03 Long Night Moon - Seasons of the Moon (18 page)

“Don’t shoot,” Levi said.

Abel stiffened, nostrils flaring. His finger trembled on the trigger. Was his gun loaded with silver bullets, too? Seth couldn’t remember.

“Why are you following us?” Seth asked, steadying his arm on the side of the car.

Levi looked frazzled. His shirt was buttoned up the wrong way. “We made a huge mistake. You need to see something.”

Seth believed him. He lowered his rifle, removed the cartridge, and tossed it in the front seat. But his brother hadn’t moved.

“Get out of here,” Abel growled.

He crept to the other side of the car and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Give me the gun,” Seth said. For a long, breathless moment, he thought Abel wouldn’t obey. But then he handed him the pistol. Seth had to check. Silver bullets. That would have been bad. “Okay, Levi. What are you talking about?”

“Come here.”

Levi popped the trunk of the BMW. There was a laptop in the back, which he tilted away from the sun so they could see the screen. He loaded a grainy, black-and-white video that looked like a blank sheet of white.

He pointed to one corner.

“This is the driveway to a house in the development back by town. Tranquil Hills.”

Seth recognized it. That was where Tate’s family lived. He had picked Rylie up from her friend’s house a couple times. If that line was the driveway, then the round blurs were the topiaries, and the brighter patches in the back were the house lights.

Abel glowered at Levi. “Where did you get this?”

“I copied it off Tate’s security system before the cops arrived,” he said.

“Why were the cops there?” Seth asked.

Instead of answering, Levi skipped ahead in the video. He resumed normal speed when a small human figure crossed from one corner to the other. The timestamp was for the previous night.

They vanished. He opened another video from a different angle. The figure approached the front door of the house. It was still blurry, but Seth thought he recognized that stride. He would have known Rylie anywhere.

She punched her fist through the window, elbowed shards of glass out of the way, and went into the house.

“Oh, hell no,” Abel said.

Levi loaded a third video from another camera. Seth didn’t want to see it.

“Why were the cops there?” Seth asked again.

“Tate’s mom was killed.” Levi’s voice was flat and emotionless. “Her throat was torn out.”

His ears filled with a roaring sound as the blood rushed to his head. Abel grabbed his arm. The painful press of his fingers into the muscle was the only thing that kept him upright.

The third video was from inside the entryway. Rylie’s indistinct figure changed. It was abrupt—a twist of the spine, a seize in her legs. Then Rylie was gone, replaced by the wolf. Seth stared at the timestamp as if he could will it to change.

She couldn’t change between moons. Could she?

Someone else ran into the grainy video. He didn’t recognize the dark hair and dress, but he assumed it was Tate’s mom. The wolf chased her upstairs where the camera couldn’t see.

There was one more video on the folder. When Levi moved to click on it, Seth closed the laptop.

“That’s not possible,” he said.

“Silver poisoning. It drives a werewolf crazy and makes them transform out of control.” Levi thumbed the plug in his ear. “Bekah and I use silver to change at will, but we don’t let it into our system. She’s bad. She must have had it a long time.”

Seth flashed back to the night his mother shot Rylie and embedded a silver bullet deep in her thigh.

He thought he had pulled all the fragments out.

But he was wrong. That was why her nails fell out whenever she got mad. She must have been changing between moons.

“Seven bodies,” he muttered.

Now eight.

“Hell,” Abel swore.

Levi nodded. “We have to find her.”

But Seth had already run back to grab his rifle.

Bekah called Levi when they reached the outer edges of town. He listened to her speak, and his face went pale.

“We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“What is it?” Seth asked. He was riding in the passenger seat of the BMW, which he was nauseated to discover belonged to Tate. He had to crack a window to be able to breathe. Abel followed closely in the Chevelle.

Before Levi could respond, the flashing red and blue lights of a police cruiser zoomed past them, squealing with sirens. It drove a cold spike of fear into Seth’s chest.

His heart sank even lower when they followed the police onto the street of Seth and Abel’s apartment.

They passed the old strip motel and stopped in front of the office of Rylie’s therapist.

Levi parked across the street in an alley. Abel looped around the block and pulled up behind them. The police car they followed to the scene wasn’t alone. It was joined by three other cruisers and an ambulance. People in uniforms milled around the parking lot, looking aimless and chilly.

Despite the late evening cold and two feet of snow, everyone in town seemed to have turned out to see what had the cops excited. A dozen people were gathered on the sidewalk. It was practically a mob, given the small local population.

Seth got out of the car for a better look, but hung at the back of the crowd. People were whispering. He caught words like “assault” and “crazy.”

He felt the itch of an approaching werewolf an instant before Bekah came around the corner.

“What happened?” he hissed.

She dragged him to the corner for a better view. “Look.”

The back of the ambulance was open. An old woman he recognized as the secretary sat on the tailgate with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Even from across the street, he could see she was shaking.

Abel loomed over his shoulder. His face was fixed in a grim mask that made him look decades older than nineteen.

“Did Rylie get her?”

“No. We got lucky. Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“I listened in on her report to the cops. She saw Rylie go inside, then found her halfway furry a couple minutes later. Police think the secretary’s lost it, but there are people who will hear her story and know it’s true.”

People like Seth’s mom. Heck, people like
Seth
.

“We’ve got to find her,” Abel said. “
Now
.”

Bekah and Levi both nodded. Seth was surrounded by gold-eyed gazes. “We can do that,” she said.

The siblings raised their noses to the breeze and sniffed. Seth wished he could smell like they did. His own sixth sense for werewolves didn’t do any good when he had a couple right next to him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Abel lift his head to do the same. Chills crawled down Seth’s spine. He pretended not to see it.

“I have her smell,” Levi said. He sniffed Seth’s collar. “There’s wolf all over you.”

He jerked away. His hand twitched for his shoulder, where his rifle usually hung, but it was still in the car. Bekah stepped between them.

Sirens went off again. Two cruisers peeled into the street.

A pair of sheriffs left on foot with German Shepherds. Seth heard a low growl from behind him and wasn’t sure who was doing it.

“Let’s split up,” he said. “We’ll cover more ground.”

They returned to the alley. “We’ll be faster on foot,” Levi said, dropping his jacket and pulling his shirt over his head. He threw his clothes in the BMW, completely unembarrassed to strip in front of others. Bekah ducked behind the corner to do the same.

Seth watched in sick fascination as Levi transformed. It was so much faster than Rylie’s changes. His body shuddered. His face extended at the same time his tail emerged, and fur swept down his body in seconds.

Not a minute later, a werewolf stood in front of him.

Levi was smaller and shaggier than Rylie. Somehow, he had the same serious expression as a wolf that he did as a human. It took all of Seth’s control not to grab for his gun again.

Bekah trotted back to them, shaking snow out of her fur.

“Whoever finds Rylie…” Seth hesitated. He felt weird talking to dogs. “Don’t hurt her.”

Bekah huffed in acknowledgment and nudged her brother.

They ran to the end of the alley and separated. Abel got his gun out of the car and double-checked the clip. “I’ll get her,” he said, stuffing it in the back of his jeans and pulling his shirt out to hide it. “Trust me.”

He ran off in pursuit of Bekah.

Seth watched them disappear, feeling strangely helpless. Hunters, police, and Abel—all searching for his girlfriend, who was alone, sick with silver, and starving for meat.

He had to find her first.

Rylie woke up in a snowdrift.

She groaned and cradled her head between her hands. Her tongue felt like it had doubled in size while she slept, and her skull was ringing. She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes.

The world was washed out and gray. It was cold, it was dark, and she had no idea where she was or how she had gotten there.

Standing on trembling legs, Rylie scanned her surroundings for familiar landmarks.

Was it the morning after a moon again? What had happened to the last two weeks? And why was she in so much pain?

She staggered to the shelter of a tree where the snow wasn’t as thick, trying to gather her jumbled thoughts. Sadness gnawed between her ribs. The grief was so immense that even her momentary amnesia couldn’t wipe it out.

Rylie was missing something—or someone—important.

Flies buzzed in her skull. She tried to shake them away.

Where was Abel? Where was her pack?

A breeze lifted, and a smell caught her attention. Meat. Rabbit, bird, or something else? She wasn’t sure. There was too much information on the icy air, from distant humans to her own sweat and the heavy chill of snow.

She even smelled rivers and stone and pine trees, but there was no forest nearby.

Tracking the smell through the skeleton trees, she shoved past bare branches and ignored the drip of icicle water on her shoulders.

The body was crumpled between two big rocks. Rylie got on all fours to study it. She couldn’t make sense of all the legs and twisted spine. Was it a human? A deer?

To her, it looked like nothing but prey, and she was so hungry. Always hungry now.

She couldn’t eat this meat. It had been dead for hours.

Rylie recalled the feeling of an esophagus collapsing between her teeth.

A distant howl broke the air. Her head jerked up.

“Abel?” she asked, wrapping her lips carefully around the sound. But that wasn’t possible. She could feel the moon slumbering now, and knew it wasn’t at its apex or nadir.

Then why had she changed?

Too many questions.

“Holy mother of God,” someone said.

She glanced over her shoulder. The wolf had been too distracted to hear the approach of boots on snow. A man stood behind her, someone gray-haired and old. He wore the flesh of animals and carried lead.

More prey. Good.

“What are you doing out here, honey?” he asked with the accent of someone who had lived his entire life in the country. “Jesus, you’re going to freeze.” He moved to strip off his coat.

Rylie bared her teeth, and he froze.

They stared at each other for a breathless moment. Would he shoot her? She was faster than him, but she wasn’t sure she could outrun a bullet.

Her mind was suspended between human and wolf. One wanted to flee. The other wanted to attack.

The wolf won.

She leaped. The hunter didn’t expect an attack from a naked girl. He yelled and tried to jump out of the way, but she was like lightning. Watching him raise his gun—too slow, much too slow—she darted around him and attacked.

Her fingers bit into his jacket. Her momentum sent them both crashing into the snow. His gun flew from his hands.

He flailed his fists, and pain exploded in her temple.

Rylie reeled.

He scrambled to his feet. His eyes were wide, his pulse raced, and his skin poured the delicious scent of fear and adrenaline into the air. “Sweet Jesus!”

By the time she flipped onto all fours again, he had already fled through the trees and left his gun behind.

He was fat and slow. She could catch him.

The pain in her temple radiated through her body, making her stumble midstep. Her spine cracked.

Not again
.

Rylie’s hips popped and her knees made a sound like shattering glass.

She couldn’t balance with her legs twisted in reverse. Sagging, she barely caught herself on a boulder and almost fell straight into the body. The pain of the transformation cleared her head for a moment. Human Rylie was relieved to realize the body was furred—a deer, not human.

But her relief was short-lived. Once she remembered killing the deer, she recalled killing other prey. Things that weren’t furry. Things that cried in human voices.

“Help me,” she whimpered. “Somebody.
Please
.”

Nobody was listening.

Where was Seth? Why wasn’t he waiting for her? He was
always
waiting.

He’s gone
.

Grief overwhelmed her as she remembered their last, desperate kiss, the press of his body against hers, and the taste of her own tears.