Awakening (14 page)

F
OR MOST OF THAT day, both Derek and Tori steered clear of me, like I had a bug they didn’t want to catch. I didn’t see a lot of Simon either. He went off with Derek to the library, still trying to find their dad or his friend Andrew. Tori tagged along. I stayed put in a lovely dank alley Derek had chosen for me. Simon left me with a movie magazine, snacks, a hairbrush and soap, and promised they’d get me to a bathroom after dark.

It was mid-afternoon when I heard footsteps tromping down the alley and I scrambled up to meet Simon. Derek might be bigger, but it was Simon who made all the noise. Derek was only loud when…

Derek stomped around the corner, scowling.…when he was mad.

He had a newspaper rolled in his hand, bearing down on me like a puppy that had piddled on the carpet.

“Bad Chloe,” I muttered.

“What?”

I’d forgotten his bionic hearing. “Bad Chloe.” I gestured at the rolled-up paper and put out my hand. “Get it over with.”

“You think this is funny?”

“No, I think it’s tiresome.”

He slapped down the paper. In the bottom corner of the front page was the headline “Missing Girl Spotted” with a picture of me. I skimmed the short paragraph, then turned to the rest inside.

It had happened last night, when Derek had been yelling at me after my run-in with the street girls. The windows around us may have been dark, but a woman had been watching from an apartment over a shop, drawn by Derek’s voice. She’d seen “a girl with light hair and red streaks” being yelled at by “a large, dark-haired man.” So now police speculated that I might not be a runaway but a kidnap victim.

“Well?” Derek said.

I folded the paper carefully, my gaze down. “Guess you shouldn’t have yelled at me in public.”

“What?”

“That’s what caught her attention. You chewing me out.”

“No, what caught her attention was your hair. If you’d kept your hood up like I said—”

“Of course. Totally my fault. After nearly getting my face carved up, how dare I forget my attacker yanked down my hood. Bad Chloe.”

“So this is a joke?”

I looked up at him. “No, it’s not a joke. It’s a serious problem. The joke is this.” I waved from him to me. “You’ve been sulking all day, brooding—”

“Brooding?”

“Just itching for me to screw up so you can rip me a new one, your favorite pastime. You couldn’t just come back and calmly say we have a problem that we need to discuss. Where’s the fun in that?”

“You think I enjoy—”

“I have no idea what you enjoy, if anything. But I do know what you’d like. Me, gone.”

“What?”

“I’ve served my purpose. I got Simon out of Lyle House. Sure, you were willing to make a half-assed effort to find me, so it looks good for Simon—”

“Half-assed?”

“You showed up hours late. Left a hidden note. Came by once a day. Yes, half-assed.”

“No. Ask Simon. I was worried—”

“I’m sure you faked it well. But, unfortunately, I found you and, worse, I showed up with Tori in tow and a price on my head. So it’s time to activate the backup plan. Make me so miserable and unwelcome that I slink away.”

“I’d never—”

“No, you won’t.” I met his gaze. “Because I’m not going to slink away, Derek. If I’m too much of an inconvenience to keep around, then at least have the guts to tell me to get lost.”

I brushed past him and walked away.

I didn’t get far. I bumped into Simon and Tori, and Derek caught up with us. And then he got his way. Not about driving me off—he still had to work at that. But this new development gave him all the ammunition he needed to persuade Simon it was time to go to their father’s friend’s place. The bus left at four. First, though, the half-million-dollar runaway needed a disguise.

Derek took me to a restroom in the park I’d seen from the roof. The building was locked for the off-season, but he easily broke the locks and got me in. He made sure the water hadn’t been turned off, then slapped a box of hair color on the counter.

“Gotta get rid of that,” he said, pointing at my hair.

“I could just keep my hood—”

“Already tried.”

He walked out.

I strained to see by the bit of light coming through a row of tiny, filthy windows. It was hard to read the instructions, but it looked similar to the red dye I’d used, so I applied it the same way. I couldn’t tell what color Derek had chosen. It looked black, but the red dye had, too, so that didn’t mean much. I didn’t think too much about it until I washed out the dye, looked in the mirror, and…

My hair was black.

I hurried to the door and propped it open to get better light. Then I went back to the mirror.

Black. Not sleek glossy black like Tori’s hair, but dull, flat black.

Before now, I hadn’t been thrilled with my latest haircut. I’d had my long straight hair chopped shoulder length in a layered style that had turned out wispy and waiflike. Still, the worst I could have said was that it made me look “cute”—not what a fifteen-year-old girl wants to be called. In black though, it was not cute. It looked like I’d hacked my hair off with kitchen shears.

I never wore black because it drained any color from my pale skin. Now I saw there was something that washed out my face even worse than a black shirt.

I looked like a Goth. A
sick
Goth, white and hollow-eyed.

I looked dead.

I looked like a necromancer. Like those ghastly pictures of them on the Internet.

Tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked them back, grabbed some tissue, and started awkwardly trying to daub leftover dye onto my pale eyebrows, praying it would make a difference.

Through the mirror, I saw Tori walk in. She stopped.

“Oh. My. God.”

It would have been better if she’d laughed. Her look of horror, then something like sympathy, meant it was as bad as I thought.

“I told Derek to let me pick the color,” she said. “I
told
him.”

“Hey,” Simon called in. “Everyone decent?”

He pushed open the door, saw me and blinked.

“It’s Derek’s fault,” Tori said. “He—”

“Don’t, please,” I said. “No more fighting.”

Simon still shot a glare over his shoulder as Derek pushed open the door.

“What?” Derek said. He looked at me. “Huh.”

Tori hustled me out the door, brushing past the guys with a whispered “jerk” for Derek.

“At least now you know never to go dark again,” she said as we walked. “A couple years ago, I let a friend dye mine blond. It was almost as bad. My hair felt like straw and…”

And so, Tori and I bonded over hair horror stories. We put our differences aside and by the time we were on the bus, we were painting each other’s fingernails.

Or not.

Tori did try to cheer me up. For her, this situation seemed to warrant more sympathy than having a dead guy crawling over me. But the closer we got to the bus station, the lower her mood dropped, coinciding with a rising discussion of finances—how much did we have, how much would the tickets cost, should I try to use my bank card again…

I did use an ATM we passed. Derek figured that was okay—if they thought we were still in Buffalo, that was good, considering we were leaving. He didn’t expect my card would work though. It did. I suppose that made sense. The bank or police might have told my dad to lock it, but he wouldn’t cut off my only source of money, even if he thought it could make me come home.

That, of course, made me think about him and how much he must be worrying, and what he was going through. I wanted so badly to contact him, but I knew I couldn’t. So all I could do was think about him, and think about Aunt Lauren, and feel awful about everything.

To get my thoughts off my family, I concentrated on my companions. I knew not having money bugged Tori. So I tried to give her a couple hundred. It was a mistake. She lashed out at me, and by the time we reached the station, we weren’t talking again.

Simon and Tori bought the tickets. I wondered whether they’d catch any flak—unaccompanied teens buying one-way tickets to New York City—but no one commented. I guess we could just be traveling alone. We were old enough to do that.

Not that
I’d
ever traveled alone. Not even on a city bus. That got me thinking about who I normally traveled with—Aunt Lauren and Dad. When I tried to stop worrying about them I only thought about someone else I was leaving behind: Liz.

Liz said she could find me, but I was sure she’d meant “in Buffalo.” How long would she search for me? Could I summon her without her green hoodie…from hundreds of miles away? I’d need to try really hard, and that wasn’t safe.

Maybe she’d move on to the afterlife. That was probably a good thing. But at the thought of never seeing her again, my mood sunk lower than Tori’s until, by the time the bus arrived, it was as black as my new hair.

Simon had gone to grab sodas for the trip. Tori was already out the station door. When I struggled to get my backpack on, Derek grabbed it and threw it over his shoulder, which would have been nice if I knew he wasn’t just hurrying me along.

“Stop sulking,” he said as he walked beside me. “It’s just hair.”

“That’s not—” I shut up. Why bother?

Simon jogged up to join us in the passenger line. He handed me a Dr Pepper.

“You okay?”

“Just thinking about my dad and Liz. I wish I could have told them we’re leaving.”

Derek leaned down to my ear. “Smile, okay?” he whispered. “You look like you’re being kidnapped, and people are staring.”

I glanced around. No one was paying any attention to us. Simon shouldered past his brother, whispering, “Ease off.” He waved me to the first empty seat. “This okay?”

I nodded and turned in.

“There’s more at the back,” Derek said. “We can’t sit together up here.”

“No, we can’t.” Simon slid in beside me.

I
STARED OUT THE bus window as we left the city.

“We’ll be back for them,” Simon said.

“I know. I’m just…off today.”

“I don’t blame you. You had a crappy night. And a crappy day before that. And a crappy week before that.”

I smiled. “At least it’s consistent.”

“And I know that”—he pointed at my hair—“isn’t making you feel any better, but if you wash it enough when we get to Andrew’s place, it’ll come out.”

“Have some experience, do you?”

“Me?
Pfft.
Never. I’m a guy. A guy guy. We do not color our hair. We don’t even use conditioner if we can help it.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “This? Totally natural.”

“I never said—”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Or the hundredth. When a guy looks Asian and has blond hair, everyone presumes it’s a dye job.”

“But your mother was Swedish.”

“Exactly. Blame genetics, not chemicals.” He leaned over and whispered. “But I did color it once. Temporary stuff like you’ve got. For a girl.”

“Aha.”

He put his chair back, settling into it. “It was a couple of years ago. I liked this girl, and she kept going on about this other guy, how his hair went so blond in the summer, how hot that looked.”

I sputtered a laugh. “So you dyed—?”

“Shut up. She was cute, okay? I bought this washout highlight stuff, then spent all weekend outside, kicking around a ball with Derek. Sunday night, I color my hair. Monday morning I go to school and, hey, look what happened from me being out in the sun all weekend.”

“Seriously?”

“I couldn’t admit I dyed my hair for a girl. How lame would that be?”

“I’d think it was sweet. So did it work?”

“Sure. She went to the dance with me the next weekend. Then I came home, washed my hair until the color was out, and vowed never to do that again for a girl until I knew her well enough to be sure she was worth it.”

I laughed, then said, “Thanks.” When he arched his brows, I added, “For cheering me up.”

“I’m good at it. With Derek, I get lots of practice.” He reached into his backpack. “I have something else that might cheer you up. Or scare the crap out of you.”

He pulled out a new sketch pad and flipped through it. A few pages in, he turned it so I could see.

“Hey, that’s me,” I said.

“So it looks like you? Or does the corpse crawling toward you give it away?” He handed the sketch pad to me. “I drew it this morning when Derek was doing his computer searches. I was thinking about last night.”

In the picture, I was kneeling on my blanket, the corpse in front of me. Thankfully, he hadn’t opted to draw the part where I’d been screaming in mortal terror, but later, when I thought he’d been outside with Tori.

I had my eyes closed, hands raised. The corpse was rearing up, seeming to follow my hands like a cobra dancing before a flute. All I could remember was how terrified I’d been, but in Simon’s sketch, I didn’t look terrified—I looked calm, confident. I looked powerful.

“I know that might not be a moment you care to have immortalized,” he said.

I smiled. “No, it’s cool. Can I have it?”

“When it’s done. I need to color it when I get some pencils.” He took the pad back. “I thought it might be interesting to do a kind of graphic journal about us. What’s happening.”

“Like a comic?”

“I was avoiding that word, for fear of sounding like a total geek. But, yeah, like a comic. Just for us, of course. A project to take our minds off stuff. It’ll be way cooler on paper than it feels when we’re living it.” He took a long drink of his Diet Coke, then recapped the bottle slowly. “You could help, if you wanted. You know screenwriting and scripts for comics aren’t much different.”

“Like a movie told in stills.”

“Right. I’m not good at the writing part. I know this is a true story, so it’s not like I need to make stuff up, but I suck at knowing what parts to put in and what to leave out.”

“I could help with that.”

“Great.” He opened his pad to the page after his picture of me. There were a few rough sketches on it. “I was trying to figure out where to start….”

For the next few hours, I plotted and Simon drew. When I started yawning, he closed the sketchbook.

“Take a nap. We still have five hours to go. We’ll have lots of time to work on this after we get to Andrew’s place.”

“Will we be staying with him?”

Simon nodded. “He’s got the extra room. It’s just him—no wife or kids. He’ll take us in, no problem.” He put away the sketch pad, then slowly zipped up his backpack. “There’s another thing I’ve been thinking. I know it’s not exactly a good time, but once we get settled in, I thought maybe you and I could—”

A shadow loomed over us.

Simon didn’t bother looking up. “Yes, Derek?”

Derek leaned over the seat, one hand on the back for balance as the bus swayed. He seemed distracted, almost anxious.

“We’re coming up to Syracuse soon.”

“Okay.”

“I need something to eat. I’m starving.”

“Sure. I figured we’d jump off and grab dinner.”

“I can’t. Not here.” When Simon looked confused, Derek lowered his voice. “Syracuse?”

“I don’t think they’re going to be hanging out at the bus station.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Nah.” Simon looked up at his brother. “I’ll grab some food, okay?”

Derek hesitated. He didn’t look anxious, really. More unhappy. Because Simon was annoyed with him?

As I watched Derek lurch back to his seat, I thought about that. Simon and Derek weren’t just foster brothers—they were best friends. From the way Simon talked, though, he obviously had other friends, teammates, girlfriends…. I doubted Derek had any. For him, it was just Simon.

Was that why he wanted to get rid of me? It made sense, but it felt wrong. At Lyle House, Derek had never seemed jealous of any time Simon spent with me. Derek just went off and did his own thing. If anyone followed, it was Simon.

Maybe he wasn’t jealous. Just feeling ignored.

It bothered me enough that when we stopped in Syracuse, I offered to take the food back out to Derek while Tori and Simon stretched their legs.

I meant to suggest that Derek and I switch seats. When I got there, Derek was staring out the window.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He turned sharply, like I’d startled him, then nodded and took the food with a mumbled thanks.

I slid into the empty aisle seat. “Did you used to live here?”

He shook his head and looked out the window again. I took that as a sign he wasn’t in the mood for conversation and was about to suggest the seat switch when he said, “We lived just about every place else in the state except here. We can’t. There are…others here.”

“Others?”

He lowered his voice. “Werewolves.”

“In Syracuse?”

“Near it. A Pack.”

“Oh.”

Was that how werewolves lived? In packs, like wolves? I wanted to ask, but was afraid he’d think I was mocking him.

So I said, “And that’s a problem? If they smelled you?”

“Yeah.” He paused, then added grudgingly, “We’re territorial.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

He kept looking out the window. I could see the reflection of his eyes, still and distant, lost in thoughts he obviously didn’t care to share. I started to get up.

“When I was a kid,” he said, without looking my way. “When I lived in that place where you were locked up, the others were like that. Territorial.”

I lowered myself into the seat again. “The other werewo—” An elderly woman approached in the aisle and I said instead, “Subjects?”

“Yeah.” He turned then. “They had this pack, I guess you’d call it, and they’d claim stuff, like the sandbox, as their territory, and if—”

His chin lifted, gaze moving to the front of the bus.

“Simon’s coming,” he said. “He’s looking for you. Better go.”

I was going to say that was okay, I wanted to hear more. Chances to hear something personal from Derek were fleeting, but this one had already passed.

“You go,” I said. “Sit with him the rest of the way.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“Really, I—”

“Chloe?” He met my gaze. “Go.” His voice softened. “Okay?”

I nodded and left.

I fell asleep and dreamed of Derek—about what he’d said, about what the demi-demon had said about him, about the other werewolf subjects. I dreamed of Aunt Lauren at the facility, saying she wanted Derek put down like a rabid dog, and of Brady saying how Aunt Lauren had tried to get him to blame Derek for their fight.

The memories and the images swirled until I felt someone shaking my shoulder. I woke up to realize the bus had stopped. Derek was in the aisle, leaning past Simon, who was asleep.

I was about to ask what was wrong. Then I looked at Derek and I knew. His eyes glittered, and his skin glistened with sweat; his hair was plastered down with it. I could feel the heat of his hand through my shirt.

I shot up. “You’re—”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “We’re outside Albany. Truck stop. I gotta get off.”

I reached to wake Simon, but Derek stopped me. “I just wanted to tell you, in case I don’t get back on. I’ll be fine. I’ll meet you at Andrew’s.”

I grabbed my sweatshirt and jacket. “I’m coming with you.”

I was sure he’d argue, but he only nodded, face averted, murmuring. “Yeah. Okay.”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll talk to—”

I looked at Simon, but didn’t need Derek to tell me not to wake him. Better to tell the person who’d never insist on following us—Tori. So I did that, then hurried after Derek.