Feral

by Schindler,Holly

  SS. Serena Sims.

  Claire shook in fear. She turned the hot faucet knob, groaning as the warm water washed the white bubbles of peroxide down the drain.

  She’s finding new ways to threaten me, to weaken me, to tear me down, Claire thought. She’s getting closer. Messing with my head. Playing her game—cat and mouse . . .

  She killed the faucet stream. The skin across her entire ankle turned black.

  “All clear!” her father shouted.

  “Gut me,” Claire whispered, staring at her wound. “She’s going to gut me. Just like she gutted that rat in my room. And then she can have what she wants—her old life.”

  She pulled her foot from the sink and dressed the wound again, leaving the bathroom without another glance into the mirror. She couldn’t bear to look at herself, see the evidence of what Serena was doing to her reflected in the terror she knew would be shining out from her eyes.

  Claire staggered into her bedroom. She couldn’t tell her dad about the scratches—what would she say? “Excuse me, Dad, but the cat who scratched my ankle during the funeral is actually possessed by the spirit of a girl who may not have died quite as accidentally as everyone thinks, and does not want to go off with the fog filled with the spirits of the town dead. She wants in my body, so she can get her old life back. And I’m a little afraid, now, that these scratches—black as they are—are also part of her plan to wear me down.”

  She dressed, stuffed her still-wet hair under a hat, and hurried downstairs to meet up with Rich.

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  THIRTY–SEVEN

  “Claire,” Rich said as he drove her to school, “I think maybe you should talk to my dad.”

  She chortled. “Does he have some sort of cat repellant I can use to keep them all out of my room?”

  “No—it’s just—I think maybe some of this is starting to bother you, more than you realize.”

  Claire shook her head as she hugged her red backpack. “But something’s off here. You see it. All those things Sheriff Holman missed. Why would I need to talk to your dad?” She swallowed her swelling anger, telling herself, He doesn’t know. If he only knew that I was being hunted, he wouldn’t talk to me this way.

  They pulled into the school parking lot, and Claire opened the truck door as soon as Rich parked.

  “Claire,” Rich continued, turning off the ignition. “There are too many weird things happening here and I think it’s affecting you. My dad—he has experience talking these things out. He can help you make sense of it. Of how you feel about all this, anyway. It might be good for you.”

  “I’ll be fine as soon as we figure this Serena thing out,” Claire promised. She picked up her pace, hurrying through the hallways to drop her coat off at her locker. She monopolized Mavis’s time in journalism, first discussing her blurb, then brainstorming ideas for her coverage of the dance, managing to avoid Rich.

  There’s nothing wrong with me, nothing. Serena’s got the rest of you fooled. But not me. I know things. No one can see like I do, Claire thought, grabbing her bag when the bell rang and tossing a “See you tonight for the dance!” at Rich before scurrying out of the room.

  “Wait!” he said. “Won’t I see you at lunch? What about after school?”

  “I’ll get a ride with Becca,” Claire said, before being swallowed by the crowds. All it would take would be a simple text to Becca, asking her to wait for her after the final bell. Becca wanted to be Claire’s new BFF, after all.

  When her fourth period class broke for lunch, Claire slipped her backpack over her shoulders and crept down the hallway, sliding behind the Faculty Only door that led to the basement.

  “You want to play, Serena?” she asked as she stomped straight into the first room, marked Janitors on the door. “That was a sneaky trick you pulled this morning. Now you’re going to play by my rules, on my turf. I’m in control of the next round. Which,” she added through a grin, “is going to be your last.”

  She climbed onto the dusty wooden desktop to reach the ground-level window—the same window that she had pushed shut during her first visit downstairs. She forced the window open, unzipped her backpack, and pulled out a can of tuna. She retrieved a can opener from the front pocket of her bag and ran it around the lip of the can before setting it on the sill.

  She jumped from the desk, pulling out all the cans she’d tugged from the cabinets at home—leftovers, remnants of the ice storm. Cans of tuna, ham, roast beef, Vienna sausages. Her hand grew tired as she worked the can opener, placing the smell-laden contents all over the dusty wooden desktop. She opened the final can of Spam and let the blob slide straight onto the desk. She unwrapped a small block of cheese and crumbled it across the desktop for good measure. Cat and mouse, Serena.

  Heat pouring from the boiler made the room uncomfortably hot—nearly as hot as ’Bout Out had felt when Claire had fainted.

  “Can’t stop,” Claire told herself as sweat trickled down her face and around the edge of her jaw, dripping down the front of her white blouse. “Food,” she said. “Eating—that’s all these cats want to do. Just eat and eat. Even Serena. She wants to swallow me whole. Well, here’s your food, Serena. Come and get it. Come straight to me. Me and Casey. Because Casey’s down here,” she reminded herself, running the can opener around canned white chicken. “And Casey’s on my side. He wants you to go with the fog, Serena. Casey will help me. Maybe no one else will. Maybe,” she went on, thinking of Rich, “everyone just wants to tell me things are bothering me. Bothering me! Of course having someone on my tail bothers me. But not like anyone around here knows. No one living, anyway. Casey knows, though—he knows all about you. And he’ll help me. I’m going to get you down here. And me and Casey, we’ll make sure you lose.”

  She smiled with satisfaction at the small metal circles full of food—her tasty little trap. She eased out of the room and up the stairs, opening the door a crack to make sure no one was looking before slipping into the hallway.

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  THIRTY–EIGHT

  Claire waved good-bye to Becca that afternoon as Owen’s car pulled back out of her driveway. She eyed the plastic still stretched across the back windshield of the Honda before she slipped inside the house. She raced into the kitchen, hung her coat on the hook beside the back door, and found a note that Dr. Cain had left pinned to the front of the fridge:

  Claire, his crooked handwriting proclaimed. Left new phone in your room. Be home before you leave for dance.—Dad.

  She raced upstairs and tossed her backpack onto her dresser, knocking the pale pink scarf onto the wood floor. It landed with an unexpected clatter. Claire frowned as she picked the silky scarf up, finding her new phone tangled up inside it.

  She tossed it onto her bed and plugged it into her charger. Good, she thought. I didn’t bang it up. And with a new phone, I won’t have to worry about any more texts from Rachelle.

  She attacked her closet, going through the just-in-case clothes she’d brought along with her—the dressier variety. The kind of thing she was always having to pull out so that she could accompany her father to some university event—an awards ceremony, a tea.

  She tugged out a long black chiffon skirt covered in red roses, a sleeveless red silk turtleneck, and a black drape-front gossamer cardigan to cover her arms and tie at the waist. Dressy enough to pass for formal attire, long enough to cover her ugly scars.

  As she laid her outfit across her bed, a soft knock danced against her bedroom door. She turned to find her father standing in her doorway, nervously clearing his throat as he pushed his glasses deeper into his face.

  “Just getting everything ready for tonight,” she said through a fake smile.

  “Sweeth
eart, are you sure you want to?” he asked her. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea. You’ve been at school all day—you ought to rest, take care of yourself.”

  Claire flinched against the sweetheart. Her father never called her that. The two of them weren’t pet name kind of people. It was a sign, she thought—a sign he thought she was—what was that word Rich had used? Bothered. “It’s an assignment, Dad,” Claire reminded him. “It’s not like I’m going to be out until the break of dawn. I’ll go with Rich, get what we need for an article, then be back in time to watch something good and mindless on TV. Okay?” She walked over and hugged him, smiled. She hated lying to him. But she couldn’t miss the dance. She had plans.

  “Okay,” he relented. “But call me if you have any trouble. And—stay near Rich.”

  Claire nodded. As Dr. Cain retreated down the stairs, Claire took a deep breath and flipped her laptop open, clicked into her email account. Heart pounding out a syncopated rhythm, she typed hurriedly:

  Rachelle—I’m going to tell you this, and I know you won’t believe me right off. But I know this—the same way I knew about the boy and the pencil box. You knew it, too, then, but I was the one with the power to talk. Because if you’d said it wasn’t you, if you’d pointed the finger, it just would have been he said, she said. Right? I had the power.

  I’ve got the power now. Because there’s a cat here, in town—Sweet Pea. She’s old, and she’s following me. Because I found the girl. Serena. I found her, when she was dead and eaten. I SAW her being eaten—and I saw her spirit. It fell in the cat. And the cat is following me.

  Weird things happen in this town, Rachelle. The kind of things that shouldn’t happen anywhere. Things like boys shooting themselves in basements and then haunting the school. So I KNOW this thing with the cat is real. Casey is proof that ghosts are real. Things like that happen in this place. It’s Peculiar, after all.

  So I’m going to a dance tonight. And I’m going to confront the girl in the cat. I’m going to fight it out with her. Because I can’t just wait for her to corner me. Not like last time. I have to stay in control of this thing. I have to, because then I won’t get hurt. Last time, I let my guard down, and I wasn’t in control, and I got hurt.

  This time, I’M going on the hunt. I’m going to hunt a little kitty and I’m going to make sure that everyone knows the truth about the girl inside. I’m going to show that she was killed, because it’s all too weird—her inhaler, the pocket, the woods. It’s wrong. And I know it’s wrong, and this time I’m going to fix everything. I’ll be in the paper again, but it will be because I fixed everything.

  Claire sighed. It felt good to get it all out—it didn’t matter that it was all in a crazed, confused rush. She just needed to write it. To say it somehow. Typing it on her computer, in an email with Rachelle’s name at the top, was almost like talking.

  Still, though—she ached to say it—actually say it, all of it, to the old Rachelle. The Rachelle who would understand. Who would believe her. Her eyes glistened with tears, blurring the screen a moment before she saved the draft as usual and signed out of the account.

  She eyed her outfit a moment, turned from the bedroom mirror, and raced straight toward the bathroom. She rifled through a drawer, picked up a pair of nail clippers, and leaned in toward the bathroom mirror. She grabbed the cameo and snipped the weakened chain free, finally.

  She returned to her room, and attacked the suitcase she’d packed in Chicago. She clicked it open and slipped her hand into the pocket, pulling out the St. Jude charm. She smiled as she slipped it around her neck, behind the gossamer cardigan. Her old good-luck charm—just in case.

  She dressed, began to work on her hair and makeup. A couple of hours later, she slid her newly charged phone into her small clutch purse and the old cameo necklace into the deep side pocket of her skirt.

  She was ready.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  THIRTY–NINE

  Rich and Claire paused at the entrance, underneath the glittering Welcome to the Winter Formal! sign.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” he told Chas, who only rolled his eyes.

  “I wasn’t. Coach made me come. To show school spirit. Especially since I was named the MVP for this season, and am in the running for athlete of the year.” He shook his head.

  “Football’s over, though. You could have blown it off,” Claire challenged.

  “Not for next year, it’s not,” Chas reminded her. “Your ticket, please, ma’am.”

  Claire glanced at Rich. “We’re working. This is an assignment, not a date. Do we need tickets?”

  Rich slipped his hand into the pocket of his blue suit, pulled out two tickets. Chas tore them, handed the stubs to Rich, and dropped the rest of the two tickets into a cardboard box. “You know, if word gets out that you’re only working, you’re going to have your hands full,” Chas told Rich.

  “How do you mean?” Rich asked.

  “Because that one’s the prettiest thing to walk through the doors tonight,” Chas said simply. “Everybody’s going to want to slow dance with her. Going to have to beat them back with a stick.”

  Claire squirmed. Her father had said something similar when she’d come downstairs—something about Claire looking absolutely beautiful tonight—the kind of thing that Claire had dismissed as fatherly kindness instead of truth. Now, though, coming from Chas, the compliments made Claire pull her gossamer sleeves down below her wrists, clutch the neck of the cardigan around her throat. She didn’t want to be gawked at.

  “You two have a lovely time,” Chas said sarcastically, and returned to pacing back and forth in front of the door.

  Rich led Claire into the decorated upstairs gym, where black silhouettes of trees clung to the walls, each limb adorned with silver foil icicles. Ceiling fans spun, their wintery breeze making aluminum foil stars dance, sparkle. Crepe paper streamers slapped together in response, while casting long, black nighttime shadows on the gym floor. Strobe lights beat against the winter-pale arms of girls in formals, making them shimmer like yet to be trampled on snow.

  The gym had been dressed up to mimic the beauty of an ice storm. Claire grabbed hold of Rich’s arm for balance. She couldn’t take another storm. Not even a pretend one.

  “It’s all right with you if I get the shots out of the way, isn’t it?” he asked. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

  “Shots?” she repeated, overlooking Rich’s lame attempt at a joke. A sudden headache made her skull feel as though it’d been caught in a vise.

  Rich raised his camera. “For Mavis. All right?”

  Reluctantly, Claire nodded and forced herself to pry her fingers from his arm, plastering on a plastic smile.

  Something’s going to happen. I’m going to make it happen. Right here, tonight . . . she thought, watching Rich as he aimed his camera, letting the flash shoot out at the crowd. She took a step backward and bumped into someone standing just behind her.

  “Hey, Claire,” Becca greeted. She was dressed in a beautiful violet shimmery halter gown, looking less like a high school knockout and more like a movie star. She yammered on, but her words were intermittent, staccato-sounding, as the music kept drowning her out in spurts. Owen stood beside her. He appeared disinterested and far calmer than he’d been a couple of days before, when the heater in his car had gone berserk.

  “I can’t believe her,” Becca blurted, glaring at Ruthie, dressed in a black satin dress with a full flirty skirt that danced about her knees. Her voice climbed well above the thump of the music, obviously not caring that Ruthie was well within earshot. “You know she didn’t even come with Chas? I mean, she ruins Serena’s relationship, and then she just moves on, like it was nothing.”

  Claire’s head swam as she watched Ruthie’s expression harden. She seemed to swallow the floor in two large steps, coming to roost with
her hands on her hips less than a foot from Becca’s face.

  “Stop it, okay? Just stop it, Becca. I didn’t do anything to Serena.”

  “You totally did—”

  “You ever stop to consider that a rumor might not be true? Huh? You want to know what Chas was doing in my basement? Watching ESPN. Yeah. He wasn’t after me, he was after my cable.”

  Becca snorted. “If you expect me to believe—”

  “Believe what you want, Becca. But I’m telling you, he came over to hang out. Period. Because Owen wasn’t around. We watched games and ate Doritos, and he complained all the time about the fact that you’d forced Serena on him. When the rumor about us first broke, he asked me not to tell the truth, because it got him out of that Serena thing, once and for all. He didn’t care that it made him into a bad guy. It got him out of it. He didn’t like Serena. And now, no one else will go out with him, because they all think he’s a cheater.”

  The image exploded into Claire’s face: Serena’s palm, that ballpoint word. The cat lowering her face to take a bite of her flesh . . . Chas didn’t cheat. Was this a piece of Claire’s puzzle? If so, how did it fit in?

  “Give him a break, Becca,” Ruthie said, and stomped away.

  Becca shook her head, not yet ready to believe Ruthie or to forgive Chas.

  She just keeps hanging on to her hatred for Ruthie, like it tastes good to her. Like it’s a juicy gutted mouse, Claire caught herself thinking.

  The sides of Claire’s neck felt as tight as a coiled rope. Screws were twisting into her temples. Her headache was getting worse. She needed to get away from Becca for a moment.