28
An hour after leaving Wendell’s house, Jem found a Flying J and parked under the canopy at one of the pumps.
It wasn’t even midnight yet. The lights were new and bright, and it was like he was on stage.
He’d stopped shaking, but inside, he was like a snow globe, everything whirling around, things flying so thick it was a whiteout.
He went inside.
The men’s room was empty. He washed his face and mouth before he checked himself in the mirror.
A little blood on his coat from when he’d bit Zeb.
He got some paper towels and then stood there like an idiot because he couldn’t keep the coat.
So he wet the paper towels and wiped his face and threw them away.
And then he went outside and stepped out of that eggshell of powder-white light and walked across the concrete pad into the dark until he found the commercial dumpsters.
He buried his coat there and walked back to the Subaru, his tee too thin for the cold, chafing his arms as his breath steamed.
Back in the car, he turned the heater up.
Had someone seen him?
Maybe. Not likely, but maybe. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. No, scratch that—he hadn’t been thinking at all. Someone else had been driving the car, so to speak. And he’d driven Jem right off a fucking cliff.
Zeb had been in that house.
One of the wolves had been in Wendell’s house.
Why?
The question hadn’t occurred to him until now. He knew it was important, but he was too tired—too drained—to think about it. What mattered was that Zeb had been there. And he’d killed Wendell. More than killed him. Butchered him.
And Jem’s fingerprints were all over that house.
And Jem had punched Wendell. Attacked him in front of dozens of witnesses.
And when the police started digging, they’d find out about care, and the bite, and God only knew what was in the records—would they have any of Jem’s side of it? Any explanation? Probably not. Just the facts.
Psycho ex-foster comes back and murders a pillar of the community.
The wave of nausea made Jem close his eyes. His jaw ached, and for a moment, he could see it again: the bloody mess of what had once been a human being.
That’s not helping. You have to think.
He started the Subaru and eased out of the Flying J’s lot. He headed east, toward the foothills. Not back to Wendell’s house. And not back home—God, not now. Toward one of the neighborhoods around the University of Utah.
Chaquille was a grad student in aerospace engineering, and he was always chill unless his research had gone to shit. He also sold some of the best weed in the valley, and he’d helped Jem out before—for a price.
Right then, he was living in a brick bungalow that some old Mormon dude had split into a duplex.
Chaquille had the basement, which was perfect for a guy who didn’t want to get up before noon most days.
The entrance was around back, down a gravel drive and past a retaining wall with streaks of rust running down it.
Loose stones crunched and slid under Jem’s soles, and when he had to adjust his balance, his knee flared up.
He put one hand on the retaining wall. It was cold, and the concrete was rough.
A porch light gave off a harsh white light that cut shadows into the snow still hanging on. Jem knocked. And then he knocked again. Come on. Don’t be out. Don’t be at your stupid lab. He knocked again.
Sticks of red meat piled on the bed.
“Come on,” he said under his breath and hammered on the door.
It opened with a jerk, and Chaquille stood there. He’d gotten rid of the cornrows, and his hair was done in finger twists now. His eyes were glassy, and the smell of weed rolled out around him. After a moment, he pushed the door open a little more. “Where you been?”
Jem shrugged and stepped past him into the duplex.
It was about what he’d expected: a low ceiling, fake wood paneling instead of drywall, brown carpet thirty years old.
Whoever had done this place had been too cheap to put in lights, so there was a floor lamp in the corner that looked like a paper box, and its soft yellow glow barely broke up the darkness.
There was also a lava lamp, and two neon signs had been mounted on the wall—an inverted cross, red, and a marijuana leaf, blue.
They made the shadows look pink and purple. The perfect place to get high.
Chaquille didn’t ask any more questions. He settled onto the couch; his laptop was open next to him, and it looked like he’d been working on something for school. He grabbed a vape off the coffee table and tossed it to Jem. Jem turned it on and took a hit.
He coughed once as he exhaled. “Holy shit, that’s strong.”
With a shrug, Chaquille turned back to his laptop.
Jem sank down into a weird chair that made him think of a catcher’s mitt.
His jaw still ached, but already he could feel the weed working its way through his system, like someone had turned up the gravity, his body starting to get heavier.
He took another hit. The inside of his mouth had a faint oily feel.
Normally, he liked a joint. Sometimes, if he knew that wasn’t realistic, gummies.
Did all vapes make your mouth feel like this?
Was it just his imagination? He took another hit to be sure.
“You been home all night?” he asked. It sounded like someone else was asking, and he checked, just to make sure. He was heavier now, so heavy he was sinking into the chair, being sucked into it.
“Far as I know,” Chaquille said.
“Any chance I’ve been here all night with you?”
Chaquille looked up from his laptop. The glow lit his face and made his eyes shine. “Depends on who’s asking.”
“Cops.”
“Then I guess you been here all night too.”
Jem started to laugh. Or maybe it was someone else.
It sounded like the words, like someone else was talking, someone else was laughing, someone not him.
Like it was all outside of him somehow, and he was still being sucked into the chair as everything got heavier and heavier.
He was going to open his eyes to check, make sure nobody else was in the room, but the pink and purple shadows were heavier too.
The blood was in his mouth, and his teeth hurt, and the door thumped as something heavy—
It’s him. It’s him. He’s trying to get in.
—smashed into it. He pressed his back to the door, and the next thump ran through the wood and into his body. It bounced him so that his heels skidded across the tile.
“—going to kill you, you little shit—”
Thump.
And the force of the blow lifted him again.
Thump.
The handle kept trying to turn.
Thump.
In the mirror, his own eyes stared back at him. They were red. Like a wolf’s.
Thump, thump, thump.
It was dark, and he was so heavy that for a moment, he didn’t think he could breathe. Something buzzed—the neon lights hanging on the wall. And then it was Chaquille’s duplex, and his skin felt too thick, and someone was pounding on the door.
Wolves don’t have red eyes, he thought as he pushed himself up. Tried to push himself up. His arms felt like rubber. His legs were too soft to hold him. He took a hit on the vape and tried again.
The knocking on the door got louder.
In the duplex upstairs, someone shouted, “Go away!”
Chaquille and the laptop were gone, and the sofa was empty now. Jem tucked the vape into his pocket. When he got to the door, people were speaking on the other side.
“—not home,” a man was saying. “I told you, Rory is better.”
“Rory is a little bitch,” a woman answered. Then the door quivered—
Thump.
—and she shouted, “Chaquille, open up!”
Jem opened the door.
It was day, and the light was so bright that at first Jem had to squint while his eyes adjusted.
She couldn’t have been more than twenty, her hair the same purple as the shadows in the duplex, and she had her nose pierced; the stud was shaped like a little crystal hand.
The man had to have been at least twice her age, and he kept pulling up his jeans like they were going to slide off him.
“Chaquille’s not here,” Jem said. Which might have even been true.
And then he shut the door.
“Hey, wait—” the girl tried.
But the door was already shut.
The duplex was too dark now, so Jem leaned against the wall while his eyes adjusted. The buzz of the neon lights felt like it was inside his bones now: in his jaw, in his teeth, in his skull. His first thought was, I’m still high. And then, What time is it?
His phone was off, so he turned it on again. It buzzed as voicemails started coming in. Voicemails from Tean. He’d been supposed to—
Something with Tean.
It was outside the fog, out there with the smell of all that red meat piled high on the bed, and he wanted to keep it that way. The clock said it was a few minutes after one. Not one in the morning. One in the afternoon. Oh fuck.
Jem found the bathroom, peed, and washed up. Thought about it. Tried to think about it. And hit the vape again.
Another door along the hallway was closed; he decided not to check it. When he let himself out of the duplex, the couple was gone, and the day seemed even brighter than it had been a few minutes ago. Where sun glared off clumps of snow, it left spots in Jem’s vision.
It was one of those ultraclear Utah days when the air seemed like glass and he felt like he could see forever, every detail on every house in the valley.
He drove home, making sure to signal, watching the speedometer.
Everybody else was moving slowly too. The whole world had slowed down.
He’d read a story once, in one of the practice books Tean got him.
It was about Sleeping Beauty. The whole world had stayed exactly the way it was except the people.
Everybody had gone to sleep. Everybody had slowed down, slowed down, slowed down until they fell asleep wherever they were—making a pie, or working in the field, or spinning wool into yarn.
He was parked in their driveway.