All Hallows' Moon (15 page)

Rylie was out there, and so was his mom.

He didn’t want to think about what they were doing.

If Seth was supposed to be an amazing hunter like Dad—destined to save humanity from the werewolf threat—then why was his life so miserable? Why did he have to grow up in a family where it was normal to live in an apartment without heat or electricity? What kind of people survived off nothing but a dwindling life insurance policy?

Why should Seth have to grow up in motels with a mom bent on hunting when Rylie had designer clothes and a family who loved her?

He didn’t deserve it. Any of it.

It was all too horrible for him to take. Misery overwhelmed and choked him. He sank to the steps and pressed his forehead to his knees.

Seth didn’t move until the sun rose.

By the time dawn stretched over the horizon, Eleanor hadn’t gotten to kill anything.

She hadn’t so much as glimpsed the werewolf since it jumped the fence. She found signs of it, yes—broken trees, paw prints twice the breadth of human feet, and even a rabbit with a snapped neck. But no matter how fast she moved, she couldn’t catch up with the beast.

The only mercy was that her chase had led them away from civilization. The blood smears she found were stuck with rabbit fur, not human hair.

“Still not a good sign, is it, honey?” she asked the clouds. She imagined Jim, her dead husband, watching the hunt from Heaven. She was never sure if it was a happy thought. He had been a hard man to satisfy. None of her kills were as good as his, and he was always happy to tell her that she could never replicate his techniques with any skill.

She wondered what he would think of the werewolf escaping her. Eleanor was sure he would have gotten it already.

Her search led her in a loop around the hills and back to the mine. It was unlikely that the wolf would have gone back to the place it turned once its den had been compromised, so she shouldered her rifle before hopping the fence.

Eleanor shone a flashlight around the cement as she went down the stairs in the mine. She didn’t care about the heavy machinery left behind by the corporation that owned it, even though the parts might have been valuable. She focused on the ground. A werewolf’s claws weren’t sharp enough to score concrete when it walked, but there was always blood where they transformed.

When she found the first smears of crimson, she tracked them back to an empty room with a heavy door that had been ripped from its hinges.

A lantern was tipped on its side in the corner. Eleanor righted it, frowning at the broken bulb and the scuffed casing. She had a similar lantern at home, but that didn’t seem too odd. Anybody could buy them at a corner store.

A glimmer of something lighter than the rest of the floor caught her eye, and she knelt to get a closer look.

Hair. Human hair.

They were like long, silvery strands of moonlight, and they made Eleanor’s heart race as she turned them over in her fingers.

Long hair probably meant a woman. A blond woman.

“Now what do you think of that, Jim?” she asked. He probably would have laughed and gone to sharpen his knives. He liked to skin the werewolves and keep the pelts as a trophy.

Looping the hairs around her hand, she tucked them into a pouch on her belt and stood. Her search had just become much easier.

Eleanor left the mine grinning.

She had been awake for almost thirty-six hours and fatigue weighed heavy on her bones, but she wasn’t ready to sleep. How many women with pale blond hair could possibly live in such a small town?

Her sons must have taken the car back to the trailer. The only sign it had been parked there were tire tracks. She found Abel’s motorcycle hidden in the bushes and mounted it, leaving the helmet hanging from a saddlebag.

Eleanor thought about blond hair as she roared down the road.

Was it blond in color, or gray? It was hard to tell the difference. If it was gray, then Gwyneth Gresham would be the main suspect.

Only one way to find out.

She went straight to the Gresham ranch and was surprised to find the Chevy parked on the hill. Eleanor tried to remember how badly Abel had been injured the night before. The werewolf had definitely bitten him, so it seemed doubtful he would have gone to work.

Parking the motorcycle behind a tree where it wouldn’t be visible from the house, Eleanor climbed into the branches to wait for Gwyneth to emerge. She didn’t have to wait long. The woman came out wearing leather gloves with her graying blond hair pulled into two thick braids. She had a shovel in one hand. She didn’t look like a woman who had spent her night mauling rabbits.

Eleanor pulled out the hair to give it another look in the sunlight. It was shinier and more silken than Gwyneth Gresham’s hair. Definitely blond, not silver.

Then why was her son’s car parked there?

Gwyneth went into the barn, and noise drew Eleanor’s attention to the other side of the hill. To her surprise, she saw Seth pacing by the pond.

I’m hunting
. Isn’t that what he said the night before? Maybe he had found the hair, too.

She had been surprised when Seth wanted to spend the summer hunting werewolves alone—proud, but surprised. Yet he seemed more reluctant to embrace his destiny when he returned. He’d become even more stubborn and talked a lot about college.

He wasn’t the boy she thought she raised. He was nothing like his father.

“Didn’t we always fear the teenage rebellion?” she whispered to Jim. Abel was a good kid. He was almost as dedicated as Eleanor. But Seth… he was a disappointment.

He suddenly straightened and rushed down the hill. Eleanor narrowed her eyes to see what he was running toward.

A pale figure limped out of the fields.

Eleanor dropped out of the tree and crouch-walked into the garden to get a closer look.

It was a girl. She was probably Seth’s age, and naked as the day God brought her onto the Earth. Her skin was filthy. One of her legs was pouring blood.

And her hair was a shimmering white-gold sheet down her back.

“Seth,” she said, her voice thick with tears. Her chest hitched. “I think I got shot.”

She dropped, and he caught her. “Oh my God.”

Oh my God
.

A sense of calm settled over Eleanor as she took in the scene in front of her. The girl—blond-haired and naked the morning after a new moon—must have been the monster. That part didn’t require much thinking. Eleanor heard Gwyneth had a niece living on her ranch. Abel had spoken the name “Rylie” once or twice himself.

But the way his son held that beast, looking at her with tenderness as he felt her leg… now
that
was something wrong.

If she thought she had been disappointed in Seth before, it was nothing in comparison to the way she felt now.

“You’re healing,” he said. “I think the bullet passed through. You should be okay.”

“It burns,” she whimpered.

“It’s the silver in the bullets. That’s why it’s closing so slowly. If we clean out the wound—”

“Where’s Gwyn? Help me get inside. She can’t see.”

Eleanor didn’t want to hear any more of it. She stroked a hand down the butt of her rifle. Jim’s voice came echoing from the dim depths of her memory.
We don’t kill them when they’re humans
.

But oh, it was tempting. So very tempting.

Now she knew. And it wouldn’t be long until the next moon.

Thirteen

A Visitor

Rylie’s thigh was on fire. She could barely move her leg. She dressed slowly in the bathroom while Seth hid in her bedroom, pulling a flowered sundress over her head. Jeans would have hurt too much.

Scrubbing her hands and arms in the sink, she got as much dirt off her upper body as she could manage before grabbing a spare towel and limping back to her room. Seth stood up when she came through the door.

“What happened? Did my mom find you?”

“I don’t know,” Rylie said. She laid the towel on her bed and sat on it, pressing a hand to her forehead as she tried to remember. The night before was as foggy as the rest of her nights as a werewolf. She groaned. “I don’t know! Why can’t I remember being a werewolf?”

He knelt in front of her. “It’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with you. Can I see your leg?”

Rylie bit her lip and nodded, lifting the hem of her skirt. The injury was kind of high on her thigh. Her blush almost burned more than the silver alloy did.

Seth leaned in close enough that she could feel his breath warming her skin. Her heart hammered.

Her excitement disappeared the instant his fingers probed the wound. Rylie squeezed her eyes shut as pain throbbed through her. It felt like getting stabbed in the hip.

“Silver is a soft metal,” Seth said as he examined her, sounding totally calm again. “The bullets are cast with other metals to inflict maximum damage. They’re supposed to sit in the injury and leech silver in your veins until you die of poisoning.”

“I thought you said the bullet passed through!”

He gestured for her to lean to the side, and he looked at the other side of her leg. “It did. You were lucky.”

Lucky. Funny choice of words. Rylie hugged a pillow to her chest, digging her fingernails into the stuffing. “How do we clean it?” she asked. She had broken bones since getting bitten over the summer, and they healed within minutes after a flush of heat. This burning kept getting worse instead of better.

“The back has closed. The front hasn’t.” Seth gripped her hand in his. “We can wait for the silver to pass through on its own. There isn’t much, or else you wouldn’t be walking at all.”

“How long?”

“Days. Maybe weeks.”

She groaned. “I have to go to school, Seth! And Gwyn can’t find out I got shot. She’ll go nuts!”

“I can pull the fragments out now,” he said.

Her eyes burned with tears. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“I’ll be fast. Do you have tweezers?”

Rylie pointed to the vanity. Seth searched through her drawers until he came up with a pair of needle-point tweezers, which she had used to pluck her eyebrows until she realized her hair was too pale for anyone to tell if she had one eyebrow or two.

“Will it hurt?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Seth pulled a lighter out of his pocket and flicked the igniter, holding the end of the tweezers in the flame. “Why don’t you stretch out?”

She felt like she was going to hyperventilate. She made herself focus on the white ceiling so she wouldn’t see what he was doing with the tweezers.

“Do you do this a lot?”

“You mean, fix people up?” he asked. “Yeah. Just last night, Abel and I…” He trailed off, hand resting on her leg. She could hear a roaring in her ears like the icy waterfalls on Gray Mountain.

“Last night? What happened last night?”

“You bit Abel.”

“
What
?”

Fire exploded all up and down her leg. Rylie mashed the pillow onto her face to smother the sounds of pain. It only lasted a moment, but when Seth withdrew the tweezers, it was burning even worse than before. Her whole body shook with sobs.

“You have to hold still, Rylie. There’s still something in there.”

“No, don’t—”

He inserted the tweezers into her injury again.

This time, she couldn’t smother her scream.

She flushed hot when he withdrew them. A wildfire of pain rolled up and down her body. Her thigh muscle shook. It was nothing like the other times she had super-healed a broken bone or scrape. Rylie felt nothing but pain. It blinded her to the world.

Seth climbed into bed and pulled her into his arms.

She wasn’t sure how long it took the pain to stop. It could have been a few seconds, or it could have been hours. But eventually, it did stop. Her leg gave another spasm and grew still.

Rylie sagged against him. She knew she must have looked totally gross, but she couldn’t make herself care.