Silver Moon (A Women of Wolf's Point Novel) (7 page)

At least it looked like any other small town diner, with the exception of the poster on the door. Some words leapt out at her as she went in. “Missing,” it said. “Eight-year-old boy, not seen for two days. Possibly abducted.” There were other things about a reward, the boy’s name and his family’s contact information but she ignored them as she looked at the boy’s picture under the headline. He looked like any other kid. Only the words made his face heartbreaking.

It made her stomach turn. There were other monsters out there too, ones that she didn’t keep inside or know personally. The thought didn’t make her feel any better.

Neither did Aunt Mabel’s greasy burger and wilted salad, but at least she wouldn’t be showing up to mooch dinner as well as arriving out of the blue. She finished up and drove over to Hal and Marybeth’s. They gave her a kind welcome and a hastily turned down the bed in the den, once they realized she planned on staying the night. Best of all, they asked her very few questions.

So it certainly wasn’t their company that drove her out to walk in the moonlight that night. She had to promise them she’d bring her cell phone and a borrowed whistle from Marybeth. After all, you never knew what might happen and what with the Jensen boy missing and all, she really shouldn’t go out for a walk alone at night at all. Becca smiled patiently through their list of concerns and went out anyway.

Still, she admitted to herself that it had been nice to have someone care about what she did. Someone besides those women from the club who she thought were her friends. Walking would ease the lump of ice in her center that was doing nothing to cool down her outsides. That was what she told herself.

She looked up at the mountains as she walked and felt something stir inside her. Whatever it was, it was calling her to run but she resisted. She didn’t know the roads here. Or the neighbors. Maybe normal middle-aged women didn’t run down the streets in the dark out here.

Her senses were sharper than she remembered them being, probably from the clear air. She inhaled deeply, pulling the wind inside her with its scents of woods and wild, exhaust and humans. Downtown was all too audible, though, so she walked away from it, hoping to find some peace in the fields and woods outside of town. Finally, the pull was too strong and she settled into a sedate jog past the houses and the parked cars.

As she reached the edge of town, she began to feel the moon stirring in her blood, calling up last night’s wildness once more. What the hell? She was outside the limit of the ordinance and she’d turned last night. Shouldn’t this be over with for this month? Was she getting bonus wolf points or something?

Glancing down, she could see that her hands didn’t look right. Suppressing a wail of horror, she dove into the woods, scrambling around until she found a dark spot surrounded by bushes. There she fought her transformation until it was obvious that she was losing. Even then, she forced herself to undress and remembered to turn her phone off.

Then she reluctantly surrendered to the moon and the wild magic inside her. Once she changed, she ran all out, a lone wolf, freed from her Pack and charging through the woods until the trees blurred before her. Her path took her up the nearest mountain, farther from people and closer to the moon. For a time, she thought about nothing but the night, reveling in her speed and strength.

She was miles outside of Mountainview when she heard the sounds for the first time. Her wolf senses didn’t recognize them at first but she moved toward them anyway, curiosity winning over caution. The Becca part of her brain woke up a bit as she got closer to whatever it was and tried to slow her wolf body down. Human fears warred with wolf curiosity until all of her attention was focused on the noises filtering through the woods.

Slowly, she recognized it as the voice of a small boy. There was another human with him, an adult male from his scent. But the cub—
child
, she managed to remind herself—sounded scared. Even so, there was nothing she could do except make it worse, given what she looked like now. Becca tried to turn her wolf self away to run up the mountain, far from the campsite. It wouldn’t help the boy’s terrors to meet a real monster.

Unbidden, a memory of the poster at the diner came back to her. Was this the same boy? She could remember his photo, back in the human portions of her memory. He was sniffling now, small sobs drifting out of the bushes and trees that still separated them. Whoever he was, he was terrified and hurting.

She couldn’t just turn away. Literally. It was if she was frozen to the spot, all her instincts warring with each other until she wanted to bang her head against a tree. She wanted to help, if she could, but this was more than that. This felt more like a compulsion, a spell she couldn’t ignore. The feeling escalated until she finally did what that insistent pull demanded and followed the sounds and scents.

Instinctively, she dropped into a hunting crouch and eased her way into the bushes, sliding slowly and carefully through them. The boy was silent now but she could still smell his fear. The wrongness she smelled on the man at his side made her lips lift back in a snarl. She slipped like a shadow through the trees until she could see them.

The man had hidden them under a lean-to of branches. There was no fire or other sign to mark their hiding place. It was easy to see how he’d avoided the human searchers for two days. The boy gave a small cry that was suddenly silenced and wolf-Becca growled, the sound far louder than she had intended. It was loud enough to bring the man out to look around. He hesitated, then picked up his gun and took a few steps into the woods.

Becca’s woods. She rustled the bushes as she backed further into the darkness, drawing the man from the clearing. Away from the moonlight, back into the darkness where he wouldn’t be able to see her, where she was protected. He stepped forward once, then again.

She leapt, taking him off guard and knocking him down. He flailed backward, dropping his gun. Snarling, she bit into his struggling body as he thrashed and fought. His scent, a musk of lust and fear and pain, maddened her, made her sink her teeth in anywhere she could reach him through his heavy jacket. Her wolf-self wanted blood and wanted it now.

He twisted sharply under her, drawing a hunting knife from his belt and slashing it across her side. She yowled in pain and tore into his arm, tasting his blood. He managed to whip her head back and forth for a couple of moments, but he couldn’t dislodge her. Becca dug her feet deeper into the soil and bit down with all the strength in her jaws.

The man dropped the knife and Becca turned and bit into his neck. He fell with her on top of him. Then he kicked out a few times, the breath wheezing in his throat as she felt her mouth fill with blood. After that, there was a moment of stillness for them both. She met his terrified eyes with her fiercest snarl. She could kill him now; it would be easy, justified even. But the little bit of Becca Thornton still awake in her head was fighting her.

Then he yanked suddenly away from her, reaching and seizing the knife again with his good hand. He slashed at her, grazing her good side and Becca lost herself, letting her wolf-self fight for her life. They twisted and turned, rolling on the rocky ground, as the knife sank in once, then twice. She howled in pain and fury, then struck again. This time, there no human voice in her head to stop her.

When Becca emerged again to regain control of her body, the man was still and her mouth was full of his blood. The scent of it was everywhere, pooled beneath him and coating her fur. She forced herself to make sure he was dead, prodding him with her paw and sniffing his face. Even if the legends weren’t completely true, she didn’t want to risk making him a werewolf.

Then she dragged herself over to the lean-to without looking back. The boy inside stared at her, his eyes so wide they were almost all white, and whimpered. For a long moment, she was torn between wanting to comfort him and wanting to eat him. The latter feeling sent a thrill of horror through her. Could she risk getting any closer to him?

But help was down the mountain. She couldn’t just leave him with the corpse and she couldn’t carry him as she was. Either she needed to bring him to help or bring help to him, somehow. She could not do either in her current form. Moonlight caressed her fur as if mocking her indecisiveness.

She tried to think and an idea slowly formed. Shelly had been able to partially change back in order to carry Erin to safety. If Shelly could do it, why couldn’t she? She limped back into the shadows, leaving a trail of her own blood on the leaves; whatever happened, the boy shouldn’t see this. At least she could feel her new body healing fast. Her wounds stopped bleeding as she sat down and she could feel itchy scabs beginning to form. If her healing continued like this, she might be able to make it down the mountain carrying the boy, despite the pain.

Becca closed her eyes and shut out the moon. She thought of quiet days and walks in the woods, of picnics and tea. Of anything except blood and running through the woods and the call of magic. Breathing carefully in and out, she tried to emulate the teacher of a long ago yoga class.

With excruciating slowness, her blood stilled and the pounding of her heart eased. She pictured herself with hands and a shorter muzzle, able to walk and run upright. Then she held her breath and tried to force her body to change. The horrible wrenching feeling that followed laid her out in the dirt, whimpering for a few minutes. But the second attempt went better. By her third try, she could stand on her hind legs, though she was still a bit shaky.

She approached the lean to cautiously, trying to shape her wolf muzzle into human speech. “Come. No hurt. Save.” The words were horribly growly and barely comprehensible but she hoped the boy would understand them. At least he didn’t run or scream. She reached out with her clawed hands and his eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.

That was something of a mercy, or so Becca hoped. At least he was still breathing. She picked him up and heaved him over one furry shoulder. Then she began to race down the mountain.

The trip was a blur of branches and pain and she stumbled frequently. The boy stayed unconscious. She tried to get him to drink at a stream they crossed but he wouldn’t open his eyes or his mouth.

Holding the partial change was harder than she could have imagined. Her muscles felt like rivulets of lava and her nerves screamed as she exerted control. The run seemed to go on forever.

Finally, just as the moon began to set, she saw the lights of Mountainview. She dragged a final effort from her exhausted body and left the boy on the porch of a house on the outskirts of town. Then she staggered back toward where she’d left her clothes after ringing the doorbell.

She found her clothes and collapsed on top of them, letting her Becca self come back. The change back happened quickly this time, at least. Later she couldn’t remember getting dressed or dragging her leaden footsteps back to Hal and Marybeth’s. She made it as far as the porch swing before she collapsed. The sleep that took her then was like falling into a well, deep and dark and utterly black.

The next headline was that his kidnapper, one James Harrison, had been found dead in the woods. His body had been badly torn up, like he’d been taken down by a pack of wild dogs. The reporters speculated on this until Becca wished the linoleum beneath her feet would open up and swallow her whole.

She opted to sneak off to the shower instead, then into the den to get some more sleep. Her dreams were full of running and blood and noise, but nothing was clear. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember exactly how she’d felt when James Harrison died. It was all one big blur. In a way, that was worse than remembering. She should feel a little guilty, she was sure of it.

Her nightmares got worse over the next couple of nights, the images clearer. She attacked a faceless man, her ears filling with his screams, and then something happened to wake her up. After the third time it happened, she thought she finally got it: she was still a werewolf and moving away hadn’t changed that. This meant that she could look forward to changing again next month. And next month, it might not be a child kidnapper and rapist whose throat she tore out.

Fears and all, she still tried to give Mountainview a chance, as if she really had the option to stay if she wanted to. She took long walks through the downtown and beyond. Plastic gingerbread and all, it was a pleasant little town. There were apartments she could rent and a couple of part-time jobs she could string together until she got back on her feet. People were friendly.

But it wasn’t home. And she had no friends here, no—and she hated to use the word–
Pack
so there was no one for her to really talk to. Even with all that had happened, she missed them, all of them, Shelly and Erin and Pete most of all.

After a week, she loaded her bag up into her car and thanked her cousins with mixed emotions. It seemed to her that Marybeth and Hal weren’t too sorry to see her go, but then, she wasn’t all that sorry to be leaving either. She started down the road toward Wolf’s Point.

All the while, her brain spun with the worries and fears and questions that she’d hoped to avoid. Why had the werewolf thing happened to her in the first place? She couldn’t even remember a dog bite, let alone a wolf one, yet here she was, changing just like in that old Lon Chaney movie. Now she knew she couldn’t outrun the curse or whatever it was but she wasn’t giving up hope that there might be a cure out there, one that didn’t involve a silver bullet.