03 Long Night Moon - Seasons of the Moon (11 page)

All of a sudden, she found herself in a chair in the hospital waiting room. She didn’t remember the ride into town or her aunt getting admitted. She tried not to cry too loudly while the nurses worked on Gwyn. She kept worrying about the stupid hat and wondering if her dad’s heart attack had been anything like this.

The hospital stunk of disinfectant and medication and sickness. She wished that she could turn off her sense of smell for a few minutes. Rylie didn’t want to know about the dead body being moved two halls down, or that someone had vomited in the room beside Gwyn’s.

All those sick people. All that prey waiting to be picked off.

She smothered her tears in her hands.

“Rylie!”

The sound of Seth’s voice made Rylie go weak with relief. He hurried into the waiting room, and she somehow found the strength to stand up long enough to bury her face in his shoulder. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered.

He kissed the top of her head and pressed his cheek to her hair. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I got home and I couldn’t find Gwyn, and the horse was wandering around on its own, and then—I found her. She had collapsed and fallen or something. Nobody told me what’s wrong. She just… collapsed.”

“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing tighter. “It’s okay.”

Waiting to hear about her aunt’s condition made Rylie not feel up to talking very much, but Seth waited with her anyway. She bit her fingernails until they bled, and then her hands warmed with her healing powers, and she started biting again.

After she destroyed her thumbnail three times in a row, Seth grabbed her fist.

“Don’t do that.”

She shook him off and paced the waiting room, stuffing her hands under her arms. “How long can it take to look at her? Why can’t we go inside? Someone needs to tell me
something
!”

He didn’t seem to hear her. He was staring at the TV. “Wait. Look at this.”

Seth reached up to increase the volume.

“…Maria Sharp left behind two kids and a husband, who say her love of baking and talented hand with a woodcarving knife will be sorely missed.” The news anchor had perfect hair, perfect teeth, and a perfectly sculpted sympathetic look. “Donations and gifts are being accepted at the Mill Street Baptist Church, where her family will be holding the memorial. In other news…”

“So what?” Rylie asked.

“You missed the headline,” he said, his brow drawn low to shadow his eyes. “She was killed in the animal attacks.”

She knew it was bad, very bad, and that there was something wrong about that news—beyond the fact someone had been killed—but she didn’t care enough to puzzle it out. Who cared about some dead woman anyway?

“Oh no,” she said flatly.

“I should have done something,” Seth muttered. It was quiet enough that Rylie wasn’t sure she was supposed to hear. “I should have been watching.”

But people were still going in and out of Gwyn’s door and she didn’t care what he had to say. Rylie wanted to grab the nurses and force them to tell her what was wrong. She angled herself to peer in her aunt’s door when it swung open again. The curtains were closed.

What was taking so long?

“Do you think Abel’s been acting weird?” Seth asked.

“What?” She stretched on her toes to see over a doctor when he slipped around the curtain, but a nurse obscured her view. Rylie caught up with the conversation a moment later. “Abel… weird?” She still hadn’t told Seth about their hunt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve found nothing that points to Levi and Bekah being killers,” Seth said, keeping his voice low and an eye on the hall. Nobody was close enough to hear their conversation. “In fact, people have been dying in these animal attacks for two months.”

“Does that mean it’s actually animals?” Rylie asked.

Tension radiated from his shoulders. He suddenly wouldn’t look at her. “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t have any leads.”

His smell changed. Was he lying?

Gwyn’s door opened again, distracting her. A nurse wheeled a cart into the hall and disappeared around the corner.

“I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’m done waiting.”

Before she could push into Gwyn’s room, a doctor stepped out, stopping Rylie short. “What’s wrong?” she asked when he looked up from his chart. She felt breathless, like she had been running, even though she could have run for miles without becoming winded.

“Ms. Gresham is resting,” he said, glancing at his cell phone. “She fainted and hit her head, but she’s alert now.”

“Will she be okay?”

“That’s a tough question with a complicated answer.”

He checked his phone again. Rylie wanted to grab his shirt and shake him. How could anything be more important than her aunt? Only Seth’s steadying hand on her arm—where had he come from?—kept her from doing something stupid.

“Rylie?”

Hearing her aunt’s weak voice made every violent thought vanish. Rylie pushed the doctor aside and went inside.

Gwyn had a needle in her arm and a couple bags of fluid hanging over her head. Rylie’s heart fragmented into a hundred pieces to see it. She sank into the chair at her side.

“Still not dead, babe,” Gwyn said. Her words croaked, so she cleared her voice before speaking again. “So stop looking like you’re mourning.”

Rylie had promised herself she wouldn’t cry anymore, but seeing her aunt looking so small and helpless in a hospital bed was too much. Her dad’s death was frighteningly sudden—one day, he kissed her goodbye, and the next, a counselor was giving her the bad news—and she wasn’t sure if it was worse losing a family member quickly or not.

Teardrops plopped on the backs of her hands. She sniffled hard and wiped them on her jeans. “You fell,” Rylie said. It was difficult to speak around the lump in her throat.

“Everybody falls.”

“Not everybody is sick, though. I knew you were getting worse!”

“I’ve been feeling fine,” she insisted. “But… I haven’t watched my t-cell counts as closely as I should, and I didn’t like how my medication made me feel. So I didn’t take a lot of it.” Anger burst in Rylie’s chest, but Gwyn touched her hand before she could speak. The IV was taped to her wrist. “Everybody falls. Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Mistakes like this could kill you,” Rylie said.

“Sometimes the treatment feels worse than the disease. You’ll understand someday—hopefully not anytime soon.” She sighed. “But you’re right. Now we’re both paying the price.”

Dread settled like a lead weight in Rylie’s stomach. “What’s happened?”

“What I have is… well, it’s kind of like a cold. But it’s a terrible cold my body can’t fight. My immune system’s shot. When I rode Butch out to check on a heifer, it got hard to breathe, and I passed out. No big worry there. But it’s caused by a more serious problem.” Gwyn’s thumb rubbed across the back of Rylie’s hand. “I’m going to be in the hospital for a couple days.”

“I’ll take care of the herd,” Rylie said. “I’ll move them to the barn myself. I can—”

“You can make them run away, that’s what you can do. You’re terrible with the cattle. Call Abel. He’ll know what needs done.”

“Is that why you’ve had him around so much? Have you been planning to get hospitalized?”

“Nobody
plans
to be sick, babe."

Gwyn sagged against the pillow, like all that talking had exhausted her. It probably had.

Rylie glared at the toe of her boots, stung by the thought that her aunt’s preparations for a worst case scenario involved getting Abel to help—Abel, of all people—instead of her niece.

“I’ll call him,” she said without looking up.

“You’ll have to call your mom, too. Jessica needs to know.”

Her gaze shot to Gwyn’s face. “What?”

“Like it or not, she’s still your mother,” she said. She couldn’t seem to work up the strength to look stern, though she tried.

“But—”

“Seth can come in, you know. Don’t make the boy wait outside.”

Rylie hadn’t realized he was still in the hall. The door was half-open, and she could see the corner of a leather jacket on the other side. He must have been listening to their conversation. He stepped in and grabbed Rylie’s hand.

“Ms. Gresham,” he said, a little too formally. He cracked a smile. It wasn’t his usual bright grin. “You’ve looked better.”

“There’s no point trying to impress me now. Make sure Rylie takes care of herself. You got me? And have fun at the Winter Ball. I’ll be disappointed if I spent all that money on a beautiful dress and find out you two moped around all night.”

“I can’t go to the dance now,” Rylie said.

Gwyn’s hand tightened. “You can and you will. Now go away. You’re worrying yourself sick, and that’ll make me sicker. I want to see what’s happening on General Hospital. I haven’t watched it in years.” And then she acted like Rylie and Seth no longer existed.

Rylie couldn’t feel the floor beneath her feet as she drifted into the hallway. The sights and smells and sounds of the hospital were distant and meaningless.

She didn’t realize she was chewing on her thumb again until Seth grabbed her.

“I’ll call Abel. Don’t eat your hand while I’m gone,” he said, pulling out his cell phone and heading outside.

Rylie watched the ripped skin around her nail heal in a daze.

The blood was gone as soon as she wiped it on her jeans, but it planted the seed of an idea that stuck. AIDS was a disease that meant Gwyn couldn’t heal. Rylie healed better and faster than any human—she could fix any injury that wasn’t inflicted by silver.

What would happen if she turned Gwyn into a werewolf?

Seth stepped out of Rylie’s bedroom and shut the door silently behind him. He didn’t have to be quiet. She had been asleep the instant he lay her in bed and brushed a kiss on her cheek. She hadn’t even gotten out of her sweater.

He sat on the stoop outside. Icicles dripped onto puddles of frost around the porch, and the chair crunched with ice when he sank into it. The cold seeped into his jeans.

Leaning his elbows on his knees, he stared out at the fields, and the dark shape of his brother at work.

Seeing Gwyn in the hospital disturbed him, but not half as much as the news report. He kept rereading the coroner’s reports he had copied and thinking of what Rylie said about the murders—that maybe they had trusted their killer.

Abel was herding the cattle into the barn. He used the ATV to do it instead of a horse.

Seth couldn’t remember the last time he saw his brother on horseback.

“It can’t be,” he murmured.

His brother was a lot of things. Brutal, occasionally cruel, intense. But was he a murderer?

Seth saw Rylie’s favorite horse wandering outside the fence and went down to catch him. Butch was still saddled. He caught the horse’s bridle and guided him to the stables, keeping Abel in the corner of his eye. He rode around the perimeter of the herd, bellowing occasionally to keep them in line.

It was warm inside the stables, and it smelled like hay and manure. Seth removed Butch’s tack, hung the saddle on a post, and brushed him down.

“How is she?”

His hand paused mid-brush. Seth glanced over his shoulder to see Abel dismounting the ATV outside the door. The other horses nickered softly.

“She’s going to be in the hospital a couple days,” Seth said. When Butch huffed and shifted, he resumed brushing. “Sounds like a pretty bad cold.”

Abel came inside, shoved the door shut, and pulled off his scarf. Had his scars healed around the edges? He didn’t look as mangled as before. “What about Rylie?”

“What about her?”

“You know... how’s she taking it?”

Seth set down the brush. Butch ambled into his stall without being prompted, sticking his nose into the trough.

“Why do you care?” he asked, folding his arms.

Abel gave a short laugh. “What—can’t I be worried?”

“You don’t even like Rylie,” Seth said.

It took his brother a heartbeat too long to reply. “Yeah. Right.” He grabbed a shovel. “Stalls need to be mucked. Let’s get it done.”

They worked together in silence, filling a wheelbarrow with horse manure. It would be composted later and used to fertilize the orchard when spring came around, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant to handle.

Even though it was freezing outside, shoveling brought Seth to a hard sweat in minutes. He stripped his jacket and threw it on the saddle. Abel followed suit. “Is there something you want to tell me?” Seth asked, keeping his focus on the soiled hay. It was hard not to sound accusing.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

Abel leaned on the handle of his shovel. “Did Rylie say something to you?”

Seth shook his head, feeling unsettled. What would Rylie have said to him? And when had his brother started worrying about her instead of wishing she was dead?

“I wonder sometimes…” he began, carefully choosing his words. He swallowed hard and started over. “I haven’t heard from Mom since she left. I think she’s busy on a hunt—I can’t think of any other reason she’d be away so long. You know? She’s not the type to let us go without a fight.”

“You drove her off, bro,” Abel said. “You picked a girl over your responsibility as a hunter. You ever consider she’s pissed at you?”

Yeah, he had. More than once. “I think she’ll be back.”

Abel scraped the last of the manure out of the stall. He moved one arm stiffly. It still didn’t have a full range of motion since Rylie attacked him as a werewolf. “Yeah. Probably.”

“She’s unstoppable,” Seth said. “There’s nothing she likes better than hunting, maybe including us. That’s something you got from her.” He leaned the shovel against the wall and wiped his hands on his jeans. “So I wonder… why did you stay?”

“You seriously asking me that?”

The horses shifted in their stalls. Seth nodded. “All this sitting around must be driving you crazy. I mean, we come from a family of hunters—killers. You had to know going with Mom would be more interesting than being here.”

Abel folded his arms. They were so thick with muscle that they couldn’t lay flat on his chest. “Maybe I like having a job.”

“Hunting is your job.”