Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon

by S. M. Reine

  Rage and instinct took over all at once, overpowering his sense of self-preservation. With a roar, Seth threw himself at Eleanor.

  She fired a gunshot. He felt it buzz past his ear.

  He froze.

  “I think I told you to turn around and walk,” she said, her face twisted with righteous wrath. Seth looked over her shoulder at his brother, bleeding from a silver-inflicted wound on his stomach, and thought of all those bodies that the Union had found.

  “How could you?” he whispered. “That’s Abel.”

  “Walk.”

  Leaving his brother was physically painful, but he couldn’t finish off Eleanor if she killed him, too. He began to march. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going back to the Union compound. Yasir’s not in charge anymore, which leaves an army at my disposal. And we’re marching tomorrow night.” He could practically hear her evil grin. “It’s almost full moon, after all.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Destiny

  Seth kept his hands behind his head as Eleanor marched him back to the Union outpost. He considered making a break for it. He had to get back to Abel. He had to see if he was okay, had to get him to Stephanie so she could patch up his wound…

  But Eleanor seemed to know what he was thinking. She dug the pistol into his neck.

  He gritted his teeth and kept moving.

  Even though he knew he couldn’t talk his mom out of anything—not her choice of breakfast cereal, much less her choice of tactics—he had to try. “We don’t have to do this.”

  “Shut up.”

  She kept up a grueling pace. Every time he slowed, she jabbed the gun into the back of his skull again to prod him forward. And she didn’t give him any opportunity to fight back. Seth wasn’t sure he could have won against her anyway.

  When they walked for over two hours without a break, he decided to try talking again. “Why did you run away from the Union?”

  He thought that would earn him another hard poke, but Eleanor said, “Yasir was out to kill me. I had to move.”

  “They found the werewolves you’ve been killing. Three of them.”

  “That’s only the start,” she said. “There are another dozen they haven’t found.”

  “As humans, Mom? I thought we always agreed to wait until the moons to hunt. It’s what Dad wanted.”

  “They would be too much to handle if we didn’t thin the herd before the moon. Once the Alpha’s picked, it’s going to get bad.”

  Seth blinked. “Alpha?”

  She finally stopped marching. She took a roll of paper from one of her cargo pants pockets, flattened it out, and shoved the pages in his face. There were holes along the sides where it had been fed through a really old printer. After being carried around for years, they were yellowed and tissue-thin.

  “Look at this. Look!”

  Seth took them from her just to get them out of his face. He recognized the handwriting scrawled in red ink along the margins. It belonged to his dad.

  “Is this from when he wrote that stupid book?”

  She ripped it from his hands. He raised a fist, and she responded by raising the gun. “Show respect.” Eleanor shook the pages at him. “Here’s what nobody knows, boy: this is all part of a bigger plan. The plan of something evil. Those werewolves weren’t the only ones summoned here. We were, too. The hunters and the witches and the heroes. It’s destiny.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Look,” she said again, jamming the gun in her belt and shuffling through the pages to the end. “Your daddy wrote about it. I found this only a month ago.”

  Seth skimmed the page as she held it up to his face. It was a solid block of rambling, stream-of-consciousness text. The book he published had been practical, like a cookbook for killing werewolves, and didn’t have any spiritual nonsense. But the words “animal spirits” and “gods” were all over the place in this text. His dad must have been drunk when he wrote it.

  “The chapter says this isn’t the first time werewolves have almost gone extinct. Their gods have a plan for handling it. They call the werewolves back to the mountain, and the gods choose the strongest of them to become Alpha. It’s all going down tomorrow night. The Alpha’s, uh…” She checked the page. “The Alpha’s coronation is a bloodbath where the hunters all die. And those things have always won. But we can turn it around this time!”

  “Or we could leave peacefully,” Seth suggested.

  Her fist tightened on the page. “Werewolves might be monsters, but at least they got one thing right.” Eleanor shoved her face into his. It took all of Seth’s willpower not to back away. “They kill the runts of the litter.”

  Death threats from his mom used to hurt his feelings. Not anymore. Instead, he missed Aunt Gwyn, and the smell of baking pies, and getting called “Einstein” like it was a good thing. “Love you too, Mom,” he said dully.

  Her face softened. “I love you, baby, but these werewolves have put you under a spell. You’re sick. Once they’re all dead, you’ll be better. We’ll be a family again. I meant it when I said I wanted that.”

  “Do you see Abel in that family?” Seth asked.

  Eleanor patted his back. She didn’t have to respond. He knew the answer.

  They went back to walking.

  Jakob greeted them at the perimeter of the Union outpost. The other kopis didn’t look surprised to see them. “Took you long enough,” he said, escorting them into the camp.

  “You knew we were coming?” Seth asked.

  The older man didn’t respond. He did, however, steady his gun on Seth. Apparently he hadn’t forgotten about the attack yet.

  The Union was getting ready to mobilize. The generator was still a mess, so they didn’t have power in their tents, but they had hooked up a couple of the SUVs to power a few lights. The monitors were all dark, though, and he didn’t see anything connected to the motion sensors anymore. As long as the werewolves kept moving, they would be safe.

  Eleanor sat Seth in a chair by the gun rack and roped his arms to his sides. It was too familiar a position. At least he wasn’t under a mobile home again.

  “Good to see you, kid,” groaned a voice.

  Seth twisted around. Yasir was tied on the ground behind the table with a bruise-blackened face.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Mutiny.” He worked his mouth around and spit blood onto a patch of grass. “Eleanor stole one of our satellite phones and contacted command. She said I had gone rogue. They ordered the team to disable me and put her in charge.”

  Seth groaned. “Sounds like Eleanor.”

  “Gotta say, kid, I kind of hate your mom.”

  He watched as his mother helped the Union prepare. Her eyes were alight with fire. Standing at the head of an army was Eleanor in her natural element, and she looked like she was having fun, even though she had just stabbed her son and left him for dead in the forest.

  “Yeah,” Seth said. “Me too.”

  Rylie paced back and forth across the trail, gnawing on her thumbnail.

  Seth, Abel, and Stephanie had been gone for an entire day and night, and there was no sign of them. Rylie hadn’t been too worried for the first few hours, but when the day wore on and they didn’t return, she started to feel a sense of unease. And when clouds consumed the sun and it started drizzling, she really started to worry.

  The werewolves moved around to find shelter under the patchy trees, but Rylie kept pacing. After working on a ranch in the snow, a little rain was nothing.

  “Hey,” Bekah said, joining her at the head of the trail. She used a woolen blanket to shield her head from the weather. “Any sign of them?”

  “Not yet.”

  The other girl inched over to share her blanket with Rylie. “It’s probably okay. That’s a really big forest out there, and I think it changes shape every time we go through it. You know? Like when the mountain wants us to get somewhere, it only takes an hour to walk across the whole thing. But sometim
es it takes days.”

  “The mountain’s not alive, and it can’t warp the forest. So don’t talk like that. It’s creepy.” Rylie held up one corner of the sheet, but without the ability to release her nervous energy with pacing, she ended up tapping her foot and fidgeting instead. “The moon’s going to rise in a couple of hours.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be back before that.”

  Rylie cast a sideways look at Bekah. “But what if they’re dead or something?”

  “I don’t think there’s any reason to jump to that conclusion.”

  “There are a bunch of men out there with guns. And Eleanor! So I think there’s lots of good reason to worry about it.”

  “Maybe a little,” Bekah conceded. “But if I trusted anyone to survive on a mountain with armed hunters, it would be Seth and Abel. They are hunters. They can take care of themselves.”

  She was probably right. It still didn’t do anything to alleviate Rylie’s fears.

  But then something moved at the bottom of the dark trail, and she perked up. The rain suppressed her sense of smell, so she couldn’t tell if it was friend or foe, but she didn’t think an enemy would walk up to them quite so obviously.

  Bekah recognized him first. She dropped the blanket with a shriek. “Levi!”

  She raced down the trail and flew into her brother’s arms. Rylie followed a little slower, trying to manage a smile. She was happy to see him. Really. And Levi looked like he’d had a rough couple of weeks—he was muddy and exhausted. But even though she knew it was horrible, she would have much preferred it to be Seth or Abel.

  “Scott and I got here yesterday. He couldn’t drive this far—the road’s blocked—but I ran as fast as I could,” he said, setting his sister down. His brown curls were plastered to his forehead. He had managed to bring shorts with him somehow, but no shirt or shoes. Bekah and Levi were both pretty good at keeping their clothes when they shifted. “Are you okay?”

  Bekah’s chin trembled. It took her a moment to work up her usual glowing smile. “It’s been pretty bad. But we’ll be okay.”

  “Did you see anyone on the way up?” Rylie asked.

  “Like who? You mean the men in black? I saw a few, but I didn’t go near them.”

  Her stomach pitched. “Let’s talk about this somewhere drier.”

  Rylie led him to camp. Toshiko had built a small campfire between two rocks with a blanket to shelter it. She smiled at the sight of them, but had long since given up trying to communicate. She left as soon as they approached.

  They settled around the fire, warming their hands and trying to dry their clothes while Bekah filled Levi in on everything that happened.

  “You attacked a bunch of hunters?” he asked.

  She gave another weak smile. “And I ate a generator.”

  He laughed. It struck Rylie as a weird sound. They hadn’t been laughing a lot since they had reached the forest. “That’s kind of awesome. No wonder they looked so mad.”

  “Where did you see them?”

  “They’ve got a camp down there.” He waved at the trees. “I didn’t take a lot of time to look around. It looks like they’re going to march soon.”

  A twig snapped nearby, cutting him off.

  Rylie spun to face it with a growl, but it wasn’t an attack by hunters. A lone figure staggered out of the trees to the south, and he was hunched over like something was hurting him.

  Abel.

  He groaned and fell to his knees. Rylie managed to beat Bekah to his side.

  “Oh my God! Are you okay? What happened?”

  Abel held out the hand he had been pressing to his side. His fingers were black with blood. “Mom stabbed me,” he said. His eyes had a hard time focusing. It was like he looked over Rylie’s shoulder instead of at her face. “Silver knife.”

  She dragged him to the fire and helped him stretch out. She was strong, but she still needed Levi’s help to shift him. Abel glared at Levi.

  “Hey, you found us. I haven’t missed your ugly face,” Abel said.

  “Well, being a jerk is probably a good sign, but I don’t think that is,” Levi said, lifting Abel’s shirt to see the wound. “Where’s Stephanie?”

  “She’s with Scott,” Abel groaned.

  That didn’t seem like the more important question. “Where’s Seth?” Rylie asked, grabbing Abel’s hand. His bloody fingers slipped in her grip.

  That got his attention. He finally looked at her. Really looked at her.

  “Eleanor,” he said.

  Rylie felt like she was going to fall over. It was the worst thing she could have possibly imagined. She would prefer Seth to defect to the Union than end up in his mom’s grasp.

  “I should check to see if there’s silver in there,” Levi announced at about the same time he started digging around in the wound with his fingers.

  Abel’s eyes clenched shut, and his teeth ground together. Rylie held his hand tighter. “How could she do this to you?” she asked, her voice thick with tears.

  “Kind of like… this.” He made a weak stabbing motion in the air.

  Rylie laughed wetly. “I got that part.”

  Abel didn’t have the energy to joke for much longer. Levi removed his hand. “If there’s anything in there, I can’t find it. Stephanie picked a good time to leave.”

  “He’ll heal when the moon rises,” Bekah said. “Right?”

  Not if there was silver in the wound. If Eleanor stabbed him, that didn’t seem too likely. But Rylie remembered how much those injuries burned. He wasn’t going to have a fun time healing, either way.

  It wasn’t a good answer, so Rylie kept it to herself.

  “The Union is moving and Eleanor’s hunting,” she said. “This is really bad. We have to go. We can’t be here when they come looking.”

  “It’s getting way too late for that,” Bekah said. “It’s not long until moonrise.”

  Levi used bottled water to rinse his hands off. “They’ll come to this peak, right? We can hide nearby until everyone changes, and then when they move in, we attack.”

  Nobody had a better plan to suggest. The cloud cover made it darker than it should have been at that hour, but night wasn’t far away.

  “Come on, Levi,” Bekah said. “Let’s talk to everyone else.”

  They went to rouse the other wolves, but Rylie stayed with Abel. He hadn’t let go of her hand. “You have to save Seth,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Go looking. Find him. Help him.”

  Rylie had been thinking the same thing, but she never would have expected Abel to tell her to put herself in danger. He was the one who didn’t want her collecting “dumpster kittens,” much less tracking down his mother. And Rylie wasn’t exactly the heroic type. She was the “go crazy and eat farmers” type.

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know if I can take Eleanor.”

  “You have to,” Abel said. He tried to sit up, then flinched and lay back. “Oh, man. You can beat her as a wolf. You’re fast. You’re strong.”

  “What if I can’t shift before moonrise?” She had changed outside the Union camp, but she had Seth to help her. She didn’t think she could do it alone.

  “So what?” He grimaced and lifted his head to look at the wound. “I’ll try to come find you as soon as I shift and heal. But she’s got a head start. You have to find him, you have to change, and you have to save him. Promise.”

  She stared out at all the werewolves as they gathered around at Bekah and Levi. They were talking loudly, explaining what little plans they had, and everyone listened attentively. Bekah would do a good job rallying them. She was nice, and she was strong, and everyone admired her.

  Rylie wasn’t nice. She wasn’t strong. She was so horribly weak—so helpless when it came to the wolf.

  But Seth needed her.

  She nodded. “I’ll do it.” It was simultaneously the easiest and the hardest promise she had ever made.

  He relaxed, like all the pain had suddenly vanishe
d from his wound. His eyelids drooped. “Good,” Abel said. He gave her a faint half-smile that looked a lot like Seth’s. “Thanks.” His fingers fell from hers.

  She watched his chest for a moment to make sure he kept breathing, but he had only passed out from the pain. Rylie couldn’t blame him. There was no burn like silver.

  Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, she slipped away from the group into darkness.

  Rylie waited to change until she put distance between herself and the dim glow of their camp. Her wolf didn’t want to leave the peak of Gray Mountain, but she was done negotiating with her beast. She was the one in charge.

  “You hear me?” she whispered to herself when she reached a cliff overlooking the river. It was a silver snake of moonlight running through the black forest. Falling rain dappled its surface. “I’m in charge. And I say we change.”

  The wolf remained silent.

  Rylie looked at her hands, imagining the claws that she had seen grow from the tips far too often. She remembered the itch of fur sprouting from her skin, and the ache of her jaw elongating.

  Seth needs me.

  Love was pretty good motivation to do the impossible.

  She began to shift.

  It hurt. It always hurt, and there was no way around it. But when she didn’t fight the change so hard, it was easier to ride it out.

  She sank to her knees and watched her feet turn into paws. The toes shortened as the foot lengthened. It traveled up her calf and inverted her knee with a slick crunch that felt like getting struck by a baseball bat, and a cry escaped her lips. It came out as more of a yelp. Her outsides were changing slower than her insides, which felt like a mass of twisting worms. She already had a wolf’s vocal cords.

  Rylie focused on the pale patch of silvery moon she could see through the clouds as her face cracked and shifted. Tears leaped to her eyes. She let the teeth fall from her mouth, and the hair from her scalp, and let the wolf deal with the pain.

  Its mind emerged like a vast shadow settling over Rylie’s thoughts. It didn’t blot her mind out, but it weighed her down. It was so happy to be in the forest, rain and all.