by SM Reine
She couldn’t change between moons. Could she?
Someone else ran into the grainy video. He didn’t recognize the dark hair and dress, but he assumed it was Tate’s mom. The wolf chased her upstairs where the camera couldn’t see.
There was one more video on the folder. When Levi moved to click on it, Seth closed the laptop.
“That’s not possible,” he said.
“Silver poisoning. It drives a werewolf crazy and makes them transform out of control.” Levi thumbed the plug in his ear. “Bekah and I use silver to change at will, but we don’t let it into our system. She’s bad. She must have had it a long time.”
Seth flashed back to the night his mother shot Rylie and embedded a silver bullet deep in her thigh.
He thought he had pulled all the fragments out.
But he was wrong. That was why her nails fell out whenever she got mad. She must have been changing between moons.
“Seven bodies,” he muttered.
Now eight.
“Hell,” Abel swore.
Levi nodded. “We have to find her.”
But Seth had already run back to grab his rifle.
Bekah called Levi when they reached the outer edges of town. He listened to her speak, and his face went pale.
“We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“What is it?” Seth asked. He was riding in the passenger seat of the BMW, which he was nauseated to discover belonged to Tate. He had to crack a window to be able to breathe. Abel followed closely in the Chevelle.
Before Levi could respond, the flashing red and blue lights of a police cruiser zoomed past them, squealing with sirens. It drove a cold spike of fear into Seth’s chest.
His heart sank even lower when they followed the police onto the street of Seth and Abel’s apartment.
They passed the old strip motel and stopped in front of the office of Rylie’s therapist.
Levi parked across the street in an alley. Abel looped around the block and pulled up behind them. The police car they followed to the scene wasn’t alone. It was joined by three other cruisers and an ambulance. People in uniforms milled around the parking lot, looking aimless and chilly.
Despite the late evening cold and two feet of snow, everyone in town seemed to have turned out to see what had the cops excited. A dozen people were gathered on the sidewalk. It was practically a mob, given the small local population.
Seth got out of the car for a better look, but hung at the back of the crowd. People were whispering. He caught words like “assault” and “crazy.”
He felt the itch of an approaching werewolf an instant before Bekah came around the corner.
“What happened?” he hissed.
She dragged him to the corner for a better view. “Look.”
The back of the ambulance was open. An old woman he recognized as the secretary sat on the tailgate with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Even from across the street, he could see she was shaking.
Abel loomed over his shoulder. His face was fixed in a grim mask that made him look decades older than nineteen.
“Did Rylie get her?”
“No. We got lucky. Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“I listened in on her report to the cops. She saw Rylie go inside, then found her halfway furry a couple minutes later. Police think the secretary’s lost it, but there are people who will hear her story and know it’s true.”
People like Seth’s mom. Heck, people like Seth.
“We’ve got to find her,” Abel said. “Now.”
Bekah and Levi both nodded. Seth was surrounded by gold-eyed gazes. “We can do that,” she said.
The siblings raised their noses to the breeze and sniffed. Seth wished he could smell like they did. His own sixth sense for werewolves didn’t do any good when he had a couple right next to him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Abel lift his head to do the same. Chills crawled down Seth’s spine. He pretended not to see it.
“I have her smell,” Levi said. He sniffed Seth’s collar. “There’s wolf all over you.”
He jerked away. His hand twitched for his shoulder, where his rifle usually hung, but it was still in the car. Bekah stepped between them.
Sirens went off again. Two cruisers peeled into the street.
A pair of sheriffs left on foot with German Shepherds. Seth heard a low growl from behind him and wasn’t sure who was doing it.
“Let’s split up,” he said. “We’ll cover more ground.”
They returned to the alley. “We’ll be faster on foot,” Levi said, dropping his jacket and pulling his shirt over his head. He threw his clothes in the BMW, completely unembarrassed to strip in front of others. Bekah ducked behind the corner to do the same.
Seth watched in sick fascination as Levi transformed. It was so much faster than Rylie’s changes. His body shuddered. His face extended at the same time his tail emerged, and fur swept down his body in seconds.
Not a minute later, a werewolf stood in front of him.
Levi was smaller and shaggier than Rylie. Somehow, he had the same serious expression as a wolf that he did as a human. It took all of Seth’s control not to grab for his gun again.
Bekah trotted back to them, shaking snow out of her fur.
“Whoever finds Rylie…” Seth hesitated. He felt weird talking to dogs. “Don’t hurt her.”
Bekah huffed in acknowledgment and nudged her brother.
They ran to the end of the alley and separated. Abel got his gun out of the car and double-checked the clip. “I’ll get her,” he said, stuffing it in the back of his jeans and pulling his shirt out to hide it. “Trust me.”
He ran off in pursuit of Bekah.
Seth watched them disappear, feeling strangely helpless. Hunters, police, and Abel—all searching for his girlfriend, who was alone, sick with silver, and starving for meat.
He had to find her first.
Twenty
Changed
Rylie woke up in a snowdrift.
She groaned and cradled her head between her hands. Her tongue felt like it had doubled in size while she slept, and her skull was ringing. She couldn’t seem to focus her eyes.
The world was washed out and gray. It was cold, it was dark, and she had no idea where she was or how she had gotten there.
Standing on trembling legs, Rylie scanned her surroundings for familiar landmarks.
Was it the morning after a moon again? What had happened to the last two weeks? And why was she in so much pain?
She staggered to the shelter of a tree where the snow wasn’t as thick, trying to gather her jumbled thoughts. Sadness gnawed between her ribs. The grief was so immense that even her momentary amnesia couldn’t wipe it out.
Rylie was missing something—or someone—important.
Flies buzzed in her skull. She tried to shake them away.
Where was Abel? Where was her pack?
A breeze lifted, and a smell caught her attention. Meat. Rabbit, bird, or something else? She wasn’t sure. There was too much information on the icy air, from distant humans to her own sweat and the heavy chill of snow.
She even smelled rivers and stone and pine trees, but there was no forest nearby.
Tracking the smell through the skeleton trees, she shoved past bare branches and ignored the drip of icicle water on her shoulders.
The body was crumpled between two big rocks. Rylie got on all fours to study it. She couldn’t make sense of all the legs and twisted spine. Was it a human? A deer?
To her, it looked like nothing but prey, and she was so hungry. Always hungry now.
She couldn’t eat this meat. It had been dead for hours.
Rylie recalled the feeling of an esophagus collapsing between her teeth.
A distant howl broke the air. Her head jerked up.
“Abel?” she asked, wrapping her lips carefully around the sound. But that wasn’t possible. She could feel the moon slumbering now, and knew it wasn’t at
its apex or nadir.
Then why had she changed?
Too many questions.
“Holy mother of God,” someone said.
She glanced over her shoulder. The wolf had been too distracted to hear the approach of boots on snow. A man stood behind her, someone gray-haired and old. He wore the flesh of animals and carried lead.
More prey. Good.
“What are you doing out here, honey?” he asked with the accent of someone who had lived his entire life in the country. “Jesus, you’re going to freeze.” He moved to strip off his coat.
Rylie bared her teeth, and he froze.
They stared at each other for a breathless moment. Would he shoot her? She was faster than him, but she wasn’t sure she could outrun a bullet.
Her mind was suspended between human and wolf. One wanted to flee. The other wanted to attack.
The wolf won.
She leaped. The hunter didn’t expect an attack from a naked girl. He yelled and tried to jump out of the way, but she was like lightning. Watching him raise his gun—too slow, much too slow—she darted around him and attacked.
Her fingers bit into his jacket. Her momentum sent them both crashing into the snow. His gun flew from his hands.
He flailed his fists, and pain exploded in her temple.
Rylie reeled.
He scrambled to his feet. His eyes were wide, his pulse raced, and his skin poured the delicious scent of fear and adrenaline into the air. “Sweet Jesus!”
By the time she flipped onto all fours again, he had already fled through the trees and left his gun behind.
He was fat and slow. She could catch him.
The pain in her temple radiated through her body, making her stumble midstep. Her spine cracked.
Not again.
Rylie’s hips popped and her knees made a sound like shattering glass.
She couldn’t balance with her legs twisted in reverse. Sagging, she barely caught herself on a boulder and almost fell straight into the body. The pain of the transformation cleared her head for a moment. Human Rylie was relieved to realize the body was furred—a deer, not human.
But her relief was short-lived. Once she remembered killing the deer, she recalled killing other prey. Things that weren’t furry. Things that cried in human voices.
“Help me,” she whimpered. “Somebody. Please.”
Nobody was listening.
Where was Seth? Why wasn’t he waiting for her? He was always waiting.
He’s gone.
Grief overwhelmed her as she remembered their last, desperate kiss, the press of his body against hers, and the taste of her own tears.
He wouldn’t be waiting for her ever again.
Rylie struggled to focus on keeping her bones and muscles from changing. She thought of human things. Walking on two feet. Hands and fingers. Clothes, school, cars, cities.
Pop. Crack.
The skin of her cheeks stretched as bones pushed out. Her ears ached. Rylie grabbed her face in both hands, and a clump of white-blond hair fell where she touched it.
Groaning, she tried to focus on breathing. Counting numbers. Anything.
Gwyn. The ranch. Home.
That was where she needed to go. It was the only place she could be safe and secure, now that her pack was gone.
Rylie needed her aunt.
She dragged herself away from town, which was nothing more than a faint glow of light beyond the hills, and moved toward the smell of cows and chickens. It took everything she had to keep moving—when had she grown paws?—without succumbing to the pain.
Her focus was so strong that she didn’t notice when the wolf’s mind slid over the human’s. And she didn’t notice when her blood dripped on the snow.
Gwyn was settling in for the night when her phone rang. She gathered her robe around herself, stuffed her feet in her slippers, and padded to the place the phone was mounted on the wall. She had been waiting for it to ring all night since she got back from the hospital to find her niece missing.
“Rylie?” she answered.
But it wasn’t a girl on the other end of the line. “Really sorry to bother you, ma’am,” responded a deep voice she recognized as Abel’s.
Her worry sharpened into something close to fear. “Have you seen Rylie? I checked myself out of the hospital, and she’s not at home or picking up her cell phone.”
“You checked out?” he asked. “Why would you do that?”
“I got sick of the hospital and thought it was high time I came home. Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Gwyn leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. She had been so sure Rylie was hiding at their apartment. “What’s going on? Is she—?”
He cut her off. “Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Don’t let Rylie in if you see her.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Not many things made Gwyn worry. The barn at her first ranch had burned down and killed half her cattle, and she still hadn’t lost her cool. She hadn’t even panicked when the doctors gave her diagnosis.
But between Rylie’s demonstration earlier and Abel’s warning, she was suddenly afraid. It was an alien feeling. She didn’t like it.
“Is this a… a werewolf thing?” she asked.
Abel went silent. When he spoke again, his voice had a new edge to it. “What do you know?”
Gwyn gave a shuddering laugh. “I don’t know much of anything these days.”
“I’m headed your way right now. I think Rylie might be, too. Don’t let her in.”
He hung up. She clutched the phone to her chest, staring around the dark house.
Gwyn lived in a dull world, and she liked it that way. She didn’t believe in ghosts or God, and all she expected to wait for her after death was a fast rot in the cold ground. In her darkest times, she didn’t turn to Jesus, and nary a prayer passed her lips to ask for help or forgiveness. She didn’t feel a need. Gwyn never had the faith the rest of her family did.
What she knew, she knew well—the earth and the cattle and the satisfaction of honest labor. The kind of things she could see and touch.
The rest of it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
As if to punctuate her thoughts, a shriek fractured the air beyond her walls. It didn’t sound like a coyote.
Her hand shook as she hung the phone in its cradle. Taking a deep breath, Gwyn walked to the window and pushed back the curtain. The porch lights made it hard to see into the night, so she flipped them off and waited for her eyes to adjust.
Another shriek. But this time, she saw what made the noise.
Something climbed her hill—something thin and pale and four-legged.
Cold shock slapped Gwyn like a winter wind.
The sight of her niece crawling through the snow was enough to make Abel’s warning vanish from her mind.
Gwyn flung open the door and plunged outside in slippers. Her weakness was replaced by sheer adrenaline.
“Rylie!”
The girl twitched and shuddered like a sickly dog. There was something wrong with her—something worse than being on her hands and knees in three feet of snow.
She slipped and slid to Rylie. “What are you doing, babe? Get up out of there!”
But then she saw what was wrong.
Her niece—the sweet baby girl who used to ride her pigs like ponies—had grown a long, bare tail, more like a rat than a wolf. Her face was bleeding. Her hair was patchy. She left a trail of crimson in the snow behind her.
“Help me,” Rylie whispered.
And then she collapsed in the snow with a scream.
Her body contorted. Her hands clawed at the sky. Fur slid from her skin like grass growing too fast, and her screams turned to howls.
Don’t let her in, Abel had said. He’d been onto something there.
“Jesus Christ,” Gwyn breathed.
She didn’t wait for Rylie to finish changing. At the bottom of the hill, she was closer to the fields
than home, and she wasn’t sure her legs could carry her up the slope. So instead, she ran for the paddock.
Her legs were sluggish with cold and her slippers had soaked through. She kicked them off at the fence and threw herself over the side.
Every panting breath made pain spike through her lungs. The doctor said she could resume normal activity when she felt up to it, but he probably hadn’t meant running form werewolves.
Rylie’s screams cut off.
Gwyn threw a look over her shoulder as she unlocked the stable door. Whatever moved in the snow wasn’t a girl anymore. It was huge and hulking and faster than anything she’d ever seen.
She ran inside and slammed the door.
Something crashed into the other side and made the latch shudder.
The horses shifted in their stalls, restless and worried. Gwyn threw the bolt on the door and went to the nearest horse—Butch, good old Butch, who didn’t fear anything—and climbed on his back as the monster struck the stable doors again.
He danced on his hooves. She gripped his sides between her knees and hugged his neck.
“Go! Get moving!”
The door cracked on the third blow. On the fourth, the stable was blown wide open.
As a wolf, Rylie was almost as big as Butch. She wasn’t shaking anymore. She looked powerful and inhuman—there was no little girl in those luminous gold eyes.
The horses shrieked. Butch darted out of his stall, and his motion caught the gaze of the wolf.
It lunged.
Butch jumped out of the way, and Gwyn clung to his back as they burst out of the barn into the chilly night air. The wolf roared behind them.
She didn’t need to kick him to get Butch moving. He had somehow forgotten he was old and turned into lightning. He sliced through the snow, Gwyn’s silver braids streaming behind them.
The wolf’s teeth snapped at Butch’s tail. Its paws were thunder pounding against the ground.
They tried to jump the fence. Butch’s hind hoof caught, and he lost his footing. He fell out from under her, and Gwyn cried out as she was flung off his back.
Hitting the ground was like smacking a brick wall face-first. All the breath left her aching lungs.