Hemlock (16 page)

Kyle glanced out the broken window. “You realy should go home. It’s getting late and Tess wil be worried.”

I felt like an invisible door was slamming shut between us.

I bit my lip. “Kyle. About what happened before . . . about what I bit my lip. “Kyle. About what happened before . . . about what Heather saw . . .” I trailed off, unable to find the right words and scared of saying the wrong thing.

He exhaled slowly. “Mac. I meant what I said. It was a mistake.”

I had been caught off guard by the kiss. I hadn’t asked for or expected it. There was absolutely no reason to feel like something important was being ripped away. Kyle and I would go back to normal—or as normal as we could be—and I’d try to forget the way he had held me and pressed his lips to mine.

“Are you al right?” he asked warily.

“Sure,” I lied as I turned and headed for the stairs. So softly that only a werewolf could hear, I added, “You can’t lose what you never had.”

I managed to make it across the bridge before the tears got so bad that I had to pul over. And then, sitting in the dark car on a deserted street, I cried like my heart was breaking.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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THREE DAYS IN THE REAL WORLD IS PRACTICALLY nothing. It blends together and is over quickly and soon forgotten. But time passes differently in high school—especialy when you’re not talking to either of your two best friends.

Kyle wanted space and I was trying to give it to him. And Jason

. . .

I couldn’t talk to Jason. The text messages he kept sending me made it clear he thought I was ignoring him because he had refused to get me the police report. That was part of it—a big part—but there was also Derby.

If I didn’t talk to Jason, I couldn’t put him in danger.

Twice I’d spotted a dark sedan outside of school and I’d seen Trackers hanging around the parking lot and halways. They didn’t make any effort to cover their tattoos or blend in. A few times I’d seen them talking to Jason.

Even Derby himself seemed to be taking an unusualy high interest in the students. They had let him hold an information session yesterday afternoon about the Trackers’ new incentive program: hand over the name of a werewolf and—provided they turned out to realy be infected—you’d get a thousand-dolar reward. It was rumored that Senator Walsh was putting up the money, although, publicaly, he denied it.

I hadn’t gone to the info session, but Serena said the gym had been packed.

been packed.

There was only one reason the Trackers would be so interested in Kennedy after what had happened with Riley Parker: they stil thought there were werewolves on campus.

My stomach knotted as I spotted Alexis Perry.

She slammed her locker door shut. “Happy?” she asked.

I looked away and kept walking, trying to ignore the sensation that things were crawling over my skin. She had been there. She had watched—had helped—Jimmy drag me into that aley.

“They sent him away because of you,” she hissed, just loudly enough for me to hear.

A scathing reply flew to my lips and I almost stopped, but then I saw Jason. He was leaning against the doorframe of an empty classroom, talking to some girl who had transferred at the beginning of the year. She was wearing a ridiculously tight red Tshirt with the words
Hunt or be Hunted
across the front. Hmmm.

Skanky and she shopped on the Tracker website. What a keeper.

I couldn’t say anything to Alexis without it turning into a fight.

And I couldn’t start a fight without Jason finding out what had realy happened. I closed my mouth and kept walking.

Jason caled out my name as I passed, but I just stared at the floor and quickened my pace, anger and frustration radiating off me in waves as a roaring sound filed my ears.

Three days of this. I so wasn’t going to make it through the week. I bit my lip and wished—for about the milionth time—that Amy was here. Not the dream Amy who’d been haunting me at night but the real one. She’d know what to say or do to take my mind off things, to make them seem bearable.

mind off things, to make them seem bearable.

Of course, with Amy around, none of this would be happening.

I rounded a corner and practicaly steamroled Ethan Cole. He tried to ask me something—I didn’t even register the words—but I just mumbled an excuse and kept going. Up the stairs. A right.

Through the glass doors. Into the library.

The quiet hum of the air-conditioning and the musty smel of reference books enveloped me and I sucked in a deep, calming breath. Since it was noon, the library was dependably deserted, save for a few die-hard geeks who were sharing gaming strategies at one of the long study tables.

I walked past the new computer stations—donated by Jason’s father to keep him from getting suspended last May—and headed for the nonfiction section at the back.

The health books were in the third aisle. I scanned the titles, looking for anything on LS. I needed more information on lupine syndrome than they gave us in health class—both to try and figure out anything I could about the werewolf that had gone after Amy and to try and understand this whole new part of Kyle’s life. A part of his life that I could probably never fuly comprehend.

There would be more books at the public library, but they had one of those detectors at the door that beeped when you tried to take things without checking them out.

Maybe it was extra paranoid on my part, but if I were a creepy hate group dedicated to finding and eradicating werewolves, I’d try to get the library records and see who had checked out the books on LS.

If the Trackers realy did have the ful support of the police If the Trackers realy did have the ful support of the police department, that probably wouldn’t be too hard.

Idealy, I wouldn’t need books at al, but searching for information about lupine syndrome online had proved to be insanely frustrating. I’d found some stuff on the CDC and LSRB

websites, but a lot of it was slanted toward the risk of LS and the reasons to report infected people. When I’d tried using a search engine, the results had been even more useless.

Giving my head a smal shake, I crouched down to scan the bottom shelves.

A wave of dizziness hit me and I had to grip the nearest shelf to keep from toppling over. My dreams of Amy had been getting steadily worse. The one last night had been so bad that I’d been scared to go back to sleep. I had downed cup after cup of coffee and watched infomercials until dawn.

The dizziness passed and I peered at the books in front of me.

There were only two on LS:
The Wolf Inside
and
Managing an
Epidemic
.

I unzipped my backpack and slipped both books inside—right next to the thick stack of notes and computer printouts I’d gathered on the Hemlock attacks and murders. Jason might not have gotten me Amy’s police report, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find out things on my own. Unlike reliable information on LS, details about the Hemlock attacks had been pretty easy to find online.

“Umm . . . Mac?”

I looked up. Serena was standing at the end of the aisle, I looked up. Serena was standing at the end of the aisle, frowning.

“Why are you stealing those books? The library doesn’t charge for them, you know.”

She walked over to me, her heels clicking against the tile floor.

I raised an eyebrow. “Since when do you hang out in the library at lunch?”

“Since I saw Alexis Perry try to melt the flesh from your bones with only the power of her cross-eyed, inbred stare. Which was remarkably like the death glare Heather Yoshida was shooting you al through English. Which al comes on top of the sprained wrist and the stitches in your forehead—neither of which you’l explain.”

Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she fixed me with a no-nonsense, “spil it” gaze.

“I told you, I—”

“Fel. Right.” Serena frowned. “
Which I told you
is the most cliché excuse in the book.”

I sighed and shifted my weight so that I was sitting on the floor with my back against the shelves. There realy wasn’t a better place to have a private conversation at lunch.

Most people had accepted the faling story, but Serena had been relentlessly trying to get the truth out of me. I didn’t want to tel her—I figured she’d be safer if she didn’t know—but I couldn’t keep dodging the same questions over and over.

Folowing my lead, Serena sank gracefuly to the floor, smoothing down the orange skirt she was wearing so that she wouldn’t flash anyone who happened to wander past.

“You have to swear you won’t tel anyone.
Seriously
swear.”

“You have to swear you won’t tel anyone.
Seriously
swear.”

She nodded.

“You heard about Derby’s nephew, right?” It was a rhetorical question. Everyone had. Of course, they’d heard only the story the Trackers were putting out, the one that painted Jimmy as the tragic victim of another werewolf attack.

“Before he was attacked, I had a run in with him at Bonnie and Clyde. He hit on me and I embarrassed him. He folowed me out of the bar and shoved me up against a wal. That’s how I got the sprain and the cut.” I couldn’t tel her the rest—the parts about Kyle—so I added, “Some guy coming out of the club saw and stopped him.”

Serena’s eyes glinted. “But you were with Jason?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to tel her that Jason had passed out and abandoned me—admitting the truth hurt too much. “I didn’t feel like babysitting him, so I went outside to cal a cab.”

She didn’t look convinced. “It doesn’t sound like something you’d have to lie about.”

I gently rubbed my wrist. “Derby asked me not to tel anyone—

asked and implied it would be very bad if I refused the request. I think he was worried people would feel less outraged about the attack if they knew his nephew had roughed up a girl earlier in the evening.”

Serena’s eyes narrowed. “That’s evil.”

You don’t know the half of it
, I thought. “Anyway, Alexis had a crush on the guy. She was angry when he flirted with me. Hence the glaring.”

“And Heather?”

“And Heather?”

Heather had been absent Monday and Tuesday. English was the first I’d seen her since her meltdown at Kyle’s. I’d spent the entire class gripping the edge of my desk, convinced she was going to leap across the room and go for my throat.

I couldn’t tel Serena that Heather was a werewolf—or about everything that was going on with Kyle—but take
werewolf
out of the equation, and I did have a boy problem. Serena was good at boy problems.

I’d had a grand total of one relationship, which had lasted al of five weeks. I was so out of my depth.

Staring at a crack in the tile floor, trying to ignore the warmth flooding my face, I said, “Kyle and I kissed. And Heather saw us.

And then Kyle said he needed space.” The words tripped over each other, each leaving me feeling worse than the last.

“So that’s why I haven’t seen you and Kyle together since last week?”

“Yeah.” I looked over to gauge Serena’s reaction.

She studied me thoughtfuly. “Who kissed who?”

“He kissed me.” I remembered the way Kyle had pressed his lips to mine, so sure and steady, without the slightest bit of hesitation. My stomach knotted.

“And did you want him to kiss you?”

“I wasn’t expecting it. But I didn’t want him to stop. And I definitely kissed him back. It felt . . .” I trailed off, not sure how to articulate it.

Serena summed it up in a single word. “Right?”

Serena summed it up in a single word. “Right?”

I nodded. “Until Heather showed up.” I thought about it. “Or I guess it went wrong before that. She saw us through his window, but before she rang the doorbel”—
busted through the back
door and destroyed the kitchen
—“Kyle said it was a mistake.”

Something twisted deep inside my chest and my voice got oddly thick. “He kissed me. And then he said it was a mistake.”

Serena wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Normaly, I’d quote that copy of
He’s Just Not That Into You
I picked up at a yard sale, but—Heather or no Heather—you and Kyle have been simmering for years. You have to talk to him.”

“He was the one who said it was a mistake and asked for space,” I reminded her softly.

“Trust me. Forget what he said and just talk to him.” A thought flickered past her eyes. “Have you told Jason yet?”

I shook my head. “No. Why?”

Serena gave my shoulder a squeeze before climbing to her feet.

“You might want to tel him before he finds out from someone else.”

I nodded. That made sense. The three of us had been friends for so long, and Jason didn’t handle change wel. Of course, teling him would mean talking to him—if I could even get him away from his new Tracker friends.

With a sigh, I stood and brushed the dust from my jeans. There was no point in teling Jason anything until I talked to Kyle. There might not be anything to tel.

“You won’t say anything about Derby’s nephew to anyone, right? Not even Trey?”

right? Not even Trey?”

Serena looked mildly insulted. “Of course not.” She started for the end of the aisle. “My brother let me have the car today. Why don’t we go get pizza—real pizza instead of the cardboard they serve in the cafeteria—and you can tel me why you were stealing library books.”

I turned a page in
Managing an Epidemic
and studied a picture that had been taken halfway through the construction of one of the camps. I had told Serena that I wanted the books because I’d been thinking about Amy a lot and was trying to understand why a werewolf would have hurt her—in other words, exactly half the truth.

I flipped back to the previous chapter and took another look at a series of maps showing the spread of lupine syndrome. They went back only twelve years—to the six months before the US

government had announced to the world that werewolves realy existed.