through gritted teeth. He repeated the words like a mantra.
By the time we reached the glass doors at the front of the building, his voice had faded to barely audible, nonsensical mumbles. At one point, he called me Amy and the mistake cut like a blade.
The guard at the door took one look at Kyle and told us to take a left followed by a right.
We finally staggered into the infirmary, and a doctor with hair as white as his lab coat looked up from his coffee and donut.
“What happened?” Keeping just out of Kyle’s reach, he ushered us through a door and into a tiny room with metal walls. It was like a vault.
I hesitated on the threshold, holding Kyle back as I bit my lip and took in the heavy bars and locks on the door.
“It’s all right,” said the doctor. “The room is just reinforced in case a wolf needs to shift.”
The explanation didn’t make me feel any better, but Kyle pulled free of my grip and walked forward, bearing his own weight until he sank onto an examination table in the middle of the small space.
He closed his eyes. For a horrible second I thought he had passed out, but then he shifted his weight and arranged himself more comfortably. A ripple swept through his torso as his muscles tried to tear themselves apart. Kyle clenched his fists and the movement stopped.
I brushed a strand of hair from my face and caught sight of my bloodstained fingers. My stomach did a slow flip. You couldn’t catch LS through blood—you had to be bitten or scratched by a fully or partially transformed werewolf—but it was Kyle’s blood and the idea of it on my skin left me feeling shaken and sick.
The doctor was speaking to me—had clearly been speaking to me for at least a minute or two. I forced myself to focus on his repeated question.
“He spotted something up in the rafters at one of the construction sites. He climbed up to take a look, but the boards were slick and he slipped. . . .” My voice cracked.
“Why didn’t he shift?”
Kyle’s face twisted in pain, but he opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. That had to be good, right? Eyes open had to be better than eyes closed.
“He was scared he’d get in trouble. I would have taken him to the zone, but the infirmary was closer.”
The doctor’s gaze fell on my hands, and a sympathetic look flashed across his face. “There’s a sink in the outer room,” he said as he turned his attention fully to Kyle.
He asked Kyle a series of inane questions, and something inside my chest unknotted when Kyle choked out his favorite color and the name of the president.
Legs shaking, I walked to the sink. The water ran pink and I couldn’t get all of the blood out from under my cuticles, but I could at least stand the sight of my hands.
I headed back to the small room—the vault—and hovered in the doorway.
The doctor was still asking questions.
Kyle’s eyes locked on mine and he gave me a small nod.
Telling myself that wasting this chance would mean he had hurt himself for nothing, I slipped out of the infirmary.
The wing housing the infirmary was made up of locked doors and identical gray hallways that were all empty save for the occasional—improbably healthy-looking and utterly ginormous—potted plant. I passed three of the things before realizing they were fake.
How long had I been gone? Five minutes? Ten? Long enough for the doctor to send someone after me, probably.
I had to find Serena, but so far all I’d managed to do was run around like a rat in a maze.
I rounded a corner and froze. A white-clad program coordinator and a guard were standing at the end of the passage. Their backs were to me as they spoke in hushed tones.
I rocketed back around the corner.
Someone had wedged one of the plastic plants into a small nook. I squeezed in behind it and crouched down. My knee hit the base, and my heart went into cardiac arrest as the plant tilted and almost fell.
“It’s just a few more tests. You want help, don’t you? You don’t want to be sick, do you?”
“No,” said a frail female voice, the syllable uncertain and unspecific.
Hope leaped in my chest. The voice was so weak that it was barely audible, but it was Serena. It had to be.
I peered around the plant as the voices reached the intersection of the two hallways. The program coordinator half turned in my direction just as I got a clear look at the girl. It wasn’t Serena. It wasn’t anyone I had seen before.
Disappointment threatened to crush me, but was quickly shoved aside by the girl’s appearance.
Her skin looked like tracing paper and the shadows under her eyes were so dark they could have passed for smudges of ink. Her lank brown hair grazed the collar of a shapeless white tunic. She was wearing the same sort of wrist cuff we’d all been fitted with, but her arms were so thin, I wasn’t sure how it didn’t slip off.
She really did look sick—desperately sick.
The guard wheeled an IV stand. The plastic bag was filled with liquid that was the same light blue as the windshield wiper fluid Tess kept in the trunk of the car. It dripped down a tube that wound around the girl’s arm and into her skin.
I bit my lip. Werewolves weren’t supposed to get sick—except for bloodlust. And whatever was wrong with the girl, it couldn’t be that. Less than 2 percent of people with LS developed bloodlust. It left you wild and frantic, and she didn’t look like she had any strength at all. She looked like she was being drained from the inside out.
“I think . . . if I can go back to my room . . . I’d feel . . . if I could rest . . .” She twisted the hem of her shirt between her fingers.
The program coordinator ignored her words and started ushering her down my hallway.
Fear constricted my lungs. I tried to make myself smaller behind my plastic plant, but there was no way they could walk by and not see me.
Suddenly, the girl collapsed. The guard just managed to keep her from falling while the program coordinator lunged to catch the IV stand.
“What’s wrong with her?” The guard supported the girl with his left arm, keeping his right hand—his shooting hand—near his holster.
“Exhaustion and stress, probably.” The program coordinator kept one hand wrapped around the IV stand. With his other arm, he helped take some of the girl’s weight. “She hasn’t slept in days. We’d better take her to the infirmary, though. Just to be certain.”
They headed straight down the hall, bypassing my corridor completely. Either I had gotten turned around, or they knew a faster way back to where I had left Kyle.
Relief surged through my muscles as their voices faded.
I crept out of my hiding place and approached the spot where the hallways intersected. The coast was clear.
Nerves buzzing, I turned left. That was the direction they had come from. With any luck, it would be where I’d find Serena. The fact that I didn’t have a plan beyond “make sure she’s okay and don’t get caught” suddenly seemed more than a little problematic, but I forged ahead.
This corridor was different from the others. It had white tile instead of gray carpet, and most of the doors had keypads next to them. After a short distance and another turn, the hall ended in a heavy steel door. I had a feeling I had just found the detention block.
“What are you doing here?”
I whirled. A guard stood ten feet away.
His uniform strained over the kind of bulk that had more to do with Dunkin’ Donuts than muscle. Thick black brows pulled together as he took in my hair and clothes. He stared at me like I was a bomb on the verge of exploding. “How did you get in here?”
