“We need to get out of here,” I say, taking my plate into my lap. “When are you going to be ready?”
“I’m ready,” he grumbles.
“Then why haven’t we tried to leave?” I ask. “I waited for the full moon so you could change. But you didn’t. I’m sorry, it’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to rot in here forever because you don’t want to show your face. They’re not just going to leave us down here feeding us eggs and biscuits and buying us clothes forever.”
“Then leave,” he snaps.
“What is wrong with you?” I snap back, losing my patience. “We’ve been here over a month. I’m sick of this. We need to get out of here before they do whatever they’re going to do to us. Why don’t you want to leave?”
“I want to get out of here as badly as you do,” he says, turning his flashing blue eyes on me. “But I can’t just leave.”
I throw up my hands. “Why not? We haven’t even tried.”
“I just…I can’t,” he says, turning back to his food. After a second, he pushes the plate away and lies down with his furry black back turned. The bandage on it is old and dirty now, but Dr. Golden hasn’t visited since before the full moon.
“Well, I’m leaving,” I say, my throat suddenly tight. I put my own plate back in the basket. “I thought we were in this together, Harmon.”
“What gave you that idea?”
I swallow hard. “You asked me to be part of the pack. What happened to that? What happened to all that stuff about wolves being noble and taking care of each other? Was that all lies? I thought wolves didn’t lie.”
“You didn’t want to be part of the pack.”
“I gave up a chance to escape for you,” I say quietly. “Isn’t that what a pack member would do? Put the pack first, above myself?”
He doesn’t even stir at that revelation. He remains lying with his back to me, his voice sharp with bitterness. “I never asked you to do that.”
“Mrs. Nguyen asked me to go with her while you were sleeping, and I said no. I thought we were a team.”
“Well, I guess that wasn’t a very good decision. If that’s what you wanted, you should have left.”
I ball my hands into fists, wanting to strike him with all the anger and frustration building inside me. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, get up, and let’s go,” I growl.
At last, he rolls towards me. “Feeling sorry for myself? Yeah, I am. But guess what? There’s no pack in the world who will follow a leader who can’t transition. I’m not a werewolf anymore. I’m nothing. I’m a mutant freak that a shifter can’t even look at without her face twisting up like she’s holding back vomit. So if I don’t care to get out of here, forgive me. But there’s nowhere any better than this. Don’t you get that, Stella? It doesn’t matter where I am. It matters what I am. And there’s nothing out there for a person like me.”
“Then stop being selfish,” I say, unable to keep my lip from trembling as tears fight to free themselves from my eyes. “You said you’d put the pack first. And if I’m part of your pack, and I want to get out, you should put that before your own needs. Just like I put you first when Mrs. Nguyen asked.”
“I don’t have a pack to lead,” he says, lying down with his back to me again. “I said if I became Alpha, I’d invite you. But I’m never going to lead anyone. So you’re free from that decision. Go do whatever you want to do, Stella. Be a model. Eat pizza. Have your fun, happy life. I’m where I belong.”
“Come with me. If you don’t have a pack, then you don’t have to do what’s good for anyone else. But you can still be noble and all the things you say wolves are.” A tear trickles down my cheek, and I reach out and touch his shoulder. “I’ll be your pack.”
“You’re not a wolf.”
I jump to my feet and swipe at my tears. “And neither are you. But I guess it’s good to know how the wolf thing really works. I’ll figure out how to get out of here myself, and you can stay here and rot, because it’s best for the pack that abandoned you. That’s not the kind of pack I’d ever want to be a part of, anyway.”
Harmon doesn’t stir when I run back to my corner, choking back tears, and begin to shove all my new clothes into an old shirt to take with me. When I’m finished packing, I head for the ladder, ignoring Harmon’s motionless form. If he doesn’t want to get out, I can’t make him. But I’m getting out of here.
I wait at the top of the ladder for hours. Harmon gets up and goes into the other room after a while. My determination doesn’t waver. Eventually, someone comes to bring us food. When the door opens, I’m ready. I dive through, knocking the door wide open. As we tumble to the floor together, the woman screams like I’ve never heard anyone scream before. The terrified shriek that tears from her throat lances my eardrums as I scramble off her, crawling blindly forwards. As I stumble to my feet, I have a second to take in my surroundings—I’m in a huge wooden lodge with a fireplace surrounded by comfortable chairs and couches.
But I don’t care about the house. I care about the door straight in front of me, across the open floor. As I take a step forward, the woman’s hand clamps around my ankle. Her banshee shrieks echo through the cavernous space with the vaulted ceiling. I stumble forward a few steps, dragging her along with me, before I lose my balance and fall. On all fours, I struggle onwards, kicking to shake her loose, ignoring the new flare of pain darting up my leg from the ankle that has only just healed.
Before I’m halfway across the room, the front door flies open and two men charge through. I’m sure I’ve seen them before, but I don’t have time to place them. One of them grabs me around the waist and hauls me up, lifting me off my feet. The woman’s grip slips from my ankle as the man turns back towards the basement door, still standing open. I scream and kick as, in two steps, he erases the distance I fought so hard for. I lash out at his legs, striking them with my heels and clawing at his thick arm around my middle.
From below, in the basement, Harmon gives a sharp protest. But it’s too late. The man flings me through the door. My body hurtles forward, and I slam into Harmon. Together, we crash to the basement floor below. For a second, I’m too stunned to register anything, even pain. I roll off Harmon, who is lying in a heap under me. An ominously still heap.
“Harmon?” I grab his shoulder and shake him. He is heavy as death, as my father was when I found him that day. “Harmon,” I scream, crouching over him. My eyes move up to the door, where the man stands silhouetted against the light from above. “Help him,” I scream. “He’s not moving, please, help us.”
Without a word, the man closes the door.
“Harmon,” I scream again, unable to find the volume control on my own voice. I swallow hard and try to calm down. Like he said before, freaking out isn’t going to solve anything. I cradle his head, search for the spot where it must have hit the wooden support pole nearest the ladder, or maybe the ladder itself, or the packed dirt floor.
Please don’t let his neck be broken, I pray as I search for bumps.
His eyelids flutter, and suddenly, his beautiful frost-blue eyes are staring straight into mine. “Well hello to you, too,” he says, his voice slightly hoarse.
I release his head, which drops to the floor with a thud. He closes his eyes and draws a breath, his face scrunched in pain.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt, reaching for his head again, then pulling back. “I’m sorry, you startled me. I didn’t mean to…I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t do that on purpose.”
“Remind me what happened?”
Before I can answer, the little door to the tunnel grinds open, and Dr. Golden appears, bag in hand, and rushes over. She kneels beside Harmon, not bothering to acknowledge me at all. I back away, but I don’t know what to do with myself, so I hover while she examines his head and neck.
She swings around to look at me at last. “What happened?”
“It wasn’t her fault,” Harmon says pushing himself up. I watch his face, noting the wince of pain when he sits. I k
now his face now, as strange as it is, know every twitch and tell. I know he doesn’t complain even when he’s hurting, but I know how to spot it, in the tension of his jaw, the twitch in his cheek, the careful breathing and the grimace when he moves.
“Does anything hurt?” Dr. Golden asks.
“Why don’t you ask them what happened?” Harmon says bitterly. “Or better yet, tell them not to throw a girl down a ladder.”
“She fell on you?”
“I was halfway up,” Harmon says.
I imagine how hard that must have been, for him to climb the ladder after me. Is that why he didn’t want to come, because he didn’t want me to see that he couldn’t do it without struggle, didn’t want to slow me down? Whatever his reasons, he must have changed his mind. He was following me out. Which means that once she leaves, we can start plotting our escape. This time, we’ll make it. We’ll have two people, and a plan.
Or that’s what I keep thinking when she takes him into the other room to examine him. I keep thinking it until he comes back with his arm in a cast and tells me it’s broken.
15
A few nights later, I wake in the dark to the sound of yelling overhead. I sit up, straining to make out the words. Angry footsteps stomp across the floor above us. Someone shouts something about a leader.
“Harmon?” I whisper urgently. “Are you awake?”
“I’m awake.”
“I think they’re here for you. Maybe they’re getting us out.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” I ask, not wanting to come right out and inquire whether his naked wolf ear still works, whether his disfigured ears can hear better than mine. Wolves have better hearing than humans, after all.
“Well enough,” he says quietly.
I get up and tiptoe across the room to him, my blanket wrapped around me. I crouch beside him. “Are they getting us out?”
“They’re talking about my arm,” he says.
Suddenly, an inhuman scream cuts through the angry voices. I freeze, an icy chill racing across my skin. “What was that?” I whisper.
“It’s just someone who was injured that night. They’ll get the doctor.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Come here,” he says, tugging on my blanket. “Don’t be scared.”
“I am scared,” I say. “How can you not be scared? What if that was my dad? What’s going to happen to us?”
“We’re going to do the only thing we can do,” he says. “We’re going to lie here and wait to see what happens next.”
I want to argue. There must be something we can do. But I don’t know what it is, and the awful scream echoes through the basement again, as if it’s coming from the earth itself. A shiver wracks my body, and I sink down next to Harmon and huddle against him, hugging myself. He curls around me, his arm slipping over me, his elbow cradling mine. After a second, his hand covers the back of mine and he laces his fingers into mine and squeezes.
The scream comes a third time, and I shiver as running footsteps pound the ceiling overhead. Harmon holds me hard, his forehead pressed to the back of my neck.
“How come you’re so good at making me feel better, and I can’t make you feel better when you’re scared?” I whisper.
“Because I’m a big bad wolf, and I don’t get scared.”
I elbow him. “Shut up. I’m serious.”
“When you’ve broken as many hearts as I have, you learn how to comfort a crying girl.”
“Oh, right. I’m sure that’s it.”
And though his voice says he’s kidding, I remember the way they looked at him the night of his coronation. He was a beautiful prince that night, and all the girls wanted him. I wanted him.
“So exactly how many of these girls were there?” I ask after a while.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” I say, nudging him. “You already know my history. What’s yours?”
“I really don’t know what you mean.”
I can’t tell if he’s kidding, and suddenly, I’m very aware of his warm body pressed up against mine through a few layers of blankets. We’re so alone. We’ve been alone together for over a month now, but tonight he’s a boy to me, not a creature.
“I mean, have you hooked up with all the girls here?”
“Oh,” he says, sounding surprised. “I…I don’t really know. It’s different from what they show on TV. It’s not the same for us.”
“What’s it like, then?”
“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “What’s it like for you? It’s a big deal, right?”
“Well…yeah.”
“It’s not for us. Once you Choose, that’s a big deal. And there’s no more playing around with other people.”
“What if someone cheats?”
“You mean after they’re mated? No, that doesn’t happen.”
“No one’s ever cheated, in the history of werewolves.”
“No.”
Urgent voices interrupt our conversation, and we lie in silence, straining to hear. Harmon holds me hard, his nose pressing into the nape of my neck. And just like that, I’m reminded of his weird nose, his gruesome face, and my body stiffens. I can’t help it. I wish I didn’t care what he looked like. I’ve always been shallow, and even like this, in a dirt dungeon, I can’t shed that part of me.
“Don’t think about it,” he says. “Tell me something happy. That’s how you make me feel better. When you talk about that, and your voice sounds all shiny and your face gets all soft and peaceful.”
“Um, okay,” I say, pulling away from him to shift onto my back. I tell him about prom, and how I never got to go, but how his coronation was kind of like that, but with importance. And that maybe if we get out of here, we’ll be able to do something silly and meaningless, like prom. Harmon listens without interrupting. When I finish, he says, “I thought you never wanted to wear a dress again.”
“I think I could make an exception for prom,” I say, smiling in the dark. When I stop talking, the silence closes in around us. No more voices, no more footsteps. No more screaming. As I crawl back to my spot under the window, disappointment creeps in. I’m relieved it’s over, but some perverse part of me is sorry that nothing happened, because even something that started out horribly could lead to escape. If nothing ever happens, we’ll never get out. I just need an opening, one small slip, and I can try again.
16
I’m in the middle of reading Much Ado About Nothing when I realize I haven’t seen Harmon out from under the ladder in days. He doesn’t work out anymore, trying to get stronger. He just lies there, waiting to die. His body is barely more human than before the full moon, and his arm is now broken. But that doesn’t mean we both have to give up. Dropping my book on the table, I duck through the tunnel into our dirt room.
“Hey,” I say. “Come here, I want to show you something.”
“What?” he asks without moving from his spot, lying on the blanket with his back to me.
“You have to come in the other room,” I say. “It’s a surprise.”
With a few grumbles, he hobbles to his feet. Now, he can sort of walk upright, though he’s stooped and crooked as an old man. As his father, I think, a fresh pang of guilt going through me. It’s my fault his father was injured so badly he couldn’t shift into a wolf. That’s why he had to retire. And the night Harmon took over, he was injured just as badly.
“What?” Harmon asks when he emerges from the tunnel behind me. His fur sticks up on one side of his head, like he slept on it funny.
I can’t help but smile. “We’re going to do a play.”
“A what?”
“A play,” I say, picking up the Shakespeare volume filled with all his great plays and sonnets.
“A play.” Harmon is staring at me, and I have to wet my lips before going on.
“Yeah. I can’t do all the parts myself. I’ll do the girl parts, and you can do th
e guy parts.”
“No, thanks,” he says, turning back towards the basement.
“Wait,” I say. “Please? I’m going crazy down here, Harmon. I need to do something. We need to get out of here, and if you won’t do that, help me do this. For my sanity.”
He pauses for a long time, his back to me, his shoulder canting in the direction of his shorter, wolf leg, his tail still there, hanging out the top of his pants. “I’m sorry, Stella,” he says. “Maybe another day. I don’t feel like it right now.”
“When are you ever going to feel like it?” I ask, raising my voice when he ducks back into the tunnel. “When are you going to feel like getting off your blanket and doing anything? When are you going to stop feeling wallowing and help me get us out of here?”
He doesn’t answer. I collapse into a chair and blow out a breath. I thought it would be better after the full moon. When I saw that he was changing, albeit slowly, I figured he’d redouble his efforts. That the little changes would give him hope. For a week or so before the full moon, we were even sort of friends. Now he’s cold and distant, hopeless. And I don’t know how to reach him.
I pick up Shakespeare, but I have to read the words over and over, and even then, I can’t concentrate on their meaning. I try to focus, to read a line out loud. And that’s when I decide I don’t need Harmon. I can read by myself.
An hour later, I duck through the tunnel and stand in the middle of the room, feeling like a complete idiot. Like usual, Harmon’s back is turned, so he doesn’t notice. Holding the book in one hand and a weird lacy hat I found in a box in the other, I begin.
“Act One, Scene One,” I say. Harmon doesn’t move, so I forge onwards, reading the setting and then starting in on Theseus. “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace.”
“What are you doing?” Harmon asks.
“Four happy days bring in another moon, but Oh! Methinks, how slow this old moon wanes. She lingers my desires…”
Harmon rolls over and stares at me as I read, quite dramatically, I must say.
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