“Why haven’t they killed me yet, Alex?” he whispered. “Why are they keeping me alive?”

To those questions, she had no answers he would want to hear.

When his shoulders began to shake, she felt an impulse to put her arms around him, but she wasn’t sure he would want that, or if it was even the right thing to do. She had never seen a boy cry like that before. Well, not since she’d accidentally on purpose elbowed Scott Rittenhouse off the jungle gym in first grade. The sound of Daniel’s grief was terrible, like a hacksaw through her heart, and he cried a long time.

“S-sorry.” His voice was thinner and no more substantial than worn tissue paper.

All cried out, she thought.

“Would you stay with me for a while?” he said in that same, fragile voice. “I don’t want to be alone with them.”

She thought of Sharon and Ruby back at the guesthouse. If they were lucky, Ruby would sleep through the rest of the night. After that, well, she didn’t know what she could do for her, other than top Ruby off with antibiotics and all those painkillers and hope she healed.

“I’ll stay for as long as they let me,” she said. “You should try to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see Jack. I s-see . . .”

“Shh, it’s okay,” she said, hating how lame that sounded. Things were definitely not okay. She put a hand on his arm. He was trembling, and his eyes were bright and desperate. Too late, she thought of the painkillers she’d left behind with Sharon and Ruby. Maybe it would be better and more merciful if he just went to sleep and never woke up.

What am I thinking? That’s not my decision to make.

“Alex.” He was shuddering as if with a sudden fever. “I’m afraid to sleep. If I sleep, what will I find when I wake up?”

“You’re just tired,” she said. “You’re hurt.”

“I want to die,” he said, fiercely. “If I had a gun, I’d b-blow my b-brains out. I would kill myself, but I’m a c-coward and now J-Jack . . .”

This time, as he wept, she held him. He still had plenty of tears. Eventually, he relaxed in her arms, his body draining of tension.

She sensed him drifting off and decided that sleep was a mercy. In her heart, she thought she knew why the Changed had kept him.

She might be wrong. Maybe if she held onto him that would help. Because nothing’s written in stone. Look at me. She’d read it in her aunt’s face and behind all her doctor’s look-on-the-bright-side bluster: both were amazed she’d lasted as long as she had. By all rights, with the kind of monster living in her head, she ought to be dead. Whoever said “where there’s life, there’s hope” was spot on, though.

There was, however, one thing she did have to know. Because it might be important. A clue? A way to understand what was happening to her? She wasn’t sure.

“Daniel?” she whispered. She saw his lids twitch. “Daniel, are you still awake?”

He muttered thickly. Beneath his lids, his eyes rolled.

“Mmmm . . .”

She hitched up until her lips brushed his ear. “Daniel, you said they told you they’d let Jack go. How did you know that, Daniel? Did they speak to you?”

He didn’t answer and didn’t answer, and she thought it was too late, and he might already be asleep. Then a bedspring creaked as he stirred. “No,” he murmured. His eyes were still closed, but his throat moved in a hard swallow, and his tongue skimmed his lips as he worked to speak. “I don’t know.” Pause. “Maybe.”

Not really an answer. “What about smell? Is that how? Do you smell them? Daniel?” She stroked his cheek, reluctant to bring him back to the horror that sleep would take away, if only temporarily, but she had to know. “Daniel, what do you smell?”

This time, there was a long, long pause.

“You,” he said.

47

According to Mickey, Slash dragged in to fetch her at seven. By then, the room had brightened, and through the slits of venetian blinds, Alex saw that it was still snowing. She’d slept on and off for perhaps five hours, mostly off. Her mind was just too full, the thoughts jumping from one to the next like crickets. As bad as she felt, she drew some small satisfaction from how Slash looked even rougher than usual: a hangover in motion, if those dark patches under the girl’s reddened eyes were any indication.

Daniel didn’t stir as Alex slid from the bed. She drew a quilt around his shoulders and laid a light hand on his forehead. No fever yet, but sweat greased his skin. Would the Changed let her come back? That was more likely than not. They wanted Daniel alive for the time being. She left the bottle of erythromycin where Daniel would see it when he awoke, just in case she was wrong about what Spider might have in store.

She followed Slash into the hall. The house was dead silent, but the choking fug of roadkill was stronger than ever from so many Changed in relatively tight quarters. Spider’s door was closed, thank God. In the light of early morning, the photos on the display table gave off an enticing glimmer. She ached to study them. She eyed Slash shuffling a few paces ahead and thought, Might not get another chance.

Moving quickly, she slipped off her pack, tugged open the top, closed the gap, and then mock-stumbled one lurching step, then two. Slash grunted as Alex slammed into her back. Alex’s supplies— pill bottles, packets of gauze and instruments, a roll of surgical tape, the plastic bottle of peroxide—bounced and skittered down the hall, and the two girls went down in a heap. Slash’s shotgun rifle clattered, and Alex had just a second to think how lucky she was the thing hadn’t gone off. Her knee gave a small shout as she banged against hardwood, but in another second, Slash cut a vicious slap that rang her ears, and then a scraped knee was the least of her problems.

“Cut it out!” With her good arm, she shoved the other girl, then shrank back, both hands up, palms out in surrender. “It was an accident, okay? It was an accident.”

Slash was breathing hard, the irritation practically fuming from her pores. She’d retrieved that shotgun, and there was no mistaking from the way Slash’s shoulders tensed that she’d be just as happy reducing Alex’s head to mist. Alex didn’t move, and she thought now that this had been a really dumb—and maybe her last—idea. Then Slash lowered the shotgun a smidge and backed away, the big girl’s upper lip peeling back in a silent snarl.

Okay, so far so good. Her knee complained a little as she clambered to her feet, and she played up the limp. The knee really did hurt. She gathered her supplies thoroughly and slowly, which allowed time for her gaze to sweep the walls—and those photographs.

As it turned out, she’d risked getting plugged for nothing because, in the coming days, Alex would see and study these pictures more than once.

What she didn’t and wouldn’t know for another five minutes, although the lack of smoke chuffing from the guesthouse chimney ought to have been a clue, was that Sharon and Ruby were dead. Judging from the rigor—they were so stiff that it took Slash and Acne and a couple of Leopard’s kids quite a while to jockey the bodies out of the guesthouse—they’d been dead for hours. How Sharon had done it was easy enough to parse. A smoggy chemical reek of vomit and half-digested painkillers and sleepers hung in a cloud, and small drifts of pills the women hadn’t swallowed were scattered over the hardwood. Knowing Sharon, Alex thought the old woman had probably started just as soon as Alex was gone, doling out the pills like M&Ms: one for you, two for me; two for you, four for me. Alex could see it.

After that little debacle, Alex would be ensconced in Daniel’s room. No one tied her to a chair or anything, but they didn’t let her leave for long either, and then it was like that stuff she’d learned way back in elementary school about spiders that cocooned their prey to snack on for a rainy day.

But this was all in her future. Now, by the time she made it downstairs and was threading around morning-after bodies draped over chairs and sprawled on throw rugs, she knew a few things. Big things.

One: Judging from the resemblance, Wolf ’s mother’s name had been Emily. The last time they’d all been at the summerhouse was four years ago this past August. That’s what the photo said. So Wolf would’ve been thirteen or so.

Two: Wolf had grandparents. This wasn’t news. Until now, she’d thought they were Jess and Yeager. But Jess wasn’t in the picture. Instead, Yeager stood with a plump, small woman, with hair done in a platinum sweep, named Audrey. So if Jess was Wolf ’s grandmother, that raised all kinds of interesting questions.

Three: One photograph had not been taken at this lake house. She didn’t know where, exactly, although she spotted what looked like, what? A cave? Or maybe just a cleft in a rock face; she couldn’t be sure. There had been a party, though. She spotted a grill, discarded platters and cups and wrappers; a couple of kids clutched sodas and burgers.

The kids were arranged in the kind of haphazard groupings that signaled pecking order, who was tight with whom, who was on the outs. Later, when there was time, she would count fortyseven kids. Some she recognized as the same faces staring from those white ninja outfits Leopard’s crew was so fascinated with. Others, she didn’t have a clue. All were mugging for the camera, and someone had helpfully penned names in a spidery hand. That was how she learned that, pre-Zap, Spider’s name had been Claire Krueger. Judging from that satisfied little smirk, she’d been on top of the heap even then. But it was the names and faces she knew best that clinched her suspicions about what Rule had been doing, and even why.

Acne was Ben Stiemke. Andrew Born would die within a day, but Alex knew him as Beretta. Slash was Beth Prigge—and pretty in her own right back then: thinner, not as sullen, and, most importantly, smooth-skinned. No scar, nothing slashed. For some reason, Alex’s mind jumped to Wolf and that half moon on his neck where his skin had been flayed open from ear to throat. For the first time, she wondered if maybe the two scars were parts of the same story.