by S. M. Reine
It wasn’t a dream. She was really at Camp Silver Brook again.
She sank to her knees and began to cry.
The stress of the long months away from Seth and Aunt Gwyn finally caught up with her. The stress of killing people, and the pain of shapeshifting into a wolf’s body. Her dad’s passing. The regret of watching those people die at camp. Losing everything she cared about in her life. And once she let the tears flow, they didn’t stop. She sobbed into her hands and watched the dirt absorb her tears.
The grief wasn’t enough to summon the wolf. It liked to feed off her anger and fear, not her sadness. But her skin prickled impatiently. Now that she was on Gray Mountain, the wolf wanted to move, to hunt, to climb to the peak and find what had been calling to it for weeks.
She felt like gravity had tripled. She couldn’t move.
Footsteps shuffled on the path. Rylie looked up, and through bleary eyes, she saw a familiar figure wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. For an instant, she thought it was Seth. That was the first place she had seen him—she had been sitting outside the office, and he had paddled past in a canoe stolen from the recreation shed on the boys’ side of the lake. But when she wiped the tears out of her eyes, she recognized Abel’s broad shoulders and scarred cheek.
He sat down next to her, but politely kept his eyes toward the lake. He wasn’t nice about many things, but he had always been nice about respecting Rylie’s modesty. It might have helped that Scott enforced a pretty strict “don’t be creepy about sky-clad werewolves” rule at the sanctuary. She liked to think it was because she was growing on him.
“Glad to see you’re okay,” he said.
She sniffled hard. “I’m cold.”
It made her feel a little better when he rolled his eyes. “Can’t you try hanging on to your clothes for longer than a few hours? Jeez.” But he removed his t-shirt and handed it over. The unscarred side of his bare chest pebbled with cold.
Rylie tugged it over her head. Abel was so big that the shirt was more like a dress, and it almost brushed her dirty knees. “Thanks,” she said. She was still crying hard enough that it took her two tries to speak.
“Whatever.”
There was a little more bitterness in his tone than usual, and his face was carved with hard, angry lines. He would probably pick on her if she asked what he was thinking about, so she asked, “Where’s the car?”
“We left it in the forest five miles back. Someone broke the windshield.”
“Five miles? Wow.” She looked down at her bare legs and couldn’t even work up the energy to blush. “Can we look for clothes? The shirt is kinda breezy, and I’m not hiking back to the car without shoes. Or pants. Or underwear.”
“Wimp,” Abel said.
Rylie was ready for his insult. “Troll,” she shot back.
“Troll? That’s the best you could come up with? You suck.”
“Shut up and help me break into the office.”
Normally, that should have earned a laugh from him, but he just grunted.
She distracted herself from the growing presence of the wolf, and the accompanying anxiety clenching low in her belly, by looking for the biggest rock she could find. Rylie picked up a rock the size of her fist, but dropped it when she saw another the size of a softball.
They stood side by side in front of the empty office. One of the windows had already been shattered and was covered in boards. The door was padlocked.
“What makes you think there are clothes in the office?” Abel asked.
She swallowed hard. “That’s where they kept the lost and found.”
Hefting the rock in her hand, she hurled it at the remaining window. It shattered. The experience was way too satisfying.
Abel punched his arm through the glass, clearing out a hole big enough for them to fit through. He got a little scraped up in the process, but by the time they were both inside, he had healed again.
The last time Rylie had been in the office, she had been in trouble for stealing a counselor’s car to sneak into the boys’ camp. The walls were still covered in the same kitschy posters. The mini-fridge stood open and empty. Papers were scattered across the desk. Everyone had left in a big hurry.
A closet in the back served as the lost and found. Rylie searched through boxes for clothes that would fit and came up with an ugly pair of shorts, hiking boots that were a size too big, and a yellow tank top that bagged around the chest and arms.
She shut the door and changed in total darkness. When she emerged to give Abel his shirt back, he didn’t even laugh at her horrible outfit.
“Okay, I give up. What’s wrong?” Rylie asked. “Did I eat someone last night?”
He snorted. “I wish you had.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” He put his shirt back on, and Rylie stared at him, waiting for an answer to her question. He sighed and flopped into the chair behind the front desk. “Two werewolves got shot last night. I found the third one dead in the woods a mile east of here while you were still chasing bunny rabbits. Kind of looked like a blood vessel in her brain popped or something.”
“Who would shoot someone out here?” she asked. “We’re miles from the city. The nearest people are at the ranger station, and they wouldn’t shoot a wolf… would they? Not with silver bullets, for sure.”
“They weren’t rangers.” His voice heated. “They were hunters.”
A chill ran through her. “Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh.’ Thanks so much for adding to the conversation.”
Rylie crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, sorry I humored you and went on your stupid spontaneous road trip to Gray Mountain! It’s not like I’m adding anything to the experience. I should have just stayed home.”
Abel stayed seated. His whole face was twisted with anger, but it was not directed at her. He didn’t even seem to hear her outburst. “They had these big black SUVs with antenna and floodlights and stuff. Expensive equipment. They chased the werewolves down. And… I saw one of them give chase on foot.” He glanced at her. “That hunter went after you specifically.”
“Well, he obviously wasn’t very good. I’m fine.” She spread her arms wide. “We can deal with hunters.”
“It’s not that,” Abel said.
“Then what?”
He paused for a long time, like he was trying to decide if he really wanted to say what he was thinking or not. Abel heaved a deep breath and gave Rylie a very serious look. She had never seen him look quite that somber before.
“The hunter was Seth.”
TWELVE
Outpost
“Where is she?”
Yasir’s roar woke Seth up with a jolt. He sat upright in his sleeping bag and stared around the forest with bleary eyes.
Morning had dawned fresh and bright over the mountain. Stripes was still sleeping on the other side of the miniature camping stove, which was currently heating a pot of unidentifiable Union rations, but Jakob and Yasir were both awake. They were tearing through camp. Yasir flung open the doors to the SUV and kicked over a stack of crates they had temporarily unloaded to provide shelter.
Seth got to his feet and dusted off. “What’s wrong?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral.
Yasir rounded on him. His fist was clenched so tightly on a shotgun that his knuckles were pale. “She’s gone! That woman is gone!”
And then Seth noticed a pair of round, frightened eyes from the open door of the SUV behind the commander. Bekah’s curls were always wild, but bed-head made her look extra crazy that morning. But she was still there. Seth had been half-certain that she would have left.
So if Bekah hadn’t run away in the middle of the night…
His fear turned to dread.
“Eleanor,” Seth said.
Yasir wheeled around to shout into the forest. “Eleanor!” His call bounced off the slopes and came back at them threefold. A flock of birds exploded from the trees.
Gone.
Seth did a quick search of the camp, but he couldn’t find his father’s book, his mother’s gun, or anything else she had brought along. One of the backpacks was missing, too. She must have gotten up in the early hours and left while everyone was sleeping.
Yasir whirled on Bekah. She paled under his glare. “Did you see anything?”
“I saw someone leave this morning, but it was pretty dark. I couldn’t tell who it was,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Was it a woman? What did she take?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” She glanced nervously between the men. “Can I go now?”
Yasir ignored her plea.
Stripes zipped up his pants as he walked out of the forest and wiped his hands clean on his shirt. “Good riddance,” he said, yawning. The anger and disgust in Yasir’s eyes said that he didn’t agree.
“Was she not supposed to leave?” Seth asked. “It’s not like she was a prisoner, right?”
The commander’s brows knitted together. The expression spoke a thousand words. “Come here, kid,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Help me search outside the camp. Stripes, Jakob—pack up! We’re getting out of here in ten minutes. You hear me?”
Seth followed Yasir far enough away that the other men wouldn’t be able to hear. But they didn’t search. Both of them had already come to the same conclusion: Eleanor was long gone.
With his arms folded, Yasir’s biceps were each as big around as a tree, and corded with veins. “Your mother raided a Union camp. She stole a lot of things. Vandalized a library. They were going to press charges against her—not with the police; we go by our own laws—but when they realized that she was married to the guy who wrote the book on werewolves, they decided to put her to good use instead. They told her it was cooperation or a prison camp. So…” He gave a stiff shrug.
“So she wasn’t a team member. You were keeping an eye on her.”
“Something like that.” He threw his hands in the air. “She hadn’t shown any signs of running for weeks! She agreed to go peacefully as long as we let her reunite with her son and kill werewolves, and we’ve done both. I was sure that she would be easy to control once we had you.” His fist cracked into his palm. “I should have never let my guard down!”
“You can’t blame yourself. My mom’s clever,” Seth said.
“She’s a conniving snake. That’s what she is.”
He didn’t argue. That was as good a description of Eleanor as anything else. “My guess? She wanted you to get her to the mountain. Otherwise, she would have escaped weeks ago.”
“Oh yeah? If you understand her so well, then tell me, kid: Where did she go? What’s she doing?”
He turned to stare at the distant peak of Gray Mountain touched by morning sunlight. The birds were silent in the trees, making it eerily still. He tried to think like his mother thought. He had seen her go through what she called “the process” so many times that he could have emulated her methods in his sleep.
“You said she wanted to reunite with her son and kill werewolves,” Seth said slowly. Yasir nodded impatiently.
Eleanor tried to put herself in the position of werewolves when she hunted. She knew how they lived and where to find them. She could predict their behaviors as easily as Seth could predict hers.
But if she wanted to kill werewolves, the best way to do it would have been to stay with the Union. So if she ran away, it would be to do something that they didn’t want her to do—or something she knew Seth wouldn’t let her do.
A terrible thought entered his mind. It was so bad he didn’t even want to contemplate it. “Eleanor has two sons. She probably didn’t mention that, because my brother is a werewolf,” Seth said. “He’s likely to come here, too.”
“You think she’s going to try to save him?” Yasir asked, eyes narrowing with calculation. He was probably trying to decide if that could be Seth’s motivation, too.
“No. I’m pretty sure she wants to kill him.”
It soon turned out that Eleanor hadn’t just vanished in the night. She had also employed what Abel had taught her about mechanics to disable the SUVs.
Yasir stared under the hood of the car at the severed tubes. “I’m going to shoot her.”
“You’ll have to catch her first. What do we do?” Seth asked.
“We walk.” He slammed the hood shut. “Another unit has established an outpost halfway up the mountain. It’s ten miles uphill—not a very long drive. Too bad about the cars.” He delivered a vicious kick to the tire.
While everybody else loaded backpacks, Jakob backtracked to look for the place they had abandoned the Chevelle. He returned an hour later while they were still trying to cram one more laptop into an overstuffed backpack. “I found the Chevelle’s tracks, but the vehicle is gone,” he reported. “Eleanor must have taken it.”
Yasir swore fluently in a language Seth didn’t recognize or understand. He could tell it was pretty foul without understanding it.
Everybody loaded themselves down with a backpack of the necessities—even Bekah—and left the rest behind.
It was a very long hike up the mountain.
Whatever training the Union put their hunters through must have been pretty good. Seth thought he was in great shape. Bekah wasn’t exactly a couch potato, either. But they could barely keep up with the rest of the unit. The men powered through the forest at top speed despite carrying fifty-pound backpacks.
When Seth and Bekah fell behind for the third time, he whispered, “You could run now.”
She was red-faced and breathing hard. “They’ll blame you.”
“Who knows what the Union outpost will be like? You should go.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” She gave him that big smile.
“Hurry up, kids!” Yasir shouted back at them. And then they were walking too fast to keep talking at all.
They were on the same side of the lake as the boys’ camp, but they took a straight path up the mountain and avoided the cabins. The quality of the air changed as they increased in elevation. It grew thinner and colder. The ground got muddier, and then he saw actual patches of snow. His feet stuck to the ground with every step.
The trees began thinning again. He spotted a glimmer of water over the side of the trail.
Breaking away from the rest of the group, he walked up to the edge and took a long look at Golden Lake as the midday sun rose overhead. He remembered standing on that exact point the previous summer. The cabins would be pinpricks of yellow at night, like stars that had fallen into the trees.
He wondered if Rylie was down there yet.
Someone yelled at him. He hiked the backpack higher on his shoulders and rushed to catch up.
They reached the outpost an hour later.
The Union had established their base in the ruins of an old settlement. When Seth had been there last time, a fence had kept people out of the historical site, but the Union had torn it down and replaced it with a perimeter of floodlights. They took over the ruins of the stone church, parked a half-dozen SUVs under the trees, and positioned two large RVs in back. Seth couldn’t imagine how they had gotten those up the mountain without a helicopter.
The Union had also dug a trench to protect their supplies. There was even a full-fledged forge where they melted silver. It was more than just an outpost. They had built a small town for themselves.
Seth stared at everything with his mouth agape. There must have been a dozen kopides working at the outpost. He hadn’t even realized that there were that many hunters in the whole world.
Yasir laughed when he saw Seth’s expression. “Impressed?”
“This is… wow. How much money does the Union have?”
“Enough,” he said.
Seth really was impressed. But he was also scared. How were the werewolves supposed to stand a chance against those kinds of forces? An ugly memory of Rylie tied up in the church came to mi
nd, and he knew that the Union wouldn’t let her get that far again if they caught her. The men walking the perimeter had big guns and hard faces. The kind of people who shot on sight.
If Seth was kind of scared, then Bekah was downright terrified. He realized she wasn’t next to him anymore and turned around to see her standing back by the trees.
He went back to get her. “Come on. Keep walking.”
“There’s so much silver,” she whispered. Her eyes were watering. “I don’t feel very good.”
Seth glanced around. Nobody was close enough to hear them, but Yasir would look for them as soon as he realized they had fallen behind again. He took her backpack. “Deep breaths. You can’t change.”
She laughed shakily. “I’m not Rylie. And don’t you think deep breaths would be a bad idea with all the silver in the air?”
A little embarrassed, he grinned. “It sounded like a good idea.”
“Thanks. Really. But I’m fine.”
Bekah squared her shoulders and followed him into the Union outpost.
Yasir’s unit was waiting by the stone church while the commander spoke with another man. It was hard to tell if he was also a commander because everyone in the Union wore black. “Who’s that?” asked the new man, nodding toward Seth and Bekah.
“The guy is Eleanor’s kid,” Yasir said. He spoke her name like a swear word. “The girl’s a potential thirty-twenty. We found her south of here, but there’s no confirmation. Do we have a holding pen yet?”
She looked at Seth. “Thirty-twenty?” she echoed quietly. He shrugged.
“We’re locking them in the church,” said the Union member. “Pretty pathetic lot. We’ve only picked up three so far. Toss her in and drop off your stuff. We’re laying silver traps today.”
“Got it.” Yasir snapped his fingers at Bekah. “You. In the church. Now.”
“I just want to go home,” she said.
“Sorry. You’re camping for the next week. Move it.”
She gave Seth a last helpless look. He leaned in close to whisper, “If you get a chance, don’t wait around. Run.”
Bekah didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken. She mounted the steps to the church, wavering a little on her feet, and took a deep breath. She went inside and was sealed away from the rest of the world.