by S. M. Reine
They shook hands. Yasir had a strong grip and rough palms.
“Commander, huh?”
“Yeah, yeah, what can I say? I left the Marines to escape the machine, and look what I’m doing now.”
“Does that mean you’re like me?”
“Are you a kopis? Then yeah. We all are, aside from the witches. And your mother, obviously.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “But between you and me, she’s a different kind of witch.”
Seth actually laughed. But then he remembered that Yasir was only there because he was hunting werewolves, and his laughter quickly faded.
Yasir led him to room six. All the lights were on inside, and he rapped on the door three times before opening it. Seth had to step over power cords running from the adjacent room to get inside. They had been taped to the threshold, but the bulge was a serious tripping hazard.
The Union had converted the motel room into a small mobile base. They had two laptops with three external monitors set up by the TV. Guns and melee weapons were set out in rows on one of the beds. They had a baton, a machete, and a pickaxe. The blades looked like they might have been dipped in silver.
Two other men stood in the back by the sink, quietly conversing. They fell silent when Seth walked in.
His mother was at the keyboard closest to the door. He didn’t think Eleanor even knew how to use a computer. She looked up when he entered, and even though she didn’t smile, there was a look of approval in her eyes. “You said you weren’t coming.”
“Gwyneth Gresham was listening,” Seth said with a shrug. “I said what I had to say.”
“And Rylie?”
He made himself look away from the silver machete. “We have to stop the werewolves. Whatever it takes.”
Eleanor nodded her praise.
“We leave at dawn,” she said.
The Union members slept for a few hours on the floor. Seth wasn’t tired, so he stood outside the door to enjoy the warm spring air. It hadn’t been getting frosty at night. He didn’t even need to wear a jacket.
Seth was going to miss that town. He knew everyone who lived in the houses down the road. That old guy who liked to be called Phyllis owned the place with the tin roof. Jean had all the Chihuahuas and the garden with the begonias. Robert, widely regarded as the town bum who drank too much of his stock at the liquor shop, liked to collect ceramic owls.
As weird as they were, each of them always had a friendly word for Seth if they caught him walking after school. Folks appreciated what he did at the Gresham ranch. He felt comfortable and safe there. Like he could really be happy, if only Rylie and Abel would come back.
As if summoned by his contented thoughts, Eleanor joined him in front of the door. “You ought to be sleeping,” she said.
“I will. Soon.” He nodded at the bumper stickers on the SUV. “So what’s up with this Union thing?”
“You might not have noticed while you were doing your very best to hide, but hunters are a dying breed. There used to be whole legions of men like you and your daddy. And now there’s just handfuls. Hell is winning, boy.”
He thought of warm days working Gwyn’s ranch and the smell of Rylie’s hair. “Yeah. I’ve noticed,” he said dully.
“Hunters are the last line of defense against evil before mankind falls. We’ve got to regroup. Take back what’s ours. The Union’s organizing and funding it.”
“Where does the money come from?”
“That’s none of your business,” Eleanor said. “You should enlist. Once we’re done exterminating the werewolves, they’ll train you and match you up with a good team. The Union can give you the direction that you sorely need.”
Seth couldn’t resist. “I’ve got direction, Mom.” He clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to suppress the surge of anger. “I guess I’ll go to sleep now.”
Before he could leave, his mother grabbed his chin in her crushing grip. Her fingernails dug into his jaw. Her lips were twisted with anger. “You think I’m stupid? I haven’t forgotten your teenage rebellion. Why the change of heart?”
“My heart hasn’t changed at all,” he ground out through gritted teeth. “I still hate you.”
Her entire body shook. “You little—”
“But this is unfinished business. I have to take care of it.”
“Finish it how?” she asked, eyes narrowed. “Finish your daddy’s legacy? Or do you have something else in mind?”
He shoved his mom’s arm away from him and rubbed drops of blood off of his chin. “I want to be a family again. Okay?”
The sentiment wasn’t enough to soften her.
“Good night, Seth. I’ll be watching you,” Eleanor hissed.
He slept in the backseat of the Chevelle with the doors locked. He didn’t trust his mother not to stab him in the middle of the night.
SIX
Cheeseburgers
Abel drove through the night. Rylie curled up in the backseat with her head pillowed on the duffel bag and watched orange bars of light slide past the sedan’s roof. Her mom would have freaked out if she had seen her daughter in a car without a seat belt, but there didn’t seem to be any point in buckling up. She could probably heal from a massive car wreck. And she didn’t really care if she couldn’t.
They had agreed to drive without stopping until they reached Gray Mountain. That meant they would take shifts behind the wheel, and she needed to sleep when it wasn’t her turn. But Rylie couldn’t get comfortable.
She could already imagine the smell of icy mountain air, lush with pine and soil and the animals in the forest. She could feel the breeze on her skin. She remembered splashing water from the brook on her face, letting it run through her fingers, and the way the sand sparkled under the surface.
But mostly, she remembered the pain and the fear.
I can’t go back.
Denying it didn’t make any difference. Abel kept driving. Mile by mile, the mountain drew nearer.
Eventually, the road noises and the motion of the car lulled her to sleep. It wasn’t restful. Trees and swollen moons and dead bodies flashed through her mind. She dreamed of crouching over Louise, a counselor who had been kind to her, and ripping out her throat. Rylie knew the taste of human blood on her tongue too well. She didn’t have to imagine what it felt like to kill.
She woke up three hours later with dry eyes, a sticky tongue, and a raging headache.
They had already left the state and were deep in the brown monotony of the desert. All she could see in every direction was dirt, dirt, and more dirt. Even the sagebrush struggled to survive.
“Is it my turn?” she asked, sitting up to see Abel over the back of the seat.
He had one finger on the steering wheel and an open bag of beef jerky in his lap. He gnawed on a hunk of dried meat that could have been half of a small cow. “Nah. I’m good.”
Rylie rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and stretched. Abel watched her in the rearview mirror.
“What? Is something on my face?”
He swallowed before speaking. “You were making noise in your sleep. Who’s Louise?”
Her cheeks flamed with heat. Oh God. At least she hadn’t been dreaming about Seth.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, climbing into the front seat. She had to push a bunch of open wrappers onto the floor to make a clear spot. Just six hours after setting out, Abel had already made the car a disaster. “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Too bad. There are no towns for thirty miles.”
“Really? Where are we?”
Abel squinted at the empty desert. “I’m guessing… nowhere. Check the map.”
He pointed to a crumpled paper on the dashboard. She smoothed it out on her lap. It was an actual map, with longitude and latitude and dots indicating cities. He had been crossing out towns as they passed and writing timestamps next to landmarks.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked. “There’s no way to tell where we are. I mean, we could be a
nywhere between here…” She stabbed their starting point in California. “And here.” She pointed at their destination.
“Are you kidding?”
“Forget it, let me grab my phone. I have GPS.”
“Don’t use that crap,” Abel said as she searched the duffel bag’s pockets for her phone. “You can’t tell me you don’t know how to use a map.”
“It’s archaic. I’m not a caveman.” She tried to turn on her cell phone, but it was dead. “Oh, no! I forgot my car charger!”
“Looks like you’ll have to use caveman technology,” he said.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
When they finally reached “town,” which turned out to be a gas station and a couple of trailers, Abel bought more jerky, a giant hot dog, and boiled eggs. “Your turn to drive,” he announced, flopping in the back of the car.
When they got moving again, he was asleep in thirty seconds.
It left Rylie with nothing to do but stare at the empty road. The desert stretched endlessly around them. They couldn’t get any radio stations in the middle of nowhere, so the only music available was a cassette tape of Santana’s greatest hits. Rylie enjoyed listening to it for a few minutes, but when it cut off with a grinding noise, she didn’t know how to start the tape over again.
So she drove in silence, alone with her thoughts.
It wasn’t a pleasant place to be. After months of trying to suppress her memories of the massacre at Camp Silver Brook, all it took was one bad dream to bring it back. Louise hadn’t been the only one who had died at camp. Amber had been the first to go. Rylie had seen her body, and she could remember the ragged shreds of her throat and bloodstained hands. She had gone out trying to protect herself, and failed. Humans didn’t stand a chance against werewolves.
None of the humans that Rylie had killed back home had fought against her. She had attacked too fast.
Trying to push away those thoughts, she focused on the rippling heat lines on the horizon instead. The sun was climbing fast. It was getting hot. She punched the air conditioning button and sighed at the chilly air.
After a couple of hours, bushes started to appear, and then trees, and signs of human life followed. Abel woke up when Rylie parked in front of the first fast food place she saw.
“What’s going on?” he asked, instantly alert.
“I’m hungry.”
“So eat some jerky. We’re not stopping for lunch.”
She turned off the car. “I can’t drive forever. It’s boring. I want to walk around.” Rylie stepped out with the keys, leaving him with no choice but to follow her.
It looked like the restaurant might have been the only burger joint in town, and they had hit the lunch rush. The line to order was all the way out the door. Rylie took position at the back. Abel lurked at her side, grumpy and puffy-faced from sleep. “It’s going to take forever to get across the country if you want to stop every few minutes.”
“You were asleep for five hours.”
“Really?” He looked a tiny bit mollified. “I can take the next leg. And we’re driving until the tank runs dry. You got it?”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
There was a time when Rylie had been scared of Abel. He towered over her head and shoulders, and all the death threats were pretty unsettling. But things had changed. Hanging out for four months and seeing all his dumb quirks—like the fact that he enjoyed John Hughes movies—shifted the balance of power a lot. It helped that she could kick his butt as a werewolf, too.
That didn’t stop everyone from staring as they entered the restaurant. Abel towered over her head and shoulders, and his scars were pretty conspicuous.
The tables inside were completely full, but someone left just as they got in. “I’ll get a table,” Rylie said. “Order a bunch of cheeseburgers, okay?”
He threw an ironic salute at her. “Of course, your majesty.”
She hurried to the table before anyone else could take it, and stretched her legs out on the seat across from her. Changing positions after hours in a car was nice, even if the hard benches weren’t comfortable.
Someone approached the table. “Are you okay?”
Rylie tensed before she looked up. It was an old lady with a white perm. She relaxed a fraction of an inch. “What?”
“I saw you come in with that man and wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.” She kept her voice in a low whisper, as if worried that Abel would hear her over the clamor of voices in the burger place. Her eyes were narrow. Calculating. Trying to decide if a petite blond girl was really with someone as intimidating as Abel.
It probably shouldn’t have been funny, but Rylie had to laugh anyway. She was a hundred times more dangerous than Abel. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, dear?” the old lady pressed.
Was she okay? No. Not at all. And she wasn’t safe with Abel, either, but that was beside the point. Rylie plastered on her most innocent smile. “I’m fine. Thank you so much.”
Obviously, that wasn’t the right answer. The woman gave her a disapproving look and walked away.
Abel dropped the receipt on the table. “We’re number seventy. Who was that?”
“She wanted to know if you kidnapped me.”
Any hint of mirth in his eyes was gone immediately. He glared at the woman, who had sat down with a group of other people her age. They were whispering amongst themselves. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her you’re a hairy monster who’s feeding me a last meal before my horrible, gruesome death. What do you think?”
“Stupid old cow,” he muttered.
Having people stare and whisper at Abel threw him into a sullen silence for the next several minutes, leaving Rylie with nothing to do but shred a napkin into progressively tinier pieces. It took almost twenty minutes for their number to get called. Abel slouched low on the bench, and she had to climb over his legs to get the tray.
He must have spent half their cash on cheeseburgers. There were over a dozen. But they smelled too good for her to complain, so Rylie ripped one open and ate it on the way back to the table. “We’ll put this place out of business,” she said, starting on her second burger.
Abel removed the buns from three of the cheeseburgers and stacked the patties together. “Good. So who’s Louise?”
Rylie wadded up one of the wrappers and chucked it into the trash. “She was a counselor at Camp Silver Brook.” She wiped some of the ketchup off a burger before taking a big, cheesy bite.
“If you’re having nightmares about her, I’m betting she’s dead.”
“Yeah. Louise is dead.” The hamburger was a thick lump in her throat. “She was nice to me.”
He finished his three patties and opened another one. “You know, whatever’s calling us to the mountain won’t be good. Werewolves aren’t good. I bet this is some super Alpha werewolf monster thing.”
“Have you seen a super Alpha werewolf monster thing before?”
“Naw. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’ve seen Alphas collect packs of werewolves, and they’re always the meanest, the hungriest, and the most vicious. Hunters don’t stand a chance against them.” He laughed bitterly. “Guess it’s a good thing I’m not on the human team anymore.”
“Maybe it’s not anything like that,” Rylie said. “Maybe we’re just getting called home.”
He snorted. “Home?”
She shrugged, poking at a pickle she had dropped onto the table. “I don’t know.”
The bell over the door, and two more people stepped into line. A strange smell caught her attention as the line of people standing by the door shifted. It set every alarm bell in her head ringing before she could even process what the odor meant.
It was woody and earthy with an underlying musk. It smelled like wolf.
Rylie went still. “Do you smell that?”
Abel’s eyes were already scanning the people standing in line. His golden eyes narrowed. “Wer
ewolves,” he muttered.
That made the restaurant about two people too crowded for Rylie. She swallowed the last burger, balled up her trash, and threw it all out.
They’re in my territory.
The thought rose to the surface above everything else, even though she knew it was stupid. Some burger joint in Idaho was hardly her territory.
But there was no talking reason with her inner wolf. It swelled and grew, and her fingernails began to itch. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, grabbing a fistful of napkins. The words came out slurred and thick. Her teeth were loosening.
He saw her hand and grabbed her wrist. “Stop it. Not here.”
The pinch of his grip only aggravated the wolf. “It’s not my choice. Let me go!”
Abel ignored her and steered them out the back, which led onto a patio. The wind was picking up as clouds moved over the sun, so there weren’t as many people dining outside. Only one table was occupied, and when they saw Abel’s massive form lumber through the doorway, they finished very quickly.
Rylie grabbed the fence with both hands, trying to ground herself in reality despite the wolf’s growing fury. She shut her eyes to focus. She wanted to feel the wind in her face and the metal bar in her hands. There was a cell phone in her pocket and a headband holding her blond hair—human hair—out of her face.
Human things. Not wolf things.
They’re in my territory. Fight them. Kill them.
Abel’s deep voice rose behind her.
“What are you doing?”
It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t speaking to her. She took a slow, deep breath, and turned around.
His broad back shielded her from the newcomers, but she could smell the wolves again. The responding voice had a Canadian accent. “We don’t want a fight. We smelled you and wanted to see what’s up.”
Rylie peered around Abel’s shoulder. The speaker was thin and scruffy with a graying beard. His companion was a short woman with a pixie cut and overalls. Their dirty clothing didn’t fit right, like they had fished it out of a trashcan.