Weregirl

by C. D. Bell

  “Wait, what?” Nessa heard herself say. “Stop the cart.” She got out and ran out on to the warehouse floor. There had to be something, a trace, that indicated what had been here only twenty-four hours ago.

  “They cleaned it up!” she said, running back to her mother. “This was where they kept at least forty wolves. Really vicious ones. Genetically altered, I think.”

  Dan Green shrugged. “I’m sorry but we’ve just decided to make this an overflow warehouse for items we manufacture in Asia. It’s being renovated now.”

  “Can we see the lab where my son and daughter were held?” Vivian asked sweetly.

  “The lab where the break-in took place?” Green smoothly replied. “Of course.”

  The lab where Mary Clovis and her boyfriend Pasty Pete had met their end was immaculate and looked for all the world like one of the exam rooms at the clinic. Nessa spun in circles, trying to take it all in. Even the windows had been repaired.

  “How did you do this so fast? Change everything, clean up the human and animal remains?” Nessa asked.

  “This was originally created as a first aid room when we thought we might move certain production operations here to Tether,” Dan Green said, ignoring Nessa’s direct questions. “But we don’t envision more than about fifteen employees on site so this should be sufficient,” Dan told them. “It should be complete around the first of the year.”

  Just then the sheriff got a call on his phone. “That was Saginaw Hospital,” he told Vivian in a low voice. “They say Billy Lark’s body has been in their care since Saturday night. The chain of custody was simple and completely clear.”

  Dan Green was all smug smiles at the news as he led them back out into the lab’s entry hall. The adults were almost out the door when something caught Nessa’s eye. She walked over.

  “Wait!” she said. The three adults spun around. She pointed. “What’s this?”

  The sheriff came over, pulled out a clean white handkerchief, and wiped it up. It was a small glob of blood-matted fur where the floor met the wall.

  For the first time Dan Green looked uneasy.

  “Huh,” was all the sheriff said. He looked at Dan Green. “Looks like some kind of animal fur to me. You won’t mind if I send this out to be tested, would you?”

  Dan Green smiled. “Absolutely not. Please go right ahead. One of our guard dogs was bitten by a coyote a couple of weeks ago. I believe they cleaned the animal’s wounds in here.”

  “I just don’t understand,” Vivian said later, after the sheriff had dropped them back at home. “I know you aren’t lying, but what we saw today…it was nothing like what you described. Are you sure you were where you thought you were?”

  Nessa just shook her head. She had stopped insisting because she knew she sounded crazy. She was starting to feel crazy.

  The last loose end that Paravida managed to sew up was Mary Clovis and Pasty Pete Packer. It was announced in the Tether Journal the following Friday that the two of them had eloped to the Bahamas. The paper even had a picture of the couple, sunburnt and toasting each other, with a beach and a sunset in the distance. The marriage announcement included the news that Mary had accepted a position at another Paravida research facility in California, and the new couple planned to relocate immediately after the honeymoon.

  As Bree said acidly, “That’s a mighty piece of Photoshop retouching. Paravida truly excels at cleanup.”

  For the next few weeks, Nessa was angry. Angry that Paravida had gotten away with it. Angry that the gray wolf was gone. Angry at Chayton because he hadn’t been there to help. Angry that Luc seemed to have moved back to the UP, or at least that was the rumor—he wasn’t in school. And hadn’t bothered to say goodbye. She was even angry at Cassian for starting to date her ninth-grade cross-country teammate Hannah Gilroy.

  She got over it by running.

  Even if it was ten degrees on the thermometer, colder when you accounted for wind, Nessa ran. Even though indoor track wouldn’t start until after the holidays, Nessa ran. When the full moon rose or the new moon was due, Nessa transformed into a wolf and then ran. Transforming was getting easier every time.

  Nessa always scoured the woods for any sign of the gray wolf. After she’d safely stowed Nate with Bree after their escape from Paravida, she had returned to the spot where she’d left him behind. Nessa had followed his trail that night for miles before finally giving up on it when she lost it at a stream.

  “How come no one talks about how werewolves have to freeze their butts off?” Nessa complained to Bree one day. “Trust me, all that fur does not do much.”

  Nessa watched Nate guardedly, trying to assess the extent of any damage he had suffered. When would he start speaking again?

  The answer was that it took him a week. And when he did, it was to say to Vivian, “Nessa is a wolf.”

  Nessa held her breath, but Vivian assumed it was just Nate’s way of processing the trauma. Nessa almost wished Vivian believed him. It was bad enough to have Vivian thinking Nessa was crazy.

  “Have you tried Chayton?” Bree said in that worried tone she’d been using to ask Nessa how she was doing in the horrible month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  Nessa just shook her head. She was so used to him being unavailable, she hadn’t even bothered to call Chayton.

  Bree was the one who finally did call. And this time, Chayton came right away.

  He showed up at Nessa’s house when she was taking care of Nate after school. She met him out front, standing on the dead grass, freezing without a coat on, noticing that Chayton’s hair was crusty with road salt—he must have driven straight to her from whatever sweat lodge or vision quest he’d been leading. She took one look at him—felt him looking at her—and started to cry.

  He opened his arms and held her as she got tears all over his leather jacket. “I don’t understand,” she said, feeling there was finally someone strong enough to be able to take on this news. “The gray wolf is probably dead. And nothing’s resolved. Paravida got away with everything.”

  For a while Chayton just let her cry. Then he said, “For what it’s worth, I’m not all that worried about Paravida.”

  Nessa looked up. “You’re not?”

  “The Paravidas of the world are going to come and go. But what Paravida has done…Those new mutant wolves that aren’t being fed anymore. They were raised in captivity and did not know how to hunt, which is why they would always return to the place of their torture and mutilation. If they manage to survive in the wild, they could breed with other wolves. That’s the danger.”

  “But my brother Nate—” Nessa said. “I still don’t know exactly what they were going to do to him, except that it involved stem cells and growing organs, and it killed Billy Lark. There’s some seriously terrifying stuff going on down there.”

  Chayton raised up a hand. “Leave it alone,” he said. “Stay with the wolves.”

  She told him about how she’d protected Nate, how powerful she had felt.

  Chayton was nodding like, yes, finally she was getting it. “You’re only going to get more powerful from here on in,” he said.

  She felt absurdly proud.

  She told him about the gray wolf, his injury. “I’m really worried about him,” Nessa said. “What if he doesn’t come back? What if he’s—” She didn’t want to say the word. “What if he’s gone?”

  Chayton looked at her sideways as if he were reading something into her meaning that she could not see herself.

  “What?” Nessa said, laughing. Then, outraged but still laughing: “Wha-at!!? He’s a wolf.”

  “Fine,” said Chayton. But he was laughing at Nessa, and Nessa was blushing and the whole thing was totally embarrassing but also made Nessa feel light and hopeful—a feeling she hadn’t even got near since the horrible night in the Paravida lab.

  “You really think he’ll be back?” she said.

  “I think he’ll be back,” Chayton said. “I think he probably just needed to heal
.”

  But as Christmas approached, Nessa could not ignore that it had been more than a month and the gray wolf still had not returned. Here Nessa was, out in the woods, crunching through the hard-packed snow, running to stay warm. The moon was full and it was a welcome relief to feel her legs stretching into wolf form, to be alone with the crisp cold air. In the days after the Paravida break-in she’d seen signs of the aggressive wolves, but now they must have dispersed, heading north, or west toward the lakeshore through the thickly wooded state forest lands.

  Chayton had said this was because she was going out every night. “They’re afraid of you now,” he said. “You know your own strength now so they’re smelling it and wisely staying out of your patch of woods.”

  “Wow,” Nessa said. “You’re making me sound really tough.”

  “You are,” he said. And again she’d felt herself blush. Hard.

  But now, in the woods, she could smell something new…or not new…something she hadn’t smelled in a long time. But safe. It was…one of the brothers. The pack! Had they returned? And then she smelled the other brother. The annoying little brothers who taught her how to play. And Sister. They were heading in her direction, so she let out a howl to alert them to her presence. She hoped they would remember her.

  They did. They burst into the clearing where she was waiting and immediately brought their goofy energy into a full-on wrestling session in which everyone was rolling on the ground and making funny yipping sounds.

  And then she sensed another presence in the clearing and saw three wolves standing together. Mama. And the alpha, Big One, the white wolf who had caused her to transform. Between them was a third wolf.

  Gray!

  Seeing all three of the wolves together, she knew what must have happened that night after the Paravida break-in. The gray wolf had walked through the water. Or swam. Or floated. Maybe he had washed up on the shore where the wolf pack was hiding from the aggressive wolves. Maybe he had intentionally gone to the place where he knew the pack to be. They must have let him recuperate with them, bringing him food and letting him rest while they patrolled and hunted.

  And now they were all back. The pack had returned, bringing Gray with them. As they walked toward her, Nessa noticed that Gray was limping on the fore leg that had been injured the night they broke into Paravida together.

  But it didn’t matter. He was alive. Chayton had been right.

  Maybe he was right about everything? Maybe Paravida didn’t matter?

  Maybe only people mattered. The land mattered. Wolves mattered.

  Sniffing noses, butting shoulders, running circles around the bare trees, Nessa thought, this matters.

  Nessa felt her whole body flooded with joy.

  Paravida might persist, but Nessa was not alone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  The next morning was a Monday, the last day of school before Christmas break. Bree gave Nessa a ride to school. “It was just so amazing,” Nessa was saying, feeling a little silly for gushing. “I mean. He’s alive. And the pack is back. That’s such good news. I can’t wait to tell Chayton. Maybe this means something, you know? Like, maybe we’ll be able to—”

  “Nessa,” Bree interrupted. “I think—”

  “I know, I know,” Nessa said. “We need to be careful. We need help. We can’t just run into Paravida this time. We have to document what we’re seeing.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Bree said. “There’s something I have to tell you before we get to school.” She was pulling into a parking spot, and before she could finish her sentence, a kid from student council was knocking on her window. He was talking before Bree could open the door. There was some emergency going down with the Secret Santa candy cane deliveries.

  While Bree explained that the hardware stores sometimes sold candy canes, and they should call there and go to the grocery store, Nessa climbed out of the Monster’s passenger side and heard what sounded like a bark.

  She shook her head, smiling to herself. It had been a cough she’d heard. Not everything was about wolves. Then, on second thought, she realized it was a laugh.

  A laugh she recognized.

  She stepped around the Monster’s prodigious back end, and there, two rows of cars away, was Luc. He must have just parked his truck in the back corner spot and was now looking at Cassian’s car, which was pulling in to a spot on the other side of the row. Cassian got out on the driver’s side, and then Hannah emerged from the passenger’s. Cassian walked around to meet Hannah on her side of the car and took her hand, walking into school.

  Bree was now at Nessa’s side. “That’s what I was trying to tell you about,” Bree said.

  But Nessa had known they were an item for weeks, and she wasn’t staring at Cassian. She was staring at Luc.

  Luc was back.

  “Are you okay?” Bree whispered. “I know it’s hard to see Cassian with someone else, even if you, you know,” she almost choked on how unbelievable this was to say, “you broke up with him?”

  “No,” Nessa said, not even aware of the words coming out of her mouth. “I’m fine. Look. Luc. He’s back.” She wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that she was staring at him.

  Slowly, like he was swinging on a pendulum, Luc turned to look at Nessa. Their eyes met. A slow smile spread across his face. He didn’t let go of her eyes. She didn’t want him to.

  She took a few steps toward him. A few more. “You came back,” she said.

  “I did.”

  Her heart skipped a beat when she heard him speak. Had Luc always made her feel this weak in the knees? Had there ever been a time where she didn’t think the straight lines of his shoulders were…perfect? She was breathing shallowly and her head felt light on her shoulders.

  “You were gone a long time,” she said.

  “I was back in the UP with my mom,” he said. “A cousin of mine was building a house and they needed some help…” His voice trailed off.

  He took a step toward her, and she could smell him—soap and something woodsy and popcorn. She looked up into his eyes. He raised his eyebrows.

  And then he stepped even closer to her. He leaned over to speak directly into her ear. He tried to say something but couldn’t. He had to clear the frog out of his throat first. He tried again. “Thanks for making me. Come back.”

  The words were like electricity shot straight into Nessa’s spine. She knew she would remember them forever.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. She could hear that she was playing it cool, like the words they’d just spoken to each other hadn’t come as a surprise. But they had. They were huge. Her heart was racing. Her breath trembling.

  Luc was Gray.

  “We have a lot of work to do in Tether,” he said.

  Nessa shivered. Luc opened his jacket and folded her inside.

  She looked out over his shoulder beyond the school parking lot, to the football fields and the track, the tennis courts, and the woods ringing the school, the woods that stretched beyond her house, beyond pretty much everyone’s house in Tether. The woods where the wolves had returned to maintain the balance that was due to all.

  Nessa looked back to where Bree was waiting next to the Monster. She was watching Nessa and Luc, then suddenly got very busy sorting through her backpack.

  “Yes,” Nessa said, turning back toward Luc, feeling his warm breath sweet on her neck, drinking him in. “We do.”

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  Weregirl is an unique book. It was originally conceived of by the team at Chooseco, a small publishing company that was founded to relaunch the Choose Your Own Adventure series over a decade ago. Once the idea of the book was hatched, five members of Chooseco staff held a retreat at a house in the Eastern Townships of rural Quebec and began to plot a book about a girl who is bitten by a wolf on a nighttime run and starts to transform.

  Did she live in urban Brooklyn or the country’s rural middle? Was she from a big family or an only child? How did
she react to the shape-shifting? Who helped her? Who did she love? Who were her enemies?

  This improvised Chooseco “writer’s room,” hashed out the broad three-act structure of Weregirl, including all the main characters and their backgrounds. They then invited me to join “the room,” and to write the actual novel they had plotted, helping to weave the details and different plotlines of that story together into an organic whole. I was in close contact with the team as I wrote, discussing ideas almost every day. For the record, Chayton is my sole creation.

  Brilliant and wonderful thanks go to everyone who participated: Shannon Gilligan, Publisher, whose creative vision for Chooseco’s new teen venture has been a long time coming; Melissa Bounty, Associate Publisher and editor extraordinaire, who has been with Chooseco since she was twenty-one years old (a long time); and the other members of the fantastic Chooseco “writer’s room” team: Liz Windover, Lizzi Adelman, and Mieka Carey.

  Additional sincere thanks go to: cross-country coach Veronica Welsh and high school runners Jacob Kahn and Kelsey Kahn for their assistance with cross-country research; Rick Kahn, Max Kahn, and Eliza Kahn for their patience and forbearance as I disappeared from their lives, buried in my manuscript. Lucy, Yoyo, Archie, Tatum, Oscar, Oprah, and Billie for companionship and inspiration. The NYRR Brooklyn Half Marathon 2011-2016 for teaching me to love running.

  This final book was also greatly aided by the exceptional

  work of copy editor Beth Morel and proofreader Josie Masterson-

  Glen. Weregirl’s breathtaking cover was created by Dot Greene and its beautiful pages, including the chapter headings and moon phases, were designed and laid out by Stacey Boyd. Early readers Exie Manahan, Bonnie Calhoun, Lucy O’Brien, Beth Stern, and Sarah Bounty provided useful feedback. Joy Worland of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library helped organize a group of YA readers who told us everything they liked to read about.