I nodded.
Nothing happened.
I bit my lip.
Nothing continued to happen.
“Would it be easier if—” Before I could complete the sentence, his face contorted in pain. With the sharp, dry sound of a board snapping under too much weight, his spine bowed, driving him to his knees.
Kyle dug his hands—hands that were too long and the wrong shape—into the carpet of leaves on the forest floor as muscles writhed like snakes beneath his skin.
My pulse thundered and a bitter taste flooded the back of my mouth.
Every other time I had seen Kyle shift, we had been under some sort of attack. This time, there was nothing to divert my attention. There was just me and Kyle and the things that were happening to his body as I stood helplessly by.
His mouth stretched in a scream, but no sound came out.
I took a small step forward; I couldn’t help myself.
“Stay back!” The words were a growl pulled from deep inside Kyle’s chest a heartbeat before his entire body twisted and shattered.
When it was over, I was left staring at a wolf with fur the color of freshly turned earth.
The wolf’s eyes—Kyle’s eyes, I reminded myself—caught and reflected the light from the campfire as I searched them for some sign of the boy I knew.
The wolf cocked its head to the side and let out a small, questioning bark—almost like he was asking if I was all right.
I let out a deep breath. “I’m okay.”
Something painfully human passed behind Kyle’s wolf eyes before he turned and ran: relief.
Smoke clawed at my throat and stung my eyes as, thirty stories below, a city burned. Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle—I didn’t know where I was and it didn’t matter: every few nights, another city tore itself apart.
Twenty-five days ago, I had helped three hundred teens break out of Thornhill Werewolf Rehabilitation Camp. Our only goal had been self-preservation, but our actions had been a spark that lit a fire under the entire country. Within days, there had been uprisings at two other camps and clashes between humans and wolf packs in half a dozen cities.
The reg population was terrified. The camps and the LSRB—the system they trusted to keep the infected safely at bay—had failed. There had always been as many wolves outside the camps as in, but people hadn’t wanted to believe it. Thornhill had forced them to believe; and groups like the Trackers, groups that fed on fear, were doing everything they could to keep the public as frightened as possible.
Within weeks, the country had plunged into the kind of violence and fear it hadn’t seen since the early days of the LS epidemic. Paranoia was at an all-time high and mob mentality had started taking hold. Anyone with a scar was suspect. The Lupine Syndrome Registration Bureau couldn’t keep up with the number of calls flooding its tip lines, and people were taking matters into their own hands. There were states where killing a werewolf wasn’t illegal, leaving crowds free to act without fear of repercussion—as long as the target of their violence really was infected. Dozens—maybe even hundreds—of wolves had been murdered since the breakout.
My father, Hank, had warned me this would happen. I should have known he’d be right.
Most of the violence hadn’t hit Hemlock. Yet. It was concentrated in cities with wolf packs and large pockets of infected people. But it was only a matter of time—especially with the Trackers in town.
I pressed my palms to the concrete ledge that encircled the rooftop as I counted burning buildings and listened to the distant echoes of shouts and screams. The anonymous city below fell into chaos and all I could do was watch.
I had done this. It had been my idea to take down Thornhill. All of this death and destruction was the result of my actions.
“Martyr, much?”
I turned as Amy stepped out of the shadows. Even though it was November, she was wearing cutoffs and a sleeveless gray shirt. Her pale skin seemed to glow in the moonlight, and her knees were scraped raw and bloodstained.
I should have known she would turn up in a place like this. In death, she lived for places like this.
The air around her shimmered and changed as she crossed the rooftop. Empty space became white tile walls. Darkness became blinding fluorescent lights. The smell of smoke was drowned out by the scent of bleach.
The detention block at Thornhill. The place where dozens of wolves—including my friend Serena—had been tortured in Warden Winifred Sinclair’s crazed search for a cure to lupine syndrome. The place I had seen in dreams every night since the breakout.
I shook my head and stepped back. “I don’t want to be here.”
Amy raised an eyebrow. “And I do?” She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear and the light caught a flash of silver at her wrist—a bangle her brother had brought her back from Mexico one spring break.
She stared at me expectantly, but then, instead of waiting for a reply, grabbed my hand and began dragging me toward the control room. My heart rate spiked as I tried to pull away. I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t want to see videos of Serena being tortured. Not again.
But Amy was always stronger than I was in dreams. No matter how I resisted, I couldn’t stop her from pulling me through the door and toward the only source of light in the room: a bank of nine computer monitors. “You need to see,” she said.
“I’ve already seen.” I tried to twist away. It wasn’t any use.
“Not the videos.”
She let go so suddenly that I stumbled forward.
“What do you mean?”
Eight of the monitors displayed a screen saver of the camp logo. The ninth showed an image of Serena behind a metal table, her shirt torn and her eyes wide. The video had been taken the night we arrived in the camp, after we had been separated. I glanced over my shoulder. “Besides the videos, what else is there?”
“Just look, Mac. Please. I need you to look.” Amy’s voice was uncharacteristically tired and small, so un-Amylike that I couldn’t refuse it.
Chest tight, I focused my attention back on the screen. Serena’s image filled the monitor—well, almost filled it. Six or seven icons cluttered the taskbar and a spreadsheet was open behind the video player.
“There isn’t anything else here.” But as I spoke, my gaze was drawn to the upper left-hand corner of the spreadsheet, where a small splash of black—what looked like part of a logo—was just visible beneath the other open windows.