All Hallows' Moon (12 page)

But what if he found out that Rylie asked for him to get fired? Would that be the last piece of the puzzle he needed to confirm that she was the werewolf?

Jorge and Abel went into the house to talk to Gwyn, kicking the mud off their boots by the front door. They were gone for several minutes. Rylie kicked at her little pile of shredded leaves, pushing it into the edge of the pond.

When the men left again, Jorge went to his car and Abel came to stand in front of Rylie’s bench.

“I know the truth about you,” he said in a low voice.

She leapt to her feet, baring her teeth. She might have gone for his throat if the back door hadn’t opened again.

“Rylie!” Gwyn called.

Thick cords of muscle stood out on Abel’s neck. Tension shivered between them.

“Well?” Rylie whispered.

She wanted him to attack her. She wanted an excuse to kill him. The wolf envisioned reopening his old wounds and finishing the job, and it could almost taste the blood.

Could she turn Abel if she bit him again? Could he be her pack? Or would she have to eat him piece by piece?

“Rylie!”

“Stay the hell away from my brother,” Abel hissed.

She stared after him as he jogged to his motorcycle and roared away. It was all she could do not to chase him. Her thoughts were buzzing around in her skull too fast to process.

“I’m not calling your name again!” Gwyn shouted, and the screen door slammed shut.

Her knees wobbled, so she sat back down on the bench. The wolf faded away, leaving nothing inside of her but the shivering embers of fear.

He knew
.

And the next moon was only three days away.

Seth walked home alone. Abel had told him to come back as soon as he finished school, but he wasted time exploring instead, wandering through the streets with no destination in mind. Everything in town was close enough to reach on foot—the west edge was only three miles from the east edge, and their community was a half mile past that.

He fantasized about his mom getting angry at him for disappearing. She could ground him. No TV or games for the week. The idea of it made him laugh.

By the time he got to their mobile home, it was getting dark. Their trailer was in the position his mom considered to be best for defense, and he didn’t make eye contact with anybody living around them to make sure he remained detached. If he started to like people, he might want to stay—and that wasn’t an option.

Abel pulled weeds in the yard without a shirt. It used to be that women flocked to gaze at him, but now that he was scarred, everyone watched from an uneasy distance as if they were afraid he would attack.

He wasn’t trying to make the trailer look better. Seth knew that. It was part of his ongoing physical conditioning. Just one more thing to make him stronger and harder.

“Done wasting time for the day?” Abel called when Seth approached. Four silvery, parallel scars striped his ribs down to the navel. It was a permanent souvenir of the night he had been bitten by a werewolf.

“Done stalking the Greshams for the day?” Seth snapped back.

“Nope. I’m pulling a double shift today. The old lady insisted I go home for dinner, but I’m going back to repair the tractor tonight so we can use it tomorrow.”

His voice sounded funny. Seth lowered his voice. “You didn’t do anything weird, did you?”

“No.” Abel stuffed a fistful of foxtails in a trash bag. “But I should have.”

“We don’t kill humans,” he whispered.

His brother’s eyes glowed like he was considering making an exception.

Eleanor sat on the floor inside their trailer, surrounded by newspaper clippings. A small stack of banker’s boxes stood against the wall. She was in the middle of what she called
the process
. She would sift through crime reports, write headlines in her notebook, and rank how likely she thought they were to be related to the werewolf.

The only decoration on their wall was a map of the region printed onto several pages. This was part of the process, too. Once she picked the most likely werewolf articles, she would stab color-coded pins into the map to mark where they occurred.

Piece by piece, Eleanor would mark the werewolf’s territory. She would use that map to find its den.

And then, on the next moon, they would kill it.

His mom looked like a snake coiled in the middle of the room waiting for someone to wander close enough to strike. She had been born in the wrong era. She was meant to be Boadicea or Wu Zetian—a queen conquering the old world. Eleanor was beautiful and smart and ruthless. She had killed a dozen werewolves on her own.

One red pin marked the map on the wall. It was centered over Rylie’s ranch.

“Found anything yet?” he asked.

Eleanor responded by pointing at the boxes. “I’m looking at domestic violence cases. Help me sort.”

“I’ve got a lot of homework to do.”

“Did I ask you if you have homework? No. I told you to help me sort. Sit down.”

He dropped his backpack and did what she ordered, making sure not to disturb her piles. “Why domestic violence?”

“I got no other leads yet, so I’m working with the basics. Werewolves are often batterers,” Eleanor said by rote.

Her husband—Seth and Abel’s father—was considered the expert on werewolves by most hunters. He had literally written the book on tracking and killing them, and he used to make everyone in the family recite passages until they had them memorized.

Eleanor hadn’t stopped studying his work after he was killed.

“What are we going to do for dinner?” Seth asked, separating the articles into two random piles. There wasn’t much point in reading them when he knew Rylie wasn’t a wife beater.

His mom glanced at her watch, looking surprised to realize it was getting late. “I don’t know, and I don’t have time to worry about it. There are leftover tacos in the fridge.” They had been eating fast food for every meal since they arrived in town.

Before Seth could say something else, Eleanor had refocused on the task at hand. She hadn’t wondered, even for a moment, why he was so late coming home. He wasn’t sure she even realized he was still going to school.

He stared at the red pin on the Gresham ranch.

Rylie’s aunt would notice if she was out late.

“How long do you think this will take?” Seth asked.

“Not long.” She finally gave him a smile. “Not long at all.”

He pretended to sort articles for an hour, but when Abel left to go back to the ranch, Seth left too. Eleanor didn’t ask where he was going. She always hoped he would come back with something dead when he ducked out, like a good werewolf hunter should. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

He found himself outside Rylie’s house a half hour later. Abel’s motorcycle was parked outside the barn, and the lights were on inside. He avoided his brother and went up the hill to the house instead.

Seth watched Rylie and her aunt have dinner through the window. They were sharing beef ribs drenched in barbecue sauce, and the two of them sat close together at the table, smiling when they talked and looking happier than he could ever remember being with his own family.

Anybody else might have thought they were completely normal—anyone who wasn’t a hunter. But Seth could sense Rylie the way he could smell trash rotting in a dumpster. All werewolves felt like that to him.

The way she moved and looked at her aunt wasn’t normal, either. She didn’t look like she belonged in a house, a city, or anywhere near other humans.

A rib bone almost fell off the table, and Gwyneth made a sudden motion to catch it. Rylie jerked. It was a small gesture, but she had to shut her eyes and take deep breaths before she could go back to what she was doing.

Her prey drive had kicked in at the fast motion. Seth had seen it too many times before.

Rylie was different from other werewolves. Seth believed it. He really did. But she was still dangerous. If his family didn’t get her, then it might be some other hunter putting a bullet in her skull someday. He had done it himself before. He could imagine the way Rylie’s blood would spray all too clearly.

He waited outside until they finished dinner and Gwyneth went to bed. Rylie washed dishes in the sink by the open window.

The wind shifted. Her head lifted, and she looked right through the shadows to where he stood.

Seth tried to duck down the hill, but it was too late. Rylie stormed out the back door. “This isn’t camp anymore,” she said. “You can’t lurk outside my house.”

“Come on, Rylie, I just want to—”

He only had an instant to dodge. Rylie flung a cast-iron skillet at his head, and it smashed into the bushes behind him. “Go away!”

“I came back because I want to help you!”

She moved to throw a soapy sponge, but his words made her hand freeze in the middle of the motion. “You want to help? How?”

“My mom’s not onto you yet,” Seth said, “but she’s working on it. She’ll figure it out soon.”

“You told Abel about me, didn’t you?”

“No. Well, yeah. But he already knew.” He could tell he was losing her. Rylie started moving back toward the house—probably to find another heavy projectile. “I want to help you hide on the next moon.”

That stopped her. “Why?”

“I don’t want you to die, Rylie.”

“Oh.”

“I want to apologize, too,” he said. “I don’t have any right to tell you to leave.”

Her anger sparked again, even hotter than before. She stalked toward him. “You need to leave me alone. I’m a monster, aren’t I? You don’t want to make me angry!”

“Do you think you could beat me?” Seth asked.

“Maybe I could!”

“Do you think you could beat my brother? My mom? How about both of them at the same time?”

Her eyes flashed. “Is that a threat?”

“No.” Seth took a deep breath. “My family is good. Really good. You’re going to get caught one of these nights. There’s no way you can avoid them without my help.”

“You said it would be better for us to avoid each other. What changed your mind?”

It was a good question. His mom would kill him if she found out he was helping a werewolf. It was why he hadn’t told them the truth about the summer when he came home. Seth couldn’t tell Rylie that—she wouldn’t understand.

“I tried to save you on the night you were bitten. I failed, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her fists clenched. “So I’m a punishment?”

“No, but I can still save you.” He spoke fast. “We’re going to get the beast under control so you can hide until my family thinks you’ve moved on. Then we’ll leave. You can stay.”

Seth watched the werewolf’s fury drain out of her, leaving normal, harmless Rylie in its wake. She nudged a weed with her toe. Her feet were bare. “Okay,” she said. Rylie peeked at him through her hair, and she finally smiled a little. “You want to come inside and talk? We have leftovers.”

He shook his head. “I should get back to my mom. She’ll wonder where I am.” It was a lie, but Seth didn’t want to sit in a house where people loved each other and be unable to share in it. “We’ll talk at school when Abel isn’t watching. At least we know he’ll be here most of the time. He’s good, but he can’t be everywhere at once.”

“And what about your mom?”

“Yeah, Seth. What about Mom?”

Abel emerged from the shadows. Seth moved to stand in front of Rylie even though he had already seen them.

“You’re supposed to be working on the tractor,” Seth said.

“Yeah, but then I saw our car, and I wondered why you were visiting the ranch. I didn’t think you would be visiting the
werewolf
.” He spat out the last word, and Rylie tensed behind Seth. Her hands gripped his arm. “I thought I told you to stay away.”

“I came here to see her,” Seth said. “She didn’t want to see me. It’s not her fault.”

Abel clenched his jaw. His hands hovered near his back, where he usually kept a handgun. Seth was armed, too—but his gun was strapped to his ankle. He wondered if he could draw faster than his brother.