your mom’s gone to Chicago for the day. If you go anywhere,
please leave me a voicemail, okay?
See you around six!
Love,
Lisbeth
A whole day without anyone looking over her shoulder? That was more than okay with Claire.
She put a pot of coffee on and sat at the island while it brewed, staring out the window. Last night had been so bizarre—but in a much better way than the night before had been. At least now she didn’t feel so out of control, like she was just supposed to sit on her hands and hope everything was okay. If she randomly started to sprout fur, she could fix it. Hell, if she thought someone was talking about her, she could listen in.
Huh.
Could she do that in her normal body, or did she have to be changed?
Claire focused the same way she had the night before, trying again to hear Emily.
Nothing happened. Claire couldn’t hear anything except the coffeepot burbling as it finished brewing.
She thought about transforming and trying again. No one was home, so it wasn’t like anyone would come walking in on her—it would probably take Emily another fifteen minutes to drive over, anyway.
Claire decided to go for it.
Just as she’d closed her eyes, the front door rattled.
“Claire?” Emily’s voice echoed off the marble floors in the entryway.
Shit.
“In the kitchen!” Claire called, silently vowing never to do anything else that stupid. How would she have explained it if Emily had walked in on her while she was covered in fur? To cover the fact that she was totally flustered, Claire got up to pour herself a cup of coffee.
Emily wandered into the kitchen. “Hey. Thanks for getting up early for me.”
“No problem. You must have driven like a bat out of hell to get here so fast,” Claire said, focusing on filling her cup to exactly the right level. Her hand was still shaking.
“Yeah, well, I had to get out of the nightmare that is my house.”
Claire turned to offer her the coffee. Emily’s eyes were red and puffy, and her lips looked pale.
“Do you want a cup?”
Emily shook her head and went to the refrigerator. She pulled out a Diet Coke and popped it open. “What am I going to do? If I have to spend the rest of the summer on the farm, I’ll miss everything! I’ll be so out of the loop by the time school starts that my parents might as well send me away permanently.”
Claire took a long sip of her coffee and tried to push away the feeling that it was her fault that Emily was so upset.
I haven’t done anything wrong. Just because I’m … what I am, this isn’t my fault.
“We’ll figure something out, Em. Seriously. What have you tried?”
Emily ticked it off on her fingers. “I promised them I wouldn’t leave the house after dark, that I’d leave my cell’s GPS on all the time, and that I wouldn’t go anywhere outside alone. Which is, like, the equivalent of putting myself in jail all summer. But practically no one else is allowed to go out after dark, so it’s not like I’d be missing that much. And at least I’d be here. But they won’t listen!” Emily flopped down on one of the bar stools and sighed. “I don’t know why they think the stupid farm is any safer than here, anyway. I mean, there’s way less people out there. If something attacks us on the farm, I’m one of three people for it to pick from. Isn’t that, like, basic statistics?”
Claire smiled at her best friend’s logic and sat down next to Emily.
“Well, that’s about all you can do, isn’t it? I mean, unless you swear to stay in your room all the time, and that’s as bad as being sent off to your aunt’s place.”
Emily laid her head on the table. “You’re not helping, Claire.”
Guilt slid through Claire like an oil spill. Maybe she wasn’t trying hard enough. There was a little part of Claire’s brain that was whispering to her that it would be a lot easier to lie to Emily over the phone. And that Emily couldn’t walk in on her midchange while she was on the farm.
“Maybe things will settle down. If I were you, I’d play up the whole ‘the farm is dangerous, too’ angle. Make them panic that you’ll be too far away, that they can’t keep an eye on you. Can you get your aunt to agree to some crazy-late curfew or something?”
“Huh. That’s not bad, actually. I can’t say anything else today or they’ll know I’m just fishing to get out of it, but it might work.”
Claire chewed on a ragged cuticle. “It’s worth a try, at least.”
“Yeah. Okay. So here I am, being totally self-centered. What’s new with you, huh?”
Claire stopped the laugh a millisecond before it hopped out of her mouth. “Um. Not, uh, not much.”
Emily shook her head. “That is so not the truth, Claire. Don’t even try to lie to me.”