Amy and I exchanged a glance.
“We look forward to meeting more of you,” Gabriel said. Smiling in a way that made me queasy.
I just stared at him, waiting until they felt uncomfortable enough to leave. The girls reacted first, becoming noticeably nervous.
Gabriel wasn’t so easy to dominate with a simple look. But he didn’t strike me as an alpha, either. Finally boredom worked to my advantage and he turned away.
Amy tried the same tactic with Sarah, but she was less likely to feel pressured to leave by simply being looked at. Instead, she basked in the attention.
“You should go,” I finally said to her. “I’ll call you later.”
She gave a dainty snort. “Maybe I’ll answer.” But she left.
Amy looked at me. “That was—”
“Weird,” I concluded for her with a wink.
“Should we tell Pietr and Max?”
“What? That there are werewolves hanging around? I say no. It’s not like they can do anything about it now. Really. And it’s probably a lucky thing. Wouldn’t there be some weird thing about territory if our guys were still wolves?”
“I guess…”
“You do know I’ll eventually fold and tell one of them,” I admitted.
“I’m counting on it,” Amy replied.
I poked at the milk container sitting on the tray by my brown-bag lunch. As far as I was concerned, after finding out what we had about the origins of the school lunches, everything in the cafeteria was suspect.
Sophie pierced her brought-from-home drink bag with a sharp straw and began quietly sucking.
Amy just glared at her apple. “We need a plan of action.”
“What?”
“This sucks—packing lunch every day,” she muttered.
“Okay, I totally agree,” I conceded, “but we have to be smart about all this. We have no idea how far up—or down—the figurative food chain this goes.”
“Good point. It does seem like everyone in Junction has a secret to hide. Who woulda thought small-town America was so—”
“Creepy?” Sophie asked.
“Troubled?” I interjected.
Amy looked at me and nodded. “Troubled. There’s nothing normal about this supposedly normal town.”
“There’s bound to be a way we could incorporate that into the school motto, too,” I suggested.
Amy stuck out her tongue. “So we agree? We need to find a way to cut off the food distributor serving Junction High.”
I nodded.
Sophie just stayed still. Quiet.
“Well, Soph? You in?”
Pietr, Cat, and Max approached the table, making me wrap things up quickly.
“Oh,” Sophie responded, looking over my head to the wall and the clock that I knew hung there, thanks to Pietr’s obsession with time. “Sorry. I need to get back to my research project.”
“Wait—Soph—”
But she grabbed her tray and dodged away as the Rusakovas joined us.
I glanced at Amy. “Do you have any clue what research project she’s talking about? I feel like I’m missing something.”
She shook her head. “I think we’re both missing something.”
Max settled in beside her. “Could it be me?”
Pietr and I groaned in unison.
But Amy’s smile made it totally worth our suffering.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marlaena
My stomach tightened, vibrating out a growl that rocked my rib cage and trembled against my spine, matching anything my throat had ever uttered. My nostrils flared, testing the breeze, sharp with a cold so cruel it was a thousand tiny pins pricking the inside of my nose all at once.
Eyes stinging, I swung my head and tipped up my muzzle, the breeze growing into a wind that brushed the bristling hairs on my upper lip and chin, tickling my snout.
But I had found what I’d come for and I turned my head into the smell, willing my stomach to silence.
The pups needed to eat. And Gareth and Gabriel might or might not be successful in their hunts. But for me—there was hope of sharing a morsel of meat with my pack.
Rabbit.
I forced my ears forward to listen for any movement and padded out on silent paws, snow working up and between my toes, chilling my feet as I kept my scent downwind of where the smell came from, my mouth lathered with saliva at the thought of its fur, flesh, and blood slipping between my scissoring canines.…
There was no doubt. The musky scent of something living in the earth’s gut, nested in its own fur and warmed by its dung, was unmistakable.
But better than the smell was the sight of it—a small silhouette huddled against the breeze, eyes closed and ears snug against its body.
And facing away from me.
Belly to the snow, I crawled forward, a methodical shifting from one side to the other as I shortened the distance between us in increments of inches.
Hunger gnawed at me, but desperation fueled me far beyond the reach of hunger’s chewing jaws.
I rose up, muscles coiling beneath my skin and toenails digging into the frozen ground as I readied to spring—my mind racing in anticipation of the connection of jaws to flesh and bone.
But the wind shifted, betraying my position, and the rabbit rocketed forward in blind panic. I launched after it, jaws snapping closed on empty air as it twisted and turned and tested the limits of my flexibility.
I followed it through hairpin turns as it wove nimbly through the briars. And I locked down that invasive human part of me.
I am wolf. Built for the hunt—made for the kill. Designed to deal death and walk away from victory with a full belly and a howl of joy quivering on my bloodbathed tongue.
Brambles tore at my face, sticking in my fur and biting into my flesh, tiny sabers sinking in and stinging. I ripped through them, uprooting the least of them and racing after my quarry.
The rabbit bent in midair, twisting back the way we’d just come, and I stretched my neck, jaws closing on silky fur. Bones crunched between my jaws, and I skidded to a stop, paws throwing up snow and bits of buried underbrush.
It struggled in my grip, and bracing myself I shook my head, twisting my neck sharply from side to side and squeezing my jaws until my skull ached and my teeth wanted to pop from the pressure.
The rabbit stilled. Went limp. All soft and giving flesh, warm and ripe …
My tongue quivered, tasting blood, hot and rich as fine, dark chocolate, and I fought back the wolf to keep from consuming my prey all alone—stripping the meat and cracking the bones to suck out the marrow.…
The alpha in me cried out: This is my right—this is my destiny—to have all I want, anytime I want it.
But the girl in me … I dropped the corpse and shivered into my human form, luckily not far from my discarded clothing. The girl in me remembered the pups waiting—their eyes full of hunger.
And hope.
I slid on my worn jeans with not even a spare coin to jingle in my pockets and settled my stained sweatshirt over my shoulders. Brushing off my feet before wedging them into my boots, I shrugged into the denim jacket I had found discarded on a playground nearly a year ago in Philadelphia.
My hands shook from the rush that came with the chase and the kill. I picked up the rabbit and tucked it into my jacket, buttoning up, the rabbit’s fading warmth against my belly a tease. My stomach grumbled again.
The hike back to the new hideout took longer than I wanted, so I sprinted the last hundred yards, arm tight against my jacket, cradling the rabbit.
The scent of wood smoke hit me, and my eyes blinked against the soot in the air. But the smoke glazing my eyes was secondary to the scent of chicken roasting. For a heartbeat my victory was forgotten. Over our humble campfire a makeshift spit turned, bowed in the center from the weight of three plump hens hanging there, glistening in their fat as they cooked, shining in the firelight like greasy stars.
Gabriel leaned away from the fire, turning
the spit slowly with one hand, a sly smile splitting his face. “Welcome home,” he said, announcing my arrival. The pups greeted me, their mouths full, cheeks bulging with freshly cooked meat. He raised a plate with his other hand. “Chicken?” he asked.
“Where…?” But I knew. There was a farm not far from our new position—a production farm selling eggs by the truckload. Regular humans didn’t smell the fat, laying hens living so close to one another inside, but I—we—did. Easily. “You’ll get us caught, you idiot.”
He shook his head. “No. The farmer won’t miss a thing. I made it look like someone forgot to latch the cages. And four birds out of a thousand…” He shrugged. “The pups are fed. That’s what matters.”
“The pups would’ve been fed without your theft,” I muttered, dragging the limp rabbit from my coat. Such a small thing. Thin already from winter. I saw that once hunger wasn’t blinding me.
And so did Gabriel. His smile twisted at one end. “Rabbit’s tasty,” he agreed. “But barely a mouthful to it.”
Someone stepped up behind me, the solid weight causing the floorboard to dip just the slightest amount. The scent of cloves and far-off places drifted to me, and I knew Gareth stood as my shadow at the firelight’s edge.
“Did you…?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Nothing,” he whispered back.
Gabriel’s grin unfurled, the arrogance clear. “Chicken?” he offered again, and I wondered if he meant something else by the single word, something about our unwillingness to steal out from under a local farmer’s nose.
With a grunt, I willed my fingernail to a sharp claw and beheaded my bunny, trimming along its hind legs and belly. My grin grim, I held its hind legs in one fist and pulled its fur free in one swift move. Another careful slice and the entrails dumped out, still steaming. The pups’ eyes sparked red. “No thanks,” I replied. “I’m good.”
Both Gareth’s and Gabriel’s gazes locked on me, confirming the accuracy of my statement.
As I cooked my meat I knew that just as dangerous as the threat of hunters and hunger was the threat Gabriel posed to my leadership and the pack’s stability.
And as sure as I was of that, I was even more certain he’d brought us to Junction for reasons of his own.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jessie
Sophie and I were headed to the school library to grab a resource on an article for the school paper—as normal a pursuit as I could imagine—when I heard them in the hallway not far from us.
“I said no thanks.” Even without seeing her signature red heels, Counselor Harnek’s voice was unmistakable. “Your type of help is exactly what got us all into this mess in the first place. We were supposed to locate the gifted, not feed them stuff that makes them go crazy or explode.…”
“That was the exception, not the rule.”
Vice Principal Perlson. The lilt of his voice and its unique rhythmic quality made it impossible not to recognize him.
“They’re all exceptions—don’t you see that? Every single kid here—they’re all special.”
“Now. Before the company came to town, you were just making assumptions about anomalies and adolescents experiencing abnormal situations—which, ironically, is the norm. There is not a normal adolescent in the world.”
“But none of those non-normal adolescents are as far from normal as these kids are now,” she argued.
“True, true. Which is why we need to take such good care of what we have. And why you should give all your test subjects the special supplement.”
“I don’t have test subjects. I have students. Confused students. A whole frikkin’ school of them, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve noticed. And I require better details regarding the group you’re training.”
Seriously? I looked at Sophie. She just stared straight ahead, her back flat to the wall.
“What do you think you still have to know about the group I’m training?”
“I want to know what precisely you are training them for. I want details.”
“The only details I’ll give is that I’m training them as was previously agreed. When I am finished with them they’ll be able to do everything we hoped for and more. And the more of them you give me access to, the more of them will be safe, functional, and accurate. But drop the issue of the supplement. The kids are already having enough problems from their reactions to the school food.”
“But only at about a level of approximately twenty percent of the total student population,” Perlson pointed out. “You and I both know that barely exceeds the percentage dismissed as chance or the odds.”
“You show me any other place where twenty percent of the student body is exhibiting the powers and nasty side effects that our kids do and—”
“Montgomery Beach Middle School, California.”
“What? Montgomery Beach?”
“Now unfortunately nicknamed Monster Beach. But what can you do? Kids can be so cruel.” He made a condescending tsk-ing noise.
“Shit,” she exclaimed.
“Now, now. We must remain professional about all this. This is not only the future we are working with but also a highly competitive business venture.”
“Oh, I’ll be professional, don’t you worry. But if you even try to get that supplement into the student body, I will go on the warpath. I will destroy you. We’re here to give these kids a brighter future—to empower them—not to ruin their lives and destroy their hopes.”
“Sometimes one thing needs to be sacrificed for the benefit of the others. We can empower them, but it will take a little more risk.”
“No. Absolutely not. I’m doing what I signed on for here—long before you came on the scene. I’m going to study the anomalies and protect our students. And don’t ever make the mistake of trying to come between me and my goals.” The clicking of her shoes, fading as she walked swiftly, let me know she was headed away from us.
I held my breath, hoping Perlson did the same thing in his loafers.
For once we got lucky.
Soph and I let out sighs of relief. “Wow,” I said. “Who’d have guessed that she’d stand up to him to protect us? I mean, I like her, but…”
Soph nodded slowly, her voice going soft again. “Yeah. Who’d have guessed?”
“So where do you think they’re being kept?”
“Who?”
“The kids Harnek’s training? Can you imagine? Training a group of kids to use special powers?”
Sophie shrugged. “What are the odds? In Junction?” She grabbed her book bag and headed to the library.
I caught up to her. “I’m going to find them.”
“Who? Perlson and Harnek? They went thatta’way,” she said with point and a roll of her eyes.
“No. The kids.”
“I wouldn’t bother if I were you.”
“Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing you aren’t me. Because I’m going to bother. Someone should look out for these kids.”
“Yes,” Sophie agreed. “Someone should.”
Marlaena
It wasn’t a big store, but then again, it wasn’t a big town. The parking lot was the most remarkable thing about the little strip mall—all sleek and recently poured macadam, black as a new moon night and smooth as satin. Snow fluttered down, only showing briefly in sharp contrast to the blacktop before it vanished, white absorbed by the black. The buildings were standard fare—something new filling the façade of a franchise store that stood here earlier—its architecture proclaiming its original intent, but its strange choice of colors showing new ownership.
Judging the space I guessed the mall had been started in the nineties, hit its heyday then, and soon started to tumble into the faint signs of disrepair and a failing economy that still marred it now. A few roof shingles hung awkwardly, some mismatched from more recent repairs. The sidewalk rose up at an odd angle where a tree’s root worked to reclaim the earth beneath it, and the brick face, its corners chipped at bumper le
vel, was in need of a good powerwash.
Gareth tugged at my hood, tucking a stray wisp of my hair back into its dark depths. “If you’d take my advice and dye it,” he whispered—his breath so close I fought a shiver—“we’d all be safer. Brunettes are a dime a dozen. But redheads—ya’ll are memorable.”
“Aren’t I memorable for something more than my hair color?” I asked, feeling the alpha in me slip away as I searched for his eyes in the falling gray of dusk.
He rolled them, his lips pressing into a long, firm line. “Come on, Princess,” he drawled in that slow Southern way of his that always seemed to say no matter how fast our lives rushed by—no matter how hard we bled out—that this was the only moment that mattered and it needed to be savored. Gareth sucked the marrow out of life without even trying—just by being. I envied him that. He looped one arm around mine. “Stroll with me.”
“I’m not the strolling type.” But with Gareth beside me, I couldn’t imagine anything else. “You’re brunette and you’re far from forgettable.”
“I’m as brunette as they come,” he said, flashing a smile full of white teeth that contrasted beautifully with his rich skin tone—so much like freshly made cocoa, and capable of warming a person just as much. An ebony curl danced near one of his pale lavender eyes and I resisted the urge to brush it back as he’d tucked mine away.
His mama was a white girl with freckles dappling her face and shoulders and his daddy was a dog as dark as midnight, he’d once said as we all had huddled together, sharing tales around a campfire beneath a bridge in some now-forgotten city miles away.
They may have been in sharp contrast to each other, but when they’d come together they’d bred one amazing wolf, in my opinion. So Gareth carried her cheekbones, pale eyes, and freckles and his father’s dark skin, broad shoulders, and amazing lips. He coughed. “Focus, Princess.”
But I was focused. On him. The heat of his body matching mine, the way my breathing fell into a perfect rhythm with his.…
“We’re here to do a job,” he reminded.
Caught. “I am very well aware of that,” I sniped, turning my head away from him to look at the stores, observe the people, and note the time. Things appeared to be winding down. More people were leaving the store than entering it. And thanks to my ever-present internal clock, I knew it was nine twenty-five. According to the handwritten sign hanging on the store’s door, they closed at ten.
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