“Cheryl, what’s wrong?” I said when she was close enough.
She put her hands on her hips. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back. I’m taking you to the hospital to see Mom since you can’t seem to be bothered to get yourself over there.” Then her eyes grew wide, and the color left her face. She was staring at Ben’s bloody shirt. The blood had turned dry and crunchy. My own shirt had a sizable spot of blood on the upper chest, where the wound was still leaking.
“Holy crap, what happened to you guys?” She started to look a bit green.
“I got shot,” I said.
“You what? Oh, my God. Why aren’t you in a hospital?” Her voice was going shrieky.
I was so not in the mood for any of this.
“Because I’m a werewolf and it wasn’t a silver bullet.”
“Oh my God . . . what . . . what have you gotten yourself into?”
I only sighed. This would take way too long to explain. In my silence, Cheryl kept going, and I realized that this whole talking too much thing wasn’t just me. It ran in the family.
“Kitty, what is going on? Are you in some kind of trouble? Is that why you couldn’t go to the hospital? And you—” She pointed at Ben. “This all started when she met you. This is your fault, isn’t it?”
“Actually, no,” Ben said, full of mock cheerfulness. “Kitty made this mess pretty much on her own.”
Please, let me pass out now. I didn’t want to have to talk to either of them anymore.
“Listen, Cheryl, can you not tell Mom and Dad about this?” I could imagine Mom’s reaction exceeding Cheryl’s level of hysteria.
“Not tell Mom and Dad? Are you crazy?”
“Oh, come on, what about all those times you sneaked out of the house and told me not to tell? And that time Todd came over—”
“But you did tell!” she screeched.
“No I didn’t, they figured it out on their own because you were an idiot!”
Ben was rubbing his forehead like he had a headache.
I took a deep breath and tried to start over. “I’m trying to keep you guys out of this.”
“Kitty!” Cheryl said, making the word part demand, part reprimand, part plea. She was four years older than me. Our relationship had started on a foundation of years of forced babysitting and commands from our parents that were all some variation of “Cheryl, look after your sister.” After she left for college, my teenage years continued in pure, unsupervised bliss. Our lives diverged radically after that, but we loved each other. We were family. And the tone of voice she was using now evoked a long history of responsibility and authority.
I spoke as calmly as I could. “Cheryl, I’m sorry I haven’t been to the hospital yet. I’m sorry I can’t explain everything. I’m okay. I got shot, but I’m okay. I—I think you should go home, or go back to Mom, or whatever. I’ll call later. I really need to take a shower.”
“No,” she said. “No, enough of this, you haven’t been straight with any of us since this happened to you. You know those old lists, how to tell if someone’s a drug addict? The secrecy, the lies, the weird behavior—that’s you! That’s totally you!”
Wow. She had a point. Now if I could just quit being a lycanthrope. “What the hell are you going to do about it—run an intervention?” God, this wasn’t going well. I had to get her out of here.
Beside me, Ben stiffened, his attention suddenly drawn elsewhere. He turned, his nose flaring, taking in a scent. He started to unzip my backpack, where he’d stashed a handgun.
“What is it?” I said.
“Do you smell that?”
I took a deep breath to taste the air.
“Kitty, what is it, what’s going on?”
“Be quiet,” I said, straining my ears.
Then I caught it. Ben had only been a werewolf for a few months, but he had a better nose than I did. Something was out there, something wrong. An alien touch in the air. Wolf, but not pack. No. Oh, no. Hardin hadn’t found Carl. Single-minded, brutal Carl who probably only had one thought in his pea brain right now: me. He’d tracked us here, we were all doomed.