Dana was pressed against the wall, hiding behind the rest of us. “I’m okay,” she responded.
Suddenly, Cora’s use of they played back in my head. “They?” I asked. “How did you know there was more than one?”
“Probably because they’ve been trying to kill us for the last day,” she answered. “I would guess they were after you too. Molly, right?”
Jesus fucking Christ. Now we couldn’t pretend this wasn’t real.
Priscilla and I must have been on the same page, because as soon as Cora said this, Priscilla had a small outburst. “Oh, hell no,” she exclaimed.
Cora sighed. “I didn’t believe it at first, but…I kind of had to when Melanie showed up.”
“What even happened?” I asked. “Better yet, why the hell did you come out here by yourself? Are you insane?”
“I know, I know…if I had any idea what I was walking into, I would have got a hold of you, I swear. But you know how I am. When I thought you were in danger, I came here in a flash too. It wasn’t gonna be any different with Melanie.”
“With all that you know? It should have been different.”
“All right, all right,” Daggett interrupted. “Can we save the lover’s spat for later?”
“Seriously,” Priscilla grumbled.
Daggett continued, “Be thankful that we’re all alive and well.” His eyes suddenly darted toward Melanie, and then muttered under his breath, “Well, mostly…”
Jesus, this was weird. Though calling it that felt like a stupid thing to say. You call a person weird, or a science project weird, not a person coming back from the dead. This went above and beyond that.
I repeated myself, though this time, calmly. “What happened?”
Cora took a deep breath, and I knew we were in for a story. “You said you guys heard my voicemail, right? Well, I knew it was Melanie’s voice. I knew it without a shadow of a doubt, and I couldn’t wait until morning to confirm it. I was afraid if I waited, she’d be gone, and I’d spend the rest of my life wondering who that was on the other end of the line. So I went. It was stupid, but I felt like I didn’t have any other choice. I found her in an old church, filthy and starving, and that’s when she told me all of these horrible things.”
She didn’t continue, so I asked, “Like?”
Slowly, she looked to Melanie. “Did you want to tell them?”
Up until this point, Melanie had been completely silent. When she parted her lips to speak, I didn’t know what to expect. “I woke up in a cage,” she said. “Several other people and I were kept there.”
“Where exactly is there?” I asked.
Melanie weakly shrugged. “Some big building. A warehouse, maybe? It was all a blur. I was so tired and hungry all the time, I didn’t have it in me most days to keep my eyes open for more than a few minutes.”
Cora laid her hand against the back of Melanie’s head and stroked her hair. “They fed her a few blood bags, but not enough. We’re guessing they did it to keep her weak.”
“You must have been taken by the men in black,” Daggett said.
“What, like the movie?” Priscilla asked.
“Not literally,” he answered. “Max, you had mentioned how these vans came and cleaned up Rookridge after your werewolf attack, and the same thing happened this past summer in Lunar City. They’re always there after something big happens.”
“You think they brought Melanie back to life somehow?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug.
“No,” Melanie said. “You guys brought me back.”
Daggett and I exchanged looks.
“When she says you, she means...your kind,” Cora clarified, but that didn’t make it any clearer for the rest of us in the room. Cora saw our continued confusion and said, “It’s your bite. Your bite does this.”
Immediately, I knew she had to be confused. “No. We make other werewolves, we don’t create this. We don’t have the power to bring the dead back.”
“Maybe not a singular bite.”
“English, please.”
Cora looked over at Melanie again. “Melanie?”
Melanie sighed like it was a struggle to even breathe. “Death from a werewolf bite is what made us. They say it’s nature’s punishment to the rabid werewolves.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Daggett asked.
“The ones that were kept with me,” she answered. “The ones like me.”
“Hold up, go back,” I said, sternly. “If that were true, there would be vampires running all over town. I’ve lost track of the people I’ve met who have accidentally killed someone.”
“The ones that turned were all in one piece when they died,” Cora said. “Decapitations, the heart being removed, bodies being torn apart, those are the ones that stay dead. For some reason, it doesn’t work.”
“So, it’s like the venom from our fangs is what’s doing it,” Daggett noted. “As long as the host is technically livable, it can be resurrected through whatever we transfer into it.”
“That’s what we figured. The actual deaths had to be caused by werewolf-induced injuries. Melanie...died,” her voice quivered, and I didn’t know if it was because it was a sensitive subject or that it was strange to say it with Melanie right beside her. “And it was caused by Travis’ bite. Just like with Molly, how we found her in one piece but bleeding out from Owen’s attack. That’s how she turned.”
It all sounded like bullshit. Everyone knew a werewolf bite turned you into a werewolf, or worse, killed you. Nowhere did I ever hear we were capable of creating another monster like this. But how could I argue against it, when the evidence was sitting in a chair in front of me, looking like she crawled out of a grave? I had a lot of damn questions, but there was one that rushed to my lips quicker
