Twenty-eight
I CAUGHT UP WITH Derek at the edge of a wooded patch beside the truck stop.
“I need to get in as deep as I can,” he said. “Follow my path. It’s muddy.”
I could smell the rain, the damp chill of it lingering in the night air. Dead and decaying leaves slid underfoot. A dog barked somewhere. Derek paused, tracking the sound, then nodded, like it was far enough away, and continued walking.
“If I finish this,” he began. “If I seem even close to finishing, you need to take off.”
When I didn’t answer, he said. “Chloe …”
“You aren’t going to turn into some bloodthirsty monster, Derek. It’ll still be you, just as a wolf.”
“And you know that based on how much experience with werewolves?”
“You could be right. Dad said it would be like that—still me in wolf form—but after what those guys did? Playing with our genes? I have no idea what will happen. So you’re getting out of here when the time comes or you aren’t sticking around at all.”
“Okay.”
He glanced back at me, fevered eyes glowing. “I mean it, Chloe.”
“So do I. You’re right. We don’t know what will happen, and we can’t take chances. As soon as you sprout fangs and a tail, I’ll run screaming for the truck stop.”
“You can skip the screaming part.”
“We’ll see.”
We walked until the floodlights from the parking lot barely pierced the trees. The moon was shrouded in cloud. Whether it was a full moon or a half-moon, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. A werewolf’s Changes had nothing to do with moon cycles. When it happened, it happened, whether the timing was convenient or not.
Derek slowed, scratching his arm through his shirt. “There’s a log here, if you want to sit and wait. I’ll get a little deeper in—I’m sure it’s not the prettiest sight.”
“I’ve seen it before.”
“If it goes further, it’ll be worse.”
“I’m fine.”
When we entered a small clearing, Derek pulled off his sweatshirt. Under his T-shirt, his back muscles rippled, like snakes were trapped under his skin. Having seen this before, it didn’t bother me, but it did remind me of something.
“On second thought, maybe I can’t watch. Unless you brought a change of clothes, you really should get undressed this time.
“Right. Hold on.”
He disappeared into the brush. I turned around. A couple minutes later, the leaves crackled as he came out.
“I’m decent,” he said. “Got my shorts on. Nothing you haven’t seen.”
My cheeks flamed at the memory, which was stupid, because seeing a guy in his boxers shouldn’t be any different than seeing him in swim trunks. I’d even seen guys in their underwear, pranking at camp by running around our cabins, and I’d laughed and hooted with the other girls. But none of the guys at camp had looked like Derek.
I turned slowly, hoping it was too dark for him to see me blushing. He wouldn’t have noticed anyway. He was already on all fours, his head down, breathing in and out, like an athlete preparing for a run.
I blamed the note Simon left, the image of the Terminator still lingering in my brain, but that’s what Derek looked like, that scene where the Terminator first arrives, and he’s crouched, naked—not that Derek was totally naked or as pumped as Schwarzenegger, but he didn’t look like a sixteen-year-old kid either, with a muscular back, bulging biceps, and …
And that was enough of that. I looked away to scan the forest and took a few deep breaths of my own.
“Sit here.” Derek pointed to a clear spot beside him where he’d laid out his sweatshirt.
“Thanks.” I lowered myself onto it.
“If it gets too bad, go. I’ll understand.”
“I won’t.”
He looked at the ground again, eyes closed as he inhaled and exhaled. His back spasmed and he winced, then stretched, his breathing deeper.
“That’s a good idea. Stretch and work it out—” I stopped. “Okay, I’ll shut up now. You don’t need a coach.”
He gave a low rumble that it took me a moment to recognize as a laugh. “Go ahead. Talk.”
“If there’s anything I can do— I know there probably isn’t, but …”
“Just be here.”
“That I can manage.” I realized his skin hadn’t rippled in a while. “And we might not even have to worry about it. It seems to be passing. False start, maybe. We should give it a few more minutes, then—”
His back shot up, body jackknifing as he let out a strangled cry. He managed two panting breaths before convulsing again. His arms and legs went rigid. His back arched to an unnatural height, spine jutting. His head dropped forward. His skin rippled and his back went even higher. A long whimper bubbled from his throat.
His head flew up and, for a second, his eyes met mine, wild and rolling with pain and terror, even more than the first time because then, as scared as he’d been, he’d known this was natural, that his body would take him through it safely. Now, knowing about the mutations, he had no such guarantee.
His fingers dug into the moist earth, the tips disappearing, the backs of his hands changing, tendons bulging, wrists thickening. He let out another cry, swallowing the end of it as he tried to keep quiet. I reached out and lay my hand on his. The muscles bulged and shifted. Coarse hair sprouted and pushed against my palm, then retreated. I rubbed his hand and moved closer and whispered it would be okay, he was doing fine.
His back arched and he gulped air, and in that moment of silence, footsteps clomped along the path into the woods.
“Are you kids in there?” It was the bus driver, his words harsh in the still forest, his figure backlit by the truck stoplights. “Someone saw you kids head in here. You’ve got one minute to come out or the bus leaves.”
“Go,” Derek whispered, his voice guttural, barely recognizable.
“No.”
“You should—”
I met his gaze. “I’m not going. Now shhh.”
“Ten seconds!” The bus driver yelled. “I’m not holding up the bus so you kids can screw around in the forest.”
“If he comes closer, you go in there.” I pointed at the thicket. “I’ll stop him.”
“He won’t.”
Sure enough, Derek barely got the words out before the figure began retreating. A few minutes later, the bus lights receded from the lot.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I have money. We’ll catch—”
Derek convulsed again. This time his head shot up and he spewed vomit into the bushes. Wave after wave of convulsions rocked him, each one emptying his stomach until vomit dripped from every branch and the sickly smell mingled with the sharper stink of his sweat.
Hair sprouted and retracted and he kept convulsing and vomiting until there was nothing left to throw up, and still his stomach kept trying, with horrible dry heaves that were painful to hear. I rose onto my knees and rested my hand between his shoulder blades, rubbing and patting the sweat-slick skin there as I whispered the same words of reassurance, not even sure he could hear them anymore.
His back muscles twisted and shifted under my hands, the knobs of his spine pressing against them, his skin soaked with sweat and covered with coarse dark hair that wasn’t retracting, but growing longer.
Finally Derek stopped heaving and shuddered, his whole body trembling from exhaustion, his head lowered almost to the ground. I rubbed his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re doing great. You’re almost there.”
He shook his head and made a sound that must have been “no,” but it was too guttural to be more than a growl.
“That’s fine,” I said. “You will or you won’t. You can’t rush it.”
He nodded. His head was down, face averted, but I could still see the changes, his temples narrowing, hair shortening, the tops of his ears sticking out as they shifted higher onto his skull.
I absently rubbed his back, then halted. “Do you want me to stop? Move away and give you more room?”
He shook his head as he struggled to catch his breath, sides and back heaving. I massaged the spot between his shoulders. His skin stopped moving and his spine retracted. His shoulders felt different, though. Set different, the muscles bunched and thick, almost hunched. The hair felt more like fur now, like my friend Kara’s husky, with a coarse top layer, softer underneath.
Derek said werewolves changed into actual wolves. I’d found that hard to believe. In fact, I’d heard that the reason the “wolfman” type of werewolf had been so popular in early Hollywood was because of the difficulty of changing a human into a wolf. If they couldn’t do it with makeup and prosthetics, surely the human body couldn’t do it. But looking at Derek, shivering and gasping as he rested mid-Change, I saw I’d been wrong. I still couldn’t quite wrap even my vivid imagination around what I was seeing, but there was no doubt he was changing into a wolf.
“It seems to have stopped again,” I said.
He nodded.
“That’s probably it, then. For now, this is as far as—”
His body went rigid. The muscles under my hand moved, but slowly, like they were settling, preparing to reverse the transformation …
His back shot up, limbs straightening, head dropping and there was this … sound—an awful popping and snapping, like bones crackling. Then his head flew up and the crackling was drowned out by an inhuman howl. His head whipped from side to side and I saw his face then, the nose and jaw lengthening to a muzzle, neck thick, brow receding, black lips pulled back to show teeth sharpened to fangs.
One eye caught mine, and the absolute terror in it chased mine away. I could not be afraid. I could not be freaked out. I could not make this worse for him in any way. So I met his gaze, unblinking, and kept rubbing his back.
After a moment, the muscles under my hand relaxed and he went still, the silence broken only by labored heaves as he panted, the sound more canine than human. His back rose and fell with the deep breaths. Then another massive convulsion seized him, and I was sure that was the final jolt, that the transformation would finish. Instead, the fur between my fingers receded. He convulsed again, gagging, threads of bile dripping from his jaws. He shook them off, then turned his face away.
Derek hacked and coughed for a minute, his limbs trembling. Then, slowly, they slid out from under him, like they couldn’t bear his weight any more, and he collapsed, panting and quivering, his fur a dark shadow of stubble, his body almost returned to a human shape, only the thickened neck and shoulders remaining.
After one more deep, shuddering sigh, he rolled onto his side, toward me, legs drawn up, one hand draped over his face as it finished the reversal. I huddled there, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. Derek wrapped his hand around my bare ankle, where my sock had slid down into my sneaker.
“You’re freezing.”
I didn’t feel cold. The shivering and goose bumps seemed more from nerves, but I said, “A little.”
He shifted, then took my knee and tugged me closer, sheltered from the bitter wind. The heat of his body was like a radiator and I stopped shivering. He wrapped his hand around my ankle again, his skin rough, like a dog’s paw pads.
“How’re you doing?” he asked, his voice still odd, strained and raspy, but understandable.
I gave a small laugh. “I should be asking you that. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. That must be what’ll happen for a few times. A partial Change, then back to normal.”
“I guess so.” He moved his hand down under his eyes. “You didn’t answer my question. Are you all right?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah. You did.” He looked at me. “You did a lot.”
His eyes met mine, and I looked into them and I felt … I don’t know what I felt. A strange nameless something I couldn’t even identify as a good something or a bad something, could only feel in my gut, jumping and twitching, until I turned away and looked out over the forest.
“Yeah, we gotta go,” he said, starting to rise.
“Not yet. Lie down. Rest.”
“I’m”—he sat up and swayed, as if light-headed—“not fine. Okay. Just give me a sec.”
He lay back down, eyelids bobbing as he fought to keep them open.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
“Just for a minute.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
I don’t know if they were even fully closed before he fell asleep.