Alpha Moon (The Cain Chronicles) (Seasons of the Moon) (4 page)

Rylie’s vision flashed. She was close to climax just with a few long strokes.

Deep inside her, the instinct of the wolf was taking over. The animal parts of her mind grew to overcome the humanity. She barely even understood Abel when he growled to her again. “I want to fuck you,” he said. “But it’s not happening until you’re as proud to be with me as I am with you.”

“Please,” she said.

Forget the people in the kitchen, the family drama, her ex-boyfriend, everything that had gone strange and wrong in the country—Rylie wanted Abel. The wolf wanted him, too. For once, they were in total agreement.

But when she reached for his belt, he pushed her hands away.

“Not yet,” Abel said, rubbing harder.

She went over the edge in a breathless, heart-stopping instant. Her mind filled with the roar of waterfalls crashing over Gray Mountain. Her muscles seized.

Rylie threw her head back and let the world fall away.

Sharing a bed
with Abel was nothing new. Rylie had slept with him every night that they were in the forest by the Haven, so she had gotten used to his warm, sprawling body taking up their sleeping bag. It was like snuggling with a really big teddy bear—not that she would ever tell him that. Being called a teddy bear probably would have wounded his manly pride.

For a few hours, she drifted in blissful, restful nothingness, where there were no worries or visiting mothers. But then morning came. Morning
always
came, sooner or later.

Rylie was the first out of bed, for once. Abel reclined against the pillows with his arms behind his head. The blanket pooled in his lap to bare the bricks of muscle down his chest and abs. The heat of his gaze felt like hands traveling over her body as she dressed.

She was blushing. That had to be the stupidest thing ever—being that intimate with someone, spending the night with them, and still blushing in the morning. The flush made the skin on her chest turn pink.

Shimmying into her underwear, Rylie bent to search for her bra. A smile played over Abel’s lips.

“Keep moving like that, I’m going to make us late to the airport,” he said.

She bit her bottom lip and tried not to dissolve into a puddle of embarrassment. “I’m not taking you to the airport with me. I’m going alone.”

His smile faltered—a tiny crack in his confidence. The momentary vulnerability that she glimpsed in him was heartbreakingly endearing. Rylie was tempted to jump on him and tell him, “Yes, I’m yours, come with me.” Anything to bring the swagger back. Only the thought of her mother leaving airport security and seeing them there, together, held Rylie at bay.

It took him a minute to put his shields back in place, concealing his hurt. The lazy smile returned. “No matter what’s up with your mom, you’re going to want me at the airport,” he said. “Security’s been watching for preternaturals. If shit gets real, I should have your back.”

“I’m not trying to get through security. It won’t be any problem. I’ll just pick my mom up, get in the car, and go.”

“The Union’s crawling over those kinds of places.”

“They won’t bother me. I promise,” Rylie said. She kicked her dress from the night before into the closet, then grabbed a fresh pair of jeans and shirt. The jeans were huge on her—they must have been Summer’s. God, where had Summer slept the night before? Having to explain the locked door was going to be embarrassing.

Abandoning the jeans, Rylie found a skirt that actually fit, then headed for the door.

Abel pounced.

He was lightning-fast, but Rylie’s reflexes were good enough that she could have stopped him if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. He flattened her to the wall, pinning her wrists above her head, and the weight of his body evoked such memories that she was tempted to never leave the room at all.

“Maybe I won’t give you a choice,” he said, nipping her throat. It pinched hard, maybe hard enough to draw blood. “Maybe I’ll follow you there. Hunt you down.”

The idea was far too appealing to Rylie’s wolf.

“Don’t forget who’s Alpha here,” she said breathlessly, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

Abel sank his teeth into her shoulder gently. She was still bruised from his last love bites, so it didn’t take much pressure to make her abs clench. If not for his grip, she would have fallen over. “I’m thinking I never want to let you out of my sight again.”

Rylie caught sight of the clock around his arms. “I have to go, Abel,” she said, squirming free of his grip.

He caught her wrists again. This time, she didn’t ask nicely—she
pushed
.

It was probably harder than she intended. He flew across the room and landed on the bed. One of the legs cracked, buckling under him.

Abel looked so surprised that she couldn’t help but laugh.

“I need to handle Jessica alone. Okay? Once I get through this morning, I promise I’ll introduce you.” Rylie stuffed her feet into a pair of Gwyn’s oversized cowboy boots.

“Seems I don’t have much of a choice,” he said, glowering from among the pillows.

She stooped to brush her lips over his cheek. Abel turned his head and caught her mouth with a lingering kiss instead.

But, thankfully, he didn’t get up when she backed away from him, cheeks aflame again.

“Love you,” Rylie said. “I really do.”

He didn’t reply, but he didn’t have to. His face said enough.

THE MORE TIME
that Rylie spent as a werewolf, the more that she found human places unpleasant. From the moment she hit the onramp for the freeway, a growing panic threatened to overwhelm her. The wolf didn’t like being trapped in a metal box while other metal boxes zoomed around her. Her very human hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel while her heart thudded against her breastbone.

Finding parking in the airport garage was a whole new kind of difficult. Her brain was organized to find its way through labyrinthine forests and long grasses in search of prey. It couldn’t make sense of the painted lines on the ground, the different levels, the numbers on the walls.

Rylie ended up driving to the top floor and parking where it was empty. She got out to find that she had angled her car across two spots, far enough to the right to make a third equally unusable.

“Sorry,” she said to nobody in particular.

At least she was right next to the stairs. She could head straight down to the pedestrian bridge without trying to navigate the parking garage on foot.

Rylie had become inured to the “We Report Preternaturals” signs that marked most local businesses now, but there was no preparing for the signs that greeted her at the airport. The first of them started to show up on the pedestrian bridge—warnings that preternaturals weren’t allowed to board airplanes without filing itineraries with the OPA.
 

The automatic doors had signs on them, too. These ones threatened “Violators of OPA Law May be Shot On Sight.” Cheerful.

Once inside the airport, Rylie was met by an overwhelming tangle of odors. She found it easy to pick out which people had already come off of a flight, and which ones were still waiting to board, just by following the stale smell of recycled air and sweat.

Rylie picked up the scent of coffee and trailed it to a first-floor cafe. She had to rub her eyes in order to read the illuminated clock on the wall. In her rush to escape Abel’s bed, she had managed to arrive at the airport at six-fifteen in the morning. Her mom wouldn’t even be there for forty-five minutes. Plenty of time for coffee.

“Medium cappuccino,” she said, digging in her back pocket for her wallet.

“Any syrup?” asked the barista.

She pulled a face. “No.”
 

Rylie paid with a ten dollar bill and almost dropped the change into the tip box—until she saw the “We Report Preternaturals” sign taped to the back of the cash register. She returned the money to her wallet instead.

She wandered through the airport in search of the C gate, sipping her cappuccino. After seeing all of the threatening signs, it didn’t taste very good at all.

Rylie located the security checkpoint, which she couldn’t enter without a ticket.
Or a travel itinerary
, she thought with an unpleasant twist to her stomach. She prowled around in search of a nearby bench, thinking that she could catch a quick cat nap before her mom arrived.

A scream drew her attention to the security checkpoint.

There were so many milling bodies and commotion that Rylie couldn’t see who was crying out. But the scream immediately ratcheted her adrenaline to eleven, making the hair on her arms stand on end.

That wasn’t a human noise.

The chaos drew Rylie’s wolf forward. She dropped her cappuccino in a trash bin.

More people were shouting now, and there was running. A woman shot past her, ramming into Rylie’s shoulder hard enough to make her stumble. A man followed, and then two more people.

She heard one clear voice through all the shouting: “It’s one of those things!”

The crowd parted enough for Rylie to see.

A man was standing in the body scanner, frozen with fear. But he wasn’t a human man. Black hair fell loose around his shoulders, framing a pale face, and his hands—
his hands
—were semi-transparent, baring the skeleton through the skin. Rylie picked out a chilling smell, like shedding snakes.

The last time that she had encountered that smell and seen someone lose their skin, it had been a demon—something that Seth called a megaira. This man didn’t look like the megaira, but he was almost surely a demon. Something about the scanner must have disrupted his energies.

A
demon
.

And security had seen him.

Rylie was rooted to the spot as people ran past her. The TSA agents had drawn Tasers and circled around the scanner, blocking all of the demon’s exits. They didn’t have guns, but that was probably better—shooting at demons had never seemed to do much good anyway.

“Help me,” he pleaded, eyes wild. “Please, just let me go!”

Even when panicked, his voice was strangely seductive. It brought to mind Abel’s mouth between Rylie’s legs, his body moving inside hers, their gasps as they worked against one another. Rylie shook her head to clear it.

Apparently, she wasn’t the only one affected. The security guards wavered. Most of them dropped their Tasers.

One of them fired.

Spikes latched onto the demon’s shirt, and electricity lanced down the wire. He screamed again as his skin flashed, his hair flickered, and his skeleton collapsed to the ground.

They were killing him.

A man with a scraggly gray beard grabbed her arm. “What are you doing standing around? Run!”

Being touched with her adrenaline running so high was bad. Very bad. Rylie didn’t even think before flashing her teeth at him and growling.

He dropped her arm and stepped back.

“Holy shit,” he said. “You’re one of
them
.”

Rylie’s hand flew to cover her mouth, but too late. He had already seen her reaction. She didn’t have fangs yet, but her teeth were loosening in her skull, and blood slicked her canines.

“No, I’m not—” she began, lisping around her loosening teeth.

“There’s another one here!” the man shouted, pointing at her.

Rylie backed away slowly, struggling to maintain her form. Her fingernails were coming undone, too. A few more seconds of this kind of panic, and she’d be fanged and clawed and impossible to pass as a normal human.

The crowd had dissipated from the area around the security checkpoint. There was nowhere to hide.

The captive demon’s power rippled over her again, more powerful than before. Her mind flooded with overtly sexual memories. Not just the last night with Abel—but the first time that they’d had sex, and the last time she’d slept with Seth, and every time before that. The mental images of naked bodies overwhelmed her. It was too much—scary, rather than sexy.

Yet her body reacted. Heat gathered between her legs as her core clenched in anticipation of sex. The beginnings of an orgasm gripped her, and Rylie had to grab the wall, dizzy with the force of it. Her knees shook.

Judging by the noises coming from the TSA, they were getting hit hard, too.

But then more of them fired on the demon, flooding him with electricity, and the sudden arousal vanished as quickly as it had come upon her. The sexual energies had been pouring off of the demon, like some magic power.

Rylie’s head cleared now that the demon had been thoroughly electrocuted. She hadn’t changed, but she had lost precious seconds to escape.

More security moved in, jogging up the hallway toward them. These weren’t TSA agents. TSA agents didn’t wear black cargo pants, black combat boots, and black polo shirts with bold white letters on their chests: UKA.

It was the Union.

“No,” Rylie whispered.

The demon caught her gaze from inside the scanner. He was a lump on the floor, pale and shivering. “Help me,” he mouthed.

She fled, leaving the demon to the mercies of the Union.

“Stop her!” someone yelled as she vaulted over the security barriers, launching herself toward the shops on the other side.

Alarms came over the PA system. People near the gates began to run, too.

Her feet pounded against the cement as the wolf overrode her mind. Normally, it made Rylie calmer to be in the grip of the beast. It was a cold, clinical, predatory thing, unemotional and always hungry.
 

But the wolf was out of its element. There were too many people, too much metal, too many strange smells.

Her panic grew.

Rylie’s teeth fell out in her palm, and she flung the bloody shards aside without stopping. Pops echoed deep within her skull as her jaw snapped. The skin on her face stretched. Her muzzle extended. She tried to hide the changes with her hands.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw three men from the Union cutting through the fleeing crowd, guns at the ready.

She needed to lose them. But how?

Rylie rushed down the long row of C gates. The crowd was chaos as people emptied out of duty free shops onto the walkways. Some dropped at her feet as if afraid to get shot by the Union. Others bumped into her, trying to flee, unaware of the shifting werewolf in their midst.