Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (5 page)

As I followed Trey down the dingy front hallway, I had to step around and over boxes. I glanced in the living room: all of the Carsons’ secondhand furniture had been pushed to one side.

“Your dad found a new place?”

“Not exactly.” Trey paused at the foot of the stairs and leaned against the banister. He pressed his knuckles to the wood. Soft punches punctuated his words. “Trackers
nabbed a werewolf and her boyfriend two blocks over last night. They put the boyfriend in a coma and a bullet in her head. Dad wants to get out of town—at least until after the rally. Our aunt lives in Charlotte. She’s taking Noah. Dad left this morning to drive him down.”

Noah was Serena and Trey’s kid brother. I frowned. “What about you and Serena?”

A muscle ticked along Trey’s jaw. “She doesn’t trust werewolves around her kids.”

I struggled to find something to say—anything to say—but Trey gave a stiff shrug and continued speaking while I was still fumbling for words.

“Dad was able to get a week off work. We’re just going to drive until we find some place we feel like stopping. The boxes are in case . . .”

“You decide not to come back.” I tried to keep my voice level, but the words wilted at the edges. Serena was one of my closest friends. My only female friend. I didn’t want to lose her again.

Trey watched me soberly. “Kyle should think about getting out, too. By the time the rally hits, the whole town will be a tinderbox.”

I thought about the number of dagger tattoos I had seen in the park. Trey was right: Hemlock wasn’t safe for any werewolf—especially not one who had killed the former head of the Trackers.

Suppressing a shudder at the thought of what the group would do to Kyle if they ever found out, I nodded and slipped past Trey.

“Dobs . . .” Trey’s voice stopped me when I was halfway to the top of the stairs.

I turned.

“It’s none of my business, but Kyle’s a decent guy. If you’re the only reason he’s sticking around . . .”

I tried to keep the anger and hurt from showing on my face. Did Trey really think I was so selfish that I would put Kyle in danger just to keep him by my side? “You’re right,” I said softly, “it’s none of your business.”

I jogged up the rest of the stairs.

The floorboards creaked as I made my way to Serena’s room. I raised my hand to knock, but her smooth voice cut me off. “It’s open.”

Like the rest of the house, Serena’s room was in serious need of new paint, but her father and brothers had tried to make the space cheerful. A bright-pink comforter covered the bed while turquoise lace framed the window. A pair of oversized wicker lawn chairs sat in the far corner, each heaped with purple cushions. The only thing in the room that lacked color was Serena herself. Since Thornhill, she’d worn only black or gray, never the bright clothing that had always seemed like an extension of her personality.

It was as though the camp had washed her out. Or like she was trying to fade away.

I walked into the room, and my steps faltered. Serena was curled up in one of the wicker chairs and she had company.

Jason rose from the other chair. His green eyes were bloodshot and there were dark circles underneath them, as
though he hadn’t slept in days. Had he looked this worn-out yesterday at school? I racked my brain and realized I had barely seen him. We had exchanged a handful of words in the hall between classes, but that was all.

“Mac. Hey.” There was a slight, awkward catch to his voice. “I just came over to see how Ree—Serena—was doing.”

My gaze darted to Serena. “Ree?” It was a pet name—one Serena’s family used. It sounded strange coming from Jason.

Serena lowered her legs to the floor and sat up a little straighter. I tried not to notice how thin she was, how her knees and elbows were like sharp points under her clothes. Her ultrashort hair—another holdover from the camp—gave her face an elfinlike quality, and the slight hollows in her cheeks made me wonder if she had stopped eating again.

But her eyes were sharp and alert. It was a marked change from a month ago. For the first few days after Colorado—the first two weeks, really—Serena had alternated between a horrible sort of vacantness and wild, almost feral outbursts. Being back with her family had helped. There were still moments when she seemed to disappear inside herself, when flashbacks tangled with reality and left her frightened and confused, but the time between those moments seemed to grow steadily longer.

She glanced at Jason. “He was trying to drag me out. He claims going to school doesn’t count as leaving the house.”

“It doesn’t.” I stared at Jason, trying to reconcile the
sight of him in Serena’s room. “Wait—that’s
your
bike in the driveway?”

He ran a hand through his short blond hair. “Not exactly. I sort of borrowed it from the new dealership.”

In addition to owning a huge amount of the commercial real estate in Hemlock, Jason’s father owned a chain of car and motorcycle dealerships. I cringed. “Your dad will just love that.”

“He’ll barely notice.” Jason shrugged. The gray T-shirt he wore left the black dagger on his neck exposed. The tattoo was incomplete—Jason had never become a full-fledged Tracker—but it was hard to look at the mark and not think of what was happening in the park.

Jason followed the direction of my gaze. He started to lift a hand to his neck and then caught himself. A faint blush crept across his cheeks.

Awkward silence filled the room, and when Jason’s phone went off, I felt almost relieved, as though I had been saved by the bell.

He pulled out his cell and glanced at the screen. “I have to get this,” he muttered, striding from the room.

A second later, I heard his steps on the stairs.

I turned to Serena and stared.

A slightly embarrassed look flashed across her face. “What?” she said defensively, then added, “He was checking on me. It’s not a big deal. He just comes over sometimes.”

I crossed the room and sat in the chair Jason had vacated. “Jason Sheffield has been coming over? On his own? To check on you? And it’s not a big deal?”

Serena frowned. “You don’t have to sound completely shocked.”

“I’m not . . . that’s not . . .” I bit my lip. “I know Jason can be really sweet. Sometimes. But he usually hides it and you’re—”

“A werewolf?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling guilty even as the admission left my mouth. The fact that Serena was infected didn’t matter to me, but as much as Jason’s feelings on werewolves were changing, I wasn’t sure it was possible for him to do a complete 180 in a few weeks.

“To be fair,” Serena said, “I think I’m sort of a last resort. I think Jason’s just . . . I dunno . . . lonely.” She tugged at a loose thread on the bottom of her oversized gray cardigan. “You and Kyle have been kind of wrapped up in each other.” I started to object, but she rushed on. “Which is totally understandable, but it’s not like Jason has many people he can talk to about stuff that happened in Colorado or what he’s going through now. And I think it’s kind of hard for him . . . seeing the two of you together.”

I felt my cheeks flush. Before the breakout, Jason had kissed me—and said he loved me—but every time I had tried to bring it up, to make sure we were okay, he dodged the subject.

Maybe I should have tried harder, but not talking about it seemed easier. Safer. Even though the more we didn’t talk about it, the harder being around each other became. When the two of us were in the same room with Kyle, the awkwardness was almost suffocating.

“I know I’ve been spending a lot of time with Kyle,” I said. “It’s just that we have so much to figure out. . . .”

“Like whether or not he should go back to the pack.”

I nodded. “We talked about it more last night. About how we could do the long-distance thing. Kyle said it’s not really that different from one of us going away to college.”

“Except college is, like, four years, and a pack is a lifetime commitment.” Concern darkened her eyes. “And that’s something you would want? That you would both want?”

“I want Kyle,” I said, “and I want him to be happy.” But it wasn’t something I really wanted to talk about, not with Trey’s words fresh in my mind. “So Trey and your dad are okay with Jason coming over?” I asked, shifting the conversation a degree to the left. “After everything that happened?
You’re
okay with him coming over?”

“I wouldn’t say Dad and Trey are exactly okay with it. I mean, Jason did try to beat Trey to a pulp, and he stood by while a group of extremists torched our house.” Serena pulled in a deep breath and glanced down at her hands as she wrapped the thread from her sweater around her finger. “But he risked his life to help get me out of Thornhill. And given that I apparently tried to kill him, I’d say we’re probably even.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” I reached over and took the thread before she could cut off her circulation. “You didn’t know what you were doing.” Serena had been completely out of it when she attacked Jason—so out of it that she couldn’t recall that night at all. She only remembered the detention
block in scattered fragments; it was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

“Yeah, well . . . it doesn’t change the fact that I did it.” She raised her gaze to mine. “Trey told you we’re leaving?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

Serena glanced out the window. “It’s like they keep taking everything. The Trackers . . . the LSRB . . . Thornhill . . . I’m not even a threat anymore. If they wanted to take me back, I wouldn’t even be able to defend myself.”

I didn’t believe that.

Serena had saved my life during the breakout. She had been able to shift just enough of her body to maul the warden and leave her infected with lupine syndrome. According to the news, Sinclair was being held under guard in a transition house—a place where the newly infected were sent to wait out the virus’s thirty-day incubation period—while the government tried to piece together how a breakout at Thornhill could have happened. Once they were done with her, she would be shipped off to a camp where she would be just another inmate. As powerless as the wolves who had been in her care. Poetic justice.

“You saved my life back in Thornhill,” I said. “You’re not helpless.”

Serena let out a soft, skeptical snort and held up her hand. The muscles under her skin slowly began to twitch and each twitch was accompanied by the sound of a breaking bone. It wasn’t the harsh snap of a rib or femur; it was a small, delicate sound—like the noise a wishbone made.
Sweat broke out on her face and the tendons in her arm bulged like steel cables. Bit by bit, her hand transformed into something long and clawed.

But she couldn’t hold it.

Serena’s breath quickened as she let her arm fall back to her side. When I glanced down, her hand looked completely human.

She closed her eyes. “That’s it. No progress since the night of the escape. I can shift my hand and then . . .”

“Nothing.”

She nodded.

Sinclair’s cure may not have truly worked, but it had changed Serena. For the briefest of seconds, I wondered if the warden would have eventually been able to achieve her goal, but I quickly pushed that thought aside. It didn’t matter. No cure was worth the price Sinclair had been willing to pay.

“It’s strange,” said Serena, “for the first year or two after Trey and I got infected, I spent so much time wishing I could go back to being normal. But this? This feels like something’s been carved out of me. It’s like I’m hollow inside.”

She opened her eyes. “But the hollowness isn’t the worst part. The worst part is knowing they took something from me and not being able to remember them doing it. If I could remember, I’d at least know
what
they did. Instead, I keep imagining all of the things that might have happened.” Without makeup and her old clothes, Serena looked young—way younger than seventeen—but her gaze held a weight that
was ancient and tired.

As much as I hated asking her to think about the detention block, it was hard to imagine there would be a better opening. “I remembered something from Thornhill,” I said slowly, “part of a symbol I saw the night we tried to break you out. It was on a spreadsheet one of the program coordinators had. I think it could be a logo—maybe something or someone Sinclair was working with.”

I pulled out my cell and brought up the picture I had snapped in the tent. “I thought . . . if I showed it to you . . .”

“I could tell you if I had seen it, too?” Serena reached for the phone. “Most of what happened really is a blank,” she warned. “I mean, if I don’t remember finally trying to strangle Jason Sheffield . . .” Her eyes grew wide as she stared down at the picture. She gripped my cell so tightly her hand shook.

She glanced up and her gaze locked on the wall behind me.

I looked over my shoulder. Whatever Serena was seeing, it wasn’t in the room with us now.

“Serena?” I turned back to her and reached for her shoulder. She flinched, but showed no other signs of response. I wasn’t even sure she knew I was there.

The pulse in her neck beat like an animal throwing itself against a cage.

“Serena?” I said her name again, louder, as I shook her, gently at first and then harder.

Still, nothing.

“Trey!”

“Dobs?” I heard Trey’s voice a second before his heavy footfalls sounded on the stairs.

Her brother’s voice seemed to break through to Serena and pull her back. Awareness of where she was slipped through her eyes as her startled gaze darted to mine.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “There was something, but I couldn’t hold it.” She pressed the phone into my hand as Trey appeared in the doorway.

Trey took one look at Serena’s face and crossed the room in three long strides. “What happened? Are you all right?” He crouched next to her chair and glanced back at me. His gaze narrowed as though he knew, without being told, that I was responsible.

“I’m fine.” Serena tried to brush his concern away. “I just tried to shift again.”

“We agreed you’d give it a few days.”

“No,” corrected Serena, “you said you didn’t want me trying. That doesn’t mean I agreed.”

Across the room, someone cleared their throat.