Secrets and Shadows (11 page)

Sophia backed away from the table, watching the food fight grow (and narrowly missing becoming col ateral damage).

“Cur?!” Max growled, suddenly in the aisle. He plucked something off of Pietr’s tray and hurled it, his eyes bright, mouth curled so wickedly at one corner the end of his lips nearly touched his eye.

I felt the impact as a glob of mystery meat smeared across my face.

Cat twitched, grabbed a napkin in one hand and the back of my neck in the other. “Wipe that look right off your face,” she snarled, swiping the offensive goo away from my mouth and nose with a heavy hand as she shot a warning look at Max.

A food fight
and
exfoliation. Not what I’d imagined as a suitable combination any day.

I snagged a fistful of Cat’s hair and wrestled her to below table level. She total y let me do it.

“What the—?” I asked, seeing peas fly overhead.

“There is something in the food. A strange scent.”

“Coriander?” I asked. “That sets me off.”

She grinned. “
Nyet
. Something—I don’t know—but it seems strange, as if a foreign compound was introduced.”

“Like a drug?”

“I can’t be sure. But I would not eat the cafeteria food.”

“Amen.”

There was an earsplitting whistle.

Coach Mac was on the scene. A few more globs of food flew, and the whistle blasted again.

“Cease and desist!” Perlson’s voice reverberated through his megaphone. “We wil not have such behavior at Junction High!”

There was a smattering of laughter.

He redoubled his efforts. “Our Junction Jackrabbits do not behave this way. We wil determine who started this and they wil receive the appropriate punishment.”

Cat sat up, rol ing her eyes.

Max settled beside me, draping his arm across my shoulders, grinning at Pietr possessively. Sly as the Devil himself. “Hey, Red,” he acknowledged Amy. “You’re rockin’ that T-shirt.”

“The name’s Amy,
cur
,” she said, something more than defiance lighting her eyes.

Marvin grinned at the verbal slap and Max snorted.

As Sarah worked on cleaning him up, Pietr resumed watching the clock.

Derek breezed over, perfectly clean. Where the heck had he been to miss the barrage?

“Jessica,” he said, clearly ignoring Max as he sprawled across me. “May I speak to you, please?”

“Umm…”

Max yawned and released me, making it clear that Derek was no threat. Cat watched my face and although Pietr kept his eyes on the clock, his fingers began to tap the table.

“Sure.” I slid into the aisle.

Derek slipped his arm around my waist. “Walk with me.”

I did.

“Look, Jessica. I real y like you. You know that. But I’m starting to think the Rusakovas are a bad influence on you. They start a lot of stuff. You’re a good girl, and I don’t want to see you fal ing in with the wrong crowd.”

I snorted. “Derek, you don’t know me as wel as you think.”
I wrote a scathing anti-jock article for the
school paper. I’m moonstruck over a teenage werewolf who’s probably going to do the horizontal
mambo with my psycho best friend. I’ve broken into a church and killed a mobster in self-defense. And
my grade point average has fallen into C territory.
“I’m not as good as you think I am. Life around me

—it’s not normal.
Seriously
.”

He grinned, dimples so deep they must’ve jabbed into his jawbone. “You’re nothing I can’t handle.”

Chal enge glinted in his eyes. “You’re not as bad as you think,” he whispered, backing me against a wal , arms boldly bracketing my body. “And if you want to be bad, you can certainly be bad with me.”

I shuddered, watching his pupils enlarge, eyes darkening just before he closed them and pressed his mouth against mine, silencing my protest.

Someone cleared their throat and Derek pul ed back from me, fingers tight on my upper arm as he swung around to see who dared interrupt. My eyes opened and I saw Amy and Pietr standing across the hal way, students rushing between us, released from the cafeteria.

Amy glared at Derek with al the venom she had, hands bal ed into fists by her hips. She hadn’t had a problem with me liking Derek until Pietr showed up. It seemed he’d changed everything.

Pietr was staring.… I blinked. At my pendant.

“What are you looking at?” Derek flared, his gaze jumping from Pietr’s daring eyes to my neckline.

“Wait,” he commanded as I moved to tuck the amber heart back beneath my col ar. My fingers twitched and paused. I looked at Pietr.

Pietr’s eyes slid to Derek’s—cool and uncaring.

“Is this yours?” Derek snarled, slipping his hand between the pendant and my col arbone, throwing the words at Pietr.

Pietr watched him, stil as stone.

Derek shook my arm, and I faced him. “This is his leash—his choke chain. You’re smarter than wearing some necklace he gave you while he’s
dating
Sarah.”

I looked down.

“Aren’t you?
Dammit!
” There was a snap and I gasped, feeling the slender chain give way under Derek’s grip. He hurled the pendant at Pietr.

In one fluid move Pietr had the pendant—my heart—in his hand, his eyes never leaving Derek’s incensed face.

“Get this through your thick skul , Rusakova. She’s not yours. Not anymore.”

My stomach knotted, my chest so tight it was hard to breathe.

With a growl, Derek towed me away.

Pietr final y real y watched me.

Leaving.

Derek deposited me at my next class. I fought the whole period to concentrate on anything but the fact that Derek had achieved what Pietr had wanted.

Derek had made my split with Pietr undeniably clear.

In social studies class the next day Pietr sat in the back of the room instead of the spot beside me in the front row. Derek took the empty seat, saying he thought his grades would improve if he sat closer to the teacher and someone as smart as me.

I wondered what that implied about the intel igence of our footbal team members since I was only pul ing B’s and C’s at best and he original y sat with
them
.

Derek took ample notes throughout class, even circling a phrase Mr. Miles repeated twice that I somehow overlooked. I was usual y more together in Mr. Miles’s class, but sitting beside Derek was like sitting beside the sun. I couldn’t help noticing how he shined.

When the bel signaled the end of class Pietr brushed between Derek’s desk and mine, heading straight for Mr. Miles. I tried not to eavesdrop, but the temptation was too great. Slowly I put away my pen. My pencil. My notebook. My textbook. My ears perked for any bit of their conversation.

My resolve to establish a new normal excluding Pietr had wavered almost as soon as I’d caught sight of him again.
Stupid heart. Stupid girl.

“I do not change service learning assignments without need, Mr. Rusakova.” Mr. Miles looked grave.

Change his service learning assignment? My throat constricted. Sure, Pietr and I didn’t actual y talk during service learning anymore, but it was stil better to have him nearby than not. Most of the time.

When it didn’t hurt me.

Oh, hel .

Pietr glanced over his shoulder at me, peeved I was stil not out the door. Derek’s buddies passed by, slapping him on the back, jostling and joking with him. Each tried in his own way to coax Derek away with them—away from
me
.

I was no cheerleader. I was much farther down the social food chain. Nobody wanted a footbal jock dating an editor of the school paper.

Derek finished loading his backpack and propped himself against the neighboring desk, waiting for me.

I invented reasons to stay. I rearranged my pens and pencils. I adjusted my stack of textbooks, ordering them neatly by period. I straightened my notebooks. Everything I’d put away, I took out and redid, buying time.

Derek waited, beaming. Handsome, strong, charming. Impossible to ignore.

Pietr leaned toward Mr. Miles, hands ruffling against stacks of papers as he spoke softly.

Mr. Miles frowned and shook his head. “I certainly don’t change service learning assignments because of a lover’s spat. Imagine how often I would be rearranging things if I did.”

of a lover’s spat. Imagine how often I would be rearranging things if I did.”

Pietr hung his head.

Derek’s mouth slid into a smirk. “Come on, Jessica.” He straightened, shouldering his backpack. “We don’t want to be late.”

As cool as it was that Derek used “we” to refer to me and him—
together
—I couldn’t leave. Not yet. Two months ago I wouldn’t have given Pietr Rusakova a second glance if Derek had shown any interest in me.

But he hadn’t. “I’m sorry, Derek. I have to talk to him.”

“Don’t waste your time. Sarah wil give him whatever he wants—
if
you know what I mean.”

I did.
Everyone
did.

“But you”—he set a hand on my desk, so close I could smel the cinnamon scent of his breath—“you have
higher
standards.”

I wanted to disagree, stand up for Sarah and say she and I were cut from the same cloth. But it was such a lie. The truth was I couldn’t even afford a yard of what Sarah’d been cut from.

Instead of disagreeing with Derek, I said, “Go on. I’l catch up to you later.”

He shrugged, not worried. Derek was top dog at Junction High School.

Before the werewolves moved in.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can say that would make me change your service learning assignment.”

Pietr groaned.

I stood and slung the backpack over my shoulder, heading for the door. I’d just taken a position outside in the hal way, my back cooled by a locker, when Pietr stepped out. My stomach tightened, quivering in anticipation.

He knew I was there before I said anything.

“Why are you doing this?”

Mr. Miles closed the classroom door. Students completed the race to class, leaving us alone in the hal way.

Pietr stood silent, looking down at me.

“I don’t know what to do,” I confessed. “I thought—when I had time to think—we’d come through everything stronger. I didn’t expect
this
. You choosing Sarah, Derek choosing me.…”

“You said a girl wil know when she’s not wanted. She’l move on,” he said, shoving my logic back at me.

The logic I hoped would work on Sarah. It hit me in the chest, a strike to my heart that left me gasping.

“I’m not—you don’t—oh.
God
.” My hands covered my ears, but it didn’t matter. His words spun in my head, mixing with my racing pulse. Like Rio’s hoofbeats thudding at ful gal op.

“
Eezvehneetyeh
. I’m sorry, Jess. It’s for the best.”

“God! How can you just”—I fought for breath, for words, for hope—“how can you
hurt
me like this?”

Red seeped from his pupils to stain the edges of his irises purple. He grated the next words out, saying, “Things. Change.”

“I know that, Pietr. Things change, life goes on, it’s not you it’s me, al ’s fair in love and war … boys become men—or more … or is it
less
, Pietr?”

I stepped forward, closing the distance between us for a heartbeat before he closed his glowing eyes, clenched his jaw, and stepped back.

“Pietr. I
know
you’ve changed. But what I saw
then
wasn’t half as horrible as what I’m seeing now.”

Opening his eyes once more, he avoided looking into mine.

“You want to know what makes a man a monster?
This
.” I waved a hand at the thin space between us.

Stoic, he took it. Where had his fire, his
fight
, gone? I’d seen it the night of his seventeenth birthday. I’d been both mesmerized and terrified by it. Now al I wanted was some glimmer of that strength, some hint of that passion pointed in my direction.

I dropped my backpack. “Don’t you feel
anything
for me, Pietr?” I lunged and hooked my hands over his shoulders, stretching to cover his mouth with mine, wil ing my lips to do what words would not.

He pushed me away. Voice strangling, he replied, “
Eezvehneetyeh
. I’m sorry, Jess. Take care of yourself.” He stormed away, red eyes flashing.

I didn’t have the heart to watch him go—couldn’t bear that he wouldn’t look back.

I wound up late to biology, struggling to cool my heart. I was fine until I noticed the dissection trays and pins.

Amy was at our station, carving up the detached head of a pig. My world wobbled and I was back at that night, in the old park as Nickolai’s head was torn free of his body.

* * *

Again.

I fumbled with the toilet paper dispenser and tore free a wad of the rough stuff to wipe my mouth, tossing it into the bowl before I closed my eyes and flushed.

The door to the bathroom squeaked open and I tried to regain control of my swirling stomach. No good.

I lurched forward and heaved more of my guts into the waiting water.

“Jessie?” Amy’s voice froze me, though my insides quivered mutinously. I flushed and rustled through the contents of my purse for mints.

“Jessie!” She pounded on the stal door. “What’s wrong?”

That was Amy: straight to the heart of a matter—no
How are you doing?
when she could guess by the sound and the smel that I was far from okay. Hoping the mints worked, I stepped out, purse dragging behind.

“Ohhh.” She wrinkled her nose and looked me over. “You smel almost as bad as you look.”

I reached into my pocket, digging for my worry stone. Its touch did little to combat my twisting stomach.