Moon of the Terrible (Seasons of the Moon) (5 page)

His quarry stopped, dropping his cigarette and kicking snow over the embers.

Abel jumped.

He hit the man from behind and wrapped his arms around him in a bear hug. Abel clapped a hand over his mouth.

The guard gave a muffled shout of surprise as he tried to twist free. Weak little human—Abel barely felt him struggle.

Abel smothered him with one huge hand, using his other arm to drag the man to the ground. The kicking grew weaker. His beating fists slowed. After a slow count of twenty, he wasn’t moving at all, but Abel kept his hand in place for a few more seconds—just to make sure.

When he dropped the guard, Abel wasn’t sure if he was alive or not. It didn’t really matter.

Rylie was close. He could
feel
her.

He dragged the body behind the house and listened at one of the windows, trying to detect motion within. He heard quiet footsteps. Smelled a strange, musty odor that reminded him of cemeteries. There were three, maybe four, distinct people within the cabin.

He checked the ammunition in his guns—each had twelve rounds in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Twenty-six silver bullets. Two idiots that needed to be rescued. One Abel.

“Hang in there, Rylie,” he muttered, creeping toward the front door.

And then he kicked it open.

E
IGHT

The White Knight

After a few hours of
waiting for something to happen, Rylie came to two conclusions: First, that boredom was just as effective a form of torture as breaking bones, and second, that there was no way in heck she was going to let Seth get sacrificed.

Her boyfriend slept against the wall, curled around his hand and breathing shallowly.
Rylie wasn’t sure exactly how much time passed, but his bones were still broken. Did that mean he wasn’t going to become a werewolf, or just that he wasn’t going to heal until the moon?

Either way, he was unconscious from the pain, and he couldn’t pick their locks. They were still trapped.

And they were running out of options.

Rylie tried to pick the lock again while Seth slept, but it was just as impossible on her second try. She also tried to squeeze her hand out of the iron ring, but it was snug against her skin. Transforming wouldn’t help—the wolf’s leg was too thick.

What did that leave? Tearing the wall down? Chewing her arm off?

A new man entered the room, carrying a bucket under his arm. He looked like the other guy Rylie had seen—muscular, frowning, and dangerous.

He emptied the bucket that Pagan had left behind for effluence into the one he was carrying. His mouth twisted as he poured.

It was hard to tell under the smell of the buckets—which was an odor that the wolf found interesting more than disgusting—but she thought she could smell metal on him. Iron, like the shackles.

Keys?

Seth had his side of the chain pulled tight as he slept. The Union guy was just out of arm’s reach. But if she could get him to step over just two feet…

“Hey,” Rylie said.

Her captor didn’t respond.

“Can you wait a second?” she asked. “I have to pee, and I don’t want it sitting in the bucket.”

That got his attention. He looked disgusted. “You couldn’t have done that
before
I came down? I’m not watching you take a piss.”

“Well, it’s not like I knew you were coming. Please? It smells awful.”

He rolled his eyes, picked up the bucket, and stepped over to drop it at her side.

She moved fast.

Rylie’s hand lashed out. She caught his pant leg and jerked him off of his feet. He shouted as he fell—hopefully not loud enough for Pagan to pick up on it.

Before she could think too much about it, Rylie slammed his head into the wall.

His eyes blanked. He went limp.

“Sorry,” she whispered, feeling nauseous.

Rylie patted him down as footsteps creaked on the floorboards overhead.

There was something hard in the man’s left pocket—a cell phone, and a pair of keys.

The basement door opened. Rylie was still fumbling with her shackle when Pagan stepped onto the landing. “Crap,” Rylie breathed, jamming the key into the lock.

The demon shot down the stairs in a flash and appeared at Rylie’s side.

The shackle fell off of her wrist, leaving a raw ring on her skin. “Hey!” Pagan shouted as Rylie rolled under her arms, just barely dodging her swiping grip.

She darted for the stairs.

A hand clamped on her ankle, and she lost balance. Rylie slammed face-first into the steps with a shriek.

She kicked Pagan in the face. “Get off of me!”

The first blow wasn’t enough to make her let go, but the second was—especially since Rylie’s heel caught her in the jaw and snapped her head back.

Pagan stumbled, and Rylie scrambled into the cabin above the basement.

The building only had one room: a kitchen, den, and sleeping area all rolled into one. An ancient freezer stood against one wall beside a beaten sofa. A TV stood under the window. Everything smelled of age and dust—and Eleanor.

But there was nobody else in sight. Rylie bolted for the front door, hoping to draw Pagan outside.

The demon was too fast.

Pagan got to the door first and blocked it with her body. She drew the gun and pressed it to Rylie’s temple.

“Think your super-healing can fix a bullet in the brain, Alpha?” she asked.

Rylie never got a chance to respond.

The front door exploded behind Pagan. Fragments of wood scattered over the floor, and the handle bounced near Rylie’s foot.

“Freeze,” growled a familiar, masculine voice that made Rylie’s heart stop beating.

Abel stood on the other side of the broken door, covered in dust and wearing anger like a cloak of vengeance. He held two handguns, each of them the size of small cannons.

Pagan didn’t listen to him. She swung her gun around to aim at Rylie again.

Abel shot first.

His bullets smacked into the wall. Pagan was a blur as she leaped behind the table. The demon shoved the couch, hard enough to knock it into his legs and unbalance him.

Abel shot two more times—and with werewolf reflexes, his aim never dropped from the demon, even as she darted toward them for a final attack.

Those bullets took her straight in the chest. She stopped with a cry as though running into a wall.

But she didn’t fall.

Her black eyes glimmered as she stared down at her chest. A smile grew on her lips. “Delicious,” she said.

Rylie recalled what Seth had told her about megaira—that they fed on aggression, and it could make them heal anything. Abel was like a turkey dinner for the demon.

But Rylie wasn’t driven by aggression. It was fear that made her jump onto Pagan’s back before she could return fire at Abel.

The gun flew from her hand and skittered across the floor. Pagan didn’t even blink. She drew another knife and swung.

Rylie ducked and caught her wrist, twisting it to the side at the last moment.

She struggled to wrestle the dagger out of Pagan’s grip, but the demon’s fingers were locked tight around the handle. There were no bones in her hand to break—she felt weirdly slippery, like she was made of oil barely contained in a thin film of flesh.

They ran into the freezer, and the force of the blow knocked it onto its side. The cabin shook with the force of it. The floor cracked.

Rylie scurried over the top, trying to put it between her and Pagan as she swiped the blade through the air again.

She tripped over the cord and fell.

Pagan grinned as she chopped at the nearest limb she could reach—Rylie’s leg. But Rylie jerked her foot away just before it hit.

The knife sank into the power cord.

Something popped, and Pagan screamed. Sparks flared.

All the lights went out.

Rylie’s eyes took a moment to adjust. Pagan’s hand was still locked on the knife, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. Her skin was completely transparent. Her bones glowed underneath.

Abel stepped up behind her, put the gun to the back of her head, and fired.

Pagan didn’t heal that one.

The demon slumped to the floor and fell on Rylie’s legs. She gave a little cry of shock and clapped her hands over her mouth.

Abel hauled Rylie to her feet, gripping her shoulders in his massive hands.

She was still dazed, in shock—everything had happened too fast for her to process it.

Her shaking hands lifted to his face.

He felt so solid, so wonderfully
real
.

“You came for me,” Rylie said. “Seth told you that we were getting married, and you came for me anyway.”

“Are you stupid? Of course I came for you. You’re my pack.” His eyes glowed in the dim light. “I know when something is wrong.”

“But… that one night…” She couldn’t seem to get the words out. She swallowed hard.

“When we kissed,” he prompted. He stared at her lips when he said it, as if he was thinking of a repeat performance, and she flushed with heat.

“Yeah. After…
that
… I thought you weren’t going to want to have anything to do with me.”

His fingers tightened painfully. It was a good kind of pain. Like being wrapped tight in armor. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“Whore,” said an all-too-familiar voice. “Isn’t perverting one of my sons enough for you?”

Abel crushed Rylie to his chest as he turned, like he could protect her with the sheer mass of his body.

Eleanor stood in the open doorway.

She wasn’t looking good. Her skin had lost a lot of its rich, dark tone and become a rubbery shade of gray. Her lips were shriveled, her hands looked like the branches of trees in winter, and—were those bones sticking out of her fingertips?

Abel froze in shock.

“Mom?”

“Beast,” she spat, advancing on them. One of her legs dragged behind her. “Idiot. Failure.”

Rylie broke free of his grip and stood in front of Abel. It was a ridiculous attempt to shield him—he was a foot taller and twice as broad, and no physical barrier could spare him from the sting of the insults.

“Shut up,” Rylie said.

Eleanor’s black eyes glimmered. “Useless slut.”

Rylie lunged.

In life, Eleanor had been fast enough to match any hunter, or any werewolf—but in death, her dusty muscles were slow. Rylie drove into Eleanor’s gut. There was nothing there to stop her. Rylie’s shoulder sank into her dress and hit bone.

They both crashed to the floor.

Death might have taken strength from Eleanor, but it seemed to have also taken away her ability to feel pain. She recovered from the shock instantly, seconds before Rylie.

Her brittle fingers closed around Rylie’s throat and squeezed.

She was strong—so impossibly strong.

But Abel’s fury was stronger.

He roared something incoherent and filled with pain, and his hands clamped down on Eleanor’s arms like shackles. He ripped her free of Rylie’s throat, wrenched his mother to her feet, and lifted her in the air. Dirty, bony feet kicked near Rylie’s face.

Abel shook her. “Never again!”

“Let me go!” Eleanor shrieked, beating against him. “You stupid, hideous—”

Whatever else she had to say about Abel, Rylie never heard it. He carried her from the cabin and into the woods. Their yells echoed and multiplied, bouncing off the trees and filling the valley by the river.

Rylie scrambled to her feet and chased them outside.

Abel and Eleanor grappled by the river. He held her over the rushing water, fury blackening his features.

“Wait!” Rylie cried.

She could barely understand Abel through his responding growl. “I’m going to rip her head off.”

“But then we might never know who Cain is!”

He shook his mother hard. She clawed at his forearms with her bony fingertips. “Who is Cain? Where can we find him?”

Eleanor spat in his face. There was no saliva in her mouth—black fluid splattered over her lips.

Rylie hung a few steps away from them, torn between letting Abel get the revenge he had deserved for years and trying to spare the only person that she knew had answers.

She was so distracted by the confrontation that she almost didn’t hear it when someone approached from the forest.

“Abel!” barked a sharp voice.

Rylie turned.

The newest werewolf at the sanctuary, Vanthe, had sneaked up behind them. And he was holding someone by the throat—Seth.

Vanthe’s arm was covered in shaggy fur, claws dug into the tender skin beneath Seth’s jaw, and his eyes glowed silver. Not gold.
Silver.

“Let Mom go,” he said.

“No way,” Rylie exclaimed. “That’s
not possible.”

“Surprised?” Vanthe asked.

She tried to make the mental adjustment—he was Cain, not Vanthe. And as soon as she thought the words, she started to see the similarity.

His skin wasn’t as dark as Seth and Abel’s, and his hair was a very rough, very curly blond. His werewolf dad must have been white. But he did share features with Eleanor: the curve of his lips, the shape of the eyebrows.

How hadn’t she seen it earlier?

Abel was still holding Eleanor off of her feet, but his anger had turned to shock. He was speechless.

“I’m not
surprised
,” Rylie said, which was true—she would have had to be thinking clearly to be surprised, and it felt like her ability to process rational thought had evaporated. “I really mean that it’s not possible. Pagan called your name before she kidnapped me. You couldn’t have been here and traveling to California at the same time.”

He smirked, like the incongruity amused him. “I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“Like necromancy?” Seth asked, and the claws tightened around his throat.

Instead of answering, Cain focused on Abel. “I told you to put her down.”

For a moment, Rylie thought that Abel was going to ignore him—or that he would drop Eleanor in the water. Would he really sacrifice Seth like that?
Could
he?

“Abel,” she whispered, heart pounding.

His eyes flicked to her. Pain crossed his features.