“And this is what all the sneaking around lately has been about? And why me and your dad weren’t allowed to meet her?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, high school’s over in a couple weeks. You’ll go up to Ithaca, and it’ll be a whole new beginning. Just remember how crappy you feel right now, and treat the next girl better.”
Daniel nodded. He’d hoped for some other answer but was starting to see there wasn’t one. He grabbed some more cheese and went up to his room, then stopped at the foot of the stairs. “Let’s go to Boaz sometime this weekend.”
“Sounds good,” his mom said.
She couldn’t get his smell out of her bed. Misty had snuck Daniel into the apartment enough times that the faintest essence of him lingered on her pillows and sheets. She used to love that. She drifted to sleep, feeling close to Daniel even while he was miles away. Then Misty learned that once he got home, the boy she dreamed of was just a suit Daniel pulled off and hung in the closet.
She’d washed her sheets twice, scrubbed the mattress with Formula 401, but his scent lingered. At least she imagined it did. Misty had started sleeping on the floor. Only soft humans needed soft beds, but it pissed her off, anyway. This was her room. Even after lying to her for months, even after she’d torn his grinning photo off the wall and thrown away every little gift he’d given her, Daniel didn’t have the courtesy to leave.
Lying in the hushed dark, Misty twisted and kicked to form a warm nest in the pile of dirty clothes. She stared at the fairy wings hanging above the bed. Months ago, she’d pinned them up there by their shoulder straps. It was very sixth grade, and Misty woke up most mornings speckled with glitter, but she’d liked watching them turn slowly, silently overhead.
Misty rolled over but couldn’t forget the wings were there. A tear snuck through her squeezed-shut eyelid. She didn’t understand how Daniel could have been that cruel, to make her believe she could fly.
“Quit,” Misty hissed at herself. She would not cry over some hand-licker boy. Climbing onto her bed, Misty yanked her wings down. One of the wires bent as she shoved them into the closet. Misty told herself she didn’t care. Grabbing her cell phone, she called Val.
“Hey, baby,” Val mumbled. “Can’t sleep again?”
“Let’s go shift in front of somebody. See what happens.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.” The thought alone made impish giggles rise like bubbles, effervescing Misty’s black mood.
There were several seconds of quiet, only the gentle static of the open line. Finally, Val answered, “I’ll call Eric.”
In the darkened room, Misty found some jeans and pulled on her boots. Their leather was as battered as she felt, but a hell of a lot tougher. Buckling them, she crossed the short hall to rouse Marc.
Performing the ritual, Misty was the last to shift. While the pack raced around her legs, she beat her feet against the earth and screamed, “Want to be a wolf! A wolf!”
The bass throb, low enough to make reality shudder, filled her head. She let go of his name, his scent, and the way he laughed. Misty dropped to all fours, and nothing was left of her tangled emotions except a smoldering, voiceless anger spreading to all humans.
The hospital’s parking deck glowed, harsh light against white concrete. Warm food smells drew the pack. Three medical students, their voices shaky and too-fast from caffeine, sat in a car cramming down an after-midnight dinner of cheeseburgers.
Eric slipped into human skin and out of the shadows. The white-coated students didn’t notice him until he kicked one of their side mirrors off, sending it skidding across the deck. The woman in the passenger seat yelped. Calmly, Eric walked around to knock the driver’s side mirror off too. Before he could, the man behind the wheel jumped out. Big and quick, he grabbed Eric’s arm.
“Little shitheel, what the—”
Eric shifted, and suddenly the man was holding a wolf’s paw. When Eric snapped at the air, the man cringed against the car. Even though the door stood open, he couldn’t think enough to dash back inside.
The rest of the pack emerged. Boots thudded on the hood, then claws scratched against its metal. They growled at the two women inside, spit dripping to the windshield. The woman in the passenger seat screamed again, covering her head with her arms. The one in the back just stared.
Pushing it a little further, Misty slunk into the car. She ate the half-finished burger off one student’s lap. The human started sobbing. Ignoring her, Misty dropped to the floor and ate some fries that had spilled around her feet.
Done with her meal, Misty let out an echoing yip, bounded out of the car, and the pack vanished back into the witching hour.
They shifted in front of a man dragging trash from a bar’s alley door and some kids on a street corner, people nobody would believe, who wouldn’t believe it themselves when daylight came. None of the hand-lickers attacked, and only a couple thought to run. Watching the pack remove their human masks, the hand-lickers’ minds jammed. If the pack had actually been hunting, they would have brought down dozens.
The mushrooms began wearing off, and Misty remembered Daniel’s name. The way he laughed. She found herself trapped in human skin by human thoughts, but the memories didn’t cut as sharp as they had a few hours earlier.
They headed back to the furnace. Eric led the way with Val at his side, Misty and Marc a few steps behind. Eric glanced over his shoulder at Misty. “Those things were hunters once,” he said. “They’ve traded spears for cities, turned soft. I never knew how soft. How unfit to rule.”
Safe inside the furnace grounds again, the pack stretched across the cool grass to snatch a few hours of sleep before school. Misty had almost drifted off when Marc whispered, “Hey. Misty?”
“Hm?”
“I thought you didn’t even want to prowl anymore. Now you’re dragging us out of bed just to scare people.”
Eric and Val lay curled together a short distance away. Misty listened to their steady, sleeping breaths mingling. “Nobody made you come,” she said.
Marc shrugged. “But I don’t have anything else to do. You had a bunch of other plans, going to Paris and stuff.”
“Well, plans change.” Misty didn’t want to talk about this.
“You don’t need Daniel to go to Paris. You want to go, get on a plane and go.”
“Shut up.” Jerking off the ground, she cocked her fist back. “You don’t know a damn thing about it.”
“Fine. Sorry.”
“Only talked about that stuff because he liked talking about it. What am I going to do in Paris? Go to a bunch of museums?” Misty sat staring into the darkness around them. Then, getting to her feet, she walked away from her brother.
She walked the railroad tracks to the blast furnace. Misty always felt small and timid at the base of the brick and coiling steel tower. She could almost feel the rot-eater god gazing down at her from above.
She started to climb, rising above the canopy of pine trees to the highest catwalk. Ducking into the mouth of the exhaust vent, Misty sat down where Daniel had first kissed her.
I’ve thought about, like, backpacking through Europe or something.
It had been a sad fantasy, pretending she liked being a stray. That she didn’t even want a home; she wanted to go see the world.
Misty let out a weak snicker. It suddenly struck her that Daniel was headed to law school, not Italy. Chasing adventure through exotic lands had been just as much make-believe for him as it had been for her.
High school was almost over. Misty and Daniel had spent the twilight of childhood together, the last days they had left to play dress up and become anything they wanted. A shooting star could put on wolf skin. A stray could insist she was actually a fairy. And when that got boring, they’d act like fearless explorers instead. The only difference between her and Daniel was that Daniel never forgot it was just a game.
Her legs were asleep when Misty crawled out of the vent. She walked around to the other side
of the catwalk. Under the lightening sky, she could barely see the outlines of her pack.
She depended on them, and, just as important, knew they depended on her. In the natural world, lone wolves didn’t survive very long. Her pack was a wolf’s protection and purpose. Even if it left a small hole inside her, all the silly daydreams she had to give up, Misty knew she belonged here.
CHAPTER 19
Prom came and went. Daniel spent the evening playing RPM:
Quarter Mile with Fischer.
After church that Sunday, his family drove an hour north to the outlet stores in Boaz. Daniel got gloves, wool socks, and a coat so thick, he could hardly put his arms down. He balked at the poofy knit caps, though, telling his mom he’d rather lose an ear to frostbite than walk around in anything that stupid.
The joke made him remember the first night he’d met Charlie Say What. He’d been scared for Misty; she barely came up to the monster’s chest. She talked about her mom, though, drawing a story out of Charlie about his own parents.
Daniel shook the memory out of his head. He’d chosen. He’d left all that behind.
His parents also bought him sheets and matching pillowcases, a brushed-steel touch lamp, and a desktop CD player. Daniel didn’t need any of that stuff; his old lamp and CD player worked fine. But his parents wanted him to have some new things when he got to Cornell.
At school, teachers treated Daniel like a thug. His old friends treated him like an outcast, and the outcasts treated him like a traitor. He went through most days without speaking a word to anybody.
With isolation came a slow clarity. Daniel had plenty of time to think about the fire, the double-edged gifts of Amanita muscaria, and how much control the wolf had seized by the end. Daniel had gone searching for answers about who he was and almost lost himself completely.
But even with that gut-tightening, hand-trembling realization, Daniel would sit in class, obsessively running his tongue over short cuspids and dull premolars. He didn’t like seeing himself in the mirror. His reflection seemed repulsive, like he was covered in burns.
Four months of shifting skin had left Daniel a stranger to his own humanity. The rest of the pack had been at it before him, and if Daniel had neared the point of no return, they were forging even further.
In the mornings, the pack leaned against one another around their picnic table. Daniel rarely heard any of them speak. They just watched the hand-lickers with wary eyes.
Misty usually slept through government class. It meant she wasn’t causing trouble, so Mrs. MacKaye was happy to ignore her. Her appearance became more and more savage. The second week before finals, she wore the same clothes three days in a row, steadily accumulating grass stains and splatters of mud. Not only did Misty spend most nights prowling, she must have started sleeping among the tall weeds at the furnace.
Thursday, Daniel waited outside the classroom for Misty. He needed to try talking to her again. He couldn’t let her destroy herself over him. When Misty saw him, there was no more expression in her eyes than if somebody had left a chair sitting in the hallway. The hair on one side of her head was getting matted.
“Look, I—”
Misty stepped around him and kept walking, heading to the cafeteria. Daniel kept on her heels.
“Misty, please.” It felt good to say her name again. “You’re really starting to worry me, okay? You look like hell. When was the last time you slept in an actual bed?”
“You better go before the pack sees you.”
“I don’t care about them. And since when did you? What about Europe? About everything else you wanted to do besides prowl?”
“Changed my mind.”
Fear hardened into anger. Daniel grabbed her arm. He had an urge to shake her. “Look, I’m a douche bag. I am. But I still know you’ve got a lot more to offer than spray-painting walls and eating fucking garbage.”
“You don’t know anything about me.” She yanked free. “You don’t know what I’ve got to offer. You don’t even know Marc’s behind you.”
Daniel hadn’t been paying attention to the whirl of noise around them. Suddenly, he noticed the dull crack of thick rubber soles. He turned and almost bumped into Marc.
“Leave her alone.”
“Relax. I’m just—” When Daniel touched Marc’s chest, it set Marc off. Slapping his hand away, Marc grabbed him around the neck and chest, pinning one arm.
“You don’t tell me what to do. You don’t touch me.” Marc’s lips pulled back into a snarl. Daniel would have laughed if he’d thought Marc was mimicking a wolf. But walking upright, speaking human language, was the facade now. The tic revealed how thin it had become.
“Quit it, Marc,” Misty said.
Daniel tried to twist away, but Marc held tight. Eric and Val edged in from either side. They wanted to hurt him. Daniel raised a foot to keep Eric back when Misty snapped, “Marc!”
Her brother let go. Daniel coughed and staggered a couple steps. People had started chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” around him. Eric led Marc and Val through the crush of bodies. None of them glanced back at Daniel. Only Misty lingered.
“I won’t stop them next time,” she whispered before turning to follow her pack.
The idiots were still chanting, “Fight! Fight!” even though Daniel was alone in the circle. He had to vanish before a teacher came rushing up. Shoving through the crowd in the opposite direction as the pack, he ducked his head and pretended he didn’t know what was going on. People laughed. “Got beat down, bitch.” Daniel ignored them.
The hushed corridors of books made the library feel like a drowsy wood in the center of always-humming school. Since his exile from the pack, it had become his sanctuary.
Daniel set his bag on one of the tables but didn’t sit down. He wandered, thinking about the evening after the fire. Misty had seen how serious their game had become. Daniel had convinced her to keep playing. He could have told her, could have told all of them, that they could be anything besides wolves ranging through a rusted-out steel town. Misty had loved and trusted him. The whole pack had. They would have listened.
His moment of greatness had come, not a diploma or money but true greatness, and Daniel had squandered it. All he had left were the Milestone towers of Cornell.
The past few weeks, he’d let go of everything he’d never had in the first place, returning to his destined path. Daniel didn’t know if he wanted to follow it anymore, but he was, because it felt safe and familiar. Now, Daniel realized the penance for cowardice would be watching Misty letting go too. She traveled in the opposite direction as him but for the same reasons.
Masks from a decades-ago school play decorated the wall above the drama section. The sun had faded their painted lips and cheeks. Splits in the papier-mâché revealed yellowed newspapers beneath. Daniel skimmed the shelves. The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Reaching up, almost afraid to touch it, he slipped the slender volume from its place and sat down on the carpet.
Through the forest have I gone, but Athenian found I none, on whose eyes I might approve this flower’s force in stirring love. Night and silence—Who is here? Weeds of Athens he doth wear: This is he, my master said, despised the Athenian maid; and here the maiden, sleeping sound, on dank and dirty ground. Pretty soul, she durst not lie near this lack-love, this kill-courtesy.
All the other characters kept silent, just words on the page. But Daniel heard Puck’s galloping rhymes in Misty’s voice and birdsong laughter.
On top of every other regret, Daniel wished he could have seen her kicking the dust off four-hundred-year-old lines, before gossip, lies, and hard lessons turned her snarling and suspicious. In his imagination, she bounded through the play’s enchanted forest, completely fearless of the real world looming just beyond the footlights. No wonder she’d beaten all the boys for the part.
Churl, upon thy eyes I throw all the power this charm doth owe. When thou wak’st, let love forbid sleep his sea
t on thy eyelid.
CHAPTER 20
A week ago, Andre Swoopes, who’d never said two words to Keith before, had asked if he could DJ his party. That’s when Keith realized the thing, what Angie had dubbed their Freak Out Before Finals, was growing even bigger than he had imagined.
Bigger and a lot more expensive. Keith had already burned through the cash his parents had given him and begun dipping into his savings account, years’ worth of summer jobs and birthday gifts, to spend it on food and the loudest sound system he could rent. Like Angie had said, though, the party needed to be wild enough to make people forget every other party in the past four years, to make them remember Keith for the rest of their lives. That was worth more than money.
Tomorrow was the night, and Keith only had one more task left. Before, he’d show up at a party, see a cooler overflowing with beer, but never wonder how it got there. Keith wasn’t half-stupid enough to ask his parents to buy alcohol for him. Luckily, Spence knew a guy named Charlie Say What, who could help them out. After school, he and Scotty drove with Keith to Center Gardens Apartments on Fifteenth Avenue.
“All right, whatever you do, don’t stare. He’s real sensitive,” Spence whispered, knocking on the door.
“Sensitive about … oh …”
A gigantic man opened the door. He had nubs of pink scar tissue where his ears should have been. But Keith had clawed his way to the mountaintop. One more ogre wasn’t going to keep him from the peak. Meeting the man’s eyes, he nodded when Spence introduced him. They walked inside and started talking price and product.
“You have anything better than Natural Light?” Scotty asked. “Rednecks drink that stuff. We aren’t going to a cockfight.”
“What I got is what I got,” Charlie rumbled. Keith suspected that, if they did want to go to a cockfight, he could help them out there, too.
They bought eight cases of Natural Light and some cheap cognac, enough to get the Orr cousins and half the girls who came swinging naked from the rafters. Scotty bought a little weed, too.
Unleashed Page 19
