Alpha Moon (The Cain Chronicles) (Seasons of the Moon) Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t make sense of the painted lines on the ground, the different levels, the numbers on the walls.
    Rylie ended up driving to the top floor and parking where it was empty. She got out to find that she had angled her car across two spots, far enough to the right to make a third equally unusable.
    “Sorry,” she said to nobody in particular.
    At least she was right next to the stairs. She could head straight down to the pedestrian bridge without trying to navigate the parking garage on foot.
    Rylie had become inured to the “We Report Preternaturals” signs that marked most local businesses now, but there was no preparing for the signs that greeted her at the airport. The first of them started to show up on the pedestrian bridge—warnings that preternaturals weren’t allowed to board airplanes without filing itineraries with the OPA.  
    The automatic doors had signs on them, too. These ones threatened “Violators of OPA Law May be Shot On Sight.” Cheerful.
    Once inside the airport, Rylie was met by an overwhelming tangle of odors. She found it easy to pick out which people had already come off of a flight, and which ones were still waiting to board, just by following the stale smell of recycled air and sweat.
    Rylie picked up the scent of coffee and trailed it to a first-floor cafe. She had to rub her eyes in order to read the illuminated clock on the wall. In her rush to escape Abel’s bed, she had managed to arrive at the airport at six-fifteen in the morning. Her mom wouldn’t even be there for forty-five minutes. Plenty of time for coffee.
    “Medium cappuccino,” she said, digging in her back pocket for her wallet.
    “Any syrup?” asked the barista.
    She pulled a face. “No.”  
    Rylie paid with a ten dollar bill and almost dropped the change into the tip box—until she saw the “We Report Preternaturals” sign taped to the back of the cash register. She returned the money to her wallet instead.
    She wandered through the airport in search of the C gate, sipping her cappuccino. After seeing all of the threatening signs, it didn’t taste very good at all.
    Rylie located the security checkpoint, which she couldn’t enter without a ticket. Or a travel itinerary , she thought with an unpleasant twist to her stomach. She prowled around in search of a nearby bench, thinking that she could catch a quick cat nap before her mom arrived.
    A scream drew her attention to the security checkpoint.
    There were so many milling bodies and commotion that Rylie couldn’t see who was crying out. But the scream immediately ratcheted her adrenaline to eleven, making the hair on her arms stand on end.
    That wasn’t a human noise.
    The chaos drew Rylie’s wolf forward. She dropped her cappuccino in a trash bin.
    More people were shouting now, and there was running. A woman shot past her, ramming into Rylie’s shoulder hard enough to make her stumble. A man followed, and then two more people.
    She heard one clear voice through all the shouting: “It’s one of those things!”
    The crowd parted enough for Rylie to see.
    A man was standing in the body scanner, frozen with fear. But he wasn’t a human man. Black hair fell loose around his shoulders, framing a pale face, and his hands— his hands —were semi-transparent, baring the skeleton through the skin. Rylie picked out a chilling smell, like shedding snakes.
    The last time that she had encountered that smell and seen someone lose their skin, it had been a demon—something that Seth called a megaira. This man didn’t look like the megaira, but he was almost surely a demon. Something about the scanner must have disrupted his energies.
    A demon .
    And security had seen him.
    Rylie was rooted to the spot as people ran past her. The TSA agents had drawn Tasers and circled around the scanner, blocking all of the demon’s exits. They didn’t have guns, but that was probably better—shooting at demons had never seemed to do much good anyway.
    “Help me,” he