Red Rose Moon (Seasons of the Moon) by SM Reine Read Free Book Online Page B

stalking, he was going to have his retribution.
    Abel would die tonight. Seth would die tomorrow. And he would claim Rylie—and her unborn infant—as his own.
    He wanted to savor the victory.
    Cain smelled Eleanor’s approach before she opened entered again. It was hard not to smell her coming now. Without Scott’s spells to maintain her, she was decaying.
    He didn’t open his eyes. “Mother,” he said, allowing himself a smile. “Was it as good as you imagined to kill Abel, so many years after he betrayed us?”
    She didn’t reply.
    He finally looked at her. Fluffy snow was stuck to her hair and the layers of her black dress. Her destroyed eye pointed toward the wall, while the other focused on him.
    And she looked pissed .
    Cain sat up. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
    Eleanor raised the knife. The blade was unbloodied. “Tell me why you let that blond whore live.”
    “Tell me you killed Abel,” he said, getting to his feet. His moments of languorous peace were shattered. “Mother. I need to hear these words from you.”
    “She’s pregnant,” Eleanor said, advancing on him at a limp. One of her legs dragged underneath her.
    “That doesn’t change anything—”
    “You want her baby to live!”
    So Abel had told her. Cain cursed himself inwardly. He hadn’t thought that Abel would tell Eleanor, much less that she would actually listen to him—Eleanor’s mind seemed to be rotting along with the rest of her body.
    “I knew I should have taken care of this myself,” he said, reaching for the knife.
    Eleanor lunged. Silver flashed through the air, and he felt the bite of the metal burying into his bicep.
    Cain roared and ripped the knife out of his arm. Silver didn’t sting a natural-born werewolf the way it did the impure, but that didn’t mean that the injury didn’t hurt like hell.
    He flung the knife aside.
    “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded, grabbing Eleanor’s remaining arm as blood cascaded down his elbow. “I’m your son .”
    “You’re a waste of breath.” She spat ichor into his face. It splashed like acid on his cheek. “You’re just as bad as Abel and Seth.”
    Hurt and betrayal crashed over him. Cain closed his eyes, took deep breaths, and tried to calm his anger.
    He had spent his childhood raised in foster homes, knowing that his mother was out there somewhere. He had spent so many days dreaming of her. What she would be like. Longing for her love.
    When he learned that she had been killed, he had abandoned everything to find a necromancer to resurrect her, and then dedicated months more to tracking down her killers—Eleanor’s other sons, the useless bastards.
    He had thought he was finally happy.
    And now she spit on him.
    “I think that you’re having a bad night,” Cain said slowly, carefully. “We need—”
    “You deserve to die,” she said in a dry voice. Each syllable was slower than the last.
    She swiped at him with bony fingertips, and it was too easy to step back and dodge her.
    “I’ll find Scott,” he said. “He needs to heal you.”
    “You don’t deserve my blood,” Eleanor hissed, taking the knife from the floor and rounding on him again.
    “Mother—”
    “I’m going to bleed it from you.”
    “Mother!”
    She swung with the knife, and he wasn’t so shocked that he couldn’t dodge her blow. Cain instinctively knocked her arm aside with his. There was a dry crack when his elbow drove into her flesh. One of the bones in her forearm fractured and jutted from the skin.
    “Bleed,” Eleanor said. Even her good eye was empty of consciousness now, too. The rage had taken her somewhere else. Somewhere inhuman.
    Cain felt panic swell in his chest. “Don’t make me hurt you, Mother. Not now. Not when we’re so close .”
    But she only kept advancing on him.
    He threw open the front door and dropped down the steps. The stakes that had bound Abel to the ground were little lumps under the snow, but his body was gone.
    She had freed