Grey threw up his own hands in reply. “All right, I don’t know the right thing to do. Do you? How do you expect me to handle this?”
Mom bent over the windowsill, her shoulders shaking. Grey, looking devastated, went to her.
“Maybe you should go,” I said softly. “You should go and I should stay.”
Grey, still hugging Mom, said, “Not on your life.”
“But if—”
“No. Either we both go, or we both stay. That’s it.”
I sighed. Of course it was. And I flinched when I heard Mom ask Grey the critical question: “What’s the real reason she wants to stay?”
Grey gave me a pained look. “The way she’s been talking, I’d expect her to have something going on with Brandon…”
“Not Brandon,” I shot back, appalled. “Ew.”
“But…someone?”
I fidgeted. Grey stepped back, still holding Mom but focusing almost entirely on me. I struggled for words. “I met…someone else,” I heard myself saying, in a thin, shaking voice. “He’s in Brandon’s family.”
Grey stared at me.
“He’s not well either. Not as bad as me, but I’m afraid it’ll get worse, and if I could help him…”
My voice broke. Grey was still staring, and I could see him putting pieces together. So, to my shock, was Mom. I guess what I said resonated with her. Helping someone who was ill—yeah, she’d have strong feelings about that.
I just didn’t see it coming that she’d whisper, “Then you should stay.”
Or that she’d say it straight to me.
Vaguely, past the blurring in my vision, I saw Grey help Mom into a seat. Why he was helping her when I could barely hold myself together, I don’t know, but he gently got her settled first. Then he finally came around the desk to me. I was still struggling to find something to say. “Thank you” felt inadequate, and trying to prompt her for anything other than those four words felt like it might just break the whole moment apart. So I bit my lip and held her gaze, and finally managed a single, shaky nod. She answered it with one of her own.
“Maybe we should go soon,” Grey said quietly to me. “We don’t want to tire her out.”
I wanted to protest. I hadn’t even wanted to come at first, but now—God, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t stop Grey as he started helping me stand, though. I just kept watching Mom, wondering if I was imagining all this. She couldn’t possibly have just smiled at me.
“Will you stay, then, Toby?” she asked. “I do love that little house.”
He closed his eyes. I wondered if he was thinking about the leaky roof and cranky plumbing, or struggling with the bills…or me…but he said, “We will.”
Mom nodded, then looked back at her crossword. I could feel her attention sliding away again. But she said one last thing before she went. One last little thing.
“Be a good girl,” she told me, just like she had when I was little.
I blinked hard, whispered “yes,” and left the room before she could see me cry.
The drive home passed by in a silent blur. Grey stopped at the town park on the way back, though, and so I found myself staring through the windshield at the distant lake, picking my way through what to say. He seemed to understand when I stumbled over any mention of our mother, and he didn’t press it.
That left a few other topics on the table, however, and I couldn’t let those lie.
“There’s…kind of a lot I haven’t been telling you,” I said at last.
“No shit,” Grey murmured.
“I thought it would keep you safer, but I think it’s backfiring, and I…”
When I broke off with a helpless, hiccupping little sound, Grey sighed and did his best to say something reassuring. “I guess little sisters have to keep secrets from their brothers sometime,” he said. “Especially about boyfriends.”
“Raoul is not my boyfriend.”
“But he’s got a name, at least.”
I sighed. Grey put up one hand in surrender, talking himself through it. “Okay. So we’ve got a werewolf family with a couple of members you don’t want to talk about because if they have any reason to dislike me, they’ll eat my face. I can get behind keeping my face. I like my face.”
It was scarred enough already, I thought, I but didn’t say so. In any case, I silently agreed.
“I think,” I said, “when we get home we need to secure the place better. I mean even better than before. Cameras, booby traps, electric fencing, gun-toting scary clowns, I don’t even know what, just…something.”
“B—”
“And if you do want to take a long weekend out of town or anything—”
“B, breathe. One of us overreacting is enough for today.” He leaned over to push open my door. “Let’s walk it off. It’s the last nice day we’re going to get for a while. We might as well enjoy it.”
I nodded shakily, took his advice, and went outside with my brother.
It was fortunate that I did, too, because he turned out to be more right than he could possibly have known.
*
I crashed so hard after all that drama that I slept through most of Sunday. Fortunately, Grey had my back. He spent the day rigging up extra crap around the house. By the time he was done, he was exhausted and soon asleep, while I was now wide awake at what looked to be nearly midnight. I stumbled through the dark house, answering the call of my growling stomach, to find that he’d left me dinner in the refrigerator and a note to say so—addressed to The Narcoleptic Lycanthrope. Cute.
I gnawed on the sandwich while I made my limping rounds around the house, double-checking everything. It was only my own bedroom window that made me uncomfortable. Mostly, it made me think about Raoul. I hadn’t seen him in days. I knew he’d said Ilsa liked to order him around, keep him busy, but right about now, that didn’t sound reassuring.
So I sat down at my clunky, old computer and fiddled with the nearest thing at hand. It was the USB thumb drive Madison gave me, with our videos from the senior project. Find the useful bits, she’d said. I wanted to laugh. What would be worth watching on there? A bunch of footage of Lacey and Madison dancing, and…
Oh.
I suddenly remembered. Brandon and Antonella’s conversation. Jake had recorded that, too.
For a minute I was too surprised to do anything. Madison must have looked at these files. She’d have noticed what Jake was recording when he was supposed to be filming her. And Madison had dropped a lot of hints that she knew more about the werewolves than she should. Had she really done me a favor? On purpose?
“Wonders never cease,” I murmured as I plugged the thing in.
It took some digging. I fast-forwarded until I saw Jake swing the camera around. He refocused the camera on Brandon and Antonella’s silhouettes, at which point I backed up a few frames and cranked up the volume on my headphones.
“It’s getting worse,” Brandon said, barely loudly enough for even my hearing. I had to concentrate to separate his voice from the much louder background music. “It must be her behind it. It’s not just me, either. Pandora’s got awful headaches, and Ayu—”
The sound blurred out again. I pressed the headphones tighter against my ears.
“Kane’s all right,” Brandon said bitterly. “Ilsa, too. They’re acting like…” There was static, and a school bell ringing. “…all in my head.”
“But it isn’t. Can’t be.”
“No. She’s screwing with us somehow. Like it’s some sort of punishment. The Elder—”
That time he cut off of his own accord. The video ran silent, then became audible again: “Ilsa’s too distracted over Marcus showing up again to care.”
Marcus? I tried to zero in on that, but Brandon didn’t add more. I caught something from Antonella about the police, and Brandon sounding doubtful they’d believe the story. Then it degraded further. All I could tell was that she was arguing with him. I could only pick out one more thing from the blur.
“Kane wants B out of it. He’s getting her off the scent.”
“Oh, hell,” I whispered, right before Antonella turned to the camera and snapped, very, very loudly, “Why are you spying on us?”
I howled with pain and yanked off the headphones. Sensitive werewolf hearing is occasionally a bitch. Figures, since I could say the same for Antonella. I could still hear her scolding me over the tiny, tinny speakers.
I smacked the computer shut. Once I could see straight, I stumbled downstairs.
The pelt scrap was still hiding underneath the couch. I bent down and snatched it up, in the nearly-dislocating-my-shoulder-in-the-process sense. It still felt horrid in my hand. It was like holding my own skin, slashed off and cut to pieces.
The real question now was whose skin it actually was. Getting her off the scent, Brandon had said. That could easily include flat-out lies. This could be the feral’s pelt…or it could be someone else’s.
Somehow or other, I was going to have to find out.
Chapter Seventeen
School the next morning was a mess of noise. I’d thought I was getting used to it, but I was so stressed that everything was scraping at my nerves. I ducked and swerved as best I could through the crowd, not seeing the people I wanted to talk to, but hearing something odder than I expected—a lot of whispers about Antonella. Too fried to decode it on my own, I retreated to Advanced Bio and found Lin, who’d had, as I’d hoped, her ear to the ground.
“Antonella’s freaking out, is what’s going on,” she whispered while I scrunched into a seat. “She’s told all her friends that Brandon dropped out, and they—”
“What?” I burst out.
A few people turned their heads. I swiped a hand at them and they whirled away, as quickly as if I’d had claws drawn. I studied my hand to be sure I didn’t, then lowered my voice. “What do you mean, dropped out?”
“The official rumor is ‘family emergency.’ He’s gone for good. Asha said Antonella wanted to leave with him, but she didn’t think it would be so soon. Whatever that means.”
“Leaving with? Like moving?”
“I have no idea.”
I was afraid I did, though I didn’t say so. I didn’t like the way this was fitting together. The Elder was getting sicker, and Raoul, his only heir, had been discredited because someone else took out the feral first. Kane was probably coming out on top because he was the one who claimed he did it. Meanwhile, I was out of the picture and out of luck because the person I was supposed to get my answers from was ostensibly dead.
But all of that depended on Kane’s story being true.
I reluctantly opened my bag. If I was on my own, I’d have to be creative. That meant…well, an unpleasant idea. I grimaced at the pelt. The way it was curled up, I could see what looked like a tiny bit of crusted blood on its edge.
“Do me a favor,” I said to Lin, while I scooted our microscope closer. “Don’t watch what I’m doing for a minute.”
She caught a glimpse of my bag. “What is that?”
“I’m trying to find out.” I made a show of arranging the supplies to hide what I was doing: slides, beakers, whatever was on hand. Lin put her hands up and left me to it. Apparently she was getting used to weird shit from me.
Good thing, too, because I wasn’t planning on doing anything scientific.
I ducked under my traditional shield of hair and tried to avoid the teacher’s gaze as I scraped a flake of dried blood off the wolf pelt.
Memories pass through the blood, they said. I had no idea if that counted for dead werewolves, and even less of an idea of what would happen if I wasn’t being guided through the memories, but I couldn’t think of anything else to try. All I needed was to know who it was, so no matter what memory I got, I figured something in there might be helpful.
After a second to brace myself, I put the coppery flake on my tongue.
I found out in that moment what it was like seeing your life flash before your eyes. Only it wasn’t my life at all. It was a werewolf on the run, stumbling under a multitude of wounds. The memory came at me like a nightmare, faded under layers of indistinct gray, but I could feel the truth of it: this wolf was broken, furious, and utterly, unmistakably feral.
It reminded me of the chaotic, broken flavor of the Elder’s memories, all right, but within seconds I could tell something was wrong. I could sense the way this wolf moved and the patterns of its thoughts, and pure, sympathetic instinct filled in a critical detail. This wolf was female.
The Elder’s target wasn’t.
I jolted with shock, but the memory was still unfolding in my head. Kane—it had to have been Kane—had caught up for the final attack, and my wolf let out a howl of terror and fury. But Kane didn’t listen. I felt teeth at my neck, and a sickening sideways crunch.
Part of the sound was in the memory. Part of it, unfortunately, was me.
The brutal intensity of the vision had been enough to knock me off my stool. I hit the bookshelf behind me, striking books and breakable glass, and fell hard to the floor in a shower of both. I moaned while Lin scrambled down to help. Everything, unsurprisingly, hurt like hell. I tried to push back the images and take stock—all limbs attached, nothing completely out of joint—and yet…
“What happened?” Lin asked, while the crowd gathered. “It looked like you had a seizure! Are you okay?”
I kept my mouth shut. I could taste my own blood in my mouth, but under that was the taste of someone else’s blood and old memories. They weren’t a match, not at all, for what the Elder had showed me. Kane was lying. The trophy he’d dumped on me was someone else.
He hadn’t found the feral at all.
“Get me out of here,” I whispered to Lin. “I need air.”
“Easy,” she said. She thrust my crutches at me, and spoke to the class. “I need to take her to the nurse’s office.”
Everyone got out of my way like I had something contagious. I tossed the pelt into my bag before anyone could ask, then let Lin lead me outside.
Everything felt wrong out there. I couldn’t put my finger on it for a second, but then I knew—we were more alone than we should have been. Gilman High was another victim of our paranoid age: cameras, security guards, metal detectors, the whole shebang. Whether it helped or not, I couldn’t say. In practice, mostly it was just irritating. Still, we were used to it, and we knew where to expect eyes on us.
So we were surprised that no one was guarding the front doors.
“Where is everybody?” Lin asked. There was nothing but eerie quiet. Then something finally crept up on my senses.
It was sort of like a smell, just enough to begin triggering a memory. Then my breathing picked up, and adrenaline began flooding through my bloodstream. Instinct screamed that someone was there—someone dangerous, coming this way.
And recognition slammed into me all at once.
The snarling nightmare images the Elder had shared. The man, broken and mad, who’d gone after us in town. And—worst of all—my own memories, the very ones I’d tried to hide from Raoul. They were all connected.
My vision went distorted, skewed into a child’s bottom-up perspective. I was in horrible pain, with blood running down my neck from a bite that nearly split bone. I was overwhelmed by this monster above me, his fangs bared and his huge yellow eyes glowing—
This was familiar. This was the feral.
And it was the same werewolf that bit me at age eight, destroying my life with a snap of his jaws.
I almost fell apart right there. How could I face that? It was no wonder I’d never put the pieces together—I was in deep, primal, freaked-out denial. The real-life monster who’d haunted me for years was coming straight for me, all over again.
Then Lin let out a terrified cry, which made me realize if I didn’t do something, the same fate that befell me was going to be hers.
I shoved Lin aside with more strength than she was expecting. I didn’t want that werewolf coming at anyone but me. And while I braced
myself there, another memory bubbled up. It was something Brandon had said to Antonella on that video. Ilsa’s too distracted over Marcus showing up again…
Marcus. A name. It couldn’t be a coincidence, not when everything else was crashing together like this.
I took the risk, and mentally shouted it as loudly as I could.
The wolf came to a halt inches from me, panting and trembling in surprise. The world froze long enough for me to get a good look. He was large, but all of us were, and his fur was gray-tipped red, ragged and ripped off in patches. His stance seemed cautious, now. I suddenly remembered what I’d done back in town, when I didn’t know any better—I’d screamed him into submission, and he ran off in panic.
I giggled, swaying on my feet—I’d scared him? For a frantic moment, I wondered if I could manage it again. Then I saw the blood smeared across his mouth, and the whole plan went away.
“Lin,” I gasped. “Lin, stay back.”
Oh yes. Get back get back. Away from the mad wolf who’s too fast to catch… The wolf skittered a few steps closer, licking the blood off his muzzle. I’ll undo what I started. Undo everything before she can get me.
“What do you mean?” I whispered. Lin shot me a confused look. Marcus, meanwhile, began making a sound disturbingly close to laughter.
What do you mean? I shouted.
Calm at the end. Has to be. End it all and then there’s quiet. End it all for you…
I yelled and flung one crutch at him. Spooked again, he shied away. Then he howled, half-crazed, half-mocking, and ran. I was sure he was going to leap at me, but he went for the doors instead, skidding on the tile and scrambling as though his limbs wouldn’t cooperate even in this form. He was strong enough to slam the doors open, at least, rocking one off its hinges. Then he vaulted through, and just like that, he was gone.
I fell to my knees, squeezing my eyes shut. My heart was hammering and I couldn’t think in more than two or three words before it all exploded into nonsense. Lin, meanwhile, was staring at the still-swaying door. She made a few steps toward it.
I grabbed her sleeve. “No,” I pleaded. “Don’t follow. Don’t.”
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