Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon (21 page)

She bit her lip. “I don’t know if I can take Eleanor.”

“You have to,” Abel said. He tried to sit up, then flinched and lay back. “Oh, man. You can beat her as a wolf. You’re fast. You’re strong.”

“What if I can’t shift before moonrise?” She had changed outside the Union camp, but she had Seth to help her. She didn’t think she could do it alone.

“So what?” He grimaced and lifted his head to look at the wound. “I’ll try to come find you as soon as I shift and heal. But she’s got a head start. You have to find him, you have to change, and you have to save him. Promise.”

She stared out at all the werewolves as they gathered around at Bekah and Levi. They were talking loudly, explaining what little plans they had, and everyone listened attentively. Bekah would do a good job rallying them. She was nice, and she was strong, and everyone admired her.

Rylie wasn’t nice. She wasn’t strong. She was so horribly weak—so helpless when it came to the wolf.

But Seth needed her.

She nodded. “I’ll do it.” It was simultaneously the easiest and the hardest promise she had ever made.

He relaxed, like all the pain had suddenly vanished from his wound. His eyelids drooped. “Good,” Abel said. He gave her a faint half-smile that looked a lot like Seth’s. “Thanks.” His fingers fell from hers.

She watched his chest for a moment to make sure he kept breathing, but he had only passed out from the pain. Rylie couldn’t blame him. There was no burn like silver.

Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, she slipped away from the group into darkness.

Rylie waited to change until
she put distance between herself and the dim glow of their camp. Her wolf didn’t want to leave the peak of Gray Mountain, but she was done negotiating with her beast. She was the one in charge.

“You hear me?” she whispered to herself when she reached a cliff overlooking the river. It was a silver snake of moonlight running through the black forest. Falling rain dappled its surface. “I’m in charge. And I say we change.”

The wolf remained silent.

Rylie looked at her hands, imagining the claws that she had seen grow from the tips far too often. She remembered the itch of fur sprouting from her skin, and the ache of her jaw elongating.

Seth needs me.

Love was pretty good motivation to do the impossible.

She began to shift.

It hurt. It always hurt, and there was no way around it. But when she didn’t fight the change so hard, it was easier to ride it out.

She sank to her knees and watched her feet turn into paws. The toes shortened as the foot lengthened. It traveled up her calf and inverted her knee with a slick crunch that felt like getting struck by a baseball bat, and a cry escaped her lips. It came out as more of a yelp. Her outsides were changing slower than her insides, which felt like a mass of twisting worms. She already had a wolf’s vocal cords.

Rylie focused on the pale patch of silvery moon she could see through the clouds as her face cracked and shifted. Tears leaped to her eyes. She let the teeth fall from her mouth, and the hair from her scalp, and let the wolf deal with the pain.

Its mind emerged like a vast shadow settling over Rylie’s thoughts. It didn’t blot her mind out, but it weighed her down. It was so happy to be in the forest, rain and all.

A few minutes later, they were complete, and a wolf stood where a girl had before.

She lifted her nose to the breeze. Picking out smells when it was wet was difficult, but not impossible. The wolf was especially attuned to the odor of silver, and she could smell it farther down the mountain.

Rylie and the wolf ran. She darted across the mountain, leaping nimbly through the forest like golden lightning.

Once she had the smell, it was easy to locate Eleanor. Rylie was surprised to find her with all the other hunters. Levi was right. The Union was marching, and they were making a direct line for the peak of Gray Mountain to make a stand. They took up the entire trail and didn’t seem worried about being spotted. Why should they? There were tons of men with guns. They didn’t have to be afraid of anything.

Rylie swung wide, making a loop around the long line of people. She climbed onto a ridge overlooking them and smelled the wind again. The sprinkling rain was dying down.

A dozen armed men. A half-dozen unarmed women. And one woman in the lead, dragging two men in ropes.

Two
men?

She bounced down the rocks to get a closer look, careful to stay within the trees where they wouldn’t see her.

Rylie recognized Seth, whose wrists were tethered to a long rope held by his mother, but she didn’t know who the other man was. He was even more beaten than Seth. His skin was earthen brown, his hair had a militaristic cut, and he wore the same black uniform as everyone else. His face resonated with the wolf. She must have seen him at the Union camp and didn’t remember him, even if her beast did.

The wolf wanted to dive in, but her human mind held her back. There were too many people. Too many guns. Too much silver. She needed to wait until the right moment.

She would follow them. She would wait.

And as soon as she got a chance, she would kill Eleanor.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE

Alpha

The hunters reached the peak
of Gray Mountain at nightfall.

“Eighteen minutes to moonrise,” Jakob said. They all had watches with countdown timers.

Eleanor stalked across the rocks, narrowed eyes scanning the mountaintop. Seth stumbled after her. His shoulder bumped into Yasir. She had given them a short line between their arms, and she seemed to enjoy dragging them around like dogs.

“There’s nobody here,” Stripes said.

Seth stopped behind his mother. They stood on a raised stone platform slicked by ice. The rain hadn’t melted any of it.

It wasn’t Seth’s first time on top of Gray Mountain. It wasn’t even the first time he had been dragged there against his will. Nothing had changed since the year before, either, but he had to stare at it. The rocks were too incredible not to stare.

At first glance, the rock formation on top of the mountain looked like it had been placed deliberately. There was no way erosion would have left pillars standing naturally in such a neat spiral. Each successive rock was a little bigger than the last, creating stairs to a single point that towered over everything else.

But Seth had taken some pretty close looks at the rocks, and there was no indication they had been laid out by humans. He hadn’t seen any tool marks, or other signs of how someone had dragged such massive boulders to the tallest place in the entire forest. He used to think that it had to be natural. But he didn’t think the fact that it looked like a temple was coincidental anymore.

“What is this place?” Yasir asked, breath fogging from his lips.

“It’s a holy place.” Seth’s voice echoed strangely in the night. All of the other hunters had fallen silent as they stared around at the deep shadows, hands gripping their guns so tightly that they shook.

Eleanor glared at the cloudy sky. On top of the temple of the animal spirits, she looked like a force of wild magic herself. Her eyes burned with challenge. Her arms were spread wide to the moist wind with her feet braced on the rocks, like a challenge to the gods to smite her where she stood.

Nothing attacked her. She dropped her hands and faced Seth.

“You call it holy,” she said. “I say it’s unholy. Pagan. This is where a bloody coronation happens tonight. This is where the Alpha is chosen.”

Yasir gave a harsh laugh. “There’s nothing spiritual about any of this. You know what werewolves are? A disease.”

Very casually, Eleanor backhanded him. Her knuckles cracked against his jaw. Seth flinched. He had been on the receiving end of her strikes before. For a human, she had a heck of an arm.

Yasir spit blood onto the ice and glared at Eleanor. She had split his lip. “I swore to protect humans—all humans—when I joined the Union,” he said. “But if you hit me again, I will kill you in front of your son and your animal gods and all of these men.”

“I’d like to see that,” she said with a cruel smile.

“Nine minutes to moonrise,” Jakob reported.

The teenage hunter stepped up. He looked more nervous than the rest of them combined. His knees were practically knocking together. “What should we do?”

“Spread out,” Eleanor said. “They’ll be here soon.”

“There are almost twenty werewolves out there,” Seth said. “We’ve got less than twenty men here. I don’t think you realize how bad those odds are.”

“We don’t need to kill twenty wolves. Just the Alpha. Cut off the head…” She sliced her finger across her throat. “Tell me, son. Who do you think is Alpha? The most powerful werewolf is the deadliest. The one who bites the most, but leaves them alive.”

It was obvious the direction in which she was taking her narrative. Seth twisted his wrists in his bonds. The knots were too tight, and dug into the soft, fleshy part of his wrist. “Rylie hasn’t made other werewolves. She’s not the Alpha.”

“When she dies, it’s all over. And there’s no way she’ll stay away as long as I have you.” Eleanor gave his ropes a hard jerk. He fell to his knees and almost dragged Yasir with him.

“So that’s why you got me? This has nothing to do with family, does it?”

“Nothing. And everything.” Her eyes were wild. Seth wondered if the Union would have given her command if they had seen it.

“This is going to be a bloodbath,” Yasir said. His voice had risen to a shout. “You can’t just wait here for them. You have to have a plan, you have to lead—”

Eleanor slapped him again.

With a roar, the commander snapped his ropes. He almost wrenched Seth’s arms out of their sockets.

Yasir tackled Eleanor.

She dropped Seth’s rope to draw her gun, and he took the opportunity to twist his wrists free. The teenage hunter was only a few feet away. Seth kicked him and wrenched the shotgun out of his hands, spinning to aim it at the boy when the other men tried to move forward.

“Freeze!” he shouted.

Everyone stopped except for Eleanor and Yasir. They rolled across the rocky top of the mountain, wrestling over her pistol.

Jakob took a step.

“Don’t move,” Seth said, pushing his shotgun into the boy’s chest. What was his name? He hadn’t bothered to learn it. “I’ll do it.”

“He won’t do it,” Jakob told the other men.

He pumped the shotgun and fired into the air.

A wolf’s howl responded.

The wail broke the night and sent shivers down Seth’s spine. Eleanor and Yasir paused mid-wrestle. She kneeled over her opponent with her fist raised, but she didn’t land the punch.

The one howl turned to two, and then three. It was an unearthly sound, like the screaming of ghosts or wailing babies or the bitter cry of the wind through trees.

And then pale shapes emerged below them.

Most of them were still human, but they twisted and writhed as the call of the moon fell upon them. Seth recognized some of the werewolves that had been with Rylie and Abel. A couple had already changed and stalked up the mountain on all fours.

For a moment, the hunters were too transfixed by the shifting bodies to shoot.

Jakob was the first to pull the trigger.

His shot went wide, striking a tree beside a wolf with silver fur.

It was enough to trigger an attack. The wolves that had already shifted charged up the mountain and crashed into the hunters like two fronts of a storm. Shots fired, growls and howls echoed off the rocks, and Seth didn’t wait to see what would happen.

He broke into a run, but stopped at the trees when he recognized one of the people approaching.

Abel’s skin was ashen gray, but he was standing—barely. His arm was slung over Levi’s shoulder. His stab wound had been bandaged and blood seeped through the gauze. The younger man propped him against a tree, stripped off his shirt, and shifted in a flurry of fur.

Seth had never been so happy to see his brother’s ugly face.

“Where’s Rylie?” Seth called.

Worry flashed through Abel’s eyes. “I thought she was with you. She left to find—
ugh
.” He groaned and doubled over.

When he looked up again, his face was growing into a wolf’s snout.

Seth backed away slowly. He couldn’t shoot Abel if he attacked. He had to run.

But when he turned, Eleanor was behind him. She grabbed his arm, and her fingernails bit into the muscle. She wasn’t armed anymore. A quick glance around showed that Yasir had her gun, and was stuck in a standoff with Jakob amidst a roiling mass of bodies.

Seth didn’t shoot fast enough. Eleanor ripped the shotgun from his hands.

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
Hopefully very, very far away.

Eleanor dragged him to the top of the stone pillars. She shook him hard. “Rylie! Come and get him!” she shouted into the night. Her voice was loud enough to carry over the growls and screams.

He didn’t know if he believed the werewolves had gods watching over them or not, but he shut his eyes and prayed to them all the same.
Please don’t let her come…

His mother’s triumphant cry made his eyes fly open.

A golden wolf erupted from the trees and landed on the rocks below them. Rylie wasn’t as big as some of the other werewolves, but she was faster, and she practically flew through the air. Her eyes were bright and clear. There was no hint of silver frenzy left in her.

“No,” Seth groaned.

Eleanor dropped him and raised the shotgun.

Rylie darted forward. Her mouth snapped closed on Eleanor’s leg. The material of her pants was thick enough that the teeth didn’t pierce, but she jerked Seth’s mom off her feet.

A massive brown wolf climbed the rocks. He was the color of the stones around him, with flecks of silver in his fur. Seth had only seen his brother in wolf form once, but he recognized Abel instantly.

He went straight for Eleanor and tackled her. Abel tried to bite her. She shoved her arm deep in his mouth so his jaws couldn’t close.