Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (23 page)

As we reached the parking lot, I noticed him tuck a stack of envelopes into his pocket.

He followed my gaze. “I know it’s just junk, but it felt wrong to leave it there.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, the words stiff and awkward and half a year too late. “About Amy. I never really said that.”

“You lost her, too.”

I nodded even though I knew it wasn’t the same.

Jason pulled the passenger-side door open for me as we neared the car. The engine was idling and Kyle had already plugged the iPod into the charger.

I slid into the Honda and opened my mouth to say we should head to my place, but before I could get a single word out, the iPod’s screen flashed to life.

The battery was still down to next to nothing, but there was just enough juice for it to work while plugged in.

I picked it up and entered Amy’s password: Jason’s birthday. The screen unlocked.

“Now what?” I whispered to myself as Stephen and Jason edged closer to my open car door to get a better look.

Amy had put the iPod in the envelope for a reason; there had to be something on here that she wanted me to see.

I frowned. All of the apps were gone—all but the video app.

I tapped the icon.

There was only one file.

I knew we shouldn’t linger here, but there was no way I could wait until we reached the apartment to find out what was in that video.

Swallowing hard, I hit play.

Amy’s face filled the small screen.

“Mackenzie Dobson, this is your life, and if you’re watching this, something has either gone horribly wrong or I’ve finally skipped town.” Amy stared melodramatically at the camera. A small slice of her bedroom was visible behind her. The light was dim—obviously nighttime. She was sitting on the window seat, her back pressed to the wall. Her long, black hair had been pulled into a ponytail that curled over one shoulder and her face was free of makeup. She was wearing a tank top, and I caught a glimpse of a wicked bruise on her upper arm. A week before she had died, Amy had slipped in the hallway at school and crashed into a wall of lockers. The video had been made no more than a week before her murder.

For months, I had only seen Amy in dreams or in
photographs and videos I had looked at a hundred times. Seeing her now, like this, made it hard to breathe.

“I’m not sure where to begin,” she admitted. She chewed on her lower lip. “Things have happened—been happening—things I haven’t been able to tell anyone.” There was a knock in the background and Amy glanced at the door. “Shit.”

The room spun sickeningly for a moment and then the screen went black, as though Amy had set the iPod facedown. There were faint sounds in the background, the slam of a door, a hushed voice that was too muffled to make out.

Stephen crouched next to me.

With a flash of light, the room flipped and Amy was back. Her eyes were red. “I don’t know how much time I have or what to do,” she said. “I found out something. Something I wasn’t supposed to. Something bad. Really,
really
bad. And my dad’s wrapped up in it.” She tugged on the end of her ponytail, winding it around her fingers. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone, but things have been happening. I feel like I’m being watched. Sometimes, I walk into my room and I can tell someone else has been in here. The other night, someone followed me all the way from school to Tre—to the outskirts of town.”

At the almost-mention of Trey, I glanced up at Jason, but his face was impossible to read.

“I’m scared, Mac.” The slight tremor in Amy’s voice pulled me back. “I’m scared something will happen to me and no one will know what was going on. I don’t want to drag anyone else into this, but I figure, if something does
happen—if things get so bad that I have to split—by the time you get this, maybe everything will have cooled down.”

I fumbled with the iPod and hit pause.
It was Ben.
Pain spread through my chest and radiated outward, making my hands shake. Someone had been watching Amy. Someone had been in her room and stalking her—just not for the reasons she had thought.

Somehow, a fraction of the weight I had been carrying since Amy’s death lifted. It wouldn’t have mattered what any of us had done on the night she died. Ben had been watching Amy long before he had killed her; if we had been with her that night, he would have just picked another.

On some level, I had already known that, but Amy’s words finally made it sink in. It hadn’t been my fault.

My gaze darted to Stephen. His face was set into hard lines as he stared down at the image of his sister.

Bracing myself as though I were about to dive into very cold water, I hit play.

“So here’s the deal,” said Amy, “and I know it’s not a very good one. If you’re watching this, I’ve gone AWOL. Or worse. In the envelope are two DVDs containing the information I was never meant to find. It’s not all of it—not by a long shot—but it’s the important stuff. There’s a password on the discs, Mac, and you’re the only one who has the key and the drive to figure it out.” Tears filled her eyes and she rubbed them away with the heel of her hand. “You’re the smartest person I know. And the best. Once you know the truth, you can decide what to do with it. Keep it secret or tell everyone. Toss the DVDs or forward
them on. I thought keeping it secret was the right thing to do, but now . . . the more I think about the things I saw, the worse keeping it secret feels. Some days, I’m not sure what’s right or wrong anymore.” More tears filled her eyes, but her voice seemed to grow stronger with each syllable. “Maybe some secrets are just too big to keep. I’m sorry for putting this all on you. There just isn’t anyone else I trust.”

The video stopped. Three minutes and eleven seconds. That was how long Amy’s last words had taken.

No one moved. No one spoke.

Finally, Stephen straightened. “Amy must have hidden the hard drive in her mailbox until I left for school. Once I was gone, she went back and moved it.” He swore under his breath. For a second, it looked as though he was on the verge of ripping the iPod from my hands and hurling it.

The anger in his blue eyes took me aback. I wanted the hard drive, too—I wanted to see everything Amy had seen—but it almost seemed as though Stephen was mad at his sister, as though he was taking her actions personally.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Next to me, I felt Kyle tense.

Shooting Stephen a wary look, Jason said, “So if the original hard drive wasn’t in the mailbox and it isn’t at the house, where did Amy stash it?”

“Yes,” said a smooth female voice from behind him, a voice I heard in nightmares and thought I would never have to hear again. “I think we’d all like to know the answer to that question.”

K
YLE WAS ALREADY OUT OF THE CAR AND MOVING AS
Jason and Stephen placed themselves in front of me, trying to block me—and the contents of the mailbox—from view.

Fear stole my breath and made every muscle shake as déjà vu crashed over me. The scar on my shoulder blazed to life, burning so hot the wound felt fresh.

It’s not possible.

The voice—that horribly familiar voice—came again. “Get out of the car. Before we start shooting.”

I glanced out the windshield. Kyle had stopped near the hood of the Honda, his hands slightly raised. Heart hammering, I shoved everything back into the envelope and wedged it under the driver’s seat before sliding out of the car.

I squeezed between Jason and Stephen. Jason tried to stop me, but I slipped past him.

I had to see for myself.

I had to see her.

Winifred Sinclair stood just a few feet away. She stepped
forward and into the glow from a nearby lamppost. Her brown hair had been pulled back in a twist, but strands of white had fallen free. They hung around her face in delicate wisps. The last time I had seen her, she’d had just a single streak of white at her temple; now her entire face was framed in white.

She wore a black trench coat, and when she glanced to her right, I saw deep gouges in her neck: the tail end of scars her collar didn’t quite hide.

It had been twenty-seven days since the breakout. In seventy-two hours, Winifred Sinclair would be capable of ripping my throat out with her claws. For now, she was still, essentially, just a reg.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous.

My gaze slid to the man at her side. Donovan. His mouth twisted into a bitter half grin as his eyes met mine. The smile chilled me almost as much as Sinclair’s return from the dead. A line of bruises ran down the side of his face, and the way his eyes narrowed made me think I’d be paying for each mark. There was something slightly off about the way he held his arm, and I flashed back to the memory of Kyle attacking him in the junkyard.

Like Sinclair, Donovan would soon be joining team werewolf.

He made a slight gesture with his left hand and six men broke away from the shadows at the edge of the parking lot. Each held a gun at the ready.

We had been so consumed by Amy’s video that we hadn’t noticed the noose closing around our necks. Even Kyle and
Stephen, with their werewolf supersenses, had been oblivious to the threat.

“Isn’t this . . . surprising.” Sinclair’s gaze passed over the boys before snapping back to me. “I probably should have guessed you’d be tangled up with Serena Carson after the trouble you caused at Thornhill, but I certainly didn’t expect to see you here. It’s like fate keeps twisting us together.”

“You know them?” Donovan shifted a hand to the holster at his hip. “The girl was at the junkyard. Thanks to her friends, three of my men are in the hospital.”

“Perhaps if your men had demonstrated more competence, there wouldn’t have been an issue.”

Given that an entire rehabilitation camp had fallen under Sinclair’s watch, I wasn’t sure she should be accusing anyone else of incompetence, but I kept my mouth shut.

She turned her focus back on me. It was an effort not to squirm under her sharp gaze. It felt like she could see beneath my skin, like she was weighing and measuring every thought and emotion I’d ever had. “I should have finished you off at the camp.”

I found my voice as Kyle let out a low growl and rounded the car to stand at my side. “Trust me,” I said with more bravado than I felt, “the feeling is mutual.”

I stared at Sinclair, trying to figure out how she had escaped the explosion at the transition house. Half a heartbeat later, the answer came to me. The attack had never been about eliminating Sinclair: it had been a cover to get her out.

“All those people—” The words caught in my throat as
I remembered what it was like to be trapped while everything around you burned. The terror and complete absence of hope as you struggled just to breathe. “They all died so you could walk free.”

She didn’t bother denying it. “Do you honestly think any of them wanted the life they had ahead?”

“They probably wouldn’t have minded the choice,” drawled Jason.

It was oddly reassuring to know his sense of sarcasm could stay intact even when surrounded by men with guns.

My gaze darted from Sinclair to Donovan and back as a horrible realization hit me. There had been time for Donovan and his men to kill Serena and me in the junkyard, but not a single shot had been fired. I tried to think back to what Hank had said about the attacks on the other wolves.
They managed to get three.
Not
kill
three,
get
three. A small distinction that hadn’t meant much at the time; now it meant everything.

The attacks on Serena and the other teens from the detention block had never been about tying up loose ends.

My stomach flipped as I clenched my hands into fists. “You want to start again. That’s why you went after Serena and the others. You’re not trying to cover up Thornhill; you’re picking up where you left off.”

Sinclair glanced at Donovan. At her nod, he slid his gun free of its holster. “Where is the hard drive?” she asked. “And where is Serena Carson?”

I met Sinclair’s ice-blue eyes and tried not to blink as my mind raced. They had snuck up on us in the parking lot, but
I was certain they hadn’t been there long enough—or had gotten close enough—to hear most of what Amy had said. And Sinclair certainly hadn’t been there when Stephen first told us about the hard drive and what was on it. Why did she want it and how had she known it was important?

A breeze swept through the parking lot, sending a crumpled newspaper and empty soda cans skittering across the asphalt. “What hard drive?” Even to my own ears, the bluff sounded weak.

Sinclair’s gaze narrowed as it slid to my right. Eyes on Stephen, she said, “The hard drive and Serena Carson. I won’t ask a third time.”

Donovan tightened his grip on his gun and thumbed off the safety. The sound it made shouldn’t have been audible, but I could have sworn I heard a sharp click—like the sound effect in an old western—as Kyle eased in front of me.

“Wait!” Stephen pushed past us and strode forward. “I’ll give you what we have—just let them walk away.”

“Stephen?” His name lodged in my throat, a strangled gasp that was more sound than word.

Stephen’s back was to us. “It’s all right, Mackenzie.”

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” Jason’s voice held the edge of a growl. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was infected. “You can’t trust a thing she says.”

But a second later, it became apparent that Stephen knew exactly who he was dealing with.

“They don’t know where the hard drive is,” he said. “They were never supposed to be part of this. Just let them
walk away and I’ll get you what you want.”

“You’re making demands?” A small, dark chuckle fell from Sinclair’s lips and slithered down my spine. “You don’t get to make demands, Stephen. Not after losing the data in the first place. Besides, they have something else we need.”

I stared at Stephen’s back as the words slowly sunk in. When they did, it felt like the pavement was crumbling beneath my feet. I took an involuntary step back, my shoulders colliding with Jason.

I looked up at him. Shock and anger fought for control of his face as he let out a stream of swear words. “I told you I didn’t trust him.”