I turned. “Serena?”
She was leaning heavily on one of the upturned pews, almost doubled over. “I think . . . I don’t . . .” She looked up. Her normally dark skin looked ashen and her eyes were wide and unfocused.
Before I could take a single step toward her, she crumpled to the ground.
7
THE FLICKERING GLOW FROM FOUR PILLAR CANDLES filled the pastor’s office, illuminating a handful of battered furniture and walls that were dotted with framed Bible verses and motivational posters.
I had found the candles—along with two blankets and a case of water—in a storeroom at the end of the hall.
I knelt on the floor next to an old sofa, ignoring the pain in my sliced-up knees as I tried to coax a sip of water between Serena’s lips. That was what you were supposed to do when someone had a fever, right? Make them drink fluids. Try to keep them comfortable.
Not that this was any ordinary fever.
Serena’s skin was almost blisteringly hot and her clothes were soaked through with sweat. A temperature like this would kill a reg; it would fry their brain and cook their organs within hours.
I didn’t know what it would do to a werewolf. Werewolves weren’t supposed to get sick—not unless you counted bloodlust—but whatever had been done to Serena at Thornhill had thrown old rules out the window.
Serena coughed and turned her head away from the bottle. “Are they here?” Her whisper was the sound of dry leaves blowing across pavement. It was the first lucid thing she had said in hours.
“Soon.” I didn’t know if the word was a lie or the truth, but it was all I had. I clung to the belief that Kyle, Jason, and Trey would walk through the door at any moment because that was the only reality I was prepared to accept. You can’t save everyone. Kyle had said that to me, once. Or something like it. I pushed the words out of my head. They were all right; they had to be.
“How long have we been here? How long was I out?”
“You’ve been drifting awhile.” I checked the time on Jason’s phone, trying not to notice how low the battery was getting. “It’s a little after eight thirty.” I had sat here for hours, trying to make Serena comfortable, trying to calm her when she became agitated and talked about people and places only she could see.
In the lulls when she was still, the noise in my own head became so loud that I wondered if I was going mad.
The paper. The logo. The idea that CutterBrown could have been involved with Sinclair, that the company could have been part of the very thing that was making Serena so sick.
Amy’s father didn’t just work at CBP: He was chief operating officer. Even though his name wasn’t on the letterhead, most people in Hemlock said he was CutterBrown. If CBP had been involved with Thornhill, he would have to have known.
. . . wouldn’t he?
I tried to tell myself that there were other reasons that logo could have been at the camp. CutterBrown had been developing a test to detect LS—the same sort of test Thornhill had used during the admission process—and they made all sorts of drugs that Sinclair could have been using in the cocktails she had given the wolves in the detention block.
I wanted to believe there was another reason. One that didn’t have anything to do with them knowingly helping the warden in the torture of dozens of teens.
“What if they don’t come?” Serena’s voice came out choked, as though her throat had constricted around the words. “Jason and Trey and Kyle. What if we wait and wait and they never come?”
“They’ll be here.” I slid the folded newspaper under the sofa. I had gone back to retrieve it after getting Serena settled, but I didn’t want her to see it. She had acted so strangely after I had shown her the sketch from my dream. The last thing I wanted was for her to catch a glimpse of the paper and have some sort of relapse.
“Can I get you anything? More water?”
She shook her head.
Jason’s phone let out a small, cautionary beep. It was the same sound it had been making off and on for the past hour as the words connect charger flashed across the screen.
My stomach twisted. The phone was our only link to the others. I was too scared to try calling Kyle or Jason—if they were lying low, a ringtone might give them away—but the hope that they would call had been one of the only things to get me through the past few hours.
Once the battery died, that hope would die with it.
“I think I’m going to throw up.” Serena struggled to raise herself to a sitting position as I made a frantic grab for a nearby wastebasket.
I made it just in time.
Her shoulders heaved as her body expelled every ounce of food in her stomach. She continued to retch long after the point where there was anything left, so long and hard that I worried things inside her body would tear.
Finally she closed her eyes and lay back.
“Better?” I asked, touching her forehead with the back of my hand. Her skin was just as hot as it had been the last time I checked.
“A bit.”
I slipped Jason’s phone into my pocket and pushed myself to my feet. I lifted the wastebasket, holding it slightly away from myself and trying not to glance inside. “I’m just going to dump this out.”
I waited until Serena managed a small nod, then I grabbed one of the pillar candles and slipped out the door.
The bathroom was at the end of a long, narrow hallway. Inside the black-and-white-tiled room, I set the candle on the edge of the lone sink and then dumped the contents of the basket into the toilet in the far stall. I didn’t bother trying to flush: like electricity, the church’s water supply had been cut off.
I stepped out of the stall and set the basket down. Cleaning up someone else’s puke wasn’t anything new: I had cleaned up after Jason more times since Amy’s death than I could count.
I leaned against the sink and glanced up.
Amy stared back at me from the other side of the mirror. Her black hair fell around her shoulders like curtains and her eyes were dark, bottomless pits.
The phone rang, startling me so badly that I almost knocked over the candle.
“Kyle? Jason? Are you okay?” I fumbled with the phone as the words rushed out. I glanced back at the mirror. My face, not Amy’s, filled the glass.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line and then a familiar, rough-edged voice said, “It’s me.”
“Hank.” I gripped the edge of the sink as disappointment threatened to crush me. I had left a voice mail for my father—one with Jason’s phone number—shortly after Serena’s collapse.