All Hallows' Moon (5 page)

Uh oh
.

“Okay. Miss Gresham, would you wait in the hall?”

Tate was gone, leaving her no distraction from the nerves gnawing in her belly. Rylie bounced her knee as she waited, chewing on her thumbnail until the edge bled. She could imagine the conversation going on inside the office.

You think she’s been acting weird?
the dean would ask.

Yeah. All the animals are afraid of her. I think something happened at camp. Something really bad,
Gwyn would reply.

We’re going to expel her
.

And Aunt Gwyneth would smile that unsympathetic smile.
Good. I wanted to send her back to her mom anyway
.

The thought of it made her want to scream.

What would happen if someone did realize what happened to Rylie? There was no way anybody would believe it if she told them she was a werewolf, and there was no cure now that she had changed.

No cure… except a silver bullet.

This scene was too familiar to one Rylie had experienced at camp over the summer. She had been caught sneaking over to the boys’ camp with a car she stole from the faculty. She only escaped arrest because a counselor stood up for her—and Jericho only did it to keep Rylie under his thumb. He turned out to be a werewolf and hoped she would help him attack the camp.

Gwyn had no ulterior motives. After Rylie’s refusal to work that morning, she didn’t have much of a reason to keep her niece at all. Even if she didn’t get expelled, it seemed like there was a pretty slim chance of getting to stay at the ranch.

She wouldn’t live with her mom. She
couldn’t
.

When her aunt emerged, Rylie stood up.

“I’m not going back to the city,” she said.

Gwyn’s expression didn’t change. “Of course you’re not. Come on, I’m parked out front.”

She strode off, leaving Rylie staring after her.

That was it? Wasn’t she supposed to get yelled at or something?

Rylie hurried to catch up with her. She got in the passenger’s side and buckled her belt silently. Her aunt tuned the radio to a country station and hummed along with it as she drove.

Instead of turning left toward the road that would take them to the ranch, they headed downtown. Rylie couldn’t stand the quiet.

“Where are we going?”

“Hardware store,” she said. “I told you we would get paint for your room after school, didn’t I?”

“You’re not going to get rid of me? I thought I was expelled for sure.”

“Not this time. The dean’s willing to work with your issues.” Rylie didn’t realize how afraid she’d been until it drained out and left her weak. Gwyn stopped at a traffic light and gave her a hard look. “You’re not going to throw anything again. Not books, not temper tantrums. Nothing. You’re going to control yourself.”

“But—”

“Tomorrow, you’re going to wake up and do your chores without complaining. You’re going to go to school. You’re going to blend in. And you’re
not going to get in trouble
.”

“It’s just—”

“I’m running a ranch, girl. It’s a big job. I can’t go running into town every day because you’re making trouble. I’ll start losing money, which is not an option, so I will send you back to your mother. Understand me?”

Rylie nodded. “I understand.”

“Good. Now, what color do you want to paint your room?”

Four

Strangers

By the time Rylie and Gwyn were finished with retail therapy, they had a lot more than paint. A shopping spree in a town with one half-empty strip mall was virtually impossible, but they picked up furniture from an antique store and Rylie scrounged together a few designer outfits from the consignment shop. It wasn’t much, but it beat her aunt’s hand-me-downs.

They emptied Rylie’s bedroom and did the primer coat that night. It was awful to her sensitive nose. She slept on the deck chair with a checkered blanket pulled to her chin, and awoke in the morning damp and chilly.

The days quickly began to take on a strange sort of rhythm: Rylie woke up at four in the morning to eat breakfast (whether she liked it or not), struggled to find chores that kept her away from the animals, and then took the long ride to high school. She didn’t dare argue with her aunt anymore. She weeded the garden, repaired fences, and hauled bales of hay. The cows panicked and tried to stampede whenever she passed. Gwyn didn’t remark on it, but she never stopped watching.

It got easier after the first day, in the sense that she was no longer a novelty and became part of the scenery. New students weren’t interesting gossip for long.

On the other hand, classes with Ms. Reedy didn’t get much easier. She hovered over Rylie and watched her every move.

Fortunately, it turned out Tate was supposed to be in Ms. Reedy’s class instead of smoking under the bleachers. He strolled in reeking of weed to claim the seat next to Rylie after a few days. He immediately pulled out his phone and started texting.

“Care to share your discussions with the class?” the teacher asked.

“Just planning a drive-by with my gang,” he said.

This seemed to be a normal response for him, because Ms. Reedy only looked pained. “Put your phone away, Mr. Peterson.”

It was nice having Tate to distract the teacher. She made it through the week without another disruption, and by the second week, Rylie was sitting with Tate and his degenerate friends at lunch. The three of them were repulsive, like every other teenage boy she had ever met, but they were also wonderfully simple creatures. All they cared about were video games and marijuana.

Rylie could almost forget the full moon was coming.

Almost.

“I hear you’re hanging out with a bad crowd at school,” Gwyn said over a dinner of steaks from her own herd. Considering how much meat her aunt ate, she might as well have been a werewolf too—and she managed to top it off with several steins of beer.

Rylie shrugged. “They’re all right.”

“Are you doing drugs with them?”

“No.”

Her mom would have never accepted that answer without an hour of interrogation, but it was enough for Gwyneth. “Good. You don’t work on my ranch if you’re not clean.”

“Trust me, that’s not a problem.” Rylie could barely control herself anymore. The idea of throwing substance abuse into the mix was stupid.

The clinking of silverware against plates filled the room for a couple moments. Gwyn set down her fork. The line between her eyebrows said she was thinking hard again.

“I’m going to give it to you straight, babe: You’re a great worker. You’re almost as strong as both my men combined, so I’m happy to have you. But this refusal to ride my horses is a serious problem. You want to explain it to me?”

“I had a bad experience at camp,” she said. “Actually, I had a lot of bad experiences at camp.”

Sympathy flashed across Gwyn’s hard face. “Yeah. I know.”

Rylie ate her last bite of steak and pushed the plate back. She could have probably had two more of them without feeling full. “I’m surprised you haven’t tried to play twenty questions about it yet. It was all Jessica wanted to talk about.”

“You went missing for two weeks. She was scared for you.”

“You weren’t?”

“I was, but you’re tough. I knew you would be fine. Since you’ve come back, though, you’ve been… different. You’re darker now. Guess that’s no surprise considering what you’ve been through.”

She didn’t meet her aunt’s eyes. “Yeah.”

“If you want to talk about it, I’m here. Until then, there’s work to be done.” Aunt Gwyn grabbed another beer out of the fridge and sat down, using the side of the table to pop the cap off. She poured it into her glass. “Your sixteenth birthday is coming up soon.”

Was it? Rylie had completely forgotten. Time for her was no longer marked by days and weeks and months. It was measured out in phases of the moon. “We don’t have to do anything.”

“Do you want to learn to drive?”

She smiled. “Really?”

“I don’t have time to drive an hour into town twice a day. It would be mighty convenient if you could do it yourself. So I’ll tell you what, Rylie—if you can get past this summer’s bad experience and go for a ride on Butch, I’ll teach you to drive. You can even have the old truck.”

Her excitement faded. “Oh.”

“Just one ride. Saddle him up, take him out with me, and head back. Then you can get your driver’s license. How’s that sound?”

“I don’t think I can do that, Aunt Gwyn,” Rylie said.

“Give it some thought.” She polished off her beer in one long drink and sighed. “I’m exhausted, babe. Think I’ll call it an early night. Why don’t you clean up?”

Rylie mulled over her aunt’s offer while she washed plates in the sink. If she could ride the horse once, she could drive. None of her friends back in the city could drive. Everyone rode the train. But out in the country, driving meant independence. Adulthood. She could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

If only she could ride on a horse.

Rylie used to love riding horses. The thought of galloping through the pastures with the breeze in her hair was so tempting that she could almost cry.

But she smelled like a wolf to the animals now. A predator. As soon as they caught a whiff of her, they would panic and bolt.

She couldn’t do it.

Rylie put away the dishes and made a halfhearted attempt at homework. It was hard to focus on drawing mitochondria when she kept finding herself doodling moons and paw prints on the margins. Her mind wandered to the horses, and then the transformation coming the next night.

She probably hadn’t eaten Phil, the trucker. Rylie would have heard about it if they found his mangled body somewhere. The cows were another story—that one had made it into the newspapers. All the local ranchers were talking about crazy coyotes and mountain lions.

The full moon would be even worse. Rylie would be even hungrier than before.

If she roamed free again, she would probably kill. She couldn’t lock herself in the bedroom next to her aunt’s. The barn wasn’t an option, either, unless she wanted to kill the horses.

Rylie groaned and cradled her head in her palms. She had to do
something
.

If only Seth had been there for her. He’d had all kinds of creative ways to keep her restrained over the summer. Of course, it turned out that was because he was a werewolf hunter, and he killed her kind. But he hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

She wondered what he was doing. Was he thinking about the upcoming moon, too?

When night fell, Rylie crept past Aunt Gwyn’s room. She had already gone to sleep even though it was only eight o’clock. There was no sound coming from her room. Rylie walked out the front door and kept going.

Her aunt’s ranch looked like it had grown out of the long grass in the middle of rolling hills and sweeping plains. Everything was made of round edges: the squash cluttering the unkempt garden, the worn wooden posts forming the fence around the pond, the bodies of the cows milling around the field.

There were no mountains in sight. Not a single jagged edge or towering rock face. That was exactly how Rylie wanted it. She’d had more than her share of mountains over the summer.

Once the house was a black dot on the horizon, Rylie tugged on her skirt’s laces and let it puddle on the ground, dropping her camisole on top. Bare to the sky, she shut her eyes and tilted her face back, spreading her arms wide.

The almost-full moon poured silvery rays through her flesh. She felt like it would dissolve into her skin and bones until she was a wraith so she could drift away on the breeze. Rylie wanted to be nothing but a thought lifting amongst the stars, letting her body and the wolf trapped inside of it disappear beneath her.

No more anger. No more violence. No more pain.

But no matter how hard she imagined separating her soul from its vessel, Rylie was anchored to the earth by human feet and human needs and a wolfish impatience that wondered why she was wandering when she should have been resting for the hunt.

Headlights on the road made Rylie cover her body with her arms, even though she didn’t think anyone would be able to see her at that distance. Prickles rolled from her hairline down to her spine. Why would someone drive down her desolate stretch of highway at night? Something wasn’t right.

The car turned down her aunt’s private road… and stopped. The headlights blinked off.

Rylie dropped to a crouch and ran down the hill. She beelined for the car, flashing through the long grass like a pale ghost. It occurred to her that her human skin was whiter than the wolf’s fur and that she would be spotted if she didn’t move fast. Hanging underneath a shadowy copse of trees to watch the driver, Rylie laid her belly to the ground.

The passenger stepped out of the car. He was tall and smelled horrible. It wasn’t like he hadn’t showered, because she could also smell his soap and deodorant. There was something else. Something that smelled sour and
wrong
.