by SM Reine
The question shocked her into dropping her earmuffs. “I’m not running anywhere!”
“You can’t smell stuff from inside a truck.”
Rylie was tired enough that it took several seconds for her to piece together his meaning. He wanted to run. He wanted to smell. He wanted to hunt—not with guns, but like wolves.
“You’re crazy,” she said flatly.
“Human Rylie is thinking too much right now. Where’s wolf Rylie?” He glared into her eyes like he would be able to see the werewolf on the other side, and she gritted her teeth, refusing to back down.
“Wolf Rylie doesn’t want to play with you either. We both think you’re a jerk!”
She spun to stomp back inside.
Something clicked behind her.
It was a distinctive sound, and after the last few months, way too familiar. She looked over her shoulder to see Abel pull back the bolt on a rifle. It was pointed at her.
Stillness settled over her as the world came into sharp focus. She saw the pulse in his throat and the way his hands were braced on the metal.
Her lip curled.
“That’s better,” Abel said.
She circled him, and he tracked the rifle along her path. Rylie angled so she could duck behind the truck if he squeezed the trigger, but a whiff of something meaty blew past her.
A skinned rabbit had been left in the truck bed.
The wolf swelled to life as the odors and sounds of the ranch came rushing around her. She could smell the livestock and hear the rustling of animals in their shelters.
None of that mattered. There were more important smells. Other wolves.
“You want to get them, don’t you?” he asked, voice low.
Rylie trotted down the hill without speaking. The trail of the wolves was old, but it grew stronger by the road.
Abel followed. Distantly, she realized two things—first, that he was no longer armed, and second, that he didn’t smell like fresh gunpowder. The rifle hadn’t been loaded. She didn’t care anymore.
She inspected the fence at the highway junction. One of the wolves had rubbed against it.
“They’ve been watching for awhile, haven’t they?”
Abel’s words annoyed her, though they made little sense. She shook to loosen a strange pressure against her body. Jacket. Gloves. What was she doing wearing such human things?
Pushing off her hat, she followed the scents across the road.
Abel was right behind.
The motion of Rylie’s legs and pumping arms made her human mind drift away. Too hot, too constricted, too slow. Rylie dropped her outerwear until she was in jeans and a tank top, then kept running untouched by cold.
They slipped through the night as shadows, darting from hill to hill with their noses to the wind and bodies low.
Time blurred. All she knew was the hunt.
The smells changed as they reached the edge of town. Images of pink skin came to mind. The wolves became man and walked with the humans. Strange. Her nose wrinkled.
“Watch it,” Abel said, grabbing her arm before she darted into the street. Headlights sliced through the darkness as a car sluiced past.
She stared at him blankly. Watch it. She couldn’t wrap her mind around the meaning.
“Jesus, you go under hard,” he muttered, studying her face. “You’re not in there at all, are you?”
Too many words.
Abel tried to move ahead, but she reached out for him, digging claws into his upper arm. He swatted her hand away. “Let go.”
She backhanded him. His head snapped back, and he staggered.
Rylie didn’t follow Abel. He followed her.
When he came up, he looked furious. He wiped blood off his upper lip with his hand. But when he stalked toward her, she gave a warning growl, and he froze. He needed to know his place.
They stared each other down, and after a moment, he dropped his gaze. Good.
Leading the way through town, she didn’t watch to make sure he stayed behind her like he was supposed to. She didn’t have to.
Rylie and Abel stayed along the fringes of civilization, even though few people were outside on such a cold night. The scent of wolf-as-man became beastly again on the other side of town.
They sped along the highway, and the tracks split a mile down the road. Each was fresh and belonged to different wolves.
She circled the junction to evaluate both paths. The wolf that followed the highway was weaker. Its smell was tainted by something strange and sickly. They could take that one and go back for the other.
Rylie led Abel on, getting more excited as the smells strengthened. It wasn’t long before they came upon another group of houses completely unlike the farms. These ones were surrounded by gates and gardens and icy fountains with a manmade lake in the center.
The fence was no challenge to climb. When they dropped to the other side, she knew they had found the wolf.
The lust for the hunt abruptly died.
Rylie knew that house. She recognized the fancy gate, all those cars, and the neatly-manicured bushes, even underneath the snow. She had wasted a lot of hours in the basement while her friends played video games. She could smell the bong from outside.
“Stop,” she said when Abel moved forward. Forcing her tongue and lips to make sounds was harder than it should have been. “We can’t go in there.”
“Why? One of them is inside.”
Rylie shut her eyes, shook her head, and tried to focus on human thoughts and feelings.
This is where Tate lives. My friends are playing games right now.
She realized belatedly that she was standing knee-deep in a snowdrift. Her shoulders were so cold she couldn’t feel them. Her face burned with the slap of wind.
“What are we doing?” she asked, hugging herself. Her brain felt thick and fuzzy. “This is insane!” She rubbed her upper arms, trying to bring heat into them.
“It’s too late to go back,” Abel said. “We can finish this!”
“How? With your hands?”
He drew a knife from the back of his belt. It was wrapped in a plastic bag and sheathed in leather, but she could see a hint of silver metal.
“Yeah,” he said. “With my hands.”
She snarled. “Put that away!”
“If we don’t do something now, the werewolf could kill one of these rich punks. You know that, right?”
Rylie punched the buzzer by the front gate. Abel nearly jumped out of his skin. “What are you doing?” He dragged her behind a bush flocked with ice and a good three inches of snow.
She shoved him. His back smacked into the brick wall.
“Don’t touch me!”
“If that thing is living here—”
“It’s not. Shut up.” She cast a sideways look at the knife. “And I told you to put that away!”
It took a long time for anyone to respond to the buzzer, and in the meantime, Rylie danced from foot to foot to keep warm. Then something rustled over the speaker, and a sluggish voice asked, “What?”
“Requesting permission to enter the Tate Zone,” she said through chattering teeth. Abel gaped at her.
Tate laughed. He was joined by at least three other voices. She thought she heard aliens getting shot on TV. “Is this Rylie? What are you doing outside in the middle of the night?”
“It’s hard to explain, but I am so cold. Open the gate.” It immediately unlocked with a buzz. Abel didn’t move. “Come on. Seth would be annoyed if I let you freeze to death.”
He followed reluctantly. Tate greeted them at the door.
“Dude, what the heck? You look like a freaking ice cube.” He was in pajama pants and his hair stuck up in the back. He didn’t look like he belonged among chandeliers or marble fixtures at all. His eyes widened when he spotted Abel. “Whoa. Who chewed your face?”
A growl rose in Abel’s throat, and Rylie stepped between them. “This is Seth’s brother. His car broke down and I forgot my phone,” she said.
“We had to walk here. Can we get a ride back to the ranch?”
Tate blinked. “Oh. Yeah, sure, let me tell the guys.”
They waited upstairs while he went back into the basement, which was a horrible, stinking bachelor pad. She thought she might get a contact high when the door swung open.
But weed wasn’t the only stench. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths.
The other wolf was downstairs.
Abel’s upper lip pulled back to bare his teeth. He eyed the stairs. “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Someone could get hurt.”
He grinned. “That’s the point.”
“No. Do you hear me?”
Tate’s friends followed him into the entryway. He pulled baggy jeans over his boxers, stuffing his hands down the sides to smooth them out. Rylie gave a little wave to the other guys, who went to the same school, but then she saw an unfamiliar face in the back.
He had the same honey-blond hair and sharp nose as Bekah. There was a silver stud in his left ear marked with a star.
Levi. It had to be.
“Don’t even think about beating the boss until I’m back,” Tate said, jabbing a finger at Patrick while John ambled toward the kitchen. They all smelled like potato chip grease and frozen pizza.
Patrick snorted. “Yeah, okay, whatever. Hey, Rylie.”
She didn’t hear him. Her eyes met Levi’s. He looked surprised to see her, but not angry. It wasn’t until he turned to Abel that a spark of challenge flashed through his gaze.
Rylie grabbed Abel’s arm. She wasn’t sure if it was to keep him from jumping on Levi, or to stop herself.
Tate didn’t notice the sudden tension. “Want to borrow one of my mom’s jackets?”
She caught onto the conversation and shook her head.
“I just want to go home.”
“Cool,” he said. “Come on, the garage is downstairs.”
Tate regaled Rylie with stories of Dark Crash Exodus as he drove them home, punctuating it with words like “epic” and “awesome.” She smiled and nodded along. Abel lurked in the backseat of the BMW like an angry shadow.
“Need someone to call a tow truck for your car, man?” Tate asked, pausing in the middle of his story to glance at Abel in the rearview mirror.
“We’ll take care of it. Thanks,” Rylie said.
He dropped them off and left again. Abel and Rylie sat on the front step of the house without talking.
She was too embarrassed to go inside, like she had done something shameful—even though nothing happened. She hadn’t spoken to Levi Riese, much less tried to kill him. But she felt ashamed and dirty.
After working so hard to keep her wolf under control, all it took to get her mind shifting between moons was a dead rabbit and a gun with no bullets.
“Don’t tell Seth,” Abel said.
Rylie barked out a laugh. “I don’t even know what I’m not going to tell him. That you’re hunting behind his back? Or that you’re hunting more like a werewolf than a human?”
“Any of it. Don’t tell him.”
They stared at each other silently. It was a moment they had shared too often over the last few weeks—a wordless exchange where they evaluated each other, as though trying to decide who was alpha.
Rylie spoke first this time. “You’re supposed to be cured. Maybe if you tell Seth—”
He got to his feet. Abel was almost a foot taller than Rylie when they were both standing, so when she was sitting, he cut an imposing figure. “Don’t forget I’m still a hunter, and you’re still a werewolf.”
“That threat doesn’t mean anything anymore. If you were going to kill me, you would have already done it.” He spun and jumped in the Chevelle. Before he could shut the door, Rylie’s mouth opened again. She didn’t mean to say what she was thinking, but she did. “I love Seth.”
He stopped. “So?”
“So that means you might be my brother someday. If something is wrong with you, we can figure it out. All three of us. Together.”
Abel slammed his door. The Chevelle’s engine roared to life, and he tore down the hill.
Rylie’s heart ached as she watched him go.
Eight
The Talk
When Rylie finally slept, she might as well have died for all that she was aware of the outside world. Her eyes shut as soon as she touched the pillow. Overwhelming darkness consumed her.
Dreams flickered at the edges of her mind. She had four legs and a mouth filled with blood.
Was it hers? Or did it belong to a fawn in a distant forest that had been dead for months?
A hand touched her. She jolted to consciousness, and for an instant, she thought Abel was sitting on the edge of her bed. She was so angry to see him that she almost snapped. Her lip peeled back with a growl.
But both sides of his face were whole and unscarred.
“Oh my God, Seth.” She flopped back onto the bed. “Don’t scare me like that!”
“Sorry.” He bent to kiss her, but Rylie dragged her pillow over her face. Her morning breath could have scared any number of vicious werewolves away.
“How did you get in?” she mumbled into the pillowcase.
“The door. How else?”
Seth tried to uncover her head, but she clamped her hands tight on the pillow.
“Did you break the lock?”
He laughed. “Gwyn let me in. It’s almost eight.”
So she had slept in. She never slept in past five anymore. But Abel’s little “hunt” meant she had gotten less than four hours of sleep, and trying to open her eyes made it feel like her eyelids were being dragged off her face.
Seth finally wrenched the pillow out of her arms, threw it across the room, and pounced. Rylie shrieked.
He pinned her to the bed, his hands pressing her wrists against the mattress, and then he was kissing her and Rylie had no idea who or what she was. He tasted warm and delicious with a hint of sugar. He’d already been into the energy drinks and protein bars. Breakfast of champions.
“Your breath is horrible,” he said with a chuckle against her cheek.
She smacked her other pillow against the back of his head, hard enough to make their foreheads bump. “Shut your—”
His lips pressed against hers, defusing her annoyance in an instant. She wrapped her arms around his neck and relaxed against his body.
Rylie hadn’t done a lot of kissing before—or any at all, actually, aside from Brent in the seventh grade, who had these horrible braces—but she was certain Seth was the best in the world. Every movement of his lips and tongue woke her up in places she hadn’t felt before.
He pulled back so he could look in her eyes. His expression was dark and heated, like he was thinking about other things. Probably the same things as Rylie.
But before she could say anything, her door opened. Aunt Gwyn cleared her throat loudly.
Seth bolted upright. Rylie flattened out and hid her head behind his back. Her cheeks burned with heat. “Breakfast is ready,” Gwyn said, her voice thick with amusement. She propped the door open before leaving again.
Rylie burrowed her head in the sheets. “I think the door is supposed to be a sign,” Seth said.
“A sign that I’m going to die of humiliation,” she said. Seth slipped off the bed and kneeled next to her so their faces were level. She peeked at him with one eye over the sheet.
He grinned. “I’m starving. Are you starving?”
Her stomach growled loud enough for both of them to hear it. He laughed and dragged her out of bed.
Rylie detoured to the bathroom to comb her hair and brush her teeth. They walked into the kitchen holding hands, but Rylie kept her eyes locked to the floor so she wouldn’t have to look at anyone. Mercifully, Gwyn didn’t ask any awkward questions.
As soon as they finished eating and rinsed off their plates, they were free to check on the cows. It looked like it wouldn’t snow for a few days, so they were moving the herd out of the barn. Rylie had to break ic
e off the troughs so they would have something to drink other than snow.
Seth opened the barn doors and spread hay around the fields for them to graze on. Rylie sat back on the fence to watch him work. She couldn’t actually approach the cows unless she felt like causing a stampede.
When was the last time she had seen Abel working around the cows? He was at the ranch every day, but she only saw him plowing snow or repairing fences. Was he avoiding the animals now, too?
She couldn’t shake it off as paranoia. Not after what happened the night before.
He joined her on the fence when he finished. Tell him about Abel. He has to know. Just tell him...
“What are you going to do today?” she asked, wincing inwardly.
He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “I’m going to check out some of the murder scenes, I think. The police have cleaned up by now, but maybe they missed something.”
“Why don’t we just go after Bekah and Levi?”
“Because...” Seth hesitated. “I don’t know. We can’t do anything until we’re sure. We have to be sure.”
Rylie watched her feet swing over the snow. “I guess.”
“I’m going into the city today, too. I need to find a place that rents tuxedos.”
“Huh?”
“Well, you know. For the Winter Ball.”
Her heart skipped a beat, and she tilted her head back to look at him. “Did you hear they changed the date to the twenty-third? The new moon?”
“You’ve been doing really good on the days before you change. The dance is pretty early. I don’t think it will be a problem, if you still want to go.”
“You haven’t even asked me,” Rylie said.
Seth’s arm tightened. “I didn’t think I had to ask.”
She pushed him away. “So what, you assumed you’d show up before the dance and I’d magically be ready to go? I need warning to get beautiful.”
“You always look beautiful,” he said, but she could tell he was just trying to dodge trouble. Seth moved toward her again and she hopped off the fence. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t think it’d make you mad. Want to go to the Winter Ball?”
“Well, now I don’t.”
