by S. M. Reine
CONTENTS
Title page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Dear Reader...
Alpha Moon
The Cain Chronicles, Episode 7
SM Reine
Copyright © 2013
All rights reserved
For Katja, who wanted to know what Rylie’s mom has been doing since her short appearance in Six Moon Summer.
And for the Abel fans, who wanted a peek at his life now that he and Rylie are settled. (Mostly.)
Love you guys. :)
ONE
RYLIE GRESHAM STARED at her cell phone and tried not to panic. She had just gotten a text message with three words—just three little words—and it struck cold fear straight to the depths of her heart.
She was pretty sure that there shouldn’t have been any words in the English language that could shake her at this point. After everything she had survived as Alpha of a werewolf pack, words were silly and harmless. And these weren’t meant to be threatening words, either.
But they were coming from her mother, Jessica Gresham-Kirshner: “Call me ASAP.”
It felt like the world was ending.
Summer realized that Rylie wasn’t walking beside her anymore. “What’s wrong?” she asked. With the morning sun glowing behind her back, her curls looked like they were on fire.
“Nothing,” Rylie said, dropping the phone into her purse. What a lie.
“Come on, we’re already late for the appointment.” Summer dragged Rylie through the glass double doors of The First Bank of Woodbridge. The contrast between the heat of the parking lot and the air conditioned coolness inside was like jumping into a pool of ice water. It smelled of coolant, recycled air, plastic, carpet, fresh paint, stucco—so many manmade things that Rylie normally tried to avoid in large doses.
“Sorry,” Rylie said, managing to give Summer a smile that she didn’t feel. “I was distracted.”
“Understandably.” Summer jerked a thumb at a sign on the door.
A plain piece of white paper had been taped to the glass. Huge words were printed on it in a thick, angry-looking font: “WE REPORT PRETERNATURALS.” Below that, much smaller, it said: “Per the Office of Preternatural Affairs.” The sight of it made Rylie’s stomach flip.
“Actually, it wasn’t that,” she said. Although the sign definitely wasn’t helping with her mood, either.
Summer’s cheeks dimpled with an impish grin. One corner of her mouth lifted higher than the other—the Wilder smile. “Abel texting you?”
Rylie blushed. “I wish.”
A man in a gray suit met them in the lobby, extending a hand to shake. He was a heavy guy with a nice crew cut. Very professional-looking. Rylie didn’t think that he would have smiled at them if he had realized that his appointment was with a pair of young werewolves, but she didn’t plan on letting him learn the truth about his bank’s soon-to-be-former clients.
Rylie shook his hand.
“Mark Melville,” he said. “You’re Ms. Gresham?”
She nodded mutely. Between the text message, the sign on the door, and all of the foreign smells of the bank, her throat had become too closed to force any words out.
He led them to his office on the third floor. His desk was backed by a large window. There were no clouds in the sky behind him; the sun had burned them all away, leaving the city heat-scorched and the trees a dull shade of green.
Mark waited until Rylie and Summer took the seats across from him before sitting, too.
“Are you sure you want to close this account?” Mark asked, rearranging the papers on his desk. There was a stack of paperwork three inches deep in front of his keyboard. Rylie had the sinking suspicion that she was going to have to sign every single page.
“We’re very sure,” Summer said firmly.
Mark frowned.
“It’s okay,” Rylie said. “She’s my…” She stumbled over the sentence, then said, “Summer’s my sister.”
That didn’t seem to alleviate Mark’s concern—probably because Summer and Rylie barely resembled each other. Rylie had fine blond hair all the way down her back and Germanic features; Summer was cocoa-skinned and dark-haired, with her father’s full lips. They didn’t look the same race, much less like they could have been produced by the same parents.
He wasn’t wrong to be suspicious. Rylie and Summer weren’t sisters. The truth was far stranger than that.
“We’d be happy to open a high interest rate savings account to hold your money until arrangements can be made with a financial planner,” Mark finally said. “We value your family’s business, Ms. Gresham. It would be our pleasure to help you manage your financial future.”
“Thanks, but I really just want all of that money in cash,” she said.
His frown deepened. “It’s a lot of cash. More than we usually hold in one bank location at any given time.”
“We warned you guys that we wanted to withdraw it last week,” Summer said. “You’ve got to have it by now.”
He kept going as if she hadn’t spoken. “From a financial standpoint, you’re losing a lot of money by closing this account. Once you take inflation into consideration, you’ll be losing a sizable sum of money every year. As your assigned personal financial services advisor, I would consider it irresponsible to let you to make an ill-informed decision.”
Rylie held her hand out. She was so done with this conversation. “Just give me a pen and tell me where to sign.”
He didn’t offer a pen to her.
“I have daughters your age,” Mark said. “If one of them tried to cash out on her trust fund—if I made the mistake of giving her the ability to cash out on her trust fund so young—I would hope that wiser minds would step in to give her sound advice. Just like I’m doing now.”
The look on his face wasn’t fatherly concern or anything else that benevolent. It was condescension. Maybe greed, too.
Rylie’s eyes flicked to the sign on his desk. Mark Melville, Financial Services. Pretty vague title there. Rylie was willing to bet he worked on commission. She would also bet that the intimidating suit, executive office, and stern frowns would be effective on most young women.
But Rylie and Summer weren’t “most young women.”
Summer planted her hands on the desk and leaned forward until her nose almost touched Mark’s. She was tall for a woman, well over six feet, but too cute to look threatening—until she let the cold glare of the wolf fill her eyes.
“We know exactly what we’re doing,” she said. “But thanks for the unsolicited advice.” Considering that her eyes had bled to chilly silver, she looked every inch a wild beast that didn’t belong in the cities of man. More like a wild animal that had somehow gotten into the bank and was prepared to maul every single employee on the floor.
Mark shriveled under her gaze. He dropped a pen into Rylie’s hand.
It took several minutes to get through all of the pages. She had to initial about a hundred different lines on every form, as well as signing her entire name in cursive at the bottom. Rylie Tara Gresham, over and over. She hadn’t used cursive since elementary school. It made her hand cramp.
A monetary figure had been printed across the top of the final form. It was the total sum of Rylie’s trust fund that they were withdrawing.
It was a lot bigger than her mom had told her—like, a couple extra zeroes bigger.
Rylie’s mouth dropped open. No wonder The First Bank of Woodbridge was freaking out about giving them that much mone
y.
“It’s not too late to reconsider,” Mark said.
Every nerve in Rylie’s body told her to leave that money in the bank, where it would be safe. She didn’t like the idea of walking out of the bank holding that much cash in hand. It was like begging for someone to rob her—not that it would be easy to mug Rylie and Summer. But what if she lost it in the truck or something? Oh God, or what if she took it home and the townhouse burned down?
But she needed that money, and she didn’t want The First Bank of We-Report-Preternaturals to keep a cent of it.
Rylie signed.
Summer placed the envelope under the passenger seat in the truck in order to hide it. It was a big envelope. Actually, several big envelopes. Rylie was kind of in denial about being in possession of that much money. She had to be, for the sake of her sanity.
“Ready to go?” Summer asked.
Rylie tossed the keys to her through the window. “Turn on the AC. I need to call someone real quick.” Might as well do it while they, and their huge wad of cash, were still under the watchful eye of the bank’s security cameras and door guard.
While Summer got the engine going, Rylie paced in front of the truck, trying to make up a reason that she shouldn’t have to call her mother back. Maybe she could pretend that she had lost Jessica’s phone number. Or maybe her own phone number had changed, and she had never seen her mother’s text message.
The thing was, she hadn’t spoken to Jessica since sending her an invitation to Rylie’s failed wedding. Not once. And she had only spoken to her twice since she graduated from high school anyway—five times if she went all the way back to her dad’s death. Saying that they weren’t close would have been like saying that Venus wasn’t close to Pluto. They were barely in the same solar system, much less the same gene pool.
Most importantly, Jessica had no clue that her daughter was an Alpha werewolf, leader of the last pack in the United States of America, and near the top of the Office of Preternatural Affairs’s most wanted list.
They had nothing in common. Nothing to discuss. That meant that the phone call could only mean bad news: a death in the family, nuclear war, whatever.
Rylie’s choice was taken from her when her phone rang. She almost dropped it. Instead, entirely by accident, her thumb hit the button to answer the call.
“Oh no,” she whispered, holding the phone away from her at arm’s length.
Jessica’s tinny voice whispered from the receiver. “Rylie?”
Okay. I can do this. She took a deep breath.
“Hi,” Rylie said, pressing the phone to her ear.
“How are you, sweetie?” She sounded awfully cheerful for nuclear war.
I just cashed out on the entire trust fund that your dead ex-husband left me, with the help of your adult granddaughter, and will be using it to build a werewolf village. How are you?
“I’m...fine,” Rylie said.
Jessica didn’t even wait for Rylie to finish the sentence. She continued talking. “It’s been so long since we chatted, hasn’t it? I have so much to tell you. Are you still at your aunt’s house?”
“Yes,” Rylie said. For a few more days, anyway. Then they were dropping half of that trust fund on a real estate agent willing to sell two thousand acres of remote, inhospitable land in the Appalachian Mountains, no questions asked, and moving far away from civilization.
“Great. I’m arriving on Friday. Can’t wait to see you. Have to run, sweetheart, I’m sorry—I’ll email my itinerary to your aunt. Kisses.”
And then she hung up.
Rylie felt dizzy.
A visit from Jessica? At the townhouse her aunt shared with a half-dozen werewolves, which were waiting for Rylie, their Alpha, to build a sanctuary for them?
Nuclear war would have been far preferable.
Summer leaned out the window. “I feel like a bank robber sitting on all this cash.” She had probably heard every word of the conversation with her super shapeshifter hearing, but there was no sign on her face that she actually understood what the conversation meant.
Jessica would be there on Friday. Friday. Just three days away. It was nowhere near enough time to make the condo look like it wasn’t occupied by werewolves—not to mention Rylie’s ex-fiance and current boyfriend, who were brothers. Her mom, one way or another, was about to learn something about her daughter that Rylie had never wanted her to know.
It felt like a target had been painted where Rylie stood on the sidewalk, and a nuclear missile was hurtling straight toward her.
“Rylie?” Summer prompted.
Rylie pocketed her phone with shaking hands.
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Ka-boom.
TWO
“THAT BITCH,” AUNT Gwyn told Rylie the instant she pulled into the driveway.
“Bitch who?” Summer asked, hopping out of the truck and planting a kiss on Gwyn’s cheek. Despite her scowl, Gwyn returned Summer’s affection with a kiss of her own, as well as the biggest bear hug her frail old body could manage.
Rylie climbed out of the truck more slowly, slamming the door behind her. “So you got the call, too.”
A warm wind whipped over the streets of Gwyn’s neighborhood, rustling the unmowed grass in rippling waves that looked like a green ocean. The smell of wolves floated on the wind. They had only been occupying the townhouse for a few weeks, but those weeks were enough for it to smell like home to Rylie.
Her aunt shoved a printout into her hands. It was flight information.
“Friday,” Gwyn said.
Jessica’s flight would arrive on Friday at seven in the morning, to be precise, which meant that Rylie was going to have to get up early to give her mother a ride. Even though they were in the city now, rather than a few hours of driving away at the ranch, the freeway was hairy at that time of morning. Rush hour traffic was a pain in the butt.
Of course Jessica couldn’t do one stupid thing in a way that was convenient for Rylie.
She crumpled the paper in her fist. “No,” she said. “No. Just…no.”
Gwyn’s eyes were pinched at the corners by stress. “Deny it all you want, babe, but she’s coming as sure as a hurricane in spring.”
“Who?” Summer asked.
There was no point in trying to dance around it anymore. Summer deserved to know.
“My mom,” Rylie said with a heavy sigh.
Summer’s eyes brightened. “My grandmother?”
“You already got a Gran,” Gwyn said gruffly. “You don’t need another in your life.”
She squeezed Gwyn tightly. “You’ll always be my Gran. That doesn’t mean I can’t be excited about meeting my mother’s mother.”
“Don’t be excited about this. There’s a reason I don’t talk to my mom,” Rylie said. Her head was throbbing. She didn’t have many headaches as a werewolf, but she could feel a pretty nasty one gathering in her temples right at that moment. “I think I want to lie down for a while.”
Rylie couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was going to explain everything to her mother. It wasn’t even necessarily the werewolf thing—it was also the fact that Rylie had twins that were now twenty years old.
The existence of preternaturals had only gone public last winter, and the country was still adjusting to the existence of magic, demons, angels, and everything in between. Her mom would still be new to the fact that werewolves existed. She didn’t think that Jessica would be prepared to wrap her head around the idea of multiple Earth-like dimensions, much less ones that ran on different timelines.
She ducked into the bathroom, splashing water on her face. It didn’t cool her off. It just made her feel wet and miserable.
Rylie stared at her reflection, imagining that it was Jessica on the other side.
“I didn’t tell you that I was pregnant, Mom, but I was. And I gave birth to twins. Then Aunt Gwyn took them to another dimension called a ‘Haven,’ which angels made centuries ago. One week passed for me, and twent
y years passed for them. Summer and Abram are adults now. They’re awesome. Want to meet them?” Her temples throbbed dangerously, and she massaged them with her fingertips. “Oh, and Aunt Gwyn didn’t age during those twenty years because she died and became a zombie.”
Ugh.
Rylie soaked a towel in water and put it over the back of her neck. Then she staggered into the bedroom, flopping onto the mattress.
Now that werewolves—and all things that went bump in the night—were publicly known, she probably could tell her mom about the werewolf thing. Except that werewolves were generally regarded as monsters. Man-killers. Cannibals.
She could just imagine the look in Jessica’s eyes as it dawned on her that her baby had become one of the things that they warned her about on the eleven o’clock news.
The worst part was that it wasn’t a lie.
Rylie was a man-killer, a monster, and a cannibal. She had killed several farmers a couple of years back, including her best friend’s mother. She hadn’t eaten much of them—even crazed by silver poisoning, a twinkle of guilt had somehow remained in the core of her wolf’s furious mind—but somehow, she didn’t think that would make the news any easier to deliver.
She had reformed. She was in control of her beast now. There wasn’t a hint of silver in her veins, she hadn’t killed in a long time. Well… a couple of months, anyway. But the people who had most recently died had deserved it.
Yeah, no way could she explain that to Jessica. Not Jessica Jean Gresham-Kirshner, who lived in a very nice condominium on the east coast with a changing gallery of boyfriends. Not the woman who ran several corporations and hated to get her manicure dirty. The woman who hadn’t let Rylie dress up for Halloween in elementary school because she didn’t want her daughter “getting the wrong ideas.”
Whether or not werewolves were publicly known, she absolutely could not tell her mother anything.
Which meant spending Jessica’s entire visit lying through her teeth.
Summer knocked on the door once before entering. She didn’t really have to, since all the lady werewolves were sharing that room. A black puffball curled around her feet as she entered. Summer was used to having her cat, Sir Lumpy, weaving in and out of her legs, so she miraculously didn’t trip.
