Havoc

by Jeff Sampson

  But it had been. And it had coordinated a visit between me and Spencer. It had to mean something.

  2:41 AM PST: That happened to me, too. Just a few minutes before you texted me. It chased me around the room, and then vanished.

  2:41 AM PST: wird. we need to talk about this in the am. can I pick u up?

  2:43 AM PST: Yeah. Also, Spencer? I saw a werewolf outside. If it wasn’t one of us, it means it must be the girl. Or Dalton.

  2:44 AM PST: r u srs? this nite is fd up.

  2:45 AM PST: Yes, it is. Get some sleep, okay?

  2:45 AM PST: k Em. c u tmrw.

  2:46 AM PST: kk

  Oh man. Did I really just type “kk”? Texting was going to be the death of me. Or make me a normal teenager. Whatever.

  I closed the phone and set it back on the table. I lay back for a moment, staring at the ceiling, then leaned over my bed, picked up the fallen lamp, and grabbed Ein from where he’d been unceremoniously kicked.

  Cradling my stuffed dog, I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. I expected visions of the shadowmen or worse to invade my thoughts and keep me awake, but my adrenaline was dying down, and whatever remnants of the sleeping pills that were still inside me let me drift off once more, back into dreams that I wouldn’t remember.

  2

  YOU ARE SUCH A NERD

  The following morning I sat on my front steps, knees to chest, waiting for Spencer to pick me up. I was bundled up in a hoodie, my glasses were firmly on my face, and my backpack sat beside me. It was three days since I’d last been Nighttime Emily or the werewolf. I was me again. More or less.

  You’re not all you. The voice again. You know you miss being me, too.

  You’d think I’d find it strange to be hearing voices, right? Well, strange was the definition of my life these days. Weirdly, I found hearing her sort of a good thing. It helped to literally talk with myself while trying to figure things out.

  And she was right. I did miss Nighttime’s confidence. Even though a little had bled into my daytime self, it wasn’t nearly the same as Nighttime’s unbridled fearlessness. But I couldn’t risk changing. Right? Not when the consequences after the last time were so horrible. I’d helped kill someone, and I’d liked it. It had been in self-defense, sure, but that didn’t keep me from feeling this nauseating guilt whenever I remembered what I’d done.

  Consequences? Guilt? He got what he deserved. We did what we needed to do.

  “I know,” I said aloud. “Just… Yeah. I know.”

  I waited for a moment. The voice—my imagination running rampant, Nighttime herself, who knows—didn’t say anything more.

  My hands were shoved inside my pockets, and I rocked back and forth a little, staring up at the overcast September morning sky. My thoughts raced, same as they had the past few mornings. Things I thought couldn’t possibly be real now were. Everything I thought was true about myself had been, at most, a partial truth.

  And though I did my best to distract myself with schoolwork and TV and discussions with Spencer, whenever it was just me and my thoughts, I still kept seeing the man from BioZenith, Dr. Elliott, hunting me.

  I closed my eyes. I needed a new distraction, someone to call, maybe. And that’s when I remembered—Megan was on her way to pick me up. She’d always picked me up, at least until recently. And I hadn’t let her know I had other plans.

  I slipped my phone out of my pocket, clicked over to the contacts list, and selected REEDY—my nickname for her. The phone rang once, twice, then she picked up.

  “Hey, I know I’m not late, so what’s up?” she answered.

  “And a good morning to you too,” I said.

  “Mm-hmm, yeah, good morning.” A crunch as she bit into something on the other end. “I’m eating,” she said with a full mouth, “and then I’m on my way.”

  My free fingers fidgeted with one of my backpack straps. “Um, actually, that’s why I’m calling. I don’t need a ride today.”

  Silence on the other end, save for more crunching as she finished chewing.

  Clearing my throat, I said, “So, you know, take your time with breakfast. Yay, free time!”

  “Are you walking?” she said at last. “Or are you getting a ride from someone?”

  “I’m getting a ride. From Spencer.”

  I heard Megan snort. “Well, all right. Saves me the gas. I’ll see you at school.”

  Before I could respond, the line went dead.

  I was hoping we’d magically be past this, this jealousy Megan had when it came to me and Spencer. But things had been weird between us since Monday morning, which I guessed was only normal. I mean, I couldn’t really blame her. The weekend before, I’d drugged her, stole her car, and then basically made her hoof it up to Seattle to reclaim said car since I’d sorta abandoned it there. Well, Nighttime Emily did. But I’d already established with Spencer at this point that no matter how different she was, Nighttime Emily was still me. I couldn’t put all the blame on the Hyde to my Jekyll.

  And then the past couple of days at school I’d kept sneaking away during lunch and free periods to convene with Spencer, talk about everything that was happening to us. Megan knew I was keeping secrets from her, there was no way she couldn’t know. We’d told each other everything since elementary school, and I wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest liar. I hated doing it. But whatever was going on with me had sent someone to kill me, and the last thing I wanted was to put her in danger.

  I just hated the rift it was starting to put between us. As I put my phone back in my pocket, I vowed then and there to force myself to find some Emily-Megan bonding time. Just because I was sort of “blossoming” didn’t mean I had to leave behind my oldest—wait for it—“bud.”

  Get it? Blossoming? Bud? Ha. Whew. Yeah, I’m corny.

  I was pulled from my thoughts by the screeching of brakes. A tan minivan pulled up in front of my curb, and Spencer leaned over to wave out the passenger-side window. His messy brown hair had fallen into his face, and he was grinning in that endearingly goofy way of his.

  I couldn’t help but smile when seeing him, because with Spencer came the kind of distraction I needed to get out of my head. Grabbing my bag, I leaped up and raced across the lawn to his car. I opened the door, and his smell—his musk, his pheromones, whatever it was—washed over me.

  The harried thoughts, the visions of dead Dr. Elliott, the stress about Megan—all of it whooshed away as I climbed inside, shut the car door, and found myself surrounded by the wonderful scent that always enveloped me in the presence of my mate.

  Uh. Not that we’d mated. The terminology, it’s a werewolf thing.

  I dropped the bag between my feet, then leaned across the driveshaft to give him an awkward hug.

  “Sweet, a morning hug,” he said as I pulled back.

  My cheeks burned. “Sorry. It’s just nice to see you, especially after last night.”

  He grinned at me, then put the car in drive as I pulled on my seat belt. “Always good to see you, Em Dub.”

  It was strange. Spencer and I had always gone to school together. Skopamish wasn’t a very big city, and though we had new kids coming in and kids moving away every year, those of us who’d lived there our whole lives more or less knew of one another. But until a week before, I’d never really noticed Spencer as anything other than the short, funny kid who always hung around with Mikey Harris and Zach Nickerson and Dalton McKinney, cracking jokes and making wise. He wasn’t exactly what I’d considered my “type,” not that I’d had any real experience to tell me what my type was.

  Then, when all this started—the nighttime changes, this urge to sniff out things—his personal scent gripped me in ways I’d never felt before. His smell identified him in that strange, werewolf part of my brain as my “mate.”

  I didn’t tell him this, but sometimes when we were apart I wondered if maybe this was on purpose. We’d more or less figured out that we were “created” by scientists at BioZenith, one of whom knew f
ull well he could get my attention by using chemical versions of male werewolf pheromones. I wondered if they wanted us to seek each other out and pair up.

  But when I was actually side by side with Spencer, it didn’t matter. I’d spent years alone in my room, watching movies and TV, wondering what it was like to be around a boy you felt a deep connection with. Now I knew—the flutteriness inside, the desire never to be apart. It wasn’t exactly “I shall watch you sleep for an eternity, my immortal love,” but I liked what it was. I didn’t want to overthink it and make it go away.

  Spencer pulled onto the street and began driving us to school. Checking his rearview mirror, he said, “Right, so you want to go first?”

  Hot air blasted from his vents. I unzipped my hoodie. “Well, not much to say. I woke up and a shadowman was there. I thought it’d just go away like all the other times, but then it was right in front of me. I freaked out and swung a lamp through it, and it made my hand freeze solid.”

  He cast me a concerned look. “Are you okay?”

  “I am, yeah,” I said. “It disappeared after chasing me around the room for a minute. What about you?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment, and his eyes glazed over. I looked ahead to see if he was watching anything in particular—and found that we were about to barrel straight past a stop sign and into a busy intersection.

  “Holy crap, Spencer!” I shouted, jumping back up in my seat, my fingers clutching the pleather beneath me.

  Blinking back to attention, he slammed on his brakes. We jerked forward into our seat belts as the tires screeched to a stop a few feet past the stop sign. A car that had the right of way zoomed past, the driver leaning on his horn.

  Spencer looked at me sheepishly, his hair fallen over his eyes. “Uh, sorry, I was trying to remember. I have trouble concentrating sometimes.”

  My eyes wide and heart pounding, I lowered myself back into my seat. “It’s all right. Just, you know, if the choice is to pay attention to the road or remember something, I say avoid heading down memory lane.”

  “Sorry, Em Dub.”

  He leaned forward to look both ways, then turned us right. The pheromones swirled together with the hot air from the heater, and my limbs untensed.

  “Okay,” I said after a moment. “So, what did happen with you?”

  Eyes on the road, Spencer furrowed his brow. “It was basically the same as you. The shadowman followed me around my room while I tripped over computer parts, then it disappeared.”

  Despite the warmth of the front seats, I shivered. “Those things are ridiculously freaky. I mean, are they ghosts? Aliens? Why are they following us around all the time?”

  “Ooh, I wonder if they are aliens.” Spencer perked up at the thought as he made a turn down a new street.

  Shaking my head, I looked out my window and watched the trees rush by. “I’m just getting used to werewolves and killer scientists, Spence. I’m not sure I’m ready for aliens. Unless Sharlto Copley is waiting in the wings to show us that they’re secretly just misunderstood.”

  Spencer grinned at me. “Hey, you like District 9 too? I loved that movie! It totally should have won best picture this year. I mean, who saw that locker movie anyway?”

  I snorted. “You are such a nerd. And I liked The Hurt Locker!”

  He held his hands up momentarily from the wheel, mock defensively. “Hey, I can’t help it if the Oscar people are biased against fun movies! But I’m sure the locker movie was probably good. To the five people who saw it.”

  I laughed. “Megan said the same thing. You remind me of her sometimes.”

  Spencer looked at me side-eyed. “Uh … thanks?”

  “No, I mean that in a good way,” I said. “You’re more like how Megan used to be when we were kids, before junior high. She was always super positive and making jokes, just like you. I, you know… I like it.”

  “So you like me, huh?” Eyes back on the road, Spencer grinned once more.

  Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I sat back. “Maybe a little. Sometimes you’re funny. But only sometimes.” I cleared my throat. “Okay, back to last night. Were you, you know, human when you saw the shadowman?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah.” I bit my lip, remembering the first times we’d seen the shadowmen. “Before, we could only see them as wolves, right? And they didn’t even try to do anything to us then. Now we can still be us when we see them, and they can go all foggy and, like, touch us. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Not much of this does, Em Dub.” Spencer cranked the wheel and took us down another street. “Shape-shifting within the span of a few minutes shouldn’t be scientifically possible, but unless we’re both crazy, we do it all the time.”

  “So basically we need to find more time to research all of this. Or find a deus ex machina-y adult to lay out the exposition.”

  Spencer scrunched his eyebrows at me. “A deus what?”

  I waved my hand. “Nothing. Just wishful thinking. All this would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to figure it out by ourselves.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  The minivan’s tires crunched over gravel as Spencer pulled into the auxiliary parking lot at Carver Senior High School. He waved at other students as he slowly made his way to a spot big enough for the car. With the minivan in park, he turned the key and the engine died with a grumble. Chill fall air seeped through the windows, and I zipped my hoodie back up.

  “Well, here we are,” he said, turning in his seat to face me.

  His eyes were on mine. His lips parted into a pleasant smile. I felt mine do the same. With all that was going on, it seemed so silly to smile all goofy at a boy. But I couldn’t help it.

  “So, you got a plan for today?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling myself blush again. “Yeah. Research. How about lunch hour we go to the library? Maybe there are books about shadowmen like there are about werewolves. Not that the werewolf books were all that helpful.”

  “Well, maybe shadowmen books will be.” Reaching behind him into the backseat, he said, “Didn’t your text say something about seeing another werewolf?”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t you, so it had to be either Dalton or the girl you sniffed out at the party last week.” Spencer and I had established when we first talked that there was a fourth werewolf, a girl, though who it was we didn’t know. “This is good. Maybe if we find them, they’ll know more about all of this.”

  With backpack in hand, Spencer pulled himself back into the front seat. He tapped the side of his nose. “I’ll keep my nostrils open, then.”

  I tapped my nose as well. “Me too. Though if it’s Dalton, I guess my eyes will work just fine.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “You’re hilarious, Em Dub.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but someone banged rapidly on the window behind me, and I jumped. For a second I was certain it was another shadowman, or even Dr. Elliott in his fedora, with his gun aimed at me, ready to kill me—

  But when I turned, I saw it was just Megan. An obviously annoyed Megan.

  I undid my seat belt, then grabbed my bag, opened the door, and hopped out. Spencer did the same, then rounded the hood to wave and say, “Hey, Megan!”

  Her eyes darted to him and then back to me. She offered him a brusque, “Hey.”

  “Allll righty, then,” he said, his eyes absurdly wide. He backed away and said, “See you later, Em,” then turned and hustled toward the school.

  Megan leaned back against the minivan and crossed her arms. She was wearing all black, per usual—a knitted baggy sweater that hung limply from her tall, skinny frame, and jeans that would have been supertight on anyone who wasn’t her. Her long, white-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  With Spencer gone, all the pheromone-elation I’d been feeling drifted away, replaced with the horrible awkwardness that now seemed to wash over me whenever I was around Megan.

  “Hey, you got here the same time as us, how about t
hat,” I said, trying to fill the silence.

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I was hoping to catch up to you. I thought maybe we could hang out and then head to homeroom together.”

  I smiled. “Definitely.”

  I hiked my bag over my shoulder, and she did the same. We walked side by side across the baseball field that separated the auxiliary parking lot from the front of the school. The sky darkened, and misty rain began to drizzle down. Beyond the school, Mount Rainier was shrouded in gray fog.

  “So—” she started to say.

  “I—” I said at the same time. We giggled nervously, and I said, “Go ahead.”

  She kicked at the dirt. “I was just going to ask, is it, like, official now? Are you dating Spencer?”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  She raised her hands before I could say anything. “It’s cool if you are, Em, don’t worry. I’m happy for you.”

  Her eyes told me she was lying. I asked, “You are?”

  “Of course I am.” Her voice was cold despite her efforts.

  “You’re my best friend, Emily, nothing’s going to change that, right?”

  “Right.”

  She slung her long, narrow arm over my shoulder. “So, as your best friend for life, of course I’m happy when you find love or whatever cheesy thing you want to call it.”

  I wanted to sigh, but I stopped myself. “Well, I’m not really sure what it is right now.” Except that we’re both werewolves who are supposed to be mates, though whether that’s in the British slang sense or the Wild Kingdom sense, I’m not entirely sure. “But I triple promise you, it’s not going to keep me from hanging out with you.”

  Megan shrugged and began to say something. She stopped walking instead, and I followed her gaze to see a crowd of kids forming at the front of the school. They were loud and laughing, some girls were hugging, I saw a couple guys high-fiving.