All Hallows' Moon (20 page)

The implications of all the different medications next to Gwyn’s bed struck her, and Rylie got dizzy. She had to sit on the desk chair.

Her aunt was sick.

Really
sick.

How could it be? She thought only guys got AIDS, but her aunt liked other women. But there was no other reason to have all those pills. Gwyneth must have left to go get the special treatment from the pamphlet.

Had sharing their food all this time put Rylie at risk? Could werewolves contract AIDS?

Was Gwyn going to die?

Rylie went through the papers one by one. Some of the more recent bills were dated for treatment around the time her dad had died. So that was why Gwyn hadn’t made it to the funeral.

The numbers quoted on the bills made her head spin. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could afford treatment like that. Gwyn’s sudden urge to sell her big ranch in Colorado made sense—she must have needed the extra money to pay her bills.

Sliding open a drawer, Rylie found several rolls of bills wrapped with rubber bands. She ran her fingers over them.

She couldn’t take any money. Gwyn needed it.

And Gwyneth needed her, too. Rylie was all the family she had left. Who would take care of her and the ranch if her sickness got worse?

Rylie’s hand covered her mouth. Her eyes burned.

“Gwyn,” she whispered to the wall.

Sixteen

Mother Dear

Seth showed up early for school the next day, just like he did every other day, and sat on the sign by the front lawn with his feet hanging over the edge.

He finished writing a paper that was due that day and gave it a quick scan in the light of the rising sun to make sure he caught every mistake. It was hard keeping up on assignments when his mom thought it was a waste of time.

Slowly, students began to arrive. He muffled a big yawn as he tracked them entering the building. Things had been tense at home for the last few days, so he hadn’t been getting very much sleep.

Something changed with Eleanor. She took the thumbtacks off her map and rarely came home. When she did, she didn’t speak to him, and the occasional words she exchanged with Abel were frosty. He was too afraid to ask what had changed.

Abel’s condition kept getting worse. The bite on his shoulder hadn’t healed immediately, which made Seth think he wouldn’t turn into a werewolf, but it seemed like he was fighting a serious flu. He threw up at least three times a day, and he complained of being freezing even though he was always drenched in sweat.

Seth didn’t know what to do. His dad might have known how to handle that kind of bite, but he hadn’t left any information in his notes. He brought as much food to Abel as he could, but they were going to run out of money. None of them would be eating soon.

Tate’s BMW pulled into the parking lot, jolting Seth back to reality. A girl with a shock of blond hair sat in the passenger’s seat.

Rylie.

The two of them were laughing together, but Seth was too far away to hear what they were saying. She looked like she was having fun with him. Seth could barely control his irritation.

Normally, Rylie looked miserable hanging out with Tate, but something seemed to have happened between the two of them. They were hanging out even more than usual, and she smiled a lot more. Seth didn’t like to admit it, but he kind of preferred it when Rylie looked unhappy. Not that he wanted Rylie to be miserable—he just didn’t want her to have fun with other guys.

She had been avoiding him since the morning after the moon, too. Seth stuffed his binder into his backpack and threw it over his shoulder.

He wasn’t going to put up with her silence anymore. He was going to find out what was wrong.

Seth dropped from his seat on the sign and walked behind them as they approached the school buildings. Tate nudged Rylie with his elbow, and she slapped him back playfully. Seth resisted the urge to punch him in the face.

She waved at Tate, and they went in separate directions. Tate went in the first building, and she headed for the next. Seth snuck up behind her and dragged her behind a bush.

Rylie’s whole body went tense. A growl slipped from her before she realized who it was.

“Seth?” She glanced around them. “We shouldn’t be talking. What if—?”

“Abel’s sick. He’s not going to spy on us.”

“What about your mom?”

“She doesn’t know. It’s okay,” Seth said. “Where have you been? I went by your house after the new moon and you were gone, and then you’ve been avoiding me all week.”

“I had to… um, I went out of town.”

“I’ve been worried about you.”

Rylie scuffed her feet. “Sorry. Is something wrong?”

“No, I just—I mean, we haven’t talked. I wanted to make sure you’re okay. It’s not like I was trying to stalk you,” he said. She wouldn’t look at him. Why was she acting so distant? “Are you okay?”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?”

“You got shot, Rylie.”

Her hand dropped to her leg. “Oh. It healed fine. Thanks.” Seth waited for her to say something else, but she was biting her thumbnail and kept peeking over the bush. “We shouldn’t hang out where other people can see, and I have to get to class. Can we talk later?”

She didn’t wait for his response before leaving their spot behind the bushes.

Seth hurried to catch up with her. “Talk to me,” he insisted.

“We shouldn’t talk in the open,” she whispered.

“Come on, Rylie.” He grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to stop. People were watching them, but he didn’t care. “What’s going on?”

Her eyes searched his face, and her gaze was like being under the weight of twin full moons. She reached up to touch his chin. It looked like she wanted to say something to him. He could practically see it hovering on her lips.

“Seth…” The bell rang. Her eyes dropped. “Never mind. I’ll talk to you later.”

She went into her class, leaving Seth alone in the quad.

He thought about Rylie all day. Her eyes had burned into his skull, and he kept seeing them when he looked at his notes instead of formulas and diagrams.

Rylie had always been excited to see Seth. He had come to expect her eagerness. He could show up whenever she wanted and she always made time for him. This new avoidance unsettled him.

His dad used to say that the spirit of the wolf ate the spirit of the man when they were bitten, which was why werewolves were evil. The changes they caused were so profound that the humans might as well have died on the night they were attacked. Seth had never known anyone before and after the bite, so he didn’t know if that was true, but Rylie had definitely changed.

Something told Seth that wasn’t the problem. Tate nudging Rylie and their shared laughter flashed through his mind. He clenched his fist, snapping his pencil in half.

“Seth?”

He realized it was the third time his name had been called. He looked up to find his chemistry teacher standing over him.

“What?” he asked.

Someone in the back of the room giggled.

“I asked if you’d solved the formula,” said Ms. Lennon.

Seth looked at his paper, but he hadn’t even written it down. “No. I didn’t.”

When the last bell of the day rang, he hurried to the parking lot hoping that he could give Rylie a ride home. He got outside just in time to see her disappearing with Tate again. His heart sank.

While Rylie avoided him, he had done some research into Tate’s family. They were rich. Really rich. Seth’s family didn’t even have a couch, but Tate’s parents had a summer home in Hawaii.

What if this didn’t have anything at all to do with werewolves and hunting?

He brooded about it as he rode out on Abel’s motorcycle. Seth meant to go home, but he looped around the small town three times before finally getting on the road out to the Gresham ranch.

There was no sign of Gwyneth’s truck when he pulled up, and Tate’s BMW was gone, too. Only Jorge’s car was parked out back.

Seth parked and went looking for Rylie. The house was silent, so he checked the garden, and found it empty there too. A lot of the plants had shriveled from the recent frost.

He finally found her standing at the open door of the stables, watching the horses with a wrinkled nose.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, standing behind her.

Rylie glanced over her shoulder at him. “My aunt said I could get my driver’s license if I rode one of the horses. She would even let me take myself to school with the truck.”

“Sounds like a good deal.”

“It is,” she said, and her smile faded. “But I can’t do it.”

Seth almost asked her why, but then he remembered the first weeks after Abel had been bitten. He couldn’t pass a dog without having it run in fear. Even if a werewolf looked like a normal person most of the time, animals could smell the difference. Abel got back to normal, but Rylie would probably spook horses.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“They can’t smell me now, so they’re being quiet. I bet I could sneak up on one of them. But as soon as they realized I was on their back…” She shivered. “What would you do if your mom found out about me?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“But what if it did?” she insisted.

“I guess we would leave,” Seth said. “You and me.”

She didn’t look as happy at the idea as he hoped. In fact, she actually looked sad. “Is that really the only good choice?”

“Unless you think dying is a good choice.”

“Your mom scares me. She scares me more than I’ve been scared by anything before. She’s way worse than Abel.”

Seth took her hand. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” she said.

All of a sudden, she flung her arms around him and squeezed tight. It was like being crushed by a giant vice. His ribs creaked. “Rylie…”

“Sorry.” She eased up, but didn’t let go. He wrapped his arms around her too. She was really warm. He knew it shouldn’t feel nice to hold a werewolf, but he thought he could have stayed there for days if they had the time.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My aunt is sick,” Rylie mumbled into his chest. “Really sick.”

“You mean, like cancer sick?”

“Kind of.”

“Is she going to die?”

She sniffled. “I don’t know.”

Seth tried to imagine what it would feel like if he found out his mom might die. Dad’s death was sudden, but it wasn’t surprising. It was part of a hunter’s reality. He couldn’t imagine anything tough enough to take out Eleanor.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The wind came up, and he rubbed Rylie’s back to try to keep her warm. The horses caught a sniff of her and started shifting in their stalls. “It’s cold. Let’s go in the house.”

It wasn’t much warmer inside. While Rylie started a fire in their woodstove, Seth explored a little. There were lots of boring knickknacks on their shelves, like novelty cats with clocks in their stomachs, but he discovered photo albums under the coffee table.

He opened the first one. The first picture had a younger, blond-haired Gwyneth with a grinning toddler in her lap. The man behind them looked like he hated to be photographed.

Seth’s mom only had one picture of him and his brother as children. It was a photo of them standing over Abel’s first kill.

“That’s me and Gwyn with my dad,” Rylie said, peering over his shoulder. “I miss him so much sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?”

“I don’t think he would have liked me as a werewolf.”

He shut the cover. “We should probably talk about the full moon tomorrow.”

“Why?” she asked, sitting next to him on the couch.

“It falls on Samhain. This moon is kind of special.”

“What’s Sow-in?”

“All Hallows’ Eve,” he explained. “It’s a holiday for witches. My dad used to say that werewolves were the worst on Halloween, but I don’t know if that’s true. I think he used to make up a lot about werewolves. But if he was right, I don’t think I can control you.”

“Oh. I forgot about Halloween. I don’t even have a costume.” She smiled a little, but it was a sad smile. “I bet I could win the contest at school tomorrow if I showed up furry.”

“Not if you eat the judges.”

Rylie didn’t laugh. “So what will we do? Where should I hide?”

“We can’t go back to the mine in case my mom checks it. Your aunt has a cellar, doesn’t she? We could try that.” Seth took a deep breath. “If you are as bad as my dad said you would be, I don’t know if I can control you. We should probably use the muzzle, and maybe some wolfsbane.”

“Isn’t that poisonous to me?” she asked.

“Yeah. A small dose would only knock you out, though. You wouldn’t feel much pain.”

Rylie rested her head on his shoulder and he pulled her close to him. They watched the fire as it grew dark outside.