Thornhill

There was shouting around us—so much shouting—but I couldn’t make out any of the words.

Another person—another voice—leaned over me on the other side. “It’s all right, Mac.” Jason. The words were raw, like he was having a hard time speaking. “Hank went to get a car and Kyle’s getting the doctor from the infirmary. You’re going to be okay.”

Hank was alive, then. Good.

There was sudden pressure on the space below my shoulder. The world went dark at the center and too bright at the edges and everything was on fire. I screamed.

“No, Serena!” Jason’s voice rose over my own and the pressure fell away.

Darkness threatened to pull me back under and I fought against it even though some distant part of my brain pointed out that the pain would stop if I passed out.

“I was trying to keep it inside,” Serena whispered. Her voice was halting, like a child’s. She fumbled for my hand and cradled it gently. “You have to cover the red so they can’t see it. It makes them so excited.”

The red? The hand that held mine was sticky and I struggled to turn it over. Serena’s palm was covered with blood.

My eyes sought out Jason.

“She was trying to help.” He brushed the hair back from my face, the touch so light it was lost to the pain. “She went crazy when Sinclair shot you. You should have seen what she did to her.”

At the mention of the warden, Serena flinched.

It was getting so hard to keep my eyes open. Almost impossible.

Not yet, I thought.

“Bloodlust . . . ?” The word came out a rasp as I fought to hold on.

Jason shook his head. “No. Whatever they did to her, it’s not bloodlust.”

Time twisted and turned. Minutes stretched out and snapped back.

Eve came. Serena left.

Kyle took Jason’s place at my side.

A man in a white coat gave me something for the pain.

I began to drift.

Strong arms lifted me. The movement should have hurt, but everything was numb and far away.

“Dad?” The unfamiliar word slipped out as Hank carried me through the gates.

“I’m here, Mackenzie. It’s all right.” He eased me into the back of a waiting car.

I opened my mouth to ask him not to leave me, but the drugs made it hard to string the words together and the car door slammed shut before I could get them out.

Epilogue

HEMLOCK’S A TYPE OF POISON, YOU KNOW. THE PLANT, NOT the town. Though I guess both are pretty toxic. Amy’s words—uttered so long ago that I couldn’t remember why or when—drifted through my head as we passed the town limits.

It was strange: Amy had always seen Hemlock as something that was holding her back whereas I had always seen it as a safe harbor—at least until the attacks last year. It was the first and only place that had ever been home.

I glanced at Kyle’s profile in the dashboard light. He was a big part of that.

Him. Jason. Tess. Hemlock was home because it was where they were.

I shifted in the passenger seat and sucked in a sharp breath.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I just moved the wrong way.” I slipped a hand under the collar of my shirt and traced the edge of the heavy bandage on my shoulder. I’d been lucky. Way luckier, according to Eve, than I deserved. As soon as I had retained consciousness long enough for a lecture, she had wasted no time in reminding me that a werewolf had much better odds of surviving a gunshot wound than a reg.

I hadn’t argued. A few inches in any direction and Sinclair’s bullet could have left me with permanent loss of mobility in my arm—that was if it hadn’t just killed me outright. Miraculously, it had missed just about everything important. I had spent a few days in bed and would have to undergo some minor physical therapy.

That was it. I was lucky.

The same couldn’t be said of Sinclair.

Serena had lost the ability to shift completely—at least temporarily—but she was still able to change the shape and structure of her hands. Eve had hauled her off the warden but not before she had almost ripped the woman to shreds.

Sinclair would live, but she’d be disfigured for life. Not to mention infected. If there was any justice, she’d end up in one of the camps she had worked at, completely at the mercy of the wolves she had once overseen.

Kyle pulled up in front of my apartment building and killed the engine. The familiar street seemed so normal that it almost felt surreal.

He didn’t say anything. He’d been unnaturally quiet since we left Colorado, but every time I asked what was wrong, he insisted he was fine.

“Tess is going to kill me.”

“Probably,” he agreed.

“What are you going to tell your folks?”

“No idea. Not the truth. Maybe I’ll just tell them I joined a militant cult. It would at least explain the hair.”

“I think Jason’s already using that one.” Of the four of us, the only person whose family could handle the truth was Serena.

As quickly as that thought came, I blocked it out. The afternoon had been long and painful, full of blame and difficult questions—all of which I deserved, but none of which I felt up to thinking about at the moment.

Instead, I leaned toward Kyle—carefully because of the whole just-being-shot thing—and brushed my lips against his. “In case you get grounded,” I murmured, before moving in and kissing him again.

Kyle hesitated—in the days and hours since I’d been shot, he’d treated me as though I were made of glass, barely touching me and only giving me chaste pecks on my forehead or cheek—but then he kissed me back. Tentatively at first and then so hungrily that every nerve in my body sparked.

After a few minutes, I pulled back, breathless. Not because I wanted to, but because I was actually starting to get light-headed.

A light burned at the bottom of Kyle’s brown eyes. I half expected him to kiss me again, but he just ran his fingertips along my temple and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I never got the chance to tell you thanks.”

The words were soft and serious and seemed out of place with what we’d just been doing. “For what?”

“For coming after me. For risking everything to get me out.” He smiled, but there was something sad and almost uncertain about it. “For knowing what I am and what I’ve done and not acting like I’m less than human even when it scares you.”

I bit my lip. The werewolf thing did scare me. Sometimes. But Kyle was human—more human than most regs. I just didn’t know how to make him see that. How did you convince someone of something they didn’t want to believe?

“Kyle . . .” I struggled to find the right words.

He shook his head. “It’s okay, Mac. Sometimes there isn’t anything to say.”

. . . there’s something I have to tell you.

The words Kyle had said that night in the sanatorium came back to me as he opened his door and climbed out of the car. He pulled my knapsack from the backseat and waited for me before heading up the walkway.

I stopped when we were halfway to the building. “Kyle?”