Feral (32 page)

What Claire had always said had been
true.
And this time was no different, she told herself, her pulse thudding about like a stampede.

She had discovered a new truth: Serena wanted her old life back. She was going to succeed by destroying Claire. She wanted Claire's body.

But Serena wasn't going to get it.

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C
laire and Rich walked the rest of the way through the shortcut in silence, while Rich shot her uncomfortable glances of concern every couple of steps. When they slipped out from the brush, edged around the back of the Ray house, and stepped into their gravel street, they found red and blue lights swirling, washing against the night sky.

The sight of the sheriff's car parked in her driveway made Claire take off running, with Rich at her heels.

“Dad?” she shouted, sprinting up the front walk. “Dad?” she tried again, stomping through the front door.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Dr. Cain exhaled, racing into the living room to scoop her up in his arms.

“What is going
on
?” she asked.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said. “I've been trying to call you since I got off work, and all I got was voice mail.”

“So you called the police?” Claire asked. “I was with Rich.”

“But why the voice mail?” he demanded.

He was so over-the-top upset, she felt ashamed to tell him that she'd been turning her phone off to avoid Rachelle's texts.

Wait a minute
, the voice in her head shouted.
How'd you get that text in the woods, that same text you got the night of the Chicago ice storm, if your phone was off?

Because Serena's getting stronger
, she answered right back, a chill dancing up her spine.

“My stupid phone hasn't been working right,” she lied.

“And you didn't
tell
me?” Dr. Cain shouted.

“Why are you so angry?” Claire asked. “Rich and I were together. Like he promised we'd be. Working on my story for the paper.”

Dr. Cain glanced up at Rich. “Why didn't
you
call me, if her phone wasn't working?”

“I'm sorry, Dr. Cain,” Rich said, his calm demeanor instantly diffusing the anger in her father's voice. “I honestly didn't know you needed to hear from Claire.”

But the face Rich turned toward Claire was round, pale. It had the look of someone who had shifted from playing a game to knowing dangers were real—and that the burden of a rescue was on his shoulders.

“I'll get you a new phone,” Dr. Cain told Claire softly. “Rich will see you tomorrow.”

Sheriff Holman tipped his hat, his services obviously no longer needed.

Rich followed, pausing once before Claire shut the front door, as if somehow expecting to hear those words one more time:
Olly, olly, oxen free!
“Claire, is everything okay? Why do I feel like something is going on, something other than Serena—”

“Everything's fine.” Claire smiled wanly. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Rich nodded reluctantly and walked out the door.

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T
hat night, Claire tossed about in her bed, nightmares stealing the restful sleep she so badly needed. Nightmares of the gang. The ice storm. The snapping of her bones, the shredding of her skin.

Blue and red lights reflected across the ice-coated surface of the bricks. Claire stared down from her spot in the sky, and she watched the girl cop reach for her arm. “It's too late for you,” the cop announced with certainty. “You're dead.”

“Of course I am,” Claire agreed as she stared down on her mangled body, cut up like meat displayed in a supermarket counter. She was lying on a blanket, instead of in the parking lot. It was as though the girl cop had taken such pity on her that she had placed a quilt out beneath Claire.
A soft place to die . . .

But Claire had a tail, too, in this dream. A long slender tail. And gray fur.

Claire snapped herself fully awake, blinking rapidly against the first streaks of sunlight that trickled into her room.

A soft rumble hit her ears—a rattling sigh of contentment that swirled, wrapping its way around a high-pitched caterwaul.

She lifted her head slightly from her pillow to look toward her legs. A calico sat in her lap, purring.

“Sweet Pea,” Claire whispered. Repulsion replaced horror as the old cat lowered her face into the open belly of a large rodent, and pulled out a string of intestines. Sweet Pea raised herself up, dragging blood-engorged pieces of entrails across Claire's quilt.

Claire gagged. Too afraid to bolt from her bed, she simply let her eyes rove across her room. Ferals. Everywhere. Stretched out on the windowsill, sunning themselves in the early morning light. Watching from her hope chest. A rumble poured from the throat of a nearby gray cat's mouth—only to be answered by another cat at Claire's feet, and the cats on her dresser, the cats playing in front of the cracked-open balcony door.

She's brought a gang
, Claire thought.
A whole gang.

Sweet Pea clamped the rat in her jaws and started to move toward the end of the bed, dragging the entrails along with her, leaving a red pool on Claire's quilt.

The rest of the ferals all began to hiss, flashing their sharp front teeth. Tails swelled. Wails became threats.

A fight—the cats were gearing up for a fight.

“Why would you do that?” Claire asked. “The cats don't like you—out by the Dumpster, by the church—they fought you. Why would you lead them here, when they don't like you?”

“I'm not trying to take their food. I'm showing them food, this time,” Serena said, her whispery voice rising out from the old cat. “They can have you when I'm done with you.”

The scene in the woods flashed through Claire's mind. Serena's goal was to get inside Claire's body. Make it her own. Why would Serena want the cats to destroy it? “If you let them eat me, there won't be any left for you,” Claire told the cat.

Sweet Pea spread her face wide, hissing, showing off her decayed, brown teeth. She blinked, letting Serena's blue eyes flash. Serena's face wafted about along the surface of the old cat's skull.

“It's your
soul
they're hungry for.” Serena's voice rose above the angry sounds of the ferals. “Your soul, buried deep inside your body, will be tastier than flesh. They'll pull it out, pull it apart, gorge on it,” Serena promised, as she began to knead her paws, pushing and pulling on the intestines of the rodent she'd just gutted. “And when you have no more soul, your body will be free for
me.
”

Claire shuddered as she dipped deep beneath her blankets, Serena's words pounding against her ears as the cats crouched low and began to stalk, surrounding her, growing closer.

“You could have let me in back in the woods,” Serena scolded. “You could have gone along with the fog. You've forced me to do this instead. To take your body and leave your
soul
for the cats to feast upon.

“If there's no soul for the fog to take,” Serena asked, “if the cats destroy your very
soul
, isn't that really the worst kind of hell?” She snarled, her tail waving as she inched closer to Claire's face.

Claire snapped up into a sitting position, throwing her chest forward and letting the blankets bunch in her lap. She screamed, her mounting fear reflected in the antique bedroom mirror on the opposite side of the room. Some cats raced for her bedroom door and the stairs, while others—the braver sort—continued to flash their filthy fangs at her.

Claire screamed again. This time, her dad came running, still dressed in his flannel pajama bottoms and his long-sleeved T-shirt, his hair messed from sleep and his glasses not quite straight on his nose.

“Hold on, Claire,” he shouted. He waved his arms, momentarily leaving to retrieve a broom. “Shoo! Shoo!” he bellowed, throwing open the door to the balcony. The cats snarled and hissed as he pushed them outside, like dust balls that needed to be cleaned away.

The old calico stayed. She crouched near the bed, as though she assumed that Dr. Cain would only want the others out. As though she felt she belonged. As though she had a right to be there. As though the house were hers.

She licked her pink-stained jaw, cleaning her whiskers.

“You get
out, too
!” Dr. Cain screamed, raising the broom one more time.

Serena yowled and skittered out the balcony door before Dr. Cain could see blue eyes shining, her spirit wafting across the face of the cat she inhabited. She raced away—but only, her hiss promised, temporarily.

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“T
hat door to your balcony doesn't fit right, Claire,” her dad reminded her, his distant voice filtering in through the bathroom door. “When I went to open it, it was already cracked—not far, but enough to let the cats slip inside. They obviously felt warm air coming from your room. I'm surprised they didn't get in before now. You go get yourself cleaned up. I'll take care of this mess.”

Standing before the bathroom mirror, tears streamed while the water ran in the tub. She could hear her father moving about overhead, gathering the bloody quilt off her bed and bagging the dead rat, sweeping the cat hair off the floor.

To add to her current misery, the scratches on her ankle were throbbing and burning. She had to know what was going on under the bandage she hadn't been able to look beneath. She forced a thumbnail under a corner of the tape, held her breath, and yanked the bandage off.

She nearly collapsed against the cold edge of the sink, a groan of agonizing pain trailing from her lips. Sweat beads popped instantly across her forehead as she waited for the pain to lessen. She dropped the gauze into the sink, the bandage soaked with blood and pus, the hues of orange and red and yellow caked, stiffly, along the edges. A sickly green slime had piled like a diseased blood clot in the center of the gauze square.

She sucked in a string of shallow breaths as she looked down, into the black swirls across her skin, the green lesions. She hoisted her foot into the sink, opened a bottle of peroxide, held her breath, and poured it over her wound. The scratches began to foam, crackling like oil in a hot skillet. Another round of tears welled in Claire's eyes, and she forced a washrag into her mouth, to swallow her wail. She watched as the peroxide foamed directly over two curving cuts:
SS
. Though it seemed utterly impossible, the scratches on her ankle were the same shape as the squiggles on the kitchen wainscoting in the Simses' kitchen.

SS
. Serena Sims.

Claire shook in fear. She turned the hot faucet knob, groaning as the warm water washed the white bubbles of peroxide down the drain.

She's finding new ways to threaten me, to weaken me, to tear me down
, Claire thought.
She's getting closer. Messing with my head. Playing her game—cat and mouse . . .

She killed the faucet stream. The skin across her entire ankle turned black.

“All clear!” her father shouted.

“Gut me,” Claire whispered, staring at her wound. “She's going to gut me. Just like she gutted that rat in my room. And then she can have what she wants—her old life.”

She pulled her foot from the sink and dressed the wound again, leaving the bathroom without another glance into the mirror. She couldn't bear to look at herself, see the evidence of what Serena was doing to her reflected in the terror she knew would be shining out from her eyes.

Claire staggered into her bedroom. She couldn't tell her dad about the scratches—what would she say? “Excuse me, Dad, but the cat who scratched my ankle during the funeral is actually possessed by the spirit of a girl who may not have died quite as accidentally as everyone thinks, and does not want to go off with the fog filled with the spirits of the town dead. She wants in
my
body, so she can get her old life back. And I'm a little afraid, now, that these scratches—black as they are—are also part of her plan to wear me down.”

She dressed, stuffed her still-wet hair under a hat, and hurried downstairs to meet up with Rich.

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“C
laire,” Rich said as he drove her to school, “I think maybe you should talk to my dad.”

She chortled. “Does he have some sort of cat repellant I can use to keep them all out of my room?”

“No—it's just—I think maybe some of this is starting to bother you, more than you realize.”

Claire shook her head as she hugged her red backpack. “But something's off here. You see it. All those things Sheriff Holman missed. Why would I need to talk to your dad?” She swallowed her swelling anger, telling herself,
He doesn't know. If he only knew that I was being hunted, he wouldn't talk to me this way.

They pulled into the school parking lot, and Claire opened the truck door as soon as Rich parked.

“Claire,” Rich continued, turning off the ignition. “There are too many weird things happening here and I think it's affecting you. My dad—he has experience talking these things out. He can help you make sense of it. Of how you
feel
about all this, anyway. It might be good for you.”

“I'll be fine as soon as we figure this Serena thing out,” Claire promised. She picked up her pace, hurrying through the hallways to drop her coat off at her locker. She monopolized Mavis's time in journalism, first discussing her blurb, then brainstorming ideas for her coverage of the dance, managing to avoid Rich.