I squinted through the dim early-morning light. Scavengers had done their job already, leaving surprisingly little of the deer behind, but the bones gleamed against the mud. “Help me bury these,” I said, plunging the shovel into the ground.
He bent down, running his fingertips over what I guessed was a femur. I almost never caught stray thoughts from his head, as guarded as he was, but I thought I heard something about wasted marrow. Anger hit me so sharply I was amazed I didn’t clock him with the shovel. He quickly withdrew his hand and waited for me to relax. It took a while.
Then I dug in with twice as much vehemence, spraying dirt so far away I’d have nothing left for cover.
“It is what we do,” he said quietly.
I shook my head firmly. “We don’t have to.” I bent into the dig. “I know you were born to this. I know you’ve lived as a wolf more than any of us have. But I’ve only done this once and I’m not adjusting super well. So if you’re going to act more like an animal than a human and get pissy at me because I spent all night feeling like I couldn’t get the remains out of my mouth and it was making me sick, that’s not my fault. And you can just…”
I couldn’t quite force out the word “go.” Raoul watched me silently. Then he reached out to clasp one hand around the shovel. Our eyes met over the handle. I sighed and left him to it.
“How do you get used to this?” I finally asked.
He didn’t reply until he finished digging. Then he leaned on the handle and thought. “It’s…about boundaries, I suppose. Finding out where you’re willing to stand. What you’re willing to sacrifice.” He looked back down at the bones. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. But as my father’s pointed out, we’re animals even when we are human. It’s not as simple as picking sides.”
I flinched. Ilsa was doing a good job of proving that these days. Raoul sighed, understanding. “She made you do this, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know what to do about her, either.” I sank down onto a nearby log. Raoul finished tamping dirt over the grave, then sat beside me.
“The only way to beat her is at her own game,” he said.
“Sneak attacks, then? Cheating?”
“Lies where it works, truth where it hurts. Her confession was extremely calculated…and I know there’s more she isn’t saying. Maybe we can get her off guard.”
“How?”
“There’s one person who could explain almost everything,” Raoul said quietly. I knew what he meant. The Elder, and our shared worry that Ilsa had done something to him. He could surely help us—if we could get anything coherent out of him.
“Can we prove it?”
He fixed a flame-eyed stare on me, one that made my insides do a strange little flip. “If we can figure out what’s happened to him…maybe we can reverse it. And then he could answer everything himself.”
There was a terrible hope in his words. I wasn’t sure I should encourage it. What if healing the Elder was impossible by now? But with all that intensity focused on me, I couldn’t back down. I nodded shakily.
He took my face between his hands, reading me as though the truth of everything was hiding behind my eyes somewhere. Then, just as I was about to fly apart in all directions, he said, “Where did you find that shovel, anyway?”
For the first time in what felt like years, I wanted to laugh. Even when we retreated home, that smile still lingered around my mouth. Ayu and Pandora both smirked knowingly when they saw it.
Let ‘em talk, I thought. The more everyone dwelled on silly gossip, the more they’d miss what we were actually up to.
I had to wonder, though, if I was busy misleading the people I actually liked, how close was I to following in Ilsa’s footsteps after all?
*
We went to see the Elder that night. It was impossible to process what had happened to him without thinking of my mother.
Mom became more and more fragile, but she’d never totally shattered. She may have stopped coping with everything, me in particular, but there was something of her still left. Even when I had to resort to watching her through hospital windows, I could always tell she wasn’t entirely gone.
Looking at the Elder now was like staring at a shell.
I was grasping for hints of life—the quiet rasp of his breathing, the occasional little twitches his hands made. He’d lost most of his hair, and his skin was dry and pale. Every now and then, he made a sound like he was growling at nightmares.
If they were anything like the nightmares he’d forced into my head, I could imagine why he’d broken down to shreds.
Raoul and I weren’t in his room for long. I kept finding excuses to look at everything else—the window, the clothes chest, the cabinet where the drinks were. The near-empty carafe Ayu had served him from weeks ago gave me an unsettling thought. I picked it up and tilted it, then uneasily pulled out the stopper to take a sniff. I caught a whiff of something sharp and astringent.
“He said something the first time I was here,” I said quietly. “Something about how Ayu should have already known what was in this drink.”
Raoul knelt beside his father’s bed. It looked unnervingly like a prayer position. I didn’t join him. My knees hurt just looking at it.
“Listen—if she’s been giving him something after all, it’s probably in this,” I told him.
Raoul looked troubled. “It might be the same thing she’s been giving us. This could just be our fate.”
That sounded awfully unpleasant. I gave the bottle another sniff. It was recognizable in a way, but it also stung, in ways the odor I’d picked up from our food didn’t. “It doesn’t smell right. I don’t think it’s the same.”
“I couldn’t tell,” Raoul admitted. “Your senses are stronger than mine. I think this stuff we’re taking makes them fade.”
Side effects. I shuddered. I didn’t want that to start happening to me. I worried, too, about what else might start breaking down after continued use. Ilsa might be touting me as a success story, but I was still just a guinea pig, really. Who was to say I wouldn’t end up like the Elder eventually? Or Marcus? Or something new and different and worse?
I sloshed the liquid back and forth again while Raoul held his father’s hand. He was upset, and starting to drift through thoughts.
“You know…everything Ilsa likes to say about how staying together keeps us stronger? All those lines she spouted to cover up what she was actually doing? I think she did believe it at first. She got that from him.” Raoul indicated his father. “But she started struggling.”
“Getting weaker?”
“Yes. Just like you.” He shook his head. “She must have wanted a way around it. And so she cheated. Ilsa was always powerful as a wolf, but she wanted to be powerful as a human, too. I don’t think she had enough in her to do both.”
“So when Marcus said they should go looking for a cure…”
“She went for it. Even though the Elder always said there wasn’t one.” Raoul kept staring at his father. “He said all we could do was try for balance. But the wolf…tends to win.”
Memories crowded in on me then. It must have taken incredible strength of will to get this far, Ilsa had said about me, the first time we met. We didn’t think it was possible to resist going wild without…help.
Now that I knew what kind of help she’d really meant, I could only shake my head.
“The wolf didn’t win here,” I said softly. “Something else did.”
“But how do we prove what it is? His mind’s so scattered right now, even his memories won’t help. I don’t know what to…”
He trailed off. I clutched the carafe tighter. Grey probably could have broken this stuff down chemically, but he wasn’t available, and so the only idea I had was…well, more direct. It was also more than a little bit stupid. Right then, I didn’t care.
I tipped the bottle to my lips, downing the last few mouthfuls in one gulp.
Raoul gasped. “B! What are you doing?”
I
giggled, woozy all at once, and sat down with a thump. Werewolf metabolism: it’ll mess with you. Whatever was in there hit me so fast I went senseless in seconds.
Raoul dropped down beside me, catching the bottle before it could slide out of my hand and smash.
“Can’t wake the Elder up, after all,” I said out loud. “That would just be rude.”
Raoul seized my shoulders as though he was afraid I’d perish in his hands. There would be worse ways to go, I suppose. But when I didn’t, he hoisted me up—not to my feet, but into his arms, as easily as if I weighed nothing. I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. For a few dizzy seconds it was like flying.
Then he turned, just enough that I was facing the Elder again, and the world tipped sideways. The Elder’s eyes flashed open. I couldn’t hear him, but the terrible demand in his stare was so intense, burning out of that ghostlike wreck of a man, that I screamed.
Raoul rushed me outside. The sky looked so huge, so impossibly vast, that I babbled madly about all the stars before a raindrop struck my cheek, and I realized there was nothing to be seen. I crumpled. Raoul managed to get me across the grounds to my own cabin and roll me into bed. He was swearing about what an impossibly stupid thing I’d done, but he sounded worried, too, and almost impressed, and like he didn’t know what to do with me. I grabbed his wrist.
“Stay with me. Please. What if something goes wrong? Stay.”
Desperate, but determined, he made up his mind. He pulled Brandon’s vacated bed across the room and lined it up with mine. Then he got in. The beds weren’t quite touching—a few inches separated us—but he was still so close that my heart nearly stopped.
“I’ll stay,” he said.
I reached over the gap for his hand. He let me take it. For a few moments neither of us spoke, or moved, or barely even breathed.
“It’s not poison. It’s something else,” I whispered. “But…”
It was the last thing I said before I fell asleep. Fortunately, all things considered, I didn’t dream at all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I woke up later, much later, to find that everything around me had changed. Raoul had gone after all, despite his promises. I thought I remembered him trying to say something to me, and someone calling, but…
I lost the thread of the thought. I closed my eyes for a while, then I heard a noise and squinted to see, struggling for focus again. Through the haze, I saw figures looming above me. Both looked too bizarre to describe. And one of them was speaking to me with disconcerting nonchalance. “Good. You’re not dead.”
I wondered exactly how true that was.
“Sit up,” said the other, and I realized it was Ayu. She tugged me upright. The first thing my eyes fell on was a note on the bedside table, and it took some effort to resolve the letters, but at last I recognized Raoul’s handwriting.
I have to help with Brandon. I’m sorry—
I couldn’t concentrate enough to read the rest. What was in that drink? I wondered distantly.
Pandora didn’t wait for me to figure it out. She was already talking.
“We’ve both had enough of this freakshow for today,” said Pandora. She still didn’t look like she was at a hundred percent yet, but I was in no position to be throwing stones, frankly. “I say we ought to get the hell out of here for the night.”
“Time to celebrate the holiday,” Ayu finished with a grin.
I finally put things together. Halloween. Well, that explained the clothes.
Pandora, hardly in need of extra height, had plunked on a top hat anyway, adorned with lace and frills and a giant plume of red feathers. Her cloak must have been stolen from a particularly theatrical pirate. Ayu, dressed to coordinate—she’d even dyed her hair the same shade as Pandora’s feathers—wore an elaborately-buttoned, long-tailed vest, along with half-length pants and fantastic chunky boots. I half expected her to produce a cutlass from somewhere.
Then again, we were all armed by default already.
“I don’t care what the police say about going into town,” Pandora said. “I bet we can get away with it. Or we can head across the lake and find a bigger party instead—”
“Wait,” I said. It came to me slowly, but it was there. “I have an idea.”
“What?”
“I got an invite to Madison’s Halloween party.”
Pandora stared like I’d lost my mind. “Madison Greenwalt? Why?”
It was a valid question, and not just because I had Madison issues. I had a complicated relationship with Halloween, too. I’d have liked it just fine if it weren’t for all the people playing at being monsters, mocking the darkness and everything that had no choice but to live in it. I think I’d earned the right to take that personally. So normally I sulked in my room with all the house’s lights off, so the trick-or-treaters didn’t bother coming to the door. Grey always seemed to understand.
But this year…he’d made it clear he understood nothing about me.
And I wanted to do something different.
I was in a strange state of mind. My thoughts felt weirdly disconnected, and I was leaping from one idea to another without stopping to consider caution or common sense. So I answered Pandora blithely. “The party’s at her house. Edge of the forest. That means it’s outside city limits. No one said we can’t go there.”
Ayu let out an evil little giggle. “Sounds like an opportunity.”
“Then we’ve got to get you dressed,” Pandora said. Before I could have second thoughts, not that my second thoughts were working in the first place, they dragged me off to find a dress. I ended up with something blue-gray and Victorian that almost fit, and made me look like some sort of tattered Alice, about as far through the looking glass as I could get. I suppose it suited.
It all happened in such a whirl that I didn’t really come to my senses until we were halfway down the hill.
Pandora knew where Madison lived, so we followed her, cutting through the forest to get there. I could only imagine what we must have looked like. I was starting to laugh, though, improbably enough. We were all at ease with each other, enjoying the run, as the trees thinned out and turned to streetlights, blurring gold above our heads.
I heard the music before I saw the house. Of course, the place was enormous. The property backed up against the woods like Madison had said, but it was more fun to go in the front, ringing the bell and seeing the light spill out to greet us, while Madison stared in shock.
“Trick or treat,” I said.
She didn’t exactly let us in. We just sauntered past her, brash as anything, and strode through the house. We tracked mud and leaves across her acres of beige, which was almost an improvement. Madison made unhappy sputters, but we only forced our way through to the real party, out in the backyard.
For a few brilliant moments after I cast open the doors, no one recognized me. I swirled straight into the dance.
Everyone was wearing costumes. Under the bizarrely contrasting colors of the hanging lanterns—orange, purple, neon green—they all looked unearthly. Near me were two witches, chatting up a zombie. Emily and Ben were characters from a video game I’d watched Grey’s friends play once. Someone, inexplicably, came as a giant squirrel. I giggled at the whole menagerie. I was getting glances, some of which looked appreciative, but I ducked away before anyone could figure out who I was.
Then I bumped into someone wearing an unflattering, furry costume. His mask was the worst parody of a slathering beast I’d ever seen: cheap fake fur, an awkwardly-shaped jaw, painted blood peeling away from rubber fangs. When I realized this person was trying to be a werewolf, I laughed and laughed, then ripped off the mask to see Jake’s eyes pop with surprise.
“You?” he gasped.
Leering, I jammed the mask over my head and wheeled away before he could stop me.
Behind me, Ayu and Pandora stepped into the melee. They sauntered through the crowd like nothing in the world bothered them, sketching ironic bows to say hello. Everyone els
e whispered and pointed—and backed away.
“Don’t worry,” Pandora drawled. “We’re just here for the food.”
Of course, that could have been the chips and dip, or any of the people in attendance. The crowd looked like they suspected as much.
I was too buzzed to think about snacks, human or otherwise. The music had all my attention. They’d picked songs with suitably creepy undertones, and I took it in, channeling it out through my hands and moving feet. I never did learn how to dance, not like Lacey and Madison had, but it didn’t matter. This music, right then, was mine.
“Come on,” I said to the nearest boy I could pull along. He followed, dazed, as I let my hips find the beat. “Who’s afraid of the big…bad…”
Someone grabbed my shoulder, spun me around, and yanked the mask off my head in one smooth motion.
“B,” Lacey said.
She was dressed like some sort of pseudo-Amazonian warrior princess. It should have suited her, but it looked so fake, so feeble, that I couldn’t stop laughing. She covered her hurt with indignation.
“Where have you been?” she demanded, while Madison glared from a safe distance.
“Around,” I said blithely. “Was busy solving a murder. And I see that you’ve made great strides in fashioning ghosts out of netting. That’s a real achievement, there.”
Apparently that drink of the Elder’s made me even snider than usual. It also made me shockingly mobile, which I demonstrated by making a neat pirouette on Madison’s deck. Everyone stared as I did it. For once I reveled in the attention.
Lacey was less amused.
“Do you have any idea how much of a wreck your brother is right now? He won’t answer any questions about you, he won’t leave the house, he won’t…”
“Go on another date with you?” I crooned. “Poor you.”
Lacey raised a hand like she was ready to slap me, but my reflexes were much improved. I grabbed her wrist so hard she whimpered, then twisted, enough that she went breathless.
“You have no idea what my brother did,” I said, before I flung her hand back. “He kicked me out, not the other way around. He deserves to feel miserable.”
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