Six Moon Summer (6 page)

“Do
not
touch me,” she said.

“Like this?” She planted both hands on Rylie’s shoulders and shoved.

Something inside of her snapped.

Rylie slashed at the other girl’s face with her fingernails. Amber shrieked and fell back.

Pouncing on her, Rylie flailed with both fists. She wanted to beat her. She wanted to
hurt
her. But something about punching didn’t feel right, like her hands weren’t meant for that purpose.

She wanted to bite and tear.

Amber sobbed. It only made Rylie angrier, and in a way... hungry.

Hands clamped down on Rylie’s arms and hauled her off Amber. She kept trying to hit and kick with a guttural roar. Rylie’s skin was a thousand degrees. She was burning in her own anger.

It took Louise and two other girls to separate them. The moment they managed to get Rylie to her feet, however, Amber came flying at her. She lifted a hand to strike Rylie. “You’re such a freak!” she shrieked.

“Cut it out!” Louise snapped, putting herself between them. “Your nose is bleeding, Miss Richmond. Take yourself to the infirmary. Now!”

Amber wiped the blood off her lip. Her eyes widened and her face paled when she saw it. “Freak,” she spat one more time before flouncing away.

Louise rounded on Rylie.

“I have been very,
very
patient with you. My parents divorced when I was your age, and I went through a rebellious phase, too. But between your disregard for authority and aggressive behavior, we’re reaching a breaking point. Do you understand?”

Rylie barely registered the words. She couldn’t focus. Her flesh was overheating, and she could barely breathe. It wasn’t asthma.

She shook her head to clear it, but it only made the world spin more. She could hear the chattering of squirrels and the birds in the trees and smell nearby deer scat. Her back legs didn’t want to support her weight. It was all she could do to focus on Louise’s moving mouth through the haze.

“Are you even
listening
?”

“I hear you,” Rylie said, but the words felt clumsy in her mouth.

It was too bright. She needed to go somewhere quiet, safe, and dark.

Louise frowned. “Turn in your wrist guards and go back to camp. We’ll talk later.”

Rylie peeled off her protective gear and dropped them in the bucket without looking. She glanced up at the sun. It was late afternoon, and it would be dark in a couple hours. For some reason, that felt very, very important.

She thought sitting down might make her feel better, but when Rylie planted herself on a bench around the fire pit to write in her journal, she found she couldn’t stay seated. She kept shaking her head as she paced around the camp. A distant, persistent buzzing rattled in the back of her skull.

The sun dropped. It was getting dark. The new moon would rise soon, and it would be the darkest night of camp yet.

Her group didn’t go to the mess for dinner. They roasted hot dogs and corn over the fire, and still Rylie paced. She had to move. She had to
go
. The dark trees were calling to her, and the muscles in her legs twitched like she was ready to run.

When they were done eating, the counselor let the girls build the fire higher and higher. The leaping flames licked at the starry sky. Ash drifted through the air and stung Rylie’s eyes.

The heat from her anger had never faded, and now it settled in Rylie’s bones. She thought she might be sick.

“Can I go to bed?” she asked Louise in a hoarse whisper.

Louise looked annoyed until she caught sight of Rylie’s pallor. Her lips drew into a frown. “Yes. Of course.”

Rylie crawled into her cot and pulled the sheets over her body, shivering hard. She writhed in bed, rolling and twisting from side to side, and she struggled to keep lunch in her stomach.

The forest wanted her.

Shoving her window open, Rylie gasped cool air into her lungs. There was only one thing to keep her from dying of this fever, and she knew exactly what it was—running up the mountain and never stopping. She had to do it.

But Rylie couldn’t afford being seen leaving again. She waited as patiently as she could in bed, too hot under the covers but too cold without them. She kept kicking them off and pulling them back on again.

All the other girls came to bed after awhile, but Amber wasn’t with them. She had no sense of time anymore. She stifled her groans on her fist and in her pillow.

Peeking through the cabin door, Louise did a head count, and Rylie made sure she was visible. Her entire body shuddered with her efforts to stay still.

“Good night, ladies,” Louise said with a pointed look in the direction of the loft.

She turned off the lights and shut the door. The girls immediately started talking. Rylie waited, feeling like she was going to crawl out of her skin. Little ants marched up and down her spine.

Eventually, the other girls fell silent. Their breaths grew deep. Everyone was asleep.

Everyone but Rylie.

Pushing the window open the rest of the way, she slithered through the small opening and dropped to the ground outside. She eased around the corner of the cabin, watching for counselors. They chatted outside their own cabin, holding mugs of hot tea and discussing problem campers—more specifically, Rylie and Amber.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do with her. Amber’s parents are threatening to sue. Rylie’s dad’s lawyer has already sent us a letter.” Louise sighed. “I can reassign them to different cabins, but what good would that do? I think they go out of their way to get into fights.” Rylie was tempted to stay and listen, but her body demanded movement.

She plunged into the forest, letting the fever drive her.

It was so much easier now. She never had to slow down to dodge the trees or leap over rocks. Her instincts guided her deeper and deeper into the wilderness. She could smell other beasts: wolves and bears, deer and groundhogs and squirrels. Rylie could even smell summer rain approaching.

Her lungs heaved with exertion. Her feet ached. Rylie’s ribs ached like something was trying to burst out of her chest. A wolf howled in the distant night.

She collapsed to her knees. The fever had been momentarily cooled by her flight in the forest but returned with a fury, and Rylie tore at her own skin. She wanted to shed it like clothing. She wanted to let the thing inside of her out.

Throwing her head back, Rylie screamed.

The sound that ripped from her throat was more beast than human.

Rylie awoke just before dawn feeling cold and damp from dew.

She sat up with a groan, cradling her head in her hands. Rylie was amongst a mess of torn-up trees. A couple of the towering pines were snapped in half, their shattered pieces jutting toward the sky. Others were clawed like the grove where she found her cell phone. It looked like a storm had whipped through the clearing.

And that wasn’t all. The ground had long claw marks in it, too. She ran her hands through the deep furrows in the ground. Her fingers fit perfectly.

Rylie turned her fingers around to study her fingernails. They were caked with dirt and blood.

“What the...?”

Her head throbbed, and she pressed the heel of one hand against her temple. Thinking too much was hard, especially after the disorientation of finding herself in such a mess. A single thought emerged from her muddied brain: if she didn’t get back to her cabin before Louise came to wake everyone up, she was going to be in big trouble.

Rylie had an easy time finding her way back. Even though she felt like she was recovering from the flu, the forest wasn’t as maze-like as it used to be. She smelled breakfast and followed it.

The door to the counselor’s cabin opened when she approached, and Louise emerged, muffling a deep yawn behind a hand. She didn’t see Rylie as she went to the first cabin. Rylie’s was on the other end. She had enough time—barely.

She scaled the cabin wall, using the grooves between the logs to lever herself up to the loft window. She wiggled inside.

Nobody else was awake yet. Patricia was snoring. Rylie had just climbed into the cot and pulled the sheets to her shoulders when Louise opened the door. “Good morning, campers! Shower time!”

Hoping she would be ignored if she stayed quiet, Rylie rolled over and pulled the blankets over her head.

“You too, Miss Gresham,” Louise called up to the loft.

Rylie picked out a fresh outfit and climbed down the ladder, trying not to grumble too loudly. Every inch of her hurt. She desperately wanted sleep, even though she felt like she must have been passed out most of the night.

Stretching under the spray of river water helped work the kinks out of her muscles, but it didn’t clear her head. It felt like her skull was stuffed with cotton.

Drying off with another hand-me-down towel, Rylie dressed and went to the mirrors to brush the knots from her hair. She found several pine needles and a soggy caterpillar tangled up in the back. She tossed them in the trash and hoped nobody noticed.

Another group filed into the bathroom. Rylie caught sight of someone she recognized.

“Cassidy!”

“Hey,” Cassidy said. She looked almost as beat as Rylie. Her head tilted to the side, and she gave Rylie a funny look. “You look different today.”

Her heart sped up. “Really? What do you mean?”

“I dunno,” she said. “But you’re looking good. I need a shower wicked bad, but there’s a big campfire thing this weekend. Songs or stories or something. I’ll see you there, right?”

She nodded mutely, and Rylie fled to the mirror as soon as Cassidy turned her back. She studied herself closely, half-expecting to see fangs or fur or something equally horrifying.

Rylie didn’t see anything other than the same silvery scar she’d had for two weeks. Then again, there was something a little off about her face. It wasn’t quite the same reflection she had seen for the last fifteen years.

Leaning closer to the mirror, she thumbed her eyelid so she could get a better look at the iris. Her eyes had always been pale blue to match her pale blonde hair. It made her look washed out and ghostlike.

But her eyes were no longer blue.

They weren’t quite brown, either. Instead, ribbons of deep gold veined the blue, like cracks in a sheet of ice. Rylie recognized that shade of gold. She had seen that color staring at her in the darkness of the forest two weeks ago when she was attacked.

A chill shook her, and Rylie stepped away from the mirror.

Be careful. You’re in danger now.

Rylie wasn’t sure why, but she needed to talk to Seth.

Rylie didn’t get the chance to catch up on her sleep that morning, nor did she get to search for Seth. She stumbled through breakfast and the morning hike. She barely kept her eyes open through the buffet line at lunch. She didn’t even notice when Louise came to stand beside her.

“Do you see that?”

“See what?” Rylie asked.

“Tofu. I put in a special request for you,” Louise said. There was indeed a small container of tofu next to the salad. It looked like nobody else had touched it. “And one other thing—I sent a letter to your parents explaining you lost your belongings. Your mother sent a care package. I put it on your bed back at the cabin.”

Louise left, and Rylie took several pieces of tofu for her plate. She was kind of excited. Having vegetarian food meant she might be able to finally satiate this gnawing hunger that had been growing within her for days. Nothing else seemed to make it better.

She went searching for a quiet table and passed by the entrees in the buffet. Folds of roast beef for sandwiches caught her eye, and Rylie hesitated. It looked good.
Really
good.

Revolted, Rylie sat down without taking any. What was she thinking? She hadn’t liked meat in years.