Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon (7 page)

Rylie couldn’t do it again. She just couldn’t.

The gun gave her a choice.

She slipped her finger over the trigger and wondered where she should aim. Rylie had been shot before. She wasn’t scared of how it would feel. She was only scared that she would survive it.

A fist pounded on the door to the bathroom. “Rylie!” Abel shouted. He sounded annoyed.

She considered her choices: doing it right that moment so she wouldn’t have to get back in the car traveling to Gray Mountain, or putting the gun away and hoping she could transform again without hurting anyone. Her breath was stuck in her chest.

Did she
really
want to do it?

He knocked again.

“You’re taking forever,” he said with a note of teasing in his voice. “Did you fall in?”

“Leave me alone!” Rylie yelled back.

She took Seth’s letters out of the box, put the gun in the bottom, and covered it again. Her cheeks burned. Her heart was beating too fast.

“Come
on
, we still have at least another day of driving.”

She went outside. Abel had his fist raised to knock again, but he stopped when she emerged. He looked half-irritated and half-suspicious. “Can’t I use the bathroom alone?” she snapped.

“What’s the problem? All those burgers getting to you?”

Her cheeks flushed. “You’re gross.”

Abel laughed. Then his eyes fell on the box, and his amusement vanished. She thought he might have looked sympathetic for an instant before he reassumed his bored, I-don’t-care-about-anything look, but she also might have imagined it.

When he spoke again, he was more serious. “I did some looking around. I have something to show you.”

He led her to the edge of the rest stop, which was separated from an empty field by a span of gravel. Abel tilted his head back to sniff the air, and Rylie followed suit. The faint odor of werewolves made her hackles rise.

They paced the gravel for a few minutes as she drank in the smells. The pheromones were telling. There had been three of them: a middle-aged man and two young women. They were sweating a lot, and they smelled sick.

Following the odor to the fence, Rylie crouched down. A pile of vomit dried next to one of the posts.

“What do you think?” Abel asked. “Two of them?”

“Three,” she said. What was making them sick?

“So it’s not the same people we saw at the restaurant.”

She shook her head. “How big is this thing?” she asked, hugging the closed box of letters to her chest. “We’ve already come across five of them. That’s a lot of werewolves.”

“Only one way to find out,” Abel said. “It’s your turn to drive, by the way.”

Rylie put the box on the floor of the car. Her hands lingered on the lid for a moment as she contemplated the gun one more time. It made her feel better to know that the choice was waiting for her, even if she hadn’t made the decision yet.

But she would soon. Very soon.

She got back on the freeway.

Time didn’t make very much
sense on the road. Cars and towns blurred past them. They stopped and started and slept fitfully and ate gas station food. Farms turned to cities, and then became farms again, which turned to forest.

Rylie woke up disoriented the next night, and it took her an entire minute to realize she had woken up at all. At first, she thought she was still dreaming about Gray Mountain, but then she realized that she was resting on leather seats. It was completely dark aside from the yellow-green glow of dashboard lights, which projected Abel’s shadow on the roof of the car.

They weren’t moving anymore.

“Are we there?” she asked, sitting up with a small groan. Even werewolf healing couldn’t do anything for the stiffness in her muscles.

Abel didn’t respond. His fists were clenched on the steering wheel.

She cleared her throat and tried again.

“Are we there?”

“Shh,” he said.

She peered out the window. She could make out the trunks of towering trees and smell pine through the car vents. It looked familiar. They must have been getting close. So why had they stopped?

Rylie climbed into the front seat.

“Don’t move,” Abel whispered. “We’re not alone.”

She followed his gaze and noticed a group of murky shapes a few feet away. Rylie leaned toward the vent and took a deeper sniff, closing her eyes to savor the subtle odors. Distant ice water, soil, rotting plants. But there was also the musk of fur and feces.

The shapes were a herd of deer. They didn’t seem to have noticed the car.

“I don’t think they’ll attack us,” Rylie whispered back.

He shook his head. “There are werewolves out there.”

“In wolf form?” she asked. He nodded. “That’s not possible. It isn’t a moon.”

Then she saw it—a flash of fur.

Even a glimpse of it was enough to stir the wolf inside of her. Rylie was still groggy and half-asleep, but her wolf wasn’t, and it responded to the sight of another werewolf too fast for her to fight back. Her ribs creaked as it swelled inside of her.

She grunted, wrapped her arms around herself, and bowed her head to her knees.

Abel didn’t seem to notice. He was too transfixed by the deer.

Her shoulders twitched. Her spine ached. Rylie focused with all her strength on human things, like Seth had told her to do, but looking at the speedometer and her shoes and the seams of the leather seats wasn’t enough this time. Not when she could smell those deer. She was so hungry, and now that she had seen them, they were
her
deer—but that wolf was already out there, already on the hunt, and it was going to get them before she could if she didn’t move fast—

One of her cheekbones popped.

The sound caught Abel’s attention. “Not right now,” he hissed. She whimpered as her mouth flooded with blood and her teeth fell onto her tongue. “Rylie, this is not the time. Get a grip.”

Taking long, shallow breaths, she silently counted to fifty. When she got to ten, her fingernails had loosened again, and by the time she got to thirteen, the claws began to emerge. Her tailbone snapped. Her back arched, and she gripped her face in bleeding hands.
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one… get a grip, Rylie!

The numbers weren’t calming her. Focusing on human things wasn’t calming her. And when the wind shifted to bring the smell of four wolves outside the car to her through the vent, that definitely didn’t help.

Abel grabbed her wrists. “Stop it!”

“I can’t,” she whimpered.

A clump of hair loosened from her head and slithered to the floor. Her scalp itched as fur emerged in its place.

Panic filled Abel’s eyes. He shoved her back against the seat, using his weight to hold her down. “I don’t want to shoot you,” he said with none of his usual bravado.

Abel was interrupted by an explosion of motion outside the car, even more violent than Rylie’s motions within.

The werewolves attacked the deer. They fell on the herd like a storm of teeth and claws. The deer tried to run, but they weren’t fast enough. Nothing would have been fast enough to escape the fury of a werewolf pack.

It turned out that deer could actually scream.

The sound of death was enough for Rylie to blink out of her own skull, like flicking a light switch, and the wolf took her place.

Calm spread through her and pushed away the pain. The wolf sniffed at the human that had it pinned back against the bench seat of the Chevelle. His body was strangely bald, and those were hands on her legs instead of the proper paws, but it was her pack. He was not her enemy.

The wolves outside, on the other hand—those smells were completely new. And they smelled sick. Their growls and yips as they tore into the deer were too savage, even for werewolves.

She thrashed underneath Abel’s weight, trying to free herself so she could confront them.

“Stop moving!”

She ripped a paw free—her body was all wolf now—and shoved. His back struck the driver’s side door.

Abel reached for her again. She snapped, and her teeth sunk into flesh. He cried out.

Satisfied that he knew who was in control again, she turned her attention to more important things.

The wolf slammed her body into the glass by her head. It cracked. She did it again, and again.

The windshield shattered and sagged inward. She pushed through it with her head and shoulders, and her paws scrabbled for traction on the dashboard. The safety glass scraped uselessly against her fur. One more hard shove, and she was through.

With all four paws planted on the hood of the sedan, she was taller than the other wolves, and could get a good look at what they had done.

One of the deer had run off, but the rest were not so lucky. The wolves were feasting.

Rylie threw back her head and gave a short howl that echoed through the trees. The feasting wolves froze and turned four pairs of luminous gold eyes toward her just before she leaped at them.

A half-second later, a black SUV burst into the clearing.

N
INE

Collisions

The Union tracked the werewolves
they had shot for a couple of days. The silver poisoning took effect as soon as the bullets hit, but it was several hours before the effects got nasty.

First, they fought with each other over the source of the gunshots. One of the women insisted it was an unseen farmer trying to get them off his land; the other said it was an assassin. The man only rambled about paranoid things, mostly the government and mind control.

Second, the paranoia began overtaking the women, too. Their rationality faded. They jogged across the farms with jerky, twitching motions until running got too hard. They lost coordination. The man fell down and couldn’t seem to get up again.

Third, they got hungry.

They limped into a field of cows, continuing to argue and twitch and have the occasional seizure. Their bodies hadn’t started to change, but the shift in their minds was obvious. They stopped navigating like humans and approached the cows like a wolf pack. They circled around a stray calf. When the cattle fled, they didn’t let the calf go with the rest of the herd. And then they fell on it and began to eat.

Seth watched Yasir’s monitor with horror as human hands and human teeth ripped into the calf. The werewolves were clearly unaware that they were being watched from a road a half-mile away by two vehicles with enhanced surveillance systems. Although by that point, the Union probably could have walked up to them without being noticed.

Seth thought he might throw up.

When the pack was done, they started arguing again. One woman gesticulated wildly with bloody hands, while the other gripped her stomach as though she was still starving.

The man collapsed on all fours. His spine cracked.

Seth had been given a Union earpiece so he could follow the conversation between vehicles. Stripes hooted as blood sprayed out of the man’s face and misted the ground. His jaw and nose elongated.

“Twenty bucks!” he told the other Union team member, who was named Jakob. “Pay up, dude.”

“You said it was going to take two days!”

“Look at the time, nimrod. It’s been almost three days now.”

Only Eleanor was silent, but Seth could see her smiling on the intra-vehicle cameras. He really hated that smile.

“That must be a record,” Yasir said, making note of the time on his laptop. The sun was dropping outside as night approached. “I’ve never seen it take effect that fast.”

Seth was so disgusted that he couldn’t think of a response.

“That’s more than enough verification,” Eleanor said with her fingers to her earpiece. “We can end the hunt now.”

Yasir closed his laptop lid. “Yeah. We can.”

“Leave them for a few minutes,” Jakob said. “I want to see how much of the herd they can take out.”

“That’s against regulations,” argued Stripes. “The cattle are someone’s private property. We’re here to protect humans and take out werewolves, not cost some rancher half his cows.”

Seth tightened his hands on the steering wheel of the Chevelle. He didn’t want to be there anymore. He didn’t want to have to listen to them discuss the fate of people whose only offense had been to get bitten by the wrong animal.

He powered his earpiece off, turned from the monitor, and watched the light fading in the sky.

Yasir kept talking to the rest of the unit. Seth tried not to listen, but when the commander exclaimed over something happening with the herd, he couldn’t resist glancing at the monitor again.

The pack had killed an adult cow. Now that the man had a wolf’s jaw, he was gulping down massive bites of meat. The weaker of the women started to change, too. She rolled onto her side and sobbed as her body shifted. Her companions kept eating.

The crying was too much, especially since it only made Eleanor’s smile widen.

He reached out to turn off the intra-vehicle cameras.

Yasir caught his wrist. “Don’t touch that,” he said sharply. He hadn’t been quite as friendly since Seth failed to shoot any of the wolves with the sniper rifle. One of the women had almost escaped. He knew that Yasir was wondering if his bad aim had been deliberate or not.

“Sorry. My mom…”

The commander watched her for a few moments. His eyes darkened at her gleeful expression, and he turned off his earpiece. “I’ve seen her type before. The people who really enjoy it.” He waved at the monitors. “This seems weird to you, doesn’t it? Betting on the lives of werewolves when we should kill them. The men are just blowing off steam. But your mother…”

Yasir hesitated, and then turned the monitor off.

Seth ducked his head. “Thanks.”

The commander reengaged his earpiece. His voice hardened. “This is what we’re going to do: we’ll circle around the field and catch them on the other side. We need to draw them out before there’s too much property destruction, so we’ll spray some pheromones to get them moving. You two move in to cut them off.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Eleanor said.

“Are you questioning me?”

“No. They’re already on the move… sir.”