Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon

by S. M. Reine

  “I’ve stopped running. You’re the one who left.”

  Eleanor folded her arms. “And it looks like I’m not the only one who did. Where’s that blond tramp? What happened to your happily ever after?”

  “Not to disrespect, Mom, but that’s none of your business.”

  “It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me. I know where she is.”

  Sudden fear for Rylie made him raise his fists, but a single look from Eleanor made him freeze in his tracks. Nobody did icy stares like his mom. “Leave her alone,” he growled.

  She glanced at her watch, unimpressed by his threat. “I’m almost out of time. Listen to me, boy: I’ve got a new family now. A better family. And I’ve come to bring you into the fold.” She swept a hand to the black SUV. “See what I’ve got? That’s just the beginning. They’ve given me money, a home, a purpose. They’re called the Union. It’s a whole army of men like you and your daddy.”

  Seth’s father had been what was called a kopis—the latest in a long line of people who hunted supernatural creatures. His dad, and their entire family, specialized in taking down werewolves. Being a little stronger and faster than most humans gave them the edge. An army of them could be bad. Really bad.

  “What purpose did they give you?” he asked.

  “Werewolves are on the move all around the world. They’re converging.” She said the last word carefully, like it was a vocabulary term she had recently learned.

  “Why?”

  “The why doesn’t matter. This is our chance.” Eleanor shook her fists with barely restrained anger. “The werewolves took everything from us. They took your daddy’s life and ate his spleen, they mauled your brother, and they took you from me, too. Now they’re going to all be in the same place, and me and the Union team are going to kill them. All of ‘em.”

  “Are you kidding? There’s got to be thousands of them.”

  She smiled a nasty smile. “Barely a hundred. This is the end, and we’ve almost won. All we’ve got to do is one final hunt.”

  “Where’s the convergence?”

  Eleanor seemed to take his question to mean that he wanted to go. Her smile turned triumphant. “Gray Mountain.”

  It made sense in a sick way. That was where it had all begun. The legends said that the animal gods had descended on the mountain to give humans the ability to shapeshift. That was where Jericho had tried to start his pack, and that was where Rylie’s life as she knew it had ended.

  “We’ve already got a team waiting there, but I came back for you.” Eleanor spread her arms wide, like she was offering a hug to him. He couldn’t remember ever having hugged his mom before. Not even in his earliest memories. “Let’s be a family again.”

  “It takes more than blood to be family,” Seth said.

  Anger clouded her expression. “You ungrateful little punk.”

  Gwyneth emerged from the house. Her hat hung over her back, and she cradled a shotgun in the crook of her arm like a baby. In the sunlight, her skin looked a fraction too pale, and her hair was more frazzled than usual. But her confident stride didn’t betray her weakness. She braced her feet a short distance up the hill. “I’m pretty sure the boy wants you to leave him alone.”

  She didn’t aim the gun, and she didn’t have to. Eleanor took a big step back, keeping both Seth and Gwyn in her sights. Her hands hovered at her hips like an Old West gunslinger.

  “Stay out of what’s none of your business, Gresham,” Eleanor growled.

  “You okay, Seth?” Gwyn called. He nodded. “You want this woman gone?”

  He hesitated. His mother glared at him, making it clear that he had better give the right answer if he didn’t want to deal with it later. “Yeah,” he said. Eleanor looked like she had been slapped.

  “You’re making a mistake,” she said.

  Gwyn pumped the shotgun. “You heard him.”

  Eleanor glared with black hatred, but she didn’t argue. She paused before getting in the SUV. “I’ll be at the motel another night if you change your mind.”

  He shielded his eyes from the sun and watched her drive down the hill to the highway. Gwyn unloaded the shotgun behind him. “What was that about?” she asked, pocketing the shells.

  “She said all the werewolves in the world are converging in one place. She’s going to try to kill them.”

  “Would ‘all the werewolves’ include Rylie and Abel?”

  “Yeah. It would.”

  “Then we better go save them,” she said, and she went inside to prepare.

  FOUR

  The Plan

  Once Rylie had control of her wolf again, she opened the door to her bedroom. Abel was seated on the floor outside as he oiled a handgun. “Having fun?” she asked, slipping out and shutting the door so he wouldn’t see how much damage she had inflicted on her bed.

  “Oh, yeah. This whole Bekah thing is great. You know how I love hunting wolves.” He dropped his rag and got up. “So what were you doing in there? Did you change?”

  Rylie glanced at the blood caked around her nails. “Nope. Just took a quick nap.”

  “Uh huh. Come on. The coven’s gathered while you were ‘sleeping.’”

  “What for?”

  Abel rolled his eyes. “Planning.”

  Usually, the coven liked to meet in the back of the fields. Rylie asked why they would do that when the house had a lot of big, empty rooms, and Scott gave her a dumb answer about connecting with the mother goddess through the Earth and trees and hearing her wisdom on the breeze. But they didn’t seem to need her windy wisdom that day, because they met in the sheltered patio area instead.

  Only Thistle, Blackbird, and Scott’s daughter Stephanie were able to attend. Everyone was gathered around the table except Tyas, who was hunched on the back step crying again. Rylie could count the number of times she had seen the younger girl smile on one hand.

  Rylie dragged a chair to the corner of the patio, where she hoped she wouldn’t have to be involved with the meeting. Abel stood at her side. He was almost as bad at being a team player as she was.

  “Looks like we’re all present,” Scott said. “We can get started.”

  “What about Bekah?” Stephanie asked. Scott’s daughter was a prim, rigid woman wearing a white lab coat and drumming her fingernails on the arm of her chair. She had never taken a shift at the sanctuary. She didn’t seem to know how to be friendly, much less take care of a house full of teen wolves.

  “Bekah is gone. She disappeared last night.”

  The witches gasped. Thistle got pale and had to grab the table to keep from falling over. She was a plump woman with graying hair who spent her shifts at the sanctuary baking cookies, weaving dream catchers, and ranting about spirit journeys.

  “Is she okay?” asked Blackbird.

  Scott rubbed a hand down his face. “I hope so. We only have theories about where she’s gone.”

  “Gray Mountain,” Levi said, pointing at a giant map of the United States he had put on the table. He had marked possible routes from the sanctuary to the mountains in permanent marker. “Twenty-five hundred miles away. If you drive without stopping, it’s a three-day drive. But none of the cars are missing, so Bekah’s not driving.”

  Thistle managed to gather her composure. “Isn’t Gray Mountain the place the kids have been seeing in their visions?”

  “Dreams,” Levi corrected.

  Scott nodded. “It’s an important location in the mythology surrounding werewolves. They say it’s where it all began. I don’t know why they would have visions about it—sorry, Levi—but it must mean something.”

  She focused on her hands in her lap. Just hearing the name of the mountain was enough to get the wolf stirring again.

  Don’t feel anything. Don’t think. Don’t lose control.

  “We don’t have any time to lose. If Bekah is traveling as a wolf, she could already be a hundred miles away. We need to find her as soon as possible,” Scott said.

  “And how are we supp
osed to do that, exactly?” Stephanie asked.

  “We’ll split into teams and take separate routes. Levi can go on foot to track her scent. I’ll follow in the van and head northeast, where we found the last traces of her trail. I was hoping that one of you could take the pickup and go straight to Gray Mountain, in case Bekah takes a train or some other mode of transportation.”

  Abel spoke up. “What about us?”

  “You and Rylie will stay here with Tyas.”

  “The hell we will!”

  Scott gave him a hard look. “We’ll talk about this later.” He faced the witches. “Well? Can any of you do it?”

  “Travel to Gray Mountain in pursuit of a werewolf?” Blackbird asked uneasily. “Even for Bekah… I don’t know, Scott. It could take her two months to walk cross-country as a human. That’s four moons. It’s a long time to be away from life.”

  “We’ll find her before she makes it across the country,” Scott said.

  “I’ll go,” Stephanie said. “There are enough doctors at the clinic to cover me, and if we’re releasing a small pack of flesh-hungry teenagers on the country, you might need my medical skills.”

  His brow furrowed. “Are you sure, Steph? You’ve barely settled into the job.”

  “Which means it will be easy for me to leave again.”

  “You know best,” he said. “Thank you. I appreciate the help.”

  Thistle was still trembling. “I have to agree with Blackbird. I’m sorry. Why don’t I stay at the sanctuary in case Bekah finds her way back?”

  “Great, perfect, whatever,” Levi said. “Great plan. Really great. So why are we sitting here? We need to go.”

  Scott rolled up the map. “You’re right. There’s no time to waste.”

  Everyone stood, and the meeting was over.

  Stephanie departed first, and Scott left with Levi an hour later. Rylie watched them load the van from her bedroom window. She was nauseated by nerves, but she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like she was going with them to the mountain.

  The van passed the gates with Levi loping in its wake, like a giant dog chasing cars.

  Rylie sat on the bed and stared at one of the paintings Bekah had left behind. She had depicted Gray Mountain perfectly, from the way the line of trees ended a short distance from the highest peaks, down to the warm golden waters of the lake. If she closed her eyes, she could see the wind-whipped pillars at the very top and remember the sting of ice under her paws.

  Another motor sounded outside. Probably Thistle going home to pick up a few things for her stay at the sanctuary.

  As soon as it was gone, Rylie’s door opened. Abel stood on the other side with a duffel bag over his shoulder. “Ready to go?” he asked. He was dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans with heavy hiking boots.

  “Huh?”

  He tossed the bag onto her floor. It was unzipped, so she could see it was only half-filled with clothes and a few guns with trigger locks. “I saved room for you. Throw some stuff in and let’s get out of here.” When she didn’t immediately move, he huffed. “What, you think we’re going to sit here while everyone else goes to Gray Mountain? After all the visions we’ve been having?”

  Rylie frowned. “You didn’t mention having the dreams before.”

  “That’s because I’m not a moronic ‘let’s share our dreams’ kind of person. I know a message when I see one. We have to go there.”

  “No way,” she said. “I can’t leave this room. What if I change?”

  “Then you change. Big deal.”

  She shook her head. “Scott wants us to stay, and they don’t need us to search for Bekah anyway. Nobody will find her faster than Levi.”

  “I don’t care about Bekah. We’re going straight to the mountain,” Abel said.

  As much as she tried not to, she could feel herself nodding along with him. It was like she wasn’t in control of her own body. But she hadn’t been dreaming about Gray Mountain’s gloomy forest for nothing. It wanted her to come back. The idea scared her as much as the idea of being free again.

  He crouched in front of her so they were on eye-level, resting his elbows on his knees. “Look, I’ve been a werewolf hunter for a lot longer than I’ve been a werewolf. I’m not a fan of letting you out, either. But I won’t let you kill anyone.”

  Rylie bit her lip. “Promise?”

  “Yeah. I promise.” His big gold eyes were open and honest for once. The scars on his face were healing, but it was still a chilling reminder of what kind of damage she could cause if she went wild.

  “If I did change, would you shoot me?”

  He laughed. “I did it before.”

  “I’m serious. If I get out of control, will you shoot me?” She caught his gaze and held it. Abel seemed to understand. He stopped smiling.

  “Seth wouldn’t forgive me if I killed you. Not ever.”

  “Forget about Seth. I’m not going anywhere unless you promise.”

  Slowly, he nodded.

  “I promise,” Abel said.

  Those two words hung in the air between them. Rylie thought the wolf would grow agitated at the threat of death, but it didn’t. Instead, as soon as she decided to go back to Camp Silver Brook, it grew eerily calm. “Okay, we can go,” she reluctantly agreed. She went to her drawers, but didn’t open them. “Give me a minute. Alone.”

  Abel rolled his eyes and left to wait in the hall.

  She packed a few things in the duffel bag. Abel and Seth used to travel a lot with their mom, so he was good at keeping his belongings down to a few essentials. He had one extra pair of jeans, plenty of socks, and a couple of black shirts. Not exactly fashion-forward.

  Rylie decided to follow his example and pack the same way. After some internal debate, she changed into clothes appropriate for the transformation: loose linen shirt and pants, and slippers. It was kind of the uniform for the werewolves at the sanctuary. It wouldn’t be warm enough if they made it to the mountain, but she didn’t have sweaters anymore. California was too temperate.

  Rylie hesitated, then grabbed the box of letters from Seth. She removed the letters, put the gun in the bottom, and then concealed it with the envelopes. The lid wouldn’t close after that, so she had to wrap hair ties around it to keep it from springing open.

  She stuck it in the side of the duffel bag and threw it over her shoulder. It had to be at least fifty pounds with all the guns and ammunition in it, but it felt like nothing more than a bulky pillow to her. There were a few advantages to being a werewolf. Not a lot, but a few.

  Abel was waiting at the end of the hallway. He tossed and caught a key ring in one hand repeatedly, and Rylie recognized it as the keys to the sanctuary’s gate.

  “Ready?” he asked. She nodded. “Great. Let’s take you back to Gray Mountain.”

  FIVE

  Hunters

  Seth waited until midnight, when he knew Gwyneth would be asleep, before leaving the ranch.

  They had spent the afternoon packing, but Aunt Gwyn had quickly gotten tired, and they agreed to set out for Gray Mountain in the morning instead of driving through the night. But Seth never planned on taking her with him.

  As strong as Gwyn was emotionally, she was weak physically. She couldn’t keep up at the ranch, much less on the road, and he was pretty sure she would get lax on taking her medication if they had werewolves as a distraction. And if Rylie discovered that Seth had let Gwyn go on a rescue mission at the expense of her health, she would eat him.

  So he waited. Once he was sure she was asleep, he picked the lock on the living room cabinet and listened for hints of motion from Gwyn’s bedroom. He managed to open it—which took five seconds, a new record for him—and got his rifle out without making a sound. The ammunition was kept on the highest kitchen shelf. He took as much as he could carry and slipped out the front door.

  Seth threw his bag in the backseat, put the Chevelle into neutral, and pushed it down the hill without starting the engine. Gwyn was sleeping with her window open.
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  He turned the car on at the bottom of the hill, but he paused before leaving to take a last look at what had been his home for the past four months. Gazing at the dark ranch filled him with a strange kind of weight. He had never felt so welcome or so happy anywhere else. The Gresham ranch was the closest thing to home he had ever known.

  Gwyn would probably have sold it by the time he found Rylie. He was never going to see it again.

  With that gloomy thought, he flicked on the headlights and tore down the highway.

  Seth left the windows rolled down as he drove. Going fifty-five miles an hour in the middle of the night was a little chilly, but it felt good, and it kept him awake. The road was a black blur speeding underneath him. It felt like he was flying over the pavement.

  The weight in his stomach grew as he got into town and parked by the motel.

  His mother’s black SUV was joined by a twin. They had license plates within one digit of each other, and bumper stickers that said “Union of Kopides and Aspides.” So they weren’t afraid of advertising themselves. Seth wasn’t sure what he thought of that. The existence of the supernatural wasn’t common knowledge, especially around those parts.

  He checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. Tanned skin. Straight hair. Leather jacket. Haunted, miserable expression. Lying to his mom wouldn’t be easy.

  Something tapped against his door.

  A man stood outside with a shotgun. Seth barely glimpsed it before a flashlight was shined into his eyes. “Identify yourself,” said the newcomer.

  Seth slowly raised his hands over his shoulders. “I’m Eleanor’s son.”

  “We heard you weren’t coming.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “All right. Get out of the car. No sudden motions.”

  Seth stepped out. The man he faced was shorter than him, and stocky. His shoulders were so broad that it looked like he would have a hard time getting through doorways. “Eleanor’s probably expecting me,” Seth said cautiously.

  To his surprise, the man laughed, put the flashlight away, and gave him a hard clap on the back. “Glad to have you! Didn’t mean to scare you, but we’ve got to be careful these days. Name’s Yasir. I’m Union Unit B9’s commander.”