by SM Reine
The wolf responded to all kinds of hunger—the kind sated by food, the kind sated by violence, and the kind sated with sex. And Seth looked delicious in every way at that moment. He dropped down again, and his lips traveled from hers to her neck, down her shoulder and onto her stomach.
When he came back up to be face to face with her, Seth looked hungry, too.
And then Rylie sank her teeth into his shoulder.
Seth shouted and shoved her away.
She landed on her butt. Instinct took over, and she rose to a crouch, baring her teeth. A growl rumbled in her chest as Seth scrambled to his feet.
He had attacked her.
But he held his hands toward her palms-forward in the universal gesture of peace, keeping his eyes away from hers. “Whoa, hey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to provoke you. Deep breaths. Calm down.”
Calm down?
Her blood thundered in her ears. She leaped for him, and he caught her wrist a half second before she could rake her claws down his face.
Seth flung her to the floor. Her head cracked against the wall.
She slumped on the carpet. Everything went fuzzy. Her ears were vibrating.
The sudden burst of pain was enough to jolt the wolf into silence again, but it still took her a minute to remember how to speak again. And once she did, she realized what she had done. “I’m sorry.”
When he spoke, it sounded like he was talking from a long distance. “Are you okay?”
“I think so…”
Seth went into the bathroom and flicked on the light. Rylie rubbed her hands over her eyes—where had the claws come from?—to keep from crying.
He was quiet for so long that she had to get up to see what he was doing.
“Oh man,” Seth said, craning around to see his shoulder in the mirror. There was a clear circle of tooth indentations in his flesh. “Jesus…”
Rylie’s hands flew to her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t mean to—did I hurt you?”
She held her breath while he probed the injury with his fingertips. “It’s okay,” he finally said, blowing out a long breath. “You didn’t break the skin.”
Rylie collapsed into a kitchenette chair. “Oh my God.”
Seth sank to his knees in front of her. “It’s okay,” he said with more confidence. “I don’t know if you could even transform me into a werewolf while you’re human.”
She wasn’t sure, either, but she had a pretty strong suspicion. The wolf wanted to bite him so it could make him pack—just like Abel. If they were all wolves, she could make them stay.
Rylie shivered. Seth was right. They did need to leave.
“I love you,” she whispered.
He kissed her. It was gentler this time, and then Seth held her face in his hands and stared deep into her soul. “I love you too, Rylie Gresham. God, I love you. But we have to do this. We have to leave.”
He wrapped his arms around her back, and she hugged him tight. Rylie finally let herself cry.
Love wasn’t enough. It never would be.
Eighteen
The Other Body
It was well after noon when Tate’s black BMW rolled up the street and stopped in front of the gate to his mansion. Levi was waiting outside.
The window rolled down. Tate leaned an arm out to look at him, head rolled back on his shoulders. He wore big sunglasses, but Levi didn’t need to see his bloodshot eyes to know he had been partying in the city ever since the dance.
“You,” Tate said.
“Me.”
“You disappeared at the ball.”
“I know,” he said. “Sorry.”
Tate tipped his sunglasses down his nose. The bloodshot veins made his irises shockingly blue. “Is that all?”
No, it wasn’t. But he couldn’t explain that he left early because the smell of Rylie’s transformation made him and Bekah go nuts. They couldn’t help it. Werewolf changes were like a chain reaction.
So he only said, “Yep.”
Tate grinned. “Apology accepted.”
He shoved the passenger door open. Levi got in while Tate keyed the access code, and their hands joined over the center console.
“You had fun,” Levi observed. He smelled more than marijuana—there was alcohol, and a few other chemical smells he didn’t recognize. No wonder Tate had taken until Sunday to get home.
“It would have been better with you.”
They stopped at the fountain by the front door. Tate didn’t park in his garage when Levi was with him, since he loved rubbing his boyfriend’s presence in the face of his parents. In fact, he liked it so much that he all but pounced Levi when they got out of the car.
He only put up with it for a few seconds. He knew the performance was for the benefit of the security camera by the front door, not because he was feeling affectionate.
Levi shoved him off. “Save it.”
“Prude.” Tate snuggled against his shoulder.
He emanated weed and beer so strongly that Levi didn’t smell the blood until he saw the shattered windows. Levi grabbed Tate’s arm to stop him from going inside. “Wait.”
“Huh?”
Tate followed Levi’s gaze to the window. A half-second of worry flashed across his face before he started grinning again. “Vandalism. Sweet. My parents are going to be pissed.”
But it wasn’t vandalism. Burglars didn’t smell like blood, sweat, and the familiar musk of fur.
“Stay out here.”
“No,” Tate said.
There was no point in arguing. Levi tried to peek through the broken window before they entered, but Tate shoved his way around him.
The floor of the grand entryway was covered in puddles of water—snow that had been tracked inside and then melted. Precious vases had been knocked off their tables and shattered on the floor. A portrait was tipped at an angle. Ragged claw marks scored the surface of a shattered table.
Levi’s eyes fell on the stairs. Even small spatters of blood were obvious to his sensitive nose.
The smears were shaped like paw prints.
“The heck is this?” Tate asked. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
Levi made his way up the stairs, ears perked for the sound of movement. He didn’t expect to hear the attacker, since he already knew they were long gone.
He hoped to hear a survivor.
But the house was silent.
“Stay downstairs,” Levi said.
Tate ran upstairs anyway, hiking his sagging jeans around his hips so he wouldn’t trip. “Mom? Dad?”
Levi chased him. The blood turned from smears to streaks as they got higher, and then a small stream that led to the bedroom doors. Tate shoved inside.
His mom was sprawled on the floor, empty eyes staring at the ceiling. She looked like she had tripped and landed on her back, or maybe fallen asleep in an awkward position.
Except that her throat was ripped to shreds.
After Rylie kissed Seth goodbye and watched him walk out the door, she wandered aimlessly around town.
The sidewalks hadn’t been shoveled, so she walked on the shoulder of the road. Cars honked at her as they slid past. They were telling her to get out of the way.
Rylie didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything anymore.
Everything had been going right—as right as it could be, considering what happened since the summer. Things were great at the ranch. She had friends and good grades. And most importantly, she had finally gotten to be with Seth.
Now what did she have?
It had only been a few minutes—or maybe hours, she wasn’t paying attention—but she was already lonely. The desolate swaths of snow looked even colder and more hostile than usual.
Everything was Abel’s fault. If he had only controlled himself…
But he didn’t ask to be bitten, did he?
Her eyes burned with tears, but they chilled as they rolled down her cheeks and quivered on her chin.
> Rylie sucked in a ragged breath, leaning against the icy trunk of a tree. The sky and ground were the same shade of white, so it felt like the world had flipped over when she wasn’t paying attention. Her head swam.
There were so many people she wanted to blame for Seth leaving—his brother, those Riese kids, even Seth himself—but it all came down to one person.
She had done it to herself.
A car passed and slowed, pulling around her into a parking lot. She blinked at it blearily.
Somehow, Rylie had ended up by the therapist’s office. The secretary, Christina, parked in front of the door and got out of her car. “Rylie?” she called, pulling down her scarf so it wouldn’t muffle her shout. “Is that you?”
The sight of the older woman rang a distant bell in her memories. She was supposed to be doing something there. Something with her stupid therapist’s stupid plants.
She trudged across the street.
“Are you here for Janice’s plants? What a coincidence!” Christina said. “I forgot my knitting here on Friday. Come on, I’ll let you in.”
Rylie wandered inside, staring around at the waiting room without seeing it. The secretary bustled to her desk and shuffled around her drawers. It distantly registered that she was wearing pajamas with penguins on them.
“The water can is in the cupboard,” she said.
Mechanically, she grabbed the water can, filled it in the bathroom, and went into Janice’s office.
The chessboard was on the table where she had left it, but the shiny black pieces were scattered across the table as though they had been disturbed. A rook was tipped onto its side. Rylie righted it and put it in position.
Scott Whyte’s stink was on everything. His stale cologne, his werewolf children, the bizarre herbs he used for magic. It was a slap in the face after their earlier conversation.
But he was keeping his promise to leave. What little he brought to the office was boxed up as he prepared to move on.
She drizzled water over Janice’s precious ferns. Some of the leaves were browning and curling in the dry air blasted by the heater. Rylie watched the water pour from the can with a quivering jaw.
Scott Whyte.
If Seth leaving was anybody’s fault, it was his.
Setting the water can down hard enough to send water sloshing over the side, she removed the top of the banker’s box marked with Scott’s name. She shuddered at the smell that washed out.
Everything on the top was normal, boring psychologist stuff—folders and paperwork, mostly. But it was only laid out to hide everything else. A gold bell. Photos of Bekah and Levi from school picture day. A little leather notebook filled with loopy handwriting and drawings of a five-pointed star.
Rylie dug her hand into the bottom of the box, and pain lanced through her thumb.
Gasping, she pulled out what had cut her—a slender knife with a pentagram carved on the side.
A silver knife.
Fire swept up her arm. The wound puffed up and reddened on the edges. She flung the knife to the desk and sucked the injury into her mouth.
Her blood tasted like silver. It burned on her tongue and down the back of her throat.
Fury swelled inside of her. That was the last insult.
He kept silver in his office, and it had cut her.
Rylie shoved the box off the desk, and it exploded on the office floor. A snow globe shattered. The bell, the picture, the paperwork—it all spilled across the ugly brown rug.
Whirling, she seized the wooden chair and smashed it into the bookshelf with a shriek. Janice’s maidenhair fell. Dirt showered on her boots.
She screamed in pain, in rage, in loneliness. She screamed for all the things she lost—her boyfriend and her life.
And blood spattered on the desk.
Shocked, she looked down at her hand. The wound hadn’t grown, but blood poured in a thin stream from her fingertips. The claws emerged a second later, and Rylie gave a cry of surprise that sounded more like a growl.
“It’s not possible,” she whispered. It was hard to speak with an aching jaw.
The pain in her chest spread. It wasn’t loneliness now.
Rylie doubled over. Her elbow nicked the table, and the chessboard fell, showering pieces everywhere.
She couldn’t be changing. It was daytime. It was two days after the last moon.
She couldn’t change.
The secretary stuck her head through the door. “Is everything okay… in…”
Her eyes fell on Rylie and her face went white.
“Get out!”
She didn’t have to say it twice. Christina wailed and ran from the office, slamming the front door behind her.
Rylie twisted. Her back bowed, and her heels kicked helplessly against the ground as her spine cracked. She fought not to hyperventilate as the fever took her.
Seth’s voice spoke to her: Be calm, be calm, be calm…
But thinking of him made her heart break, and she lost any semblance of control.
Her shoulder blades wrenched back, forcing her breastbone forward. Her shoulders popped.
Ribs spread. Her jacket grew too tight. Her hands scrabbled uselessly at her zipper as she fought to free herself with fingers that were no longer attached to normal hands.
And then the wolf erupted.
Nineteen
Surveillance
The snow wasn’t as thick twenty miles south of town, so Seth could get the Chevelle up to speed. Empty road stretched in front of him for miles and miles. There was nothing behind him but a lot of regret.
The road used to be his life—his, Abel’s, and Eleanor’s. They stayed with friends and family sometimes, but they usually tracked werewolves on the open road.
When he moved into Abel’s apartment, he hoped he wouldn’t move again until it was into university dorms.
But there they were… again.
Abel was stretched in the backseat with his head pillowed on his jacket. He had slept nonstop since the transformation. His backpack was on his lap, and there were a few things in the trunk, but everything else had been left behind.
Including Rylie.
His gloom was distracting enough that it took him awhile to notice the car in his rearview mirror. It started as a distant black speck—nothing to worry about. In the long roads between states, it was normal to have people follow one another for hours at a time.
But the car crept up on him, and a sense of unease came over Seth as it did.
He pulled off on a service road. When the black sedan took the same turn, his heart skipped a beat. “Abel,” Seth said. His brother rolled over and mashed his face deeper into the seat. He raised his voice. “Abel. Wake up. We’re being followed.”
Abel’s eyes flashed open in the rearview mirror, awake and alert in an instant.
“What?”
“Get ready,” Seth said.
His rifle was in the seat next to him. It was locked and loaded with silver bullets. Seth hadn’t been expecting an outside attack—it was just in case Abel woke in a bad mood and didn’t recognize him.
Seth stopped on the side of the road. The other car did, too.
“Let’s do this,” Abel said, gripping a handgun the size of a small cannon.
They got out at the same time, one on each side of the car, and shielded themselves behind the doors.
But it wasn’t an attacker waiting for them. It was a black BMW, and Seth recognized the honey-brown hair of the boy who got out with his hands over his head.
“Don’t shoot,” Levi said.
Abel stiffened, nostrils flaring. His finger trembled on the trigger. Was his gun loaded with silver bullets, too? Seth couldn’t remember.
“Why are you following us?” Seth asked, steadying his arm on the side of the car.
Levi looked frazzled. His shirt was buttoned up the wrong way. “We made a huge mistake. You need to see something.”
Seth believed him. He lowered his rifle, removed the cartridge, and
tossed it in the front seat. But his brother hadn’t moved.
“Get out of here,” Abel growled.
He crept to the other side of the car and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Give me the gun,” Seth said. For a long, breathless moment, he thought Abel wouldn’t obey. But then he handed him the pistol. Seth had to check. Silver bullets. That would have been bad. “Okay, Levi. What are you talking about?”
“Come here.”
Levi popped the trunk of the BMW. There was a laptop in the back, which he tilted away from the sun so they could see the screen. He loaded a grainy, black-and-white video that looked like a blank sheet of white.
He pointed to one corner.
“This is the driveway to a house in the development back by town. Tranquil Hills.”
Seth recognized it. That was where Tate’s family lived. He had picked Rylie up from her friend’s house a couple times. If that line was the driveway, then the round blurs were the topiaries, and the brighter patches in the back were the house lights.
Abel glowered at Levi. “Where did you get this?”
“I copied it off Tate’s security system before the cops arrived,” he said.
“Why were the cops there?” Seth asked.
Instead of answering, Levi skipped ahead in the video. He resumed normal speed when a small human figure crossed from one corner to the other. The timestamp was for the previous night.
They vanished. He opened another video from a different angle. The figure approached the front door of the house. It was still blurry, but Seth thought he recognized that stride. He would have known Rylie anywhere.
She punched her fist through the window, elbowed shards of glass out of the way, and went into the house.
“Oh, hell no,” Abel said.
Levi loaded a third video from another camera. Seth didn’t want to see it.
“Why were the cops there?” Seth asked again.
“Tate’s mom was killed.” Levi’s voice was flat and emotionless. “Her throat was torn out.”
His ears filled with a roaring sound as the blood rushed to his head. Abel grabbed his arm. The painful press of his fingers into the muscle was the only thing that kept him upright.
The third video was from inside the entryway. Rylie’s indistinct figure changed. It was abrupt—a twist of the spine, a seize in her legs. Then Rylie was gone, replaced by the wolf. Seth stared at the timestamp as if he could will it to change.