by Laura Burns
Sarah frowned. “Why would Karina be in this room?”
“Look, she has a dark side, okay?” Ethan sounded embarrassed, an emotion Sarah hadn’t even thought he could feel. “She liked it in here.”
“You mean you guys…” Sarah glanced at the table in distaste. It was almost impossible to imagine Karina in here, or even her with a dark side. Karina was … sunny. A sunny Southern California girl.
“I told you it was personal. Let’s get out of here,” Ethan said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
They had only taken two steps toward the door when Ethan stopped her abruptly. Footsteps. Right outside the room.
13
Ethan grabbed Sarah’s arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. With his other hand, he turned off his cell. Confused, Sarah did the same. He pulled her to the side of the door, against the wall, just before the beam of a flashlight cut through the room.
“School security follows me sometimes,” Ethan whispered, his mouth against Sarah’s ear, his breath hot on her neck. “Be chill.”
She nodded, desperately trying to not inhale his pencils-and-oranges scent, still unsure why they needed to hide from security. She’d never heard of a “Don’t leave the school grounds” rule. Of course, it had never occurred to her to try. It probably hadn’t occurred to anyone but Ethan, since leaving involved crawling through a hedge.
“Clear,” a voice said from the hallway. “Must have been rats.”
The flashlight beam swept across the room again. The light caught one of the shards of another grouping of broken-glass-fronted cabinets, shining light directly into Sarah’s eyes.
And she was in. Light from the muzzle of the gun flashing over Izzy’s face. Izzy smiling. Aiming the gun at Karina. Sarah screaming. “No!”
A hand clapped over her mouth and she was out. No. Sarah felt the world go spinning around her. She wasn’t out or in. She was out and in. The woods mingled with the dark of an OR, and Karina’s eyes were still there—her dead eyes—but it was Ethan’s hand on her mouth. There was no clear break between her memory and the present. Confusion flooded her body, and Sarah retched.
“Whoa!” Ethan snatched his hand away, and Sarah stumbled to her knees.
Footsteps came running toward them in the dark. Sarah couldn’t think of anything besides breathing. Where was she? In the woods with the Wolfpack, or in the asylum with Ethan?
“Sarah, what the hell?” Ethan’s voice cut through the chaos in her mind. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
She clung to his voice, using it to pull her out of the memory. And she was out, finally. “Yeah. I just—”
“What are you kids doing in here?” The two security guys appeared in the doorway, flashlight beams focused on Sarah and Ethan. The light hurt her eyes and she flinched without meaning to.
Ethan stepped in front of Sarah, blocking the light. “Nothing,” he said. “We were just messing around.”
“You can’t be here, and you know it, Mr. Steere,” the bigger of the two men growled. “This time we’re going to—”
“But we’re just doing research,” Sarah said, impressed that she’d managed to think so quickly after that surge. It had only lasted moments, but it had felt as if she’d never escape it. Climbing to her feet, she held up her hand against the flashlights. “Can you lower those?”
“Excuse me?” The big guy sounded a bit thrown, but he pointed the light at the floor. “Research?”
“Yes. For Dr. Diaz,” Sarah improvised. “He wants our chem class to focus on the proper usage of psychotropic chemicals, and there are some examples of improper storage out here. We told Dr. Diaz we’d collect the samples so he could reference them in class.”
“Just look at them,” Ethan said, smoothly picking up on her line. “In the cabinet there, unsecured.” Sarah was relieved that there were old medications in these cabinets too. “Some of them were marked poison, but the storage method allowed the medicines to seep out into the atmosphere as they decayed.”
Sarah had to bite her lip to keep from laughing, but the mention of poison seemed to do the job.
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t be in here. This structure isn’t sound,” the big guy said, his tone less angry than before. “Let’s go.”
“We’re going to have to confirm your story with Dr. Diaz,” the second guard added as they all headed down the grand staircase. Sarah felt a huge sense of relief just to be back where the sunlight reached them.
“That’s okay. Dr. Diaz will confirm it,” she said, hoping that it was true.
* * *
“I didn’t mean to get you involved,” Sarah said the instant Dr. Diaz closed his office door behind the departing security guards. “I was trying to keep Ethan from getting in trouble. He was only out there because he was helping me.”
“Wrong. I was there looking for Karina. You’re the one who insisted on coming with,” Ethan argued.
“You were helping me by looking for her,” Sarah pointed out.
“Karina?” Dr. Diaz’s eyes narrowed. “Is this about last night, Sarah?”
“He knows about last night?” Ethan asked, turning to Sarah, annoyed. “He saw the fight in the library? How insane did this fight get?”
“A fight? Sarah, you didn’t say anything about that.” Dr. Diaz sounded concerned.
“I … We…” Now Ethan was going to find out about the Wolfpack too. Sarah closed her eyes and pictured Grayson’s face as the branding iron seared her.
“What the hell is going on? What happened to Karina?” Ethan demanded.
“I’d like to know that, as well. If this is some sort of stunt that your little group is pulling, Sarah, it’s gotten out of hand.” She cringed. Dr. Diaz had never acted so much like a teacher before. Instead of the friendly, easygoing man she was used to, she was facing yet another disapproving adult. One who suspected that she was doing something wrong.
“It’s not. Or if it is, they’re pulling the stunt on me too,” Sarah answered. She opened her eyes and forced herself to meet Dr. Diaz’s gaze. “I’m really scared that what happened last night was real. I don’t know how else to explain where Karina is.”
“And Ethan? What’s your part in this?” Dr. Diaz asked.
“I slept until about noon and woke up to find my girlfriend gone. Maybe dead, right, Sarah?”
She sighed. There was no way to keep her Wolfpack vow and keep her sanity too. And she needed help. “Karina and I—and Izzy—are part of a secret society. I was initiated last month. They made me promise not to tell anyone.”
Ethan snorted. “The Wolfpack?”
Sarah gaped at him. “How do you know about that?”
“They asked me to join last year. I laughed in their faces,” Ethan said. “Can’t say I knew Karina was in it, though.”
“She is. Was.” Sarah frowned. “The pack does a bunch of missions. Some of them are stupid—”
“Like kissing your roommate’s boyfriend?” Ethan interrupted edgily.
“Yeah.” She blushed. “And some of them are kind of dangerous. Last night, for Halloween, we were supposed to commit a murder together. It was going to be a way to bond us all for life. We had to sacrifice one of our own.”
“Excuse me?” Ethan cried. “Murder?”
“It was just a joke,” Sarah said quickly. “At least I thought so. Karina got picked to be the victim and we took her out to the woods and tied her to a tree. I figured that was it—we’d just scare her and let her go. But then Izzy…”
“Izzy shot her,” Dr. Diaz finished for her. “That’s what Sarah remembered.”
She shot a glance at Ethan. His body had gone rigid, and his jaw was tight. “But we went back and there was no body,” she told him in a rush. “Dr. Diaz came with me. There was no body! No sign of anything!”
“No. There wasn’t,” Dr. Diaz agreed.
“And today everyone else in the pack acted like none of it ever happened. Even Izzy! Nate said we all just watched a movie. The ot
her people I talked to said the same thing.” Frustrated, Sarah kicked at the leg of her chair. “It’s making me crazy. They all had the same details—which movie, how Nate and I … I mean, nobody could answer me when I asked where Karina was. They all just said she was watching the movie too, but no one actually remembered talking to her.”
“So you’re the only one who remembers the murder.” Ethan’s hands were clenched on the arms of the chair.
“If it was a murder. Maybe it was a prank. Maybe they’re all messing with me. I don’t know,” Sarah told him. “I’ve always trusted my memory. But today I keep getting these weird little flashes of what they described, us all down in the den watching a movie. And there’s no proof of anything else. But I remember seeing Izzy shoot Karina last night. Maybe it was faked, but I saw it.”
“Sarah, last night I thought you had too much to drink and that you were confused,” Dr. Diaz said. “But the fact that Karina is still gone troubles me.”
“Can’t you find out where she is? If a student is missing, the school has to search for her, right?” Sarah asked.
“Tell that to my brother,” Ethan muttered.
“I’m going to call Dean Farrell about it right now,” Dr. Diaz promised.
She nodded, standing up to go with Ethan. Dr. Diaz sounded perfectly calm. But she saw his expression as she pulled the office door shut behind her. He was afraid.
“We have to keep looking, but I don’t know where else to try,” Sarah said. “I already checked the den where we meet.”
“That’s fine with me, Sarah. I’m done with you anyway,” Ethan snapped, walking off at a fast pace.
She watched him for a moment, then ran to catch up. “Why? You want to find Karina as much as I do. You have to keep helping me. There has to be something else we can do.”
“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?” Ethan demanded, whirling around so quickly that Sarah stumbled backward as he got right up in her face. “You thought you could just lie about what happened, and I’d go along with it like an idiot?”
“No! I didn’t want to betray my friends,” she protested weakly. “I took a vow.”
“Your friends think killing someone, or pretending to, is some game, but you’re still willing to lie for them,” he said, disgusted. “Screw you.”
“Ethan, wait. I wasn’t lying. Well, not really,” she said. “I lied about us being in the library and Izzy and Karina fighting. But I’m not sure that anything happened. The rest of the pack says we were in the den watching a horror movie, and that we didn’t go out anywhere or do any kind of crazy murder ritual. Doesn’t that sound more plausible than what I remember?”
He didn’t answer. He also didn’t walk away again. “You said you remember everything. You said you trust your memory.”
“My memory is perfect, but it’s really weird. It’s not just that I can remember everything,” she said. “Sometimes I get these, I don’t know, visions from the past—like, I remember things in such detail, with smells and sounds and feelings, that when the memory comes it seems more real than what’s happening right now. It used to be hard for me to tell which was real, until I learned to recognize it. That’s what happened when I freaked out in the asylum.”
“Okay…,” Ethan said doubtfully.
“Diaz told me that my memory means my brain processes input differently than other people’s do. He said my brain might not even recognize the difference between the memory of a dream or a hallucination and a real memory. I never felt like I couldn’t tell the difference between a dream and reality, but if my brain can’t recognize the difference … maybe my memory isn’t as perfect as I always thought.” Her voice broke, the realization making her feel like the earth was crumbling out from under her feet.
“So maybe this memory you have about killing Karina was a bad dream, but you keep remembering it as if it was true,” Ethan said. “Got it.”
“Maybe. Maybe my brain is in meltdown. What I’m saying is that I wasn’t lying to you,” she replied. “I’m just not sure what happened. I have something that feels like a memory, but everyone else who was there has a different story. All I know for sure is I’m worried about Karina, and I don’t know where she is, and I don’t really trust the Wolfpack anymore, and I need some help.” Sarah drew in a shuddering breath. “I keep seeing her eyes. Karina’s dead eyes,” she whispered.
Ethan’s face paled.
“I don’t want it to be true,” Sarah said, a sob escaping her. “Oh, god, I just want it to be a bad dream, but she’s gone. She’s gone.”
“Okay. It’s okay.” Ethan reached out and pulled her into his arms, holding her tight. The last of Sarah’s resolve broke, and she burst into tears, clinging to him.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled against his chest.
“No worries. I’m scared too,” he said.
Sarah took in several deep breaths, willing herself to stop crying. The tears still came, but she managed to get control of the sobbing. “It hasn’t always been this bad. I think maybe the Blutgrog screws with my memory.” It definitely screwed with the intensity of her sensations. It could be screwing with her brain in other ways too. “It’s this drink we start the Wolfpack meetings with. It’s supposed to be made with the old blood of the POWs, but it’s basically grain alcohol.”
“Nice.” Ethan shook his head. “No wonder you’re hallucinating.” Ethan’s arms loosened slightly, and Sarah suddenly became very aware of the fact that he was holding her, her chest pressed tightly against him, their bodies entwined. She pulled away so fast that she almost fell over.
“Okay. I’m done with the freakout,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “So will you help me?”
“Yeah.” He smiled, a real, genuine smile. Sarah wasn’t sure she’d ever seen one on his face before. “And then after we find Karina, we can work on figuring out what happened to my brother,” Ethan said. “You’re the only one I’ve ever told about him.”
“Oh?” She wasn’t sure why she felt surprised, but she did. Why would he tell her something he hadn’t even confided to Karina? As far as she knew, Ethan didn’t even like her, let alone trust her enough to share such a painful family secret.
“I tried, when I first got here,” Ethan went on. “I didn’t say he never came home, I just asked all the seniors if they remembered him, but they didn’t.”
“Most of his friends probably graduated with him,” Sarah guessed. “What about the teachers?”
Ethan sighed. “They just talked about how brilliant he was. Nobody had a clue he was missing.”
“If he fell off the ferry—”
“If he really fell off, the school should’ve had a huge memorial for him,” Ethan cut her off. “Everyone here should’ve known about it whether they were friends with him or not.”
Sarah blinked in disbelief. “You’re right,” she said.
“Instead I’m supposed to believe that they told us he disappeared but didn’t bother to mention it to the teachers who’d just handed him his diploma right before he got on the boat?”
“No. That doesn’t make sense.” Sarah frowned.
“The truth is here. Somewhere. I just have to find it.” Ethan’s gaze bounced around the marble hallway as if it were a cage.
“I’ll help you.” Sarah reached for his hand and squeezed. “We’ll help each other.”
Ethan nodded. “We know one thing for sure: Karina hasn’t been around all day. Locate Karina,” he told his cell. “Just in case,” he added to Sarah.
“Student offline,” the cell responded.
“The cells don’t work in the den,” Sarah said. “But I checked down there.”
“They don’t work in the asylum either, but we checked there too.” Ethan was silent for a moment then said, “I want you to take me there, to the tree. You said you tied her to a tree.”
“Dr. Diaz and I already went back to—”
Ethan interrupted her. “I don’t care. I need to see it.”
* * *
<
br /> “So they all had exactly the same details?” Ethan asked as they walked through the woods.
“Yeah.”
“And you think they might all lie?” Ethan probed.
“They might,” Sarah admitted. “The Wolfpack values loyalty to the group above everything else. You put the other members above yourself. You do what you’re told. You protect the group. I even thought maybe Nate came up with a story to give the Wolfpack an alibi for Karina’s murder.”
Ethan raised one eyebrow.
“I know, I sound paranoid,” Sarah said. “But covering up a murder is a good reason to come up with a mass lie. And there was something rehearsed about what they all said—everybody kept using the same words, about me and Nate being … distracted.”
“But you don’t remember this … distraction?” he asked.
“No. And I really believe I would if it were true.” She felt her cheeks grow warm. “Unless the Blutgrog has started eating my brain or something.” She rubbed her face with her fingertips, as if that would help her think more clearly. “But even if the pack is lying, it might not be to cover something up. Like I said, they love playing games, giving out missions. They could all be screwing with me.”
“And people do this voluntarily?” Ethan sounded disgusted.
“At least it would mean Karina is okay,” Sarah replied. She stopped, trying to get her bearings. The forest looked different in the daylight, and navigating it wasn’t something she had a lot of experience in. “I know the clearing is close. There’s an incredibly tall pine tree, and the clearing is underneath it.”
“There.” Ethan pointed to the left. “I know the Pine Tree. It’s massive.” He led the way through the underbrush, holding branches so they wouldn’t snap back and hit Sarah in the face.
“Ethan … I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For being a bitch to you all this time. I thought you were an ass.”
“Don’t go getting mushy on me,” Ethan replied. “I’m still an ass.”
She smiled.