01 Six Moon Summer - Seasons of the Moon

by SM Reine

  “I’m always hanging out with monsters,” Seth said with a slanted smile.

  “I’m serious, Seth.”

  He considered the question without breaking rhythm. Their canoe sluiced through the water and the other shore grew closer and closer. “I spend a lot of time with my family.”

  Something in his tone of voice made Rylie ask, “Do you like them?”

  “Not always. But they’re family, you know? You don’t have to like them, but you need to love them.” Seth changed the subject. “We’re going to have to move fast when we get to camp. Everyone’s in bed, but the counselors take turns walking around. We can’t be seen.”

  “Okay. Where are the books?”

  Seth’s sideways smile grew. “In one of the counselor cabins. It’ll be a challenge.”

  “I’m up for it,” she said with confidence she didn’t feel.

  He pulled up the paddles in shallow water and drifted toward the shore. There was no sand on this side; the rocks jutted into the water and became a jagged cliff. Seth jumped out in the waist-deep water, guided their boat to a safe spot between the boulders, and lashed it into place. “Can you climb?”

  Rylie eyed the rocks. They looked at least thirty feet tall. “Maybe.”

  Seth hauled himself onto a rock and gave her a hand up. Grabbing what looked like a good handhold on the cliff, she was surprised to find she could lift her bodyweight effortlessly. He had to hurry to keep up with her.

  “Not bad,” Seth panted when they reached the top.

  “Thanks,” she said, looking down at the water with surprise. The cliff seemed even taller from up here.

  The layout of Camp Golden Lake was just like its sister camp. The main office was near the shore, and they had to crouch behind a tree to avoid being spotted by a stocky counselor as he passed.

  “Come on,” Seth whispered as soon as the counselor’s back faced them.

  They crept along the wall of the office and hurried past the big fire pit. Seth led Rylie toward a squat log cabin behind the dining hall.

  “Which one of the groups is yours?” Rylie asked, examining the trail directory nearby.

  “Oh, that one.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the water. “Quiet. Someone’s coming.”

  Rylie got on her knees behind the sign, trying to make herself as small as possible. She felt like her pale blonde hair and white skin made her too visible in the darkness, unlike Seth, whose dark coloring didn’t reflect the light as well.

  The patrolling counselor passed. Rylie recognized his short yellow hair and broad girth: Jericho. His eyes swept over her hiding spot, and she tried to be invisible. Fortunately, Jericho’s eyes didn’t settle on them, and he moved on. She let out a heavy breath.

  “How much further?” Rylie whispered.

  “This is it,” Seth said. “It’s where the counselors hang out when they’re not working.”

  “And they keep those books in here?”

  He nodded. “The library is in the back room. Kids aren’t allowed.”

  “No wonder, if they’ve got stuff on werewolves,” Rylie muttered. “How do we get in?”

  “The front door, of course.”

  Rylie watched while he crouched in front of the door and inspected the lock. “You do have a way to get in, right?” she asked. He produced a leather wallet filled with rows of thin metal hooks. Her eyes widened. “Are those lock picks? You brought lock picks to camp?”

  Seth flashed the Boy Scout salute at her. “Be prepared, right?”

  He selected two of the picks and inserted them into the lock, his eyes falling half-closed as he concentrated on opening the door. Rylie shifted back and forth on her feet, alternating between watching him and the camp around them. Neither Jericho nor the other counselor were in sight, but she still had the awful feeling they were being watched.

  Finally, he twisted both picks, and the lock clicked. Seth opened the door.

  “Ladies first?” she asked. Rylie felt too exposed in the dark night. She went inside and Seth shut the door behind them. He turned on his flashlight and harsh shadows crept up his cheekbones and forehead.

  “That way,” he said, pointing with the beam.

  “The counselors are holding out on us,” she observed as they navigated to a door at the back wall. There were vending machines with soda and chips—neither of which were offered to campers on her side—and even a big-screen TV in the corner.

  There were no windows in the back room, so Rylie flipped on the light. A lone fluorescent bulb flickered to life.

  Three of the walls were covered with tall cabinets, and a pair of free-standing cabinets occupied the middle of the room. Half the shelves had movies; the others had an array of worn books, many of which looked as old as the camp.

  “Some library,” she said. Seth stood on a stood to pull a dusty box from atop a cabinet. It was full of boring history books from the fifties and sixties. “How did you know to look for those here?”

  “I didn’t. I like to explore.”

  The most interesting book in the box wasn’t a book at all, but a binder with a loose collection of hand-written pages. “Legends of Gray Mountain,” Rylie read aloud off the cover.

  “That’s the best one. It was written by a guy who said he used to hunt werewolves,” Seth said. “Look here.”

  He took it from her long enough to flip to a section in the back. Rylie skimmed the page. “So there’s five moons before the real transformation, counting the one where I got attacked. I only have three more before I become a...” She couldn’t say “werewolf.” It was too weird.

  “Keep reading,” he said. “That’s not all.”

  The next page described what would happen on each of the six moons. The first was the bite. The second, which Rylie had just undergone, was mostly a mental change from human to wolf. The third involved some physical shift, which increased in the fourth and fifth moons, until the sixth... when she really became a monster.

  Several hand-drawn illustrations showed what kind of physical changes she could expect: claws, teeth, fur. The works. It wasn’t pretty.

  She swallowed hard. “This does not sound good.” Rylie flipped to the back, which had a short history of several different packs. Notes filled the margins, marking which werewolves had been killed by hunters. “So if I am becoming a—a werewolf... that means whoever attacked me is a person most of the time. Right?”

  “Right,” Seth said.

  “Who is it?”

  “It would make life a lot easier if I knew,” he said grimly.

  “I wish I could take this with me,” Rylie said. “I want to read all of it. Do the counselors have a copy machine?”

  “Yeah. In the office.”

  “Let’s do it. There’s no way I can get everything I need out of this in one night.”

  “What do you expect to find?” Seth asked.

  “I’m hoping for a cure. But why do they have all these books here? It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  “It makes sense if this used to be an outpost before it became a summer camp. Silver Brook and Golden Lake have only been here for thirty years. Humans have been here much, much longer than that.”

  He pushed open the front door and glanced around to make sure they were alone before hurrying to the back door of the office.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” he warned as he picked the lock. “We don’t want anyone to see us through the windows.”

  She nodded and went searching for the copy machine. It was gathering dust behind a tall stack of banker’s boxes and a computer older than she was, but it hummed to life when Rylie pressed the power button.

  Pulling all the pages out of the binder, Rylie arranged them into a neat stack and fed them through the paper tray. The copy machine thumped and whirred. Green light flashed between the parts of the machine. She kept an eye on the windows and tried to block the light with her body.

  Seth gathered the pages as they came out and stuffed the originals back in
to the binder. Rylie found an empty folder on a nearby shelf for the copies. She barely breathed until the copying finished, certain that Jericho would storm in at any second.

  “Let’s go,” Seth said as soon as he grabbed the last pages.

  They locked the office behind them and hurried back to the communal cabin. Rylie waited, twisting her hands together, while Seth returned the original copy of The Legends of Gray Mountain to the cabinet.

  “I want to get back to my side of camp,” Rylie whispered, clutching the thick folder to her chest. They stuck to the shadows as they jogged back toward the lake. “I don’t feel safe here. I just know—”

  “Hey! What are you two doing up?”

  Jericho strode toward them. Rylie’s heart sped.

  Seth took the binder and grabbed her hand. “Run!”

  They fled into the forest. Jericho crashed through the bushes behind them, tearing through the trees as though they were barely an obstacle. Her hand slipped out of Seth’s. Too afraid to slow down, she increased her pace, darting deeper into the forest and further away from the trail.

  She wove in and out of the trees. Rylie was fast. She was agile. She was running blind, and good at it. But her pursuer was better.

  Someone blew through the forest behind her. Praying it was Seth, she pushed on.

  Trees flashed past. The dirt thudded beneath her feet.

  It took too long to realize she was suddenly alone.

  “Seth?” Rylie whispered, stopping short.

  She had lost him. What if Jericho had caught him? There was no doubt in her mind he wouldn’t be as forgiving as Louise. Seth could get sent home, and then Rylie would be alone. The thought was frightening.

  Tilting her face into the breeze, she took a short sniff, trying to detect Seth’s odor. She felt stupid doing it, but she immediately found him. He wasn’t far. She was confident she could follow the smell right to him.

  There was another smell, too: musky, woodsy, and warm. It was a very strong odor, but it wasn’t human. It wasn’t exactly animal, either.

  The werewolf. It was near.

  Trembling, she took another long, slow sniff. It was on the move. The werewolf was coming toward her. Rylie watched the trees around her, trying to see what she knew had to be there.

  It didn’t come into her line of sight. It hung back.

  Watching.

  Did it recognize her? Did it remember attacking her almost a month ago? Or was it just trying to decide if she would be easy to take down?

  “Come out,” she called softly into the night. “You want to fight? Come get me.”

  The smell began to fade. It was leaving. Seth’s smell was growing stronger, even though the breeze was blowing in the wrong direction now, and she could hear the crunch of his footsteps on pine needles.

  She was torn between following the werewolf and reuniting with Seth. Rylie didn’t need The Legends of Gray Mountain if she could get answers from the source, and her heart ached with the need to follow it. She took too long to consider and all traces of the werewolf vanished.

  Disappointed, Rylie went to Seth’s scent. He was still wandering through the forest. “You’re safe,” she said.

  “Yeah, the counselor didn’t eat me. You okay?” he asked.

  Rylie nodded. She wasn’t ready to tell him she could track by scent. “Do you think he recognized us?”

  “How would he know you?”

  “Jericho caught me on this side of the lake the other day. He’s—well, he’s kind of terrifying.”

  “Hopefully he just thought you were a boy out of bed,” Seth said.

  “A boy with long blonde hair?”

  “If it makes you feel better, I have good news. I kept a hold on this.” He showed her the folder of pages they had copied.

  “Great, I guess. Or not great. I don’t know, Seth.” Rylie sat on a felled log and cradled her head in her hands. “This is so much to take in. I didn’t even believe in this stuff a month ago. Not even ghosts, much less werewolves. You know?”

  He sat beside her on the log, slinging his arm over her shoulders in a comforting half hug. “Yeah. I do.” Rylie’s cheeks heated again. Becoming a werewolf couldn’t be too bad if it meant getting Seth to comfort her.

  “There’s another full moon in a few days,” she said. “What do I do?”

  “I think you should lay low. The werewolf is a person, so it might come looking for you.” She opened her mouth to speak, but Seth went on before she could. “I’m not trying to scare you. Just stay in big groups and don’t get in trouble. I’ll come help you out on the next moon.”

  “Am I dangerous until then?” she asked.

  He gave her a serious look. “Maybe.”

  They made their way back to the lake. It was easy with Rylie’s sense of smell. Seth took her to Camp Silver Brook in the canoe, but this time, their trip was silent. Rylie stared up at the waxing sliver of moon in the sky.

  Why had Rylie, of all people, been bitten? She was going to become a wolf at the end of summer, and she hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

  She got out on the beach. Seth stayed in the canoe.

  “I’ll see you on the full moon,” he said, passing the folder to her. His fingers brushed against hers. “Remember: lay low.”

  She climbed her way back to camp and looked for Seth once she reached the office. Seth waited in the boat, and although it was too dark to see his face, she could tell he was watching her go.

  Rylie got into bed and huddled under the sheets. She didn’t fall asleep.

  It was a long time until morning.

  Eight

  Laying Low

  For a few days, Rylie thought she might actually get away with her trip to the other side by following Seth’s orders. She stayed in her cabin when she could and passed the time by reading The Legends of Gray Mountain by flashlight.

  The young werewolf changes late at night, when the moon is at its height. As he ages, he begins to transform earlier and earlier, until finally, at full maturity, he can change on the night of the full moon at will. In the early years, he is mindless, and he knows insatiable hunger.

  Rylie stared at the words insatiable hunger. She shivered.

  When she had to leave the cabin for activities, Rylie participated without arguing. She swam in the lake and went kayaking. She made bracelets, learned about edible flora, and took hikes. Amber still looked like she was afraid Rylie would explode, so they avoided each other. Louise was relieved.

  “You’ve been doing great this week,” she said when Rylie was helping clean up after a campfire dinner. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  She gave the counselor a weak smile. It was hard to rebel when all she could think about was becoming furry on the next full moon.

  Rylie tried to get through all of The Legends of Gray Mountain, but she found herself returning again and again to the pages depicting what would happen every moon. The final werewolf looked like a normal wolf, but bigger and deadlier.

  Her fear wasn’t the worst part. No. The worst part was that she was almost excited.

  She tried to banish the thought, just like she tried to ignore the meat on the buffet line, but it was hard without other distractions. Amber hadn’t picked on her much since the archery incident, and everyone else was avoiding her, too. Making hemp lanyards was hardly more interesting than The Legends.

  If nothing else, reading made her free time pass quickly. She started reading it by the campfire’s flickering flames during her free time in the evening, too, brushing ash off the pages.

  The next full moon. Rylie curled her fingers to examine them. She couldn’t imagine claws bursting from the tips. It was ridiculous. Nightmarish.

  But her symptoms were undeniable. One lunch, Rylie found herself hovering over the sandwich meat again, imagining the feel of it tearing between her teeth. They would have hamburger that night. She could smell it being ground in the kitchens even though they hadn’t started cooking yet.

  “I’
m a vegetarian,” she whispered to herself, like she had every day for the last couple of weeks. It sounded even feebler than before. Giving into eating red meat would not be laying low, especially after the scene she made over getting more vegetarian options.