Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (9 page)

Serena was staring at me, brows furrowed.

“He was still breathing,” I repeated, more firmly, but I could still see the doubt in her eyes. “Come on,” I said, turning away in an attempt to put an end to the subject.

I walked the length of the church, looking for a way in. The stained-glass windows were still intact—I guess even vandals had limits—but several basement casements had been smashed.

I went to the nearest one and crouched down. Jagged shards of glass still clung to the frame, making it look as though the window had teeth. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and carefully knocked out the remaining pieces before sticking my head inside.

The room beyond the window was as dark as a tomb.

“I need Jason’s phone,” I said, reaching back blindly. Serena handed it to me and I shone its light down into the darkness.

The feeble glow didn’t pierce more than three feet into the gloom, but it was enough to tell that the room had
been some sort of office. There was a desk underneath the window and the floor was littered with file folders and pamphlets.

I stowed the phone in my pocket before scooting back and swinging my legs over the windowsill.

Serena grabbed my wrist. She was still shivering, shivering so hard the trembles radiated up my arm. “You’re not seriously breaking into a church?”

“We broke three hundred werewolves out of a government rehabilitation camp, you can’t possibly be squeamish about a little B and E. Besides,” I added, “the window was already broken.”

“Breaking out is different from breaking in,” insisted Serena. “And it’s different when it’s a church. It’s sacrilegious or bad luck or something.”

I rolled my eyes and pulled my arm free. “It’s not like our luck can get much worse.” Slowly, trying not to slice myself open on any remaining glass, I lowered myself through the window.

Shards crunched under my sneakers as my feet hit the desk. “Be careful when you come through,” I warned as I hopped down to the floor. The mingled scent of mildew, old books, and mothballs ruffled my nose. I fumbled in my pocket for Jason’s phone and used its light to find the door as Serena climbed through the window.

I stepped into a hallway. A rectangle of daylight glowed at the far end of the corridor: a door at the top of a single flight of stairs.

Serena was silent as she followed me up out of the
basement and into the main part of the church.

Light filtered through stained-glass scenes of angels and mangers and illuminated rows of wooden pews—most of which had been turned on their sides. Soft coos echoed above our heads, and I glanced up to spot clusters of pigeons nesting in the rafters. It wasn’t hard to see how they had gotten in: patches of the roof had rotted through.

I wandered up the center aisle.

There were scattered signs of habitation. An old sweatshirt. A Bible with pages torn out. Three battered paperbacks and a book of matches from some random cheap motel. A travel mug next to a stack of newspapers. I picked up the topmost paper. It was from last week. “Someone was crashing here. Recently.”

I strained my ears, but the pigeons and the creak of old wood were the only sounds I could hear. Hopefully, whoever had been squatting here had moved on.

The paper had been left open to the business section and my eyes were drawn to a photo in the upper left-hand corner of the page. It was a picture of Amy’s father standing outside of CutterBrown Pharmaceuticals—the company he had helped take from a niche research outfit to one of the leading drug developers in the United States.

Someone had doodled a circle around Ryan Walsh’s head, but all of my attention was focused on the building in the background, on the steel-and-glass sign that stood just a few feet from the main entrance.

A roaring sound filled my ears. It felt like something was prying my rib cage open, like the thoughts and emotions
rushing down my throat with every breath were too large for my body to contain.

No wonder the image in my dream had seemed familiar. Even seeing just a small slice, I should have known what it was. A kingfisher in flight: the symbol of CutterBrown. Their logo was everywhere—on everything from the new wing at the hospital to scholarship applications in the guidance office at school. But nowhere had I seen it more often or on more random items—on everything from pens to shot glasses—than at Amy’s house.

Amy’s father had chosen the symbol himself. He had told me so, once, a long time ago—so long ago that the memory was hazy around the edges.

Before Ryan Walsh joined the company, CBP had been one of a handful of medical start-ups in Hemlock—small companies like the one Kyle’s parents and Serena’s father worked for—but he had lured away some of the best researchers in the world and then channeled the company’s R&D budget into two drugs that had proven very, very popular.

These days, CBP was involved in all sorts of things and was one of the largest employers in Hemlock, making Ryan Walsh a sort of local god.

The paper shook in my hand.

A pharmaceutical company would have been the perfect partner for Sinclair. Hell, even the blood test the camp used to confirm incoming inmates were actually infected was something CutterBrown had been developing. Despite that, not once had it occurred to me that the warden might have
been working with—or even for—CBP.

Why hadn’t it occurred to me? How could I have been so stupid?

Sometimes people see things they’re not ready to accept.
Amy’s words drifted through my head.

There was a soft thump behind me. I had been so consumed by the paper and the horrible ideas filling my mind that, for a moment, I had forgotten where I was.

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.

T
HE 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.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m not hurt.” Unless you counted bruises, exhaustion, and so much worry that I was close to losing my mind.

“Serena?”

“She’s . . .” I started to tell him about the fever but the battery warning on Jason’s phone went off again. The small interruption gave my tired brain a chance to register the
strangeness of the question. The message I had left for Hank had been on the far side of extremely vague. While I didn’t think it was likely someone was hacking my father’s voice mail, I hadn’t felt safe leaving anything more than Jason’s number and a request to call. “How did you know something happened to Serena?”

He ignored the question. “Is she all right? Is she safe?”

I didn’t want to answer his questions until he answered mine, but I was too worn-out and worried to play games—especially with Jason’s phone on the verge of death. “She’s sick—some kind of fever. Men showed up at her house this afternoon. They had a photo of her.
From Thornhill.
Serena’s brother held them off—along with Kyle and Jason. They gave us a chance to get away.”

I hesitated. “I don’t know where they are,” I admitted. “Jason gave us an address. He told us to wait until sunset and then get out of town if they hadn’t shown.”

“It’s past sunset.”

“They’ll be here.”

“You can’t afford to be sentimental, kid. You know better.”

“They’ll. Be. Here.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a debate. My father had always been great at cutting people loose, but I wasn’t anything like him.

Hank sighed. When he spoke again, he sounded like he had aged about forty years. “The remaining two Denver packs were hit last night. Someone is going after the wolves from the detention block. They managed to get three—two from Carteron, one from Portheus. It’s why I tried to call
you this morning. I thought there was a chance they’d go after Serena.”

“They almost got her.”