Moon of the Terrible (Seasons of the Moon) (4 page)

But she hadn’t known that he could withstand having every bone in his left hand broken without screaming.

Guess she learned something new every day.

Pagan heaved a sigh as she turned Seth’s purpled, swollen arm in her hands, looking for a place that she hadn’t damaged yet. Each of the joints was turned the wrong way. His skin was mottled with purple bruises.

Seth hadn’t made a single noise. Not since he told Rylie, “Don’t watch.”

She tried to do as he told her—it would only be worse if she got mad and gave Pagan what she wanted. So Rylie had only peeked twice. She regretted both times.

He remained silent as Pagan pinched his shattered thumb. “Well, this is no fun,” she said, dropping his arm. “You’re not getting angry at all.”

Seth breathed hard through his nose. His skin was ashen gray, almost the same color as Eleanor’s. “My mom trained me to withstand torture,” he said without a hint of emotion. “You can thank her for it.”

Pagan snorted. “Great.”

She slammed her fist into Seth’s face, knocking his head into the wall.

Rylie wasn’t expecting it, and the shock made her wolf instantly take control. “Stop it!”

“That’s a little better,” Pagan said. “That’s more of the animal I want to see. I think we’re warmed up now—don’t you?”

Rylie strained on the end of the chain, her hand swiping uselessly through the air.

She roared her frustrations.

“Rylie!” Seth shouted, jerking on the chain that connected them. “Calm down!”

“Well, don’t do
that
. Things are just getting good!” Pagan said.

The door at the top of the stairs opened. A brunette man wearing a black polo shirt gestured. “I need you, Pagan,” he said.

Rylie was surprised enough to see someone new that she immediately stopped fighting. She sniffed the air. The man wasn’t a werewolf—so not Cain.

“Hold onto that thought, blondie,” Pagan said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She went upstairs, and the door shut behind her.

Only then did Seth groan.

Rylie sat at his side, careful not to touch his arm. “That was amazing,” she whispered. “How did you do that?”

He cradled his hand against his chest. “You kidding? That was no worse than sitting through my anatomy finals.”

It was probably meant to make her laugh, but the wolf didn’t think it was funny. Seth’s pheromones smelled sick and heavy—like wounded prey. She found herself staring at his broken fingers.

Her stomach growled. When was the last time she had eaten?

“Are you okay?” Seth asked, stirring her out of her reverie. She slumped against the wall.

“Yeah. I just… I don’t know how to get out of this without changing.”

“What if I picked the locks on our shackles?”

Seth held up two of the silver pins that Pagan had laid out with her other weapons. Somehow, he must have slipped it away from her stash while she was torturing him.

Rylie’s relief was instant, dizzying—and brief. “But your fingers are broken.”

“I’ll walk you through it,” he said. She pulled her sleeve over her hand and let him drop the pins into her palm.

Footsteps beat against the floor over their head. It sounded like Cain’s people were pacing.

Rylie’s heart sped as she peered closely at the lock.

“What do I do?” she asked.

He described the process to her—pushing each of the tumblers into place with the first pin, and then using the leverage of the second pin to turn the lock.

Rylie tried. She really did. But she couldn’t even imagine the inside of the lock based on his descriptions, and she wasn’t nimble enough with her shirt over her hand. Especially not when the wolf felt like it was still circling inside of her skull.

She slipped and burned her fingers on the silver. The pins dropped to the floor. Her eyes burned. “I can’t do it. I can’t, Seth.”

He rested his unbroken fingers on top of hers. “There’s one other thing we can try. It’s crazy, but we’re running low on options.”

“What?”

“Bite me,” Seth said.

Rylie stared at him. “
What
?”

“You heard what I said. Bite me.”

The implications of his order dawned on her, and with it came a creeping feeling of dread.

She shook her head fervently. “No, Seth!”

“Look, think of it this way,” he said. “If you can infect me, all my wounds will heal within hours. Best case scenario, I heal my hand, pick these locks, and we can worry about the werewolf thing after we escape. Worst case scenario…” He gripped her hand tightly in his. “Cain wants a werewolf for his ritual? He can have a werewolf. But he can’t have you.”

She pushed him away. “No. I’m not going to do it. I would rather change and take my chances against all of them with my teeth.”

“If Abel can handle being a werewolf, so can I,” he said.

Rylie gave a disbelieving laugh. “That’s not what this is about, is it? Like, some new phase of your stupid competition with your brother? Who can be the bigger, badder wolf? No! It’s not worth it, Seth!”

“This is about survival, and keeping you safe. I can’t protect you if I don’t heal this hand,” he said, getting onto his knees in front of her as the chains rattled. “I’m sorry.”

And then Seth slapped her.

Rylie’s hand flew to the heated spot on her cheek where he had struck. She sucked in a hard gasp. “Hey!”

“Bite me,” he said, and he hit her again on the opposite cheek.

Anger built inside of her, making the werewolf stir.

Was he insane? Suicidal?

“Be careful,” she whispered, scooting back into the corner until she hit the wall and had nowhere else to go. “You’re making me mad. The wolf—”

Seth’s lips were stretched into a grimace, as if he was the one getting hit. “I know.”

His third blow was a close-fisted strike. Pain exploded in Rylie’s jaw. She sprawled on all fours.

“I’m not going to bite you,” she said, but her voice was deeper than usual, and her teeth were aching.

One of her canines dropped out of her mouth.

“Don’t transform,” Seth warned her.

She tried to say, “Then stop hitting me!” But all that came out was a low whine. The bones in her face ached.

He shoved his wounded arm into her mouth.

The wolf
bit
.

Rylie shoved him back, but it was too late. The taste of blood had flooded her tongue, coppery and tangy and sickeningly delicious.

“No,” she whispered.

She tried to wipe the blood off of her tongue—tried to take back what she had done. But it was too late. It didn’t take much to spread lycanthropy.

Her mingled fear and horror was strong enough to drive away the wolf, leaving Rylie feeling emotionally raw and exposed.

She had bitten Seth
.

He leaned against the wall with a groan, eyes squeezed shut. His forehead shone with sweat. “Now we just have to wait,” he panted, cradling his bleeding arm.

Rylie gave up fighting it. She collapsed in the corner and began to sob.

S
EVEN

Bloodhounds

When they were less than
an hour from the house, Crystal insisted on making one more pit stop. Just an hour away, and she couldn’t hold it.

“Women,” Abel muttered, leaning on the hood of the van while he waited. Trevin had gone inside for another burrito, but Vanthe stuck around to keep him company.

“No kidding,” Vanthe agreed. He pulled off his knitted cap, rubbed the coarse blond hair on his head, and then tugged it back on. “I heard Scott and Levi talking before we left. They said that Seth was going to your old house.”

“Yeah. But my family’s not there.”

“Where are they? I mean, I know that Seth’s your brother, but what about mom? Dad?”

Abel stuffed his hands under his armpits to keep them warm, even though he hadn’t really been cold a moment before. “They’re both dead. Killed by werewolves.”

Vanthe clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “That’s rough.”

Abel thought back on the day his mother died. Eleanor had stabbed him with a knife before she went down. She used his transformation into werewolf as her excuse for attacking, but Abel felt like she had been stabbing him in smaller, less-literal ways for years.

Constantly showing preference to Seth, her precious baby. Ignoring him. Being condescending and outright hateful.

And yet, until she fell from the cliff, some part of him had still hoped that they could be a family again someday. A very small part.

“I guess,” he said, even though it had been too long since Vanthe spoke.

The other werewolf lifted an eyebrow. “You guess?”

Abel shrugged. He kicked a pile of snow. “Things were tough between us. We had problems, but… she was my mom.” He gave a stiff shrug. “You know?”

“Yeah. I know.”

They shared a long moment of understanding silence.

Trevin and Crystal came back out. She attracted stares in her micro-shorts and midriff in the falling snow. She grinned at Abel. He didn’t smile back.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Abel’s childhood home looked exactly
the way he remembered it: run down, crappy, and miserable. He could smell Rylie and Seth as soon as he stepped out of the van, and he could also smell that they hadn’t been there in days. It was enough to make him want to get back behind the wheel and leave immediately.

“What is this place?” Crystal asked, coming to stand beside him. He could feel the heat radiating off of her exposed skin.

He glared at the windows, the curtains, the dead garden, the surrounding trees. Everything was covered in an inch of snow. It reminded him of the time that Seth and Abel had built a snowman in the yard—and how Eleanor had told them they were morons for wasting the afternoon like that.

“Nowhere important,” he said.

The snowfall would have muted the freshest trails, and he was suddenly a lot less optimistic about finding anything at the house. But Vanthe and Trevin circled around the back anyway, noses lifted to the air.

“I smell gunpowder and leather,” Crystal said. “Who is that?”

Abel drifted behind her, making no effort to sniff around. “My brother.”

Her nose wrinkled. “And I smell… perfume?”

That was weird. Rylie didn’t wear perfume anymore.

Abel took a deep breath in.

Crystal was right. The smell of perfume drifted through the air, thick and flowery. “Guess a woman must have been here recently,” he said with a frown.

“Hey!” Trevin called from the back of the house. “I think I found something!”

He was kneeling on a patch of snowy ground when Abel sprinted to his side. He was still eating the gigantic burrito from their last pit stop, and one of his cheeks bulged with a mouthful of beans and tortilla.

“What are you talking about?” Abel asked. He didn’t see anything weird.

Trevin used his ungloved fingers to scoop up a handful of snow and expose the ground underneath. The soil was stained with dried blood.

Abel felt like the ground had vanished beneath his feet.

Was that Rylie’s blood? Or an enemy’s?

He muttered a curse and bent low to smell the earth. “Good find,” he told Trevin. “Where’s Vanthe?”

The other werewolf took another big bite of burrito and jerked his head toward the trees. “He ran off into the forest.”

“Why?” Crystal asked.

“Maybe he needed to pee. I don’t know.” Trevin held his food toward her. “Hungry?”

She wrinkled her nose. “No.”

Abel ignored them as he cleared away more snow to inspect the blood. It was a small splatter, so it must not have come from a very big injury. Trevin’s nose was good for picking it up under all of the moisture.

But he did smell more of that sticky-sweet perfume.

“You picking that up?” Abel asked Trevin as he swallowed the last of his burrito and wadded the aluminum foil.

Both Trevin and Crystal sniffed.

“That perfume,” she said.

It smelled familiar, but Abel couldn’t place the odor—it was too faint to get a good read. He got to his feet and started following it.

“Stay with the van,” he yelled over his shoulder. “I’ll be back soon.”

Abel left the other werewolves behind. As soon as he disappeared into the trees, he drew the handguns he had in the shoulder rig under his jacket. They felt satisfyingly solid in his hands.

The smell of perfume grew stronger as he delved deeper into the forest. The ground sloped toward a river.

An old cabin squatted on the opposite shore. It was backed up against a cliff, and surrounded by split-rail fencing that looked so old that Abel thought it might crumble at a touch. Icicles hung from the edges of the roof.

As far as Abel could see, it could have been just about any cabin in the woods. Maybe it belonged to hunters—normal hunters, of the “let’s kill ducks and deer” persuasion.

Except that he smelled more blood.

And Rylie.

It was the faintest trace of her lemony scent, but it stirred his wolf in a way that no other smell could.

Was that his mate’s blood? Had she been hurt?

He slid down the embankment and crouched on the bank of the river to get a closer look.

A man stepped around the side of the house. He wore a black jacket, black slacks, black shoes. Was he a Union hunter? A flare of red, the scent of tobacco—he was smoking a cigarette.

Someone called out. The man turned.

Pagan approached from the forest, armed with silver knives and a dainty pistol. The angular cut of her hair swayed every time she stepped over the snow.

They exchanged words, but Abel saw their lips moving, he didn’t hear anything they said. His head was filled with white noise. His heart pounded in anticipation.

Pagan stepped through the front door of the cabin, disappearing into its shadowy depths. The man in black paced around the other side of the house.

His back was turned. He was alone.

Abel slipped around the boulders, stepped through a shallow portion of river, and crept up behind the man.

The smell of Rylie was stronger on the other bank, and now he could smell his brother, too. Stress and pain hormones poured out of a tiny window near the base of the cabin. There must have been a basement.