The Gathering

THIRTY-TWO

AS I APPROACHED THE house, I could see Mom on the porch, her feet bare as she tugged on one of my dad’s jackets and peered anxiously into the forest. When she saw me, she let out a sigh of relief.

“I heard voices,” she said. “Was that Rafe?”

“Yes.”

She pulled the jacket around her and lowered her voice. “I know you really like him, Maya, but you can’t be meeting him—”

“I wasn’t. It’s over.”

“Oh.” She waited until I was on the porch. “Did you just break up now?”

I shook my head. “Earlier. He came by to see if I’d talk. Maybe work things out. We couldn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

She gave me a hug, then ushered me into the house, Kenjii following. She led me to the kitchen and started fixing a snack. I wasn’t hungry, but I wasn’t eager to go to bed either.

Kenjii lay at my feet and I petted her as Mom put crackers on a plate. As she was slicing cheese, she said, with her back still to me, “Your lip. Does that have anything to do with …?”

“Did Rafe hit me? One, I wouldn’t sneak into the woods to talk to a guy who split my lip. Two, if something like that happened, Daniel would never help me cover it up.”

“Sorry,” she said, bringing the plate to the table. “I had to ask.”

“I know.”

She sat across from me. I nibbled on a cheese-covered cracker.

After a minute, she said, “He wasn’t what you thought he was.”

Exactly what Daniel had said. I nodded, then I asked, “Do you think I’m intolerant?”

She frowned. “In what way?”

“If someone screws up, I won’t give him a second chance. I’ve made up my mind about him and I won’t trust him again.”

“Is that what Rafe said?”

“Something like that.”

She leaned back in her chair and watched me for a moment before she responded. “He wasn’t who you thought he was, and you’re angry with him for tricking you.”

I nodded.

“If I’m right, though, you’re even more angry with yourself for not seeing it.”

I put down my cracker. “But I did see it. That’s the problem. I saw what he was before anyone else did.”

“A player.”

I nodded. “He knew I wasn’t going to fall for that, so he showed me …” I picked at the cheese on my cracker. “He showed me something else.”

“Another part of himself,” she said softly. “And you fell for him.”

I wanted to deny it. Salvage my pride and say, no, it wasn’t that way, I only liked him a little. But it was that way.

So I nodded, and she reached out for my hand.

“That’s what you’re really upset about. Being tricked. Yes, you set high standards for people. Too high sometimes. But you set higher ones for yourself and that’s what worries me more, Maya. I want you to have big dreams, big goals. I want you to strive to achieve them. But I don’t want to see you beating yourself up every time you make a mistake.”

I nodded.

“I don’t know the whole situation with Rafe, and I’m not going to pry,” she said. “But if he’s trying to talk to you, you should hear him out. Maybe you can forgive him. More important, forgive yourself.”

As Mom was cleaning up, I thought about what Rafe said, about the experiments.

I was genetically modified. And I was living in a medical research town. Again I pictured that list of names.

“Does Dad have a relative named Elizabeth Delaney?”

Mom paused. “Isn’t that his cousin Greg’s wife? No, that’s Bethany, I think. You should ask him. God knows he has plenty of relatives. Did you meet someone online?”

I shook my head. After another minute, I asked, “How exactly did Dad get this job?”

“Hmm?”

“Someone at school said the St. Clouds just offered him the job.”

She laughed and sat down again. “I wish it’d been that easy. If someone’s implying that he had connections and was handed his position, the answer is no. I’m sure that applies to some people here, but not us. The St. Cloud Corporation wanted a new park warden, so they hired a headhunter. Do you know what that is?”

“A company that looks for people matching a job description.”

“Right. The St. Clouds wanted a specific kind of person. They preferred a young warden with a young family. And, if not Canadian, then with a Canadian connection, to make the transition easier.”

“Someone who’d put down roots and stay. Become part of the community.”

“Exactly. When we arrived for the interview, there were a half dozen other applicants. We suited the profile better than most. I’m Canadian, with family nearby, and, as much as I loved Oregon, I wanted to come home. You were the same age as a lot of the kids here. And your dad came with glowing recommendations. Still, we almost missed out. A woman got the offer first but ended up turning it down.”

What did I expect? That my family was linked to the St. Clouds by this Project Genesis? That they just happened to be living in Oregon when I was found and were approved to adopt me? Or that the St. Clouds were the scientists who’d genetically modified me, and they’d found me and lured my parents here?

If I thought about it more, I’d have realized there couldn’t be a connection. The research going on here was drug related, not genetic. The St. Clouds weren’t mad scientists; they were a legitimate corporation. You could find them on the internet and find links to the drug companies they owned.

It might seem coincidental—being genetically modified and living in a medical research town—but I couldn’t see any connection beyond that. My parents obviously knew nothing of my past and neither did the St. Clouds.

When I got back to bed, I fell straight into a nightmare about Serena. Saw her disappearing under the water as if yanked down. Swam out and felt someone yanking me down.

When the hand released me, I started to swim up. Then pain sliced through my legs, so sharp and strong that I howled. Water filled my lungs.

I jolted awake. My legs seized and I had to jam my pillow against my mouth to keep from screaming. It felt like a dozen charley horses hitting at once, excruciating cramps that brought tears to my eyes.

If I could have cried out, I think I would have. But the pain clamped my jaws shut and all I could do was lie on my side in agony until, slowly, my muscles began to relax.

As I massaged them, the knotted muscles felt like golf balls under my skin. I inhaled and exhaled as deeply as I could, remembering all my runner’s tricks for dealing with leg cramps.

Only these weren’t from running. I heard Rafe’s voice.

Muscle pains. I’ve been getting them a lot lately.

When I could stand, I walked to my mirror. I lifted one bare arm and made a fist, watching my muscles bunch and imagined them bunching more, changing, fur sprouting as my upper arm became a thick foreleg, my fist turned to a paw, huge claws sheathed. I shook my arm and turned away.

People couldn’t turn into animals. They just couldn’t.

But you saw it.

And that was the reason I hadn’t protested, hadn’t questioned. I’d watched Annie Shift.

If I really wanted to, I could find an explanation, however lame—I was overtired from sleepless nights, I’d hallucinated, I’d been drugged. Only I hadn’t considered any of that. I’d accepted it, maybe even more easily than I accepted the news that my mother was white, not because I’d rather be a skin-walker than Caucasian, but because this felt like the truth.

All my life I’d felt like I didn’t quite know who I was. I’d chalked that up to the adoption, not knowing my family, not knowing my tribe. But that wasn’t the missing piece. This was.

I could stand in front of the mirror and mentally refuse to believe a person could change into an animal, but in my heart I knew it was true. One day, like Annie, I’d be running through the forest on all fours, smelling, seeing, hearing, and feeling the world as a big cat.

One day? No. If Rafe was right about the dreams and the muscle cramps, that day was coming fast. The thought of it made my stomach seize. In relief, excitement, or downright terror? Probably a little of each.

When would it happen? How would it happen? What would it be like? Could I prepare?

And the rest—the part of “becoming like Annie”—that I was trying so hard not to think about. The part where I lost my human reason and began a true descent into animal. How long after the first Shift would that start? How much time would I have to find answers and make sure that didn’t happen to me?

No, how much time would we have. Rafe and I. As much as it hurt to be around him, I needed him. We wanted the same answers, and he had a lot more of them already than I did.

Maybe I had screwed up with Rafe. What mattered was that he was the guy with the facts and, I hoped, a plan.

When I got downstairs the next morning, Daniel was already up, sitting with Dad, looking over his shoulder as he monitored the fires.

“So what’s the latest word from the flaming frontier?” I asked as I poured myself an orange juice.

“It’s not flaming enough to cancel school,” Dad said.

“Damn.” I glanced at the map on the computer. “I’m guessing those red spots are fire. Looks safe for now, but what about the animals?”

“I’m driving them to the refuge this morning,” Mom said. “They’ll keep them until the fire watch ends.”

I gave her a hug. “Thank you.”

She handed me her teacup for a refill. I took it and ignored Daniel’s outstretched empty coffee mug.

He arched his brows. “You want a ride to school or not?”

“If you don’t drive me in, Dad will have to. There are dangerous predators on the loose.”

Daniel sighed and got up to fill his mug.

“You okay?” he whispered as he stood beside me at the counter.

I nodded and turned to Dad. “Speaking of predators, any luck finding Marv?”

Dad shook his head. “Right now, the focus is on this fire.”

Good. I hoped any cougar hunts were postponed for a while. Otherwise, with Annie roaming the woods in cat form, we could have another problem to deal with.

Daniel and I took care of the animals and got them ready for transport. When we arrived at school, I left Daniel with Corey and Brendan, and went off in search of Rafe. I checked the smoking pit first. Hayley was there. She glanced at me, and I nodded, then moved on, rounding the school to start down the path he’d take to get here.

“Looking for Rafe?” a voice said behind me.

It was Hayley. Her expression was guarded, and I thought of what Rafe had said. She was right—I’d never gotten past that incident with the math homework. I hadn’t consciously held it against her, but it had changed the way I saw her. I’d backed off, and maybe others had, too. I should have noticed, and I hadn’t.

That didn’t justify all the crappy things she’d done to me and said about me since, but it did make me look at her a little differently as she came down the path.

“I heard you guys broke up,” she said.

“We did.”

“Did you decide he wasn’t good enough for you?”

If I had, I wouldn’t be looking for him, would I? I didn’t say that. Didn’t have the energy to fight back. Just shook my head and kept walking.

“Maya?”

I glanced over.

“What happened to your lip?” There wasn’t any nasty snap in Hayley’s voice now.

“It wasn’t Rafe,” I said.

I started to turn away again.

“He likes you.”

I looked at her.

She shrugged. “I’m just saying, if you didn’t want to break up, he’ll come back. He really likes you.” A sardonic twist of a smile. “Everyone does.”

She walked away. I wanted to go after her, but I didn’t know what to say.

I carried on along the path again and didn’t get far before someone else hailed me. When I saw Sam jogging along, I tensed and glanced around. We were still within sight of the school. Safe enough.

She stopped in front of me. For a minute, she just stared at my lip. Then she pulled her gaze up to my eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”

I remembered what Rafe said and what Mom said, and I resisted the urge to say “whatever” and walk away. But I wasn’t going to say “It’s okay,” either, because it wasn’t.

“Why’d you hit me?” I said.

“I didn’t mean to. I just—” Her gaze shunted to the side. “I get mad sometimes, okay? Like Daniel does, only he can control it and I—I can’t.”

“Like with Rafe’s sister?”

Her cheeks colored. “I wouldn’t have hit her. I could tell she was, you know, slow. But I was mad at Rafe for not taking a hint, and when she laughed at me for wanting him to stay away, I blew up. I stopped, though.”

“You didn’t with me.”

“I wanted those pages.”

“Why? Because they said your parents had been murdered? How come that’s a secret?”

I waited for her to explode. How come that’s a secret? Would I want everyone knowing my parents had been murdered? Would I want them asking questions? Looking at me funny? Wondering what exactly I’d seen?

She didn’t say any of that, just scowled and started to walk away.

“What else was in those pages?” I called.

She stopped, her shoulders tensing.

“There was more, wasn’t there? Something you didn’t want me to see.”

She turned, then, and gave me this look that made me shiver. A figure appeared around the bend, bearing down fast.

Sam opened her mouth, as if to say something, then wheeled to walk away—and smacked into Daniel.

“D-Daniel.”

“You going to take a swing at me, too, Sam?”

Sam stammered denials and Daniel told her off, but I wasn’t listening. Last night, I’d started to remember something Serena said about Sam before she died. Now seeing her with Daniel, it came back.

Serena had been at my place, holding down a rabbit while I changed its dressing.

“I had a run-in with Sam last night.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah. I was at the Blender with Nicole, when you and Daniel were taking this little guy to Dr. Hajek. There were a couple of summer boys there, college guys hiking the island. They came over and flirted with us. Nicole got shy, like she always does, and I was trying to show her how it’s done.”

“Uh-huh.”

She laughed. “Okay, I was kind of flirting back. But you know me. I don’t mean anything by it. Even Daniel only gives me hell for teasing the poor guys. Anyway, I’m flirting and Sam stops in to grab a burger. Acts like she doesn’t know us, of course. I talk to the guys a bit more, then Nic and I leave.”

“Okay.”

“I cut through the woods to Daniel’s place. I’m by the ridge, and who pops up? Sam. She tears a strip out of me for flirting with the summer boys. Says it’s disrespectful to Daniel. I tell her to mind her own freaking business. She gets really pissed. Calls me a blond twit who doesn’t appreciate what she’s got. She said someone needed to teach me a lesson. I laughed, which was the wrong thing to do, because she gave me this look, this really … scary look.”

Serena tried to laugh, but it came out shaky. “I know that sounds dumb, but it spooked me. Then Daniel got there. He heard us fighting. I told him what she was mad about—that I’d been flirting with summer boys. He just shrugged and said, ‘So?’ but Sam gives me that look again and stomps off.”

Was Rafe right that Sam had a crush on Daniel? I’d never thought so, but maybe she just didn’t express her feelings the way most girls did. Sam didn’t do anything the way most girls did.

I remembered my dream, about Serena being pulled under. She had gone down so fast she did seem to be dragged. And I had felt something grab my leg.

How angry had Sam been with Serena? How jealous over Daniel? Jealous enough to “teach her a lesson” that had gone very, very wrong?

But how would she do it? Slip into the water at the wooded edge, then swim under it and hold Serena down long enough to drown her?

That was crazy. No one could hold her breath longer than Serena.

Daniel brushed past Sam like she wasn’t there and came to me. He leaned down to whisper, “She do anything?”

I shook my head as the bell rang. We started back toward school.

“You need to stay away from her,” Daniel murmured when Sam was out of earshot.

“I know.”