The Frenzy (15 page)

“Liv?” she cries. Her voice sounds confused. I stop and look at her but she is looking toward the house, up toward the window of my room. She half looks back at me and then she shoots.

My mother is usually a good shot, precise as hell. But anyone can be distracted. And the pain blasts through my paw, shattering fur and muscle, blood and bone.

I dive into the underbrush, limping on three legs, on fire with pain. The other pain, the changing pain, is nothing compared to this.

And that is all I know.

I heard beeping sounds and felt the bright light through my eyelids. The air cool and sterile but I could smell death down the corridor. I tried to move but my body was trapped. And somewhere far away and softened by narcotics there was a horrific pain, or the memory of pain.

This was what I felt when I woke finally in the hospital. I opened my eyes, a light flickering attempt that finally succeeded. Corey was at my side.

“Liv!” He stood up and moved closer. “Mom!” He was yelling now. “She’s awake.”

His face was drawn, dark shadows under his eyes. He pressed his cheek against mine and his skin was cold.

I tried to talk. My lips were chapped and my throat felt closed. I wanted to ask what had happened. Where was my mother? But I just blinked at him instead.

“You’re in the hospital. There was an accident. Do you remember, baby?”

I tried to shake my head no but even as I thought
that, I was remembering. I was remembering it all. I was a shape-shifter, a werewolf. My best friend, Pace, was dead and if it hadn’t been for Corey my heart would have turned to stone. My mother had called the boy I loved, “this boy.” She had said, “Think of the children.” Rage had seized me. And I was bleeding and the moon was full. This was the combination that led to change. I had changed. My mother had seen a wolf in the garden. She didn’t know that the wolf was me and she had shot at it. She had shot and there was a splintering pain in my left hand. My left hand … I couldn’t take any more.

I had to close my eyes and sleep.

When I woke in the hospital again Dr. Nieberding was there.

“Corey!” I said. I tried to move. I looked down and saw the bandages wrapped around
my hand. Some blood had stained the white. In my mind I saw my mother lift her gun. My hand. What had happened to my hand? I leaned forward and vomited over the side of the bed.

“Nurse,” Nieberding called. He moved his chair closer to me. “Do you understand what’s happened, Olivia?” he asked.

I stared at him. My eyes must have looked as wild as I felt because he cleared his throat and moved away slightly. There was the taste of acid in my mouth.

“You’re in the hospital. There’s been an accident. We don’t know exactly what happened but we’re looking into it.”

“Corey!” I said. He was the only one I wanted, the only one who would understand. I tossed my head back and forth. Then I realized. My body was in restraints.

“We didn’t want you to hurt yourself,” Nieberding said. “When you’re calmer we can take these off.”

“Get away from me!” I could feel a stirring of the frenzy deep in my body. A month could have already passed since the last moon; I wasn’t sure—I had lost
all sense of time. I took a breath, trying to control it. I couldn’t let it happen here. “Get me Corey!”

“Your mother wants you to know she is very concerned. She and your father are doing everything they can to find out how this happened.”

I know how it happened.

“What did she tell you?” I growled.

“You had an argument and then you ran into the woods. A search party was sent out and they found you there … like this.”

No! That was a lie. My mother had mistaken me for a wolf and shot me in our own backyard. I had run to the woods on three paws, leaving a trail of blood. A sound was starting in my throat, a low whistling hum that would escalate soon into something fierce and blood curdling.

The nurse came. “Visiting hours are over, Doctor,” she said.

Nieberding stood up. “Yes, of course. And get this cleaned up, please.” Wincing, he gestured to the vomit.

Dr. Nieberding walked away. I looked at the end of my arm. I thought of my left hand, how I had used it to pet dogs and cats, to care for them, to hand ice cream cones to people, to hold the handlebars of my bike, to stroke Corey’s face. I retched again but there was nothing left in my stomach except bile.

The third time I woke up it was Corey again. My mother still hadn’t come, at least not while I was conscious. It was night and the room was hushed and darkened. The air blew cool on my skin and my lips were parched.

I reached for his arm with my right hand and pulled Corey to me. By the soft light from the window I could see there were tears in his eyes.

“How could this have happened to me?” I sobbed.

He kissed my face. “It’s going to be okay, baby.”

“Okay?” I lifted my left arm. There was a fresh bandage on it now. “My hand! Corey! My hand.”

“I know.” He held me and we wept together, so
close that I couldn’t tell whose breath I heard—mine or his.

I kept repeating, “What happened? What happened to me?”

“I’ll be your hand,” Corey said.

“But you’re leaving me!”

“No, Liv. I’m not leaving. I’m not going to go anywhere without you.”

“Where’s my mom?” Suddenly, in spite of what she had done I felt like a little girl again, wanting her presence, the smell of her perfume and the feeling of her hands combing my hair.

But it was Corey who stroked my hair away from my forehead. “She’s been here. Your dad came, too. They won’t speak to me, though. I think they are trying to blame me for what happened. I wouldn’t have gotten in at all if my mom didn’t work here.”

“Your mom knows?”

“She knows I’ve been camping in the waiting room and I won’t go home without you.”

“My hand,” I sobbed again. “Corey!” How could I live like this, a monster without a hand?

“I know someone who can help,” he said.

But I just wanted to sleep.

When I woke the next morning—I thought it was the next morning but it could have been longer—Joe Ranger was standing over me, holding a silver hand.

It looked just like the ones I’d seen in his shop but it gleamed—bright metal.

“What the hell is that?” I yelped.

“I brought you a present.” His lips curled into a small, worried smile.

I remembered the newspaper articles in his room, the picture of me. I had trusted him once. “Get the fuck away!”

“Liv, this will help you.”

“Yeah, right. Help. I asked you for help before. You want to kill me. I know what you are and what you did. And I’m not stupid. I know a little about
myself. I know what silver is supposed to do to them, to … me.”

“Calm down, Livvy. I thought you could do this on your own. You’re getting there, mastering it, but this will make it easier. And it will protect you from your enemies.”

“Get me Corey!”

Joe sat at my bedside, holding the strange metal object and I writhed away from him.

“You’re not right about any of those things you said.”

“What things? That you want to kill me? That you’re a werewolf? That you’re the full moon killer?” I made my voice loud on purpose.

“And you don’t know how important you are to me or why,” Joe went on, making his voice even quieter now.

For some reason I didn’t scream. I guess I wanted to hear what he had to say and for some reason, as much as I was acting that way, I wasn’t entirely afraid
of Joe Ranger. “That’s right. I don’t know. How should I know? Why do you keep my picture in your drawer? I trusted you. You were one of the only people I trusted.”

“Liv,” he said. “I had a relationship with your mother before you were born. Do you understand?”

I looked at Joe. His hair was red like mine. His eyes were green like mine. He had watched over me since I could remember. Like a father.

“No!” I said. I’d heard enough. “Get him away!”

The nurse came in. I knew her. Corey’s mom. “Core thought you’d be glad to see him.” She looked hard at Joe. “I think you need to leave now, Mr. Ranger.”

He stood up and shook his head sadly.

Then he put the silver hand down on the chair. And left.

It shone eerily and I wondered if it could hurt me. And, at the same time, I wanted it.

Joe Ranger was my father? My mother had slept with him? I tried to replay my whole life with this
new knowledge. How my mother must have been so unhappy with my dad. I thought of them sleeping in their separate beds, hardly ever touching, never kissing. How my dad must have despised me because he knew on some level I wasn’t his, but how he took care of me as his own anyway. I could see his suspicious glances, the way hate flared in his eyes when he drank too much and I did something that upset him. How Joe Ranger had watched over me because I was his child. How hard it must have been for my mom to look at me with my red hair and green eyes. How she must have grown to hate any wildness—mine, the wolves’, Joe Ranger’s—because it reminded her of her own, what she could never really have or be.

When Corey came back in I was crying again. “Baby?” He sat beside me. “I thought that would help. What happened?”

“Silver, Corey.”

He glanced down at the thing on the chair. It was skillfully crafted. It looked just like my hand, as if Joe
had used the hand that was gone as a model.

“Take it away!” I said.

Corey frowned so a crease formed between his eyebrows. “Didn’t he explain it to you?”

“He’s a freak, Corey. He’s dangerous. I know what he did.”

“Wait, what are you talking about?”

So I told Corey about the newspaper clippings in Joe’s room and how he had seen me leaving his place. How I thought he was one, like me. How I believed Sasha had bitten him, cursed him that way. He was the full moon killer. I was sure. Actually, I wasn’t sure I believed any of this but I needed to say it anyway, to distance Joe from me as much as possible. I didn’t tell Corey the other part—that Joe had told me he was my father. I didn’t want to say it out loud; it felt like too much to handle if I made it real with words.

Corey shook his head no. “Listen, Liv. They know who did it. It wasn’t Joe.”

“They know who did what?”

“There was another killing that night. The night you hurt your … The night this happened to you.” He took my left arm and cradled it in his right, so gently. It was the first time he’d touched it. I didn’t flinch. This was Corey. He had seen me change. He could handle everything, even this.

Then Corey told me about the off-duty police officers hunting in the woods; one, Jake Cunningham, had been killed and partially eaten that same night I’d frenzied. His friend had escaped and identified the murderer after spending the next night hunting for him in the woods with a posse of men.

This friend was not someone you mess with. This friend was the chief of police.

My father’s friend Jake Cunningham was dead. My father had somehow found Sasha’s cabin and now he had someone under arrest.

“He’s been working on it nonstop. That’s probably why he hasn’t come here that much.”

I wasn’t sure if that was the only reason why my father
hadn’t come. I was already a burden to him, a reminder of everything that had gone wrong. Now I was something worse—a reminder of the violence and pain that existed beneath the surface of our lives.

Corey took a newspaper out of his back pocket and showed me the picture. I recognized the light eyes, the thick dark hair with the thick sideburns and the lupine features.

“It looks like he killed them all, for the last four years. Olaf’s dad, all of them.”

“Victor,” I said, remembering that night on the road after Carl Olaf had reached down my shirt. Victor had read my mind that night. I had felt him rummaging inside my head when we met on the road. He had heard me tell Sasha that my father had hit me in the face and he had growled low in his throat. I had dreamed of him in my room and I was never sure if it was actually a dream. My diary had been open on my nightstand. Scattered through it were the names Dale Tamblin, Sadie Nelson and Sherry Lee. I had thought
at first that Joe Ranger had come into my room but it was Victor who had invaded my diary and my mind. He had said, “I am capable of many things. You could redeem me.” I hadn’t understood at the time. Was he talking of his ability to kill, and asking me to keep him from doing it again by taking him in my arms?

I thought of Victor standing in my room and my whole body went cold.

My father had even more reason to hate me now—I was, in part, the cause of his friend’s death.

“Joe Ranger wants to help you,” said Corey. He leaned in closer, whispering, “The hand will keep you from changing if you wear it.”

He reached over and held it like something very precious, like the part of my body that was no longer there. I couldn’t look away from what he held. But I couldn’t take it, either. If I did, then I would be fully acknowledging that my hand was gone, that my mother had shot it off, that I would never have a human hand with five ingeniously human fingers, not
ever again. I would die and my skeleton arm would end in a stump.

Also, if I took the hand, then I was fully accepting that Joe Ranger was more than a strange, kind man who had watched over me. He was the source of my mother’s pain. He was my father.