Claire De Lune (24 page)

Zahlia, what’s going on? Matthew will see us!
It was the first time Claire had needed to communicate the way the rest of the wolves did, since her lupine mouth made speech impossible. It felt as natural as talking, and Claire’s confidence grew.

Watch yourself, Young One.
Zahlia’s warning echoed off the trees. Claire laid her ears flat against her head. She hoped Matthew hadn’t heard that
.
He would notice that she was missing any second—she had to get back into her human body. Zahlia took a step forward, stalking her.

What are you talking about? I’m trying to save my mother. If Matthew sees you, it’ll screw up everything! Why didn’t you just call me back? Can’t we talk later?
Claire could smell her own fear and frustration. Her confusion. It made her smell weak.

Zahlia, upwind, caught the scent, too. She gave a little leap, bounding farther into the clearing. At the same moment, Matthew called out.

“Claire? You okay over there?”

Zahlia took advantage of Claire’s distraction and launched herself at Claire.

You. Stay. Out of this.
Zahlia growled, and pressed closer, knocking Claire into the car.
Your mother has made more than her share of mistakes, and you are following in her footsteps. If you
don’t back off, I will be more than willing to let that
boy
pay for your errors.

Claire crouched low, her shoulder aching where it had slammed into the wheel well. A guttural rumble tore against her throat, and in spite of her confusion she tensed to spring, ready to defend herself.

Zahlia, what is going on with you? I’m trying to ask for your help. Why are you pissed? I don’t understand!

Zahlia squared off against Claire. She panted in anticipation, her hot breath washing over Claire’s face. It reeked of the hot-pepper scent of fury.
I’m helping you by not crushing you here and now. Consider yourself warned.
Zahlia turned and streaked off into the woods.

Crouched behind the metal bulk of the car, Claire squeezed herself back into her human form and yanked on her clothes. She kept one shocked eye trained on the woods as she stood. Her hands trembled.

What the hell just happened?

The wolf who’d just threatened her was nothing like the person—the friend—that Claire had trusted so much. She’d been sure Zahlia would understand, that she would want to help.

And she threatened Matthew, too. Crap.

“Matthew?” she called, hurrying back to the blanket where he lay on his back in the pale glow from the lantern.

“Yeah, you okay? You were gone awhile. I was starting to
worry.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t find what I was looking for.”

Claire stared at the trees, thinking she saw Zahlia lurking in every shadow.

She leaned in and kissed him.

“Claire,” he whispered.

Claire cut him off with another kiss before he could say anything else.

“Let’s get out of here,” she murmured against his lips. She looked over his shoulder at the woods, wondering where Zahlia was. Had she gone? Claire scanned the trees. No eyes flashed in the lantern light, but the black wolf was a master at hiding from her prey.

“Sure, no problem.”

Together they wadded up the blanket and headed for the car. The drive home was quiet, with Matthew focused on the dark roads and Claire scanning the ground on each side, looking for wolves. It was too soon to press him anymore about getting in to see the lab. She knew that. She could
smell
it. But all the same, the words “please take me to see my mother” were ready to leap out of her mouth, and she struggled to keep them contained.

“Now you’re the one who seems quiet,” said Matthew.

Claire shrugged.
Yeah, if you only knew how hard I was working to stay quiet.
“A little, I guess. Hey, um, are you busy tomorrow night?”

“Yeah—I have soccer practice until late. I’m not free again until Saturday.”

Claire swallowed her disappointment. Saturday seemed like a year away. “Okay,” she said finally. “Saturday sounds great.”

Matthew lit up like a struck match. “Great! I have soccer practice until five, but after that, I’m all yours. Was there something special you wanted to do?” He squeezed her hand.

“I don’t know. Let’s just see how it goes.” Claire squeezed back.

That’s the understatement of the year.

The feel of his palm, warm against hers, sent a little ribbon of excitement sliding between her shoulder blades.

When he kissed her good night, guilt and desire and the sinking feeling that she was in too deep with Matthew spun together inside her. It would all be so much easier if she didn’t actually care about him, if he hadn’t just admitted that he thought his father was wrong.

C
LAIRE
SLIPPED INTO
the house and found Lisbeth on the couch, curled up around an enormous bowl of ice cream. “I’m home and I’m not late, and I’m going to go take a shower now, okay?”

Lisbeth squinted at her. “You haven’t been smoking, have you?”

“Huh?”

“Well, you’re rushing to take a shower … ,” Lisbeth said pointedly.

For one second, Claire felt like every other sixteen-year-old on earth. “Lisbeeeth, that’s crazy. It’s hot outside. I got sweaty. I want to take a shower. I don’t smoke! God.”
. … dess,
she added silently.

“Well, good. You’d better not. I mean, the toxins they put into those death-sticks …” She wrinkled her nose.

Claire rolled her eyes and stalked upstairs to her bathroom. She pulled off her shirt, examining the bruise on her ribs where Zahlia had crashed into her. Why would Zahlia have threatened to attack Matthew? It could have been her idea of revenge—Dr. Engle’s son in exchange for Marie. “An eye for an eye” sort of thing. But then, why would she have charged at Claire like that? And her creepy apartment … Claire couldn’t make sense of it all, but whatever was going on with Zahlia, she needed to be stopped before she got captured too.
Or before she kills a human
.

Her phone rang and Claire flipped open the phone without even looking at the screen.

“Hello?”

“Claaaaaaaire!!! Guess what? I’m coming HOME!”

It was Emily. A very excited Emily.

“I—really? Already?”

“I know I said I’d call, but when I talked to my mom, she said she’d come right out to get me, and then my battery
died—anyway, long story short, I’m coming back! And in time for Drama Club tryouts, too! I’m absolutely dying to see you, Claire. I’ll be home Friday. When can we get together? What about Saturday?”

Claire felt a half smile twitch across her mouth. She could imagine it—Emily lounging on Claire’s bed, painting her toenails, digging through Claire’s closet to try on anything new she found there.

Except that I can’t let her in my closet—not with the stuff I’ve got hidden there.
The bloodstains from her hunts had refused to come out of two shirts and one pair of pants. They were wadded up in the back corner of her closet, but Emily would find them.

And I can’t exactly try to find Mom and give myself a pedicure at the same time. Dammit.

There was no way she could hang out with Emily. In a flash, Claire understood why her mother had never had any real friends. Their lives were too different, and it hurt too much to have it constantly thrown in your face like that.

“I wish I could, but I have plans with Matthew.” At least it wasn’t a lie.

“Hey, that’s fantastic! You guys are getting pretty serious, huh?”

“Yeah, we are, actually.”

“Fine, then I’ll let you off the hook for Saturday on
one
condition: I. Want. Details. And I mean, like, boxers-or-briefs
details.” There was a wicked edge to Emily’s voice. “When can I see you?”

“Um, actually, my phone’s about to die and I’m totally exhausted, but I’ll call you, okay?”

“Oh, uh, sure.” Emily sounded let down and Claire felt responsible.

Claire hung up and flopped back on her bed. The truth of who she was,
what
she was, hung over her like a lead umbrella. Her mother had told her over and over that it would get easier, that Claire would become like an oyster.
“The truth,
chérie
, the secret—it is like a grain of sand. You must hold it inside the way an oyster does, smoothing it over and over until it becomes a jewel that makes you stronger, more valuable, even though no one can see it inside you. It will only hurt at first.”

But I’m not a damn oyster, Mother.
This truth was much bigger than a grain of sand, and it grew every day. Claire could feel herself straining at the edges, stretched to the point of explosion with the effort of keeping it contained. For what felt like the twelve millionth time, she went from feeling like being a werewolf made her superior to being certain that her condition was a curse.

She curled up on her comforter. Outside the window, the moon rose, pale against the darkening sky. She was running out of time—in only a few weeks the moon would be full, and Dr. Engle would take her mother away from her forever.

Claire pressed a fist against her mouth to muffle her whimpers and let the tears roll down her cheeks. She was so alone that she ached with it.

Hours later, Claire rolled herself up in her covers and closed her swollen eyes. She slept fitfully. Nightmares jolted her awake again and again.

Shortly after dawn finally broke, Claire stumbled downstairs and poured herself a cup of coffee. She wrapped her hands around the hot mug and wandered down the quiet hall.

Without exactly meaning to, she ended up in front of her mother’s darkroom. Even with Marie sitting in a cage at Dr. Engle’s lab, Claire couldn’t bring herself to break the cardinal rule about food or drink in her mother’s workspace. She set the coffee on the little table next to the door and went in. The computer screen stared across the room at her, like a giant eye. Claire sat down in front of it and pulled up the same file she’d tried to get into the day before.

She missed her mother. Terribly.
I wonder if she misses me as much.
Claire stared at the password box on the screen, just as an idea crept into her head. Was it possible?

Slowly, she typed the letters into the blank field and hit
ENTER
. The file opened immediately. All the words she’d tried before, and she’d never once thought that her mother would have used her own daughter’s name. The password was
Claire
, after all.

Claire blinked back the tears that had gathered in the corners of her eyes and focused on the image of the forest at night that had appeared on the screen. It wasn’t like her mother’s usual work—the photo looked rushed, unprofessional. Claire let the slideshow run, squinting at the screen. It looked like her mother had been in the woods, taking pictures from behind the protective curtain of pines. There was something out past the tree line, but it was hard to make out. The pictures had been taken without a flash, but her mother had obviously been using a slow shutter speed so that whatever she was aiming at would show up on the photo.

But her subject had been moving.

Claire stared at the blur in front of her. A jolt of recognition shot through her and Claire whimpered. She’d seen pictures of that same house before. It was where the man had been killed and left right out on his lawn.
The man the
seule
had killed.
In front of the house was a half-light, half-dark blur.
Oh, Jesus. Mom saw it happen—she was photographing the whole thing!
The pictures darkened and sharpened as Marie tried to get a clearer shot of the struggle in front of the house. Claire could only make out the indistinct shape of a very dark wolf.

As the slideshow flicked forward, the man’s body suddenly stood out as clearly as the bricks on his house. He lay perfectly still, his mangled torso hideous against the cheerful daisies that bloomed behind him. Next to her victim, the wolf blurred
as she moved away from the body.

The last two photos showed the wolf clearly. In the first she stared down at the mess in front of her, but her back was to the camera. The next photo showed her at the man’s back gate, her face mostly obscured by one of the sunflowers growing next to the fence. A dark lupine chin and a few gleaming teeth were clearly visible beneath one of the blooms, but that was it. Claire watched the two photos play over and over again, her frustration building higher with each flash of the screen. Something seemed so familiar about the pictures, the last one especially.

Claire stared at the sunflower, blocking the
seule
’s
face with its too-big center and fringe of petals. She’d never really liked that particular flower. They were corny, somehow. The image of the sunflower in Zahlia’s apartment jumped into her mind.

Zahlia never seemed like someone who would keep sunflowers around.

Wait—why
would
she … ?

Oh. Shit.

Maybe it was a coincidence. It could be a coincidence. Claire sat frozen at the computer, remembering the other things in Zahlia’s weird little office. With her stomach churning, she clicked open the Internet and looked up the name of the editor who’d been killed.

The search engine found it instantly. Dave McKinney.
The briefcase on Zahlia’s office floor—the initials on it had been DRM.

Claire pushed away from the desk, her hands clenched so tightly that her fingernails cut into her palms.

The dog. The one on Zahlia’s bed. One of the victim’s dogs had gone missing when they’d been murdered.

It had been Zahlia. She’d killed every one of those poor people.

Claire turned and vomited all over the darkroom floor.

When she quit heaving, Claire snapped off the monitor and put her head down on the desk.

How could Zahlia have killed all those people? The same werewolf who had helped her when no one else would, practiced with her in the woods—how could she be so
savage
? Oh, God, and she’d threatened Matthew.

After Claire wiped up the mess on the floor, she picked up the phone and dialed Matthew’s cell.