All Hallows' Moon Page 4

  Her excitement faded. “Oh.”

  “Just one ride. Saddle him up, take him out with me, and head back. Then you can get your driver’s license. How’s that sound?”

  “I don’t think I can do that, Aunt Gwyn,” Rylie said.

  “Give it some thought.” She polished off her beer in one long drink and sighed. “I’m exhausted, babe. Think I’ll call it an early night. Why don’t you clean up?”

  Rylie mulled over her aunt’s offer while she washed plates in the sink. If she could ride the horse once, she could drive. None of her friends back in the city could drive. Everyone rode the train. But out in the country, driving meant independence. Adulthood. She could do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

  If only she could ride on a horse.

  Rylie used to love riding horses. The thought of galloping through the pastures with the breeze in her hair was so tempting that she could almost cry.

  But she smelled like a wolf to the animals now. A predator. As soon as they caught a whiff of her, they would panic and bolt.

  She couldn’t do it.

  Rylie put away the dishes and made a halfhearted attempt at homework. It was hard to focus on drawing mitochondria when she kept finding herself doodling moons and paw prints on the margins. Her mind wandered to the horses, and then the transformation coming the next night.

  She probably hadn’t eaten Phil, the trucker. Rylie would have heard about it if they found his mangled body somewhere. The cows were another story—that one had made it into the newspapers. All the local ranchers were talking about crazy coyotes and mountain lions.

  The full moon would be even worse. Rylie would be even hungrier than before.

  If she roamed free again, she would probably kill. She couldn’t lock herself in the bedroom next to her aunt’s. The barn wasn’t an option, either, unless she wanted to kill the horses.

  Rylie groaned and cradled her head in her palms. She had to do something.

  If only Seth had been there for her. He’d had all kinds of creative ways to keep her restrained over the summer. Of course, it turned out that was because he was a werewolf hunter, and he killed her kind. But he hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

  She wondered what he was doing. Was he thinking about the upcoming moon, too?

  When night fell, Rylie crept past Aunt Gwyn’s room. She had already gone to sleep even though it was only eight o’clock. There was no sound coming from her room. Rylie walked out the front door and kept going.

  Her aunt’s ranch looked like it had grown out of the long grass in the middle of rolling hills and sweeping plains. Everything was made of round edges: the squash cluttering the unkempt garden, the worn wooden posts forming the fence around the pond, the bodies of the cows milling around the field.

  There were no mountains in sight. Not a single jagged edge or towering rock face. That was exactly how Rylie wanted it. She’d had more than her share of mountains over the summer.

  Once the house was a black dot on the horizon, Rylie tugged on her skirt’s laces and let it puddle on the ground, dropping her camisole on top. Bare to the sky, she shut her eyes and tilted her face back, spreading her arms wide.

  The almost-full moon poured silvery rays through her flesh. She felt like it would dissolve into her skin and bones until she was a wraith so she could drift away on the breeze. Rylie wanted to be nothing but a thought lifting amongst the stars, letting her body and the wolf trapped inside of it disappear beneath her.

  No more anger. No more violence. No more pain.

  But no matter how hard she imagined separating her soul from its vessel, Rylie was anchored to the earth by human feet and human needs and a wolfish impatience that wondered why she was wandering when she should have been resting for the hunt.

  Headlights on the road made Rylie cover her body with her arms, even though she didn’t think anyone would be able to see her at that distance. Prickles rolled from her hairline down to her spine. Why would someone drive down her desolate stretch of highway at night? Something wasn’t right.

  The car turned down her aunt’s private road… and stopped. The headlights blinked off.

  Rylie dropped to a crouch and ran down the hill. She beelined for the car, flashing through the long grass like a pale ghost. It occurred to her that her human skin was whiter than the wolf’s fur and that she would be spotted if she didn’t move fast. Hanging underneath a shadowy copse of trees to watch the driver, Rylie laid her belly to the ground.

  The passenger stepped out of the car. He was tall and smelled horrible. It wasn’t like he hadn’t showered, because she could also smell his soap and deodorant. There was something else. Something that smelled sour and wrong.

  Some deep, dark place within her recognized the stench. It made her stomach roil.

  The other door opened, and the driver came out onto the side of the road. “Put that away.” A woman’s voice.

  He turned, letting Rylie see that he was holding a rifle. She could make out a sliver of his face. He had a strong jaw and dark eyes. “I thought I heard something.”

  “You’re not shooting anybody tonight. I said, put it away.”

  A chill rolled through Rylie. She had been hoping these people might be farmers, but something about that tone said they were not. They didn’t look like they belonged in her little rural community. Both wore plain clothes in dark colors, and they looked more like soldiers than ranchers.

  “We’re being watched,” the man insisted, and Rylie didn’t dare breathe.

  “You’re imagining things. Get back in the car, Abel. What if the property owner comes out and sees us pointing guns at her cows?”

  The rifle lowered. “Do you think the woman who owns the ranch is the one? This Gwyneth Gresham?”

  “No. It would have started months ago if she was. Get in the damn car.”

  The man went to the other side, and Rylie finally saw him. All of him. He might have been attractive once, but a scar bisected his face now, running from one eyebrow to the opposite corner of his mouth. It wasn’t as scary as his expression. It was the look of a man who had killed other men and was willing to do it again.

  A trickle of fear crept into Rylie’s heart. And then, right on cue, her stomach growled. The wolf stirred inside of her at the sight of the scar. It was hungry.

  This “Abel” was injured and vulnerable—her favorite thing. She could finish the job. He was probably delicious. Weren’t the ones who fought the ones who tasted the best? There was nothing like the chase, and the satisfaction of hunkering down to eat a well-earned meal.

  She shuddered and shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see him anymore. The injury was too exciting. Rylie had never been so fascinated by the thought of someone in pain before, but now it made her heart race.

  Rylie slipped back into the shadows as the car returned the main road. Once they were gone, she went home and climbed into bed. Violent thoughts raced through her mind.

  She was terrified of what those people might have been looking for, and worse, what she wanted to do to them. She couldn’t calm down enough to sleep.

  When she finally did, her dreams were filled with blood.

  Five

  Truancy

  Five o’clock in the morning is the worst time possible to chase cattle through knee-high mud, but that was exactly where Rylie found herself on the morning of September eighth.

  Rylie had never thought of cows as creatures that could run, since they had the dumb expression of black meatballs, but it turned out the proper motivation could get those tubby bodies moving—fast.

  “Amazing,” laughed Gwyn from her seat on the fence. “You really woke up those cows!”

  It seemed like the first logical step to getting on a horse would be to approach other, slower animals, so when her aunt asked if she wanted to milk cows, Rylie agreed. But it was harder than she expected. Much harder.

  Anger burned in her cheeks. “Are you going to help me or what?”

  “Why would I
help when I’m having so much fun watching?”

  Bitch.

  The thought whip-cracked through her mind, and it almost crossed Rylie’s lips before she could bite it back. Violent thoughts spilled through her, one after the other: shoving her aunt off the fence, ripping her claws into the cows, tearing out throats, showing her aunt what was really fun…

  But Rylie couldn’t get near the cows as a human, much less maul them. She was too slow. The embarrassment of it didn’t calm her fury.

  It would be the full moon that night, so Rylie’s temper was at its worst, but she didn’t dare snap at her aunt again. She would be sent back to the city. She might hurt someone. It was the only thing that kept her from acting on her ugly fantasies.

  “I hate this,” Rylie said. It was probably the biggest understatement she had ever made.

  Gwyn’s smile softened. “Yeah, babe. I know.” And then she had that impatient look again, and she checked her watch as she hopped off the fence. “Well, that was a good laugh. Let’s feed the goats.”

  “Don’t the cows need to be milked?”

  Her aunt laughed. “These aren’t dairy cows, Rylie! These are steak cows! You think people chase cattle to milk them anyway? There are pens and chutes and machines for that.”

  Rylie went rigid. Her vision blurred. “You mean you were having me chase the cows for fun?”

  “I enjoyed myself,” Gwyn said.

  A rumbling growl rose in Rylie’s throat, and the remaining cows fled to the other side of the pasture.

  Rylie refused to speak to her aunt on the ride into town even though she itched to ask about the people she had seen the night before. She had a feeling they weren’t cattle hustlers. “I’m going to get a ride back with one of my friends,” she said, hopping out of the truck. “Don’t bother getting me.”

  “All right. Give me a call if you change your mind.”

  She waited to leave until Gwyn’s truck disappeared around the corner.

  The school wasn’t expecting her that morning. She had already called in sick pretending to be her aunt. It wasn’t a complete lie. Rylie never felt good on the day before a moon. There was no way she would make it through Ms. Reedy’s class without eating someone.

  But she couldn’t hang around town, either. It was too small, and everyone knew each other. Someone would tell her aunt she ditched.

  So instead, Rylie ran.

  In the days at her mom’s condo, Rylie did a lot of research. There wasn’t much real information about werewolves online. So she read about normal wolves—the kind that lived in the forest and didn’t eat people. She learned that they ran at about five miles per hour and that they could travel fifty miles a day.

  Rylie had never pushed herself to see how fast she could go, but she was pretty sure she could beat normal wolves in speed and distance. Even as a human, it felt like she would never get tired.

  She wound through the fields toward her aunt’s ranch, leaping fences and avoiding the road. It was getting to be harvest time, so there were lots of people working on tractors and other big equipment. A farmer yelled at her, but she was too fast to hear what he said.

  It felt good to run. It used up all the high-tension energy of the wolf. She finally passed the last farm and broke into federal park land, where there was nothing but open hills and blue sky.

  Rylie was looking for something, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. She needed somewhere to hide. Somewhere safe, where nobody would stumble upon her. Where could she hide when the land was so open?

  She hoped to find a cave or something, but it quickly became obvious there were no caves in the land of rolling hills even though she searched for hours.

  The sun passed its apex and grew hotter. Rylie finally stopped under a tree to drink her water and see what her aunt packed for lunch. Apparently one of the hens had stopped laying eggs, because she had half of a roasted chicken in a Tupperware container. She tore into it and tried not to dwell much on the fact that it wasn’t raw.

  Once she was satiated, Rylie lounged under her tree and surveyed the hills around her, picking bits of chicken meat out of her teeth with a rib bone. She had found a few old shacks, but none of them looked like they could hold her.

  Rylie pulled out a county map she borrowed from her aunt’s house and frowned at it. Normal wolves could travel fifty miles in a day. There were more than fifty miles of emptiness to the north and east of the ranch, but how could she get herself to go that direction once she transformed?

  She still had no ideas by the time she packed up her knapsack and went running back for the ranch.

  Rylie arrived an hour after school ended. Her aunt and the ranch hands were loading some of the livestock into trailers, so she avoided them to keep the cows from panicking.

  Flopping on the floor of her bedroom to wait, Rylie chewed on her bottom lip as she watched the shadows march up her wall. Her skin was dry from the climate. It cracked under her teeth, tasting of salt and iron.

  The hours passed and evening settled over the pastures. Rylie sat on the porch after dinner and watched the sun turn to a sliver on the horizon, leaving nothing but a fading orange glow. The animals quieted down. A cloud of mosquitoes swarmed over the rain barrel.

  Twilight. She could already feel the moon pulling at her.

  Rylie’s eyes burned. That tug meant she would change soon. She had come to associate it with the agony of her bones breaking, her skin tearing, and fur swarming over her flesh.

  She didn’t want to change again. Not tonight, not ever.

  Rylie went inside. Her aunt had fallen asleep leaning on the kitchen table with a mug of tea steaming by her hand. Gwyn looked as ragged as Rylie felt. When had her aunt started to get old?

  All her anger from that morning was gone. Kneeling by Gwyn’s chair, she shook her gently. “Hey. Why don’t I help you into bed?”

  Her aunt’s eyes opened a sliver. She smiled to see Rylie. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Then you fake-snore really good. Come on.”

  Rylie led her back to her room. Moving slowly across the house felt strange when the wolf part of her was ready to run, but she forced herself to be gentle.

  Gwyn wouldn’t let her walk her all the way into her room. “I’m fine,” she insisted. “Leave me alone.” There was no venom in her tone.

  “Okay. I’m going to bed too. See you in the morning.”

  The door shut. Pain rocked through Rylie, and she pressed her forehead to the doorframe.

  She had to move fast.

  Running was harder with the full moon hanging overhead. Her feet flashed beneath her, but it felt strange to spring on two legs when Rylie wanted to drop to all fours. She stopped once she reached the hill where she had seen the car the night before.

  Another swell of power hit her. Rylie’s eyes blurred and her ears rang. She stripped her clothes off and stashed them under a bush before continuing. She made it another quarter mile before she lost control.

  Her legs gave out. Rylie dropped to her knees and began to transform.

  Her vertebrae ground against each other like they were twisting into dust. One popped, and then another. Her tailbone snapped. The skin at the base of her spine stretched and ripped as the tail extended to her knees. Rylie screamed, digging her fingers into the soil.

  Make it stop, make it stop—

  When she lifted her hands, her fingernails had torn free of her skin and lay on top of the dirt like ten bloody seeds waiting to sprout. Claws emerged. The bones in her wrist rippled and rearranged.

  Please just make it stop—

  Her kneecaps cracked.

  Thick clumps of blond hair puddle beneath her.

  Her ribs shifted. Blood sprayed across the ground, splattering in lines on the grass and misting the petals of the flowers.

  Rylie sobbed into her fists, but she couldn’t make fists anymore, she didn’t have fingers—and then she couldn’t cry because her lips were gone and her face was tearing—

  Stop,
stop, oh God, just stop…

  Fur itched under her skin and erupted from the surface.

  And then Rylie was gone.

  The wolf felt the completion of the changes, but it was not bothered by the pain. It shook itself, flicking remnants of Rylie’s blood across the field. Stretching its paws in front of its body, it extended its body to work out all the kinks.

  Rylie had eaten nothing but meat that night, but the moon was full, the wolf was strong, and all it could think about was the gnawing hunger beneath its ribs.

  Over its shoulder, the wolf could smell animals. They weren’t far away at all.

  And it wanted to hunt.

  Rylie woke up with feathers stuck to her face.

  She sat up. Something itched against her gums, and she picked another feather out of the space between her canines and molars. It was big and red. The last time she had seen that feather, it was attached to a rooster.

  The chicken pen was completely silent. She crawled to the door of the henhouse and looked inside.

  No wonder it was so quiet.

  “I’m going to be in so much trouble,” Rylie muttered.

  She managed to get inside before her aunt woke up and took a long, hot shower. Rylie scrubbed at the chicken blood on her face, chest, and arms with a loofah until her skin turned raw and pink.

  All the wolf had left inside the chicken coop were bloody stains. When she tried to remember what she had done with them, she could almost recall the sensation of bones cracking in her jaws, and the feeling of fragments scraping down her throat.

  Rylie wanted to feel guilty. Chickens were living creatures deserving of compassion as much as any cow, after all. But when she remembered the rooster’s attack on her first morning at the ranch, she felt a little satisfied to have eaten him.

  She knew her aunt had woken up when her hot water vanished, and she leaped out of the shower with a yelp. That meant Gwyn was cooking breakfast. Rylie shivered as she toweled off with weak motions. She was drained after the full moon. She couldn’t even make herself fake a smile at the breakfast table.