by C. D. Bell
Nessa shook her head. “I didn’t ask for this,” she said.
“No one does,” Chayton confirmed. “But you did decide. There was a moment. A decision you made.”
Nessa thought back to that night in the woods. “The wolf in the trap,” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t try to help him, but I just couldn’t leave him there.”
Chayton nodded.
“The wolves saw something in you,” he explained patiently. “They saw that you have power. So you must find the power within yourself. Then you will come to understand why you were chosen.”
“And what if I don’t want this? Can’t you just make it go away? Is there a powder or a spell or something?”
Chayton shot forward in his seat, grabbing both her wrists, his voice urgent, his grip painful. “It will not go away,” he said sternly. “It is part of you. It is in the stars of your future. You must master it. You must find the power I’ve been describing. If you don’t, what the wolves have unleashed will kill you.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What did he say?” Bree asked back in the car.
Nessa shook her head. She couldn’t talk about it yet. First, all the embarrassing things she had said. And also, the fear that had gripped her the moment Chay had released her from the trance he’d put her in.
“He said all this stuff about letting go but not letting go. It didn’t make a huge amount of sense.”
“It’s okay,” Bree said, seeing how upset Nessa was. “You’ve been through a lot. Maybe it will start to make sense later.”
“I don’t think this is ever going to make any sense,” Nessa said, gazing out the window. “At least I’m back to normal.”
Which was true. Just as Chayton had told her, the moment he released her from her trance, the fur covering her body was gone.
Nessa remained silent the rest of the drive, as Selena and Bree kept up a running conversation about the insurance claims business. Nessa stared and thought.
Maybe Bree was right. Maybe if she just relaxed, some of the stuff Chayton had told her would return to her. For instance, now she was thinking: There are wolves in those woods. She could feel them running along the paths, nosing under rocks and fallen branches, tracking scents, stopping to drink at streams.
As the car sped by the woods that surrounded Tether, Nessa peered through the breaks in the trees. She remembered the rancher’s blog post about Tether being the locus for more reporting on wolf attacks than any other spot in the country.
It was impossible. It was all impossible. She would go to school Monday. She would find Coach Hoffman. She would explain that she was sorry about the race on Saturday, that she hadn’t been feeling well, and most important, she would explain that it would never happen again.
It couldn’t.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nessa woke up Sunday after a night of dreamless sleep. Her skin was clear, her fingers long and thin again. No fur. She stretched lazily. She felt loose and strong. The sun was out. The air was crisp and clean. She was able to find clean socks and clean underwear and a shirt—Delphine was in charge of laundry, so this was reason for celebration.
There was even good cereal in the house for breakfast. She breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe everything could just go back to normal?
But when she showed up at school the next day, she realized everything was not normal. In the parking lot, Jake from homeroom gave her an awkward little salute she couldn’t interpret and a full-tooth smile.
A group of freshmen girls she could not say she’d ever set eyes on before were falling all over themselves to call out her name from the turnaround where the school buses had dropped them off.
People were looking at her as she walked by, and more than one person who normally didn’t speak to her called out, “Hey, Nessa,” and “Great job Saturday.”
Chayton had said she’d be able to tell what kind of wolf she was from the way people’s behavior toward her human form was changing. Was this what was going on?
Nessa turned to ask Bree if she noticed how strange things were becoming, but it was Hannah who was approaching.
“Nessa,” she called, breathless from having jogged over to talk to her. “That race on Saturday. Wow.”
Nessa didn’t quite know how to react to Hannah staring at her like she was a rock star. Hannah had never been rude to Nessa exactly, but she hadn’t ever run over to her in parking lots either.
“Thanks,” Nessa said. She smiled, but it felt forced. Remembering a beat too late that conversations were not supposed to be one-sided, Nessa said, “How did you do?”
Hannah went red in the face, like she couldn’t believe Nessa was actually speaking to her. “Fifteenth overall,” she said. She seemed embarrassed. “It wasn’t anything like what you did.”
“That’s amazing,” said Nessa. When she was a freshman, she would have been over the moon about a twenty-fifth-place finish. She’d have been over the moon just to be running on varsity.
“Yeah, but what you did,” Hannah said. “Nessa, Coach was going crazy you weren’t there for the ceremony. He was shouting, ‘Course record! State record!’ He said you could probably expect to start hearing from recruiters soon.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nessa shrugged. Now she was almost annoyed at Hannah. Exaggerating in this way was like jinxing it.
But once Nessa got into the school building, she realized this was bigger than Saturday’s race. Ashley Clark, one of Cassian’s beautiful senior friends, was standing by the trophy case flipping through pictures of the Homecoming court she’d been queen of, but when she saw Nessa, she pushed through the crowd. “Nessa,” Ashley said. She tucked her chin. “Do you want to see the pictures of our dresses? Why weren’t you there?”
Nessa glanced down at Ashley’s phone. “Um, you guys look great,” she said, passing Ashley back her phone and heading to her locker.
“It’ll be you next year!” Ashley called out after her.
“Nessa, what’s happening?” Bree said in a low voice. “It’s like overnight you got famous. Did you see the way Cassian was just looking at you?”
“Cassian?” Nessa’s heart did a small leap in her chest. But then she shook away her own reaction. She didn’t want to get too excited. In her experience, this generally led to fall-on-your-face embarrassment, especially with guys. She checked the time on her phone. “Look,” she said, “I gotta talk to Coach.”
Coach Hoffman taught tenth-grade history—Nessa had had him as a teacher the year before—and she found him in his classroom, carefully setting up the board.
Nessa cleared her throat. Coach looked up and saw that she was there, his face immediately transforming from a look of distracted concentration to one of extreme joy.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he said, his enthusiasm growing with each successive syllable. “The girl of the hour. Nessa, get over here!” He held out both hands for a high five and then wrapped her in a bear hug.
He released her quickly. “I’m so proud of the way you ran on Saturday I’m not even going to start in on you about what was going on with the lateness and not sticking around and being completely unreachable, though we will talk about that later. Nessa, what happened? Where did you find that speed?”
Nessa paused. She didn’t want to say something cheesy and not true. She wanted to be real with Coach. But also? It was kind of hard to remember the actual running from Saturday. When she thought about the day, mostly what she remembered was how afraid she’d been. How scary the changes to her body had been. How little she had known about what was going on. How much she’d wanted to run and how frustrated she’d felt that she might not be able to.
She remembered how Chayton had pressed his hand up against her heartbeat and told her to pay attention to the things she knew but didn’t know she knew. And she remembered her heart beating during the race, how she’d felt like her stride had gotten about twenty percent longer, how her breathing aligned perfectly with her footfalls. The drumming she’d been
doing with Chayton had formed a connection between her heart and the rhythms she heard, the rhythms she felt, the rhythms of her body.
This was all getting totally tangled in her brain.
“I felt…awesome,” she said to Coach. She knew she was saying something true, because he was looking at her intently, his entire face still, the pen he’d been capping and uncapping frozen in place. “I felt really quiet in my head and like I wasn’t worried about gassing out. I usually think a lot when I’m running, but I didn’t this time.”
“What was with the track pants?” Coach said. “And the long sleeves? The hat? You must have been roasting.”
“I know,” she said. “I wasn’t feeling well. My body temperature was all over the place.”
“You ran that well when you were sick?”
“Go figure.”
“And then please tell me you spent the rest of the weekend sleeping and that’s why you didn’t return my texts and calls?”
“Something like that.” Nessa grinned shyly.
The conversation with Coach had gone better than Nessa had thought it would. Everything that day seemed to be going her way. If she raised her hand in class, she’d get called on. Outside at lunch, the coveted spot underneath the hawthorn tree was miraculously empty for Nessa and Bree. Her locker, which almost always jammed, opened easily as if it had just been oiled.
At practice, Hannah was outright staring at Nessa as she slid over to make room. Tim Miller stopped in the middle of a story he was telling about one of the extra science classes he was taking when she joined the stretching circle. He stared at her, star-struck.
“What’s up?” Nessa said, giving him a look that signaled, Please act normal, okay?
As the team started out for that day’s slow and easy 10K—it took them away from school and all throughout Tether—Nessa ran at a pace that felt positively gentle, but passed everyone on the team except Cynthia and Luc.
When she caught up to Cynthia, she fell into step with her.
“Impressive time Saturday,” Cynthia said.
“Thanks,” Nessa answered, guarded.
“I guess whatever else that wolf bite did to you, it certainly made you faster.”
Nessa nearly stopped dead in her tracks.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Cynthia said, looking studiously sincere. “Just couldn’t help but notice the improvement in your times. After an injury, shouldn’t it have taken you awhile to build back your speed? But no. You get faster. And…you run in track pants on an 80-degree day. What the heck is going on with you? It’s all kind of strange.”
Nessa was so surprised in the moment that she couldn’t come up with any way to explain herself. Of all the people she’d expected to ask so directly about the connection between the bite and the race—Coach, her mom, Delphine, maybe—she hadn’t counted on Cynthia.
After practice, while waiting for Vivian to pick her up on the way home from work, Nessa felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to find herself face-to-face with Cassian, who had just come out of the locker room, freshly showered after practice, his steely gray eyes locked on Nessa’s. She caught her breath. She could smell his soap.
“Hey,” he said, and Nessa felt her face warm. How could he make that one simple syllable so sexy?
“Hey,” she said back to him, her own voice weirdly breathy and soft.
“Nessa,” Cassian said. “Your brother goes to the clinic at the same time as my sis. I’ve seen you there.”
“Yeah, me too. I mean, I’ve seen you there too,” Nessa said, almost stuttering she was so nervous.
“I’ll be there this weekend again. Maybe I’ll see you there?”
“Yeah, sure, probably,” was the best Nessa could come up with in reply.
“Yeah, sure, probably?” Bree said on their way to school the next morning.
“At least it was better than, ‘Call if you need me,’” Nessa pointed out.
“No it’s not!” Bree said. “With a guy like Cassian, if you don’t act at least mildly interested, he’s not going to waste his time.”
“If everyone’s falling all over themselves around him, it’s better to be the one person who isn’t.”
“In books maybe,” Bree said. “In reality, most guys are incredibly insecure and need all the ego support you can give them.”
They were pulling into the parking lot now, and there Cassian was, with Cynthia sitting on the hood of his car. She had a notebook open, resting on her knees. Cassian was lying back next to her, propped up on his elbows, his eyes hidden behind aviator shades. A car pulled up next to his, and one of the girls on the spirit squad brought Cassian a coffee. He sat up to take it, lifted the lid, breathed in, and raised his eyes suggestively at the girl who brought it, which caused her to collapse in giggles and punch him in the shoulder.
“Somehow,” Nessa said, “I don’t think that guy needs help with his ego.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with kids in this school, but if this our-school’s-been-turned-into-a-Nessa-fan-club keeps up, you’re not going to need any help with your ego either.”
“What’s your problem?” Nessa joked, flashing Bree her most ridiculous face.
Bree rolled her eyes.
The truth was that all of the attention Nessa was getting was kind of fun. And it wasn’t just kids. Coach Hoffman called her in for a lunchtime conference to go over her training regimen. Mr. Porter, the guidance counselor, wanted to schedule another meeting to “reinitiate that conversation about college prospects.”
It wasn’t just her running that improved. Her science teacher, Mr. Bloom, kept her after class Wednesday.
“I’ve got to say,” he said, showing her her lab write-up, “I’m really impressed by your work. Your hypothesis was smart, your data collection rigorous, your analysis thorough and far-reaching. Frankly, this is college-level work. What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know,” Nessa said. “I think I’m just focusing better?”
“Okaaaaay,” Mr. Bloom said, as if he were letting go the fact that this couldn’t possibly be the whole story. He tossed her lab notebook to the pile but overshot it. Nessa, without thinking about it, caught the notebook before it fluttered to the floor.
And then she froze in place, notebook in hand, while Mr. Bloom just stared at her, open-mouthed.
Nessa had reached out about eight feet to snag the book, a grab the equivalent of a frog nailing a mosquito with its tongue.
In the awkward silence, Nessa tried very hard not to make a move, not to try to explain away what she’d just done, hoping that if she just stood there, like everything was normal, Mr. Bloom would decide to see things that way himself.
Which he eventually did, letting the episode go with nothing more than a question; as she walked toward the door, he asked, “Have you ever thought about playing on the softball team in the spring?”
Nessa hadn’t been lying to Mr. Bloom. She was more focused. Wednesday night, she had to write a paper for English—something she generally hated—but instead of getting up seven times to get another Oreo or text Bree something inane or play a round of Wii Bowling with Nate, Nessa stayed at the computer, headphones on, music full volume, somehow able to think about nothing but the words on the page.
She constructed an outline. She wrote, “There are three reasons why…” She wrote, “The first example…” She wrote, “In spite of this…” and “It is, however, true that…”
Using her index finger to nail the final period onto the last sentence in the last paragraph on the last page, Nessa thought, Yes! Done! Bingo! Right on cue, the song she was listening to came to an end, and Nessa pressed pause on her phone to keep the next from beginning. She felt almost out of breath, like it had been a physical, not just mental, exertion. She removed her headphones. It was only nine at night and she felt so good, she decided to drop to the floor and knock out twenty-five push-ups.
The bedroom door opened as Nes
sa reached nineteen, and Delphine just watched her from the doorway until she was done. Delphine was wearing pretty white lace pajamas, resting against the door frame with her eyebrows raised and her arms crossed.
“You’re my sister, and I love you and all, Ness,” Delphine said. “But you are seriously turning into a total fitness freak. Are you training to be a Navy SEAL or something?”
Nessa grunted out a single, “Ha.” Then: “Twenty-three, twenty-four, TWENTY-FIVE!”
“Seriously!” Delphine said. “I feel lazy just breathing the same air as you. And I’m putting you on notice. If you so much as think about buying a weight bench off an infomercial, we are going to have to have a serious talk.”
“Haters gonna hate,” Nessa said, laughing.
Delphine pushed herself up off the door frame with
exaggerated effort and rolled her eyes.
“Jocks,” she said.
Selena had kept her promise about keeping Nessa’s secret, but since she knew Bree’s and Nessa’s mothers, it also meant she’d kept her distance from the girls a bit. She had given Bree one present for Nessa, though: a slim rectangular moon phase calendar for this year, charting every cycle the moon would pass through and the calendar date on which it would happen.
The new moon was scheduled to come at the same time as the next cross-country meet.
And the meet was at another school. She’d be on a bus with the team in close quarters. Sweatpants and Bree’s Peterbilt hat weren’t going to cut it.
Plus, what had Chayton called her transformation before? Peach fuzz? This next time she would transform more fully. It was too scary to even think about what that meant exactly. To say the word. To think the word. To keep her fingers from googling the word.
She needed to talk to Chayton again, so after Thursday’s cross-country practice, Bree picked up Nessa at school, and they drove over to Mike’s garage. This time it was open, but when they found Mike, he was sitting on a pile of tires, drinking a double-sized can of beer, his eyes bloodshot.