Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (2 page)

I wasn’t convinced that joining a wolf pack could be compared to a semester away at school with Thanksgiving break and keggers, but I still felt a small flare of hope. Speaking slowly and carefully, needing to know I wasn’t misunderstanding, I said, “So even if you go back to Colorado, you’re saying you want to stay together?”

He nodded. “I’m still not convinced it’s what’s best for you, but I tried to make the decision for the both of us and it failed spectacularly.” He reached out and traced the curve of my cheek with his fingertips, making me shiver, before gently pressing his palm to my shoulder, right over the spot where I had been shot. Something dark and haunted slipped behind his eyes, and I knew he was thinking of how close I had come to dying just a few weeks ago. “Besides, if I’m
being honest, I’m not sure I’m selfless enough to walk away from you a second time.”

I pulled him to me, clutching him so hard and kissing him so fiercely that every inch of my body trembled.

“You know,” breathed Kyle, easing back just far enough that speech was possible. “We could just forget about this whole shape-shifting thing.”

“Mmmm. Tempting, but no.” Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted myself to stick to the slow path. I placed both hands on his chest and pushed myself back.

My fingers itched to touch him again, but I forced myself to return to my place across the fire.

Kyle stared at me for a long moment over the flames. With a shake of his head and a small sigh, he kicked off his Vans and slipped out of his jeans until he stood in just a pair of dark-blue shorts. “That side of the fire. Remember.”

I nodded.

Nothing happened.

I bit my lip.

Nothing continued to happen.

“Would it be easier if—” Before I could complete the sentence, his face contorted in pain. With the sharp, dry sound of a board snapping under too much weight, his spine bowed, driving him to his knees.

Kyle dug his hands—hands that were too long and the wrong shape—into the carpet of leaves on the forest floor as muscles writhed like snakes beneath his skin.

My pulse thundered and a bitter taste flooded the back of my mouth.

Every other time I had seen Kyle shift, we had been under some sort of attack. This time, there was nothing to divert my attention. There was just me and Kyle and the things that were happening to his body as I stood helplessly by.

His mouth stretched in a scream, but no sound came out.

I took a small step forward; I couldn’t help myself.

“Stay back!” The words were a growl pulled from deep inside Kyle’s chest a heartbeat before his entire body twisted and shattered.

When it was over, I was left staring at a wolf with fur the color of freshly turned earth.

The wolf’s eyes—Kyle’s eyes, I reminded myself—caught and reflected the light from the campfire as I searched them for some sign of the boy I knew.

The wolf cocked its head to the side and let out a small, questioning bark—almost like he was asking if I was all right.

I let out a deep breath. “I’m okay.”

Something painfully human passed behind Kyle’s wolf eyes before he turned and ran: relief.

Smoke clawed at my throat and stung my eyes as, thirty stories below, a city burned. Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle—I didn’t know where I was and it didn’t matter: every few nights, another city tore itself apart.

Twenty-five days ago, I had helped three hundred teens break out of Thornhill Werewolf Rehabilitation Camp. Our only goal had been self-preservation, but our actions had
been a spark that lit a fire under the entire country. Within days, there had been uprisings at two other camps and clashes between humans and wolf packs in half a dozen cities.

The reg population was terrified. The camps and the LSRB—the system they trusted to keep the infected safely at bay—had failed. There had always been as many wolves outside the camps as in, but people hadn’t wanted to believe it. Thornhill had forced them to believe; and groups like the Trackers, groups that fed on fear, were doing everything they could to keep the public as frightened as possible.

Within weeks, the country had plunged into the kind of violence and fear it hadn’t seen since the early days of the LS epidemic. Paranoia was at an all-time high and mob mentality had started taking hold. Anyone with a scar was suspect. The Lupine Syndrome Registration Bureau couldn’t keep up with the number of calls flooding its tip lines, and people were taking matters into their own hands. There were states where killing a werewolf wasn’t illegal, leaving crowds free to act without fear of repercussion—as long as the target of their violence really was infected. Dozens—maybe even hundreds—of wolves had been murdered since the breakout.

My father, Hank, had warned me this would happen. I should have known he’d be right.

Most of the violence hadn’t hit Hemlock. Yet. It was concentrated in cities with wolf packs and large pockets of infected people. But it was only a matter of time—especially with the Trackers in town.

I pressed my palms to the concrete ledge that encircled the rooftop as I counted burning buildings and listened to the distant echoes of shouts and screams. The anonymous city below fell into chaos and all I could do was watch.

I had done this. It had been my idea to take down Thornhill. All of this death and destruction was the result of my actions.

“Martyr, much?”

I turned as Amy stepped out of the shadows. Even though it was November, she was wearing cutoffs and a sleeveless gray shirt. Her pale skin seemed to glow in the moonlight, and her knees were scraped raw and bloodstained.

I should have known she would turn up in a place like this. In death, she lived for places like this.

The air around her shimmered and changed as she crossed the rooftop. Empty space became white tile walls. Darkness became blinding fluorescent lights. The smell of smoke was drowned out by the scent of bleach.

The detention block at Thornhill. The place where dozens of wolves—including my friend Serena—had been tortured in Warden Winifred Sinclair’s crazed search for a cure to lupine syndrome. The place I had seen in dreams every night since the breakout.

I shook my head and stepped back. “I don’t want to be here.”

Amy raised an eyebrow. “And I do?” She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear and the light caught a flash of silver at her wrist—a bangle her brother had brought her back from Mexico one spring break.

She stared at me expectantly, but then, instead of waiting for a reply, grabbed my hand and began dragging me toward the control room. My heart rate spiked as I tried to pull away. I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t want to see videos of Serena being tortured. Not again.

But Amy was always stronger than I was in dreams. No matter how I resisted, I couldn’t stop her from pulling me through the door and toward the only source of light in the room: a bank of nine computer monitors. “You need to see,” she said.

“I’ve already seen.” I tried to twist away. It wasn’t any use.

“Not the videos.”

She let go so suddenly that I stumbled forward.

“What do you mean?”

Eight of the monitors displayed a screen saver of the camp logo. The ninth showed an image of Serena behind a metal table, her shirt torn and her eyes wide. The video had been taken the night we arrived in the camp, after we had been separated. I glanced over my shoulder. “Besides the videos, what else is there?”

“Just look, Mac. Please. I need you to look.” Amy’s voice was uncharacteristically tired and small, so un-Amylike that I couldn’t refuse it.

Chest tight, I focused my attention back on the screen. Serena’s image filled the monitor—well, almost filled it. Six or seven icons cluttered the taskbar and a spreadsheet was open behind the video player.

“There isn’t anything else here.” But as I spoke, my gaze
was drawn to the upper left-hand corner of the spreadsheet, where a small splash of black—what looked like part of a logo—was just visible beneath the other open windows.

Amy closed the distance between us. Leaning in so close that her breath left a layer of frost on my cheek, she said, “Everyone always sees more than they remember. And sometimes people see things they’re not ready to accept.”

I woke with a start, disorientated and confused. I wasn’t in my bedroom and I wasn’t back in the dormitory at Thornhill. There was a weight across my chest. I started to panic but then the roof of the tent came into focus and I became aware of Kyle—the scent of his skin and the steady sound of his breathing—beside me.

He had thrown an arm over me in his sleep. For a moment, I just closed my eyes and enjoyed being near him, grateful to no longer be trapped in the dream. Being in the detention block once—seeing the videos of what had been done to Serena—had been horrible enough. Having to revisit that place—those images—night after night in my dreams was exhausting.

Everyone always sees more than they remember
. A chill swept down my spine as I thought about Amy’s words.

As quietly as I could, I unzipped my sleeping bag and carefully wormed out from Kyle’s embrace. He rolled onto his back, but didn’t wake.

I rummaged in the bottom of my knapsack until my fingers closed around a pen. Digging through my jacket pockets turned up a receipt for the soda and chips I had
bought when we stopped for gas, and using my phone as a flashlight, I sketched out what little I had seen of the symbol from my dream.

The result was a thick squiggle that looked like a half-melted version of the Nike swoosh.

I frowned down at the piece of paper, turning it this way and that. Something about the curve of the lines seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It definitely wasn’t the twisted vines of the Thornhill crest, but it did look like it could almost be part of a logo.

Maybe it was nothing, but there really had been a spreadsheet on the monitor the night we had broken into the detention block. At the time, I had been too distracted to do anything more than note its existence. I had been too focused on the realization that Serena had been tortured and the possibility that we’d all be caught at any moment.

What if I had missed something? Something important. What if that was why I kept seeing the detention block in my dreams night after night?

I snapped a photo of the sketch.

The flash was blinding in the tent. I held my breath until I was certain I hadn’t woken Kyle, and then I typed what I could remember of the dream into my memo app. It was one more fragment to add to my growing collection of memories and questions—what Jason and Kyle had dubbed my “Thornhill Files.”

They thought I was obsessed.

Maybe I was.

Aside from Sinclair and a handful of her former staff, we
were the only ones who knew what had really happened at Thornhill. The employees in the detention block had been so determined to keep their secrets that they had set fire to the camp’s main building once they realized the breakout couldn’t be stopped.

Every scrap of proof had burned in the blaze.

Everyone else wanted to let go of the camp. They wanted to believe it was over and that we were safe—or as safe as we could be. Thornhill was gone and Sinclair couldn’t hurt anyone else. We’d never be able to prove what had happened inside the fences; the only thing we could do was try to put it behind us, try to put ourselves back together. All we could do was try to move on.

And I wanted to move on.

It was just . . .

Warden Sinclair had kept her search for an end to lupine syndrome secret from the LSRB. She had falsified admission records, kept most of her staff in the dark, and paid Trackers to bring in wolves under the table—all to keep the bureau from finding out that she was torturing and killing inmates in pursuit of a cure.

A cure she couldn’t possibly have been working toward on her own.

The drugs, the detention block, the research—all of it would have taken money and resources. Way more money and resources than a civil servant could pull together. Someone had to have been helping her—if not the LSRB then someone else—and whoever that someone was, they were still out there, free to start again. Free to hurt people like
Sinclair had hurt Serena. They wouldn’t even need another camp. Not really. They could just grab infected people off the street.

Knowing what we did . . . it felt like some sort of responsibility—like we had to figure out how Sinclair had gotten away with so much and who had helped her. How could any of us really put Thornhill in the past when there were still so many questions?

I stared down at the small sketch for a moment, and then sent a text to the person who had been standing at my side in front of the monitor that night.
Need 2 ask u something.

My phone vibrated a second later.
s’up?

I rubbed my eyes. Jason’s response had come too quickly for my message to have woken him. I tried not to think about what sort of trouble he might be getting into at 3:00 a.m. on a Friday night in a town overrun by Trackers.

Both Kyle’s parents and Tess, my cousin and legal guardian, were still having trouble coping with the news that Kyle was a werewolf and that we were both, technically, fugitives. They watched us like they were waiting for the sky to fall. Jason’s parents, on the other hand, were happy just to have him back without a scandal. Once he had assured them that he hadn’t dragged the Sheffield name through the mud or gotten anyone knocked up, it had been business as usual.

I sent him the picture of the sketch.
Does this look familiar?

No. Y?

Before I could reply, he sent another text.
Gotta go.

That was it. No explanation. No good-bye.

Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, I was certain it couldn’t be good.

Leaving a group like the Trackers wasn’t easy—especially when you had the kind of status and money Jason did. They had gotten their claws into him and they intended to keep things that way. And Jason . . . Jason believed that staying close to them would help keep the rest of us safe—as though he could be a kind of early warning system if someone found out Kyle and Serena were infected or that I was the daughter of a pack leader.