House of wolves, p.12
House of Wolves, page 12
I didn’t really think Jasper would be able to justify his behaviour or give me one good reason for the way he’s been acting about Matthew and me. But I didn’t expect quite how deep a hole he’s dug himself into.
“Wow,” is all I can say for a moment. “You call yourself his friend.” I shake my head and turn to leave, not interested in talking to him any longer. I ignore the slump in his shoulders when I go, as he realizes what he’s said.
Jasper lets out a weary sigh. “I’m sorry,” he says to my back. “Please don’t tell Matthew.”
I spin on my heel back into his room and scoff, shaking my head. “Oh, I’m telling him all of this,” I snap.
“Why?”
“Because I need to make things difficult, remember?” I sneer. “He doesn’t deserve to have you thinking all this about him behind his back and then acting like his friend.”
Jasper sputters. “I just – I need to work myself out. I didn’t mean any of it to sound like that. I’m still working on some things.”
“I don’t care,” I say. He was looking at the floor before, but his gaze snaps up to meet me. “I don’t care if you’re acting like an asshole because you’ve got a mess in your head to figure out. I don’t care if you’re like this because you’ve got some issues. Take some accountability and do better!”
I turn a second time and stomp my way out of his room and down the stairs. I text Liam to have him come pick Lou and me up: I’m not getting back in a car with Jasper.
II
Matthew
It turns out that not worrying about school isn’t that easy. I thought it would be the furthest thing from my mind, but sitting in Chris’s office at lunch, I wonder what kind of future I’ll be left with by the end of this year.
Without Cal or Jasper back at school, and Lou off with Jana and Amala, I’ve been spending my breaks with the other guys on the team. Spending time with Marcus has been good, but whenever the topic of my injury comes up, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m lying to him. I am, really. I have to. I have to pretend that the wound wasn’t healed overnight, and I feel like I’m taking advantage of him every time he insists on carrying a textbook for me. It’s not unusual for him to do favours like that: even after we broke up and he started seeing his new boyfriend, he always cares. We’re still friends. I hate that I can’t just tell him that I’m fine.
On the other hand, Josh and Max are getting on my nerves. It’s ironic: the three of us have been practically one being for years. We get along so well, not just because of basketball but because we have the same energy for endless round-and-round conversations about things that don’t matter and debates at lunch about things we won’t care about tomorrow. It was fun before. I liked having people to ramble on with too loudly, the three of us having spirited discussions that should be impossible to follow, with Marcus as our ring leader. When Jasper needs quiet, I feel understood with Max and Josh, who have just as much energy to burn and as many ideas to explore as I do.
But now that their stubborn curiosity and constant questions have turned on me, it’s not enjoyable. I have the impossible answers that would make their day, and I can’t say a word. I’ve been listening to them talk about what happened. I’ve heard their dramatic storytelling of Vankev’s downfall and my having prevailed like some kind of hero, and for once, I have nothing to say.
So, I’ve been slipping into Chris’s office at every break to avoid them. In the quiet, I realize that even though I made it away from Vankev alive, I may not have made it out with as much as I thought.
I’ve been benched, since playing any games or participating in practices when I should still have a very unhealed gunshot wound would invite questions that can’t be answered. But even with my grades for this semester fixed and exams being cancelled, my academic performance has never been impressive enough to make me think I could get into any kind of post-secondary school with it alone. I’ve always relied on what I’m good at: sports and art. Now I have to pretend I’m too incapacitated to participate in half of those. Honestly, I haven’t put as much thought into what I’ll do after graduation as I should have, but I don’t like that my options may have been significantly reduced because of Vankev.
“You’re staring a hole through my wall,” Chris says, interrupting my thoughts. He doesn’t even look up from his computer. He doesn’t mind me sitting on the table in the corner of his office while I eat, and he mostly ignores me to work while I’m here.
“Are you going to let me play at all this season?” I ask. Between Vankev taking me off the team for a week until I started handing in all my overdue assignments in my classes and then almost killing me, I’ve only had a chance to play one game.
Chris sighs and spins his chair around to face me. “I don’t know.”
“What will it take for you to let me?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what the right answer is. Hiding is the best way to keep you all safe, and while I certainly disagree with Vankev’s method of guarding that secret, I don’t know where the line is.”
I know that there’s no way for him to know what to do with me: none of us have been in this situation before. All we have is the knowledge that Wolves have to remain a secret for our own safety. I questioned it, initially, until I remembered how people still have trouble accepting other humans’ differences. Throughout history, anytime people caught wind of wolves in their midst, we were slaughtered along with any suspect humans. It was Chris who worded it that way, and I haven’t questioned the need to stay in the shadows since. The world isn’t ready for wolves.
I know they told my family everything for my own safety. And they told Angie, for Jasper’s sake. She took it well, and Jasper’s been seeing her twice a week and working slowly toward being okay again. I’m happy for him.
While Chris and Emmet are more lax in deciding who should know than Vankev was, I know better than to push those boundaries further than a need-to-know basis. As stressful as it was to face them afterward, my family needed to know eventually. Angie needed to know so she could help Jasper. If Lou and her family hadn’t found out through Cal, Chris and Emmet would have stepped in now and told them too, so she didn’t have to hide from them. But so far, the list of people who need to know ends there.
“I wasn’t in the hospital long,” I point out. “Nobody knows how bad it really was. I’ve been saying the bullet just grazed me when people ask. Can’t we go with that and move on because I’m good enough to play?”
Chris looks at me, considering, for a long time.
“As long as I cover the scar, nobody will know,” I press. “I just – I don’t even know what I want to do after high school, but if I want to go to college, I’m relying on a sports scholarship.” I’ve been told not to worry about the money every time the college talk comes up with my parents, but I’m not stupid. They’ve been helping Danny with at least part of his tuition for his entire med school career. Hannah’s in her first year of school for cosmology – or cosmetology. I think. She’s told me before, but I keep mixing them up. She’s in whichever program is for hairstylists. But our parents are paying for part of hers, too. Maddy’s taking a year off, but I’m sure she’ll decide on doing something ambitious. I know I’m the youngest of four, and I also know that my grades will not do me any favours.
“I know,” Chris sighs. “I know. This is your last year, and I have no doubt that your athletic performance could have carried you wherever you want to go.”
The way he’s talking, I brace myself to be told that he’s not going to let me back on the court at all.
Then he stands and shuts off his computer monitor behind him. He nods toward the door to the gymnasium. “Come on. We’ll see how well you can hold up and get your muscles back in the habit of working.”
I grin and take a breath of relief as I follow him out into the gym. Knowing Chris, he’s going to make me take it painfully slow as I work back up to the level I was at before, but it’s something.
He doesn’t stop in the gym, and I follow him instead to the weight room. I groan: this room holds nothing but repetition and boredom and stale sweat, and I’d rather run laps for an hour in the snow than do anything here.
“No complaining,” Chris says, and points at a bench. “Sit.”
Reluctantly, I do. He disappears into an equipment room and returns with the lightest weights a few moments later. He hands one to me, and I raise an eyebrow.
“You say you’re fine. You’re going to prove it,” Chris challenges. “And I have a feeling our definitions of ‘fine’ differ greatly. If you get hurt on my court because you push yourself too far, I promise you will not play another game. If one stretch or motion you do today hurts, and you don’t tell me, you’ll have detention for the rest of the year.”
I smirk. “Are you even allowed to do that?”
He grins right back. “Try me and find out.” Then, “you’re going to work yourself back up to par slowly, and you will do it right. You’re not going to walk back into a game just because you can manage to throw a ball. We’re doing this the right way, or not at all. Deal?”
I sigh, looking around at every ridiculous piece of exercise equipment in the room. I think they offer nothing that can’t be achieved by actually doing things. Maybe I’m just a lousy athlete and I should take it more seriously, but to me, biking without going anywhere, and lifting things just to put them down again, is a special kind of torture.
But now isn’t the time for argument. “Fine.”
Chapter Seven
I
Asa
Jana Carter and Matthew Mackenzie are alike in that neither of them ever stops talking. I don’t trust either of them, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
However, they’ve both been given information they have no business knowing. Matthew is less of a problem now that Calia’s bit him, and it’s in his own best interest to keep his mouth shut. Self-preservation is a more reliable filter than petty loyalty.
Jana, on the other hand, might broadcast everything she knows just to spite me, judging by the glare she gives me when she sees me step into Goldie’s. Dad would kill her in a heartbeat and lean on her troubled younger teen years with her homophobic mother and the inevitably ensuing mental problems to cover it up. Dad always had a preference for staged suicides: it’s easy to get away with a killing that seems to have no living perpetrator. Though, women and their statistically cleaner methods are more difficult to fabricate.
I push the line of thought out of my head as I take a seat at the counter next to Jana, who is still glaring. I don’t care what Dad would have done with her. I am not my father.
My father is dead.
“What do you want,” Jana sneers.
I wonder if she thinks her punk aesthetic and grungy attitude make her intimidating.
I gesture at the coffee bar behind the counter. “A beer, obviously,” I deadpan.
She narrows her eyes. “Was that a joke, Asa?”
Amala appears from the other end of the café, where she was cashing out another customer. She smiles when she sees me and leans with her elbows on the counter in front of me and Jana.
“Did you understand it?” I ask Jana, patronizing.
She bites back a smile and looks away from me. She’s strange – grinning even though I just insulted her intelligence. “I never thought I’d see the day that Asa Vankev told a joke,” she says. “But it wasn’t that funny, and I still don’t like you.”
“Okay.” I turn my attention to Amala. “Your mother’s cure.”
Amala’s expression darkens a few degrees cooler than her customer-service smile. She shakes her head. “It’s not ready.”
“I know. I want to talk to her.”
She sighs and wipes her clean hands on her apron. “I’ll ask. Would you like a coffee while you’re here?” she says, changing the subject.
“Black.”
Amala nods once and happily busies herself with the order, but Jana, beside me, pretends to gag. “You know sugar won’t be the thing to kill you, right? Live a little, man.”
Amala gives her a look, but then looks to me to see if I’ll reconsider. Coffee is just for caffeine. While I never drank much of it with Dad – never had alcohol or did drugs or had sweets or much food at all, for that matter – when I did, it wasn’t fancy. Everything I’ve done for years has been solely out of necessity, and I’ve had the barest of essentials needed to keep my father’s spare pair of hands alive.
I don’t care enough to change my order – black coffee is fine – but Amala is still waiting, and the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed an extravagant show of a drink with Dad around is enough to tip me toward having one now. I wave a dismissive hand. “Fine. Make whatever.”
Amala flashes a delighted grin before resuming her task, and I have a feeling she’s about to make my teeth rot.
I find Amala after class the following day like we agreed. Her girlfriend still has band practice, and if she didn’t, I think she’d be following us with a glare trying to burn a hole through my head. Amala smiles when she sees me. I don’t. I follow her wordlessly down the stairs and out of the school, through the parking lot across the street.
I wait for her to unlock her car, a little blue VW that looks older than us but is well taken care of. Inside smells like lavender air freshener, and a little blue flower charm hangs from the rear-view mirror.
As she pulls the car out of the lot, she sighs. “My mom still isn’t sure about this.” She glances at me over the console, and I wait for her to say what she actually means. “She wants to help, but the ethics of this whole situation are a mess. She can be patient, but you have to be cooperative if you want to get anywhere.”
She means that I’m going to want to soften my attitude and mirror the manner of the rest of the general public. “She won’t find my dazzling personality and prodigious wit charming. Noted,” I deadpan.
Amala beams over at me while she drives. The sheer glee directed at me is unnerving. “Jana said you were making jokes. It’s nice to hear.”
I don’t say anything. It wasn’t really a joke as much as it was an intentionally worded observation. I believe jokes are meant to have punchlines.
After a few minutes, Amala makes conversation again. “So. You and Stephen.”
I stare pointedly out the windshield ahead, which makes her giggle.
I haven’t thought about it. I haven’t considered Stephen and me, not in the way Amala says our names now: as a single entity. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that whatever it is Stephen and I are doing is mutual. We both crashed into each other, and now I live in his apartment.
“Does he make you happy?” she asks.
I almost scoff. It’s an over-simplified question, as if now that I’ve traded my father for Stephen, the world is a happy, shiny place. If Stephen’s made me do anything, it’s – well, definitely not something Amala needs to hear.
She’s not fazed at all by my silence, and she hums softly to herself, a single note before speaking again. “I hope so. You deserve it.”
I don’t tell her that what I ‘deserve’ has little to do with it. I don’t want to discuss karma or what kind of retribution – cosmic or otherwise – I’ll have to face for my past. I don’t even know which of my actions can be considered my own. Regardless, I think that my hand in my father’s crimes, unwilling or not, exempts me from deserving much.
When we arrive, Amala’s mother is in her garage workspace, poring over notes and writing more. I expect Amala to introduce me and leave, but she takes up a spot on a stool and sticks around.
I appreciate that Dr. Mishra – Anita – is driven and direct. She doesn’t bother with pleasantries and quickly asks me what I want.
I’ve already done the homework I planned to offer, and I tell her so. After my father died, I had few obligations. By then, Accalia had taken the cure, thought it was working, and turned when it failed. I had held onto the dose she had brought me. I injected it the same way Cal did, seeing no way that the site was the reason it failed. Anita gives an affirmative nod.
She doesn’t waste time expressing any anger she has that I, too, took the stolen cure. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I wouldn’t know until the next full moon.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You’re not able to change before then?”
“No.” I don’t let it bother me. Calia’s not here to gloat about the single advantage she has over me.
“Okay. Calia took it too. When did she know it was ineffective?” She has her pen at the ready to take notes.
“I’m not certain. She turned without the moon after she took it.”
Anita nods. “Since you two stole the product of my research and tried it yourselves,” she starts sternly, “I’ve reconsidered some of the conclusions I’ve been led to. I’ve also updated my home security.” She says this with a glare. “Amala brought up the healing property of a transformation, and I witnessed it with Matthew. Incredible as it is, it poses a problem. I think what happens is that, as part of healing the body between forms, the transformation rejects the cure before it can work.”
“Or,” I say, “it just doesn’t work. It’s supposed to stop the change, and it didn’t.”
She presses her lips together in a firm line but nods. “That is also a possibility.” She sighs and steps back from the table. “This is going to be an ethical nightmare,” she mutters, looking up at the ceiling.
“It already is,” I agree, “now how can you test if it’s working before the full moon?”
She looks back at me.
“If it’s the transformation that stops it working, and I took it two weeks ago, it should have done something by now.”
Anita narrows her eyes and considers. She seems hesitant, but her curiosity is clearly winning over. “I’d have to run a blood test to get a count on the active wolf genetic material in your body.” She stumbles with the language, understandably. There aren’t any universally understood technical terms for ‘werewolf genes.’ “That’s what reacts to the moon and creates an additional rhythm that the body follows. Instead of a circadian rhythm or a hormonal cycle, this one restructures the body down to a genetic level, back and forth. Humans don’t have any of that genetic material. Wolves do. Hopefully, yours have started to go dormant and decrease in number.”
