Gray Moon Rising: Seasons of the Moon by S M Reine

She shuddered again, harder than before. “What’s wrong with me, Seth?”
    He held out his hands to calm her. “Let me look. Okay? I know a little first aid.”
    Bekah lifted her leg. Seth helped her clean off some of the blood and found a wound in the thickest part of her calf. One of those Union bullets had grazed her and left silver behind. The last time he had seen a similar wound, it had been on Rylie’s thigh.
    “It looks like there might be bullet fragments in your leg. I can remove them, but you have to be quiet. Can you keep from making any noise?” Seth asked. When she looked horrified by the suggestion, he nodded toward the sleeping bags outside. “We can’t risk waking them up.”
    She went pale. “Okay. I guess.” She made herself stare at the roof of the car and dug her fingers into the felt floor mat. “You have to help distract me. Tell me why I keep seeing this forest.”
    “Werewolves originally came from Gray Mountain,” he said, grabbing a first aid kit out of the back, sterilizing his hands with alcohol, and opening sterile wipes. “Myth says that human settlers fought with the gods, and lycanthropy ended the war.” He cleaned off the rest of the blood. “This is going to hurt a lot.”
    At her nod, he took a deep breath and dug his fingers into the wound on her calf. The bullet hadn’t gone deep, so the first part was easy to find. Bekah bit her fist, but didn’t cry out.
    “All the werewolves are being called to the forest, so it’s not just you,” he went on, dropping the first fragment of bullet on a piece of gauze. “Nobody knows why or how, though.”
    She flapped her hands in the air as he extracted the second piece.
    Seth pocketed the bloody gauze so he could get rid of it. “Okay. You’re done.”
    “Ouch,” she whispered. “But… it’s burning. That’s good.” As they watched, the edges of the injury began to close.
    “We’ll have to bandage this,” he said, cleaning up the blood he had smeared on her. After a short moment, she was totally healed, and the only sign something had happened was a red mark like a fading bruise. The wound wasn’t as bad as Rylie’s had been after all. “The Union can’t know you were shot, and they definitely can’t know that you’ve healed from it. So if anyone asks, you tripped in the forest and scraped yourself. Got it?”
    “I’ve got it. Who are you traveling with?” she asked below her breath, eyeballing the sleeping bags through the window. “What’s ‘the Union’?”
    Seth gave her a short summary. Bekah didn’t need much detail—she was smart enough to infer that the situation was bad.
    “So you’re saying this is an extermination force,” she said.
    “Pretty much.” He grimaced at the faint silhouette of the mountain against the sky. “There are supposed to be more of them on the mountain. And I’m expecting for us to run into more werewolves as we get close to the next moon, too.”
    “This is bad. This is really bad,” Bekah said.
    “You don’t have to tell me that.”
    “What are we going to do?”
    Seth ran through a list of options in his mind: Panic. Run away. Kill the Union in their sleep. Panic and run away. Find Rylie and Abel and probably dozens of other wolves. Or confront whatever was calling them to the mountain and get caught in a slaughter.
    None of that was especially inspirational, and judging by Bekah’s terrified eyes, she really needed inspiration.
    “Well, first, I’m going to sleep. I’m wasted.” He made himself smile even though he didn’t feel it. He wrapped the bandages around her leg and pinned them in place. “I could let you out of here. It would be safer than staying with us. If they find out what you are…” Seth trailed off and tried not to look toward the rifles mounted behind the driver’s seat. He failed. To her credit, Bekah only looked a little bit terrified.
    “But they would know that you did it.” She shook her head. “No. I can fake it for now.