Read Blood Moon Harvest (Seasons of the Moon) for Free Online

she had been punched in the chest.
    They had spent months converting the barn into a living space for the pack. She spent so many long hours picking out furniture for the bedrooms, laying carpet, getting into paint fights with Seth—and it was gone. All gone.
    “Survivors?” Abel asked.
    “Stripes was killed, but the pack is fine.” Seth hugged Rylie tightly. “I was so worried about you. You vanished.”
    “I’m fine,” she said with a wince. The pressure hurt her scrapes.
    Seth only just seemed to realize that she was wounded. His eyes widened into huge circles. “Why aren’t you healing?”
    “I don’t know,” Rylie said. “I really don’t know.”
    When the last of the fire was put out and dirt was spread on the coals, everyone moved inside. A lot of the pack was crying and angry, but if Aunt Gwyn was shaken, she showed no sign of it. She immediately bustled off to prepare coffee, which was her idea of being comforting.
    Seth sat with Rylie on a few inches of couch and hugged her chilled body to him. She was strangely quiet, but he couldn’t exactly talk about her feelings when the living room was packed tight with werewolves.
    The front door opened, and Yasir stepped in. He caught Seth’s eye over the crowd.
    “Can I talk to you?” Yasir asked.
    Seth gave Rylie’s shoulders one last squeeze, and then joined the commander outside. There was a light breeze and just enough clouds to keep it from getting hot. It would have been a beautiful day, if not for the destroyed barn.”
    “What’s wrong?” Seth asked.
    “You mean, aside from the obvious? It’s Stripes.” Yasir jerked his thumb down the road. “I found something while moving his body. Come look.”
    The dead Union hunter was stretched out on a tarp in the back of the SUV.
    Stripes’s throat had been torn out. It was fast and messy, but Seth had been dealing with so many cadavers in school that he only saw the anatomy of it—the mangled carotid, the digastric muscle, the glisten of his cervical vertebrae. If Pagan had gone a few centimeters further, she might have decapitated him.
    “A megaira can do this?” Seth asked.
    Yasir shook his head. “That’s the thing—they can’t. You saw her. No teeth or claws.” He pulled on a latex glove and parted the skin to show Seth where muscle had been torn away. “This damage looks like it was caused by an animal.”
    “You mean Cain is a werewolf?”
    “If that was Cain rescuing Pagan last night—yes, maybe.” But he was still very tense. That obviously wasn’t his only news.
    He pulled Stripes’s shirt down, baring his left pectoral. The skin was rubbery without the flow of blood underneath.
    Stripes had a tattoo of a bleeding apple.
    “Look familiar?” the commander asked.
    “That’s the same tattoo Pagan had on her neck.”
    “Exactly.” Yasir covered the mark, mouth twisting with distaste. “We’ve had some hunters jumping ship from the Union. I thought it was normal defection, but what if they’re leaving to join Cain?”
    “But if Pagan and Stripes were on the same side, then why would he have helped you interrogate her?”
    “I can only guess. Punishment for getting herself caught? But someone wasn’t happy with Stripes, and it wasn’t Pagan.” Yasir waved a hand at the destroyed throat. “We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that a member of the pack may also be a follower of Cain.”
    Seth’s head was spinning. A traitor inside the pack? “Nobody was missing this morning.”
    “We didn’t see who attacked last night. It could be anyone.” The commander wrapped Stripes’s body in the tarp, removed the glove, and disposed of it in a biohazard bag. “I need to tell Union HQ what’s happening. There’s no way to hide Stripes’s death from them, and they’ll want to conduct their own investigation. So that means at least one unit out here.” Yasir shrugged. “Sorry.”
    Seth blew a breath out of his lips.
    “Okay. Do what you have to