Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon (13 page)

“A group of confirmed werewolves have been located,” Yasir explained. “We caught a fight on camera. One of them even changed in the middle of the day. So we have all the proof we need to exterminate them.”

The commander left a pause after that, like he was waiting to see how Seth would react.

He had a terrible feeling he knew who had been fighting by the cabins.

It took all his strength to make himself copy Stripes’s bored expression. If the Union was hunting Rylie and Abel that night, Seth wasn’t going to get left behind.

“Okay,” he said with forced calm. “When do we leave?”

F
IFTEEN

Pack

Rylie took Toshiko and the
red-haired werewolf, who asked to be called Trick, to the beach before going back to camp for more blankets and pillows. She grabbed extra cans of food while she was at it, too. If she was going to start collecting werewolves, she would need a lot more of everything.

When she returned to the beach, she found Trick with a massive black eye.

“Your friend is back,” he said, washing blood off his cheek in the lake. The bruise was already healing, but it looked like his pride was seriously damaged.

She had to laugh. “Lost that fight, too?”

“The man’s a beast! You said ‘friend,’ and I thought it would be another cute girl!”

“Abel’s not that much of a beast,” she said, feeling strangely defensive, even though she had called him worse names many times. “Just don’t challenge him for territory. He doesn’t like it very much.”

“I see that,” Trick said, splashing more water on his face.

Rylie waded through the lake to drop blankets off with Toshiko. The new wolves had taken one of the bigger caves on the edge, and the woman was already curled up on the sand and totally unconscious. Rylie set everything down without disturbing her and paddled to her cave.

Abel was waiting for her. He had the duffel bag.

“I found people,” she started to say, but then he turned around and she saw that he held the box of letters in his hand.

Her amusement at Trick’s black eye vanished in an instant. She could tell by the way that Abel approached that he had found the stolen gun.

He lifted it between them. “What is this?” he asked, eyes bright with anger.

“Those are my letters,” she said. Her voice was very small.

He flung the box to the rocks. The wood cracked at the corners and the lid flew open. All the letters spilled out, and so did the gun. It slid to a stop with its end pointing at her feet. Her cheeks burned. She bit her lower lip and focused on her toes in the sand so she wouldn’t have to see Abel’s fury.

His low growl was almost worse than being yelled at. “For the last few days I’ve been asking myself, what’s that silver smell? I mean, we don’t have anything silver. And you know, I still don’t have a hang of the werewolf senses. There are a lot of scents I don’t understand yet. So when I found that box in the car and I smelled the silver…”

Her fists trembled at her sides, but she didn’t look up. “You shouldn’t have opened that. It’s my private box.”

Abel grabbed the pistol and shoved it in her face. She took a reflexive step back. “And this is my gun! What the hell are you doing with my gun, Rylie?”

The wolf inside of her responded to his heat in kind. It fed off the humiliation and grew to occupy every empty space in her skull. She snapped.

“It’s for me!” she yelled.

His hand wavered. “You were going to use this… on yourself?”

Rylie made herself meet his gaze, and she let all of the wolf’s rage, all the pain, show in her gold-flecked eyes. “I’ve killed people, Abel. And that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I don’t even remember it. I don’t know what I did, or who I killed, or if they… if they suffered.” Her voice hitched. “I’m a monster.”

“So this is your answer?” Abel unloaded the gun and shook the bullet in her face. The wolf wanted to bite his hand off.

“It’s my choice,” she said. Her eyes burned with tears.

“That’s not a choice. That’s a copout! What’s wrong with you, Rylie?”

“What’s wrong with me? I got bitten by a werewolf, that’s what’s wrong with me. I can’t control when I change, and when I do, it hurts. It
hurts
, Abel.”

“Yeah, it hurts,” he said. His lip was curled with anger and the tendons in his neck were rigid. “But you know what? You deal with it. That’s what you do. You don’t go and shoot yourself!”

She reached for the bullet in his hand, but Abel was too fast. He stepped out of her reach and threw it with all of his strength. It plunked into the lake and sank.

“Hey!” she protested.

Abel he spread his fingers wide to show that his skin had blistered where he held the bullet. “You see what that does? You want that in your skull?”

Her jaw ached. She pressed her hands against her temples. “It’s better than having this
thing
inside of me!”

“You really think it’s better to be dead?”

“Yes!”

Abel’s eyes widened. His mouth moved, but no response came out, like the ability to speak had fled from him. He paced to the front of the cave and then back again, weighing the gun in his hand as he glared at her. Finally, he seemed to come to a silent decision.

He shoved the pistol into the waistband of his jeans.

“What are you doing?” Rylie asked.

“This is my gun. I’m taking it back.”

“But I need it.”

Abel grabbed her shoulders in both of his huge hands and forced her to face him. The span of his fingers almost wrapped all the way around her arms. “What would Seth say if he knew what you were thinking? What do you think he would do if you killed yourself?”

The mention of his name put her over the edge, and once the tears started flowing, it was like breaking open a dam. They cascaded down her cheeks and rolled off of her chin. “He wouldn’t want me to die. But that’s not his choice, Abel. He doesn’t have to live with what I’ve done.”

Abel searched her face, confusion and dismay etching his features.

“No,” he said forcefully, like it changed anything. “
No
.”

“I don’t know why you care,” Rylie mumbled, hanging her head. “You would have killed me months ago if you could have. And maybe you should have done it. I wouldn’t have bitten you, and you wouldn’t have turned into this horrible
thing
.”

The muscles in his cheek flexed as he clenched his jaw, but the scarred part of his face didn’t move at all. Abel gave her a hard shake. “You don’t know why I care? You’re my pack, Rylie! I need you!” It came out a roar, and his voice was as rough as a wolf’s cry.

As though shocked by his own reaction, he dropped her and took a big step back.

Guilt weighed heavily on Rylie. “Abel…”

He didn’t look at her. “Killing yourself isn’t a choice,” he told the wall, more quietly than before, but with no less fury. And then he strode out of the cave, taking the gun and the last of Rylie’s choices with him.

Trick pretended to be busy
digging holes in the sand when Rylie finally left the cave. He had probably heard the entire argument, not to mention all the crying she did afterwards. It was too embarrassing to consider.

“Where’s Abel?” she asked, scrubbing the tears from her cheeks.

He pointed her up the beach.

Rylie found Abel on the shore a half-mile away. He stared at the moon-dappled surface of the water, and she sat on the log next to him.

He radiated anger and hurt and fury. It was in every tense line of his body, the deep furrow between his eyebrows, and the slant of his eyes. He didn’t even acknowledge her when she scooted over to bump her arm against his.

“Hey,” she said.

His fists clenched.

Mosquitoes buzzed around them in a cloud without landing. It seemed like even the insects were too afraid to attack them. She nudged a rock with her toe, scooting it through the damp sand to make a divot. The slopping water immediately softened the shape in the sand.

Rylie tilted her head to the side to look up at him. “You wouldn’t shoot me. Would you?”

After a long pause, Abel shook his head. It made her sadder than she expected. If he couldn’t pull the trigger—Abel, who used to be a scary hunter, who had stalked her and threatened her and tried to ruin her life—then who could do it for her? Who would be there to stop her if she tried to hurt someone?

“But you promised,” she whispered.

“I lied.”

They shared a long look. Rylie didn’t even see the scars anymore. She just saw Abel—who probably had never been as scary as he pretended to be—and all the vulnerability he had been hiding. He said he needed her, and he meant it.

She wanted to be angry with him for lying, but she couldn’t find it within herself. She was too tired to be angry anymore.

Rylie rested her head on his shoulder. His body was even hotter than hers. It drove away the late evening chill of spring ice. “I get it,” she said.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

She didn’t bother trying to tell him it was okay. It wasn’t. Regret twisted in her heart—not regret at what she had been planning, but regret that he had found out.

There was nothing left to be said about it after that. He had gotten rid of her silver bullet, taken the gun away, and said he wouldn’t shoot her. She couldn’t trust him to stop her anymore.

“So what’s with the new guys?” Abel asked. It was a welcome change of subject.

“I found them in the cabins when I was looking for supplies. They’re not even from America, and Trick—that’s the red-haired guy—he said that he’s run across other groups in the forest. There are werewolves everywhere, from all over the world.”

“Yeah. I figured that would happen. But what are those two doing
here
?”

“They were wandering around naked and hungry. What was I supposed to do?”

He rolled his eyes. “You can’t pick up werewolves like dumpster kittens.”

“Who says?”

“I say. You don’t know any of these people. And they’re
werewolves
. Soulless murderers. Monsters.”

“Like us,” she said.

Abel stood up and glowered at her. “Next time you call yourself a monster, I’m done with you. Hear me?”

She was pretty sure he didn’t mean it. Rylie rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

He jerked his head toward the caves. “We should sleep.”

They waded back to the caves and found that Trick and Toshiko weren’t alone. Three more people were sitting on the rocks in the shallows. Only one of them was dressed, and all of them were very obviously werewolves. They introduced themselves as Ramona, Hannah, and Peter—a family from Texas.

Rylie stayed back while Abel confronted them. Her wolf was too desperate to attack.

“Where did you come from?” he demanded.

“We ran into them earlier in the week. Thought they might like a place to hide, too, considering the odd things that have been happening lately,” Trick said with a shrug. “It’s not a problem, is it? It’s not like you own the caves.”

“Dumpster kittens,” Abel muttered. Louder, he said, “I don’t care. Okay? But stay out of
my
cave.”

He sloshed through the water to the spot that he and Rylie had claimed for themselves. She gave Trick a sheepish smile before following.

She had gotten so used to having other werewolves around at the sanctuary that she settled down pretty quickly, despite the foreign smells. In fact, she almost felt a little safer knowing they were out there. But guilt weighed too heavily for her to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Abel’s fingers blistered by the silver bullet.

She pulled the scratchy wool blanket up to her chin, closed her eyes, and tried to sleep.

Something moved in the cave. She peeked through a slitted eye. Abel sat over her, elbows on his knees, and a frown twisting his mouth. She shut her eyes again and pretended to be asleep.

Eventually—maybe minutes later, maybe hours—she sank into unconsciousness.

And Abel kept watching.

S
IXTEEN

Extermination

Rylie woke up to find
Abel missing and the crescent moon high overhead, still hours away from sunrise. Pushing back her blankets, she waded ankle-deep into the surf to peer around the side of the rocks. Someone was sitting on the beach, but it was too dark to make out their features.

“Abel?” she whispered. He didn’t respond.

When she reached his side, she realized that it was Trick stretched out on his back. He pillowed his head on his arms to watch the moon. He smiled when he saw her.

“Trouble sleeping?”

She sat next to him. “A little bit.”

“Dreaming of the mountain?”

“Actually, no. I think…” She took a deep breath. “It sounds silly, but I think my wolf is happy I’m here. So I don’t
need
the dreams anymore.”

“Same here,” Trick said, scratching his chin through the mess of his beard. “I can still feel it calling, though.”

She felt the same, but it was too creepy to admit aloud. “Did you see where Abel went?”

“Nah. He wandered off, but I avoided him. I don’t need another black eye.”

“I tried to bite your arm off. Why aren’t you avoiding me?”

He winked. “You’re much cuter than he is.”

Rylie rolled her eyes.

“Where’s everyone else? Toshiko and the new guys?”

“They’re all sleeping in the caves. Another two wandered in after you went to bed. Hope you don’t mind.”

Rylie could already hear Abel’s reaction.
Dumpster kittens
. She tried not to smile.

“Well, I don’t care. We’ll just have to get more blankets tomorrow. There’s tons of them back at camp. Do you know any of the people who came in this afternoon?”

“No. They’re all perfect strangers to me. And I wouldn’t mind if it stayed that way, to be frank,” Trick said. “I’d like to never see any of your smiling faces again, once the mystic hootenanny is over.”

“Okay. Fine. I was only trying to make conversation.”

Rylie started to stand, but he flicked sand at her. “Don’t make me sit out here on my own. Sit back down. Tell me how you can change into a werewolf in the middle of the day. Bet that’s wicked good craic.”