All Hallows' Moon (24 page)

He didn’t. He wrapped his arm around Rylie’s shoulders and watched as it drove away.

“What am I going to do?” Seth asked.

She gripped his hand. “I said you could stay with me. My aunt’s coming back today. I’ll ask her. I mean, you’re turning eighteen soon, right? So it would only be for a few months anyway.”

“I can probably stay with Abel. That’s not what I’m worried about. But…” Admitting the problem pained him. Seth grimaced. “We’ve never had much money. Without Dad’s life insurance, I won’t have anything at all.”

“That’s okay,” Rylie said. “I could—”

“I don’t want your money.”

Her cheeks colored. “That’s not what I was going to say. I could ask my aunt if you could work here, too, since we’ll need a lot of help around the ranch if she’s sick. She pays pretty good.”

“Oh. Do you think she would hire me?”

“I’m sure she would. Gwyn trusts me,” Rylie said firmly. She looked down at herself, and her cheeks got pinker. “Um… do you think we could go inside? I’m kind of freezing.”

Seth laughed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

The wolf was unusually quiet after the moon on All Hallows’ Eve. Rylie didn’t feel the slightest bit of a stir as she went through her morning chores, and she even managed to feed the chicks without sending them into a panic.

She never felt too much the morning after a transformation, but now it was like she was hollow on the inside. The wolf wasn’t just quiet. It had completely gone away.

“Do you think this is it for now?” she asked, standing by the pond with her shoulder bumping against Seth’s.

“What?”

“The werewolf thing. I don’t feel it at all.”

He tangled his fingers with hers. “You’re not cured, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But that was the worst it will get, right? I’ll never have a day as bad as this Halloween.”

“No. Probably not.”

“Good,” she said. “Then I want to try something.”

Gwyn came home that afternoon to find them in the stables. Her aunt took one look at Seth, who was brushing and saddling Butch, and her eyebrows lifted so high on her forehead that they looked like they might fly off completely.

“Did you have fun while I was gone?” she asked. She looked exhausted. Her sleeves were rolled down to the wrists, but Rylie could see bruises on the backs of her hands.

“Not really. I missed you,” Rylie said honestly.

Gwyn lowered her voice so Seth wouldn’t be able to hear her. “We should probably talk as soon as possible.”

Sadness gripped her heart. “I already know, Auntie,” Rylie said. Gwyn’s eyes widened. “I looked in your room and I saw everything. I’m really sorry. I know I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Well.” She hooked her thumbs in her belt loops and didn’t say anything else about it, but Rylie saw her swallow hard. “That’s that.”

“It’s okay. I’m going to stay and help you.”

A hint of a smile crossed Gwyn’s face. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend?”

Seth walked over and offered her a disarmingly handsome smile. “My name is Seth, ma’am. I’m Abel’s brother.”

“He mentioned you,” she said, and they shook hands. “How long have you and Rylie been… friends?”

“A little while,” he said.

“Uh huh.” Gwyn gave Rylie a look that said
you have a lot of explaining to do
, but she was polite enough to save it for later. “What are you two doing in the stables?”

“I’m going to ride a horse,” Rylie said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Once Butch was ready, Seth and Gwyneth stood back to watch Rylie. The horses were watching her, too. Rylie felt like the whole world was waiting to see what would happen.

All she had to do was mount the horse, but she couldn’t make herself move forward. She kept thinking about the last time she reached for a bridle and ended up with a broken collarbone. Even though Butch barely looked awake, Rylie had to hold her breath while she opened his door. He huffed.

“Good horse,” she muttered. “I’m not a scary monster. I’m just a girl going for a ride.”

He didn’t move away when she grabbed the pommel, and he stood still while she climbed on and got her foot in the other stirrup.

Rylie froze on top of him, too afraid to flick the reins.

Gwyn was grinning. “Looking good, babe.”

Seth stepped forward to take the bridle. “Hang on, Rylie. We’ll do this together.”

He led them to the doors, and together, they rode into the daylight.

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About the Author

SM Reine is a writer and graphic designer obsessed with werewolves, the occult, and collecting swords. Sara spins tales of dark fantasy to escape the drudgery of the desert, where she lives with her husband, the Helpful Baby, and an army of black animals.

Turn the page for an excerpt from

Long Night Moon

Coming Spring 2012

Prelude

The Cage

Gwyneth Gresham had run for too long. She couldn’t do it anymore.

Her feet slipped on the ice, and she shrieked as she tumbled down the hill. Rocks and branches battered her body. Her clawed hands scrabbled for purchase and found nothing. She bounced over a boulder, ribs giving an audible
crack
as they met a ridge, and then she hit the bottom in a drift of thick snow.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move.
It can’t end like this
.

Something approached her. The heavy thump of footfalls against snow were like nails in a lid of a coffin, and Gwyn raised her head to stare her hunter in the face.

The wolf circled. The hackles on its back had lifted into thick spikes caked with snow, and every huffing breath fogged the frigid air. Chunks of ice were stuck to its lower legs and between its paws. In the bright light of the moon, its fur seemed to sparkle with glitter.

It flattened its ears against its skull. Its teeth were already stained with blood.

“Is that you?” Gwyneth asked, her voice shaking with cold. Her entire body trembled. “Please—you don’t want to do this.”

A low growl rose in its throat. Its lips peeled back as it took a step closer.

Gwyn hadn’t believed. She had denied everything her niece said. It was impossible—full moons and werewolves and monsters. She lived in a rational world. A world of ranching, herding, hard work. There was no such thing as magic.

But now, she believed. She believed everything.

With a growl, the wolf jumped.

“Rylie!” Gwyn screamed.

One

Homecoming

Seth knew it was going to be a long day when he found the blood in the fields.

Blood was never a good sign. Sometimes it meant that Rylie had gotten into the pastures again and eaten something she would regret, which meant he would spend the rest of the day with a girl who was depressed about the death of an innocent calf at her jaws. Or, considering the location, it might mean that she had eaten some harmless ducks. He could already hear her long speeches about the innocence of ducks. It was kind of cute, in that “dear God just shut up” way.

Sometimes it meant Rylie had injured herself. It was easy to do during the violence of the change. A couple weeks ago she had impaled herself on a fence, which was scarier than dangerous. Werewolves healed fast. As long as she didn’t hit anything important, she could shake it off in a few minutes—and she had.

But this was different. Seth had never found blood not in such a quantity after a moon. It was splattered over the frozen surface of the duck pond with a dark cherry sheen, like hard candy, and he somehow knew that it didn’t belong to a duck.

It was probably the human handprints in the blood.

He glared at his cell phone. When human bodies became involved, even he couldn’t hide it—he had to call the police. Cops would mean an investigation, and if they saw him with his gun, he would have to answer a lot of questions. It would be a long day. Seth hated long days.

He trudged around the duck pond in calf-deep snow, keeping the blood in his periphery. There weren’t any paw prints around the pond, nor were there the other signs of a normal werewolf attack. The snow should have been disturbed. There should have been claw marks on everything solid nearby—frenzied werewolves liked to leave marks. Plus, there was no body. If a human had died during the new moon, it wasn’t Rylie.

That was almost worse. It meant something was killing things at night, and it wasn’t his werewolf girlfriend.

“This is going to be good,” he muttered.

He tracked the blood away from the pond, across the pastures, and into the fields of the neighbor’s farm. It was still dark, but the stars around the horizon were disappearing, so morning was approaching. Having no light made it difficult to follow the blood stains, especially since sometimes it disappeared for yards at a time.

Once the sun touched the horizon, it got a lot easier. He picked the trail of blood up a few hundred yards down with another puddle, and then it smeared for the next few feet.

Whatever was bleeding wasn’t running. It had been carried.

He didn’t have to track long to find the source of all that blood. Seth crossed the neighbor’s field and entered the thin forest that was scattered around its edge. The naked trees made skeleton shadows on the ground, and the fingers of the branches all pointed at one thing—the body of Rylie’s farmer neighbor, half-buried in snow with his head tilted back to show his throat had been torn out.

Yeah. It was
definitely
going to be a long day.