Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon (2 page)

She spun in a circle, searching for an escape, but the mountain was everywhere. It was everything.

And it wanted her.

Shock jolted Rylie awake. Her eyes flew open, and her heart pounded in her chest. Her body was drenched in sweat.

She was also on the floor.

The carpet was spotted with drying blood. Fistfuls of white-gold hair were clumped by the wall. Nobody had come in to clean yet.

Rylie grimaced at the window. The sun was high in the sky, and Abel leaned against the bars. That could only mean one thing: it was the morning after the new moon. He always visited her when she woke up.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

Squinting through the sunlight, she could see that Abel looked way too awake and refreshed for the morning after a moon. He smelled like shampoo. Even though his eyes were rimmed with circles, he was actually standing up and fully clothed, which was more than Rylie could say. His beard was even trimmed.

He was also chewing a huge, barely-cooked steak. Her empty stomach gnawed beneath her ribs. “Ugh,” she groaned.

“Yeah. Good morning to you, too. I brought a present.” He pointed to the floor, and she noticed a second plate next to the shredded remains of her bed. She was going to need a new mattress again.

She fell on her breakfast, ripping into it with dull human teeth. “How long have you been up?” she asked around a juicy bite of meat.

“Since dawn. It’s almost three now.” Abel swallowed the last of his steak and sucked the juice off of his fingers. Rylie was afraid to ask how much of that time she had spent furry. It was normal for werewolves to change back at sunrise, but she hadn’t been normal for months. “You turned back at noon. I know you’re wondering.”

No wonder she was so tired. Judging by her furniture, the wolf must have been trying to escape all day.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Uh huh. Food’s not the only thing I have for you. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Abel left, and Rylie took the chance to hurriedly dress in shorts and a t-shirt before finishing breakfast. Even though he had given her a hunk of cow that weighed at least two pounds, she was still starving when the bone was bare.

She contemplated her dream as she sucked on the remaining rib. It wasn’t the first time she had dreamed about Gray Mountain. That was where she had been bitten almost a year earlier, so it was serious nightmare fuel. But Rylie had stopped dreaming completely since she got silver poisoning. The wolf occupied her sleeping mind.

Did that mean that the beast was the one having nightmares?

Voices crossed outside her window. She dropped the bone on her plate and peeked through the bars.

Levi and Scott were conversing down the hill. She could have made out their words if she focused, but considering how upset they looked, Levi was probably complaining about Rylie’s behavior again. She didn’t want to hear about how much she needed drastic intervention for the twelfth or thirteenth time. It was like a popular song on the radio: kind of entertaining at first, but it got on her nerves after a few weeks.

Her stomach grumbled. She checked the time. Three o’clock, like Abel said. There was always a witch in the building to keep an eye on the kids—usually Scott, when he wasn’t pulling the traveling psychiatrist routine—and they prepared food at the same time every day. Three o’clock was between meals. She could steal another steak from the kitchen without seeing anyone.

Abel met her outside the door to his room. “Going somewhere?”

“Food.”

“Sounds good. I’ll come.”

He matched her pace, and Rylie noticed he had something in one of his hands. Her heart sped. “Is that…?”

He held up an envelope. The sharp handwriting spelled out her name. “What, this little letter? You’re not excited about it, are you?”

“Give me that,” she said, holding out a hand.

“Hmm.” He tapped the corner against his chin. “I don’t know…”

Rylie shoved him against the wall and snatched it from his hand. Being the older werewolf gave her the advantage in strength, even though she was a foot shorter. He didn’t try to fight back.

She hugged the letter to her chest. It smelled faintly of gunpowder and leather.

Abel gave an exaggerated eye roll. “You two make me sick. Are you ever going to write back to him?”

Rylie bit her bottom lip. Her boyfriend, Seth, had sent a letter every week since she moved into the sanctuary. Sometimes two a week. It wasn’t always a long note, since his life had become boring after all the werewolves left, so sometimes he included drawings or pressed leaves from the orchard instead.

It made her heartsick to think of him. She only read the letters in her bedroom, just in case the emotions were too strong to control and she transformed. It had happened twice already.

She couldn’t imagine writing back. She hadn’t even said goodbye.

Cheeks burning and lips sealed, Rylie focused her eyes on her feet and didn’t reply. Abel ghosted behind her through the halls without trying to provoke her again. It was rare for him. He loved to annoy her. But he could also be very quiet, for such a big guy.

Probably from all those years he spent hunting werewolves.

The house was empty after the moon. Their footsteps echoed off the stairs as they headed through the archway into the kitchen. Everything was red tile and glossy marble countertops. The witches had hung a big pentacle on one wall and put fresh herbs in the window to dry. Passing the icon made her skin crawl. Scott had told her a dozen times that it had nothing to do with Satanism, but she still didn’t like it.

Abel was eyeballing the pentacle, too. “Want to take that thing out back and set it on fire?”

“Sure, if you want to be the one who touches it. Who knows what kind of curses it has?”

He grimaced. “Point taken.”

They raided the fridge together, which was mercifully occult-free aside from a group photo of the coven with a big “Blessed Be!” stamped across the bottom. Scott was on the right side with his arm looped around his daughter, who was a taller, strawberry-blond, and somewhat less Sean Connery-looking version of her dad. The other witches were middle-aged women called stupid things like Broomstick and Thistle.

The refrigerator was full of thawing steaks and chicken limbs. There was always some combination of raw meat available. Feeding five teenage werewolves was no small feat, and they were careful to make sure that the kids never went hungry.

“Maybe if I used thick gloves,” Abel mused while they waited for the oven to heat their food to body temperature. He was still glaring at the giant pentacle.

Once everything was cooked, Rylie and Abel sat at the dining room table to eat. It looked out on a patio where Scott had placed chairs and a ping-pong table so the kids could have fun on their human nights, but Rylie never used it.

“How was the new moon run?” she asked between mouthfuls of steak.

He shrugged. “Boring. The way they like it.”

“So Tyas is adjusting?”

“You could call it that,” he said with a snort. “She ate a deer. I grabbed a few bites myself. It wasn’t bad, you know. Fresh venison.”

She winced. “Don’t tell me about it. Please.” Rylie had once been an avid vegetarian. Once she’d seen how livestock was slaughtered, she had lost her stomach for dead animal flesh. But a werewolf’s need for meat was more than preference. She would go wild if she tried to starve herself.

Abel grinned. “Bet you don’t want to hear about the part where I woke up with deer fur stuck in my teeth.”

“Seriously, shut up.”

“I can’t believe you still have a weak stomach for stupid deer.”

Her cheeks flamed again, and she stared hard at the pattern left by the grease on her plate. “Yeah, well, I can’t believe I put up with you.”

“Nobody else can bring you Seth’s letters.” He shrugged at her nasty glare. “Just saying.”

“Jerk,” she muttered under her breath.

“Emo kid.”

She threw her plate in the sink and very deliberately did not touch the sprayer. There was a sign on the wall written in Bekah’s tidy cursive that said “Rinsing your dishes makes the dishwasher happy!” surrounded by lots of hearts.

“Hey!”

Levi slid through the doorway on socked feet, catching himself on the counter.

She rolled her eyes. “Are you the dishes police now, too? Are you going to yell at me for leaving dirty plates in the sink?”

“What? No.” He had to stop between words to take a breath. His honey-brown hair, darker than his sister’s but no less curly, was frazzled and sticking up in every direction. He looked like he had been running for miles. It wasn’t easy to exhaust a werewolf.

“What’s going on?” Abel asked, entering the kitchen.

There was no color in Levi’s face. “Bekah is gone.”

Levi searched as a wolf
with Abel close behind, but Rylie kept her investigation closer to home.

She searched in Bekah’s favorite hiding spots first. Bekah wasn’t in her bedroom. She wasn’t tending to the tomato sprouts that were getting hardened off in the shed. She also hadn’t curled up with a book in the so-called “study,” which had three bookshelves behind two televisions and four different video game consoles.

The other girl hadn’t been in the sanctuary for hours, as far as Rylie could tell. All her smells were old.

Scott fretted while everyone else searched. When Rylie finished looking around, she found him trying to call Bekah’s cell phone for what had to be the millionth time. It had been a whole hour since Rylie had eaten, so she snagged some beef jerky out of the pantry while she watched him pace.

Watching him hang up and dial again and again got painful after a few minutes. Rylie interrupted him. “I don’t think she’s here.”

“Hope springs eternal,” he said. “You kids are never far from your cell phones.”

“Yeah, but wolves don’t have thumbs.”

His brow was pinched. “Why would she still be a wolf?”

Rylie shrugged. If Bekah was distant enough to elude her sense of smell, then she was probably traveling on all fours. But Scott didn’t seem to accept that she might be gone. Really gone.

“I’ll check her room for a note,” Rylie said. They had already looked for her in there three or four times, but the suggestion took the edge of fear off of Scott’s smell, so it seemed as helpful as anything else they could do.

He kept trying to call Bekah as they went to her room. When they got to the hall outside her door, Rylie’s ears picked up a buzzing sound.

She went inside. Where Rylie’s bedroom was like an especially nice prison cell, Levi and Bekah’s rooms were normal bedrooms. They weren’t at risk of transforming between moons, so the window wasn’t barred. Bekah had a shaggy rug in the shape of a flower. Her easel had a blank slate of paper. Her bed had a cute comforter patterned with ivy and roses. They had tried to give Rylie a similar comforter, but she had eaten it.

“Call Bekah again,” she said, and he obeyed.

The glow of a cell phone vibrating under Bekah’s dresser caught her eye. She picked it up. Thirty-four missed calls weren’t exactly a million, but it was pretty close.

Scott swore under his breath.

But the cell phone wasn’t the only thing under the dresser. Rylie pulled out a piece of paper, and then another, and another. Bekah had hidden stacks of paintings behind the furniture where nobody would have thought to look.

“What is that?” he asked.

She sat back, spreading the pages around her on the carpet. Watercolors warped the papers, giving texture to every peak and valley Bekah had painted. Each image was nearly identical. Yellow lights were picked out at the base of a tall mountain, like a distant town—or a forest full of cabins.

“Camp Silver Brook,” Rylie whispered.

There was no way Bekah had ever been to Gray Mountain. None of the other werewolves had. They were on the opposite side of the country, and both youth camps had been closed since a werewolf attack killed several people. Only Rylie had survived being bitten.

Rylie smelled Levi and Abel approach before they showed up in the doorway.

“She’s not on the grounds,” Levi said, putting on a shirt. The laces on his linen pants were still loose. “I found her smell on the road out of here, but it disappears in the forest.”

“Look at this,” Scott said, lifting one of the paintings. It was the same peak from another angle. “Do you recognize the subject?”

“That’s it,” Levi said. “That’s the mountain I told you about.”

“What mountain?” Rylie asked.

Scott frowned at a third painting. “Levi has been having strange visions.”

“Dreams,” he interjected.

“Visions. Dreams. Call them what you will. He’s been seeing the same mountain repeatedly, and so has Tyas. She began having these dreams after her last moon, when she assumed the true wolf form, and we realized they were ‘dreaming’ about the same place when they both said the visions had cabins.” Scott swallowed hard. “But Bekah never mentioned…” He set the pictures down and took a deep breath to steady himself.

Abel’s voice broke through the stunned reverie. “Look at this.”

He fished a diary out of the space behind Bekah’s dresser and handed it to Rylie. The first pages were covered in her normally tidy handwriting, but halfway through, it turned virtually unrecognizable. “I have to get there,” she read out loud. “Have to get there, have to get there… That covers, like, three whole pages. And then ‘they need me’ covers another three pages.”

“She went crazy,” Abel said.

Levi jerked the diary out of her hands. “Bekah’s not crazy!”

“Well, the answer is obvious,” Scott said with a distant, pensive stare. “We don’t know why, but we know where she’s gone. That gives us a place to begin searching.”

Rylie felt like the ground was breaking up beneath her feet.

Gray Mountain.

The despair and fear that swelled within her was too much. The wolf didn’t care about searching for Bekah, but it cared about the place it had been born. And worse, Rylie cared about it, too. She felt the massive, furred body of the wolf surge inside her. It rubbed against the inside of her throat.

She shoved past Abel and ran to her room, slamming the door shut behind her.