Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (19 page)

“Is there some twisted part of you that
wants
to see if I’ll beat the crap out of you?” I plucked the glass from his hand and took a sip for courage before tipping the rest down a potted plant.

“Jason?”

Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield materialized out of nowhere.

Panicked, I shoved the empty glass back into Jason’s hand.

In some ways, Matt Sheffield looked like an older, colder
version of his son. He had the same eyes without the spark of warmth. The same mouth without the capacity for laughter. But as cold as Jason’s father was, he had nothing on his wife.

The temperature around us dropped as her gaze settled on me. “Jason, you didn’t tell us you would be here. Or that you were bringing Mackenzie.”

Somehow, just the way she said my name made me feel like a piece of gum that had been dragged in on the bottom of someone’s shoe. I was suddenly achingly aware of the fact that I didn’t belong here. I tugged on the sleeve of my dress—the dress Jason had paid for—self-consciously and prayed she wouldn’t look down and recognize the shoes.

“Would have,” said Jason, wrapping an arm around my shoulders, “but then we would have had to have an actual conversation, and I know how much you detest those mother-son moments.”

“I don’t know why you always say such things.” The ice in Mrs. Sheffield’s voice cracked artfully. The words were a show for anyone who might be within earshot. “You know I try.”

“Darling,” said Jason’s father, completely oblivious to—or just ignoring—the tense exchange between his wife and son, “I see some people I need to say hello to.” He turned and held out his arm.

Before taking it, Mrs. Sheffield shot a pointed glance at the empty glass in Jason’s hand. “Do try to remember where you are and behave yourself.”

“Love you, too, Mom,” called Jason as she walked away.
“Not a word about the fact that I didn’t go home last night or the National Guard or the curfew.” He set the glass on the floor. “Someone really needs to send that woman a subscription to one of those parenting magazines.”

“I think it’s about eighteen years too late.” I shook my head. “Come on. I just want to get out of here.”

I gripped the key tightly in my hand as we made our way to the study. The tap of my heels echoed in the empty hallway and I couldn’t stop glancing over my shoulder.

“Don’t look so nervous,” said Jason, though he seemed just as off-balance as I felt.

I can’t believe we’re doing this
, I thought. You’d think anything would be easy after taking down a rehabilitation camp, but the closer we got to the study, the more my stomach twisted into knots.

“What the . . . ?” Jason’s steps faltered and his shoulders tensed as we neared the door.

There were scuff marks around the lock and gouges in the doorframe. The door was closed, but not all the way. “Someone broke in.” It was a clumsy job—the kind Hank would have chastised me for—and the noise probably would have drawn attention if it hadn’t been for the background din of the party. I strained my ears, but couldn’t hear anything inside.

Jason pushed the door open with his shoulder. It groaned on its hinges, but slowly swung inward to reveal a dimly lit ruin.

Bookcases lined each wall, but their contents had been strewn around the room. Shards of broken antiques and
torn pages from heavy leather-bound books covered the floor. Near the far wall, a large desk had been turned onto its side. Its drawers had been reduced to kindling—it almost looked as though someone had destroyed them in a blind rage.

“The room is soundproof,” I murmured. Amy had always said her dad needed complete quiet to work. “That’s why no one at the party heard the noise.”

Jason swore under his breath. I thought he was responding to the destruction, but as he strode toward the desk, I saw what had captured his attention.

Bile rose in the back of my throat as I followed him to a crumpled figure half hidden by the desk. It was a man with dark hair and the same sort of suit the security staff were all wearing. He was lying on his stomach in a pool of blood. It seemed impossible that one body could contain so much blood.

The outer edges of the puddle had already started to dry: he had been here for a while.

I reached for the man’s shoulder, and then stopped. Whatever had happened to him, he was obviously beyond help.

Nauseous, I stepped back and turned to stare at the remains of the room. “What do you think happened?”

“Just a guess: we aren’t the only ones looking for something.” Jason nodded down at the body. His voice was even, but he looked slightly green. “He probably walked in on whoever trashed the study.”

A low groan drifted through the room. For a second, I
thought the sound had come from the man at our feet, but then the noise came again, from behind us.

“Oh, God.” I ran to the far corner where a familiar, silver-haired figure lay on his side. I pulled off my gloves and let them fall to the floor as I crouched next to Amy’s grandfather. He groaned softly as I pressed two fingers to his throat. His pulse was weak and erratic. “I think he had a heart attack.” I fumbled for his hand. “Senator Walsh? John?”

The old man’s eyes fluttered open. They locked on my face, but seemed to stare right through me. “Amy.” His voice was a rasp but his fingers gripped mine so tightly that it was almost painful.

“No, it’s—” I started to correct him, but couldn’t.

“Stay with me.” He closed his eyes but continued to squeeze my hand.

I looked up at Jason. “You have to go get help.”

“I’m not leaving you alone in here. You go. I’ll stay.”

“He thinks I’m Amy.” A lump rose in my throat. “I can’t leave him.”

Jason ran a hand roughly over his face and stared down at Amy’s grandfather. When he spoke, the words sounded strangled. “Three minutes. I’ll be back in three minutes.”

I nodded and turned my attention back to Senator Walsh. “It’ll be all right,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure it would be all right at all. “You’ll be okay. Jason’s getting help.”

The door clicked shut as Jason left the room.

Amy’s grandfather struggled for breath. When he spoke, each word was labored. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Shhhhh. It’s all right. You don’t have to fix anything.”

“Amy . . . I didn’t know.” His voice became a barely audible rasp, forcing me to lean closer. “He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He’s a good boy.”

A shiver slipped down my spine as I remembered Stephen’s hasty exit from the kitchen and the blood Kyle had smelled. “Do you mean Stephen? Was Stephen here?”

From the other side of the study came the rustle of fabric and a thick, wet cough. “He’s talking about his son.”

Yanking my hand free of the senator’s grip, I twisted around just as the figure by the desk rolled over and struggled to a sitting position.

I stared, horrified, at a familiar face and a pair of flat, gray eyes.

“He’s talking about Ryan Walsh.” Amy’s killer smiled at me weakly. “Hello, Mac.”

M
Y SHOULDER BLADES COLLIDED WITH THE DOOR. I
didn’t remember standing or moving.

I stared at Ben from across the room as sweat soaked my skin and my heart thundered in my chest. For a horrible second, I was back in the forest outside Hemlock, my shoulders pressed to a tree as a white werewolf—as Ben—loomed above me.

I dug my nails into my palm, using the pain to keep the past from pulling me under.

Ben was thinner than I remembered, and he had dyed his normally blond hair a rich, deep brown, but it was unmistakably him. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood. It clung to his lower torso and his left shoulder in large patches.

A reg would already be dead from blood loss; given the way Ben stayed on the floor, leaning against the upturned desk for support, the wounds might be too much for even a werewolf to heal.

He didn’t look like he was going anywhere, but I wasn’t
taking any chances. My gaze swept over the mess on the study floor and settled on a letter opener a few feet away. Locking my eyes on Ben, I walked over to it and crouched down. My fingers skimmed torn books and the remains of a Chinese vase before closing on the ebony handle.

“Don’t worry: I couldn’t hurt you even if I wanted to.” Ben laughed—or tried to—as I straightened. The laugh turned into a cough as a thin trail of blood ran down his chin. “I don’t want to hurt you, incidentally. What happened that night was never part of the plan.”

I glanced at Senator Walsh. He lay unnervingly still, but I could just see the rise and fall of his chest. “What did you do to him?” I asked, voice steady even as I fought an almost overwhelming urge to run. “Killing his granddaughter wasn’t enough?”

Another wet cough bubbled up from Ben’s chest. “I didn’t do anything to him. The senator found out his son is a monster. Too much knowledge can be fatal at his age.”

“What do you mean? What did he find out?” My gaze flickered down to Ben’s bloodstained clothing and my stomach rolled as I tried to picture Amy’s father killing—or at least trying to kill—someone. “Did Ryan Walsh do that to you?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

My grip on the letter opener tightened. “That’s not an answer. What happened?”

“Of course it’s an answer. You just don’t know the right question.”

“What are you doing here, Ben?” I asked, a fraction of
my fear giving way to anger. “Why did you come back? Why couldn’t you just have disappeared and stayed gone?”

Ben hesitated. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, “I needed to get into this room and this party was my best chance to do it.” His gray eyes clouded with pain and then narrowed. “Maybe I should be asking you the same question. What are you doing here, in this room?”

The letter opener shook in my hand as I crossed my arms over my chest. I ignored his question for one of my own. “What in this room could possibly be so important that you’d risk coming back to Hemlock?”

“Proof.”
Ben studied my face intently. “Why are you here, Mackenzie? How did you get tangled up in this?” He looked oddly concerned for someone who had been ready to kill me less than a month and a half ago. “Is it Kyle? Or is it those friends of yours—the brother and sister?”

“How do you know about Trey and Serena?” Tendrils of fear crept down my spine. “You didn’t just come back. You’ve been here awhile. You’ve been watching me.” I thought of the things I had found in the church—the newspaper with Ryan Walsh’s face circled and the battered paperbacks. Ben had never gone anywhere without a book; the spare room in his apartment had been crammed full of them. “Those were your things in the church. That day I saw you on the street—I thought I imagined it, but you were really there.”

Ben shook his head weakly. “I spent weeks worried I’d run into you or Tess, then yesterday I go back to the church and hear your voice coming from inside.”

I flinched at the sound of my cousin’s name. “Don’t you dare talk about Tess. You ripped her heart out and never once told her who you really were. If she ever found out about the things you’ve done . . .”

Ben’s gray eyes darkened as he struggled to haul in a deep breath. “You won’t tell her. You and I both know it would destroy her.”

He sounded so sure. So utterly certain. And he was right. I hadn’t told Tess. I was too scared it would kill something inside of her to find out the man she had loved—the man she had wrapped her arms around and trusted and slept beside at night—was a monster.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Just for a second. My memories of Ben were so twisted and tangled that it was hard to look at him. “Why did you come back,
Ian
?” I used his real name, hurling it like an insult. “You said you were looking for proof. Proof of what?”

Ben’s eyes took on a faraway, lost look. When he spoke, his voice held that same lost quality. “I wanted to know if it was true. Everything my father said. I let him talk me into killing Amy because he told me it would be payback for the things her father had done to me, that it would stop Ryan Walsh.”

A sick feeling wrapped itself around my core. “What did Ryan Walsh do to you?”

It was like he hadn’t heard me. “I didn’t know there would be others before Amy,” he said, “not when I agreed to come to Hemlock. After, I told myself that a few more deaths didn’t matter—not if it stopped all the others.”

“The others?”

He squeezed his eyes shut as his face twisted with pain. “We weren’t supposed to ask about them, you know. At Van Horne. That was the worst part. They would disappear in the middle of the night, and you had to act like they had never existed.”

His words were a hook in my chest, reminding me of the disappearances at Thornhill and pulling me closer even as every survival instinct I had told me to stay back. “You were at Van Horne?”

Ben didn’t answer.

There was a radio at his waist. It burst to life with a crackle of static. “We’ve got reports of a medical emergency in the east wing. Heading there now.”

“Ben?”

Silence.

His chest rose and fell, but the time between breaths seemed to grow longer. I glanced back at the door. Any second, the security staff would come bursting into the room. Once they did, I’d lose any chance I had of getting information.

I eased closer. “Ben . . . what happened at Van Horne?” I swallowed. “Was CutterBrown experimenting on wolves at the camp? Was Ryan Walsh there?”

He coughed, ragged and violent. Flecks of blood dotted his lips and splattered my dress.

“Ben?” Desperate, I closed the remaining space between us and reached out to shake his shoulder. His shirt was so saturated with blood that the fabric stuck to my hand.

Disgusted and horrified, I pulled back, but Ben grabbed my wrist. The gesture was so fast that I dropped my makeshift weapon and flailed for balance. I struggled to pull free, but even gutted and dying, Ben was a werewolf and I was just a reg.

His eyes flew open. They were wild and unfocused. “They wanted to see if they could give me more scars. Each one had a name, but no one would ever tell me the order of the words.”

He coughed again.

“Mac?” Awareness filled his eyes, but he didn’t release his grip on my wrist.