by S. M. Reine
“You’re werewolves,” Abel said. One of his hands reached back, and Rylie realized he was moving for his gun.
A fight.
Rylie grabbed the fence again and took deep breaths.
“We’re only passing through,” said the woman. She paused, and then added, “We don’t have to fight for territory… right?”
Abel’s low growl clearly meant he was wondering the same thing. “Where are you going?”
“The same place you are, I bet,” said the man. “We thought we were the only ones heading to the big mountain by the lake until we came across another one of us doing the same thing.”
“Have you seen many others?”
It was the woman who responded. “We just ran across the one guy in Boise.”
“So you haven’t seen a kid wandering around?” Abel asked. “Curly hair, about this tall… She can go wolf whenever she wants, so she might not look human. Kinda light brown fur?”
“She can turn at will?” asked the man, his voice sharpening. “No way.”
The wind shifted and blew the smell of the two other werewolves at Rylie. Her whole jaw ached as her teeth loosened.
They’re in my territory.
“Shut up,” she whispered to herself, quietly enough that nobody else would hear.
“She’s just a kid,” Abel said. “Her name’s Bekah. Rebekah Riese. If you see her, tell her that her dad is trying to find her.”
“We’ll do that,” said the woman. “Guess we’ll see you on the mountain.”
Rylie didn’t hear their footsteps, but she felt them move away. They slipped into the forest beyond the road.
Her pulse pounded in her temples, and she still felt dizzyingly close to transformation, but it got easier to hang on to her human body as they got farther away. When their scent was nothing but a stale odor on the breeze, she opened her eyes and spread her hands in front of her. She had only lost two fingernails this time. They would grow back in a minute. They always did.
Abel waited nearby. “Are you human?” he asked when she turned around. She nodded. “Get in the car. We’re going.”
SEVEN
Yasir
Yasir talked a lot while they were on the road. He had a lot of weird, discomfiting stories that were also somehow entertaining.
Seth learned three important things from the older hunter as they followed the short convoy of black SUVs: first, that Yasir had killed a lot of people in the Marines, and he wasn’t very sorry about it; second, that the Union made him commander specifically for that reason; and finally, that the Union was turning that ruthlessness toward hunting a specific group of werewolves.
“We’ve been following this guy for the last five days,” he explained, typing rapidly on a laptop in the passenger’s seat of the Chevelle. “I’m waiting for him to hook up with other wolves before we hit him, but we want to catch their cluster before they reach the mountain. We pinned one of them with a tracker back in Vancouver. See?”
He swiveled his screen around so Seth could glance at it while he drove. A squiggly blue line traced a long route from Canada down through Washington, and then into Idaho.
The Union must have made a pretty big detour to visit Seth. He wasn’t sure how he felt about his mom going so far out of her way to ruin his life.
“What are you going to do when you catch the werewolves?” he asked.
Yasir looked surprised. “Kill them. What did you expect?”
“I thought Union command might have other plans.”
“Ah, well.” He returned his attention to the laptop. “There are rules about what we do. We have to verify lycanthropy before the kill, ideally with a visual confirmation. And we collect teeth or skins to keep them counted.”
“That’s what my dad did, too,” Seth said.
Yasir took a couple books out of his bag. The top one was a new edition of “The Legends of Gray Mountain,” but the second one was tattered and yellowing. Seth didn’t have to look at the cover to know what the title was, or who the author would be. His stomach gave a funny flop when he saw it.
“Your dad did write the book on werewolf hunting.” Yasir flapped the pages in the air. “The Union used it to develop regulations.”
“So we can’t kill them until the next moon anyway.”
The commander typed faster. “There are ways to make a wolf turn before the moon hits.” Yasir’s tone suddenly changed. “Take the next exit.” He thumbed a device in his ear. “Hear me? Take the next exit.”
Seth glanced at the laptop screen. The blue line was flashing.
“What’s going on?”
“He stopped. We’re going to check on him,” Yasir said.
They exited by a small town that was populated with a gas station and three houses, and then passed it. The farther they got from the freeway, the bumpier the road became. It lost the lines halfway across a field of cattle. Yasir told the convoy to stop.
The entire team got out. One of the other men, who went by the name “Stripes” for no reason Seth could see, tossed a sniper rifle to Yasir.
“What are we doing?” Seth asked as the commander handed the gun to him and took another.
“Can you shoot?”
“Yeah, I’m a pretty good shot. Why?”
“You can come with me. You all stay with the vehicles to provide support.” He tapped his earpiece. Seth felt Eleanor’s eyes follow him as he climbed over the fence into the field. Yasir led him to the edge, which was on the side of a hill overlooking more farms. “So tell me, Seth, son of Eleanor—you just graduated from high school, right? What do you want to do with yourself?”
“I want to go to medical school.”
“Doctor, huh? Noble. Where are you going to college?”
It was too embarrassing to admit the truth. “I haven’t decided.”
The commander cut the barbed wire fence with clippers and let Seth through to the other side. He slid a short distance down the hill, found a flat spot behind a boulder, and stopped. He propped his elbows on the rock to scan the farms below with binoculars.
He spoke into his earpiece. “Is he still there?” Seth couldn’t hear the response, but Yasir seemed satisfied by whatever they said. “You know what, kid? I like you. You remind me of myself before I went into the Marines.”
It took Seth a moment to realize Yasir wasn’t speaking to the team anymore. He wasn’t sure what to say. Fortunately, the commander didn’t seem to expect a response, and kept talking.
“My dad’s gone, too. My surviving family is on the other side of the world. And my mom was a terrible—really terrible—person before she died.” He propped the sniper rifle on the boulder, and gestured for Seth to do the same. “But you’re a good guy. I can tell. You’ve got a lot of heart. Maybe too much.” He peered through the eyepiece. “Life’s a lot easier if you learn to let go, like I did during my tours of duty. Look behind the farm.”
Seth did as instructed. It took him a few seconds of tracking the scope along the fence to reach the farm, and when he did, it took him another few seconds to find the people waiting around it.
“Are those farmers?”
“Look at the way they move,” Yasir said. “Tell me if they’re farmers. Take your time.”
He watched the group walk. There were two women and one man. He paced and waved his hands in the air, and his head twitched occasionally, like there were flies buzzing around his face that he couldn’t swat. One of the women glared at him. The other didn’t look at her companions at all.
At first, they looked like ordinary people. Angry, but normal. But Seth had learned a few things when he hunted werewolves as a child. The one on the ground wasn’t ignoring the others; she was watching their surroundings, fearful of being discovered. The man looked like he had psychosis, which was common in late-stage lycanthropy. And the standing woman looked every inch the predator.
Seth couldn’t make out their irises, even with telescopic vision, but he had seen enough werewolves to know them
on sight. A lead weight settled in his gut.
“Those aren’t farmers,” he said, voice hoarse.
“Like I said, Seth, you’re a good guy. So that’s why I want you to help me on this one.” Yasir rested a hand on Seth’s shoulder. It was heavy enough to force him to lower his upper chest to the rock. “Listen to me: take a deep breath and let it out. Keep your sights steady. Then shoot the standing woman.”
Seth couldn’t breathe, much less fire. “But they’re human.”
“I told you, there’s more than one way to make a wolf change. Look at this.” He ejected the cartridge from his gun and showed one of the rounds to Seth. The tip was silver. “This is a soft alloy that pulverizes on impact. It will hurt to get hit, but they won’t die.” He jammed it back into the rifle. “One of the better Union inventions, if you ask me.”
The intent was painfully clear: Yasir wanted to give them silver poisoning. It was the fastest, easiest way to make a werewolf lose its mind. Given enough time, they would start changing uncontrollably between moons, although that group already looked stressed enough to be on the edge of snapping.
“So we shoot them,” Seth said slowly, “and then they change in a couple of days so we can identify and kill them.”
Yasir looked pleased that he had caught on. “Go ahead. Do it.”
Seth put his eye to the scope again and relocated the standing woman. She didn’t resemble Rylie at all. His girlfriend was skinny and blond. The woman was broad-shouldered, tall, and muscular. She was probably at least his mom’s age.
But when he looked at her, all he could see was Rylie.
“You shoot her, I will shoot the man, and then I’ll pick off the one on the ground before she can run,” Yasir said in a low voice behind his ear. “Three easy shots.”
A year before, Seth wouldn’t have cared about firing. He had killed werewolves. Inflicting silver poisoning wouldn’t be the worst thing he had done to score a kill. But that had been when he thought that werewolves lost their soul after the bite. Before he knew the truth.
Did the people down there have brothers and girlfriends, too?
But if he didn’t shoot, the Union would know he was up to something. And knowing Eleanor, he would get tied up somewhere. He didn’t know how he could reach Rylie and Abel without maintaining the ruse.
The woman walked a few steps. Seth kept his sights on her.
“On the count of three,” Yasir said, getting into position.
What were three strangers’ lives in comparison to Rylie’s?
“One… two…”
Seth’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“Three.”
EIGHT
Midnight
Rylie dreamed of Gray Mountain again. She dreamed of its frozen peak, the tangled forest, and the dead people on the shore of the lake.
When she woke up the next morning, they were two states away from where she had fallen asleep, and they were in the middle of rolling hills. Abel decided they should take a short break at a rest stop bathroom. She agreed.
Rylie took the gun with her.
She locked herself in a stall, eased the weapon from the box, and hefted its weight in her hands. She chewed on her bottom lip.
The gun wasn’t heavy. She could probably bench press a car if she wanted to (which she didn’t), so a pistol definitely wasn’t a problem. But it made her feel heavy to look at it, to rub her fingers over the mechanisms, to open it up and pull out the silver bullet again.
The sting of silver on her skin and in her nose was a welcome burn. It hurt, but not the way that losing her fingernails hurt, or the way that spitting human teeth onto the ground like falling stars hurt. It was a pain she could control. In fact, the gun gave her a lot of control—the choice to never change again.
What if she had turned into a werewolf at the burger joint? There must have been more than fifty people crammed in the restaurant with their families. She imagined the faces of smiling children and happy parents, and she thought of killing them. Leaving behind nothing but blood.
Rylie couldn’t do it again. She just couldn’t.
The gun gave her a choice.
She slipped her finger over the trigger and wondered where she should aim. Rylie had been shot before. She wasn’t scared of how it would feel. She was only scared that she would survive it.
A fist pounded on the door to the bathroom. “Rylie!” Abel shouted. He sounded annoyed.
She considered her choices: doing it right that moment so she wouldn’t have to get back in the car traveling to Gray Mountain, or putting the gun away and hoping she could transform again without hurting anyone. Her breath was stuck in her chest.
Did she really want to do it?
He knocked again.
“You’re taking forever,” he said with a note of teasing in his voice. “Did you fall in?”
“Leave me alone!” Rylie yelled back.
She took Seth’s letters out of the box, put the gun in the bottom, and covered it again. Her cheeks burned. Her heart was beating too fast.
“Come on, we still have at least another day of driving.”
She went outside. Abel had his fist raised to knock again, but he stopped when she emerged. He looked half-irritated and half-suspicious. “Can’t I use the bathroom alone?” she snapped.
“What’s the problem? All those burgers getting to you?”
Her cheeks flushed. “You’re gross.”
Abel laughed. Then his eyes fell on the box, and his amusement vanished. She thought he might have looked sympathetic for an instant before he reassumed his bored, I-don’t-care-about-anything look, but she also might have imagined it.
When he spoke again, he was more serious. “I did some looking around. I have something to show you.”
He led her to the edge of the rest stop, which was separated from an empty field by a span of gravel. Abel tilted his head back to sniff the air, and Rylie followed suit. The faint odor of werewolves made her hackles rise.
They paced the gravel for a few minutes as she drank in the smells. The pheromones were telling. There had been three of them: a middle-aged man and two young women. They were sweating a lot, and they smelled sick.
Following the odor to the fence, Rylie crouched down. A pile of vomit dried next to one of the posts.
“What do you think?” Abel asked. “Two of them?”
“Three,” she said. What was making them sick?
“So it’s not the same people we saw at the restaurant.”
She shook her head. “How big is this thing?” she asked, hugging the closed box of letters to her chest. “We’ve already come across five of them. That’s a lot of werewolves.”
“Only one way to find out,” Abel said. “It’s your turn to drive, by the way.”
Rylie put the box on the floor of the car. Her hands lingered on the lid for a moment as she contemplated the gun one more time. It made her feel better to know that the choice was waiting for her, even if she hadn’t made the decision yet.
But she would soon. Very soon.
She got back on the freeway.
Time didn’t make very much sense on the road. Cars and towns blurred past them. They stopped and started and slept fitfully and ate gas station food. Farms turned to cities, and then became farms again, which turned to forest.
Rylie woke up disoriented the next night, and it took her an entire minute to realize she had woken up at all. At first, she thought she was still dreaming about Gray Mountain, but then she realized that she was resting on leather seats. It was completely dark aside from the yellow-green glow of dashboard lights, which projected Abel’s shadow on the roof of the car.
They weren’t moving anymore.
“Are we there?” she asked, sitting up with a small groan. Even werewolf healing couldn’t do anything for the stiffness in her muscles.
Abel didn’t respond. His fists were clenched on the steering wheel.
She cleared her throat and tried again.
“Are we there?”
“Shh,” he said.
She peered out the window. She could make out the trunks of towering trees and smell pine through the car vents. It looked familiar. They must have been getting close. So why had they stopped?
Rylie climbed into the front seat.
“Don’t move,” Abel whispered. “We’re not alone.”
She followed his gaze and noticed a group of murky shapes a few feet away. Rylie leaned toward the vent and took a deeper sniff, closing her eyes to savor the subtle odors. Distant ice water, soil, rotting plants. But there was also the musk of fur and feces.
The shapes were a herd of deer. They didn’t seem to have noticed the car.
“I don’t think they’ll attack us,” Rylie whispered back.
He shook his head. “There are werewolves out there.”
“In wolf form?” she asked. He nodded. “That’s not possible. It isn’t a moon.”
Then she saw it—a flash of fur.
Even a glimpse of it was enough to stir the wolf inside of her. Rylie was still groggy and half-asleep, but her wolf wasn’t, and it responded to the sight of another werewolf too fast for her to fight back. Her ribs creaked as it swelled inside of her.
She grunted, wrapped her arms around herself, and bowed her head to her knees.
Abel didn’t seem to notice. He was too transfixed by the deer.
Her shoulders twitched. Her spine ached. Rylie focused with all her strength on human things, like Seth had told her to do, but looking at the speedometer and her shoes and the seams of the leather seats wasn’t enough this time. Not when she could smell those deer. She was so hungry, and now that she had seen them, they were her deer—but that wolf was already out there, already on the hunt, and it was going to get them before she could if she didn’t move fast—
One of her cheekbones popped.
The sound caught Abel’s attention. “Not right now,” he hissed. She whimpered as her mouth flooded with blood and her teeth fell onto her tongue. “Rylie, this is not the time. Get a grip.”