Chapter 26: Chapter 26

After I was attacked, the rest of the night passed without incident. I rigged up a makeshift alarm for the door to alert us to entry. Mason looked at it, snorted, and shoved the dresser in front of the door, instead. Even with that, I don’t think either of us slept. I rest until a bell signals breakfast, and then I ask Mason whether he’s eating, but he only rolls over and grunts. As soon as I leave, though, I hear the dresser being shoved back in front of the door.

Allan’s also heading for breakfast, so we fall in step together. I tell him a bit about what happened last night. We’re still talking as we join the line for the breakfast buffet, and it takes a couple of minutes to realize something’s happening up ahead, a commotion that has guys gathering like they do when a fight breaks out. I stiffen, ready to leave. Until Paige arrives, I’ll force myself to retreat from any situation that looks as if it could erupt in violence.

I hear catcalls and whoops, which don’t sound like audience reactions to a fight. I ask Allan, who only shrugs and says, “I don’t even want to know what it is. I’m starting to feel like I’m living in a zoo. Except those who are actually part animal aren’t the ones acting like it.” He pauses. “That didn’t come out right. I don’t mean you’re less human.” Another pause. “How do you guys think of it?”

“In the Pack, we do consider ourselves part wolf and part human. Just as you might say you inherited certain characteristics from your mother and

certain ones from your father. That doesn’t make you two people. It’s a seamless blending.”

I realize I’ve switched into lecture mode and scoop up a forkful of bacon as I say, “The short version is that we’d be insulted if you said we were subhuman, but not if you call us part human. To us, the wolf doesn’t negate the human.”

“Makes sense. Oh, there’s Kate and Holly. Looks like they’ve got their food, and they’re ducking whatever’s going on.”

I catch my sister’s eye, and I’m going to ask what’s happening, but she only smiles and waves and then continues for the door. She’s obviously heading outdoors to enjoy breakfast with Holly, so I won’t interfere. My sister never had a wide circle of friends, but in middle school, she’d had no end of girls wanting to befriend her, and she’d had a decent group of pals. In high school, that slowly constricted. I know my sister misses that female friendship, and I’m glad to see her hanging out with Holly.

After breakfast, the staff disappears into a meeting, and a bunch of the campers do, too, planning some kind of party.

While the counselors are away, the campers will play.

The buffet is still out. I decide to take food for Mason, and Allan decides that’s the point at which we part company.

“I’m sure he’s secretly a great guy,” Allan says. “No, he’s not. But he should still eat.”

Allan smiles and shakes his head. “You’ll make a great dad someday. However, not being nearly so charitable, I’ll skip the company of the brooding vamp and go find Holly and Kate.”

I take the food to Mason and then immediately wish I hadn’t. I could have foreseen that, couldn’t I? While I’d love to believe he’ll accept the gesture for what it is—simple consideration—if asked to predict his response, I’d have said he’d see the food as a bribe or a solicitation for friendship . . . or a solicitation for more than friendship, the werewolf equivalent of bringing him

flowers. Admittedly, had I predicted the last one, I wouldn’t have brought it.

Last night, our attackers said Mason is gay. That doesn’t jibe with his seemingly homophobic comments from earlier, and I suppose that could mean those guys were wrong. However, Mason didn’t argue the point, either. Does that mean his comments weren’t homophobic but rather like a female roommate warning me about sneaking into her bed in the middle of the night?

I don’t care what Mason is. I could just do with a little less of him acting as if every friendly word and gesture is a come-on. It’s exhausting. I wasn’t lying last night. My sexual orientation remains a mystery even to me. Maybe that suggests I’m bisexual. Maybe it just puts me somewhere on the spectrum, and I won’t know which way I lean until I have an actual romantic encounter, and I’m in no rush to do that. For me, it isn’t a question urgently requiring an answer, and I don’t appreciate being grilled on it by a near stranger.

So Mason hints that I’m bringing him flowers, and I ignore him. That seems the best defense. I leave the food, and I grab a book and plunk onto my bed—only because I don’t want to walk out and seem like he was right and I’m fleeing in embarrassment. I read for the next hour. He eats the food and then plugs in his earbuds.

After an hour, I head out, planning to join Kate and the others. I decide to grab snacks from the dining hall first, and I’m heading for the stairs when I see Elijah. He glances over his shoulder, as if for an escape route. Escaping me? Afraid of me? I’m fine with that—it just surprises me.

At school, I’m the quiet, studious kid who never makes waves, never causes trouble, certainly doesn’t scare anyone. Even if I have the physique to fight, no one has any reason to start one with me. In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve fought Mason and those guys last night, and I won easily. I threatened Elijah, and now he’s obviously trying to avoid an encounter. Here, I am someone new. Here, I am a guy you don’t cross.

me.

Here, I am Clayton Danvers’s son.

Even as I recoil from the thought, a frisson of satisfaction runs through

Hell, yeah, I’m Clay Danvers’s kid.

What, no, no. That’s Kate, and she can keep it. I’m the thoughtful one, the

careful one. The brains. Not the brawn.

Except Kate has her own brains, and I have my own brawn. Dad has a freaking PhD. He is the brains and the brawn.

Yet Dad is not the calm and reasonable one. He’s the homing missile, the smart weapon, but a weapon nonetheless, and I’m . . .

I’m standing here, trapped in the web of my anxieties, while Elijah is about to breathe a sigh of relief and retreat.

I walk toward him, on an angle that means his only escape route is straight through a gaggle of the popular girls. The same girls he’s apparently avoiding.

Is he really avoiding them? Or did he use that as an excuse to get close to my sister?

I saw how he looked at her yesterday. Kate isn’t some random girl he asked to help him out. He’s interested, and she’s oblivious to that, just happy to hang out with a cute guy who also happens to be a werewolf.

Seeing himself cornered, Elijah plasters on a fake smile. “Hey . . . you.

Good morning.”

“We need to talk.”

“Uh, sure. Later, though. Right now—”

“Don’t worry. It isn’t about Kate. We need to talk about what’s going on, your theory. Wait here while I grab some fruit.”

As I walk away, one of the girls giggles and says to Elijah, “Hey, you?

Forgot his name, didn’t you?”

“Nah, I know it,” Elijah says. “Can’t forget it—it was also my brother’s.

Which is awkward.”

I slow as I listen.

“It was your brother’s?” the girl says. “Your brother’s dead? I’m so sorry.

That guy is such a jerk.”

“For daring to have the same name?” another girl says. “Don’t be stupid.

Elijah, I’m so sorry to hear that, though. What happened to your brother?” “Uh . . .” Elijah seems to be struggling for a polite way to say none of

your business. Instead, he says, “He fell in with a bad crowd, and it got him killed.”

“A gang?” one girl says breathlessly.

Another girl’s voice rises as she says, “Oh my gawd, did you actually say that?”

Elijah laughs softly. “It actually kinda was a gang. Now, if you will excuse me, ladies, I’m going to duck out before he comes back.”

They cluck sympathetically as he flees. I don’t pursue. I’m standing at the table, still littered with the remains of breakfast, looking more like an abandoned pig’s trough than a buffet. My mind whirs as I stand with my hand poised over an apple.

I know it. Can’t forget it—it was also my brother’s. Fell in with a bad crowd, and it got him killed.

It actually kinda was a gang.

I turn to see Elijah taking off at a lope. He glances sideways down the hall, and his profile . . .

The girls notice me watching and fan out, as if to block him from my view. I still see him, though, in my mind. That profile. That face.

I knew I’d seen it before. Now the answer hits with a rush that sets my heart pounding, my brain shouting that I’m being silly. Worse than silly. I’m being racist, seeing a Black werewolf and jumping to an imagined resemblance to one of the few I know.

I reach for my phone. It’s not there, of course. But I can pull up what I want from memory.

When we got our first cell phones, Kate and I had taken pictures of the Pack. Kate played amateur photographer, sneaking around like a paparazzi, wanting “real” people, not their smiling photo-ready faces. I wanted the same, but I got it another way. I took pictures of pictures, photographs of Jeremy’s sketches and paintings of the Pack.

I’d started with the two portraits in his studio. The ones of my parents. In it, Dad wasn’t much older than I am now. He’d been leaning against a wall, talking to Jeremy, with his mouth full of . . .

I look down at the apples under my hand.

Dad, talking, with his mouth full of apple, his head bursting with some idea that couldn’t wait until he chewed and swallowed. Like Kate. But now, in that painting, I see something uncomfortably close to a mirror.

The portrait of Mom is very different. In it, she looks dangerous, almost feral. That was Jeremy capturing sides of my parents seen only by those who knew them best.

I have other paintings on my phone, too, of Pack brothers, some gone before I was born, like . . .

I mentally zoom in on one portrait. It’s Mom in her twenties, sitting on the sofa. Her legs are drawn up, and she’s leaning sideways in deep, almost conspiratorial conversation with a Pack mate, her best friend. He’s laughing at some inside joke, the kind that best friends have, the kind I used to have with Kate. His head is thrown back, and I see him and . . .

Elijah.

That’s who I see in his profile.

I don’t just see Elijah in that painting, either. I see Kate as she’d been last night with Elijah, the two of them laughing at some joke the rest of us didn’t get.

I remember the first time I saw that picture, and I hear Mom’s voice.

“That’s your namesake, Logan. I met him just after I met your dad. He died a few years before you were born, and your dad knew it would mean a

lot to me if we named you after him.”

“You were friends,” I say, and it’s not a question—even as a kid, I could see the answer in that painting.

She smiles. “We were very good friends.”

Logan Jonsen.

When I focus on that mental image of the portrait, I see the differences between Logan and Elijah. Logan was lighter skinned—his mother was Caucasian. Their features aren’t an exact match, either. In the first portrait, Logan also has locs, longer than Elijah’s, and that could mislead me, make me jump to a conclusion, but I’ve seen photos of Logan Jonsen taken long after he’d shorn off the college-era locs and become a lawyer, yet another reason I’ve leaned toward that occupation. I can pull up those later pictures and still see the overwhelming resemblance to Elijah in his profile, in his eyes and mostly in his smile.

Elijah is Logan Jonsen’s half-brother.

And Elijah knows it. He knows who his brother was. Knows Logan was Pack. Knows he was murdered in a war between mutts and Pack. Yet that’s not how Elijah sees things, is it?

It actually kinda was a gang.

Elijah knows who we are. He also knows who we are in relation to his brother, and it is very clear how he feels about that.

Elijah blames the Pack for his brother’s death. He tried to hide from Kate, tried to hide the fact he’s a werewolf, and now that we know, he’s hiding the connection to his brother.

I had good reason to be suspicious. Elijah is up to something.

I take two steps in the direction Elijah disappeared. Then I stop short.

I will confront him. I will get to the bottom of this. But first I need to tell Kate. Otherwise, if I go after him, she’ll think the worst of me, and we don’t need that. We really don’t.