Hemlock (37 page)

“Then again,” added Derby, “I have a feeling you would have proven difficult to control.”

I swalowed. “Unlike your son. How can you use him like this?”

It was sick. Completely and utterly twisted.

Derby stepped away from Ben. “Ian was infected in the attack that kiled his mother and brother. When that happened, I was left with a creature that looked and sounded just like my son but which was a copy of the thing that had kiled my family. I had him interned the same day I buried them. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, both my sons were kiled that day.” His eyes glinted.

“I ‘use him,’ as you put it, to try and stop that from happening to anyone else.”

I tried to imagine Ben as a teenager. He had lost his mother and brother, and then the only person he had left had turned on him.

I wiled Ben—Ian—to look at me. “You’ve been in the camps since you were fifteen?”

He nodded and stared at the ground. “Until he got me out.”

“Until he needed you,” I corrected.

Every muscle in my body trembled with disgust as I looked at Derby. I’d known the man was evil, but this was almost beyond Derby. I’d known the man was evil, but this was almost beyond comprehension. “You turned your own son into a kiler. You’re just as much a monster as he is. Probably more.”

The instant rage on Derby’s face was so fierce that I wished I had kept my mouth shut.

“I did what was
necessary
.” He crossed the few feet that separated us and glowered down at me. “I mourn those deaths more than you could ever know.”

Those deaths. Plural. Derby had been behind them al.

“You couldn’t just kil Amy,” I said, piecing it together. “On its own, her death would have been suspicious. But since she died in the middle of a string of attacks, everyone wrote it off as an ironic tragedy.” My stomach churned with revulsion. “You had your own son kil and attack al those people so you could use them as window dressing.”

“This is a war, Miss Dobson, and wars are not without casualties.” There wasn’t a trace of guilt in his voice. True devotion to the cause he had established. “At least their deaths weren’t wasted. They served a greater purpose—as wil your’s.”

Derby crouched down and sliced through the bonds at my ankles. “It wil be too messy to undo these after you’re dead,” he explained, ignoring my struggles as he puled me to a sitting position and worked on the ropes around my wrists. “Besides, we need it to look as though you fought back. We don’t want a repeat of what happened with Amy Walsh. If the police don’t find anything beneath your fingernails, some of them might become suspicious.”

It was the wrong thing to say. I curled my fingers and gouged Derby’s cheek with my nails.

Derby’s cheek with my nails.

His face twisted into a sneer as he drew back his arm and slapped me.

My head rocked to the side and the world tilted. “I thought you controled the police,” I said, as I tried to blink away the ilusion that the nearby trees were dancing in a circle. “Or is someone besides Bishop catching on?”

“Ian,” snapped Derby, ignoring my taunt and standing.

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know if I can.”

Derby’s voice sliced through the air, so sharp it made me wince.

“This is your chance to repent for what you are. Remember why you agreed to do this—to help put an end to infections, to make sure no one else dies like your mother and Scott, and so no one else has to endure what you did inside the camps.”

I pushed myself to my feet, swaying slightly. “Ben . . .” I reminded myself that Ben wasn’t real; he was an ilusion. “Ian, he doesn’t care about you. What he’s doing doesn’t even make sense. No one can put an end to infections.”

A flicker of doubt crossed his face.

I didn’t hear Derby behind me until it was too late. He grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked me back. I cried out as he drew his knife along my arm, splitting my skin from elbow to wrist. He shoved me so hard that I went flying.

My shoulders colided painfuly with dirt and rocks a nanosecond before the side of my head bounced off the ground. I blinked up at the stars and then glanced at my arm. Thin rivers of blood were running down my pale skin.

And I was lying in a heap at Ben’s feet.

I scrambled unsteadily away as he stared, transfixed, at my arm.

He licked his lips, almost like he could taste the blood.

I kept moving backward, too frightened to take my eyes off him long enough to gain my feet. It felt like a dozen fishhooks were hauling my heart and lungs in different directions and it was hard to breathe.

“You don’t have bloodlust,” I said, desperately seizing on what Bishop had told Kyle and me about the other victims and how they had been kiled. “You don’t have to do this.”

It was like he didn’t hear me. “No . . . no. No. No. No.” He said the word over and over, like a refrain.

“Ian doesn’t have bloodlust—not in the traditional sense,” said Derby, almost like he couldn’t resist talking right up until my bitter end. “But, with each attack, he’s had more and more trouble controling himself. It’s almost as though he’s developed some form of it after repeated exposure to blood. It’s rather fascinating.”

Derby realy had turned him into a monster.

Ben fel to his knees, the movement oddly graceful and inhuman.

Slowly, with horrible cracking sounds, his arms lengthened. His fingers stretched, growing oddly jointed as his spine shattered and reknit itself. With each pop and splinter of his body, he slowly advanced.

He kept saying, “No,” under his breath, and I had no idea if his transformations were always like this or if it was taking so long because he was trying to fight it.

But just as that thought gave me the faintest glimmer of hope, the But just as that thought gave me the faintest glimmer of hope, the recognition slid out of his eyes, leaving them unfamiliar and inhuman. Ben was no longer home, and the thing that was left didn’t care about me.

My shoulder hit something and I chanced a glance behind me.

Just a tree. When I turned my attention back to Ben, I was facing a white werewolf.

The wolf sprang and I had nowhere left to go. I threw my arms up to protect my face as its weight crashed into me. I smeled its hot, rank breath as bits of saliva dropped onto my hand. I whimpered and the wolf let out a low growl of pleasure.

Its fur brushed against the gash on my arm, white soaking up red, and I screamed.
Please let it be quick
, I prayed.
Please
don’t let it hurt too much
.

A shot rang out across the clearing. The beast above me let out a roar of pain just as something lodged itself in the tree next to my head. Flecks of bark hit my skin as the wolf reared up and away from me.

I lowered my arms and tried to force air back into my lungs; I had forgotten how to breathe.

Jason stood at the edge of the clearing, a gun clasped in his hand, a massive black wolf at his side.

He swung his arm, training the gun on Derby. “Cal it off.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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THE WHITE WOLF FROZE. ITS GAZE DARTED BETWEEN Jason and me, and then it slowly backed away.

Shaking so hard that my muscles ached, I curled my arm against my chest and pressed the cut to my shirt in an effort to slow the flow of blood.

The wolf licked its maw and stopped its retreat. An involuntary gasp escaped my throat as it took a smal step back toward me.

“Cal it off or I swear to God I wil shoot you.” Jason’s voice echoed off the trees.

I had never heard him sound so strong or certain of anything in his life. I clung to that certainty even as I stared at the thing that used to be Ben.

“Jason, you don’t understand what’s going on.” Derby’s voice was calm, almost paternal.

“I don’t need to. Cal it off.”

The placating tone in Derby’s voice slipped. “It could tear her throat out, you know. Before you could squeeze off a single shot, she’d be bleeding her life onto the forest floor.”

Jason’s eyes flicked to mine, just for a second, and then locked Jason’s eyes flicked to mine, just for a second, and then locked back on Derby. “You’d stil be dead.”

A low growl trickled out of the black werewolf’s throat and Jason shook his head. “I don’t think he’s too happy about what you puled at his house.”

The moment stretched out like a rubber band. Everything was hyperclear and crisp. Then Derby reached for something at his belt and time snapped back.

There was the sound of gunfire—so loud in the smal clearing—

and I screamed as the white wolf leaped at me. But before it could connect, before its claws could shred my skin like paper, a dark shape hit it from the side, knocking it away in a blur of fur.

Kyle.

I struggled to my feet as he placed himself between Ben and me.

The white wolf took a step to the side, and Wolf-Kyle mirrored the movement, snarling.

Pulse pounding, I looked around for a falen branch or a rock.

Anything so that I wasn’t completely defenseless.

There was nothing.

Across the clearing, Jason dove behind a thick elm and I lost sight of Derby and the black werewolf. Trey, I reminded myself.

The wolf was Trey.

Motion puled my attention back to the two wolves in front of me as Ben lunged and sank his teeth into Kyle’s back.

Kyle managed to shake him off, but the white wolf’s face came back stained with blood.

I knew Kyle couldn’t keep this up. He hadn’t been able to stop Ben in the Meadows, and he wouldn’t be able to stop him now.

This time, I didn’t have a Honda I could just aim at Ben, and I was the only person on two legs who
wasn’t
armed.

Kyle was going to get himself kiled. He was going to get himself kiled and there wasn’t anything I could do to save him.

A hand locked around my wrist and I lashed out before realizing it was Jason.

He dragged me deeper into the trees.

I stumbled along behind him, trying to plant my heels into the ground, desperate to go back. Branches scratched my arms and face. “No! We can’t just leave Kyle and Trey!” I tried to wrench my arm free, but Jason’s grip was like a steel manacle.

“Come on,” he panted, puling me forward as though my struggles didn’t have the slightest effect. “I promised Kyle I’d get you away.”

Ignoring my objections, Jason forced me farther and farther from the fight. I kept trying to make him stop, kept trying to break free, but I barely slowed him down. Dimly, some part of me realized that I was stil weak from the drugs, but that fact didn’t matter.

Al that mattered was that Kyle was facing down Ben and he was going to lose if we didn’t do something.

I tripped on a tree root and nearly went crashing to my knees, but that wasn’t what finaly stopped Jason.

He let go of my arm and stared down at his palm. In the scant moonlight filtering through the close-crowded trees, I could see that his hand was covered in something dark, almost like he had that his hand was covered in something dark, almost like he had pressed it into a tray of paint.

Jason’s other hand stil clutched the gun. He shoved it into the waistband of his jeans and I had the brief, slightly hysterical thought that I hoped he had remembered the safety.

He grabbed my arm and turned it so that he could examine the cut.

“We have to go back.”

“What”—Jason swalowed—“what happened to your arm?”

I shook my head. My arm didn’t matter. “We have to go back,”

I repeated. “We can’t leave them.”

Jason gripped my shoulders. “Did it scratch you?” His voice was low and urgent, almost frantic. I remembered the morning he saved me from Heather, the fear on his face when he thought she might have infected me.

“No. Derby did this.” I touched the edge of the cut and then wiped my fingers on my jeans. “He was trying to set Ben off with the blood.”

Jason let go of me. The relief that slid across his face was overwhelmingly palpable, and for a horrible moment I wondered what scared him more: the idea of my death or the thought of me becoming a werewolf.

Ben
.

I gasped, realizing I hadn’t told Jason. “It’s Ben. He’s the wolf.

He kiled Amy.”

“I know.” The two words were a threat. “Trey caled Serena.

He smeled the wolf when he dropped you off. He was nosing around the building when Ben dragged you out the back door and around the building when Ben dragged you out the back door and into Derby’s car.”

Jason hauled out a pocketknife and, before I could ask what he was doing, cut away a strip of his black T-shirt. He put the knife away and lifted my arm. “He folowed them out to the nature preserve—which is where we are, by the way—and caled us from the road.”

Jason wound the cotton around my arm, binding the cut. “He lost them once they were inside. It took a while for him and Kyle to pick up the trail.”

He stepped away and I bent my arm, testing the makeshift bandage. “We have to go back. We have to help them.”

Jason shook his head. “I’m going back. You’re staying here.”

“Not a chance!” I was aching, bleeding, and terrified, but I wasn’t going to stay behind. Not when everyone else was risking their lives.

Jason reached out and brushed the hair back from my face.

“Please, Mac. Just for once, do what someone asks you to.” His eyes were so fierce that my legs trembled.

I opened my mouth to object, and he pressed his fingers to my lips. Hi skin smeled faintly of gunmetal and blood.

“Please,” he repeated, the fierceness in his eyes turning to something haunted and desperate. I wondered if he saw Amy when he looked at me.

A low growl echoed through the trees and I whirled.

Relief surged through me as I realized it was Kyle.

And then Jason swore.

Heart in throat, I turned.

Heart in throat, I turned.

Derby stood a few feet away clutching a black handgun and pointing it squarely at my chest.