Murphy stopped hopping and swearing when I pulled out the desk chair and fell into it. My legs felt hollow, as if all the bones had melted.
Tobias Green. I called him Grandfather Tobias. I’d loved and respected him. I’d looked after him more than anyone else in my pack and, although I’d had a sense of duty because he was old, I’d done it more out of genuine love. He was not my blood grandfather, but he might as well have been. I loved him that much.
Ever since that moment in Houston when I’d realized the grandmother in Paris had deliberately put a lethal overdose of narcotics in the homemade pill she’d given Murphy, it was an easy, yet devastating, intuitive jump to understand that Grandfather Tobias was guilty of killing my bond mates. Once we’d uncovered the grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ plot, it had been horrifyingly clear he’d done something to the car. I’d brought it to him that afternoon and he’d gone beneath it to inspect it because he was a mechanic and he told me he wanted to see for himself that his dear girl and her bond mates were in a safe, reliable vehicle. Yet he’d tampered with the brakes so they’d fail and I’d lose control.
Without being able to prevent it, I flashed back to the accident.
* * * *
“The Comet or Blue Moon, Grey? Which club do you want to go to?”
I see Grey laughing in the dashboard lights as he fiddles with the CD player. Depeche Mode’s Strange Love morphs into Billy Idol’s White Wedding. Grey has an addiction to eighties music. Sometimes I find it endearing. Sometimes I find it annoying as hell.
“I don’t care. It’s your birthday, Stanzie. You choose. The Comet or Blue Moon, it doesn’t matter to me.” He turns his head to smile at me. The love he feels for me is written all over his face. His shaggy, dark hair falls into his blue eyes. He’s got the back part confined in a rubber band. When it’s loose, his hair brushes his shoulders. Right now it’s about two inches longer than mine. I’m experimenting with a bob. I’m not sure I like it.
He needs a haircut. He has an appointment on Monday. I wrote it on the erasable calendar stuck to our fridge. I made it for him yesterday.
“Elena?” I glance into the rearview mirror to see her beautiful face. She is putting on eyeliner and her bright red purse is open on the seat beside her—a compact in one hand, the eyeliner stick in the other. She frowns at her reflection, with concentration, not because she finds fault with her appearance.
“Oh, you know I don’t care, I just want to dance with you, Birthday Girl.”
The Comet is closer and I have a sudden desire to be out of the car. I want to feel the summer breeze and hear my new metallic gold stiletto heels click against the soft, warm pavement of the August night. I want to hear music from this decade. I want to dance, to feel Grey’s hands on my hips as we move together beneath the strobe lights and Elena guards our drinks at the table.
I make a decision. I take the exit. The road climbs over a small crest then dips sharply. I brake because we’ve been traveling at seventy miles an hour and now we need to slow down. We’ll still be above the legal speed limit, but this is a Mustang GT, metallic gold like my stiletto heels, with an ink-black leather interior. My dream car is a present from Elena who has just signed a lucrative contract with a company that develops PC games. Elena is a whiz at designing games. We have six different PCs and laptops set up in our house in New Britain and she is always perched in front of one of them, sucking absently on her bottom lip as she contemplates the scenarios in front of her on the screen.
Yesterday she made an important deliverable to the company and they extended her contract for another game, this one even more ambitious—about werewolves. It is slated for tentative release October of 2010, which is two years and two months into the future.
I put my foot on the brake, but it doesn’t seem like we decelerate. Confused, I press harder then we hit the dip and I see a shadow or a bird or something that distracts me then the wheel is a traitor beneath my hands. Elena screams in the backseat as the guardrail looms closer.
I have time to think to myself, This is just a dream. This is not happening. This is not—
The Mustang’s front end smashes into the guardrail with a terrific bang. It crumples with a metallic grinding and tearing. The engine screams in protest.
“Stanzie!” Elena shrieks. Grey is stiff and terrified beside me. The whole car reeks of our extreme fear. It pours out of our skins like invisible sweat and the mad stink of it paralyzes my muscles and vocal cords. I am a mute statue. I cannot even blink.
As Billy Idol sings the Mustang turns up and over. Wind rushes in when Grey’s door flies open. I see a blur of movement when he falls out and my paralysis breaks. I reach out for him, but the airbag hits me in the face and something hard smashes the back of my seat. Elena stops screaming. She stops screaming because her neck breaks under the force of her body slamming into the back of my seat. She, like Grey, never wears a seatbelt.
* * * *
Pressure brought me out of my trance. Murphy squeezed my shoulder reassuringly.
Allerton said my name, probably not for the first time.
The car crash was so vivid in my head I could still hear Elena’s screams and the jagged sound of tearing metal.
“I’m here.” I swallowed an obstruction in my throat. It was two and a half years ago. It was time to let go and get over it.
I’d been doing a good job of that, thanks to Murphy, but one sentence made me realize that maybe I would never truly be free. It was not a pleasant thought.
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.” Allerton’s voice was rich with sympathy. I visualized his handsome, distinguished face and his dark black hair he wore as fashionably cut as his designer suits. “I thought you should know. There’s something else as well.”
My stomach sank even though I had no idea what the something else could be, only that it wouldn’t be good.
“He wants to speak to you. Privately.”
My mouth dropped open in protest. Sick bile burned my throat and I must have twisted in my seat because Murphy put both hands on my shoulders. I was absurdly grateful for his touch.
With his Pack-enhanced senses, he could hear what Allerton said, and he could smell my distress. I know I reeked of it.
“Do I have to?” Tears clogged my sinuses and, if not for Murphy, I would have been bawling like a baby, I knew it.
“Of course not,” said Allerton at once, and there was just a tinge of disappointment in his voice that I strove to ignore, but it was impossible. Damn him. Damn me for wanting to please him because he was a Councilor.
“Where is he?”
“He’s being held in the safe house in Hartford. I’m here with him, along with one of the Regional Councilors. Riverglow is not being told the whole story. Just that he confessed to doing it not why.”
Riverglow was the name of my former pack—Jonathan, Nora, Callie, Vaughn and Peter.
“Aren’t they even curious?” I couldn’t disguise the bitterness in my voice.
“He’s saying he accidentally put a hole in the brake lining, causing the brake fluid to leak out, and he realized it when he went over the car after the accident but was too ashamed to admit it.”
“An accident? And do they believe it?” My voice shook with outrage. “They didn’t believe me. Are they going to believe him?”
“Constance, he had to say something. We need to keep the knowledge that people in the Pack are murdering others under wraps. He can’t tell