Hemlock (18 page)

I tried not to look too disappointed. It would have made things a whole lot easier if Kyle could have just spent an afternoon at the mal, picking werewolves out of the crowd. It would have at least given us something to start with.

Kyle watched me, a slightly worried expression on his face. “I’l pick you up for school tomorrow, okay?”

I nodded and fought off a yawn.

He reached out and stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. “Are the dreams realy that bad?”

Shivering, I nodded. “I’ve never had nightmares like these before.” Sometimes there were moments when Amy was herself—

when it seemed like we were just hanging out—but the dreams always took horrific turns. Last night, I had been the one attacked by a wolf while Amy recorded the whole thing on her phone and provided a running commentary. I’d woken up gasping and crying, convinced that my sweat-damp sheets were soaked with blood.

“You can cal me, you know. If they get bad and you can’t sleep.”

I smiled. “You’re going to protect me from my subconscious, too?”

In response, Kyle brushed his lips against mine. The kiss was soft at first—almost chaste—and then deepened.

When he finaly puled away, I had to put a hand on the car to steady myself.

steady myself.

“Good night, Mackenzie Catherine,” he said softly, before walking around to the driver’s side.

I stepped away from the curb and watched as he drove away. I waited until the Honda’s tailights were swalowed by darkness, and then I turned back to the apartment building.

I had told Kyle that his leaving would hurt just as badly regardless of whether or not we “complicated” things. I hoped I was right.

A tear slid down my cheek and I brushed it away. I felt like I had just entered the ultimate zero-sum game. Kyle would stay, but only until Amy’s kiler was found. Gain one thing and lose another.

A car door slammed, jolting me out of my thoughts.

I glanced back at the street. A car I hadn’t noticed was parked in the shadows under a large elm. My stomach lurched as Jason stepped into a pool of light cast by a street lamp.

The look on his face reminded me of an animal on the verge of striking. I’d seen that look directed at other people—usualy when he was so drunk that he itched for a fight—but he’d never looked at me that way before.

He stepped onto the curb, balance failing him a little as he swayed slightly between one step and the next. “And here I thought you were avoiding me because you were mad.”

I licked my lips; my mouth was suddenly dry. “I haven’t been avoiding you.” Al right, so that was a complete lie. I was totaly avoiding him, I just couldn’t tel him why.

“So how long have you and Kyle been going at it?” Jason’s tone

“So how long have you and Kyle been going at it?” Jason’s tone was fake casual, venom under velvet.

“We’re not—” I started to deny it, but movement on the street caught my attention. Two other guys had gotten out of the car and were leaning against it, watching us like we were a movie at the drive-in.

I shook my head. I hadn’t done anything wrong and I wasn’t going to put on a show of defending myself in front of his new friends. “You know what? Believe whatever you want. It’s none of your business, anyway.”

Jason let out a short, scathing bark of laughter. “You’re right.

It’s none of my business. I don’t care who you hook up with.”

The hostility in his voice was like a slap. I may have been avoiding him, but I didn’t deserve this. I started for the apartment building but made it only three steps before I turned, too furious to just walk away. “Why do you do that? Why do you try and drag other people down with you?” I looked at Jason and saw what everyone else probably did. A pathetic rich kid who destroyed everything in his path. “Do you think this is what Amy would want?

Do you think she’d want you to hurt yourself and anyone who cares about you?”

Jason reached into his jacket and took out a thick, brown envelope. “You know what I think?” he asked, tossing the package at my feet. “I think she’d find it kind of poetic. Not that you would understand.”

He turned to leave and the colar of his jacket slid down, exposing a black dagger on the side of his neck.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

IN THE SPACE BETWEEN ONE BREATH AND THE NEXT, I was at jason’s side, franticaly yanking back his jacket. Trackers were marked in two stages: first the dagger, and then later the T. I had to see if he had the ful tattoo.

He grabbed my wrist—thankfuly the one that wasn’t sprained

—and roughly puled my arm away from his neck, his grip tight enough to hurt. I tried to wrench free, but it was like forcing your way out of a pair of handcuffs.

“What did they do to you?”

Jason shook his head. “Nothing I didn’t ask for.”

“Having trouble with your girl, Sheff?” One of the Trackers stepped onto the lawn. His cheeks were rutted with acne scars and his head was shaved. Some guys looked okay without hair. This guy was not one of them.

I tugged my wrist free.

I tugged my wrist free.

Jason didn’t take his eyes off me. “No trouble, Less. I’l be done in a minute.”

Bald Less took a long—insultingly appraising—look at me and then shrugged. “Whatever, man. Just hurry up. Alexis is getting restless.”

Sure enough, Alexis Perry was leaning out the passenger-side window, talking to the Tracker who’d stayed by the car. “Come on, Jason,” she yeled as Less strode back across the street.

“Great company you’re keeping,” I muttered, rubbing my wrist.

“I’m not looking for your approval.” Jason kicked the envelope over with the toe of his shoe. “Enjoy the reading. I figured, since you already seemed to hate me, you might as wel have a decent reason.”

I didn’t know how to reply. I couldn’t do anything other than watch, dazed and befuddled, as Jason walked back to the car and climbed, a little clumsily, into the backseat.

With the squeal of tires and a chorus of shouts, he was gone.

I bent to retrieve the envelope he had tossed at me and clamped a hand to my mouth to muffle a strangled sound that tried to force its way out of my chest.

I’d been worried Derby would get his claws into Jason—I just had never expected Jason to bare his neck and welcome it.

Operating on autopilot, I managed to make it back upstairs and to my room.

I sat cross-legged on the bed and stared at the envelope. Every nerve in my body hummed like a power line and my pulse seemed to skip beats. Part of me wanted to cal Kyle, to ask him to come to skip beats. Part of me wanted to cal Kyle, to ask him to come back so I wouldn’t have to do this on my own, but another part of me didn’t want anyone watching while I pored over the last few moments of Amy’s life.

It felt oddly private—like the things she whispered to me while I slept.

Hands shaking, I fumbled with the flap and ripped the envelope open.

The file slid out easily. A plain brown folder with Amy’s name and the date of her death printed on a white label. Feeling like I was standing on a high ledge, I opened the folder.

Photos.

Why hadn’t I realized there’d be photos?

Amy’s black high-tops. Her hair. Her blood. One brown eye staring sightlessly at the camera.

Another photo. Amy’s hand wrapped in a bag, preserving the white fur that had been clenched in her fist.

Her torso, which didn’t look human at al. Just a mess of shredded fabric and things—
don’t think about organs and
insides
—glistening in the dark.

I dropped the photos and bolted for the bathroom. My shoulders shook as I knelt on the ceramic tiles and threw up into the toilet. I retched over and over—long after there was nothing left in my stomach—as tears streamed down my face.

The phone rang in the kitchen, but I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t make my legs work and my throat was on fire.

I pressed my cheek against the edge of the bathtub, letting the I pressed my cheek against the edge of the bathtub, letting the cold porcelain draw some of the heat away from my face.

Someone—some
thing
—had done that to Amy, and none of us had been there to keep her safe.

After a while, when I was sure I could stand, I got to my feet and flushed the toilet. I washed my hands and splashed water on my face. I avoided looking in the mirror. I couldn’t look at my own face—whole and alive—after seeing those pictures of Amy.

I turned off the bathroom light and went back to my room.

I kept my eyes on the
Les Mis
poster on the far wal—a souvenir from a trip Tess and I had taken to New York the summer before last—and sat on the bed. Going by the texture of the paper, I separated the photos and slid them out of the police folder and back into the envelope.

I’d look at them again—if I had to—but not right now.

My stomach knotted. Jason had seen Amy after the attack.

He’d seen her like this, and I couldn’t even look at the photos.

I forced myself to start reading the file.

The detective leading the case—Mike Bishop—had been pretty thorough. There were witness reports and locations where Amy had been spotted, even her cel phone records. It was almost like an episode of some prime-time cop show.

I scanned the phone records, zeroing in on the hour just before her death. Kyle’s number had been highlighted—the last number she’d caled—as had two cals to Jason. A third number was highlighted in blue. I didn’t recognize it, but Amy had caled it seven times during that one hour.

I frowned and turned the page over. The number belonged to I frowned and turned the page over. The number belonged to Trey Carson. Why would Amy have caled Serena’s brother? I leafed through the rest of the papers, eventualy coming to a statement from Trey.

He’d been working at the video store and had forgotten his cel at home. He had no idea why Amy had caled him. I flipped back to the phone records. Each cal had lasted about ten seconds—just long enough to hang up after you’d gotten someone’s voice mail.

One wrong number might have been a mistake, but no way could Amy have caled the same wrong number seven times.

Something clicked.

Jason was supposed to pick Amy up at the mal that night, but she’d been found in an aley off Windsor Street. Windsor was just about halfway between the mal and the video store.

It didn’t make much sense—I’d never even seen Amy talk to Trey—but what if she’d been on her way to see him the night she died? It seemed unlikely, but so did al those phone cals.

I went back to the statements. There was one from a woman who’d seen Amy walking with a blond man of medium build and height. The police had shown her a photo of Jason, but the woman couldn’t be positive that he was the man she’d seen: it had been dark and she’d only glimpsed him for an instant and from behind.

I knew it couldn’t have been Jason. He’d been late picking Amy up. He hadn’t seen her until he found her in the aley.

The apartment door creaked open and my heart tried to jump out of my chest. I’d been so upset after seeing Jason that I had forgotten to turn the dead bolt.

“Mac?”

“Mac?”

My shoulders sagged in relief at the sound of Ben’s voice.

“In here,” I caled, hastily shoving the police file behind the smal mountain of pilows at the head of my bed.

I tried to look calm and normal as Ben appeared in the doorway.

His hair was damp, like he’d just gotten out of the shower, and his clothes were rumpled. The jeans he was wearing had the beginnings of holes over both knees.

“You’re not working tonight?” The Cat had a pretty relaxed dress code, but they drew the line at denim.

Ben shook his head. “Business has been down again since those two new werewolf attacks. My shifts got cut back.” He glanced around my room. “Tess asked me to come upstairs and check on you. She caled and didn’t get an answer.”

I couldn’t tel Ben that I had been heaving my guts out in the bathroom, so I shrugged and said, “I was doing laundry downstairs.”

He nodded and his eyes locked on the green-and-white Coyotes pennant on my closet door. An odd expression crossed his face, almost like he was somewhere else.

“Are you okay?”

He blinked. “Yeah. Sorry. Usualy you have your bedroom door shut when I’m over.”

That was true—though it wasn’t anything personal. Tess had a habit of ransacking my room and never putting anything back. I liked Ben, but I didn’t want him to see the contents of my liked Ben, but I didn’t want him to see the contents of my underwear drawer scattered across the floor just because Tess thought one of her bras had gotten mixed in with mine the last time she’d done laundry.

He walked over to the pennant, pushed it to one side, and watched it swing back into place. “My little brother would have been your age by now. He’d be a senior. He’d be going to basketbal games and dating girls and saving up for his first car.”

I swalowed. It was the most Ben had ever said to me about his brother. “What was his name?”

“Scott.” Ben turned away from the pennant. “His name was Scott.”

“Does it ever get any easier?” I asked, thinking about Amy.

He leaned against the wal and crossed his arms. “In some ways.

After enough time passes, you realize that maybe a whole day went by where you didn’t think of them. Then you feel guilty because you’re not supposed to forget—even if it is just for a day.”

“Ben, you can’t . . .” I struggled to find words that wouldn’t sound empty and cliché. “You can’t spend your whole life blaming yourself for an accident.” Tess had told me that Ben had been in the backseat of the car when it crashed, that a truck had blown through a red light, pulverizing the front of the car and kiling his mother and brother almost instantly. She’d also told me that he stil dreamed about it, that there were nights when he woke up screaming. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He shrugged. “I survived and they didn’t. That’s fault enough.”

I knew Ben was twenty-two—only five years difference between us—but he seemed so much older sometimes. “Is that between us—but he seemed so much older sometimes. “Is that why you don’t talk to your family very much?”