We enjoyed several days of peace and quiet, Pietr and I curled up on the love seat at the Rusakovas’ studying. I briefly believed my grades might be salvageable. Those days Alexi and Cat were scarce, and Max and Amy were everywhere, laughing and flirting outrageously. But beneath it all the stress of not having Tatiana, their mother, free was wearing on us all.
The Rusakovas had all gone back to visit a few times, but the CIA (an organization I increasingly doubted was what they claimed to be) kept making excuses about freeing Tatiana. They kept asking for more samples. And more time.
I didn’t even look at Wanda’s text before I erased it, glanced at the clock, and called Max. He picked me up as soon as Dad and Annabelle Lee were fed and my chores were done.
Back at the Rusakova house, we gathered around the thirteen journals as soon as Amy headed out for a run. Max went along with her, still worried Marvin might do something stupid. Amy promised to go slow and easy on him, but Max suggested he could go as fast as she wanted, boldly pointing out he had amazing endurance. All said with an undeniably wolfish grin.
Lying on the floor, Pietr sprawled beside me (testing his own endurance). I flipped through the old books. “So this really is the one we need,” I said, tapping Hazel’s offering.
“Da,” Alexi said. “Now it’s a matter of putting it all together. It appears your Mrs. Feldman got further in this than she suspected.” I did not question his reluctance to call her something more familial. “Her notes are quite promising. This, my research, and Grandfather’s … We may have something. We just can’t define these last two ingredients my grandfather suggested. They don’t make sense when you read them in Russian.”
“Well, what do they say?” Before he’d opened his mouth I specified, “In translation. Seriously. Russian is lovely, but you might as well speak Greek to me for all the good it’d do.”
Alexi sighed. “I thought Pietr was teaching you Russian.”
I blushed and Cat giggled. “None that deals with chemical reactions.” I thought for a second. “Or maybe it does,” I said with a snort.
Pietr groaned.
“I don’t want to know,” Alexi insisted. “What’s annoying is it seems he tried to disguise his list. Like he didn’t want his ideas to fall into the wrong hands.”
“Luckily nobody knew enough about his research to go after any of it until very recently.”
“Here,” Alexi tapped the page. “I’m warning you—Grandfather fancied himself a poet. This ingredient is described as: Ancient tears from sappy eyes whose pining tops brush ’cross the skies.”
“Amber,” I said.
They all looked at me.
“What? You guys must totally suck at crossword puzzles. I’ll bet I could trounce you in Boggle, too. Ancient tears, sap, pine. Amber. The pendant … next?” I challenged.
“This one is wolfsbane,” he mentioned, moving down the short list.
“Seriously?”
He nodded. “Most legends are based on real things.”
“You’d like my history teacher. So. You have any, Alexi?”
“Wolfsbane? Of course.”
Pietr snarled. “Nasty stuff.”
“Easiest way to ground an unruly werewolf,” Alexi chuckled. I looked at him briefly. Ever since the first visit to Mother, Alexi was looking better. Healthier. Letting his pseudo-siblings know he was doing what was needed all along—having Mother’s stamp of approval—made a huge difference. “And this is something like: The life, which liquid, runs in part from trembling hand to heavy heart.”
I shrugged. “Blood.”
“Whose blood?” Cat asked.
“Wait. Um…” Alexi slid out another journal. “Grandfather postulated that opposites attract for a reason, that everything had some strange balance or equilibrium it sought out. Like, once two very different things came together, you could find their commonality.”
I looked at Pietr. “We’re very different, and yet we’re together. What if it’s my blood?”
Pietr cringed at the thought.
“At the lab the day they did the initial tests…” Alexi closed the journals. “Your sample looked like it was fighting Max’s.”
I gulped. “It’s my heart,” I tugged out the amber pendant, dangling it before them. “My blood. Holy crap. I’m the cure?” I flopped onto my back. “That’s why Wanda…”
“What?”
“She’s been absolutely refusing to drive me here. She and Dad got into an argument. She wanted me grounded for going off with Max to Marvin’s place and not saying anything.”
“The CIA knows what we’ve known all along,” Cat said. “You’re a real part of this.”
“Ugh. But, Wanda said she wants you all to be cured—to be normal,” I insisted.
Pietr sat up, looking into my face. “A: Max will never be normal. B: How is it the one werewolf movie you haven’t seen is Dog Soldiers?”
“It’s a soldier movie with werewolves, not a werewolf movie with soldiers,” I returned.
“I agree with Pietr,” Alexi said. “The CIA doesn’t want them cured. They need to make more of them and unfortunately they only have directly related purebloods at this point, so they can’t risk breeding them.”
“We’re right here, you know,” Cat said in disgust.
“Eezvehneetyeh.” Alexi continued. “So to have any chance at replicating their genetics they need all the DNA they can test before it breaks down too far with age.”
My heart squeezed. “Most human DNA starts breaking down at an early age.” I rubbed my forehead and looked at Alexi. He knew. “Oh, God. Your mother’s DNA,” I said. “It can’t do the job. Her…”
Pietr nodded, realization dawning. “Her usefulness has reached its end. Except as a lure to us.” His eyes closed, and I pulled myself up to wrap my arms around him.
“We need to get her out.” I said what everyone knew even more acutely now.
“And we need to have the cure ready,” Cat stated.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help,” I promised.
Cat took control. “Horashow. We’ll need a sterile kitchen knife, a bowl, and your arm.”
I peeled myself away from Pietr to gather supplies from the kitchen. In the dining room I set down a bowl, a knife, and a mortar and pestle I’d cleaned the dust out of.
Cat brought bandages, and Alexi contributed a pretty awesome chemistry set. Cat pushed up my sweater sleeve as I sat at the table and she swabbed my arm.
Alexi muttered, “If these notes are correct…” He reached for the pendant I gladly gave over. My heart was the least I’d give to help the Rusakovas. “We shouldn’t need much of the amber—or much blood—to make this work.”
He set the pendant in the mortar and handed both it and the pestle to Pietr. “Go ahead. You broke her heart before. This time do it for a decent reason.”
Pietr growled, forcing the pestle into the mortar, and I heard the pendant crunch apart. He ground it slowly, deliberately, so he didn’t stir the fine dust and lose any of the precious stuff.
The front door opened and for a moment we all froze, expecting Amy to bound in and up the stairs for a shower. Max surprised us instead, scoping out the situation. “Back in a minute!” he called out over his shoulder.
I felt a slice as the knife zipped across my arm and a warm trickle as my blood ran.
Max was rooting around, looking for something in Amy’s backpack. “That girl’s going to wear me out,” he admitted, withdrawing a sketchpad and pencils. He grinned. “But I’m loving every minute. Everything okay in here?”
Alexi nodded.
I looked at the red puddle gathering in the bowl by my elbow. “And human blood doesn’t…”
Max snorted and Pietr chuckled.
“Jessie,” Cat admonished. “We aren’t sharks. Or vampires,” she added wistfully. “Human blood doesn’t do it for us.”
“Far too tainted with chemicals and preservatives,” Pietr whispered. “The only time it’s attractive is if
it’s laced with a substance a oborot has a major attraction—”
“—or addiction to,” Cat added. “Heroin, meth, cocaine…”
“Pizza,” Max whispered, eyeing me devilishly. “What did you have for lunch today, Jessie?” he growled, licking his lips.
“You’re such a pain,” I muttered.
“Stating the obvious,” Pietr pointed out.
“Hey,” I called to Max. “Has Amy started drawing again?”
“Da. But she’ll kill me if I show you. Mostly they’re nudes,” he puffed out his chest. “Of me.”
“Liar,” I called his bluff. “What’s she really working on?”
“Me,” he declared with a wiggle of his eyebrows. “Almost as much as I’m working on her.” He winked roguishly.
“The blood’s coming faster,” Pietr marveled, leaning over my arm to watch.
“Because your brother’s pissing me off,” I snarled.
“I can show you one I drew of her.…” Max pulled a loose sheet of paper from between the sketchpad’s pages, holding it up proudly.
A stick figure with a red scribble of hair and boobs stared back at me, smiling.
“Max!” I snapped.
He tucked it away and shrugged. “Yeah. She said: No more paper for you!”
“That’s plenty of blood,” Pietr announced, and Cat bandaged me up.
“Glad to speed the process,” Max teased, placing a sloppy kiss on my forehead before heading back to Amy.
Alexi carefully measured the ingredients, mixing some of the powder and dried wolfsbane into the blood before pouring it into a beaker and slowly applying heat.
Max reappeared in the foyer to rummage for something else. His nose wrinkled. “Gross.”
I agreed. “Definitely pungent. That—”
“Smells like Cat’s cooking,” Max concluded.
“Very nice, Maximilian,” Cat pouted. “I do not recall you complaining when you licked the meatloaf dish.”
“I did that purely in self-defense. If I hadn’t eaten it, it would have come for me,” he protested.
Cat threw a notebook at him.
Max dodged, laughing. “We’ll be on the back porch. For … An hour?”
Alexi nodded. “Horashow.” He checked the temperature of the mixture and turned off the heat. “Well. It should be that simple. Amazing what might be undone if someone’s willing to make a small sacrifice and take a risk.”
“So what now?”
“We’ll need to test it. See what it does to a sample of their blood on a microscope slide.”
“Do you have a microscope?”
Pietr hissed something at Cat.
Alexi nodded, ignoring them. “Upstairs. I’ll go get it. We’ll test our cure against their blood and see what happens. If we get a result we can decide if it’s to be ingested or injected.”
Pietr hissed again.
“It will take a little more time, but science generally does,” Alexi explained.
I couldn’t help it. I turned away from Alexi to see what Pietr was complaining about.
“Cat!” Alexi cried out, staring in horror.
“Time is precisely what we don’t have, Alexi,” Catherine said apologetically. She smiled, her teeth stained a sobering dark red and brown with my blood. “Weren’t you the one just talking about sacrifice and risk?”
“Da,” he whispered. “But, it’s like medicine … the dosage…”
“Will be fine,” she assured him. “Ugh.”
“What? What is it?” he demanded, giving her a little shake.
She wrinkled her nose. “Little—aftertaste. I think I should sit down. Or—” She looked at me.
“Head to the bathroom?” I was closing the bathroom door behind us when she finally nodded agreement.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She swayed, and I helped her sit on the cold tile floor by the tub. “I will be far better than okay if this works, Jessie,” she confided. “To be a normal human—have a normal life span—that is better than anything I have ever dreamed of.”
She clutched her stomach and groaned. “Ohhh.”
“I’ll get Alexi—” But she grabbed my arm and said plainly, “Nyet. I don’t want him to see me—like this—ohhh. Pietr. Get Pietr.” She sagged against the side of the tub, eyes narrow and unblinking.
I barely had time to turn the knob before he slid past me to kneel beside his twin.
“I heard,” he whispered. “It hurts, da?”
“Daaa.” She bit her lower lip to keep from crying out.
“Like the change?”
“Ugh. More—noise,” she panted, pressing her hands to her ears. “Oh. I think—”
I screamed when the wolf flashed into being, wiping out Cat. Eyes burning, tongue darting between snapping teeth, it lunged at me.
Pietr was between us in a heartbeat, crushing the breath out of me as he pinned me against the bathroom door. Alexi shouted for us to let him in from the other side. Pietr’s heart beat so hard it threatened to leap out his back and into me. This was new to him, too.
Not reassuring.
“Catherine. Ekaterina!” He growled something at her in Russian, and his body burned as fur sprouted all along his head, neck, shoulders, arms, and torso. There was a crunch as if all the bones and joints in him struggled to shift at once. With a wail that rocked me he melted from human to wolf, T-shirt pulling apart. Slick jaws snapping, he stooped toward her, the hair on his body rising and making him look even bigger—even more terrifying than I’d ever seen him in his wolfskin.
Still wolf, Cat whined, throat trembling out a final threat as she dropped to the floor and exposed her soft belly. Submitting.
Pietr’s jaws clamped shut on the ruff of her neck and he pulled her up, shaking her soundly before dropping her back down. He snorted out a breath so hot it fogged the bathroom mirror.
Cat shivered on the floor while Pietr slowly regained his human form and his senses.
“What’s happening?” Alexi demanded, pounding on the door so hard it rattled me.
“She changed. I don’t know.” I tried to explain through the bathroom door, my hand on Pietr’s bare back. “It’s like she poofed into her wolfskin and now…”
“Not my week to clean the bathroom.” Max.
“Get back to the porch and keep your girlfriend busy,” Alexi demanded.
“Hard to keep her focused with so much noise,” Max grumbled, marching back down the stairs. Beneath his grumpy facade I heard real frustration as he worried about Cat.
“Now what, Jessie? Can you let me in?”
“No. Sorry. Cat said you weren’t allowed.”
“Dammit.” His fists thundered against the door again.
“She’ll be fine, Alexi,” Pietr reassured, his voice steady. I was the only one to see the way his hands shook. To see the fear reflected in his eyes.
Suddenly the wolf convulsed, giving one long shudder that shook her from snout to tail and she tore straight down her center, ripping in half as simply as I’d separate a paper towel from the roll. Catherine flopped forward, out of the wolfskin, spattered in gore. Simple, human, and exhausted, she smiled in vindication.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Strangely, things between Sarah and me improved. It was almost like we were back to our pre-Pietr time, Sarah swallowing books whole—Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Orwell’s Animal Farm—and me not doing any PDA. Max and Amy made up for my lack of public displays of affection, though, and I worried, catching Marvin glaring at them one morning before Derek led him away, hand on his shoulder. Sophie followed our antics from a distance, watching thin air with quiet curiosity almost as frequently as she watched us.
“Is she here?” I asked after everyone had scattered to classes.
Sophie’s forehead creased, her focus somewhere else, like she was trying to hear something a great distance away. She nodded. “She gets clearer,” she breathed, “when she really tries. I think she wishes you could see her, too.”
/>
I looked at the same spot that held Sophie’s rapt attention. No luck. “It’s enough I know she’s around occasionally,” I assured.
“She’s always around,” Sophie corrected.
“Oh.” Thinking about my mother as witness to the quick makeout session Pietr and I had had the previous night, I muttered, “I am so grounded when I die.…”
Sophie chuckled.
“What’s she doing?”
“Hear no evil, see no evil … I think she means she knows when to cover her eyes and ears.”
“Mom always had a strong sense of humor.”
“She’s glad you’re staying away from Derek, too.”
“Yeah. I wish I knew why that was so important. I mean … I know he’s mixed up in some weird stuff here, but…”
“Stay clear of him, Jessie,” Sophie intoned. “No matter what. You’ve been really lucky so far. But even luck runs out.”
Mr. Belden stepped out of his classroom, glaring. “Tardy bell in three—”
I rushed the door …
“Two—”
… slid across the floor …
“One—”
… and into the seat by Pietr.
The bell rang. Belden slapped a pink slip of paper on my desk. “Detention,” he declared.
“What? I made it…”
“Running in the hall.”
“That is absolutely unfair,” Pietr muttered.
“What was that Mr. Rusakova?” Belden asked.
Pietr paused, coming to a decision. “That’s unfair. It absolutely sucks.”
Another pink slip was produced. “One for you as well.” Belden seemed quite satisfied.
But Pietr was more so.
We were mired in quadratic equations when the desk behind me lurched and I felt something hot and wet spatter across the back of my shirt. “Oh. God.” I’d know the smell anywhere.
Vomit.
Out of our seats, we all stared as Kylie Johansen convulsed on the floor, fountaining like a lawn sprinkler set on random. Belden was on the intercom, nurse on the way as Pietr and I pulled desks away from Kylie’s writhing body.
The nurse shouted for us to clear the room. EMTs arrived so fast I wondered if Junction High kept them on stand-by. The classroom door shut. Stunned, my mouth wouldn’t. I looked at my classmates. Stephen Marx held his head like he had a migraine to beat anything, and Lynn Marretti clutched her stomach, pale and quivering. In fact, all of my classmates except Pietr looked like absolute crap. And I was the one coated in spew.