Authors: S.M. Reine
Rylie would never get used to waking up naked in the middle of nowhere.
She stretched out in a snowdrift, reaching her hands high over her head and flexing her toes so every muscle went taut. She felt like she had been beaten up. Her skin was battered, sore, and completely unmarked. But what else was new?
Sitting up, she peered around at the fields in the dim light of early dawn. Snow stuck to her hair. She recognized the ridges of the hills to the south, but everything else was masked in a thick layer of snow, turning all her normal landmarks indistinguishable. Was this the edge of her aunt’s fields, or further out?
And where was Seth?
He usually tracked her all night so he could be nearby with her clothes when she woke up, but there was no sign of him this time. The only footprints near her were in the shape of wolf paws the size of a small lion’s.
She got to her feet and brushed the snow off as best as she could. Even though she was wet and her hair had frozen, she wasn’t cold. Rylie stayed feverishly warm for a good hour after she became human again. It was like a ticking clock, though—if she didn’t find clothes and get dressed before she became a normal temperature, she could freeze.
Tilting her head into the still air, she took several short sniffs. The colors of winter splashed through her mind: the chill of ice, rabbits warm in their dens, the stink of engine oil, and a cloying flowery smell that was the perfume Rylie used to make her clothes easy to locate.
But there was one other scent, too. It was the kind of smell that caught the attention of the wolf inside her even though it should have been sleeping after a new moon.
Blood. Lots of it.
She was torn. Rylie needed her clothing before she got cold—or worse, before a farmer doing his morning chores saw her streaking through the snow—but the blood smelled sticky-sweet and delicious, and she was so hungry.
Maybe just a peek.
Rylie jogged across the hills. She was light enough that her feet barely sank into the snow, and she made good time. Steam drifted off her skin and plumed around her mouth as she breathed. Even though she was sleepy and sore, the call of blood was so strong that she ignored it and pushed on.
More than a mile away, the smell of blood became much stronger. It was coming from a large grove of trees that sprawled along the border of a farmer’s land.
And people were waiting on the south end.
Rylie hesitated near the back of the trees, ducking behind a thicket to keep herself from being seen. Trucks labeled with the sheriff’s department logo were parked all over the field. There was an ambulance, too, and some vehicles she didn’t recognize with government license plates.
She sniffed again. So much blood.
Ignoring her better instincts, which told her to turn around and leave before an officer spotted her, Rylie crouch-walked through the grove, following the smells to the east.
A man in a uniform walked past her tree, just a few feet away. She froze.
But his back was turned, and he didn’t see her. He was distracted by something on the opposite side of the grove. “Jesus H. Christ, what a mess,” he muttered. “You ever seen something like this before, Mary?”
“What a mess,” echoed a woman that Rylie couldn’t see. She was blocked by a tree.
What was it? What were they staring at that smelled so delicious?
The man moved, and Rylie caught a glimpse around his legs.
At first, all she could see was meat, raw and dripping. Her stomach growled so loudly that she was afraid the sheriffs might hear it.
So hungry.
And it was just laying there on the snow, waiting for someone to take it. Still fresh. Still warm.
After a moment, her human mind kicked in and override the wolf.
A human body
.
The sheriff shifted again, blocking Rylie’s view, but the corpse was branded into her mind. She could see it even with her eyes shut—throat torn open, blood smeared up his chin and down his chest, making his clothes stick to his body. Her stomach lurched. Most of her was repulsed and horrified by the sight of it, even though it wasn’t the first person she had seen dead before.
But some of her still thought it looked edible.
Rylie clamped both hands over her mouth to keep from vomiting, but her shoulders heaved, and she felt bile rise in the back of her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut, focusing on taking deep breaths. She couldn’t make a noise. She couldn’t get caught.
“Think it was a coyote?” Mary asked.
“Hard to say. I’ve never seen a coyote that vicious.”
Taking the noise of their conversation as an opportunity to mask her movements, Rylie slipped out the back of the trees again. She skirted the grove, wishing she had never followed the smell of blood. She felt dizzy.
A motion on the hill overlooking the grove caught her eye. A dark figure, silhouetted by the rising sun, waved his hand to her from the very top. Even though he was too far away to smell, she recognized Seth instantly. He was waiting for her. Of course. He was always waiting for her. As soon as she lifted a hand to wave back, he disappeared.
His message was clear. Rylie had to get away from the sheriffs.
She hurried away from the grove, keeping low, and followed the smell of her own perfume to the stash of clothing she had hidden between some rocks a good half mile away. It was behind the hills where the sheriffs couldn’t see her, but she had to hurry. Finding a dead body meant they would probably sweep the whole area to try to find what killed him, and she didn’t want them to locate her or her clothing.
By the time she reached the rocks, her temperature had started to drop, and the chill was seeping into her bones. Her feet burned with cold. Her fingers became stiff and unresponsive. Shivering hard as she pulled the clothes out of the bag, she hurried to pull the jeans over her legs. They felt strange scraping over her numb skin.
She had to stop and blow on her hands until her fingers would bend before she could manage the dexterity she needed to put on thick socks and boots, and she skipped the shirt so she could get into the fur-lined jacket. Rylie had initially refused to wear it—she used to be vegetarian and hated wearing animal products. But when she was human and naked in the snow, she was grateful for the fur to replace what she had lost in her change from wolf.
“Sorry,” she muttered through chattering teeth, trying not to imagine the poor rabbits that must have been sacrificed for her warmth.
Rylie jerked the hood over her head, stuffed the shirt and bra into her pockets, and trudged toward the road where she knew Seth had parked the truck. She reached the truck just seconds after he did. The windows were iced over, and its hood was covered in an inch of snow. He tossed his rifle inside and started clearing off the ice.
“What happened?” she asked, voice muffled by her hood.
He grinned when he saw her buried deep in the oversized jacket. His slanted smile always made her heart stop beating for a second when she saw it. “You’re not cold, are you?”
“No,” Rylie said.
“Liar.”
“I’d like to see you spend all night naked one of these moons. Then we’ll see who’s cold.” She climbed into the passenger’s seat, and after a minute, Seth joined her. Rylie pushed her hood back. “Seriously, what happened?”
“You saw the body. What do you think happened? Someone got killed.”
“It wasn’t…?”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t you. I left the sheriffs an anonymous tip, so they can figure out what happened on their own. I didn’t want to answer questions about my rifle.”
“Why? Everybody in the country has a gun.”
“And you think they won’t be suspicious of a brother from the city?”
Rylie blinked. “I don’t think they care about your—you know, your race. I mean, they’re police officers. They’re professionals. And anyway, they would know there’s no way you could have torn out someone’s throat with your gun.”
Seth made a noncommittal noise. She recognized it as his way of saying
I think you’re wrong but I’m not going to tell you that,
and irritation pricked the back of her neck. “I got a good look at the body before I called the sheriffs,” he said. “His throat had been torn out, but it was too neat to be a werewolf. They’re savage when they attack.”
“You mean,
I’m
savage when I attack.”
“It wasn’t you. I tracked you for at least half of the night, and you stayed out in federal lands the whole time.” Seth cleared his throat. “None of him had been eaten. Like I said, you’re innocent.”
Rylie stared down at the toes of her boots. “Oh.” He was right. She had gotten to a few animals before, and she never left much of them behind. “Who was it?”
“Isaiah Branson.”
“My neighbor?” Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh God. That’s so close to my house. What if my aunt had been outside? What if—?”
Seth grabbed her hand. His fingers were chilly, but his touch spread warmth through her body. “It wasn’t Gwyneth. Don’t worry about something that didn’t happen.” He turned the key, and the truck’s engine turned over. “We’ve got a lot to worry about other than that anyway. It wasn’t a knife that tore open Branson’s throat. It was teeth. But if it wasn’t a werewolf’s teeth, then what was it?”
Rylie couldn’t answer that. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to know.
Long Night Moon
Coming Spring 2012
Excerpt from
The Forest of Adventures
by Katie M John
Preface
Sleep is for the innocent. For the guilty, the night is a time when we are fearful prisoners locked tightly behind heavy eyelids. We look asleep but we’re not – we’re living in nightmares, and it leaves us exhausted and half crazy. This is the punishment for our crimes.
It always starts the same, with the thick scent of wildflowers and sun warmed earth lulling me into a false sense of peace. It doesn’t last. Too soon it fades, to be replaced by the sinister iron-stench smell of blood blending with mud, and the sweeping sounds of sharpened metal striking at the sky. On hands and knees, I crawl forward. My palms slip on the grease of the rain-soaked earth and my dress is heavy with rain so that I’m dragged even lower – sliding serpent like towards him.
He looks at me, his cheek half buried in the earth, his eyes staring blankly out. I can’t tell if he’s dead or still dying. I think I hear him whisper my name so I stretch out a hand, but I can’t quite reach. Death breathes on my bones and flowers of red ice bloom over my heart. I wake, gasping for air as if I’ve been drowning.
The pain was exquisite, the pain was love.
1. BEGINNING
Blake Beldevier arrived at college on the first day of the January term. He came with the snow. Perhaps looking back, this should have served as an omen: a warning to anybody foolish enough to fall in love with him, they ran the risk of having their heart turned to ice.
Nothing could have prepared me for the first time I saw him. He walked in to the common room, took a seat and started reading
The Times
. It wasn’t for this weirdness that I noticed him - although it would normally have been enough – but because of his instantly breath-stealing beauty. It was the sort of beauty that snaps a secret part of you to attention and reduces you to the beast you are at heart. It was a rough and rugged beauty, a colouring of the skin, a face that had been hewn from a remote and wild cliff face, a darkness of the eyes which were full of latent storms and solitude. He was more beautiful than any other boy I’d ever seen in my seventeen years.
All of this I saw in an instant but it was enough. A sickening current swelled in my stomach. I felt dizzy and stars erupted in front of my eyes as if I’d been hit by a force of freezing ocean air, knocking the breath from my lungs. The book I was holding, a thing of exquisite and private joy previous to this moment, flapped limp in my lap, revealing itself as the faded and battered thing that it was. Now, here in front of me, sat something more divine than anything an author could create.
By the time I’d tried to regain the appearance of someone who was actually sane – flicking through the pages of my book to give the impression I’d been reading and had hardly noticed him – he’d gone to his lesson.
Sam, who’d been sat at my side throughout all of this, was completely oblivious to these seismic shifts. He was too busy scribbling down the last two answers of his Math homework. As I got up to leave for my lesson, he took hold of my right hand and kissed the well of my palm. His love was a solid and reliable love. It was for its purity and simplicity that I loved him. Sam was clear waters. Instinctively I understood that Blake Beldevier was the swirling waters of a deadly current.
The sense of treachery I felt, as I walked to my literature class, was as overwhelming as the force that had been the meeting of Blake. Suddenly, it felt as if I had an iron scarf wrapped around my throat, and where Sam’s love usually offered a warm contentment, for the first time in the two years we’d been together, his love felt like it was choking me.