Blood Moon Harvest (Seasons of the Moon) (2 page)

Seth barked out one word: “Hunter.”

Rylie’s aunt pointed at two of the wolves—Levi and Sora. “You two, come with me.”

Then she stepped into the living room long enough to grab her shotgun and headed out the back door.

“Turn on the lights,” Seth ordered, and Bekah hurried to obey.

The fluorescents flared on, and he inspected his brother’s injuries. There was both an entry and an exit wound, and it was shallow. If Pagan had been using normal bullets, it wouldn’t have fazed Abel.

But she had been using silver bullets.

The skin was inflamed and red. Blood puddled underneath him.

Everything Seth knew about safe handling of wounds didn’t apply to werewolves—Abel didn’t have any diseases to protect against, aside from the kind transferred by a bite, and Seth didn’t have to worry about contaminating the injury. Werewolves were immune to infection.

All that left for him to do was remove the fragments of metal at any cost. The alloy hunters used was soft and tended to spread inside the body. Silver poisoning was an ugly thing to witness. If Abel didn’t die, he would go crazy.

Seth had watched it happen to Rylie before. He didn’t want to see it happen again.

“Sorry,” he muttered, plunging his fingers into the wound. Abel shouted and arched his back. His fists flailed. He almost hit Seth. “Someone hold him!”

Bekah helped pin him down as Seth removed two large bullet fragments. She was strong, despite her size, but it took all of her weight to keep Abel’s shoulders flat on the linoleum.

Seth dug out the biggest pieces of silver and dropped them on the counter. He wiped his hands on a dishrag.

Abel sagged, panting and weak. “You are a shitty doctor, bro.”

“You’re welcome,” Seth said. He would have to explore the injury further, and quickly.

Rylie dragged Pagan into the kitchen. She almost wasn’t recognizable as the attempted assassin Seth had been hunting in North Harbor. Her arm was a mangled mess of blood, and her pale face was covered in dirt. She sagged in the jaws of the werewolf like a rag doll.

“Holy crap. Is she alive?” Bekah asked, hovering nearby with her hands held out, as if she wanted to help Rylie but wasn’t sure how.

Gwyn entered next, tracking muddy boot prints on the linoleum. “She’s alive, but I think something’s wrong with that woman,” she said, nodding at Pagan. “Rylie took it easy on her. It’s like her skin is tissue paper.”

“Throw her in the cellar,” Seth said. “Padlock the door. I’ll look at her when I’m done with Abel.”

Bekah threw Pagan over her shoulder and took her out the back door again.

Rylie’s bones popped and crunched. The shift back from wolf was smoother, but it took a few minutes longer than her last transition.

Gwyn draped a blanket over her niece’s bare body. “I’m going to make sure that Pagan doesn’t wake up and hurt Bekah.”

Rylie didn’t respond. She only had eyes for Abel.

“Are you okay?” she asked, gripping one of his hands in both of hers. Her mouth was still stained with Pagan’s blood. A streak ran from the corner of her lips to her right ear.

Abel responded by lifting a hand to Rylie’s cheek. She closed her eyes and tilted her face into his palm.

Nauseating venom surged through Seth. He took Rylie’s hand to distract her. “I need to finish extracting the silver,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “Can you help me move Abel?”

She could have lifted the weight of three people at once if she wanted to, but Abel was tall and unwieldy. They had to work together to drag him down the hall to his bedroom.

He gave a low groan as he settled into the mattress.

Seth ducked into the bedroom he shared with Rylie to find tweezers and gauze. When he returned, she was kneeling beside Abel, and they spoke in low voices.

“Pagan won’t be firing another gun anytime soon,” Rylie said, eyes burning and cheeks flushed. Seth hadn’t seen her that angry in a long time. “I ate her arm.”

Abel didn’t seem to care about the implications of a werewolf bite that didn’t kill. He gave a faint smile. “That’s my girl.”

Seth sat down on the side of the bed, shoulder muscles tensed into knots. “This is going to hurt,” he said, and without further warning, he began to operate on his brother.

Rylie couldn’t watch Seth work on
Abel. It made her nerves tie into knots. So instead, she got dressed and paced outside the cellar door.

It was almost an hour before Bekah and Gwyn came out again. They wrapped a chain around the handles and padlocked it.

“Is Pagan going to survive?” Rylie asked, gnawing on her thumbnail.

“I don’t know,” Gwyn said, checking the safety on Pagan’s pistol and stuffing it in her belt. Her eyes roved over the darkened hills as she guided her niece toward the back porch. “She’s bleeding a lot.”

Guilt twisted in Rylie’s stomach. “I was angry.”

“You’re a force to be reckoned with, babe. For now, that woman’s not going anywhere. What did you call her? Pagan? What kind of name is that?”

“You would have to ask her parents,” Rylie said, echoing what the assassin had told her the first time they met. The joke fell just as flat the second time.

Gwyn faced Bekah. “Start boarding the living room windows.” She waited until the Riese girl went inside before speaking again. “Rylie, there’s something not right about that woman down there. It’s not just the severity of the injury. Her skin—I could see through it to her bones.”

Rylie blinked. “What?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but… I don’t think she’s human.”

“Then what is she?”

Gwyn shook her head. “Maybe a ghost.”

T
HREE

Questioning

Seth spent the entire night
locked in Abel’s bedroom. “Pagan used some kind of bullet that encapsulated silver pellets. The wound
looks
superficial, but the damage is deep,” he told Rylie when she checked on them at three in the morning. His eyes were rimmed with rings of exhaustion, and his brother was unconscious. “I keep finding more fragments buried in the muscle.”

“Can you get it all?” she asked, twisting her hands together.

Seth’s eyes were dark as he returned his attention to the injury. “I have to.”

She slipped out of the room. He didn’t acknowledge her exit—he was too absorbed in fixing his brother.

Vanthe was in the hallway outside, like he had been listening in on their conversation.

“What are you doing here?” Rylie asked.

He leaned around her to see into the bedroom. She shut the door before he could get a peek. “Is Abel going to be okay?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, like saying it would make it true.

Anger sparked in Vanthe’s golden eyes. “Who would have dared come into the sanctuary for an attack?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got the shooter locked up, and we’re safe for now. I promise.”

“Who was it?” he pressed, stepping closer.

Rylie squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, staring him in the eye. He was a new werewolf, so he probably didn’t realize that she was asserting her dominance, but it should have triggered an instinctive reaction anyway.

It didn’t. He looked too angry to notice that she was challenging him.

She was already on edge from being attacked. The sting of disrespect was enough to tip her over the edge. “Sit down,” she growled through her teeth.

The weirdness of the command broke through Vanthe’s temper. “Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I might rip your throat out.”

That got him moving. He dropped onto the chair against the wall.

As soon as he was shorter than Rylie, her heart stopped pounding quite so hard. It still took a few deep breaths before she could speak rationally.

“I’m an Alpha werewolf,” she said in a tight voice that was about an octave deeper than normal. “Don’t ever look me in the eye. Hunch your back when we’re talking. And if you’re going to argue with me, you better do it when your head is below mine. Otherwise, I could bite your head off—literally.”

“Abel doesn’t do any of that.”

Her fading anger spiked again.

“You’re not Abel,” she snapped. “Show some respect.”

Vanthe focused his gaze on her feet, and it looked like the effort was physically painful. “Fine. I can do that.”

“Good.” Rylie took one more deep breath and let it out. She tried not to be too obvious about checking her fingernails for blood. They were usually the first thing to go when she was on the brink of wolfing out, but all of them were secure.

“I’m just worried,” Vanthe said, quieter than before.

It was normal for werewolves to seek their Alpha when they were scared—and she had snapped at him. The new guy. God, she was the worst Alpha ever.

She sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll get down to the barn.”

He kept his shoulders hunched until he was out of sight.

She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror. There was still blood on her mouth, and her eyes blazed with anger. She looked terrifying. No wonder Vanthe had been scared.

She took a blanket to the porch swing and wrapped herself in it, watching the hills lit by the moon’s waning crescent. The muffled sounds of hammering rang out in the night as Gwyn and the pack locked down the ranch house.

Rylie glimpsed the occasional flash of Bekah and Levi running laps around the perimeter. She watched them for what felt like hours.

But she must have dozed off at some point, because she woke up with the light of sunrise warming her cheeks, and Seth’s hand on her shoulder.

Rylie sat up with a jolt. The swing tilted at her motion. “What’s going on? Are we under attack?”

“Not right now,” Seth said, settling next to her.

“Abel?”

“He’s going to be okay. I think I’ve got everything. I’ll have to watch his symptoms for a few days to make sure he doesn’t have silver poisoning, but he’s stable for now.”

She sagged against his arm. “Thank God.”

They sat together for a few silent minutes, watching the ranch stir with the onset of day. Someone must have taken charge while Rylie was asleep. There were still werewolves running laps around the fence, but Bekah and Levi had been replaced by Trevin, Vanthe, and Analizia.

A few other people had already gotten down to chores, too. Raven was pulling weeds down the hill, and her sensitive ears and nose suggested that others were working in the back acres, somewhere out of sight. Nothing inspired proactivity in a bunch of lazy werewolves like an attack.

“Everything looks normal,” Rylie said.

“Everything is, as far as I can tell. Pagan was alone.” Seth’s arm tightened around her. “But why?”

She leaned over to kiss his cheek. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his skin was coarse with stubble. “Let’s find out.”

Nobody had gone down to
check on Pagan since Gwyn locked her in the cellar. Rylie had been secretly hoping she might have died—not just because she hurt Abel, but because that would mean they wouldn’t have to deal with her turning into a werewolf.

But when they opened the chains on the door and descended down the dark steps, she found Pagan sitting in the corner, wrists tied behind her back, very alive and looking totally bored. She was in the same shorts and camisole that she had been wearing in North Harbor, although they were much bloodier than before.

There was no sign of the transparent skin that Gwyn had reported. But there was blood—lots of it. She didn’t seem to have clotted at all, and the floor under her was drenched with sticky crimson fluid.

“How can I help you?” Pagan asked in a too-bright voice, like a cashier at a coffee shop. She looked totally unimpressed by the rifle Seth had propped against one shoulder.

“Why are you hunting us?” Rylie asked.

“I’m watching you for Cain.” She twisted her arms in their bindings. Fresh blood flowed around the ropes, filling the air with the iron scent of blood until Rylie couldn’t smell anything else. “He told me to reconnoiter, but to save your deaths until he could enjoy them properly. But it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to kill when it arises.”

Seth crouched in front of her, gun aimed safely at the wall. “Who’s Cain?”

“He’s your reckoning.”

He turned the barrel so that it was pointed at her chest. She didn’t even glance at it. “Tell me who Cain is.”

“Oh, please.” Pagan focused on Rylie over his shoulder. “Is he serious?”

“Deadly serious,” Rylie said, hoping that it sounded threatening. She had never needed to question a prisoner before.

“Who are you?
What
are you?” Seth asked.

Pagan gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “You don’t have the testicular fortitude required to get me to talk, little boy. I’m older than I look, and I could tell you things about my life that would give your grandkids nightmares.”

“Maybe he’s not going to do anything to you, but I could,” Rylie said, baring her teeth.

“Be my guest. I still have another arm for you to eat.”

Rylie didn’t really know what to do when she got called on her bluff. She wasn’t really going to bite Pagan again. Just the thought of trying to torture someone made her queasy.

Pagan saw the doubt in her eyes, and she laughed again.

“I can prevent you from bleeding to death from your injuries if you talk to us,” Seth said.

“I can’t bleed to death. Are you kidding? My God, this is the most fun I’ve ever had being captured.” She kicked her feet up on a box of canned green beans. Pagan grinned. “I bet it’s going to be even more fun when Cain frees me, and we kill every last one of you.”

Seth stood. Stepped back beside Rylie. “Is he coming?”

“Oh yes.” Pagan shifted on the floor to bare her wounded arm. Her hair fell over her neck. There was a tattoo on her neck of an apple dripping with black blood. “And your flooding fluids will taste so sweet.”

As if to illustrate, she twisted her arm hard. The rope dug into her wrists. Fresh blood cascaded down her hands.

And she kept laughing.

“She’s not human,” Seth said
after they had locked the cellar again and returned to the surface.

It was a warm, bright day, but Rylie felt cold all over. “If she’s not human, than what is she? I couldn’t smell her. There was way too much blood.”