Sisters Red (10 page)

87

"Sorry, I was a little busy fighting two Fenris. Maybe if I'd had a chance to solo before then, I'd have been able to relax long enough to pick up on pack signs," Rosie whips back.

"It's the pack mark, Rosie! How could you not know for certain--"

"Both of you calm down!" Silas interrupts. He wipes Rosie's knife on his jeans and hands it to her, then stoops to toss my still-bloody hatchet to me. I give him a dark look as I clean my own blade on my cloak.

"Arrow, Bell, Coin. A representative of each pack. Phase--he means the moon phases, doesn't he?" I mutter, dozens of Pa Reynolds's Fenris stories rushing back to me.

"Yes. And he's right--there's a full moon in about a week, which means..." Silas drifts off.

"They're after another Potential Fenris. There must be one out there now. Here, right under our noses," I finish his sentence for him. Potentials are rare, but not unheard of. A single bite, just enough to break the skin--that's all it takes to transform a Potential into a full-fledged Fenris, according to Pa Reynolds. I shudder. I've wondered far too often what it feels like to have your soul ripped away. It's not something I want to reflect on again.

We've never been able to pinpoint exactly what makes a man--or boy--able to lose his soul and become a monster. Just that it is very specific, occurs only during certain moon phases, and is important enough to make the wolves leave their territories to find him. They're drawn to him by some unrecognizable force, like a scent that humans can't pick up

88

on. They don't know exactly where and who the Potential is, but they know when he exists, and they'll scour the entire country for him.

"A Potential..." Silas frowns, nodding. "That makes sense. There's no other reason for so many packs to send members this far out."

"How many wolves will they send out to look for him?" Rosie asks. Silas and I shrug simultaneously.

"As many as it takes. They all want to add to their own packs, to be the pack to get a new member. And since Potentials are so rare, I bet every pack has members swarming every city in the state, or will soon. Once one of them picks up the trail of the Potential, the numbers will triple," Silas answers as we approach the picnic tables again.

"Great," Rosie says weakly.

In a big city, the pack keeps each Fenris in check to avoid drawing too much attention to itself. But when a wolf is sent out on its own, when
hundreds
of wolves are sent out... what's to stop them from feasting on every small-town girl they find?

"So we just hunt more often?" Rosie says, noting my expression. "We're already hunting all the time. We must've killed hundreds..."

"Ninety-three," I mutter, running my hand along a picnic table's mossy top. I shake my head. "We've killed ninety-three." Nearly a hundred wolves, yet with centuries of immortal wolves hunting, finding Potentials, and creating

89

new monsters out of them, having killed only ninety-three makes my stomach writhe. The remaining Fenris probably don't even know the difference.

I shake my frustration away and continue. "All these packs are going to Atlanta, I bet--they're having a string of murders, remember? And these are huge, old packs. Bell, Arrow, Coin... and that's assuming that the smaller packs aren't hunting as well. Sparrow is getting bigger, so it would make sense for them to hunt out here--they'll have wolves all over the region. And that's
if
the packs don't combine forces to try to get the Potential--I think at the end of the day, the Fenris care even more about creating a new wolf than they do about getting him into their own pack. There's no way we can kill them all."

"We can hunt every day. And Silas is back--he can help," Rosie says encouragingly, though I can hear the disappointment in her voice at the prospect of endless hunting. Silas nods halfheartedly as we reach his car.

"The moon phase begins next Saturday," Silas says, screwing up his face as he counts off days on his fingers. "That's when the full moon hits. So for twenty-nine days after Saturday, till the next full moon, the packs will be out in droves looking for the Potential. God, I wish Pa had known more about them..." He trails off. I wish that too, more than anything. What turns a man into a Potential seems to be some crazy code that only the wolves can decipher. Sure, we know it's a certain man in a certain moon phase, but without the

90

specifics we can't predict a Potential's emerging, figure out where he'll be, or find him before the monsters do. We might as well know nothing at all.

The sounds of the festival are loud now, invasive and far too cheery for the dark cloud hanging over my thoughts. A group of children stare at my scars. One is so entranced, she accidentally lets go of her bright green balloon, which rises and disappears into the annoyingly blue sky.

We climb into the car and sit in the stuffy air for a few moments of silence. Silas backs out of the parking lot and we weave through the crowds of people in red and green, people with no idea that a monster was in their midst. And that more are coming. Silas flicks on the turn signal and we finally escape the festival herd. We can't kill the wolves fast enough. I can't do enough. Girls will die, and a new Fenris will be changed. New Fenris hunt daily and are stronger, faster, hungrier, than any other wolf. Frustration pours over me as we turn onto our road. "So we just lose. Until they find the Potential, we just let girls die while the packs send out even more wolves every day."

"What if... what if we went there?" Silas says, swerving to avoid an armadillo.

"Went where?"

"To the city. Hunted them where their numbers are greater. Where they're congregating."

Yes, it makes so much sense. The perfect hunt, from their origin.

The perfect hunt. Too perfect.

91

"It'll never work. We can't just move to Atlanta, Silas. We can't even get an apartment. We're dead broke," I say as I run numbers together in my mind. We trudge inside; I fall onto the couch almost immediately, fingers on my temples.

"I can pay for part of an apartment," Silas says slowly, sliding into a wooden chair in our kitchen. I raise my eyebrows and Rosie makes a surprised sound in her throat.

"You want to move to the city?" I ask sharply.

"Not for good, but for a month or two, sure. I know this will kill you, Lett, if you don't go, and you're... well, you're like my family," he says quickly, glancing between Rosie and me. "I mean, I can't pay for it alone, but Pa Reynolds gave me a pretty decent inheritance. And besides, he's at Vincent's Elderly Care just inside the city. It'll give me a chance to visit with him for a while."

I rise from the couch, mind racing. It could work. It's so simple, really. But I can't believe that Silas, the one who abandoned the hunt and me for San Francisco, would be so eager to leave Ellison for the wolves. Yet he is. I am. And Rosie will go where I go.

"We still need money." But we could sell... my gaze moves to Oma March's bedroom, then to Rosie's eyes. My sister sighs and looks away, then nods at me.
Do what you need to do.
As I look at that bedroom door, a thought swims around the back of my mind: how it would feel to destroy the leader of the pack that destroyed me.

"Okay," I say breathlessly. I look at Silas. "Okay, then. Let's do it."

92

Silas nods. "I have a friend who I think can sublet his apartment to us. It won't be pretty, but it'll be cheap."

"Cheap is good," I reply. "When can we go?" I need to go fast, now that the decision has been made. I try to suppress the desire to get back into Silas's car and drive to the city immediately. Rosie runs her fingers through my hair in an attempt to calm me.

"I don't know--a week or so? Is that too soon? We should try to get out there before the phase starts, before the Fenris get
really
anxious," Silas says.

"No. No, a week sounds okay. A week." I sigh and turn to face Rosie, pulling my hair away from her fingertips. An unspoken message flashes between us.

"A week," Rosie answers softly, nodding.

93

CHAPTER SIX

Rosie

Scarlett does things now, never later. As soon as
Silas leaves, she starts packing for what we begin to call simply "the move" in an ominous tone. We talk about it with the same casualness as one talks about "the table" or "the cat" because we have a silent, mutual understanding that leaving the cottage will be easier if we do it like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just go, quickly, and don't think about it too hard.

It's difficult, but possible, to back-burner the idea of leaving our home, the place where we grew up, the rooms full of memories both good and bad; it's painful, so I think my brain naturally wants to shove the idea away instead of letting me dwell on it. But there's another part of moving that I can't ignore, a part that my mind keeps coming back to because it's exciting and nerve-racking at once.

94

I'll be living with Silas Reynolds.

The same apartment, same rooms, same shower and kitchen and floor. Where will he sleep, in relation to me? What will he think about the fact that my hair looks like Screwtape's fur in the mornings? And most important, why do I
care
about all this so much? They're questions that I can't ask anyone--not Scarlett, certainly not Silas--and so they and a million others rotate around my head, taunting me all week while I pack my bags.

It doesn't take much packing for me to realize that my bedroom is full of
things
. Pictures and old paintings and little wooden figurines that Silas and his brothers used to carve for Scarlett and me. Old things, ancient things that I can't throw away because Oma March gave them to me or because they help me cling to my few pre-attack memories. Do those things come with me? No. Of course not. Just the essentials.

But two days before we leave, I carefully wrap Oma March's green glass mixing bowls in two of my old T-shirts as my sister mutters about maps and plots prime hunting locations.

The morning of the move, Silas pokes his head through the door. "Ready?" he asks.

"Yes," we reply, so simultaneously that even I can't tell whose voice was whose.

Silas refuses to help us cage Screwtape, who hisses loudly, having long suspected something is up. I go to pick him up, trying to act like everything is normal, but Screwtape darts away. It'd probably be easier to crate a Fenris than it is to

95

crate Screwtape. The dance repeats until Scarlett and I are red in the face and Silas is laughing at us. We finally run the cat down, and Scarlett manages to toss the laundry basket over him when he's too busy anticipating his next dash.

"We could still leave him," Silas jokes--I think he's joking, anyway--as we load the howling basket of fury into the backseat of his car. Scarlett looks as though she might feel the same way as she nurses a batch of claw marks on top of the thicker Fenris scars. She climbs into the backseat of the car as Silas and I slide into the front. Silas hot-wires the ignition of the hatchback and pounds on the radio for a few minutes before it buzzes to life.

"We can't change the station, by the way," he says.

"Because you really like pop music?" I ask, wrinkling my nose as a bubbly song blares at us.

"Not hardly," Silas says. "I hate it. But last time I changed it, the car stopped. Oh, and lean away from your door--sometimes it opens randomly."

"Um... great," I say, leaning as far away from the door as possible. But this feels even more dangerous, because I'm leaning incredibly close to Silas, so close that I'm hyperaware of the fact that my sister is right behind me. My stomach twists as it fights my body's urge to fall against him. I shudder and try to shake the desire off.

"Well then," Silas says, and the car falls silent other than a pop singer's sexual grunting and Screwtape's low, deep growls. The three of us look up at the cottage as the car rumbles beneath us, and suddenly something tightens in my

96

chest. I've got the sudden urge to run back and tell the cottage not to worry, we'll be back, to stay locked up and keep the garden watered.

It's just a house. But I catch Scarlett's eye in the side mirror, and she gives me a knowing sort of look.

"Go ahead, Silas," she says in a voice that's uncharacteristically gentle. I'm relieved she said it, because I don't think I could have. Silas nods and turns to back the car up, accidentally brushing a hand against my shoulders as he does so.

"Sorry," he says under his breath, like he's whispering in church. I shake my head as Scarlett settles her long arms and legs in the backseat and uses her cloak as a blanket.

Still trying to lean somewhere between the door of death and Silas's shoulder, I stare out the window as we lumber out of town. The road is smooth, hypnotic, with the dotted lines vanishing rhythmically before us. I glance back at my sister. She's fallen asleep, and Screwtape is casting her dark looks, as if she's to blame for his predicament.

I look toward Silas, trying to appear as if I'm just glancing out his window. Really, I want to study him intensely. He's wearing one of his many nearly threadbare T-shirts, jeans that are soft from washing, wavy hair... Everything about him begs to be touched...

"You're nervous," Silas says suddenly.

"What? No!" I answer sharply. Am I that obvious?

Silas raises an eyebrow and laughs.

"It makes sense. I mean, you and Lett have lived in Ellison forever." Right... right. He's talking about the trip, not