01 Six Moon Summer - Seasons of the Moon

by SM Reine

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIX MOON SUMMER

  E-book Edition

  Copyright © 2011 by SM Reine

  ISBN 978-1-257-14883-7

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or any portions thereof, in any form.

  SM Reine

  Website: http://smreine.com/

  Email: smreine@gmail.com

  Twitter: @smreine

  Interior and cover design by SM Reine.

  Stock imagery provided by:

  Sean and Ashlie Nelson (ashensorrow.deviantart.com),

  MoonsongWolf (moonsongwolf.deviantart.com),

  and Velourya Stock (atumbleweed.deviantart.com).

  Modeled by Delphine (exquiseophrene.deviantart.com).

  Acknowledgments

  As with the completion any book, there are dozens of people to whom I owe thanks. These are the folks who have supported and tolerated my shenanigans over the years, assisted me with edits or promotion, inspired me to persist, and changed the baby’s diaper while I stayed on the couch with a laptop to write yet another blood-drenched scene.

  Naming everyone would likely fill a book larger than this one, so in brief:

  My husband,

  my sister,

  my mothers (both of them),

  Erin and Kylie,

  my grand aunt and great grandmother,

  and the ever-helpful baby, who nursed, pinched, and squirmed on my lap while I wrote and slobbered all over the pages as I edited.

  My so-called writing career would not be what it is today without any of you.

  For Jude

  and for Lara:

  You know what you did.

  Contents

  The End of Summer

  Full Moon

  The Boy

  Observations

  Hiking

  New Moon

  Solutions

  Golden Lake

  Laying Low

  Teeth and Claws

  Co-Ed

  The City

  The Fourth Moon

  Trouble

  Confinement

  Sacred Ground

  The Camp Social

  Hunter and Hunted

  Attack on Camp Silver Brook

  Moon Called

  The Third Werewolf

  The Day After

  Prelude

  The End of Summer

  The moon rose high in the sky.

  Rylie’s veins pulsed with its power. It pressed against her bones, strained against her muscles, and fought to erupt from her flesh.

  A wolf’s howl broke the silence of the night. It called to her, telling her to change.

  “No,” she whimpered through grit teeth, digging her fingernails into her shins hard enough to draw blood. “No.”

  Rylie burned. The fire was going to consume her.

  The moon called for her, but it would be the end of her humanity if she obeyed it. She would never see her family again. She would never see her friends or graduate high school. Rylie might not die, but her life would be over.

  Yet if she didn’t change, the boy she loved would die at the jaws of the one who changed her.

  Rylie had to lose him or lose her entire life. But was love worth becoming a monster?

  One

  Full Moon

  Three months earlier.

  Empty buses idled in the parking lot at the bottom of Gray Mountain. Almost everyone had arrived for the first day of camp an hour ago, but one girl came in her own car.

  “This is it,” announced Rylie’s dad. “Camp Silver Brook.” He tried to sound upbeat. Rylie could tell he was faking it.

  She glared at the camp’s entrance. The footpath was marked by a tall sign carved out of a tree, but she couldn’t see any cabins from the parking lot. Dense trees prevented sunlight from reaching the ground even though the day was sunny, so the forest looked dreary and dark.

  Three months of this: dirt, pine needles, and having to share a cabin with strangers.

  “Thanks for the ride, Dad.” Rylie didn’t pretend to sound happy. Missing the bus hadn’t been an accident.

  “Come on, it’s not that bad. Aren’t you excited? You can ride horses and go in a canoe and take lots of hikes.” Her dad got to the trunk before she could pick up her bag.

  “Yeah. I’m thrilled. Can I have my backpack?”

  “Let me walk you in,” he said.

  Rylie grimaced. “Dad. I’m almost sixteen. I don’t need to be babysat.”

  “Come on, humor your old man.”

  She rolled her eyes but didn’t argue.

  They walked up the trail together, backpack slung over his shoulder and her gaze fixed on her pristine leather hiking boots. Rylie’s mom said the shoes were a going away present for the summer, but she knew they were actually an apology for the divorce.

  The buses pulled away by the time Rylie and her dad reached the top of the hill, leaving their car alone at the bottom.

  After living in the city for so long, the forest seemed too quiet. Her feet shuffling against the dirt echoed against the slopes of the mountain and her breath was loud in her ears, although it might have been the asthma making her wheeze. Rylie touched her pocket to reassure herself that the inhaler was there. She was probably allergic to everything in the woods.

  It was a long walk up the trail on Gray Mountain. Rylie’s dad wasn’t in good shape, and he was struggling within minutes. “Look, Rylie,” he panted, and she recognized the beginning of an apology. He had already told her he was sorry for the divorce a dozen times.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she interrupted. “Really.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his balding scalp, wiping the sweat away. “It will all be better by the time you come home in August. I promise.”

  She didn’t reply. What was there to say? It wouldn’t be better in August. It would never be better again, unless she could go home to a house with her mom and her dad. A house where they didn’t yell all the time. A house where they didn’t get rid of their daughter so their lawyers could fight in peace.

  They kept walking in silence.

  Rylie heard voices before she saw the other campers: four large groups of girls, all around her age. They laughed and chatted, pushing each other around, meeting old friends and making new ones. Counselors with clipboards led them toward a fork in the path marked by a sign indicating “Silver Brook.” The other sign read “Golden Lake.”

  “Excuse me,” said Rylie’s dad. “Excuse me!”

  People turned to look at them, and Rylie stared harder at her shoes. A counselor broke away from the group. “You must be Rylie! Glad you made it!”

  “Thanks,” she told the ground.

  The counselor scanned her clipboard. “Let me see... there you are. Group B.”

  Rylie’s dad slung an arm around her shoulders in a half-hug. She tried to inch away from him. “Do I need to check her in?”

  “No, but it looks like her paperwork isn’t finished. Did you mail it in?”

  “Uh... I might have forgotten,” he said.

  Hope swelled within her. Maybe he hadn’t finished Rylie’s enrollment and she wouldn’t be able to stay. She could walk back down the hill, get in the car, go home, and pretend this camp thing didn’t almost happen.

  “That’s okay,” the counselor said. Rylie peeked at her name badge. Louise. She looked like a high school gym teacher. “You want to come to camp and fill a couple things out?”

  And all
hope was gone.

  “Sure!” he boomed. “Good day for a hike!” Rylie could have withered and died on the spot.

  Louise clapped her hands. “All right, campers! Let’s catch up with everyone else!”

  Rylie trailed behind everyone, watching the other girls in Group B while her dad chatted with the counselor. They all wore short-shorts and fake tans. One girl had a gold chain around her ankle with a single diamond, and Rylie glimpsed perfect white teeth when she talked.

  Many of the people in Group B were from Rylie’s city, but they went to the private school, May Allan. Rylie’s parents would have sent her there, but it was too far from home. Seeing her potential classmates made her glad. Rylie was the richest kid in her class at school. She would have been a nobody at May Allan.

  It was a long hike to the girls’ cabins, and Rylie was worried her dad would have a heart attack before they made it. Louise set a fast pace to catch up with the other groups. He barely managed to keep up.

  Once they reached the camp, Louise directed them to a log building overlooking the lake. “That’s the office. I need to take Group B to their cabins.”

  “I could just go home with you, dad,” Rylie said in a last-ditch effort to escape.

  He laughed, bracing his hands against his knees to catch his breath. He seemed to think she was joking. “The paperwork will only take a minute, pumpkin. Why don’t you wait out here?”

  She sat on one of the benches, smoothing her hair down with her hands. There was already a canoe out on the lake. Rylie could just make out more cabins on the other shore—probably the boys’ camp. She had read about Camp Golden Lake in the brochure. The boys and girls weren’t allowed to hang out at all.

  Rylie studied the rest of her surroundings from the bench, digging the toes of her hiking boots into the dirt. The common area was unremarkable. They had cut down a lot of trees to make seats around an amphitheater with a fire pit in the middle. Rylie could see the recreation hall and the dining room, and paths leading to cabins elsewhere in the camp.

  It was oppressively quiet, like she was the only thing alive in the woods.

  “Three months,” she mumbled.

  What in the world was there to do in a forest for three months? Walk around? Look at trees? Commune with the stupid deer? At least in the city, there were libraries and coffee shops. There was nothing like that here. Rylie wasn’t even sure there were showers.

  A splashing sound drew her attention back to the lake. The canoe had drawn close to her side of the shore. Rylie shielded her eyes to look at the person sitting inside.

  It was a boy. He was probably her age, or maybe a little older, judging by the breadth of his shoulders. His arms were dark tan, like he had already been camping for months, and he was looking right at her.

  Rylie chewed her bottom lip. One of the guys from Golden Lake? He was going to get in trouble if he was caught so close to their shore.

  She raised a hand to wave at him. After a moment, he waved back.

  Her dad came out of the office. “Okay, everything is settled. They told me you’re in Cabin B3. Sounds like you’ll be with some nice kids! Why don’t I take you there?”

  “I can find it myself,” Rylie started to say, but her dad looked sad. She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure. Show me.”

  Glancing back at the lake, Rylie saw the canoe had already moved on. The boy was gone.

  The cabins for Group B were laid out in a rough circle around another fire pit. A few girls were trying to get a fire going, carrying wood up the path and piling pine needles between the rocks. The sun was still high, but Rylie could tell sunset would fall quickly in the mountains.

  “Here it is!” her dad said. He rubbed his hands together, looking between Rylie and the cabin like he wasn’t ready to let her go. “I could help you unpack if you want.”

  “I really think I can handle it,” Rylie said.

  He sighed and handed the bag over. “You’re right. Have to let you go someday.”

  “You could let me go home,” she whispered, but he didn’t hear. He hesitated at the mouth of camp.

  “Love you, pumpkin,” he called. Someone near the fire giggled.

  Rylie slung her backpack over her shoulder. “Love you too, dad.” She didn’t wait for him to leave. She couldn’t stand to see the other girls whispering.

  It was going to be a very long three months.

  The first few days were as bad as she expected. Rylie managed to skip orientation by telling Louise that she wasn’t feeling good. Once she was alone, Rylie pulled out her diary and opened it to the first blank page.

  Dear diary, she wrote. I hate my life. Rylie considered the words with a frown. Camp could be interesting, I guess. Maybe if I see it as a learning thing instead of a punishment for the divorce...?

  She chewed thoughtfully on her pen for a moment, then dropped it. Why fake optimism? She stretched her cell phone over her head to search for reception in the cabin’s tiny loft, but there was nothing this deep in the mountains. She wouldn’t even be able to text her friends back home. Rylie flung her phone to the bed and tried not to let frustration choke her.

  “I can’t believe this,” she told the empty room.

  Rylie missed a few campfire sing-alongs and hikes in the first week, but after begging illness for a few days, Louise forced her to go to the infirmary.

  She tried to fake a cough. The nurse wasn’t fooled. “You can stay overnight, but you’re going back to the cabins tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” Rylie asked. “I could be contagious. Maybe I should go home.”

  The nurse gave her a look which obviously meant nice try, and Rylie was back in her cabin the next morning.

  She didn’t mind sleeping on a tiny cot in the loft. (All the other beds were taken by the time she got there.) She did, however, mind having to share her living space with a bunch of teenage girls. Rylie’s friends back home were mostly guys. Girls were catty and stupid.

  And these ones hated Rylie for no reason at all.

  They shot nasty looks at her before heading out in the morning, and they didn’t talk when they saw her in the evenings. Her roommates avoided her during the day and treated her like an alien when Louise forced them to interact. Maybe they were shy, Rylie thought. She hadn’t done anything to make them mad, after all.

  She learned she was wrong on the fifth day, when she finally made herself go choke down dinner at the mess. The cooks offered some kind of meat product slathered in gravy, and just looking at it made her queasy. Rylie had been a vegetarian ever since she learned how animals were butchered in the seventh grade.

  “Tofu?” asked the man in the hairnet behind the counter. “You want tofu?” Which meant, of course, they didn’t have it.

  She sat down to eat her carrot sticks, trying to imagine herself anywhere but the mess hall: maybe watching a movie at the second-run theater on thirty-second street, writing a journal entry on a park bench, or reading a book at the coffee shop on the corner.

  Rylie closed her eyes and let her imagination carry her away. There were no moths fluttering around the lights and no mosquitoes. Only percolating coffee and an indie guitarist in the corner. Maybe a cute guy at the next table. She could sip a mug of chai tea and drift away on the angst-ridden guitar melodies.

  “Where is she from?” whispered a girl at the table behind her, stirring Rylie from her fantasies. She was loud enough for everyone to hear. It had to be deliberate.

  Another piped up in the same fake whisper. “I don’t know. She didn’t come on one of the buses; her dad dropped her off. I saw him. He was wearing glasses like this.” Rylie glanced over in time to see the girl holding her hands in front of her eyes to indicate big circles. “And he was super fat.”

  “Where’s she been all week?”

  “She hides in one of the cabins. She never comes out. It’s so freaking weird.”

  “Look at her clothes.”

  “Look at her hair.”

  Rylie’s cheeks fla
med as she touched her white-blonde hair. Even though she always thought it was too pale for her face, she had never heard anyone talk about her like that before. A rope of embarrassment twisted in her stomach.