Red Moon Rising (15 page)

W
e watch while Dad walks slowly around the bare basement, checking out the walls and ceiling. “I'm surprised you didn't finish the basement. It's big, could make a great space.”

Troy says, “We would have liked to, but it takes in water. Even with the sump pump, it's too humid down here.”

“When we're done with all this, I might be able to fix that,” Dad says. He starts to pace out the floor, getting rough measurements. He pulls a ballpoint pen from his pocket and writes them on his forearm. He paces it out in the other direction and writes that figure, too. Looks up at the ceiling, then the wall opposite him, and writes a third number on his arm. “I'll build the chamber. I'm going to start tomorrow.”

“Are you going to bring your crew?” Mom asks.

“No. Can't tell them. I'll have Kevin help with some of it.”

“Who's Kevin?” Troy asks.

“He's my partner in the contracting company. Not a blood relative—actually, he's human—but he might as well be family.”

“I'll help too,” Troy says. “I'm supposed to leave for Vienna tomorrow, but I'll cancel.”

“Don't cancel,” Dad says. “We don't want any changes in routine.”

“But I'd like to help,” Troy says. “I'm pretty handy with a screwdriver.”

“Do you have a lot of construction experience?”

“Well, none, really,” he says with a smile. The fact that he's not pretending to be “one of the guys” kind of impresses me.

Dad says, “That's okay. Believe me, you'll help in other ways. Just keep up appearances, go about your work as usual. You know what could be helpful? I don't know if I have the cash on hand to get all the materials….”

Troy waves his hand and shakes his head. “Money is absolutely not a problem. Don't give it another thought.”

“Great. Thank you.”

Troy shrugs and smiles.

Dad tucks the bottom of his Henley into his jeans. The shirt is tight across his broad shoulders, chest, and arms. It's funny: when Mom first married Troy, I imagined play-by-play scenes of cage matches in which Dad slowly beat the crap out of him. Now, we're all working together. Weird how things turn out.

Dad looks around one more time. “I'll need to be here pretty much day and night. Sorry, but you're going to have to get used to having me around.”

“I can help build,” I say.

“You have school,” Mom says.

Dad says, “Maybe we can skip a day here and there when I need a pair of strong hands?”

“No problem,” I say. I look at Mom. She shrugs and nods.

“I'll have the first materials delivered tomorrow.”

“The neighbors will notice,” Troy points out.

“True. Let word get out that you're finishing the basement. The basement will be smaller because of the chamber, but nobody would ever be able to tell, not without checking against blueprints.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “I just thought of something. What about Loretta? What do we tell her?”

Dad's looking at me, confused, and Troy says, “Our housekeeper. She's here every night. That could be a problem.”

Mom shakes her head. “I don't think so. Loretta never, ever comes down here, not since that raccoon got in. We can tell her the same story: that we're finishing the basement.”

“And she'll be gone during the full moon when I'm down here.”

“I'm not worried about her,” Mom says. “Anything else we should be doing?”

“Tomorrow you need to go buy two large dogs.”

“What?” she says. The last thing she'd ever want in her house is a couple of dogs shedding all over the furniture. Okay, well maybe the
last
thing she would want in her house is an adolescent werewulf, but dogs would be next on her list. “Is that a joke?”

“Have to do it,” Dad says. “I'm going to put heavy soundproofing in the chamber, but there's still a chance people could hear Danny howling.”

She shakes her head. “Of all the animals, dogs. They're so high-maintenance.”

I could make a comment about the fact that she never complains about Jessica, the absolute
queen
of high-maintenance, but this is no time for jokes.

For some reason, Troy has a little smile on his face.

“What's funny?” I ask him.

“Nothing. It's just that I always wanted dogs, and this is a horrible reason to get them.”

“Well, I never wanted pets,” Mom says. “But we'll do what we have to do.”

Dad shows us where the new walls will go, where the door will be, ventilation, everything. It feels like we're planning a war. Which, I guess, we are.

Building the chamber has been a good distraction for me. Lola and Poe, the two Siberian huskies we got, stayed downstairs with us while we worked. They seemed to like me a lot; probably because I was the one who walked them most. It was a good time to think, just walking with the dogs in the quiet of the night.

What with the Change, Juliet, building the chamber, school, and now this completely weird thing of Mom and Dad being back under the same roof every day, there was a lot to think about. “It's crazy, right, Poe? Lola, what do you think?” They looked up at me whenever I talked, and I almost wondered if we would understand each other in a different way after I've been through the Change. Maybe we'll have in-depth conversations about literature and politics.

It was a bad scene when we told Jess and Paige. We were all together. Troy stayed in the background and let Dad do most of the talking.

“I don't get it,” Paige said. She sat back into the corner of the couch and put her bare feet up, knees to her chest.

“He had the genetic treatments,” Jess said. “How can this happen?”

“You know he wasn't able to finish them,” Mom said. “We thought he made it past the critical point, but apparently he didn't.”

Paige swallowed. “What's going to happen to him?”

“We're going to make sure he's okay,” Dad said.

“Hold on,” Jessica said. “We're not sending him to a compound, are we?”

I tried to laugh. “Come on, Jess. Getting rid of me for a few days every single month? This is what you've been waiting for. What could be better?”

“Don't be an idiot,” she said. “This isn't funny.” There was a quaver in her voice.

“Jess?” I said. “It's going to be okay.”

“Shut up,” she said, punching me in the arm. “You don't even know what you're talking about. I want to hear that from
him
,” she said, hooking her thumb at Dad without looking at him. I could see that she was scared. She twisted a lock of hair around her finger. “We can't send him to a compound.”

Dad looked at Mom, then at Troy, eyebrows raised. Troy held out his hand toward Dad, palm up, like,
go ahead
. Dad turned to the girls. “Okay, here's our plan. It's really, really important—I can't tell you how important it is—that you don't tell anyone about this. Not friends, nobody. Danny's life depends on you keeping this completely secret. Do you understand?”

They both nodded.

He explained the plan to them. We went over the fact that there would be deliveries, and there might be times when work would be done day and night. At a few points in the discussion, the girls looked at Troy to gauge his reaction, but he was totally with us, nodding, occasionally asking questions about how to work things out. Dad explained the cover story of finishing the basement.

And so we started the next day and stayed at it practically around the clock. Dad ate dinner with us a lot, since we didn't have any time to waste while building.

We drilled deep into the cement floor and built a lattice of rebar, floor to ceiling. We put up a set of steel forms on both sides of the lattice, leaving an opening for a door. We drilled twelve two-inch holes around the doorway, putting eighteen-inch solid steel bars in each one—these would anchor the steel door frame. That's what we've been doing for the past forty-eight hours.

I hold the last of the bars in place while Dad secures it. “You don't think this is kind of overkill?” I ask.

“The door could be a way out if it isn't completely solid.”

“You said it's going to be a steel fire door, like the one in the boiler room.”

“This'll be much sturdier than that. But if you can pull the door off the frame, then all this is for nothing.”

I laugh. “Like I'd be able to pull a steel door off its hinges.”

He doesn't laugh. “You'd be surprised.”

Dad moves a portable cement mixer into the garage during the day when the neighbors are asleep.

Kevin Baker comes over for the cement part. “How you doing, kid?” he asks.

“Getting by,” I say. I always liked Kevin. Looking at him, most people would probably assume he was scary, maybe the leader of a homicidal biker gang. Hardly.

He used to be a cop in town, but about ten years ago there was some bogus brutality charge against him. Dad said it was a setup, which I believe. Still, he quit the force before the trial, and the charges were dropped. He went into business with Dad, grew a beard, a ponytail, and a bit of a gut, and he's always seemed a lot happier than he ever was as a cop.

He squeezes the back of my neck. “Don't you worry, champ. We're gonna take good care of you.”

It takes almost seven hours for us to pour the high-performance concrete inside the forms. This is going to be a fortress.

The vicious glares Gunther throws my way in Gym are getting to me. The bell rings, and I just want to go upstairs to the locker room, change, and go to English.

I'm the first one up, and I should be able to get out of here before Gunther and his crew come in. I strip off my sweaty T-shirt as I walk toward the freshman lockers. I glance into the huge mirror as I walk.

I stop and look back at the mirror. There's hair on my chest. Not a huge amount, but enough to see from a few yards away. I turn and look over my shoulder: hair on my back, too. And of course, now I see that there's more hair on my forearms than vamps typically have. But it's totally natural for wulves.

When Constance gave us the meaning of the word
hirsute
, I knew I'd remember it by thinking “hair suit.”

I don't know how I didn't notice this before. Is it possible that it just grew today?

Dozens of footsteps thunder on the metal stairs, and students flood into the locker room. Nobody pays any attention to me as they swarm past, shouting and laughing. I realize I'm just standing here like a statue. Not a good idea with my new hirsute condition. I pull on my damp T-shirt before anyone notices.

But I'm too late. One person is staring at me.

It's Gunther. And he looks suspicious.

After working on the basement while I was in school, Dad's ready for my help when I get home. I was planning to take a shower right away and shave my chest and arms, but I'll have to do that later.

We take the metal forms down, leaving a twelve-inch-thick concrete wall crossing the basement. All these structures took three days and nights of hard work to put in place.

“Not bad for a rush job,” Dad says.

“Can we really get it all finished in ten days?”

“We'll have to.” Dad hands me a short sledgehammer. “Let's see how strong it is. Give it a solid hit.”

I give the wall a nice shot with the hammer. It doesn't even make a mark.

“No,” he says. “I mean really smash it. I want to see if it chips or cracks.”

I wind up and take a good hard swing. The sledgehammer bounces off the wall and out of my grip. My hands buzz like beestings all the way to my elbows. And there's not the tiniest dent in the wall.

“I guess that'll hold,” he says.

“Yeah, I'd say it's pretty solid.” I shake my hands out and smile at him, proud of our work. He's not smiling.

I realize why. For a while there, I forgot the reason for all this.

It's going to be my prison every month, maybe for the rest of my life.

A
t the end of the school day, Juliet gave me a naughty smile when she met me at my locker. That smile meant just over fifteen minutes of fun in the room over the stairwell. Except, as great as kissing her is, the closer we get, the guiltier I feel. “You okay?” she asks after pulling away a little.

“Better than okay,” I say. “Why?”

“You seem distracted.” She lifts my wrist and pushes the button on my watch that makes the time glow. “I have to go. My father's probably already waiting for me out front.”

I walk with her to the entrance in B-wing, holding her hand. She stops before we turn the corner into the lobby. “Say good-bye here. My dad may be watching.”

“You could always tell him I'm just a friend.”

She smiles. “He'd know I was lying.”

I shrug. “Fair enough.” We lean in for a last kiss, then she hurries to the door. I go right up to the corner of the wall, trying to peek around it to watch her leave.

“You're seriously going to make me vomit.”

Heart attack! I spin around fast enough to get whiplash. Claire is sitting on the floor of the hallway about ten yards away, her back against the wall and her legs out in front of her.

My hands are on my chest. My heart is pounding from the quart or two of adrenaline running through my body. “What the—”

“I'm not kidding,” she says. “That was completely nauseating. No offense.”

“Why are you sitting in the hallway spying on people?”

“I'm not spying on
people
. I'm spying on
you
. And I'm not even spying. You're late. I've been waiting for you almost half an hour, and if that wasn't bad enough, I have to sit through a creepy peep show, too.”

“Hey, I never told you to watch. And it's not like we were going wild here in the hallway.”

“Yeah, well. It was more than I needed to see.” Her eyes are half closed and a little red around the edges.

“What's going on?” I ask.

“Let's just get out of here and I'll tell you on the way home.” She drags herself to her feet and swings her backpack up, making sure it hits me in the stomach before settling it over her shoulder.

We're on the narrow black asphalt path that goes by the tennis courts, and I feel really bad for Claire. “What exactly did she say?” I ask.

“Just what I told you. ‘We don't have anything in common' and ‘I don't mean this in a bad way, but you're really too young for me.' What difference does that make?”

“Wait, she called and told you this, or she texted you?”

“I just
said
. She texted. She didn't even have the decency to do it in person.”

“Would that have been any better?”

“Yes. I don't know, maybe not. But it would have been a little classier, more personal. I mean, seriously.
Texting
a breakup?”

“That's pretty cold.” When we come to the end of the path, we go left on Judson. Instead of splitting off on Summit, tonight I'll walk her all the way to her house and go home from there, unless she wants me to stay and keep her company.

She lets out a long breath. “Remember we were just talking about how amazing it is that we're both in relationships?” She shakes her head. “I should've known better. Oh, well. One down, one to go.”

“Thanks for the optimism, but I haven't given up yet.”

Claire lets out a short breath, like
huh
. “Oh, really? And so, what'd you decide to tell her about your little secret?”

“I'm still thinking about it.”

“You're going to end up breaking up with her. You'll have to.”

“Not if I can help it.”

She nods over and over, like she agrees. “Okay. But just a little advice from someone going through it this minute: if you're going to do it, do it soon.”

I'm not sure if she's saying that from a misery-loves-company feeling or if she's so unhappy that she has a bleak attitude toward everything.

“Considering how
you
feel now, I'm surprised to hear you advising me to break up with her at all,” I say.

“If we had been together longer before she dumped me, it would have hurt even worse. I'm just saying: Don't drag it out. If it has to die, kill it fast.”

She pulls up her hood and covers her head. I take it as a signal that she doesn't want to talk about it anymore. That's fine, because I don't, either.