"We'll try not to hold it against you," Emily joked.
From the kitchen came the sound of a griddle being thumped into the sink. "Girls?" Emily's mom called up the stairs. "The pancakes are ready! Come and eat them while they're still hot."
"Oh, yum!" Emily reached for a damp wad of paper towels and pulled off a handful, wiping her glue-coated fingers on them and handing the rest to Amy.
Amy wiped the glitter off the perfect ovals of her little fingernails.
"I'm starving," she announced. "And I totally want to hear about the after party and stuff last night. God, you must have been up all night—I can't believe you're not an exhausted mess today! What's your secret? Seriously. I have a billion quizzes next week. If you have a secret energy drink or something, I want in."
The questions sent an angry jolt through Claire. She worked so hard to keep her secrets hidden, and Amy, with all her cheerful and well-intentioned bonding crap, was on the verge of ruining everything. Claire had a sudden urge to snarl at Amy—to startle her into silent submission.
But this wasn't the woods, and Amy wasn't a wolf.
"Yeah." She cleared her throat. "I'm pretty much all about caffeine."
Claire's lupine side lunged inside her, pushing at the cover of her human skin. She was right at the edge of transforming, balanced on a thread-thin line between human and wolf. She stayed motionless as marble, tracking Amy's movements with her eyes, until she was a hundred percent sure she could control herself. Until she knew she could stay human.
With shaking hands she set the bowl of glitter on Emily's bed, her gaze sliding over the bedside lamp. The memory of the epic fight Emily and her mother had when Emily broke it last year swam into Claire's mind. How Emily had come storming over to Claire's house. How, later, they had tried to glue it back together, adding shells and buttons and bits of yarn to hide the places where the ceramic was missing. She could still hear the echo of the two of them laughing so hard over the derangedlooking results that even Emily's mom couldn't stay mad.
Last year. When Claire still thought she was human.
With her wolf self roiling and snapping underneath the tender barrier of her smooth, pink skin, last year seemed untouchably far away.
It tore at her to do it, but Claire knew she had to leave. The stress of being around Amy—with her intense scrutiny and the way she made Claire so achingly jealous of her relationship with Emily—it was too much. Claire could feel her control slipping. She couldn't afford that. The risk to Emily was far too great. After all, if she ever found out what Claire was . . . It was against the laws of the pack to kill humans, except in cases of selfdefense. Killing someone who knew a pack member's identity definitely counted as selfdefense, since it was only by keeping themselves hidden that the werewolves stayed alive at all.
The thought of Emily—happy, bouncing, warm-skinned, very alive Emily—being hunted by the pack made Claire's insides tremble. She would do anything to keep that from happening. Including telling a skyscraper-high stack of lies.
Emily stood in the doorway, looking back at her with a confused expression on her face.
"You coming?" she asked. "You're about a zillion miles away." She doesn't even know how true that is.
"C'mon." Emily jerked her head toward the kitchen. "It's pancakes."
Claire wanted those pancakes more than anything. Wanted a normal Sunday morning with Emily—just Emily—when she wasn't endangering her best friend's life. She stood up, wiping her hands on her pants. "I think I'm going to head out, actually. I'm not all that hungry. Lisbeth cooked this morning—you know how that goes."
Emily's mouth opened and then shut again. "But—but how will you get home?"
"I'll run. It's just a couple of miles." Claire shrugged. She tried to keep her face calm, but she was dying to leave before her mask slipped—before Emily guessed just how upset she really was.
"You'll run? God, Claire, you really have changed, haven't you?"
Hearing the question was like touching a live wire—painful and shocking and way too close to the truth.
"Hey, I'm still the same old Claire. I'm just in better shape." Claire fake-smiled, shifting from foot to foot, trying to get her wolf self to shut the hell up for a minute.
"Oh, sure. You had to go and get into something athletic." Something wistful drifted across Emily's expression as she fiddled with the door's hinge. "We didn't even talk about KateMarie, though." "Yeah, I know." From the kitchen, the sound of Amy and Mrs. Lucero chatting pricked at Claire's ears. Made her feet itch to get moving. She edged toward the door. Emily noticed and stepped back to let her through. "Soon, okay?"