Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon

by S. M. Reine

  Yasir clapped his hands. “All right, everyone. Drop your bags in the tent. It’s time to start the real work.”

  THIRTEEN

  Advent of Wolves

  Rylie and Abel found a series of caves on the beach north of the campgrounds. They picked one in the middle to be home base. It wasn’t much of a cave at all—more like a place where the rocks had slipped to make a sheltered area. They had to walk through calf-deep water to reach it, but it was dry and flat inside, and protected from the wind.

  “I’m going to find the car and recover the duffel bag,” Abel said. “You need to locate supplies.” When she looked at him blankly, he rolled his eyes. “You know. Blankets, pillows, towels, canned food. Supplies. It’s not that hard. Go figure it out.”

  “What if we run into Seth?”

  Abel’s face was hard. “Then we’ll deal with him.”

  They hadn’t talked much about Seth. Even though her wolf should have been exhausted after the previous night’s run, finding out that he was with hunters had been upsetting enough to make her start changing. She managed to get control of herself before she went four-legged, but discussing the issue of Seth didn’t seem worth the risk.

  But they were both thinking about him. She could tell by the slant to Abel’s mouth and the tension in his shoulders. He never said it, but he loved his brother, and running into him on the hunt must have hurt.

  She wanted to believe it was some kind of a mistake—that maybe, somehow, Abel was just imagining things. But if Abel had seen his brother, and if Seth really was with the hunters that had killed three werewolves, there must have been a good reason. Rylie didn’t believe he would turn against them. Not Seth.

  Her wolf stirred at the thought again, so she put Seth out of her mind. She had gotten good at that lately.

  “Watch out for yourself,” Abel said, crouched at the mouth of their little cave.

  He left, and a few minutes later, she left too.

  Rylie found a laundry bag in the front office and put anything that looked useful into it. She skipped pens and paper and other office supplies. Instead, she broke into a box of towels branded with the camp logo and took a handful. Then she located the laundry facilities by following the scent of bleach and started gathering pillows and blankets.

  Once her bag was half-filled by linens, she went to the back entrance for the kitchens. Nothing in the walk-in refrigerator was good. It had been unplugged, and everything was worse than rancid. It was practically sentient. She didn’t even have to open the door to know that. It reeked through the gaps. But the canned food looked good, and it wasn’t hard to dig up a can opener.

  Rylie tossed it all into her bag, keeping an eye on the dining room through the double doors. The windows were so dirty that it made the big room feel like a gloomy cavern.

  And then something dark moved in the mess hall.

  She wasn’t alone.

  Adrenaline shot through her veins. An enemy in my territory. Fight. Kill.

  She held her breath. Closed her eyes. Counted slowly to ten. It wasn’t easy forcing her human thoughts to dominate those of the wolf, so she spoke aloud to herself. “It’s probably a raccoon looking for food,” she whispered. Or a bear—but if that was the case, then she would have to keep shapeshifting as an option after all.

  Dropping her bag by the door, Rylie crept out into the mess hall. Everything was where she remembered leaving it. The tables were still lined up in the center of the room. The buffet line was dusty, and the food that had been left in the trays had long since dried out. Whatever it was, the damage of time was so bad that even her sensitive nose couldn’t tell what it used to be.

  But her nose did pick up another smell. A living one.

  Rylie stood in the center of the room, watching for another hint of movement. The wolf wanted to hunt, but she pushed it back. She would react like a human would and be civil.

  “Hello?” she called, her voice quavering as the wolf seized her throat. She took a deep breath before saying, “Who’s there?”

  Something bumped against a table at the back of the room. Slowly, a human figure stood.

  It was a woman. She looked like she was probably in her mid-twenties, but shorter than Rylie. Her skin was the color of coconut milk and her black hair fell in straight lines to her shoulders. She also looked very, very confused, and judging by the way she wasn’t wearing any clothes, it was probably because she had been wandering through the forest since the last moon.

  She said something. It sounded like Japanese or Chinese. Rylie didn’t understand a word of it.

  “It’s okay,” Rylie said, holding out her hands with fingers spread. Her nails were itching, but she made herself ignore it. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Not on purpose, anyway.

  The woman spoke again, arms folded over her chest. She hung her head.

  “Here. Let me get you a shirt.”

  Rylie moved for the laundry bag. The woman dropped into a half-squat, teeth bared in a growl.

  Her wolf reacted by sweeping to the surface, and it momentarily consumed her thoughts. The sweeping musk of pheromones washed over her. They may not have shared a human language, but the smells were more than enough.

  The woman had been through the creek. She had walked through mud and pine and slept in dens made of soil. But before that, she had been on an airplane. Rylie recognized a faint whiff of stale, recycled air. The other smells were too old to distinguish, but everything about the woman smelled of places Rylie had never been, and it was interesting enough to the wolf to quell some of the aggression. Especially when the woman finally dropped her hands and closed her mouth.

  “I’m going to get you a shirt,” she said again, speaking slower and louder than before, like that would actually cross the language barrier. Rylie tugged on her own shirt.

  “Toshiko desu,” said the woman.

  “Shirt?”

  “Watashi no namae wa Toshiko desu.”

  Rylie frowned. “Okay… hang on. Just a second.”

  She fished an extra shirt and shorts out of her laundry bag. She had made her selections based on her own size, but the other woman was much smaller. Rylie set the clothes on a table between them and backed away.

  The woman dressed. “Arigatou.”

  “My name is Rylie.” She patted her chest. “Rylie. Rylie. What’s your name?”

  Mimicking the chest pat, she said, “Toshiko. Toshiko desu.”

  What she was trying to say finally registered. “Oh. Your name is Toshiko, isn’t it?” Rylie pointed at herself, and then to the woman as she dressed. “Rylie. Toshiko. Right?”

  Toshiko nodded encouragingly, although Rylie couldn’t tell if that was because she was happy to have the clothes, or if she actually understood what was happening. After she was fully dressed, she pointed to the door and said something else. She seemed to want Rylie to follow her.

  Shouldering her laundry bag, Rylie followed the other werewolf at a distance. Outside, she could see that Toshiko was filthy. Her feet were covered in dried blood, and so were her hands. Judging by the smells, only some of it was her blood. Rylie had to stop and take a few deep breaths to quell her inner wolf again. It didn’t like that someone else had been eating. It wanted to be the first to eat, always, and to have its teeth in every kill.

  “Get over yourself,” Rylie muttered.

  Toshiko looked askance at her, but she only shook her head.

  They walked for a few minutes over familiar trails to other cabins. Toshiko led her to the place where Group C had slept, and pointed at each of the cabins while speaking. She talked slowly and loudly, too. It didn’t make any difference. But Rylie didn’t need to speak a foreign language to get what she was saying.

  “There are others here?”

  The woman nodded with wide eyes, not quite as enthusiastic as she had been before.

  A door opened. Rylie’s hackles rose as a man stepped outside. He was as naked and dirty as Toshiko had been.

  “Back off
!” he growled with a thick brogue, eyes flashing.

  She dropped her bag. She couldn’t hold on to it anymore. The wolf had no idea what to do with hands. “Be careful. Please don’t provoke me,” she responded. Her voice was deep again, and her spine creaked. Her lower back ached as an extra vertebra or two tried to grind into place.

  “My territory. Mine!”

  Rylie quickly sized up the situation. He was a pretty big guy—not as wide as Abel, but almost as tall. His red hair was a mess. He had a good amount of muscle. She didn’t think she could take him… as a human.

  Her whole body shuddered. She doubled over with a groan.

  He seemed to take it as a sign of weakness. He crossed the distance between them and swung a fist.

  Distracted by the pain of a changing body, she couldn’t dodge it. The blow connected with her face. She sprawled back on the dirt with a cry that was only half-surprise—her kneecaps snapped simultaneously, and she was so shocked she couldn’t find the mental control to stop it.

  Toshiko ran between them, waving her arms, but that only got her a right hook across the face, too. She went flying.

  Rylie barely saw it. Pain consumed her.

  Her skin was on fire, her fingernails were bleeding, and blood sprayed as her face extended into a wolf’s jaw. The change had accelerated as she had matured in the last few months, so everything happened at once with a blur of pain.

  All her hair was gone in a heartbeat. Her ears crunched and slid to the top of her head. Her new clothing ripped at the seams. She flipped onto her belly and dug her fingers into the dirt as they shortened into paws. A tail lashed from the base of her spine. Rylie found her footing on hind legs that had reversed direction, and wailed as the fur erupted across her fleshy pink skin.

  Only a minute later, a wolf stood in the middle of the cabins.

  It looked at the man, who had frozen next to the charcoal that used to be a campfire, and it liked its chances against him.

  “No,” he said. “That’s not possible.”

  She jumped on him.

  Her momentum carried both of them to the ground, and the wolf clamped its jaws on his arm when he flung it in front of his face. She worried it in her teeth like a chew toy. The taste of blood washed over her tongue as he screamed.

  No…

  A tiny human voice whispered inside the skull of the wolf.

  “Let me go!”

  He punched her again. Even as a human, he was pretty strong, and that distinctly human move surprised her. She moved enough for him to scramble to his feet and break into a run.

  The wolf loped after him.

  The man dodged her attempt at a tackle. The bleeding of the wound on his arm was already slowing.

  Toshiko yelled next to them. Her voice cut through the wolf’s focus.

  Don’t hurt her.

  A ripple ran through the wolf’s body, and it hesitated. That inner voice was growing stronger. In the middle of the day, so soon after the last change, the wolf was already weak. And Rylie desperately didn’t want to hurt anyone. The urge was so powerful that it completely shattered the wolf’s focus.

  She sat on her haunches and tried to shake the voice out of her head. It didn’t help.

  Let me go. Let me turn back.

  The man watched her warily, fists at the ready.

  It hurt more than usual to shift back to her human shape. Usually, the wolf hung onto her consciousness until it was over. But it slipped away quickly and quietly, leaving Rylie to face it on her own.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said the man when she finished changing.

  He moved for her. Rylie held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t come near me! I could have killed you.”

  “I wasn’t going to attack again.” He laughed with disbelief. He was a lot calmer now that he had a couple big chunks bitten out of his arm, though they had grown back completely. “I’m not stupid. Do you want a hand up?”

  “I bit you.”

  He shrugged. “I attacked first. Are we good?”

  “I guess so,” Rylie said.

  “Need help up?”

  She took his hand. She picked up the tangled scraps of her clothes, but they were too destroyed to put back on. Good thing she had taken a lot of clothes out of the lost and found.

  The others waited in awkward silence as she dressed.

  “Sorry about the arm,” she said when she finished. “I don’t meet new werewolves very often, and I kind of have… control problems.”

  “I think we all do,” he said.

  Toshiko didn’t seem to be listening. She picked through Rylie’s laundry bag, found a bag of trail mix, and tore it open. She dug into it like it was a turkey dinner instead of stale almonds and cranberries.

  “When is the last time you guys ate?” Rylie asked.

  He had to think too hard about it. “When was the last change? We’ve been eating a couple of deer we killed.”

  So that explained all the blood. “Have you seen others?”

  “Yeah. I’ve come across three other groups, but they’re all out there somewhere now.” He nodded toward the trees. “Been picking a lot of fights, to tell you the truth. Can’t seem to help it—I lose my brain for a few minutes when I smell someone new. That’s the first time I didn’t win.” He rubbed his arm. “You’re not like me.”

  Rylie laughed shakily. “Yeah. And no. I can explain, but not here. There are hunters on the mountain, and they’re probably going to search the camps.”

  He frowned. “For what?”

  “For us.”

  “What?” His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. He spun around to stare at the forest, like he expected an army of hunters to march through right that second. “But… why?”

  “Because they’re werewolf hunters, and we’re werewolves, and they want us all dead. They think we’re monsters.”

  “I’m not a monster. I’m just Irish.”

  Rylie didn’t really know what to say to that. She was “just” some high school girl who had been bitten at summer camp, too, but she was also a monster. The first thing didn’t seem to matter much when the second thing came into play.

  Changing the subject seemed a lot easier than trying to explain the hunters. “I have clothes that should probably fit you in the bag, too,” she said. “Hang on.” Rylie dug out the baggiest shorts. He looked skeptical, but put them on. They didn’t even reach halfway down his hairy thighs. “My friend will bring more clothes with him. You can borrow something better.”

  “A friend, eh? Where’s this ‘friend’?”

  “He’s looking for our car. But we’re camping in caves by the lake. I think you and Toshiko should come with me.”

  “Toshiko?”

  The Asian woman looked up from shaking the bag of trail mix into her mouth. Rylie’s brow furrowed. “Isn’t that her name?”

  “I don’t understand a bleeding thing she says. She started following me around when I got here and I can’t shake her,” he said. When Rylie opened her mouth to ask Toshiko to leave with them, he shook his head. “Don’t bother. She talks nonsense.”

  “I think it’s Chinese, actually,” she said.

  But it turned out he was right. They didn’t have to talk to Toshiko to get her to follow. Rylie picked up her bag and started walking for the beach, and the other werewolf followed.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked as they shuffled along.

  Rylie’s eyebrows lifted. “Why are you asking me?”

  “I dunno. You’ve got the cave and the clothes and the news about the hunters. I expected you to have a plan, too.”

  She grimaced at the peak of Gray Mountain. The sun was creeping toward it. She hadn’t given it any thought to what she would do once she got there. She had kind of hoped she would run into someone else with a plan. Or even better—someone with answers. But it was becoming more and more obvious that everyone was as clueless as she was.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t help with that.”
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br />   FOURTEEN

  The Ruined Church

  Seth thought it would be hard to get away from the Union once he was entrenched in their compound, but with Eleanor gone, they pretty much ignored him. Nobody even looked at him twice when he went wandering around the ruined settlement the next day.

  The Union must have had a ton of money. Yasir said they had only been there since the new moon, but they had built themselves a small city. They had a tented mess hall, exercise equipment, and all kinds of monitoring devices.

  The trackers in the SUVs were only the beginning of their technology. He peered through the open door of an RV to study their huge monitors, and saw they had an enlarged map of the forest with an overlay of patchwork colors. A woman in uniform sat in front of the monitors. Judging by her silver jewelry, she must have been one of the witches assigned to the team.

  “What’s everything in the RV for?” Seth asked Stripes, who was seated on the grass nearby to eat a can of beans for dinner.

  “Motion detectors.” He waved his fork in the air. “They’ve been putting them in the trees. See that number? That’s an estimate of the number of animals in the forest. The lower number is how many of those the computer thinks are werewolves.” The number of animals was in the thousands; the second number was fifty-six.

  “It looks for unusual human movement patterns. We’ve tagged a couple of werewolves, too, so we can follow the groups that way. Union uniforms have trackers, so we don’t count.”

  A knot of worry grew in Seth’s stomach as he watched the blinking lights travel across the screens. “How many werewolves are here, in the compound?”

  “There are four in the church we haven’t confirmed yet. I think we killed twelve others, but you’d have to check the teeth hanging in the supply tent to be sure.”

  The idea was nauseating. “So you guys are picking off wolves while they’re human after all?”

  “Only if we’ve seen them shift, or if we have a recording of them healing a major wound. We’ll do a sweep tomorrow to pick up a few more, but we’ll wait until the next moon to finish them off.” Stripes looked bored by the conversation. He scraped his fork at the bottom of the can, knocked the remaining beans into his mouth, and belched. “I’m going back for seconds.”