by Clare Hutton
From: [email protected]
Tasha:
Weird, weird things are happening here. I can’t really explain, because all the facts seem like nothing: Hailey has pointed ears, and her ring finger is as long as her middle finger, and I’m positive she sneaked out the night the wolf was howling. Does this make any sense? It was a full moon, if that helps.
I’m just going to say it, because you’re not here, and I can’t say it to anyone who *is* here — I think Hailey might be a werewolf. Which is crazy. Which is why I can’t say it to anyone. Plus I don’t want to say it because I feel bad for Hailey, who already doesn’t seem to have any friends, and I don’t want to make it worse by spreading rumors that she’s a werewolf. Tell me I’m insane.
I miss you.
xoxox
Marisol
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hi, Marisol,
You’re right, you’re insane. Which I warned you was going to happen if you got stuck out in the middle of nowhere, but even *I* didn’t expect it to happen so fast.
If you seriously want to figure out if she’s a WEREWOLF, the only thing I can tell you (other than to get some mental help), is that I was in a play about a werewolf last summer at theater camp. I can’t remember if I told you about it, but it was called “Full Moon Follies.” I played Mira, who was eventually bitten by the werewolf and had to choose whether to become a werewolf or let the mad scientist try out his potion on her. I got to sing a solo and wore this completely fabulous slinky black dress!
Anyway, in the play, werewolves couldn’t go anywhere near silver. It was like vampires and crosses — the werewolf couldn’t even touch silver without screaming in agony. If we’d had the money for special effects, his hands would have smoked, too. Why don’t you get her to touch something silver? Then, after nothing happens, you can forget this.
Or are you just kidding?
Come out of the Valley of Many Mountains, Montana, and call me — I can’t tell if you’re joking on e-mail.
Miss you!
LYLAS (Love You Like A Sister),
Tasha
Okay. Silver. The idea of werewolves was still a little hard to believe, but I liked to think of myself as a scientist, and that meant I should weigh the evidence and find out all I could before forming an opinion.
I tried looking up “how to tell if someone is a werewolf” on the Internet, but it was really unsatisfying. What I needed was a sensible guide to werewolves in daily life, like The Idiot’s Guide to Werewolf Detection. But the top results from my search either just listed what Anderson had already told me or were things like “In this Harry Potter book, Snape assigns them a paper on how to identify werewolves” and “In this movie, the vampires can sense werewolves by their smell.”
It was like people didn’t think werewolves existed in real life. Which they didn’t, of course. Probably.
That whole day, I kept an eye on Hailey at school. She looked spacey and tired. At lunch, I waved her over to the table where I was sitting with Amber and Bonnie and Lily. Bonnie gave me a funny look, but none of them said anything mean to her. Still, all she did was yawn and smile and say very little. She ate like crazy, though, as if she was totally ravenous. I couldn’t help but speculate — had transforming into a werewolf taken a lot out of her?
When I got home that evening, I decided to take action. Tasha’s advice was the best thing I had to go on so far, so I rummaged through the little jewelry box I’d brought with me from Austin and found my old charm bracelet. I used to wear it all the time, but it was noisy and got caught on stuff, so I hardly ever wore it anymore.
One of the charms was a silver star, and I slipped it off the bracelet, took a pendant off a necklace chain that was stamped sterling silver, and replaced the pendant with the star.
I went down the hall to Hailey’s room and tapped on the door. This time when she opened it, she greeted me with a smile. We’re really starting to become friends, I thought. What I was about to do would probably make her like me even more (unless she burst into flames), which I felt kind of guilty about. I liked Hailey, but I was partly being nice to her to find out if she was a monster.
“Hi,” she said, opening her door wider. “Do you want to see what I’m doing?”
“Sure,” I said, and I followed her into her room.
Tons of animals looked out from the pictures on her walls, but with the lights on, Hailey’s room was pretty cozy. The walls themselves (or what I could see of them below the pictures and posters) were painted yellow, and her bedspread was printed with sunflowers. Against one wall there was a desk with another big sunflower painted on the top. Tiny bits of color were spread out across the desk. As I got closer, I realized they were little ceramic squares. In the indent was a half-done mosaic made of the tiny squares in a swirling pattern of blue and green.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s beautiful.”
“Thanks,” she said softly. “For English, we’re supposed to do a response to a poem of our choice, and I thought this would be more fun than something where I had to stand up in front of the class and present. The poem goes: ‘Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows/Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.’ It’s by Coleridge. These colors and the circles sort of made me think of the ocean.”
“Yeah,” I said. They made me think of the ocean, too.
“I haven’t been to the ocean yet,” Hailey said, “but I’d really like to go. I definitely will sometime. I’d love to see seals in the wild.” She grinned at me.
“Um, I have something for you,” I said, suddenly feeling shy. “I wanted to thank you for, you know, making me feel welcome here. You’ve been a star.” I handed her the necklace.
“Oh!” said Hailey, surprised and happy. “Thank you!”
She put it around her neck, and when she fumbled with the clasp, I moved forward to help her with it. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but she didn’t burst into flames or scream in pain. The silver rested around her neck harmlessly.
I returned to my room feeling pretty silly. But still, a little tickle of doubt lay at the back of my mind. The silver test hadn’t seemed entirely scientific.
CHAPTER NINE
I was really ready for the weekend. I had just about stopped getting lost in the halls and figured out what was going on in my classes, but it was still hard work.
Saturday morning, Jack came downstairs all lit up and full of energy, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Hey there, ladies,” he said, tugging my ponytail lightly.
“What’s with you?” Hailey asked, amused. “What’re you doing up so early on a Saturday?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” Jack said, sweeping his arm toward the window. “The sun is shining, breezes are blowing, and it’s the perfect day to take our new pal” — he pointed at me — “on a ride and picnic.”
“Great,” I said. It was a little chilly for a picnic, but I’d noticed that people here felt like if there wasn’t frost, it was a great day to be outside. “My mom’s worried about me riding without an adult, though.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “Hailey and I take new riders out all the time. And there will be three of us, so after you break your leg, one of us can stay with you and the other can go for help.”
I stared at him.
“Kidding,” he said. “Seriously, my mom knows it’ll be fine, and she can convince your mom.”
And she did. As the only child of a single mom, I’m used to my mom checking everything out for me — she meets my friends’ parents before she lets me spend the night at their houses, and she calls to make sure I get where I say I’m going. When I go to visit my dad, it’s twice as bad, because he’s not used to having me around all the time, so he feels like he needs to be extra careful. But Molly talked and talked about how responsible Jack and Hailey were, and how experienced on horseback. She said how good they were at t
eaching new riders, and how they both had first aid certification and had done special overnight horseback trips for years. Finally, it seemed like my mom was exhausted by all the words, and she agreed to let me go.
Jack led out a brown horse with a black mane and tail and tied it to the fence, then went back to the barn and brought out a black horse and a lighter brown one and tied them next to the first one.
“This is BeeBee,” he said, patting the brown horse’s neck. “She’s very friendly and patient. We always give her to new riders because she’s calm and she likes to stay with the other horses — if you don’t tell her where to go, she’ll come right along anyway.”
I stroked BeeBee’s nose nervously. She had a white stripe down her face, and the hairs were coarse under my fingers. She blew out air and looked at me in a friendly way.
“She’s nice,” I said.
“Of course she is,” Jack said. He showed me how to use the step to climb up on BeeBee’s back and told me how to hold the reins. “This one is Shadow,” he said, swinging easily up onto the black horse. “He’s my buddy. Hailey usually rides Snowflake here.”
“Snowflake?” I said, frowning at the horse. It was undeniably brown.
“I named her when I was six,” Hailey called, jogging toward us from the barn. “I’d just seen a TV show with a horse named Snowflake in it. Thanks for saddling her up, Jack. Mom asked me to spray the rosebushes before she beds them down for the winter.”
“Hurry it up or we’ll leave without you,” Jack called jokingly. Hailey sped up, then slowed to a walk as she got near the horses. She reached for Snowflake’s bridle, and the horse snorted and stepped quickly back away from her.
“Hey, Snowflake, hey.” Hailey followed the horse, making soothing sounds, and it halted, nostrils quivering. When Hailey put out her hand again to take the bridle, Snowflake half-reared, moving backward and shaking her head.
Hailey stopped. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said, her voice shaking. “She was fine yesterday. Maybe she’s sick?”
“Take Shadow,” Jack said, slipping off his horse. “Let me try Snowflake.” Snowflake calmed down as Hailey moved away from her, and nuzzled Jack’s hand almost apologetically. Hailey reached for Shadow, and he stamped his feet and backed quickly away from her.
“That’s weird,” Jack said.
“You think?” Hailey snapped. She sounded like she was about to cry. “Snowflake loves me. Forget it. I’ll stay home.”
Jack frowned. “No, we’ll figure this out. Maybe it’s the pesticide you just sprayed on the garden. You smell sort of chemical-y. Let me hold Shadow.” He took the horse’s lead, and patted it on the neck, talking softly. After a minute, Shadow stood still, but when Hailey moved toward him again, he tossed his head and tried to pull away.
“I washed my hands,” Hailey said tearfully. “I can still smell the spray, though. If that’s what’s bothering them, I don’t know how to get rid of it.”
Jack and Hailey kept trying for a while, but Snowflake and Shadow wouldn’t let Hailey get near them, and Hailey was getting more and more upset. The horses stamped and shifted, while BeeBee held still and steady as a rock under me, looking more bored than I’d ever suspected a horse could look. I half expected her to pull out a Nintendo DS or something to pass the time.
“Okay,” said Jack finally. “Marisol, would you get down?”
“Um,” I said, peering down from BeeBee, who seemed about ten feet high. Was I just supposed to slide off her? Jack held out his hand for me to take hold of it, and I managed to scramble off, although not very gracefully.
“Hailey, you take BeeBee,” Jack said. “Whatever’s bothering the others, she couldn’t care less. Marisol, you can ride Snowflake.”
“Yikes,” I said. “Remember, I don’t know how to ride?”
They both reassured me that Snowflake was a very gentle horse. Hailey wiped her eyes with the back of her hands, and Jack attached a leading rein to Snowflake’s bridle. “All you have to do is sit,” he said confidently. I wasn’t so sure, but eventually found myself up on Snowflake’s back. She didn’t throw me off, so I guessed I was okay.
When Hailey went to mount BeeBee, the horse showed the most life I’d seen from her, shifting nervously and sidestepping. But she let Hailey get onto her back, and we were off at last.
We took a trail through the woods, and I couldn’t help shifting nervously myself. The woods seemed alive with sounds — cracking twigs, chattering squirrels, and branches blowing in the wind. I was uncomfortably aware that, even though Hailey wasn’t a werewolf (at least according to the silver test), I had definitely heard regular wolves in these woods. And there were probably bears, and maybe mountain lions, too. I like wildlife, but there aren’t any big, bloodthirsty animals in downtown Austin.
When we broke out of the woods into a sunny meadow, my worries were temporarily forgotten. The clearing was green and pleasant, and there was a huge snowcapped mountain in front of us. On the mountain, I could see three separate waterfalls. It was gorgeous.
“Nice, right?” said Jack. “Wait until you see what I packed us for lunch.”
He’d made soy cheese sandwiches with “special homemade mustard,” black bean salad, and, for dessert, double fudge brownies. It was all pretty yummy, though the mustard was definitely unique. The brownies weren’t cooked all the way through, but they still tasted delicious and chocolaty.
We were starved after the ride, and we ate and ate, then lay on the picnic blanket, totally stuffed.
“Look,” said Hailey, pointing up at a bird circling high above us. “A red-tailed hawk. It’s looking for mice.”
A little ways off, the horses stamped their feet in the shade. They were restless, and it looked like they were watching us. No, it seemed to me that they were watching Hailey. The silver star hung innocently around her neck.
Was Tasha’s idea really a good werewolf test? I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with Hailey and that the horses knew it.
The hawk swooped in lazy circles. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to think about this now. I was going to bask in the sunshine. My stomach was full, and as the sun warmed me, I felt myself getting sleepier and sleepier.
This time, the sun was shining. As I walked through the woods, I laughed at myself: There was nothing scary here.
Then I heard a rustling and the snaps of breaking wood behind me. Something big was shoving its way through the branches just off the path, and just out of sight.
It was moving fast. I could see branches thrashing as it shoved its way through, but I couldn’t see what was making them move.
A low growl split the air.
I started to run, suddenly afraid.
It was getting closer, and I knew no matter how fast I ran, it could outrun me.
The growl came again, louder, and closer still.
My heart thumped wildly inside my chest. My hands trembled and my stomach knotted with fear.
Something was coming after me, and I didn’t know how to get away. I was absolutely terrified.
CHAPTER TEN
The growl came again, and my eyes snapped open.
My heart was still pounding from the dream.
As it steadied, I realized the growl was thunder. I was lying on the picnic blanket. The sunny sky had turned black with ominous-looking clouds while I slept. I sat up, and a cold wind whipped me in the face; I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. The horses whinnied and pulled at their ropes.
Jack and Hailey were both napping on the blanket next to me. “Wake up, you guys,” I said, shaking Hailey.
She rubbed her eyes and groaned. “Oh, wow, did we fall asleep?” Once she focused, she frowned. “It’s going to storm,” she said.
Jack had woken up, too, and he looked nervously at the sky. “It’s gotten cold,” he said, shivering. “We’d better get out of here.” They both scrambled to their feet and hurriedly started gathering the stuff from our picnic.
“
What’s the big deal?” I asked, catching on to their urgency. I scrambled to get the brownie remains into my backpack. “Why are you freaking out? So we get wet.”
Hailey fastened the top of her backpack and slung it onto her shoulders. “With the change in the weather, this might be a blizzard. We need to get home fast,” she said grimly.
“A blizzard?” I said, looking back and forth between her and Jack. “It’s September. We just had a picnic.”
Jack shrugged. “It happens. We’d better head back right away.”
An icy raindrop hit my face. At the edge of the clearing, the horses were shaking their heads and pawing at the ground.
I’m not going to be able to get on her, I thought, looking at Snowflake. There were no steps out here. But what choice did I have? Jack boosted me up, and somehow I settled into Snowflake’s saddle. Jack handed me the reins and was fastening the leading rein to her harness when thunder cracked again, directly overhead.
Snowflake reared, yanking the rein out of Jack’s hands. With a surge of speed, she bolted into the woods with me clinging to her back.
We were charging straight toward branches, and I bent low over the horse’s neck, trying to shield my face. I wrapped my hands in the reins and hung on to her coarse mane, trying to squeeze her sides with my legs as tightly as I could.
Snowflake was galloping along, and each step was so jarring I felt like I was going to fly right off her back. A pine branch brushed hard against my side, and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t get any lower, and I didn’t want to see what I was going to hit. I just concentrated on staying on the horse.
Thunder rumbled right overhead. I heard my own ragged panting as the storm broke and the icy rain began to pour down over us. Snowflake tensed and began to gallop even faster. I suddenly pictured her losing her balance on this uneven ground, stepping in a hole, falling, and rolling on top of me.
For a second, I thought maybe I should let go and fall off before that happened. But then I opened my eyes. We were going so fast. There was no way I could fall off, even on purpose, without getting really hurt.
