Claire hung up and flopped back on her bed. The truth of who she was, what she was, hung over her like a lead umbrella. Her mother had told her over and over that it would get easier, that Claire would become like an oyster. “The truth, chérie , the secret—it is like a grain of sand. You must hold it inside the way an oyster does, smoothing it over and over until it becomes a jewel that makes you stronger, more valuable, even though no one can see it inside you. It will only hurt at first.”
But I’m not a damn oyster, Mother. This truth was much bigger than a grain of sand, and it grew every day. Claire could feel herself straining at the edges, stretched to the point of explosion with the effort of keeping it contained. For what felt like the twelve millionth time, she went from feeling like being a werewolf made her superior to being certain that her condition was a curse.
She curled up on her comforter. Outside the window, the moon rose, pale against the darkening sky. She was running out of time—in only a few weeks the moon would be full, and Dr. Engle would take her mother away from her forever.
Claire pressed a fist against her mouth to muffle her whimpers and let the tears roll down her cheeks. She was so alone that she ached with it.
Hours later, Claire rolled herself up in her covers and closed her swollen eyes. She slept fitfully. Nightmares jolted her awake again and again.
Shortly after dawn finally broke, Claire stumbled downstairs and poured herself a cup of coffee. She wrapped her hands around the hot mug and wandered down the quiet hall.
Without exactly meaning to, she ended up in front of her mother’s darkroom. Even with Marie sitting in a cage at Dr. Engle’s lab, Claire couldn’t bring herself to break the cardinal rule about food or drink in her mother’s workspace. She set the coffee on the little table next to the door and went in. The computer screen stared across the room at her, like a giant eye. Claire sat down in front of it and pulled up the same file she’d tried to get into the day before.
She missed her mother. Terribly. I wonder if she misses me as much. Claire stared at the password box on the screen, just as an idea crept into her head. Was it possible?
Slowly, she typed the letters into the blank field and hit ENTER. The file opened immediately. All the words she’d tried before, and she’d never once thought that her mother would have used her own daughter’s name. The password was Claire, after all.
Claire blinked back the tears that had gathered in the corners of her eyes and focused on the image of the forest at night that had appeared on the screen. It wasn’t like her mother’s usual work—the photo looked rushed, unprofessional. Claire let the slideshow run, squinting at the screen. It looked like her mother had been in the woods, taking pictures from behind the protective curtain of pines. There was something out past the tree line, but it was hard to make out. The pictures had been taken without a flash, but her mother had obviously been using a slow shutter speed so that whatever she was aiming at would show up on the photo.
But her subject had been moving.
Claire stared at the blur in front of her. A jolt of recognition shot through her and Claire whimpered. She’d seen pictures of that same house before. It was where the man had been killed and left right out on his lawn. The man the seule had killed. In front of the house was a half-light, half-dark blur. Oh, Jesus. Mom saw it happen—she was photographing the whole thing! The pictures darkened and sharpened as Marie tried to get a clearer shot of the struggle in front of the house. Claire could only make out the indistinct shape of a very dark wolf.
As the slideshow flicked forward, the man’s body suddenly stood out as clearly as the bricks on his house. He lay perfectly still, his mangled torso hideous against the cheerful daisies that bloomed behind him. Next to her victim, the wolf blurred as she moved away from the body.
The last two photos showed the wolf clearly. In the first she stared down at the mess in front of her, but her back was to the camera. The next photo showed her at the man’s back gate, her face mostly obscured by one of the sunflowers growing next to the fence. A dark lupine chin and a few gleaming teeth were clearly visible beneath one of the blooms, but that was it. Claire watched the two photos play over and over again, her frustration building higher with each flash of the screen. Something seemed so familiar about the pictures, the last one especially.
Claire stared at the sunflower, blocking the seule’s face with its too-big center and fringe of petals. She’d never really liked that particular flower. They were corny, somehow. The image of the sunflower in Zahlia’s apartment jumped into her mind.
Zahlia never seemed like someone who would keep sunflowers around.
Wait—why would she … ?
Oh. Shit.
Maybe it was a coincidence. It could be a coincidence. Claire sat frozen at the computer, remembering the other things in Zahlia’s weird little office. With her stomach churning, she clicked open the Internet and looked up the name of the editor who’d been killed.
The search engine found it instantly. Dave McKinney. The briefcase on Zahlia’s office floor—the initials on it had been DRM.