by SM Reine
“Rylie...”
“I might be a werewolf, but I’m still a—a modern woman,” she said, trying to summon up the same amount of dignity her therapist had when she said it. “I’m not going to go just because you snap your fingers at me.”
“So you’re mad I didn’t ask, but now that I did, you’re mad about that too?”
“Yes, but... no.” She folded her arms. “You have to ask me the right way.”
Seth dropped to his feet. “Okay, tell you what: You figure out how you want to be asked—if you want to be asked at all—and let me know if I should rent a tux or not. I’m going to get moving.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh as he walked away, and she felt a little guilty. He was right. How did she expect him to ask her out? Seth almost made it back to his car before she called to him. “Hey!” she shouted. He turned around. “Do you want to go to the Winter Ball with me?”
“I’ll think about it!” he yelled back.
Rylie was still grinning stupidly when she returned to the ranch house. She all but floated as she hung the rest of the Christmas lights. All thoughts of Abel had vanished. Her brain was stuck with Seth, and kissing in bed that morning, and the Winter Ball.
The dance was at a venue in the city. Rylie had heard some of the senior girls talking about getting hotel rooms to stay overnight with their boyfriends. Seth was a senior, too. She wondered if he’d want a room if she wasn’t becoming a werewolf that night.
Rylie stared at herself in the mirror over the fireplace, and gold eyes stared back. A thrill shot through her stomach.
She was sixteen now—practically an adult. A lot of her guy friends back home had been having sex since they were fourteen or fifteen. Tyler even hooked up when he was thirteen, which had to be some kind of record. He sure bragged about it enough.
But she couldn’t get excited about the prospect of a romantic evening. Seth and Rylie would definitely have a long night together, but they wouldn’t enjoy it. He’d have to chase her all over the wilderness while she ate rabbits and picked fights with coyotes.
It wasn’t exactly the most romantic thing she could imagine.
Gwyn appeared behind her reflection, and Rylie’s cheeks flamed with heat. She jumped off the chair, feeling as embarrassed as though her thoughts were imprinted on her forehead.
“Are you busy?” Gwyn asked.
She picked at a box of decorations. “Oh yeah. Really busy.”
“Want help?”
“I was actually going to do some homework and go into town. I need to buy a dress. Do you want me to get anything while I’m there?”
“We could use groceries. I’ll give you a list,” Gwyn said. Rylie could feel eyes burning on the back of her neck. “But we need to talk, babe.”
Oh God.
“When you go into town today—anytime you’re in town at all, actually—I don’t want you at Abel and Seth’s apartment. I know you’ve been over a couple of times. Should have told you sooner, I guess.”
Rylie spluttered. “What? They’re over here all the time.”
“There’s no adults there—and no, Abel doesn’t count. There’s more to adulthood than being over eighteen.” Rylie opened her mouth to protest, but Gwyn cut her off with a slash of her hand. “They’re good boys. Our doors will always be open to them. But you can’t go over there, and you can’t have Seth in your room. That’s the rule.”
“But that’s stupid!”
“I know.” Gwyn heaved a sigh. “I remember being a teenager. You know so much more than I do. But you’re only sixteen, Rylie. You’re too young to have sex.”
Rylie’s mouth fell open. Maybe her aunt was psychic. “I wasn’t—I’m not—” She smothered her face in her hands. “I’m going to crawl into the duck pond and die.”
“Suit yourself.”
“We’re not—I mean, we haven’t—it’s not like... ugh. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Sex is complicated, Rylie,” Gwyn said. “Sure, you can wear condoms and mostly prevent pregnancy—”
Rylie threw her hands in the air. “I’m not listening to this!”
Her aunt chuckled. “You can’t ignore me because it’s embarrassing.”
“I won’t go to their apartment. Okay? Happy?”
“That’s all I’m asking.” Gwyn sank onto the couch with a sigh. “So why do you need a dress?”
Grateful for the change in subject, Rylie sat on the arm beside her. “The Winter Ball is coming up. Christmas Eve.”
“Is that a school event?” she asked. Rylie nodded. “I’m fine with it so long as there are chaperones.” She made a few notes on a piece of paper. “Here’s what we need from the store. Take some cash with you, get something nice. Don’t bother bringing back change. Whatever’s on my desk is fair game.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Rylie surrendered the box of decorations and headed back to her aunt’s bedroom.
Most of the house was decorated in country casual, but Gwyn’s room could only be described as a “boudoir.” Everything was dark wood, her sheets were crimson silk, and there was a weird velvet painting of a horse over the headboard.
Gwyn didn’t trust banks, so she kept most of her money stuck in weird places around her desk. Rylie took a wad of cash out of the pen cup and hesitated before leaving again.
There were a lot of yellow pill bottles strewn around the room. It seemed like they were multiplying. Rylie worried her lower lip between her teeth. She didn’t like seeing so many pills—it meant things weren’t getting better. Stranger still, there was concealer in a dozen different shades on her bedside table, like Gwyn was trying to figure out what worked best.
She went back to the living room before she could see anything else strange and worrying.
Gwyn met her at the door, watching as Rylie put on boots and a jacket with a little smile.
“I remember when you were barely taller than my goats.”
Rylie rolled her eyes. “Don’t get all mushy on me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Remember the spices. They’re listed on the back.”
They hugged, and Rylie took the opportunity to sneak a close look at Gwyn’s face. She was wearing a lot of makeup. It looked like she was covering sores around her mouth. How hadn’t Rylie noticed?
“I love you,” she said impulsively. They weren’t usually affectionate, but it came out before she could stop herself. “Even when you’re embarrassing.”
Gwyn ruffled her hair. “Drive safe, pumpkin.”
It was the nickname Rylie’s dad used to call her before he died of a heart attack, and it made her eyes burn to hear it coming from her aunt. Nobody had called her pumpkin in months.
She made it all the way to the truck before starting to cry.
Nine
In a Dark Alley
Long nights made the days fly by. Rylie passed out every night with the sunset and woke up twelve hours later feeling like she hadn’t slept at all, dragging herself through chores and another day of school with heavy limbs.
Seth spent most of his breaks studying in the library or with the team, so Rylie tried to hang out with Tate instead. But Levi seemed to have become his new best friend. He didn’t confront her or anything, but he was always around, thumbing that silver star on his earlobe and staring. Rylie couldn’t stand his smell. It got bad enough that if she saw Tate approaching, she would turn around and head in the opposite direction instead.
“What’s bugging you?” Tate asked in class one day.
She forced a casual shrug. Levi wasn’t there, but his smell was all over Tate’s hair and clothes. “It’s not you. It’s just…”
“Levi.”
“Yeah.” She smiled sheepishly.
Tate chucked her in the shoulder. “He’s cool, but you’re still my best bro. And the weirdest. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
His reassurances didn’t do anything to calm Rylie. In fact, it only made her worry more. She had no idea what a
werewolf wanted with her friend, but she had a feeling it wasn’t good.
Seth and Abel weren’t the only ones who could investigate. And she didn’t need their permission to hunt.
Rylie sneaked into her geography teacher’s classroom while he was at lunch. She logged onto his computer using the password on a sticky note under his keyboard.
The student records were accessible through an icon on the desktop shaped like a door. She resisted the urge to check her grades and loaded Levi’s records instead. Everything was there—his history of athletic extracurriculars, his perfect grades, and a list of every school he attended.
She emailed them to herself and jotted down Levi’s address before logging out.
“What are you doing in here?” asked her teacher, entering with a lunch bag under one arm and a mouthful of tuna sandwich pouching his right cheek. It smelled horrible and stale.
“I thought I left my phone in here,” she said.
He watched her leave with a suspicious look, but she hurried down the hall before he could ask more questions.
She felt jittery for the rest of the day, like someone would find out what she had done. She didn’t care if the school caught her—what would one more red mark on her record mean anyway?—but feared what Bekah and Levi might do.
Fortunately, the afternoon passed uneventfully. Seth had practice after school and Tate drove off with Levi, leaving Rylie a whole boring evening on her own.
She turned on her phone to find a message from the tailor saying her dress was ready. Rylie left her car at the high school and wandered downtown, yawning and stretching. Her entire body was sore. Rylie didn’t think she would ever sleep well again.
It was a sunny day, and the streets had been plowed, leaving the pavement damp and steaming. The little bell over the door jingled when Rylie walked into the tailor’s.
He grinned when he recognized her. “You’re going to love this.”
They went into the back room. Her dress hung in a curtained room next to a full length mirror, and it was so big that she needed help getting it over her head.
The tailor laced the hooks up the back and then bustled around to double check his measurements. She stared at herself in the mirror with awe. She couldn’t wait to see Seth’s reaction. “It’s perfect,” she said. “This is great. Thank you so much.”
“It’s better than perfect,” he said with a wink.
Rylie had already paid for the dress at the fitting, so she only had to take it home. He zipped it up in a bag and she carried it slung over her shoulder. It was bulky, but not heavy. Of course, nothing was too heavy for her anymore. She probably could have carried a car over her shoulder if it hadn’t been such an awkward shape.
The wind shifted, and a whiff of something meaty caught her attention as she ambled down the road. She stopped and sniffed.
Something smelled amazing. It wasn’t dinnertime yet, but she was suddenly hungry. She checked the time. Gwyn wouldn’t mind if she was a few more minutes late.
She tracked the smell with her nose to the breeze, keeping an eye out for whatever restaurant was venting such a sweet smell. She hadn’t heard about a new restaurant opening. It was a big deal whenever something opened in town—the lone Starbucks in the grocery store was still the talk of the town, and it had been built the year before.
Rylie stopped in front of a narrow alley between a diner and an antique shop.
Another sniff. That was definitely the source of the smell. But it wasn’t coming from the buildings—it was coming from the trash.
Why would an alley smell so good? Maybe something was rotting in the Dumpster. Gross. One of the weirdest parts of becoming a werewolf was that everything smelled interesting, even things that should have been icky.
She couldn’t resist the urge to find out what smelled so strongly. Rylie climbed over a pile of plowed snow and peered into the trash.
A leg was sticking out of the trash bags. A human leg.
She gasped and jerked back. Her foot slipped in the snow and she landed hard on her butt, scrambling back on all fours as if she could escape what she had seen. Her dress bag landed on damp sidewalk and she didn’t even care.
Fumbling for her cell phone, she pressed the speed dial for Seth. It picked up on the third ring.
“What?”
“Seth! There’s a body, someone’s dead, it’s in an alley—”
“Who is this? Rylie?”
The voice was too deep and gruff to belong to her boyfriend. She groaned. “What are you doing with this phone, Abel?”
“Seth forgot it at home. Who died? Where’s the body?”
She bit her lower lip. She didn’t want to see Abel—ever again, preferably.
“I’ll just call the cops.”
“Don’t. We’ll lose the chance to collect our own evidence. Tell me where you are.”
Reluctantly, Rylie gave him directions to the alley. She didn’t like having to wait near the body. It smelled delicious—oh my God it smelled good, and that was so horrible—but she was afraid it would vanish if she left.
Every time a car passed, she tried not to look nervous. It was hard to believe that everyone else couldn’t smell it.
Abel showed up five minutes later. He brought a cheap digital camera, rubber gloves, and sandwich bags. Her stomach flipped at the sight of him.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to touch that thing,” she said, feeling nauseous.
“Fine. I won’t tell you.”
Abel climbed into the Dumpster like it was a totally normal thing to do and started digging around. Shifting the trash made the smell waft toward her more strongly.
“It’s just like the other ones,” he said. “Her throat’s been ripped out, but there’s no other major injury.”
“I don’t want to know.”
He gave a low whistle. “It’s pretty bad.”
“I said I don’t want to know!”
The camera clicked as Abel took pictures from various angles. He took long enough that curiosity got the better of her, and she edged her way up the pile of snow to give a sideways peek at his shoulders over the rim of the Dumpster.
“Definitely just her throat.” Abel jumped out and peeled off the gloves, dropping them in an empty sandwich bag. He had bits of hair and blood in the other ones. It looked like he had taken some kind of tissue sample.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, covering her nose and mouth with her hands.
“You think this is bad? This is just the start.” Abel grinned. How could he smile like that?
“We have to do something,” Rylie said.
“We could have gotten that Levi kid the other night.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe the woman would have survived if they had finished the job when they had the chance. Rylie could tell her thoughts were showing on her face because Abel gave a grim nod.
“What happens next?” she asked.
He smirked at her. That lopsided smile looked like Seth’s, but so much more sadistic. If Rylie had still been dreaming, she thought his smile would show up in her nightmares.
“You can call the police if you want. I’m taking these home to do a little more research.” He wiggled one of the bags at her. Something slimy and red slid around the inside of it. “Have to put the evidence on ice.”
That was too much for Rylie to handle. The sour taste of bile stung her throat.
Abel’s laugh echoed behind her as she fell to all fours and threw up on the sidewalk.
Ten
Levi
Seth struggled with self-doubt.
He had done more research on the Riese siblings. He tracked their history back for two years, and found nothing that indicated they were killers. But a big chunk of time was missing. It was like the records for two years had been completely removed.
That was the kind of thing Seth’s mom looked for when searching for damning evidence surrounding a werewolf, but he didn’t know what to do with it.
For the first time
since she left, Seth wished his mother was there so they could talk about it. His dad had been a werewolf expert, but he wasn’t sure if they ever killed teenage werewolves. Levi was his age. Bekah was a little younger. Hunting them seemed… wrong.
He knew Bekah Riese was waiting for him to make a move. She was always watching when Seth was with Rylie at school. It made Seth feel like he was the one being hunted instead of doing the hunting for once.
When Seth went for lunchtime practice in the gym on Wednesday, it was no surprise to find Levi warming up with the team. But he was surprised to see Rylie waiting for him, too. She was at the top of the stands with her knapsack by her side and her hair in thick braids like Gwyn’s.
He waved at her. She gave him a weak smile.
Seth changed in the locker room and came out to find the guys shooting hoops. There wasn’t enough time for an organized game, but they dribbled the ball up the court and back again, elbowing each other and dodging and laughing.
The ball flew at Seth, and he caught it. He was surprised to see Levi had thrown it.
“You going to play?” he asked.
A group of girls on the bottom row of bleachers giggled and sighed. Rylie had gone pale.
“You’re on,” Seth said.
A skirmish between the two city guys was too exciting to miss. The other athletes backed up with hoots and cheers. He couldn’t tell if they were cheering more for him or Levi.
He bounced the ball a couple times to loosen his shoulders, then went for the hoop.
Levi jumped in front of him. Seth twisted, guarding the ball with his body, and made a wide turn so he could run toward the end of the court.
A hand shot in front of him, knocking the ball out of the way.
People yelled as Levi made a fast lap around the gym. Seth blinked. He’d moved too fast to be seen, using his supernatural werewolf speed to steal the ball.
“Cheating?” he muttered under his breath.
Levi’s eyes glinted. “I’m not holding back. Are you?”
Rylie stared hungrily from the top of the bleachers as Seth took a deep breath, opening up all those special senses that made him the “legendary hunter” Bekah had called him. He ignored it most of the time. He didn’t like to show off.