Chapter Text
The sound of soft scuttling snapped Chloe out of a light sleep, her senses on high alert in an instant while her heart pounded in her throat. Her head, still fuzzy from sleep, swam as she scanned the darkness, counting one, two, three bodies, sprawled in their sleep.
She blinked until her vision and head both cleared of cobwebs, and she sat upright, wincing as her sore muscles ached. Nothing moved in the dark, and she couldn’t smell any animals, either, so maybe—just maybe it was all in her head, a figment of her exhausted over-imagination, brought on by stress and shock.
Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears as she sat there, straining to hear or see anything move. Pain wormed through her jaw as she clenched her teeth, body gridlocked with tension. Her hands squeezed around the holey hem of her blanket.
Maybe it’s just my imagination, she told herself, but she was still frozen, unable to move, her throat shrinking by the minute, mouth filled with saliva. Breathing was the only noise for several long, drawn-out minutes that dragged on as if through molasses. You’re being ridiculous.
But she knew she wasn’t, all things considered.
There was no movement or noise save for Simon turning onto his stomach or Tori smacking her lips, so Chloe relaxed, breathing steadily in a cycle of in through her nose and out slowly through her mouth until her racing heart steadied and slowed to a calmer pace. The blood stopped whooshing in her ears.
After a minute, she laid back down and just stared into the dark, still a little too shaky to fall back asleep. Instead she thought about a lot things, topics she usually avoided because of how tender and sore the wounds still were—Her dad. Her aunt. Lyle House. The Change. Derek. Her mom.
Especially her mom.
I miss you, Mom, she thought as hot tears beaded along her waterline and overflowed, dripping diagonally across the bridge of her nose, leaving a trail of residue behind. It wasn’t often she thought about Jennifer, but she was just so tired, so scared, so uncertain of the right step to take she couldn’t help it.
And maybe it was ironic, missing her mom when she was the reason she was dead, but right now she was just a scared kid, wanting her parents to hug her and kiss her and reassure her.
What was she thinking, acting like she had any life skills or street smarts to survive on her own? She was a girl who, before, had never wanted or worried for anything, had never gone hungry a day in her life, with a closet full of jeans that cost at least fifty dollars or more and equally expensive T-shirts and hoodies. Sheltered.
She pushed her face into her pillow and inhaled the stale scent, sniffling as quietly as she could, even as the tears kept filling and overflowing and sliding down her face. Scrubbing at her eyes, dotting them with the sleeves of her hoodie or blinking didn’t deter them at all.
Silent sobs wracked through her, shaking her body, as she curled herself into a tight little ball, knees drawn to her chest, arms binding them. Her heart knocked against her ribs.
It was the events of the last week or so crashing down on her, hitting her hard and knocking her on her ass. Tori’s cruelty at dinner, the laundry room and staircase incidents where Derek had looked at her like a monster, Steve’s apology and her answering anxiety attack about it, the miserable sickness of the Change, and everything after and in between was punching her all at once, leaving her head spinning as she focused on her breathing patterns.
Then she heard it—scuttling.
Again.
Clear as a bell.
It wasn’t imagined.
She snapped upright, tears still rolling down the slope of her cheeks, dripping off her chin and wetting her sweatshirt, as she scanned the darkness. As her gaze swept from left to right, she caught sight of something moving over Derek, rising up, the movement jerky and halting. Her stomach sank with dread as she kicked her feet free of tangled blanket and crawled forward on her hands and knees, concrete scraping her palms and obliterating her kneecaps with her frantic speed.
The smell of decay was overwhelming, but that was nothing compared to the abject shock and horror that slapped her across the face when she knelt at Derek’s side and got a good look at whatever was moving.
In the gloom, it kind of looked like a white basketball bobbing every now and again, but that made no sense. There hadn’t been any basketballs, let alone a painted one, in the warehouse, or at least one she’d seen. And then she saw the empty circles below the topmost curve and, further down, the two small triangular slits situated above what looked like a curving seam.
It’s not a basketball.
It was a skull.
This was the dead body she’d scented earlier, the one she’d been so concerned about, the very one Simon—no, Derek had insisted wouldn’t be a problem. But this was Derek, and if there was one thing she’d learned about him since she’d met him, it was that he was stubborn to a fault. No doubt he’d wanted to spare them their worry and now look: she was face-to-face—er, well, skull at a reanimated corpse, a soul forcibly crammed back into its body.
There was a small little chattering as it swung its head, something long swinging from the bottom of its face, and her stomach flipped over at the realization that its jaw was broken, barely hanging. And the noise were its teeth clicking together, loose in the bone.
She shot a desperate glance at Derek’s face. If she woke him now, she wasn’t sure what reception she’d receive, and the last thing she needed was chaos because of his own stubbornness. But the body had to be released, and she had nothing to throw over it, since her own blanket hadn’t even covered her past her ribcage and there hadn’t been much to pick from to begin with. Actually, the idea of something looming above her at night with a blanket thrown over it was horrifying.
In a split decision, she swung herself across Derek’s midsection and leaned down, shaking his shoulder gently at first and then firmer, harder, until his eyes shot open and his mouth dropped. She slapped a hand over it and motioned for him to be quiet with a finger pressed to her lips.
“Don’t freak,” she whispered, still staring into his confused eyes. “I need—I need you to do whatever it is you think about when you r-release a soul, okay?”
His big, black eyebrows knitted together at her words, and she could imagine his voice: I didn’t raise anyone, though.
Behind her, the zombie chattered and clicked, and she screwed her eyes shut at the brush of it touching her back, ice-cold even through two layers. It shifted behind her, and her skin pebbled with awareness and fear, but she clenched her jaw. The reek of death turned her stomach.
“I need you to focus, okay?”
His bewildered gaze flicked over to where Simon and Tori lay then slid back to hers. His throat boobed as he swallowed hard, confusion replaced by understanding in an instant, then regret.
The regret’s a little too late, buddy.
It took every ounce of willpower in her to not shriek like a bonafide scream queen when the zombie swayed forward and bumped against her, clicking and chittering softly in her ear, trying to communicate but unable. No doubt it was horribly confused or scared or even angry at being back in its body.
She was just plain horrified that Derek was strong enough to force a body back in with little to no effort. In his sleep, he’d accidentally raised a body, and goosebumps rose up and down the length of her arms beneath her sleeves at the thought of such power.
Astounding, yes, but she had more pressing matters at hand.
Like the zombie shoving itself into her back repeatedly, ramming her, rocking her forward as it sought out Derek. She elbowed its searching hands away.
“Derek.”
His gaze snapped to hers.
“Focus on me, o-okay?” Her voice cracked as ice ran across the back of her neck. The zombie or her senses, she couldn’t tell. Just screwed her eyes shut and started blabbering about something, anything, to distract herself. She wracked her brain for anything, but all she could think of was that horrible night. And she’d rather die than talk about that with anyone, especially him.
She swallowed hard and tried to remember something asinine, completely mundane.
“When I was twelve,” she started, voice breaking, but she pushed on, fighting against the zombie’s surprising show of decent strength, “I gave myself a haircut once. Right in time for picture day, too.” Her mouth turned up slightly. “And God, was it horrendous. I was a tiny kid too so I ended up looking less chic and more…” She pursed her lips. “…haunted Victorian child ghost.”
His face pinched with determination and concentration, his lips moving at odd intervals as he whispered to himself too quiet for her to hear.
“I didn’t mean to mess up my hair. Young wolves…they’re not known for good self control. Especially in high states of emotion. And, as a twelve-year-old, I was chalk full of ’em. I was nightmare. Puberty and wolf impulse? A disaster waiting to happen, especially since the wolf gene skipped both my mom and aunt, who had no idea how to handle me. How to help. My uncle, Ben, was a Wer, too, but he died when he was a teenager.”
The cold retreated, but she kept going. The words spilled out, and it must’ve been working because she could feel the chattering and hissing backing away, putting more and more distance between them.
He was really, really doing it—releasing the trapped soul.
And she was helping him.
Something warm glowed in her chest, and emotion tightened her throat for a moment. A hard swallow cleared it.
“I had an emo phase when I was twelve, and I hated my hair. Baby fine and pin straight, with nothing of interest or volume to it. Blergh.”
His lips continued to move, his eyes flickering behind his screwed-shut eyelids, so she kept going, too.
“So, I’m scrolling through Facebook or Youtube or something—I can’t recall what, exactly, and it really isn’t that important anyway—but I saw a video and thought, ‘Yeah. I can do that.’ It was a girl giving herself one of those shaggy haircuts that all the emo kids had online. It seemed easy enough, but I cut too much and ended up looking like Angelica’s doll in Rugrats.” She snorted. “I’d never seen my dad so at a loss for words. My mom laughed until she had to excuse herself to the bathroom, came back, and we went to the salon that day to fix it—or whatever was left. There’s a picture somewhere of me at twelve, scowling for the camera because I had a mouthful of braces, dressed in a punk band T-shirt that I didn’t actually listen to and hundreds of those handmade kandi bracelets and about a mile of eyeliner and this mess I thought looked so cool. I didn’t. I just looked like I’d rolled out of bed.”
She went quiet as she became aware of both the silence and Derek’s now relaxed expression then glanced over her shoulder. At their feet lay the skeletal remains, rags of tattered clothing too worn for her to make out, innocuous like it’d never been alive in the first place.
Trusting he wouldn’t do anything stupid, she lifted her hand and climbed off him, standing a few feet downwind of the skeleton. Her stomach churned at the idea of dying, chained to the Earth for years even only to be shoved back into your original, decayed body, unable to communicate, at the beck and call of someone else. How awful to be made a puppet in your own body.
Derek’s tight, low whisper broke through her thoughts.
“Chloe, I—” he started, throwing continual glances at the dead body.
She held her hand up and shook her head. “Don’t. Just…don’t.”
And that was all she was going to say until she saw his expression, the quick flash of hurt that twisted his features, and her heart thundered with anger.
How dare he? How dare he when he was the reason for this? His pride had gotten in the way and, of course, she had to save him. In his misguided attempt to be strong and brave, all he’d done was ignore a potential problem until it came back to bite them all in the ass.
And right now she was just too tired to deal with it, so she turned away and approached the body, crouching down to examine it. Bleached-white told her it’d been here for a while, and she highly doubted the tatters rags would give any hint of identity. Someone out there was missing them, and she only hoped they’d found closure.
She didn’t really want to mess with them but she also didn’t fancy another summoning in his sleep, so she got to her feet and grabbed her blanket, using it to wrap the bones. Then she took them out through the dilapidated back door, where she stopped a few paces in the wood and knelt. Cold earth seeped into her denim-clad knees, but she ignored it in favor of setting her bundle down and digging a grave with her hands, scooping dirt out with her fingers until her arms and shoulders ached.
Then she buried the body and apologized, since she couldn’t exactly report it right now. But she would. She would if she got the chance.
Dusting off her hands and knees, she headed back into the warehouse and didn’t say a single word to Derek as she laid down on her spot, sticking one arm underneath her armpit and the other between her knees, eyelids falling shut. Sleep came quick and heavily.
And when the sunlight streamed in through the high windows in the morning and shone down on her face, pulling her awake, she found a blanket had been draped over her in the night.