Hemlock 03: Willowgrove (33 page)

Yes
, I realized, pulling in a deep breath. I would do anything to keep what had happened to Serena from happening to anyone else. I remembered what Kyle had said to me last night:
sometimes the right thing doesn’t feel right at all
.

I handed the USB key over.

“No one said anything about this.”

I shrugged. “They just told me to deliver it.”

Grumbling, he plugged it into his computer and then double-clicked the one file it contained: Amy_Walsh_Memorial.

A series of photos faded in and out. Amy as a little girl. Amy in a kayak. Amy shoving a snowball down Jason’s back. If I strained my ears, I could just make out Taylor Swift coming from the computer’s speakers.

“This thing is almost six minutes long.”

“There were a lot of pictures her family wanted to include, and since Senator Walsh has been such a strong supporter of the rally . . .” The words tumbled easily from my lips. All that time I had spent pretending to be infected in Thornhill had helped my lying skills.

The guy closed the media player, then dragged the video into another window before turning in his swivel chair and handing me back the USB drive. “We’ll run it after this speech. Is anyone here to introduce it?”

I shook my head. “The rest of the family thought it would be too difficult to attend.”

The man let out a noncommittal grunt and scrawled
something on a piece of paper. He handed the note to the girl with the strange temporary tattoo. “Run this over to the stage. Let them know there’s been a change in the lineup and get them to intro the clip.”

He glanced back at me. “Anything else?”

“How long until it airs?”

“Ten minutes. Maybe a little longer if the guy speaking right now runs over.”

“Ten minutes.” I swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”

It was enough time for me to get to the RfW protest, but how could I be sure the others had made it there? Kyle was supposed to meet me at the booth. Since he hadn’t . . .

Panic locked around my chest like a vise.

What if the Trackers had taken them? What if they were strung up somewhere or lying dead with bullet wounds to their chests? What if Donovan had gotten to them and they were in the back of a van on their way to another detention block?

What if . . . ? What if . . . ? What if . . . ?

As long as I’d had the video clip to deliver, I had been able to keep most of my fear at bay. Now my task was done, and the dam holding all that fear in check was starting to crack.

I pushed the panic aside: I needed to think, and I couldn’t do that if I fell to pieces.

“Do you have cameras set up around the square?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have one covering the west entrance to the park?”

“You mean where they strung up the wolves?” He turned back to his computer and clicked through windows until a live feed came up. “We have a camera there, but the bigwigs told us not to run footage from it.”

The picture wasn’t great: The angle was high and strange and the whole thing wobbled as though the camera was shaking. Shadows made it impossible to pick out much beyond the arch itself. My stomach rolled. Two unmoving forms were still stretched out beneath the arch—Trey and Eve—but there was no sign of Kyle, Serena, or Jason.

Good
, I told myself.
That has to be good.

“Some shit went down over there about twenty minutes ago,” said the guy, “couldn’t tell what happened, but it died down pretty quick.”

Without replying, I ducked under the tape and pushed my way back into the crowd.

Kyle had promised to meet me here. Something had to have happened.

Whatever it is, he’s all right. They’re all right.
I said the words over and over under my breath like a prayer.

Anything else wasn’t possible.

I
FOUGHT MY WAY THROUGH THE PRESS OF PEOPLE, HEADING
for the western arch in the hope I could somehow track the others from there. It wasn’t a great plan—it wasn’t a plan at all—but I didn’t know what else to do.

I kept glancing at the screens along the sides of the park. One was still broadcasting scenes from other rallies, but the other two were showing the stage in the center of the square. I had been warned the speaker might go over, and he didn’t show any signs of slowing down.

“Are you tired of being afraid?”

“YES!” roared the crowd.

“Do you want to take back our communities?”

“YES!”

The chorus of consent was deafening, and each resounding “yes” made me flinch.

The arch came into sight as the crowd around me thinned. My pulse thundered in my ears as my eyes passed over the bodies and the area around the entrance. Just like
on the computer monitor, there was no sign of Kyle or Jason or Serena.

A patch of nearby shadow moved and I caught a glimpse of broad shoulders and blond hair.

“Jason?” I started forward and then froze as Stephen stepped out of the darkness.

I turned to run, but he was faster.

He grabbed my arm, holding it far more tightly than Sinclair had, holding it tightly enough that it felt like it would snap.

I opened my mouth to yell for help, but something hard and solid dug into my ribs. Without looking down, I knew it was a gun. It seemed strange, somehow: why bother with a gun when you could kill—had killed—with your bare hands?

“Don’t even think about screaming.”

I tried to swallow past the sudden lump in my throat. “Stephen, what are you doing here? We thought . . . we figured . . . Why are you still in town?”

“Where else was I going to go?” The stale smell of alcohol rode his breath and flipped my stomach. His eyes were vacant, empty. “The Trackers are here to protect everyone from the monsters. That’s what I am, isn’t it? I’m a monster, aren’t I?”

I didn’t answer and he pressed the gun more firmly against my ribs. “Aren’t I?” he asked again, his voice a growl.

I shook my head. “You’re not a monster, Stephen.” As much as I wanted to hate him for betraying us and working with Sinclair, he wasn’t evil. Selfish, definitely, but not evil.

“You’d say anything right now.” His voice was as flat as the expression in his eyes.

I didn’t try to break free as he pulled me along the outskirts of the square: it was all I could do just to keep my footing. A few people shot us curious glances, but no one seemed to notice the gun or my distress. There were thousands of people in the park, but not a single witness. “What do you want, Stephen?”

“Just to talk.”

He steered me toward the northeast corner of the square, to the row of concrete chess tables. As crowded as the park was, the shadow-filled corner was deserted.

Stephen let go of my arm so suddenly that I stumbled and had to catch myself against one of the tables.

He could shoot me right now.
The thought sent a wave of adrenaline crashing through me and was almost enough to make me run. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that I’d only make it a few feet before the first bullet hit.

I didn’t want to believe Stephen could hurt me, but after watching him stand by while Donovan had practically drowned Jason, seeing the emptiness in his eyes now, I couldn’t be certain.

“Sit,” said Stephen, gesturing with the gun, “and keep your hands on the table.”

I sat, spine ramrod straight and palms pressed flat to the concrete table’s checkered surface.

“We came here, once. Do you remember?” Stephen slid into the seat opposite me. He had changed his clothes
sometime during the past twenty-four hours, but his eyes were bloodshot and a day’s worth of stubble covered his jaw. He rested one hand on the table but kept the other hand, the hand with the gun, out of sight.

“I remember,” I said. I pressed my fingers to the table. “Amy wanted to learn how to play, so you took us here. You said”—I swallowed; it was oddly difficult to get the words out—“you said playing in the park was better than playing inside.”

Stephen’s gaze roamed over the black-and-white squares as though watching a game in progress. “You picked it up so quickly, but you never won. You hated sacrificing your pieces.” He raised his eyes to mine. Some of the horrible emptiness had left their blue depths. “I didn’t expect you to be here, you know. I never wanted to involve you in any of this.”

I had already been involved. I had been involved from the moment Ben had killed Amy, but I didn’t say anything.

Stephen passed his hand over his eyes. He looked tired. So tired. “Where are the DVDs, Mac?”

My hands shook on the table. “Why? So you can turn around and give them to Sinclair?” I didn’t add that Sinclair was currently in the loving care of a bunch of Trackers.

“Maybe. If she’s still willing to talk after last night. If not, I’ll find someone else. Someone at Zenith or another company.”

I stared at Stephen, desperately searching for some sign of the boy I once knew. “I don’t understand. You know what she was doing. You know she was torturing people. Why
would you want to help her?”

“Because she’s my best chance of not being this way.”

“There are worse things than being infected,” I said, voice low and careful.

“Easy to say when you’re human,” he shot back. His gaze slid to a spot just behind my shoulder. “Kyle’s infected. Ask him if he wouldn’t do the exact same thing in my place.”

“I wouldn’t.”

My breath caught in my throat at the sound of Kyle’s voice. I wanted to turn, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off Stephen. “He has a gun,” I said, voice as calm and level as I could manage. Why were people always pointing guns at me? “Stephen, you’re not like Sinclair or Donovan. You’re a good person. You don’t have to help them.”

His gaze cut back to me. “You think helping them is something only a bad person would do?” The look in his eyes was sharp and direct. “Grow up, Mackenzie. You talk about Sinclair like she’s evil. Do you have any idea how many wolves die in the camps every month? Fighting, food shortages, overzealous guards, suicides . . . what Sinclair is doing is a few drops in a very large bucket and it at least serves a purpose. A few lives to save thousands. Are you telling me you’d never sacrifice one life for another?”

My stomach churned as I considered his words. Was that what I had done when I turned Sinclair over to the Trackers? Sacrificed her life for ours? Yes, maybe, but it had been self-preservation. Sinclair had gone after us, leaving me no choice. Stephen was talking about the death of innocent people. Dozens, even hundreds of them. Maybe it was tempting
to look at people like they were part of an equation, but once you started down that slope, where did you stop?

When I didn’t answer, he glanced at Kyle. “Mac can’t understand. She’s human. But you can’t tell me that part of you doesn’t know it’s worth it.”

“It’s not.” Kyle’s voice sounded a little closer. “I’ve seen what Sinclair was doing to people—what she’ll keep doing. Letting her get away with it so I can have my shot at happiness would make me more of a monster than LS ever could.”

“You really don’t get it. Either of you.” Stephen ran a hand through his blond hair, leaving it a tousled mess. He looked angry and a little lost and suddenly terribly young. “It’s about the greater good.”

“The greater good?” I started to rise from the table and froze as he tensed. “Do you know what was in those files Sinclair had you steal? Did you know that CutterBrown unleashed the epidemic?”

Stephen closed his eyes, just for a second. “Yes.”

I chanced a nervous glance over my shoulder. Kyle was standing just behind me. To his left, I could see one of the video screens. It was still showing the speaker onstage with no indication of when—or if—they would get to Amy’s memorial video.

I turned back to Stephen. “Your father and the people he worked with helped create this world. And I’m sure they told themselves the same thing, that what they were doing was for the greater good, that they’d cure cancer and MS, and a dozen different things—all while turning a profit. And later? When they tortured wolves at Van Horne? I’m
sure they told themselves that they were just putting things right, just fixing their mistakes. The thing no one seems to understand is that if you have to constantly tell yourself that what you’re doing is for the greater good, then what you’re doing is probably neither good nor great.” Slowly, muscles aching from the tension coursing through me, I folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself tightly like I could somehow hold myself together while emotions threatened to pull me apart. “The wolf who killed your sister? He did what he did, in part, because he was infected and then tortured in Van Horne. Your father’s company helped create the monster who killed Amy. Tell me how anything about that can possibly be good.”

As I stared at him across the table, Stephen’s face changed. It became colder and harder, less like the boy I had known and more like a cornered animal. “You’re lying.”

“Do you really think Mac would lie about Amy?” asked Kyle, voice hard.

As he spoke, the first strains of a delicate love song drifted through the square. A heartfelt voice singing about a doomed affair wasn’t exactly what you expected to hear at a massive anti-werewolf rally, and the melody drew Stephen’s eyes to the nearest video screen.

He pushed himself to his feet and took several steps forward, the gun hanging loosely in his hand.

I twisted in my chair.

Images of Amy—more than a dozen in all—flashed across every screen in the park. When the last picture faded, text took its place. Statistics outlined the progress of the LS
epidemic from a few hundred cases in the beginning to the thousands of new cases reported this year.

The text had been Jason’s idea.
Trackers aren’t the brightest bunch
, he had said.
You have to help them connect the dots.
Even though the clips were mostly for the benefit of the dozens of news networks covering the rally, I hadn’t argued.

The statistics faded out.

The lupine syndrome epidemic began with CutterBrown Pharmaceuticals—a company based in Hemlock—which unleashed the virus.
Files flashed across the screen. A moment later, they were replaced with another line of text.
They went on to conduct illegal and unethical medical experiments on werewolves inside Van Horne rehabilitation camp. Experiments continued at Thornhill by Zenith Pharmaceuticals and Warden Winifred Sinclair.