I thought of the fight I had witnessed that morning and said, “So someone like Pryor wouldn’t make a good match?”
“How do you mean?” Sam asked me.
“Well he seems like a rebel — someone who rocks the boat — stronger willed,” I explained. “I guess a wolf would have a job trying to crush his soul once inside him.”
“Yeah, perhaps you’re right,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s why he’s such a jerk, like it’s some kind of act so he isn’t matched. But if that’s what his game is, it could backfire on him.”
“Why?”
“Because the wolves want to match with as many of us as possible,” Sam said. “Remember they only get to pull this crazy shit every five years and only in one town at a time, and they only get six months to do it. Those of us who aren’t matched get to go home — back to our families. See, Pryor can kick off as much as he likes, but McCain will just beat it out of him — break him. There are very few kids who aren’t eventually matched.”
“Does it scare you?” I asked Sam.
“Does the thought of being matched scare you?” he shot back.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. I really didn’t know how I felt about matching as I believed it really had nothing to do with me. I’d come from another place — another reality. But now that Sam had asked me the question, I realised now that I was living at Ravenwood, I ran the risk of being matched just like he might be.
“Like me, you’ve probably just grown up accepting the fact that one day it might happen to you,” he said. “A bit like getting cancer, I guess, that’s how I came to see it. The odds weren’t in your favour, but you just prayed that you’d never get it.”
“I guess,” I said, pretending I’d had similar thoughts while growing up. In a way I felt like I was tricking him. Sam seemed like a nice guy, and I really didn’t understand what it must have been like to grow up knowing that one day you ran the risk of having your soul taken by a werewolf. I’d had to grow up coming to terms with the fact that I was a half-breed and that had been bad enough, but whatever I turned out to be, I was still going to be Kayla. I was never going to lose my identity — have my soul taken away from me. “Don’t you hate your parents for letting them take you?” I asked him.
“Do you hate yours?” he shot back.
“It’s different for me,” I told him. And keeping up the pretence, I said, “My parents both died in a boating accident so I had little choice.”
“I’m sorry that your mum and dad died,” he said. “My parents died too.”
To hear him say that made me wonder how much longer I could keep lying like this to him. I had no idea how he was really feeling. I wondered what the penalty would have been if the parents refused to let their child go, but I couldn’t ask for fear of blowing my cover. I was meant to know all this stuff if I’d grown up in this world just like him. So I said, “When the wolves turned up in Wood Hill, did some of the parents try and hide their children or smuggle them away?'
“What would’ve been the point?” he asked, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. “The wolves know exactly who does and doesn’t have children in town — the government gives them access to the census. Anyway, a few weeks before McCain arrives in town, everyone knows that he sends spies, wolves that have previously been matched and look human. You must have heard that?”
“Something like that,” I nodded briefly.
“And you must have heard what happened years ago in that town…what was it called now?” he said scratching his head and looking at me as if I might know the answer. But of course I didn’t. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, some parents did try and resist and the wolves did that thing with their eyes. They looked into those parents’ eyes and drove them half mad. They were never the same again, like vegetables I heard.”
As I sat and listened to Sam talk, I remembered the people of Wood Hill and understood why they tried so hard not to make eye contact with those who passed them on the street. Then, I thought of the woman I had seen with the pram and the doll which had had its eyes removed. As if reading my thoughts, Sam started talking again.
“If any of the kids resisted being taken, the wolves would just stare into their eyes and they would be driven half mad with what they saw in them,” he said. “I heard about this woman from one town, I think it was some years ago now, who was so desperate for her child not to be taken, that she cut her son’s eyes out then removed her own, so neither of them could be brainwashed. How bad is that?”
“Awful,” I whispered, feeling numb as I finally began to understand the devastation that the wolves — Skin- walkers — were causing to these people.
“Some of the teachers at Ravenwood tried to object to what was happening,” Sam told me.
“What, the matching?”
“No, not that,” he said, coming away from the window to sit next to me on the edge of the bed. “Like our parents, most of them realise that they don’t have a choice in matching, but it’s the way that McCain goes about it — that’s what some of the teachers objected to. The brutality of the man, that’s what the teachers didn’t like. Isn’t the matching bad enough, why does he have to be so cruel about it? Look what he did to you this morning.”
I glanced down at my hands and was surprised to see that they had almost healed. There were a few black scabs where McCain had stuck his Taser, but nothing more. The purple swelling had gone and so had the streams of liquid-fat. Sitting on my hands, I looked at Sam and said, “Did you know a teacher by the name of Emily Clarke?”
“Yeah, why?” he asked me, sounding surprised.
“Oh no reason,” I said, breaking his stare. “I just heard a few girls talking about her in the bathroom this morning. They were saying what a great teacher she was and how much they missed her.”
Accepting my lie, Sam said, “She was a nice lady and a good teacher. She wasn’t cruel like the others. Miss Clarke stood up for us. McCain hated her. But now she’s gone, just like the other teachers.”
“What do you think happened to her?” I asked, trying to make my questioning sound as casual as possible.
“McCain probably killed her,” Sam shrugged.
“You’re kidding me?” I said, again trying to sound as laid back as possible.
“Yeah, I’m just messing about,” he said staring at me with those blue eyes, which in the fading light looked almost turquoise. “I don’t mean this in a sick way, but part of me wished that he had murdered her.”
“Why?” I asked him, surprised by what he had just said.
“Because he would have broken the conditions of the treaty, don’t you see?”
“Would he?” I said.
With his eyes open wide, Sam looked at me, and said, “Kayla are you from this planet or what? You must know that if just one wolf kills — murders — a human, then the treaty is broken. And if that happens then the matching comes to an end and we’re free!”
“What if McCain did murder Miss Clarke and the other teachers?” I whispered, not taking my eyes from his.
“McCain wouldn’t be that stupid,” Sam said.
“What if he’s not stupid?” I said. “What if McCain is a killer?”
“You’d never prove it,” Sam sighed.
Then, thinking of how Elizabeth Clarke had told Kiera how her sister had hidden a secret camera in her room, I looked at Sam and said, “We’ll never know if we don’t look.”
“Look for what?” he asked, frowning at me.
“Clues,” I said back.
“And where are you going to start looking for clues?”
“Do you know where Miss Clarke’s room was?” I pressed.
“Yeah, why?” he said and the look of fear I could see in his eyes told me he had guessed what I was going to say next.
“We go and check it out tonight,” I whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
