Vesper (20 page)

Trying to be nonchalant, I strolled down the aisles. I might as well have started whistling, I was so conspicuous. I dared a glance over at Patrick as I walked past a shelf stacked with little rolls of toilet paper, cheap razors hanging above them on hooks. He seemed to be having a dilemma choosing between a Butterfinger and a Snickers.

This is so not what Nighttime Emily would do,
I thought.

I pulled my hands from my pockets, rounded the shelves, and came to stand directly next to Patrick. I couldn't breathe.

"Hi," I squeaked.

Blinking, he looked up, a brief expression of confusion crossing his face before it reverted to his default of stoic and broody.

"Hello," he said, eyeing me.

There was a lilt to his tone. I'd been right, he had a definite accent. Which was way attractive.

Wetness seeped over my palm and my heart pounded, and I was suddenly very conscious of the fact that I was wearing a mourning outfit borrowed from an extremely nonfashionable forty-three-year-old woman.

"So ...," I said, kicking at the scuffed tile with my shoes, my arms pressed tightly against my sides, my fingers drumming against my thighs. "You were at the funeral too, huh?"

He shrugged, then went back to rifling through candy bars. "Yeah."

My heartbeat seemed to rush into my ears, like there were drums pounding away next to my head. I was hyperaware that attractiveness-wise, Patrick was in a totally different league than me. I wanted to duck down and run out of the store, but I knew if I did I'd never figure anything out, so I forced myself to continue.

"You're new, though?" I asked. "I mean, I know you're new, it's just I saw you at the wake-slash-party thing at Mikey Harris's house and now at the funeral. You couldn't have known Emily Cooke, unless you knew her before you went to school with us, or ..." I stopped and gulped in a breath. "Yeah."

Cocking an eyebrow, Patrick asked, "Do I know you?"

"No!" I said. "No, not really, I just saw you around, thought I'd say hi." I stuck out my arm, my hand stiff. "I'm Emily. Uh, another Emily—Emily Webb."

He regarded my sweaty hand, making no move to take it. "Patrick," he said.

With a nervous smile, I lowered my hand and tried to casually dry it off on my slacks. This was so not going well. I longed for Nighttime Emily's instincts to kick in and take over. If this guy was supposed to be my mate,
shouldn't
she emerge and woo him? That would be so much easier.

Wait. The musky odor ... I didn't smell anything. Patrick didn't smell.

As smoothly as I could—which was about as smooth as a jug full of gravel and broken glass—I stepped in closer, nostrils flaring as I took in a big sniff.

Maybe I just wasn't as sensitive to his scent as Nighttime Emily, and that was why I didn't pick up the alluring musk.... Though that hadn't seemed to matter in the cafeteria the first day I'd seen him.

"Uh ...," he said, taking a step back from me.

"Do you want something? I want to buy a lolly and go, so if you don't want anything...

Nervous giggling erupted in my throat. Gesturing at the shirt he wore beneath his black leather jacket, I said, "Communist Herrings, huh?"

His shirt was red, with a little black fish wearing a tall furry hat beneath the band name.

"Yeah, back in London, little band my mates formed," he said. "Nothing big."

"Oh," I said. "That's cool."

He stared at me. I in turn stared at his shirt and wondered if maybe I could feign stumbling against him, get in a good whiff. Maybe there was something I could say to keep him from leaving until I could be sure he wasn't who I thought he was.

"So ... you're from London?" I rambled. "That's really cool, I love British people.
Doctor Who
is awesome. I've seen, like, the whole series. Oh, and
Spaced,
too, and
Skirts
is just the best thing ever and ... Um, do you live on Orchard Road?"

The street name from where I'd seen the other werewolf run Friday night popped into my head, and I said it before I could really think about how amazingly creepy it must be to have some strange girl come up to you, act all fidgety, try to smell you, ask a bunch of prying questions, and then name the street on which you lived.

Patrick's eyes darted between the front doors and me like he wanted nothing more than to flee the store. I laughed a little too loudly as heat flushed my skin, and I saw the lady behind the counter lower her magazine and give me the stink eye.

"I'm not a crazy stalker or anything, I promise," I stammered. "Just, I've lived in Skopamish, like, forever, and I know someone moved out from there, so...

"Yeah," Patrick muttered, his sharp eyebrows furrowed as he took a step back from me. "Orchard Road ... I need to go, so I will see you at school, then?" He gave me one last wary look, then turned and hustled out of the store.

Well. That went just
swell.

It wasn't until a few hours later, when I'd had some time to dig into ice cream and beat myself up over being so massively lame, that I realized a couple of things about my little encounter with Patrick.

Thing one: He most definitely did not have the smell. No musk, no pheromones, nothing. I wasn't an expert on scentology or anything, but I was guessing your personal scent wasn't exactly something you could shut off.

Thing two: Patrick was tall, and Patrick had an accent. But... What would Patrick look like in a long coat and a brimmed hat? What would he sound like if he lowered his voice and faked an American accent?

I sat at my desk chair, stiff, my hands shaking. Because:
whoa.

I'd been thinking about this all wrong. Patrick had appeared right after Emily Cooke was killed. Even though he couldn't have known her, I kept seeing him at functions where people mourned her death. And there was that book he was reading in the library, the one about serial killers.

The shooter had lured me from the club using a vial of the same type of scent I had smelled on Dalton. That meant that if he wanted, the shooter could slather that smell on himself like some sort of heavy cologne ... maybe go to school, see what girls were drawn to him....

Maybe cute new guy Patrick wasn't my "mate" after all. Maybe he was the killer.

I sat at my desk for a long time, watching the screen saver on my monitor. It was there that I made a decision.

Emily Cooke was dead. Dalton McKinney was in the hospital. And someone, maybe Patrick, was after me now. I couldn't do much as Daytime Emily. Not when going up and talking to a very cute boy turned me into a jittery, frantic crazy person.

But Nighttime Emily could possibly do something. And Werewolf Emily most certainly could.

That night, I wasn't going to take the sleeping pills. I was going to let the change happen. And then I would go to Orchard Road, where Patrick lived, where I'd seen the other werewolf run.

And I was going to find whoever was behind this and stop him before anyone was killed, anyone else's life snuffed out like artistic, scatterbrained, witty Emily Cooke.

I lay in bed, Ein clutched to my stomach, waiting for night to fall and the change to happen.

I'd decided to make it easy for Nighttime Emily. I'd pulled on a formfitting black turtleneck that Dawn had made me buy when she tried to give me a makeover last year, and a pair of black pajama pants. With dark shoes and a knit cap pulled tight over my head, I was a cat burglar by way of an Angelina Jolie movie.

Now all I had to do was wait.

I almost chickened out several times, wavering between anger-fueled confidence and rational
Do not go after a killer!
thoughts. But I realized I didn't have much of a choice—I couldn't tell anyone of authority about my secrets, couldn't call my one friend to back me up without risking her getting hurt. From the articles I'd read about Emily Cooke and Dalton, the police were baffled by the complete lack of evidence left at the crime scenes. They were no closer to finding the shooter, which meant he had another night to stalk the streets, to find me or the other werewolf, to sneak into Dalton's hospital room....

Darkness settled outside. The houses and trees disappeared into blackness, making the whole world seem a frighteningly empty void.

"So," I said aloud as I waited. "Other Emily. I just wanted to thank you for not actually possessing me. Murdered or no, that wouldn't have been cool."

I was met, of course, with silence. All I could hear was the buzzing of my computer.

But I imagined she was there. Sitting in the corner, dressed fabulously, beaming at me. In my head, she had been bled of color, was just black and white and shades of gray. It was hard for me to picture her in full Technicolor.

"I wish I'd known you," I went on, just to fill the silence in the room, talk over my worried thoughts. "I wish I hadn't been too afraid to talk to you.

Because I think we could have been friends, you know? You could have showed me how to not explode into nerves around new people, and I could have showed you a bunch of great movies that would totally make you laugh.”

My imagined Emily Cooke crossed her legs and tilted her head, her expression not changing. I tried to imagine her saying something back to me—but, I realized, I didn't actually remember how she used to sound.

I took off my glasses and closed my eyes. Lowering my voice, I whispered,

"111 do this for you, Other Emily. Because you didn't deserve what happened to you. And I'm really sad that you're gone.”

I couldn't hold on to the image of my fake Emily Cooke, and she faded away. Sadness lurched through me, heavy in my stomach. Which was strange, because I hadn't even known her.

The sadness gave way to a pulsing, determined anger. I
was
going to find whoever the killer was. And he was going to pay for what he'd done.

The change happened, and for the first time I accepted it without even an ounce of resistance. My stomach cramped, my chest tightened, but it wasn't as bad as before. There was no queasiness, no pain. Just a whirling sensation in my head and a pleasant fluttering in my gut, like the feeling you get after an amusement park ride. The transition was over in just a few seconds. And I was back.

Strength surged through my muscles. Stretching, I tossed Ein off of me, then leaped to my feet.

I raised my eyebrows at the sight of myself in the mirror. I thought I'd looked good while I was Daytime Emily and I was ... right. Maybe there was hope for my daytime self s fashion sense after all.

Remembering why I was dressed like the next Bond girl, I grinned dangerously. I had a mission: go find the guy who'd dared to trick me on Friday night, who'd tried to shoot me, and finish the job I started when I threw a Dumpster at his face.

I slid up the window, swung over the sill, and leaped to the grass below. I landed softly, delicately—as fugly as they were, the sneakers I'd picked out for myself earlier were certainly practical. Much easier to land on than heels, at least.

I glanced side to side, making sure I was alone,

then ran down the street to my left, toward the woods.

I padded beneath the tall trees, my feet crunching over fallen leaves as I moved nimbly around logs and scrubby bushes. There were dirt trails—that was what the woods were for, anyway, a sort of hiking park—but I didn't bother following them. I felt more at ease in the thick of the woods, liked the challenge of finding places to step without making a sound. Besides, I knew exactly where I was headed, and the dark night and the overgrown underbrush weren't going to keep me from making a beeline there.

I emerged from the trees exactly where I'd tracked the other werewolf the other night—in fact, I could still see the deep indents of our clawed footprints in the dirt of the path. Orchard Road was laid out before me, a row of boxy, semi-run-down, small houses. The two houses straight ahead were where I'd seen the other werewolf vanish.

I crouched down behind some bushes as a car drove by, its headlights flaring up over the trees behind me. Blinking to gain back my night vision, I studied the two houses.

One had a shorn, patchy lawn, and hokey painted wooden signs jutting out from a front garden filled with weeds—you know, little gnomes and the backside of someone in a polka-dot dress made to look like she was gardening. There were a few lights on inside, but I couldn't see anyone.

The other house, the one on the left, was similar—minus the corny signs but plus a brand-new, untouched basketball hoop set up in the driveway. I spotted a pair of trash cans on the side of the house, behind which were broken-down moving boxes.

That was the one.

Making sure no one was out on the street and no other cars were coming, I stalked across the road, my sneakers making almost silent little smacks as I stepped on the asphalt. I went around the side of the house with the basketball hoop, running my hand against the plastic siding as I crept along.

At the back of the house, I found one window lit up, the blinds open just enough so that I could see. Gripping the edge of the windowsill, I peeked in and saw Patrick.

He was wearing a pair of long pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt. For a moment I just watched him through the slatted blinds—he looked incredibly hot with his dirty-socked feet crossed, a pair of oversize headphones on his ears, and his sharp brow furrowed in concentration as he read his book.

Then I saw the title of the book and realized it was the same serial killer one I'd seen him reading the other day at the library. He must have gone back and checked it out.

"Getting tips?" I growled to myself.

His room was bare, except for the bed and a desk. Boxes were stacked in the corner with clothes haphazardly hanging out. Probably not a lot of time to decorate when you spend your evening massacring teenagers.

So what was his deal? I wondered. He was so cute that I didn't particularly want him to be a murderer, but I'd read enough of the R. L. Stine paperbacks my dad kept from when he was a teen to know that you can never trust the cute new guy not to go all wild-eyed and stabby. But me, I was a werewolf, and Patrick, he was from London. Maybe he was from some secret Londonian cult whose sole purpose was to snuff out a werewolf epidemic, like a young priest who needed to rid the world of us devil spawn.