so that she could look at Rylie, head propped on her hand. Purring, Sir Lumpy jammed his nose underneath her chin. “Whatever you choose to do, I’m going to support you. Okay? Don’t let it eat you up.”

Rylie gazed up at her daughter—her
daughter
—and surveyed the gentle slopes of her face, so much like hers, yet somehow still foreign and strange. It had been weeks since Summer and Abram returned from the Haven dimension as adults. Rylie had lost most of the baby weight and was totally healed from labor. The heinously difficult pregnancy felt like a nightmare.

It was almost like Summer had appeared from thin air. But Rylie still felt fiercely possessive of her.

The idea of Jessica learning the truth and judging
Summer for who she was, and how she had been made—rather than knowing her as the strong, smart, hilarious young woman that she truly was—filled Rylie with passionate fury.

Jessica didn’t deserve to know about Rylie’s real family: Summer, Abram, Abel, Seth, the pack. None of them. Period.

“I’m not going to tell her the truth,” Rylie said. Sir Lumpy, obviously offended that the conversation had nothing to do with him, purred louder and started making biscuits on Summer’s arm. “She’s going to visit, we’ll tell her that we’re all just roommates or whatever, and she’ll leave without ever knowing anything.”

“Okay,” Summer said.

And that was that.

But it wasn’t the end of the conversation. Not by far.

Rylie called the
seller that afternoon. “I have the money,” she said. She was still in bed, and she pulled her pillow over her head to protect herself from the sunlight coming through the window.

“All of it?” Bert asked. He was nasally-voiced, almost falsetto. They had only spoken on the phone so far. Judging by the way he sounded, Rylie imagined that he probably looked like a wire hanger with legs.

“Yes. Can we meet this afternoon to sign the paperwork?”

“Mmm, I don’t think so. I’m busy. How’s Friday afternoon, four o’clock? We can drive out to look at the property together before it gets dark. It’s kind of a hike, so bring appropriate footwear.”

Rylie bit her bottom lip. Friday afternoon—the same day that Jessica was arriving. Now
that
would be a fun conversation.
I’m going to be late for dinner. I need to go pay for my werewolf sanctuary.
No, that was definitely on the list of Things Jessica Can’t Know.

“In that case, I’d rather wait until next week,” she said.

“Next week?” Suspicion crept into Bert’s tone. “I don’t want to delay the sale any longer. I have other interested buyers.”

Rylie somehow doubted that. How many people could be interested in that much land so deep in the mountains, with zero access to utilities?

Maybe he was bluffing, maybe he wasn’t, but she didn’t want to risk it. The pack was counting on her to build a new sanctuary. They needed somewhere to be safe from the Office of Preternatural Affairs, somewhere that they could fly under the radar of census personnel trying to add them to databases, a place that they could safely wolf out every new and full moon. She couldn’t let her mother’s visit get in the way of that.

Her skull throbbed dangerously as the headache struck back. “You really can’t meet until Friday?” Rylie asked, trying not to whine. It was hard when her head hurt so much.

“Friday at four. I’ve already got a notary visiting that afternoon.”

She sighed, and a clump of fur that Sir Lumpy had shed sucked into her mouth. She coughed, spluttered, wiped off her tongue. It only seemed to spread the fur around. “Okay,” she wheezed, pulling a face. “Friday at four. Where’s your office?”

Bert gave her an address in Northgate, a five hour drive away. Rylie rolled out of bed long enough to write it on a piece of paper and stick it to the cork board on the wall.

“See you there.”

He hung up. Rylie flopped into bed again, and decided she wasn’t getting out again until Friday morning. Period.

Her resolve lasted
until the next morning, at which point Rylie was swept up in errands with Gwyn and Summer. There was a lot to do before they could move onto their land. They would have to build practically an entire village to house the werewolves, and that meant making arrangements with contractors, picking out floor plans, and ordering building materials.

When Thursday night rolled around, Rylie was a bundle of nerves. She tried to distract herself by helping Aunt Gwyn cook dinner. Even with most of the pack hanging out in California with the coven, the house was uncomfortably full, and the kitchen was the only place she could get room to breathe. The other residents of the house were wisely hiding from Gwyn’s grumpiness, lest they get enlisted in some kind of unpleasant chore.

“I don’t even have a room for her,” Gwyn said, jerking oven mitts over her fists like she was donning armor.

“She’s going to get a hotel,” Rylie said. She had already told her aunt as much at least six different times.

That answer seemed to relax Gwyn as little on the seventh time as it had on the first. No matter what she thought of Jessica—which was not a favorable opinion—her DNA was riddled with country-bred courtesy. If she had talked to you more than twice, you were family. Family didn’t stay in hotels. Family stayed with family. Even when family was a pain in the ass.

Gwyn shoved a pan of meat into the oven and slammed the door.

Rylie touched her elbow. “It’s okay. She understands we don’t have much room. It’s not rude.”

“Bring in the sun tea, babe.”

Rylie obediently retrieved the jug of tea from the table on the back porch. It smelled like fresh lemon, and the jug was warm in her hands.

While she was outside, a glimmer of sunlight on glass caught her eye.

It was one of the pack’s cars—an old, beat-up truck that they had bought off of a farmer for two hundred dollars. Rylie’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of it.

There had been reports of a murder spree in another city. Seth and Abel decided that it had to be a rampaging werewolf, so they had taken Abram on a hunting trip to take it down. Weirdly, Summer’s boyfriend, Nash, had chosen to tag along, too. With two hunters, a werewolf, and an angel on the murderer’s trail, Rylie almost felt sorry for the perpetrator.

Raw power of their hunting party aside, the three of them had been gone for a week. Rylie knew that they would be fine—Seth and Abel had been hunting werewolves for years before she met them—but she couldn’t help worrying that something would go wrong while they were away.

It didn’t help that the men were so damn vague about their hunting activities. The only updates Rylie had gotten had come from Abram, who called Summer every single day. They talked for at least an hour each time. He talked to Rylie, too, but he didn’t have as much to say; he only seemed to unleash his inner chatterbox for his twin sister.

As long as that hour-long phone call happened, Rylie could believe that her boys were all okay. She could sleep at night. But she had still been missing them fiercely.

That truck had been one of the two vehicles they had taken hunting.

Rylie shielded her eyes from the sunlight as the pickup parked next to hers. The man who stepped out was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. Her sharp werewolf eyes could pick out the half-healed scars twisting the left side of his face, but she didn’t need to see them to know that her mate was home. She could feel it deep within her gut.

Abel’s eyes found hers over the fence. Rylie’s cheeks heated immediately.

She ran inside and shoved the jug of tea into her aunt’s hands.

“What’s the rush?” Gwyn asked, stepping back when Rylie bumped past her.

“Abel’s home,” she said breathlessly. She caught a glimpse of Gwyn’s knowing smile on her way out of the kitchen.

Rylie met him at the front door. Any room that Abel stood in was filled by his presence, and Gwyn’s tiny living room was no exception. He practically had to step sideways to fit the breadth of his shoulders through the door.

It had been a very long week since Rylie had last seen Abel, and his familiar smell almost brought her to her knees. “Hey,” she said, grinning stupidly at him. She couldn’t seem to help it.

Abel’s eyes warmed at the sight of her. He dipped his head toward her, grazing his nose over the soft skin along the side of her neck, and inhaled deeply. It was a wolf greeting, not a human greeting. But the feelings that it stirred in Rylie were
definitely
human.

She tilted her cheek against his and returned the favor, smelling the odors behind his ear, near the hairline. He smelled of werewolves, of Alpha, of musky man-sweat and gunpowder.