Fatal (17 page)

His arms wrapped around my waist and crushed me against me so hard I could barely breathe. I trembled in his grasp as our lips worked, my entire body electrified with an unshackled need.

Then he pushed back away from me, shoulders heaving as he stumbled and caught himself against the counter.

Chapter 24

His face twisted like he was in pain.

My lips stung, we'd kissed so hard. My body flushed with heat. It had been incredible, just as I'd wanted and imagined. But the wish fulfillment was tainted by what he'd said.

"What… what else did you have to say?" I said.

"Not much time," he breathed, squeezing the counter so that his knuckles turned white, "There's a room, downstairs. Come on."

He pushed himself away. I wanted to call after him, to ask what was happening, to ask what he was going to reveal. But he stumbled from the kitchen. I had to choose between following him and being by myself in that old, creepy house.

So I came with him. He opened a door that led down to the basement, nearly falling down the stairs when he hit the
light switch. He was hunched over, and I could hear his breaths whistling in and out between his clenched teeth.

My own breathing was rapid, too. Adrenaline coursed through me, hot and cold, all my senses sharpened from it.

"Adam? Where are we going?" I said, almost whispering. It felt like a whispering occasion, somehow wrong.

He trailed one hand along the rail, gripping it tightly every time he descended a stair. Again, I considered just running back up and outside. There was that BMW parked out front. But Adam had the key for it in his pocket.

Something snapped inside him, the noise alone enough to send my stomach tumbling. He nearly fell down the stairs, then.

"Adam!" I said, grabbing him by the arm to keep him from tumbling away.

Beneath his jacket, I could feel his flesh and bones moving, changing shape.

I wanted to let go as a primal fear shot up my spine, but another spasm grabbed him so I kept him from falling.

"Just... over here..." he said.

When I saw his face, it was absolutely dripping with sweat. His features were twisted, his teeth clenched together and his lips pulled back.
Whatever it was had to be absolute agony.

My body started responding to him, feeling a sympathetic pang deep in my muscles every time he groaned.

"There... that room," he said, leaning against the wall and pointing at an opened wooden door with thick steel bands running across it. It had to be at least four inches or so thick.

I ran over to it, pushing it the rest of the way open and searching for a
light switch, running my hands along the wall. All I felt were deep gouges in the wood. The only light came in through a skylight, right in the middle of the ceiling about thirty feet from the floor.

My eyes adjusted, and I saw the deep scratches all over the walls. They were jagged and long.

"What... what is this?" I said.

"Now you believe me," Adam said.

I jumped at his voice. It had changed again, taking on that awful, modulated tone. And he was right behind me, leaning against the doorframe.

"Lock me in... not safe out here..."

"What is it, Adam, what's happening?"

He's turning into a werewolf, I thought. Something in my mind knew, even though the rest of me wouldn't accept it. Werewolves were stupid dog monsters for late-night horror flicks.

But I moved aside all the same. He fell onto the floor, his back arching up as he tore at his hair.

"Damn..." he said, "Not the jacket... Here!"

He worked the already torn jacket off his shoulders and tossed it to me. Then he started trying to take the rest of his clothes off. His t-shirt ripped as his suddenly clawed fingers tore into it.

His abs and chest, just like his face, were soaked and glistening with sweat.

"Close the door!" he said.

His eyes had changed. They were yellow, now. My brain reacted, taking over. I slammed the door shut, turned around, and leaned against it. From within the room
there was a ripping noise, followed by an inhuman cry of pain.

I buried my face in his jacket, blotting out the world as I covered my ears. That only succeeded in muffling the noise a little.

I'd never felt so terrified in my whole life. I'd heard phrases like "scared stupid" and "petrified" before to describe the feeling, but never before did I feel so scared that I was actually incapable of moving, of helping myself.

It was like the human body just shut down in that scenario, somehow realizing there was no way out of the situation and choosing instead to let nature take its course.

At first, I thought the silence was just my brain somehow turning off.

No, I thought, you're not dead. He's just not making any noise anymore.

That almost scared me more than when he had been. At least then I had some idea of what was going on.

The air was stuffy and stale in his jacket, too, pressed right up against my nose and mouth like that. The urge to breathe came back and I lifted my face away from it.

That pounding noise was my heart. That rasp the breath rushing in and out between teeth clenched in fear. Despite my earlier coldness, a chilly bead of sweat ran down the curve of my spine.

But aside from that, there was nothing. I heard nothing from behind that door.

Swallowing, trying to push that lump back down my throat, I leaned forward onto all fours and then climbed to my feet. Not knowing what else to do with it, I threw Adam's jacket around my shoulders. It was several sizes too large for me. I fingered the tears in the leather and thought about the claws I'd watched sprout from where Adam's fingernails used to be.

I became aware of something breathing heavily and deeply behind me. My back tensed. This was the part in horror movies when the dumb blonde turned to find the beast staring right at her, its eyes hungry and saliva dripping from its fangs.

I understood that urge now, too. That desire to turn and put a face to your fear.

A thought flashed through my mind: is this how Jenn felt?

Slowly, I turned.

Those yellow eyes stared back at me through the little barred window in the door.
Below them was a long, black-furred snout. I got the impression of a muscular, wolfish body standing behind the door.

Those clawed hands, swollen now to monstrous proportion, reached up and wrapped around the bars as he draw his lips back from fangs that were far too white.

"Adam?" I said.

When he growled, I could feel the reverberations in my chest. This wasn't Adam. It shared the same body, but one look into those feral eyes and I knew there was nothing of that man left in there.

The monster tried reaching through the bars, but his forearm was too thick. When it got stuck, he roared.

I screamed and fell back on my ass, turning over right away and scrabbling away on all fours, too terrified to make that leap onto my feet to sprint.

That huge door slammed against its frame as I ran up the stairs and slammed the basement entrance shut behind me.

"I see..." I said, "I see..."

I rushed into the kitchen, the only room in that big, empty house I was familiar with at all, and hid under the marble overhang of the island.

Even with the door closed and little distance between us, I could hear his howls of frustration down there. When he slammed into the door, I could feel the house tremble.

Not knowing what else to do, I struggled for a moment to pull my cell out of my pocket. Now that I was away from the sight of that thing, I could gather myself a little better.

I unlocked it, checking for any messages.
Nothing. I was here with Adam (or what used to be Adam, anyway) and there was, as I was growing accustomed to, nothing from Jenn.

I nearly dropped the phone, then. This is what Adam wanted to tell me. And he did it by showing me the truth. I looked at the jacket again, at the little shreds of leather around the scratches, and the way it was torn.

This is what had happened to him the night of the date. He thought he could control it, but he'd lost control (because of me, I knew then).

I'd hurried home as he became that monster. Jenn went for her walk, then. She'd been out there, all alone with him.

Quickly as I could, I stripped the jacket off and threw it on the tile floor. How many of those scratches and tears were from her?

But I also knew why Adam had brought me here tonight to show me this. I looked over at the fridge and touched my lips, remembering that frantic, impassioned kiss. I could still taste him, if I thought about it.

He cared about me, and he wanted me to care enough about him to realize the truth.

That monster had killed Jenn. That was why I couldn't find her. Her body was out there, somewhere.

He also wanted me to see that it wasn't him that killed her. It was the monster. And he and the monster were separate, like different personalities sharing one body.

The truth of it all made me bury my face in my hands, pushing back against my eyes to keep the tears locked behind those lids.

As though he could know what I was thinking and feeling from down there, the werewolf let out a howl that cut through all the walls and doors between us.

"Shut up!" I said.

Was this what Vick warned me about in the cafeteria? But how could he know? I wiped at my cheeks, trying to keep from going crazy right then and there.

If werewolves and witches were real, what else was? I thought I'd learned long ago that monsters and demons and all that crap were all stories, meant to be understood as parables, or ways to keep unruly children in line, or for cheap late night entertainment.

The whole time, it was the children who were right. The adults, the people who were supposed to know it all, were just fooling themselves the entire time. Fooling themselves while they slept in their beds with the closet open, or the space under the bed unchecked. Fooling themselves while out camping.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to think about it. My sanity was slipping away, and I grasped at it with the very tip of my fingernails.

"Okay, calm down. It's all okay, he's locked up..."

Clearly, he'd transformed down there before. All
those gouges and scrapes in the wall proved that. Why else would he have a reinforced door like that?

Then I realized there was another piece of the puzzle. I could see what it was, just not where it fit.

Vick knew about all this. But how?

I felt overloaded, and completely exhausted. As my muscles unclenched, the adrenaline drained out of me. Balling myself up as best I could, my eyes slid shut.

I thought I dozed for only a moment. The clock on my phone said it was about quarter after one in the morning.

Down in the basement, that thing still raged. I stood at the
entrance, my forehead leaned against the cool door. Despite my apparent nap, I didn't feel any less tired. If anything, my body felt even less energized.

I walked around the first floor like a zombie, pausing to glance out at the useless BMW parked in the driveway.
Wherever I went, I always found myself back in the kitchen.

I sat in the seat Adam used when we first came in. The loaf of bread was still there, along with the peanut butter and knife. I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, not bothering to cut the crusts off.

My eating was mechanical, without any flavor. It was just nourishment, sugar to give me a little boost so that I could try and make it through this.

I had this stone-cold, heavy certainty in the pit of my stomach that Jenn was dead.

What made it even heavier was that it felt like it was at least partially my fault.

Could I go back in time to the day of the midterm? If I could, I'd go find Jenn straight away after class. I'd make us stay in her room or mine all night, neither of us allowed out.

Maybe then, Adam would have been able to control himself without me around. Even if he hadn't, we'd be behind the security of several locked doors.

As far as I knew, time travel was still impossible. That left me in the present, with only a few facts to rest on.

They read like this: Adam was a werewolf. Adam had also basically admitted to killing Jenn, even though he blamed this on his monstrous alter ego.

The peanut butter did keep me going for a few hours. It was surprising how long
it took for time to drag by, early in the morning when the entire world was still asleep.

I wondered when he'd turn back to his human form. Would it be when the sun broke in through that skylight? Did that mean he remained a werewolf longer in the winter than in the summer?

There was a digital clock, its numbers green, on the door of the fridge right over the ice dispenser. I watched the time change, advancing forward no matter hard I concentrated on forcing it to stop and reverse.

Those numbers read, "5:17" when I keyed "911" into my phone.

I didn't have Jenn's body, but I had her admitted killer locked in a room downstairs. The cops wouldn't believe me about the werewolf stuff, but one look in there and they'd have to open an investigation.

My thumb hovered over the little green receiver-shaped "Call" button. One push, a few words, and there'd be a cruiser here shortly.

My thumb shook. I bit down on my bottom lip, trying to will myself into pushing the button and alerting the authorities.

"It's the right thing to do," I said, "Come
on, you know she'd want you to."

This was all so awful. Jenn was the type of person who'd be absolutely thrilled to find out that monsters were real. Hell, for all I knew, death by monster was her preferred way to go.

Besides, Adam wasn't really the monster. I'd come to that conclusion myself already, hadn't I?

The clock on the fridge read "6:09" when I finally locked my phone and put it back into my pocket.

Chapter 25

I woke up to see daylight coming in through the windows along the far kitchen wall. I'd slept with my back hunched over, my head resting on my folded arms on top of the marble island.

Everything was stiff.

"Ouch..." I said as I straightened up.

I had a purpose, though. Straight down into the basement I went, down that hall towards that iron-banded door. I could see the light in there as well, coming in through the skylight.

Going onto my tiptoes, I looked in through the window. Adam was
curled up into a fetal ball, naked, right under that spot of daylight.

"Adam," I said, "Adam!"

He stirred, looking over his shoulder at me.

"
Steph...? You're still here."

"Of course I am. The keys to the car are in your pocket.
Unless you ate them last night."