Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon (18 page)

Stephanie finished working on a patient, who shivered with a werewolf’s healing heat. She brushed a thick lock of hair off her forehead with her wrist, since her latex-gloved fingertips were bloody. “You should heal quickly now. Tell me immediately if you notice another bullet fragment emerging.” The doctor gestured to Rylie. “Bring me the trash bag.”

Rylie took the bag and hurried over, holding it open so the doctor could drop her gloves into it. “Is everyone going to be okay?”

“These ones will be, thanks to my efforts,” Stephanie said. She gave Rylie an appraising look. “Let’s have a chat.” They walked to the back end of the hollow, several feet away from the nearest werewolf. Everyone was starting to move for the entrance. “This is an ugly situation, and it’s only going to get uglier. You know that, right? Quite a few people will die.”

The memory of Trick sprawling on the sand struck her again anew. Rylie’s gut clenched. “I know.”

“Seth is right. We
must
get off the mountain. But given the Union’s monitoring, it will be more difficult than just calling Scott. We can only fit so many in the van, and anyone left behind would be slaughtered. We must disable the devices at the Union camp first.”

“But that’s a death trap.”

“Yes. It could be, especially for anyone who attempts it as a human. You and Bekah are the only ones who can change between moons, so you’ll have to do it, as much as I hate endangering children.”

“Abel won’t ever let me do that,” Rylie whispered.

“We’ll separate. Abel will lead everyone up the mountain. You, Bekah, and Seth can splinter off to attack the Union.”

“What about you?”

“My skills as a doctor are too valuable to risk losing. Given the lack of alternatives, I’ll stay with the group. So what do you think, Rylie?”

She cast her gaze at Abel and Seth at the head of the hollow. It was a steep climb to the surface, so she could only see their legs. Their argument must not have gone well, because they weren’t facing each other anymore. “I’ll talk to Bekah.”

“I was listening,” Bekah interrupted. She was seated a few feet away as she tried to eat a can of green beans. “Super hearing, remember? It’s a decent plan. Let’s do it.” She gave a nervous chuckle. “Before I think about it too much.”

So it was settled. All the werewolves congregated on the trail outside the rocks. Their numbers had somehow grown again, and there were over a dozen people Rylie didn’t recognize. They were a pretty weird mix of ages and nationalities. Many of them didn’t even seem to understand English.

Abel climbed on a tall rock to point at the mountain’s peak. “We’re almost there. Let’s finish this!” he shouted.

It was a pretty universal sentiment. People headed up the trail.

Rylie hung back with Bekah to whisper the plan to Seth, who indicated agreement by giving her hand a hard squeeze.

Even though they were turning into a pretty big crowd, it seemed impossible to find a chance to sneak off. The group moved slowly. They had to keep stopping to let the injured people catch up.

And Abel watched Rylie closely. Every time she turned around, she caught sight of his eyes tracking her every motion. It was like getting Seth back only made her more of a target for his watchful stare.

The entire day passed without a chance for her to leave.

“We should go,” Bekah whispered to Rylie in the middle of the night. They had stopped to rest in a thicket, and everyone was scattered through the trees. “Now. While everyone’s sleeping.”

But Abel wasn’t sleeping. He sat in a nearby tree, where he had destroyed another tracking device, and watched over everyone.

“Not yet,” Rylie whispered back.

She fell asleep before they could sneak out that night. And the next day wasn’t good for leaving, either. They had to make supply runs back to Camp Silver Brook in order to feed everyone, and Abel didn’t let Rylie or Seth do it.

As they climbed higher on the mountain—so horribly slowly—the air got thinner and colder. Patches of snow started to appear. The plants were browner, the ground was muddier, and getting colder only made everyone
even slower
.

Rylie thought she was going to go crazy.

But eventually, the moment did arrive. It was early in the morning on the following day. Abel went off the trail to shoot a few devices he spotted in the trees, and Rylie, Seth, and Bekah jumped at the chance. They left as soon as he was out of sight.

“Abel is going to kill me,” Rylie muttered, keeping an eye out for him as they ran deeper into the forest.

“He would have to get to you before the Union does.” Bekah’s cheeks were colorless, and she didn’t even attempt to smile at her weak joke. “I can’t believe I’m going back there willingly.”

“We’ll make it fast,” Seth said. “In and out. We have to kill their generators and grab the phone. It will be easy.”

“Easy. Yeah. Right.” That didn’t really comfort Rylie at all.

She remembered the route to the old settlement on the mountain, even though it had been a long time since she was tied up in its church. Bekah was too disoriented to find it, and Seth had difficulty keeping up with them, so Rylie took the lead.

They must have traveled for a couple of hours, but time made no sense in the forest. But the smell of gun oil and silver was easy to follow. When the trees started to thin, she stopped.

“It’s about a quarter of a mile that way,” she said, pointing. Fear and anxiety clenched her throat shut. It was hard to breathe, much less speak.

“There are black boxes everywhere,” Bekah said, staring up at the trees. “They’ll know we’re coming. Should we shoot them?”

Seth checked his rifle and the extra ammunition he had taken from Abel’s duffel bag. “In about two minutes, it won’t matter if they know we’re coming. You should shift now.”

That was the part that worried Rylie the most—the part where she was not only supposed to change on command, but not kill her friends while she did it. But she didn’t need to worry about the first one. Going in to fight with the Union had already stirred her wolf, and her fingernails were itching.

Tears burned in the corners of her eyes. “What if I kill someone?”

“I’ll be there,” Seth said firmly. “You won’t.”

Bekah gave them a faint smile. “Good luck, guys.”

She stripped down and changed. She had the process down to an art; it only took a few moments, and if it hurt, there was no way to tell. Fur swept down her body in elegant lines. Her tail extended with a crunch at the same time as her face. She lowered to all fours before her popping knees made her fall.

Before long, a wolf with a honey-blond coat stood in front of them. It shook blood out of its fur. Even in a nice transition, there was no way to stop some minor injuries.

Rylie was sick with nerves. She grabbed Seth’s hand.

“I don’t want to do this,” she whispered.

He kissed her gently. “Trust me, Rylie. And trust yourself.”

Seth backed away, but he never looked away from her. He trusted her. She knew it with every fiber of her being.

Rylie shut her eyes and let go.

Yasir was getting his unit
ready to move out when one of the witches interrupted him.

“You should see this,” Raven wheezed, out of breath.

He followed her to the monitoring RV. The outpost was empty aside from his team and a few witches who had stayed behind to keep an eye on the werewolves locked in the church; it was like walking through a ghost town.

“What is it?” he asked, leaning over her chair to punch the button that brought up recent alarms. The list was huge. It registered movements every thirty seconds, which included everything from squirrels and fat caterpillars to herds of deer.

“We’ve been following the two surviving groups of thirty-twenties since the beach assault,” Raven said. “The smaller one is heading up the mountain. I think they’re going to the peak.”

Yasir nodded impatiently. “Right. I was about to address that with my team.”

“The big one is going around to the other side of the forest, maybe to attempt an escape.” When he opened his mouth to speak again, she hurriedly went on. “I know the other unit is already going after them with the vehicle fleet. They should converge in thirty minutes.”

“Yeah, so we’ll have all the wolves confined or killed by the end of the day. What’s the problem?”

“If those are the only two groups left… then what’s this?”

Raven highlighted a few recent alarms he hadn’t noticed. Their corresponding coordinates looked familiar.

He scanned the monitor with the map and saw a single red dot that had broken off from the other, bigger clusters of dots.

It was right outside the camp.

He breathed a swear word in Arabic. Yasir wasn’t a fluent speaker, but his grandpa had taught him a few of the worst phrases for fun when he was a kid, and he liked to save them for special occasions. And there was no occasion more special than realizing there was something unfriendly on his front doorstep.

Yasir burst out of the RV. “Team! Move it!” he roared.

His teammates ran over. They were only half-prepared for an attack. Jakob had his ammo belt on, but no gun. Stripes only had knives.

“What is it?” Jakob asked.

“I think Eleanor is back,” Yasir said grimly. “We’re delaying the mission.”

He grabbed ropes off a supply table as they ran out to meet the red dot in the forest.

But it wasn’t Eleanor waiting for them.

Seth stood on top of a felled tree with the rifle Yasir had given him. There were two very large, very shaggy wolves standing in front of him—about three times the size of the average timber wolf. One of them was growling, drooling, and trying to chew off its own foot as the other sniffed the air.

Both of them turned golden-eyed stares on the men when they burst through the trees. The moon wasn’t for three days, but they were unmistakably, undeniably werewolves, and the unit had nothing more than a knife among them.

“Afternoon,” Seth said cheerfully.

The werewolves jumped.

They moved like lightning, too inconceivably fast for his mind to follow. Stripes screamed. A furry body knocked Yasir into a tree hard enough to make the breath rush out of his lungs. He flung his arms over his face with a ragged gasp, bracing himself for the bite—but it never came.

Both wolves darted past them and into the compound. Seth followed.

“Hey!” Yasir shouted, but the boy didn’t stop. He dropped to his knees to check on Stripes. “What happened? Where did it get you?”

“My arm! My arm!”

He checked his teammate’s arm. There was no sign of a bite, but there was a really big scrape on his elbow.

“Get back on your feet, you idiot!” Yasir barked. “Jakob, with me!”

They scrambled back to camp.

The amount of damage two werewolves could do in ten seconds was incredible. Witches screamed and ran. The wolf with brown fur had a mouthful of wires from the generator and chewed them until the engine sputtered and died.

But it was nothing compared to the gold wolf, which seemed to have gone crazy. It tore through tents, knocked over everything in its path, and snapped at witches. The women weren’t prepared for attack. All they could do was flee.

In the middle of it all, Seth ran for the supply tent.

Yasir chased him.

He found the boy digging through the box of confiscated items. “What are you doing?” he demanded, seizing Seth by the shoulder.

“I needed this.” He held up a cell phone. “And I needed to keep you guys from killing anyone else. That’s what the girls are doing. We’ll be out of here in a minute.”

“Are you
insane
?”

Seth shrugged. “Sorry.”

Yasir was about ready to shoot the boy himself, but before he could decide what to do, the tent posts buckled. The canvas ripped. The gold werewolf stuck its head through the hole, slavering and wild-eyed.

Maybe it was his imagination—werewolves didn’t
think
, not like humans did—but Yasir was almost certain that it looked at his hand on Seth’s arm and got angrier. It knocked the tent over to lunge for him.

“Whoa!” Seth shouted, jumping in front of Yasir with his hands out. The werewolf stopped dead. “It’s okay! You don’t want to do that!”

The werewolf twitched. A ripple spread through its fur. But it didn’t attack.

Yasir grabbed a shotgun off the rack.

He didn’t have time to load it and fire. Seth ran out of the tent, and the wolf followed him like a white-gold blur.

They made a line straight for the forest.

“Bekah!” Seth yelled, and the second wolf stopped mauling the generators to join them. The lights had already gone out in the RV and on all of the tents. The cables were totally destroyed.

The brown wolf ran to him.

At the same moment, Stripes and Jakob appeared. They dropped to their knees in front of their commander with shotguns and aimed.

Everything moved in slow motion for Yasir. He processed the way they were aiming—with Seth in the line of fire—and the bounding motion of the werewolf as it jumped over a tent. Someone was about to get seriously hurt, and he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the werewolves.

“Stop!” Yasir yelled. “Stop!”

Stripes shot him a disbelieving look. “Seriously?”

Jakob got to his feet and took a step forward before Yasir grabbed his shoulder. “Leave them alone.”

Seth met Yasir’s gaze over the back of the gold werewolf. “Thanks.”

They rushed out of the camp. A sick feeling eased its way into Yasir’s gut as he watched them leave. “You let them go,” Stripes said. “What were you thinking?”

“Seth’s not our enemy.”

His teammates exchanged looks, and something subtle shifted in the unit’s dynamic in that moment.

It reminded Yasir of the time he was on a special mission in Afghanistan. His commander at the time had snapped from the stress of fighting and had started to make bad decisions. Yasir and his brothers ended up taking charge, and the instant they agreed to do it had felt very much like what was happening between Stripes and Jakob.

It was what happened when the men lost faith in the authority. But he wasn’t one of the soldiers anymore. He was the commander.