Hunter's Trail

With no other options, I dragged myself backward toward the bathroom, hoping I could lock myself in and scream for help. If I stayed right on the other side of the door, Ana wouldn’t be able to change into a werewolf; she’d have to break it down as a human, and if her fingers were broken—

The half-assed plan turned out to be futile anyway, because the damned hallway was too long. I felt, rather than saw, when I scooted too far and Anastasia left my radius. Her howls of pain cut off abruptly, and I could see her backlit figure straighten up, flexing fingers as they healed, bones knitting together almost instantaneously. I froze with indecision: move forward toward Ana and keep her wounded, try to extend my radius again, or race for the bathroom door as best I could?

I went for the bathroom. There were still at least five feet between me and the doorway, and I felt like the tendons and ligaments holding the parts of my body together were dissolving. I scrambled hopelessly for the door, dragging my leg behind me, even as Anastasia’s silhouette took a long, deliberate step in my direction. Stalking.

She tackled me just as I reached the threshold of the bathroom. There was no time to even drag myself in before she was on top of me, her fingers clawing for my throat, her legs smashing down on my bad knee. I cried out with pain, but she cut off my air, hands around my throat. The tackle had pivoted me onto my back in the doorway, and my right arm flailed out, as I tried to punch her in the eye, the nose. But her reach was longer than mine and she dodged easily. I was panicking, every cell in my body screaming at me as I reached out, fingers scrabbling on the bathroom floor for anything that could help me—and they brushed against soft leather. A boot.

Terrible hope erupted in my brain. Please be the right one, I begged silently. A fifty-fifty chance. Ana pressed down harder, trying to crush my throat as she strangled me. Haze started to darken my vision as I laboriously worked my fingers around to the opening of the boot . . .

I pulled out the knife and thrust it between her ribs in one smooth movement, like I’d practiced it every day of my life.

I gasped as her fingers finally loosened and sweet, glorious air rushed into my lungs. And then I let out a pathetic, wheezing scream, because blood was everywhere. On television, people never really bleed until you pull the knife out. But I had stabbed Anastasia in the heart, and her blood spurted immediately, pouring down onto my stomach, drenching my arms, my clothes, and finally soaking into the hallway carpet beneath us. It was so hot that it seemed like its own living thing, like her life was deserting her for me, and for the first time I understood what the word lifeblood truly meant. I managed to tilt my body enough to get her mostly off me, but after that the last remnants of my strength disappeared, and my head slapped down against the linoleum of the bathroom like it had been pushed there. For the first time since my fingers had touched boot leather, I looked at her face.

It was slack and staring, no traces of surprise or hurt or pain left. She was dead.

I closed my eyes and welcomed the darkness.

Chapter 33

When I was nine, there was a whole week in the summer where my mother just stayed in bed.

My father, a history teacher who taught driver’s ed during the summer, was the one who called my mom’s boss at the veterinary clinic and said that she was sick. She didn’t sound sick when I heard the two of them talking in their room, so I kept trying to get to her, to show her my crayon drawings or beg her to play Crazy Eights. My father was usually the pushover of the two, but he kept intercepting me at the bedroom door. First he tried to calmly redirect me toward the backyard or my room, but I was stubborn and prone to running headfirst toward anything I was supposed to leave alone. Finally he came right out and ordered me not to bother Mom unless there was a fire. I momentarily considered starting a small controlled fire, but even I wasn’t willing to go that far. Plus they’d hidden the matches.

By the third day I was sick of all of it: being alone, not understanding. After Dad had left for work, I stomped up the stairs and to my mom’s door, opening it just a bit before bumping it all the way open with my hip. “Momma,” I announced, with as much righteousness as my nine-year-old self could muster, “you have to get up now.”

She didn’t move, so I sighed dramatically, like she did when I didn’t want to get out of bed to go to school. There was still no response, so I marched across the room and circled around the bed. There, I saw that she looked . . . like a ghost. Her face was pale and wrinkly, and her eyes were rimmed in red like she’d opened them underwater in the city pool. When she saw me, the line of her mouth trembled and she flipped back the corner of the sheet as an invitation. Temporarily shocked into compliance, I climbed into the bed and snuggled my back against her belly as she wrapped her arms around me. “I don’t get it,” I complained after a moment.

“Scarbo,” she sighed into my hair, creating a circle of warmth on the back of my head. “I hope you never ever do.”

Years later, I would learn that our long-estranged grandmother had died that week, and my mother had been torn up with grief and guilt and regret. And it was years after that, when I lay on the floor in Molly’s hallway, staring at Anastasia’s corpse, that I could finally understand why she had stayed in bed. Unmoving.

I’d seen so much death. More in the last week alone than anyone should see in a lifetime. Ana wasn’t even the first person I’d killed, but while I hadn’t enjoyed killing Olivia, I hadn’t felt one moment of remorse about pulling the trigger. Olivia had been truly evil.