by S. M. Reine
“Sure, if you want to be the one who touches it. Who knows what kind of curses it has?”
He grimaced. “Point taken.”
They raided the fridge together, which was mercifully occult-free aside from a group photo of the coven with a big “Blessed Be!” stamped across the bottom. Scott was on the right side with his arm looped around his daughter, who was a taller, strawberry-blond, and somewhat less Sean Connery-looking version of her dad. The other witches were middle-aged women called stupid things like Broomstick and Thistle.
The refrigerator was full of thawing steaks and chicken limbs. There was always some combination of raw meat available. Feeding five teenage werewolves was no small feat, and they were careful to make sure that the kids never went hungry.
“Maybe if I used thick gloves,” Abel mused while they waited for the oven to heat their food to body temperature. He was still glaring at the giant pentacle.
Once everything was cooked, Rylie and Abel sat at the dining room table to eat. It looked out on a patio where Scott had placed chairs and a ping-pong table so the kids could have fun on their human nights, but Rylie never used it.
“How was the new moon run?” she asked between mouthfuls of steak.
He shrugged. “Boring. The way they like it.”
“So Tyas is adjusting?”
“You could call it that,” he said with a snort. “She ate a deer. I grabbed a few bites myself. It wasn’t bad, you know. Fresh venison.”
She winced. “Don’t tell me about it. Please.” Rylie had once been an avid vegetarian. Once she’d seen how livestock was slaughtered, she had lost her stomach for dead animal flesh. But a werewolf’s need for meat was more than preference. She would go wild if she tried to starve herself.
Abel grinned. “Bet you don’t want to hear about the part where I woke up with deer fur stuck in my teeth.”
“Seriously, shut up.”
“I can’t believe you still have a weak stomach for stupid deer.”
Her cheeks flamed again, and she stared hard at the pattern left by the grease on her plate. “Yeah, well, I can’t believe I put up with you.”
“Nobody else can bring you Seth’s letters.” He shrugged at her nasty glare. “Just saying.”
“Jerk,” she muttered under her breath.
“Emo kid.”
She threw her plate in the sink and very deliberately did not touch the sprayer. There was a sign on the wall written in Bekah’s tidy cursive that said “Rinsing your dishes makes the dishwasher happy!” surrounded by lots of hearts.
“Hey!”
Levi slid through the doorway on socked feet, catching himself on the counter.
She rolled her eyes. “Are you the dishes police now, too? Are you going to yell at me for leaving dirty plates in the sink?”
“What? No.” He had to stop between words to take a breath. His honey-brown hair, darker than his sister’s but no less curly, was frazzled and sticking up in every direction. He looked like he had been running for miles. It wasn’t easy to exhaust a werewolf.
“What’s going on?” Abel asked, entering the kitchen.
There was no color in Levi’s face. “Bekah is gone.”
Levi searched as a wolf with Abel close behind, but Rylie kept her investigation closer to home.
She searched in Bekah’s favorite hiding spots first. Bekah wasn’t in her bedroom. She wasn’t tending to the tomato sprouts that were getting hardened off in the shed. She also hadn’t curled up with a book in the so-called “study,” which had three bookshelves behind two televisions and four different video game consoles.
The other girl hadn’t been in the sanctuary for hours, as far as Rylie could tell. All her smells were old.
Scott fretted while everyone else searched. When Rylie finished looking around, she found him trying to call Bekah’s cell phone for what had to be the millionth time. It had been a whole hour since Rylie had eaten, so she snagged some beef jerky out of the pantry while she watched him pace.
Watching him hang up and dial again and again got painful after a few minutes. Rylie interrupted him. “I don’t think she’s here.”
“Hope springs eternal,” he said. “You kids are never far from your cell phones.”
“Yeah, but wolves don’t have thumbs.”
His brow was pinched. “Why would she still be a wolf?”
Rylie shrugged. If Bekah was distant enough to elude her sense of smell, then she was probably traveling on all fours. But Scott didn’t seem to accept that she might be gone. Really gone.
“I’ll check her room for a note,” Rylie said. They had already looked for her in there three or four times, but the suggestion took the edge of fear off of Scott’s smell, so it seemed as helpful as anything else they could do.
He kept trying to call Bekah as they went to her room. When they got to the hall outside her door, Rylie’s ears picked up a buzzing sound.
She went inside. Where Rylie’s bedroom was like an especially nice prison cell, Levi and Bekah’s rooms were normal bedrooms. They weren’t at risk of transforming between moons, so the window wasn’t barred. Bekah had a shaggy rug in the shape of a flower. Her easel had a blank slate of paper. Her bed had a cute comforter patterned with ivy and roses. They had tried to give Rylie a similar comforter, but she had eaten it.
“Call Bekah again,” she said, and he obeyed.
The glow of a cell phone vibrating under Bekah’s dresser caught her eye. She picked it up. Thirty-four missed calls weren’t exactly a million, but it was pretty close.
Scott swore under his breath.
But the cell phone wasn’t the only thing under the dresser. Rylie pulled out a piece of paper, and then another, and another. Bekah had hidden stacks of paintings behind the furniture where nobody would have thought to look.
“What is that?” he asked.
She sat back, spreading the pages around her on the carpet. Watercolors warped the papers, giving texture to every peak and valley Bekah had painted. Each image was nearly identical. Yellow lights were picked out at the base of a tall mountain, like a distant town—or a forest full of cabins.
“Camp Silver Brook,” Rylie whispered.
There was no way Bekah had ever been to Gray Mountain. None of the other werewolves had. They were on the opposite side of the country, and both youth camps had been closed since a werewolf attack killed several people. Only Rylie had survived being bitten.
Rylie smelled Levi and Abel approach before they showed up in the doorway.
“She’s not on the grounds,” Levi said, putting on a shirt. The laces on his linen pants were still loose. “I found her smell on the road out of here, but it disappears in the forest.”
“Look at this,” Scott said, lifting one of the paintings. It was the same peak from another angle. “Do you recognize the subject?”
“That’s it,” Levi said. “That’s the mountain I told you about.”
“What mountain?” Rylie asked.
Scott frowned at a third painting. “Levi has been having strange visions.”
“Dreams,” he interjected.
“Visions. Dreams. Call them what you will. He’s been seeing the same mountain repeatedly, and so has Tyas. She began having these dreams after her last moon, when she assumed the true wolf form, and we realized they were ‘dreaming’ about the same place when they both said the visions had cabins.” Scott swallowed hard. “But Bekah never mentioned…” He set the pictures down and took a deep breath to steady himself.
Abel’s voice broke through the stunned reverie. “Look at this.”
He fished a diary out of the space behind Bekah’s dresser and handed it to Rylie. The first pages were covered in her normally tidy handwriting, but halfway through, it turned virtually unrecognizable. “I have to get there,” she read out loud. “Have to get there, have to get there… That covers, like, three whole pages. And then ‘they need me’ covers another three pages.”
“She went crazy,” Abel sai
d.
Levi jerked the diary out of her hands. “Bekah’s not crazy!”
“Well, the answer is obvious,” Scott said with a distant, pensive stare. “We don’t know why, but we know where she’s gone. That gives us a place to begin searching.”
Rylie felt like the ground was breaking up beneath her feet.
Gray Mountain.
The despair and fear that swelled within her was too much. The wolf didn’t care about searching for Bekah, but it cared about the place it had been born. And worse, Rylie cared about it, too. She felt the massive, furred body of the wolf surge inside her. It rubbed against the inside of her throat.
She shoved past Abel and ran to her room, slamming the door shut behind her.
THREE
Open House
A warm wind rippled through the long grass outside of the Gresham ranch. It tasted like oncoming summer—the first breeze without the bite of winter’s cold in months. A lone white cloud drifted over a hill dotted with violet blossoms.
Dust kicked up behind a steel blue Chevy Chevelle as it turned off the highway and bumped up the road to the ranch house. It slowed by the mailbox. The window rolled down.
Seth reached out an arm to remove a handful of envelopes. The engine idled as he sat back to flip through them.
He had brown skin, brown eyes, and brown hair, which he had been growing out and had straightened so that it reached his jaw. His skin had gotten even darker since he quit the football team and dedicated his time to working on the ranch instead. It seemed like the least he could do, since Gwyn was letting him stay with her until he graduated high school in three weeks.
“We’re reaching record highs this spring!” the radio announced. “It got up to eighty-eight degrees yesterday, which is the warmest first week of May we’ve seen since the year 1865. That is crazy. Don’t you think that’s crazy, Bill?”
“Crazy good!” Bill drawled. “And the horses are loving it. I got to take Old Blue out for her first good run this season…”
Seth turned the radio down and the car’s fan up.
He glanced through the stack of envelopes. Hospital bills. Advertisements from the Realtor’s office. The weekly specials from the grocery store. And another hospital bill. There were no letters from Rylie, and nothing from any of the universities he had applied to. Twice the disappointment, but nothing new.
He tossed the mail onto the passenger’s seat and drove the rest of the way to the ranch house.
There were three cars waiting by the door into the kitchen, which was how everybody got into Gwyneth Gresham’s house. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had opened the front door. One of the trucks belonged to the gardener they hired to beat the orchard into shape, one was the Realtor’s, and the third was a black SUV that Seth didn’t recognize. It must have belonged to one of the prospective buyers for the ranch.
He could make out figures moving through the freshly washed windows of the barn. The Realtor was working her magic.
Seth kicked the mud off his boots before entering the kitchen.
Aunt Gwyn sat on a stool by the counter as she arranged tulips in a ceramic vase. Even though it was over eighty degrees again, she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and hat inside. She was self-conscious about all of her bruises. “Hey, son,” she greeted Seth as he handed her the mail. “How was school?”
“It was all right.”
“All right?” She narrowed her eyes. He could feel the weight of her gaze on the back of his neck as he filled a glass with filtered water. “Sounds mighty ominous.”
Seth forced his features into a solemn mask and took a long drink before responding. “Yeah. I got to see my grades.”
Gwyn set the scissors down and folded her hands. Her thick gray braids were undone, leaving her hair in looping curls over her shoulders. Combined with her heavily lined face, she looked like a very stern old wise woman. “Tell me you at least got an A on your term paper.”
“I did,” he said as seriously as possible. Then he couldn’t hold it back anymore. His mouth split in a huge grin. “And I’ve got A’s on everything else, too!”
She gave him a dirty look that didn’t hide the warmth radiating from her eyes. Her cheeks dimpled. “You had me going there for a minute.”
“It gets better. The school counselor said I’ve done so much extra credit that I’ll pass all my classes with A’s, even if I flunk finals!”
Gwyn flung her hands in the air and gave a whoop. “Damn, boy, you don’t do things halfway! Come here, come here.”
Seth bent down and let her give him a hug. Her body was frail, but she wasn’t quite as gaunt as she had been around the New Year. Her embrace warmed him in a way that had nothing to do with record highs. He had never been congratulated for good grades before moving in with Gwyn. She made him feel like a superhero.
“Thank you,” he said, planting a kiss on her temple.
“Ah, shut up. You’re making me all mushy.” She swatted him on the shoulder. “Get out of here and find something useful to do, Einstein.”
“You kidding me? I’m not doing anything useful for the next month.” He flopped onto the stool next to her.
“You’ve still got to finish the year out.”
“I know, I know.” His smile faded. “Have we gotten any calls today?”
Gwyn cleared her throat and went back to trimming stems. “Only from folks wanting to see the ranch.”
It was hard to feel too happy when they hadn’t spoken directly to Rylie in months. She had only called once, all the way back in February, and it was to ask her aunt about how treatments were progressing. She refused to speak to Seth. He did hear from Abel every Monday and Thursday, and he got secondhand updates about Rylie that way, but it wasn’t the same.
“I still haven’t heard back from any of the universities,” Seth said, which was only fractionally less depressing than his girlfriend’s refusal to speak with him.
“Bet things are just going slow.”
Seth bent a flower’s stem in his fingers. “Maybe I’m that terrible. Maybe nobody wants to touch me.”
Gwyn snorted. “Sure, wonder boy. You and all your perfect grades are so damn offensive that nobody will dare respond to your applications. I’m convinced. Tell you what: I’ll make some calls tomorrow and see what’s going on. All right? But you can’t sit around. I told you to find something useful to do, and I meant it.”
Seth gave an exaggerated groan. “Fine. How’s the orchard going?”
“Dunno. You can check on the gardener when the Realtor’s done showing the newest lady around.”
“Is this one actually going to make an offer?”
Gwyn shrugged. “Heck if I know. I’ve got plenty else to concern myself with.” She plumped the flowers up and tilted the vase to examine it from another angle. “What do you think? Pretty nice, huh?”
“It’s… flowery.”
“Yeah, yeah. Get outside.”
Seth drained his glass of water, put it in the sink, and headed outside. He grabbed one of Gwyn’s spare hats on the way out and checked the weeds sprouting next to the steps. He had sprayed weed killer on them twice, but they kept coming back. Pulling them would be productive, but it was way too hot.
Plopping the straw fedora on his head, he stretched out on the hood of the Chevelle. The glass was warm beneath his back as he reclined on the windshield. It would be a great time for a nap.
But he didn’t close his eyes. He tipped his hat down to shade his face and leaned around to grab his binder from the passenger’s seat. Seth flipped it open to blank piece of paper and chewed on his pen for a minute before writing.
Rylie,
Spring’s here. You’d like it. There’s flowers blooming, and Gwyn’s on a cleaning frenzy. Getting stuff done makes her so happy.
And you know, graduation is coming up. I’ve got such good grades that I’m definitely walking even if I blow my finals. It’s hard to believe I made it. I didn’t think I ever would. But ev
en though I’m getting ready to graduate, it’s not as good as I expected.
Not without you…
Feet crunched on the dirt. Seth pushed the brim of his hat back to watch the Realtor return to her car. The prospective buyer was hidden behind her.
He folded the letter and tucked it in his back pocket, pretending not to listen to their conversation. “You should really see it at night,” the Realtor said with all the enthusiasm of an artist sharing her masterpiece. “You can come back this evening if you want to see more. The fireflies…”
“I’ve seen enough.”
Every muscle in Seth’s body turned to stone.
He didn’t want to turn around. As long as he didn’t see her, he wouldn’t have to admit to himself that he knew that voice. There was no way she had the nerve to come back. Not after what she did to Rylie.
The Realtor said her goodbyes and drove away, leaving him alone with the buyer.
He slid to the ground and faced her.
If vipers could grow two legs and walk among humans, Eleanor would have been their queen. She was tall, muscular, and mercilessly beautiful. Her hair was slicked back. Her shoulders were straight. She wore her usual uniform of a black tank top and cargo pants, although she had thrown a shirt over it to make her look fractionally less military.
Eleanor didn’t smile for Seth.
“Hello,” she said.
He removed the fedora and held it to his chest. “Mom. What are you doing here? You can’t tell me you want to buy the ranch. You couldn’t even afford it.”
“You don’t know anything about me, boy,” Eleanor said with venom in her voice.
Seth thought about the guns in the house. He had only kept one—his favorite rifle—and it was locked in a living room cabinet, since Gwyn didn’t want weapons in his bedroom. It was too far away. Knowing his mom, she had at least two knives and a handgun somewhere on her body.
He inched toward the kitchen door. Annoyance flitted through Eleanor’s eyes. “I didn’t come back to buy the ranch, and I didn’t come back to fight you. Stop thinking about running.”
