by S. M. Reine
He rolled his eyes. “You can’t pick up werewolves like dumpster kittens.”
“Who says?”
“I say. You don’t know any of these people. And they’re werewolves. Soulless murderers. Monsters.”
“Like us,” she said.
Abel stood up and glowered at her. “Next time you call yourself a monster, I’m done with you. Hear me?”
She was pretty sure he didn’t mean it. Rylie rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
He jerked his head toward the caves. “We should sleep.”
They waded back to the caves and found that Trick and Toshiko weren’t alone. Three more people were sitting on the rocks in the shallows. Only one of them was dressed, and all of them were very obviously werewolves. They introduced themselves as Ramona, Hannah, and Peter—a family from Texas.
Rylie stayed back while Abel confronted them. Her wolf was too desperate to attack.
“Where did you come from?” he demanded.
“We ran into them earlier in the week. Thought they might like a place to hide, too, considering the odd things that have been happening lately,” Trick said with a shrug. “It’s not a problem, is it? It’s not like you own the caves.”
“Dumpster kittens,” Abel muttered. Louder, he said, “I don’t care. Okay? But stay out of my cave.”
He sloshed through the water to the spot that he and Rylie had claimed for themselves. She gave Trick a sheepish smile before following.
She had gotten so used to having other werewolves around at the sanctuary that she settled down pretty quickly, despite the foreign smells. In fact, she almost felt a little safer knowing they were out there. But guilt weighed too heavily for her to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Abel’s fingers blistered by the silver bullet.
She pulled the scratchy wool blanket up to her chin, closed her eyes, and tried to sleep.
Something moved in the cave. She peeked through a slitted eye. Abel sat over her, elbows on his knees, and a frown twisting his mouth. She shut her eyes again and pretended to be asleep.
Eventually—maybe minutes later, maybe hours—she sank into unconsciousness.
And Abel kept watching.
SIXTEEN
Extermination
Rylie woke up to find Abel missing and the crescent moon high overhead, still hours away from sunrise. Pushing back her blankets, she waded ankle-deep into the surf to peer around the side of the rocks. Someone was sitting on the beach, but it was too dark to make out their features.
“Abel?” she whispered. He didn’t respond.
When she reached his side, she realized that it was Trick stretched out on his back. He pillowed his head on his arms to watch the moon. He smiled when he saw her.
“Trouble sleeping?”
She sat next to him. “A little bit.”
“Dreaming of the mountain?”
“Actually, no. I think…” She took a deep breath. “It sounds silly, but I think my wolf is happy I’m here. So I don’t need the dreams anymore.”
“Same here,” Trick said, scratching his chin through the mess of his beard. “I can still feel it calling, though.”
She felt the same, but it was too creepy to admit aloud. “Did you see where Abel went?”
“Nah. He wandered off, but I avoided him. I don’t need another black eye.”
“I tried to bite your arm off. Why aren’t you avoiding me?”
He winked. “You’re much cuter than he is.”
Rylie rolled her eyes.
“Where’s everyone else? Toshiko and the new guys?”
“They’re all sleeping in the caves. Another two wandered in after you went to bed. Hope you don’t mind.”
Rylie could already hear Abel’s reaction. Dumpster kittens. She tried not to smile.
“Well, I don’t care. We’ll just have to get more blankets tomorrow. There’s tons of them back at camp. Do you know any of the people who came in this afternoon?”
“No. They’re all perfect strangers to me. And I wouldn’t mind if it stayed that way, to be frank,” Trick said. “I’d like to never see any of your smiling faces again, once the mystic hootenanny is over.”
“Okay. Fine. I was only trying to make conversation.”
Rylie started to stand, but he flicked sand at her. “Don’t make me sit out here on my own. Sit back down. Tell me how you can change into a werewolf in the middle of the day. Bet that’s wicked good craic.”
“It’s silver poisoning,” she said. She wiggled her toes into the cool sand. “It’s not that interesting. I promise. I can’t even control it.”
“How’d you go and get silver poisoning?”
Abel’s mom had shot her and left silver-injected meat for her to find at school. It was the stuff of nightmares, and very firmly on the list of “creepy subjects she didn’t want to talk about.” So she shrugged. “That’s not an interesting story, either.”
Trick laughed. “You’re killing me.”
“If you’re bored, why don’t you tell me how you got bitten? I’m sure it’s a lot more interesting than my story.”
“Oh, aye, it’s a good one,” he said. “It’s a steamy tale of unrequited love, excellent beer, and an accidental nip from my ex-girlfriend, who was a dog in more ways than one.” Rylie giggled, and he nudged her knee. “See? I told you it’s good.”
“It sounds very good. I don’t know if—”
A distant popping noise cut her off. It cracked through the air and echoed off of the trees. Trick sat up, his long hair crusty with sand.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Rylie said after a moment’s pause. The sound didn’t repeat. “It kind of sounded like fireworks or something.”
And then it popped again.
A moment later, someone screamed.
“Gunfire,” Trick said. “That’s gunfire, isn’t it?”
And then a group of men burst from the trees. Three of them. They were dressed in black and blended in with the night, and the smell of gun lubricant was so strong that it came off of them in waves.
The men were shouting.
“On your knees! Hands over your head!”
Rylie was so shocked that she fell over instead of obeying, or better yet, trying to run.
But Trick didn’t take it nearly as well.
He got to his feet with a wolfish howl that echoed through the night and dived for the nearest man. They seemed to be ready for his attack. One of them slammed the butt of his gun into Trick’s stomach and knocked the wind out of him.
Another of them put him in a headlock. The third said, “Light them up.”
They hauled Rylie onto her knees. Flashlights clicked on. They aimed them at Trick’s face and held a photo next to his chin.
He snarled and twisted, but the man holding him had a great grip. Veins bulged in his arm as he struggled to hold Trick’s head steady. One of the other guys had to jump on his legs to keep him from breaking free.
“Yep,” said the one left standing. “This is the one that healed really fast after the fight. Get him.”
In the past few months, Rylie had been too close to way too many firing guns for her comfort. Guns were a pretty normal part of life on a ranch—shooting coyotes, putting animals out of their misery, filling wrecked cars with holes for fun—but they had fired at her more than once. It was an experience she never wanted to repeat, but she was getting used to them.
It didn’t make it less surprising when one of the men pressed his gun to the back of Trick’s skull and fired.
The shot exploded through the night air.
Rylie’s hands flew to her mouth as she screamed. Even though it was too dark to see the damage, she saw the way he slumped and smelled the gunpowder and blood.
When Trick hit the sand, he didn’t move again.
“Grab his teeth, identify the girl, and let’s get going,” said a man in black. “There’s tons of them out there. They’re scattering like rats.”
A hand fisted in Rylie’s hair and jerked her head back. She cried out as they shone the bright light in her face like they had with Trick. She blinked rapidly. Her eyes streamed, and it wasn’t just from the burn of the light.
They killed Trick.
A responding thought rose inside of her: They’re killing my pack.
“Well, look at that. She matches the picture,” her captor said. “This is the wolf that fought the red-haired guy. Makes our job easy, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, go ahead and shoot her.”
Rylie saw the shadow of the gun turning toward her like it was in slow-motion, and her mind replayed the horrible sight of Trick’s death in her mind a hundred times in a single heartbeat. The ear-shattering bang. The slump of his body.
For the first time, she deliberately turned inward, focusing on the ache in her jaw and the itch in her nails, and she cried out to her inner wolf: Help me!
The change came upon her faster than ever before.
The wolf crested and crashed like an ocean wave, and she barely had time to see the fine spray of blood as her claws erupted.
Someone yelled. “Watch out!”
Rylie twisted and jabbed her entire hand upward. Her fingers connected with something soft. The person with the gun screamed and fell.
She leaped to her feet and ran.
But she hadn’t just gotten claws. The wolf had started to take over the rest of her body, too, which meant her bones creaked and groaned as they changed length. Her kneecaps made strange popping noises with every step.
Gunshots rang out behind her and hit the sand near her feet. They only barely missed. She tried to pick up speed, but her feet were too clumsy. She tripped a few yards down the beach.
“Get her!”
“She got me! I’m bleeding!”
“Just shoot—”
The third voice cut off with a strangled yell.
Rylie stopped struggling to get up again and turned. Someone new had pinned one of the men to the ground and ripped the rifle from his hands. He turned it around, fired twice at the others, and then whipped it across the face of the man beneath him.
Abel might not have been able to turn into a wolf on command, but he was just as terrifying in human form.
She was so happy to see him she could have cried. But wolves didn’t have tear ducts.
“Help me!” she yelled with a distorted, growling voice.
The two men on their feet fled for the forest, and Abel fired after them as he hurried to Rylie’s side. He ran out of bullets, flung the rifle aside, and grabbed her arm.
“Did they hurt you?” he asked, searching her shifting face with his eyes.
“They killed Trick,” she groaned. Her ribs were shifting inside her body, growing to make room for her changing organs, and they rippled along her sides. “Abel, I think I’m about to turn—”
“Don’t,” he said shortly.
Abel hauled Rylie to her feet, hugged her to his broad chest, and half-carried her to the nearest rocks. Flashlights danced in the shadows of the trees. Men shouted as they searched.
“I don’t think I can stop it, Abel!”
He pulled her into hiding beneath a rock and pinned her to the boulder. The moonlight glinted off the whites of his eyes. “If you change right now, I will club you like a baby seal,” Abel said. “I’m completely serious. Look at me, Rylie.”
The weird turn of phrase pierced through the wolf’s fury. Rylie loved seals. They were one of the many reasons she had decided to be a vegetarian and avoid animal products.
“That’s the worst euphemism I’ve ever heard,” she whimpered.
He nodded. “Yeah. Right. It is horrible. And I’ll do it. Baby seals.”
For a moment, she was suspended in that mental place between girl and wolf. But Abel’s glare and the press of his hands slowly dragged her back to her human side. She stopped fighting. Her body sagged in his grip.
“You’re a really terrible person,” Rylie said. “Seals are such nice animals.”
He didn’t let go of her. “You good?”
She nodded.
Abel dropped his hands and peered around the side of the rocks. The popping had stopped, but the screaming hadn’t. Things in the forest shifted and cracked like a stampede through the underbrush. The flashlights were on the wrong side of the beach, but they were still hunting for wolves. Hunting for her.
“They have my picture,” she said.
“Shut up and don’t think about it. Stick close. We’ve got to move.”
He drew the gun from the small of his back and eased around the corner. Rylie bit back her retort at being told to shut up and followed.
Abel started to run up the path away from the hunters. She grabbed his wrist. “Wait! What about the other werewolves?”
“Not my pack, not my problem,” he said.
“But they need help!”
He stopped and grabbed her elbow. “We can’t help them if we’re dead. You said it yourself: they have your picture, Rylie. They want to kill you. We have to run tonight. We can help anyone who’s left tomorrow. Okay?”
She bit her bottom lip and gazed at the lights up on the beach. The fear was nauseating. She couldn’t stand the idea of having one of those guns pointed at her again.
Rylie wasn’t proud of herself for it, but she nodded.
Abel dragged her off. “You scared the crap out of me, Rylie. I saw Trick, and I thought they killed you.”
“They almost did.” She hurried to keep up with him, but the wolf didn’t need her help to navigate the dense forests of the night. It had a perfect mental map of where she was going, which left her mind free to replay Trick’s collapse again and again. “Oh my God, Abel. They killed him. They shot him like… like it was nothing.”
He didn’t look at her or say anything in return, but his hand shifted from her elbow to her hand. She was too stunned to be comforted.
Abel paused on top of a ridge looking down at the lake, staying low so that the floodlights sweeping through the forest wouldn’t fall on them. “We need somewhere to hide,” he muttered without releasing Rylie’s hand. He drummed the pistol against his knee. “We need a den.”
The breeze shifted. An odd smell caught Rylie’s nose.
She tore her gaze from the beach to look up the mountain.
Someone was watching them from the cliff above.
It was too dark to make out any features with her eyes, but she smelled oil and gunpowder and leather. For a hopeful instant, she thought it might be Seth. But the shape was too slender, and the smell was sour, like everything about Seth gone wrong. Rylie narrowed her eyes. It looked like a woman’s face.
No way.
“Abel,” she whispered, tugging on his arm. “Abel, look—”
He followed her pointing finger, but the woman had disappeared. “What?”
“Oh. I guess… never mind.”
Rylie didn’t want to say what she was thinking. Not if there was any chance it might not be true. But a deep, primal fear had filled her at the smell of that woman, and the wolf was almost certain that it had been Eleanor watching.
“Let’s move,” Abel said.
They found a dense thicket of trees a mile away, where they could hear the shooting without being seen, and hid underneath a felled log. It seemed like the gunshots and screaming went on for hours.
After that, the night was filled with the silence of death.
In all the years Seth had spent hunting werewolves, facing them down had always been harrowing. He walked the line between being the hunter and the hunted. Even though he was better armed and had been trained by his family, it was still a fair fight.
But the Union assault on werewolves hadn’t been a fight at all.
It was a massacre.
Seth had gone all night without firing a single shot. He followed a group that combed the cabins, certain that it was where Rylie would hide, but the camp had been empty. He missed all the action. And when dawn broke over the beach
, Seth had to help drag the bodies into rows by the water so he could see for himself.
The men had killed three werewolves and trapped two others to take back to the church. A heavyset woman and middle-aged man were hogtied by the rocks, where the pictures the Union used to identify the victims were posted on a log nearby. Three of them were crossed out with red marker. He realized with a sickening jolt that the other two were photos of Rylie and Abel from a surveillance camera. His brother had grown a goatee. Seth would have to pick on him for that later.
So they were alive, but they were marked.
“Want to help me pull teeth?” Stripes asked cheerfully when he noticed Seth nearby.
“No,” he said, feeling faint. “I’m going to sit down.”
He slumped to a log and cradled his head in his hands. Seth watched as a couple of Union men carried more bodies out of the forest. That increased the number of dead to six. How many families would grieve for the loved ones who never came home?
Yasir tracked down Seth a few minutes later. “How’s it going?” asked the commander.
“Great,” Seth said dully. “Just great.”
“Walk with me.”
They went to the edge of the forest, away from the Union members picking through the bodies. Everyone was examining dead werewolves or ripping teeth out of skulls, so he was happy to get away from them. He felt like a ghost drifting across the beach.
The commander stopped by the trees.
“We didn’t kill those last three,” Yasir said.
“What?”
“You heard me. We didn’t kill those last three. Someone found them shot and stabbed with silver behind the camp. We don’t even have verification that they’re werewolves.”
There was a certain weight to his gaze that spoke volumes. Seth sucked in a hard breath. If they hadn’t been killed by the Union, then who else would have done it? Territory fights between werewolves wouldn’t have ended with a gunshot.
Eleanor was on the hunt.
Yasir nodded when he saw realization dawn in Seth’s eyes, and he held out the shotgun.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Take it,” Yasir said. Slowly, he obeyed. He checked the chamber. It was loaded with normal ammunition. “Look, kid, I know your allegiance. You said your brother’s a werewolf. Your girlfriend’s a werewolf. You went into the church to check on the werewolf girl. And you didn’t take a single shot last night.”