But morning was still a few hours off.
I reached for Kyle’s hand, gently lacing my fingers through his.
For a few hours, if I tried hard enough, I could pretend that everything was fine.
Amy was still alive, Jason had never joined the Trackers, and Kyle had never become infected. None of us had so much as heard of Thornhill, and Hemlock wasn’t at the epicenter of what could turn into a full-fledged war between wolves and regs.
Everything—everything—was all right.
I edged closer to Kyle and rested my head on his shoulder.
Sometimes, it was better to fall asleep to a comforting lie than to the truth.
2
I ROLLED MY SHOULDERS AS I LINGERED UNDER THE HOT water. I was about as far from pampered as you could get, but I was a city girl, and my back was complaining about a night spent sleeping in the woods.
Still, every kink and knotted muscle had been worth it.
I closed my eyes and remembered the sensation of Kyle’s arms around me and the way his lips had tasted a little like cinnamon. My heart beat a little faster as I turned off the shower and raised my fingertips to the slow smile that stretched across my face. He wanted to stay together. Even if he went back to Colorado, he didn’t want it to be the end of him and me. The end of us.
“Mac?” My cousin Tess’s voice drifted through the closed bathroom door, jolting me from my thoughts.
“Yeah?”
“Your phone’s been blowing up for the past ten minutes.”
Shit. Straining, I could just make out the last notes of my ringtone before whoever was on the other end of the line gave up.
I quickly hauled on clothes, wincing as my shoulder twinged. The bullet I had taken during the Thornhill breakout had been Warden Sinclair’s last attempt at revenge. I had been warned that my shoulder might never be quite the same, but I wasn’t about to complain about the occasional flashes of pain: a few inches either way and the bullet would have left me crippled. Or dead.
For an entire week, Jason had gone around calling me Miracle Girl.
I caught sight of my reflection as I pulled open the bathroom door and quickly looked away. Ever since Thornhill, the girl who stared back at me from the mirror seemed somehow . . . less. It was as though I had left some part of myself back at the rehabilitation camp, locked behind its electric fences.
Miracle Girl. Yeah, right.
I beelined for my room and grabbed the phone from my nightstand. These days, I usually took it everywhere—even into the bathroom—but I had been so tired after Kyle dropped me off that I had stumbled to the shower on autopilot.
I unlocked the screen. Three missed calls—two from my father and one from a number I didn’t recognize—and a text from Kyle telling me I had forgotten Tess’s sleeping bag in his car. I bit my lip and dialed Hank. Not entirely surprising, it went straight to voice mail.
After Trackers had burned down Hank’s club and run his pack out of Denver, most of the Eumon had relocated to an old mining town in the middle of nowhere. They were so far out that Hank only had cell reception when they made the trek to other towns for supplies or news. I left a message and then checked my own voice mail.
Two hang-ups. Typical. Messages were footprints and Hank didn’t like leaving tracks. Even his cell phone was a cheap disposable: every two weeks, both the phone and the number changed. It was amazing how many of the habits he’d developed during his long career as a jack-of-all-trades criminal could be applied to life as a werewolf. Don’t draw attention. Stay on the move. Be ready to leave everything behind and run.
For werewolves who managed to evade the LSRB and the rehabilitation camps, life meant constantly looking over your shoulder and always sleeping with one eye open.
As the reg girlfriend of a werewolf, that was the same life I was signing on for.
My gaze was drawn to the wall above my desk, where I had tacked up dozens of articles about Thornhill and the breakout—more fodder for what everyone else worried was my growing fixation. Life on the run was no picnic, but it was far, far better than ending up in one of the camps.
I gave my head a sharp shake, clearing my thoughts.
I didn’t need a crystal ball to guess why Hank had called. He wanted me out of Hemlock until the Tracker invasion was over. We had argued about it twice already this week. My father had changed—I had seen proof of that since Denver—but a sudden paternal interest didn’t mean he automatically got to have input into my life. I had been making decisions for myself since he had abandoned me all those years ago, and that wasn’t about to change.
I was staying in Hemlock. I wasn’t going to let a sudden influx of Trackers run me out.
A voice mail began to play.
“Mac . . . Hey. It’s Stephen. I’m back in town—at least for a while. Taking a break from school and working for Dad . . .”
The familiar deep voice threw me for a loop. Of all the people who could have left me a message, Amy’s brother was practically the last person I would have expected.
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’ve been going through Amy’s room. I thought there might be some things you would want. Photos, books—that sort of stuff. Maybe we can grab a coffee or you can stop by the house. The place is a zoo with the fund-raiser tomorrow night, but call me when you get a chance.”
An automated voice told me I had reached the end of my messages.
My hand shook a little as I lowered the phone. I tried to remember the last time I had spoken to Stephen. Last Christmas, maybe. He went to school out East—at least he had until recently. He had flown back for a few days after Amy’s death, but he hadn’t been at the funeral. Jason said he hadn’t been able to make it past the cemetery gate.
And now he was back in Hemlock.
I bit my lip. I couldn’t imagine Stephen taking time off from school—not even for a semester. He had always been the golden boy to Amy’s black sheep. Straight-A student. Responsible and dependable. The perfect older brother. The kind of older brother I had always wanted.
“Mac, there’s coffee.” Tess’s voice drifted down the hall.
“Okay!”
Hearing Stephen’s voice shouldn’t have felt strange—even after he had gone to college, I had still seen him when he came home on breaks—but it was impossible to think of him and not think of Amy. Every memory I had of him was tied to her.
I slipped my phone into my pocket as I walked to the bookcase on the other side of the room. I already had the only thing I really wanted of Amy’s: a bracelet made from a handful of foreign coins, a flea market find she always claimed was lucky. I reached into the glass bowl I kept important odds and ends in, and lifted it out.