by Jeff Sampson
I hopped to my feet and opened the front door as Jared came up the walkway. His blond hair was more tousled than usual and his eyes were heavily lidded, as though I’d woken him up. He offered me a friendly smile anyway as he came to the door.
“So I hear there’s trouble,” he said as he came to stand in front of me. “With you, I’m hardly surprised.”
My face burned. “Well, I . . . uh . . .”
“Hey, man.” Spencer edged his way beside me and held out a hand to Jared. Jared, to his credit, did not act horrified that I was basically half-naked with a boy, alone, at six in the morning. He took Spencer’s hand and shook it.
“It’s out back,” Spencer said. “Thanks for coming.”
Spencer led the way to the backyard and showed Jared the scene. Jared stopped cold as he saw the body of the killer. While he stared rigid-faced at the gory remains of last night, Spencer and I explained our story: We’d heard a commotion outside the night before, but hadn’t seen anything, just heard muffled shouts and dogs barking. This morning we’d woken up and . . . found the body.
Jared didn’t say anything for what felt like a million years.
“There have been reports coming in,” he said finally. “People seeing wild dogs running through the hiking park. No attacks or anything, but I guess that’s changed. What makes you think the victim is Emily Cooke’s killer?”
“Well, the weapons, for one,” Spencer said.
We crossed the grass to the body, and Spencer showed Jared the dead guy’s arsenal. He’d retrieved the gun from Patrick’s backyard with the plastic bag, and now both it and the knife were next to the body—the knife rinsed clean of our blood.
“You can go all CSI on the gun, right?” I whispered. “Compare it to the bullets that the guy used on Emily C. and Dalton?”
Jared’s eyes scrutinized me. But there was no denying that some sort of animal had taken this guy apart. There was no way he would think I had done it. No way.
“Yes,” he said finally. “And if it is him . . . well, I guess karma took care of him, didn’t it?” Putting a gentle hand on my shoulder, he turned me away. “I’m sorry you had to see this, Emily.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
Jared said he would take it from there and got on his cell phone with his fellow officers, mentioning that though we would have to be questioned, it could be later, after the shock had worn off. My chest felt tight as Spencer and I walked away—lying to the police? Not something I would ever have considered doing.
But I had to. For Emily C. For Dalton. And for Spencer, too—and the others like me. Because with the wolf’s instincts telling me to seek out my “fellows,” I was betting there were more of us. Those of us who had survived, we were safe now. My pack—if that was the word—was safe.
Spencer and I stood on the patio and watched as Jared kneeled down to inspect the killer’s trench coat, continuing to talk on his cell phone while reaching in and finding the same wallet I had.
“So,” Spencer said. “I guess it’s Monday. Strangely, I don’t feel so excited to run off to school.”
School. How incredibly strange it felt, after a weekend of clubbing and run-ins with a killer, to have to deal with something as utterly mundane as school.
I took in a long breath. Spencer smiled at me, and once again I felt my heart flutter. “Do you think we have time to go somewhere before school?” I asked him.
“Like where?”
I glanced back at the body, still lying in the grass with flies buzzing around its neck and chest. “I think we should see if Dalton has woken up,” I said. “And I want to see where exactly this BioZenith place is.”
Chapter 18
Nice to Meet You, Emily Webb
Spencer let me borrow a pair of shoes that were too big for my feet, then drove me home. I got there before anyone was awake, and I snuck up to my room to find my glasses and some new clothes. A quick Google search brought me once again to the BioZenith web page; I jotted down the address on a piece of notebook paper and shoved it in my pocket.
That done, we took the twenty-minute drive to Seattle and Harborview Medical Center, where Dalton was still recuperating.
There was barely anyone at the hospital that early in the morning, just some employees in scrubs and addled people wandering around. The place smelled clean, antiseptic—the scent brought back memories of being rushed to the emergency room when I’d gotten supremely sick with the flu as a kid, and it was almost as though I could feel the heat in my head and bile in my throat all over again.
I guess the staff had come to expect visiting high schoolers early in the morning, and a nice nurse led us upstairs to Dalton’s room. She left Spencer and me there alone.
Dalton lay in a hospital bed, his skin paler than usual, his red hair a matted mess. Tubes ran into his nostrils, his arms. Balloons and cards and flowers littered the countertops and his bedside, and complicated machinery hummed quietly, keeping track of his heartbeat and other important functions.
“I can’t believe he survived getting shot in the head,” I whispered.
Spencer stepped through the door to stand beside me. “I sort of can. With the things we can do.”
Spencer’s big eyes were strangely sorrowful beneath his thick eyebrows. We hadn’t talked much during the car ride; I guess both of us were lost in our thoughts.
“Have you done crazy things too?” I asked. “I jumped out of a moving car and hung on to a tree once.”
“Wow, really?”
I nodded, resisting the urge to grin at the admiration in his voice.
“Nah, I haven’t done anything like that,” he said, looking back toward Dalton’s still form. “But I feel stronger. I can lift things. I lifted our refrigerator at home just for fun. And I can see things so much better, like things far away. It’s . . .”
“Kind of cool?” I whispered, finishing the thought.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. It felt completely wrong to be comparing notes about our shared powers, I guess we’d call them, with Dalton lying so close.
Dalton’s attractive face seemed off, somehow, like the left side was a bit askew. A thick bandage covered the top of his forehead, behind which I knew a bullet had entered his skull.
I didn’t know what I had expected to see, really. Though I could still smell his unmistakable werewolf musk, all I saw now was the same Dalton who’d been going to school with me for years. Ginger-haired, clean-cut, attractive, and seeming as innocent as any boy can be.
“What are you doing here?”
The voice was female and undeniably annoyed. Jumping, I turned to the doorway to find Amy Delgado standing there, glaring hatred at me while Nikki Tate stood beside her, pointedly looking away.
I reached down and grabbed Spencer’s arm. He didn’t seem the least bit fazed.
“Hey, Nikki,” he said. “Amy. We were just checking on Dalton before school. He seems like he’s doing better.”
“He is,” Nikki said. “We got some good news this morning. The police called to tell me they may have found the killer dead. I came to tell Dalton.”
“That’s wonderful news,” Spencer said. “I just wanted to see him. He looks better than I expected.”
Amy’s lips were pursed as she slowly shook her head, her mane of black hair trembling about her shoulders. “That’s great, Spence,” she snapped. “But why would you bring her here after she—”
Without even thinking about it, I let out a sigh of exasperation so loud that Amy stopped speaking. Instead she gaped at me.
My first instinct was to try and play it off, shrink in on myself, duck my head. But you know what? The night before, I had gone head-to-head with a crazed man intent on killing me, and I may have been the one who killed him instead. I’d just discovered that a bunch of scientists had probably done something to me for some reason I didn’t know. At that moment, I was too damn exhausted and angry to care what Amy Delgado or anyone else thought of me.
And so I didn’t back down. I rolled back my shoulders and met Amy’s withering expression with one of my own. “You know, Amy,” I said, “I hadn’t been here to see Dalton since the shooting, and I just wanted to see for myself if he was okay. And he’s okay. So now we’ll go and leave you three alone, all right?” I turned to Nikki. “By the way, I’m really sorry about the party. I wasn’t myself, and I’ve felt really guilty about it.”
Nikki shrugged. “All right,” she said.
Amy’s hands were clenched at her side and she seemed about ready to leap at me and go all catfight. Through clenched teeth she said to Nikki, “‘All right’? Really?”
“It’s fine, Amy,” Nikki said in a soft voice. “They were just leaving. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
I pushed sideways past the two girls and into the hallway, my head light and my insides wobbly. Had I really just done that? I realized I had, and I felt completely frightened and, also, totally exhilarated.
Keeping my head up, I walked purposefully past gurneys and down the hall. As I did, I distinctly felt a hand shove me in my back. I stumbled, my sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. I spun around, certain Amy had chased after me and tried to push me down. But she was still all the way back at the entrance to Dalton’s hospital room, her arm extended, her palm aimed at me. No one else was anywhere near me.
Amy rotated her hand around and clenched down all her fingers except for the middle one. She flashed me a knowing smirk.
Okay, that was strange. Something was definitely up with her.
Spencer shoved past her and jogged down the hall. “Sorry about them,” he said. “Those girls can sometimes be a little, you know, intense.”
“Yeah,” I said as I resumed walking through the brightly lit halls, trying not to bump into nurses and doctors walking the other way. “Just—”
I stopped as I caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired figure in the hospital’s lobby. Patrick. He had his back turned to us and was on his way out. Why he was there, I didn’t know. But part of me wondered if maybe he was there for Dalton too.
Patrick definitely wasn’t a werewolf. And he hadn’t been the killer. But maybe there was more to him than just a case of mistaken identity.
But I had too much to process right then without wondering what was up with Amy and Patrick. No, I needed to focus, as I had one more place I needed to go before school.
“What is it?” Spencer asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, and I pushed through the hospital doors and into the parking lot. “Just, after last night, I really find it hard to worry about what Amy and Nikki think of me.”
“Yeah, I hear that.”
Spencer opened the passenger-side door to his car, then ran to the opposite side. We got in and he asked me, “Where to now?”
I pulled the crumpled notebook page from my pocket and smoothed it out over my jeans. “Next stop, BioZenith.”
The place was pretty easy to find. It was in an industrial park north of Skopamish, and was more or less on the way back home, just a few exits earlier. Though woods surrounded the area to the north and the south, the industrial park was all pavement and giant, boxy buildings interspersed with pristine roads.
We drove down a winding street lined on either side with trees cut to be all trunk and round top, like lollipop topiaries. Beyond the overly manicured trees and the sidewalks, the buildings sat together, shiny cars parked sporadically in front of them. Some of the buildings were all glass, reflecting the bright sun that had burst through the gray clouds sometime that morning. Others were beige brick, with semis parked in loading docks on their sides.
There were concrete square signs aimed at the street, but they didn’t have any business names on them, just street numbers. I read the signs as we drove slowly past until I finally saw the one we wanted: number 304. BioZenith.
“There,” I said, pointing out Spencer’s window.
He pulled over and parked his car along the curb opposite the sign, and we both studied the structures beyond.
BioZenith turned out to be a series of dual-level white brick buildings connected by glass walkways. We were on the northernmost street of the industrial park, so behind the buildings were the peaks of evergreens. The offices on the north side of the building would have a nice view.
There wouldn’t have been anything all that noteworthy about the place—except that it was the only business on this street that was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence lined with barbed wire. The only way in was through a pair of gates midway through the south side of the fence. There was no one there, but I could make out a camera atop the fence aimed at the entrance, and there looked to be a call box there as well.
“Is that a laboratory or a prison?” Spencer asked.
I leaned over him and studied the place. “I know, right?” I said. “For a place that claims to only experiment with vegetables, they have a crazy amount of security. I—”
It was only then that I realized I had basically crawled halfway into his lap. Awareness rushed through me, and I scooted back into the passenger seat.
I coughed and tried my best to act smooth. “So, I guess we should . . . regroup? If you’re ready, maybe we can talk about what we know. Last night and this morning have been such a rush.”
“Yeah,” Spencer said. “Yeah, they have.” Twisting to face me, he held out a hand. “Well, let’s do this properly. Spencer Holt, werewolf and computer geek. Nice to meet you.”
“Computer geek, huh? I didn’t know that.”
I reached for his hand. As our fingers slipped into each other’s palms, an electric rush jolted up my arm. Those damn butterflies fluttered into my stomach, and my arms quivered. His smile, his touch—even as they made me go all wobbly, they calmed my brain. I shook his hand.
“Emily Webb,” I said. “Also a werewolf, also a geek. But more of an entertainment geek, I guess.”
“Nice to meet you, Emily Webb.”
“Likewise, Spencer Holt.”
We chuckled at our dorkiness, then dropped each other’s hands. I didn’t want to let go. All I could see were his brown eyes, wide and open and looking into my own. I had never really seen Spencer before today.
We held each other’s gaze too long, and we both broke off at the same time, clearing our throats.
“So, I guess we should start at the beginning,” I said.
“Agreed.”
I told my story first. Everything, just as I’ve recounted it here. The calmness I felt at being with the guy who smelled right also made me feel open, able to say anything I wanted without fear of being judged. Because I knew—I just knew—that Spencer would understand.
And he did. He listened intently, nodding along, never questioning, never judging me. I finished with the evening before, as I prepared to go after the killer.
“And that’s it,” I said. “You basically know the rest. I went to Patrick’s, and this Gunther Elliott guy found me. Then you came and . . . well.”
Spencer let out a low whistle and slumped into his seat. Outside, cars whizzed by as the morning workers started heading to their jobs inside the featureless buildings.
“Wow,” he said. “You’re brave, you know that?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I didn’t really do anything. It was all Nighttime Emily and the werewolf.”
Spencer’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “But, no, that is you, right? Just different parts of you.”
That made sense, didn’t it? Because maybe the confidence and wild ways of Nighttime Emily had always been a part of me, just something I’d been too afraid to ever let loose. Dawn had always insisted that deep inside me was a great girl waiting to be free, all shiny butterfly emerging from its hoodie cocoon.
It wasn’t easy to reconcile the total otherness of Nighttime Emily with what I thought I knew about my everyday self. Not at all. But I kind of liked the idea that Nighttime Emily’s ease in dealing with trouble was really some part of me I’d just always been too a
fraid to tap.
Would I ever manage to figure out how to bring that out during the day? I wondered. Figure out how to shut off the part of me that screamed in fear anytime I tried something new?
My mind raced so much with these thoughts that I almost missed Spencer’s story. “I’d be in my room and I’d feel sick and I’d cramp up, like you said you did. But I didn’t really go wild or anything. I mostly just got super focused on homework and my computer. . . . I’d been working on building a new computer for the past few months, and I finished putting it together in a few hours. It was like I became some sort of genius.”
He shrugged. “I dunno, I guess I was always able to write or program for hours, but I could never really stick to one thing for too long. All my teachers always told me I had a lot of potential, but I was always too lazy to really live up to it.”
“So the change made focusing easier?” I asked.
Spencer’s cheeks went splotchy red. He was blushing. It was totally cute.
“Man, I must sound like some totally ADD flake with a huge ego.” He ran his hand through his already tousled hair, mussing it further. “But yeah, I guess so. It was sort of like there was some block in my brain that wouldn’t let me do things to the . . . best of my abilities? And that’s when I figured out I might have some other abilities too.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I was kicking around a soccer ball in our backyard,” he said, “and my foot went right through it. So, you know, super strength or whatever. I tried it out by lifting the refrigerator next. That was the same night of the party, when I turned into a wolf for the first time.”
“That was your first time too, huh?” I asked. “I was, um, kind of out of it. What happened?”
“Well, I chased after you and—”
A car door slammed nearby, interrupting us. We’d been so engrossed with our stories that we hadn’t really noticed the parking lots around us getting full, a steady stream of shiny cars zipping down the road beside us. Someone had parked their car in front of Spencer’s, and a man in a suit walked by, keys jangling.
