Page 54 of Dark

“Why don’t you get changed and I’ll take you on up to the hospital?”

He took a step towards me. I shrank back, the barbed wire catching on my ruined shirt.

“You wouldn’t let me go with you before,” I accused.

Ben didn’t even blink. I wasn’t fooled. All it would take was me getting into that car, and I would be dragged down to the sheriff’s office. Probably after my outburst back at the house, they would have me assigned to juvie this time. And then I would never see August again.

“You know this isn’t your fault, right? August didn’t get sick because of what we talked about last night.”

I said nothing. But inside, I was back at the kitchen table. The long fluorescent lights hummed overhead, making my head spin, knowing, knowing what was coming even before Sofia said the Caldwells wanted to adopt us. Me picking at the placemat. And August bursting into tears.

Reaching into the front seat, Ben pulled out a paper sack. Placing it and my clothes a few yards from the shoulder of the road, he walked around to the driver’s side.

“You change your mind, I’ll wait a little ways up the road.”

Inside the sack was a juice box, two pale white strips of string cheese, and a slightly smashed peanut butter, honey, banana and granola sandwich that had Dallas written all over it.

I stared at that sandwich for a long time, trying to figure out if it contained ghost pepper flakes like that one time. Maybe ground-up crickets.

(Or as it turned out, just cinnamon. Dallas was weird.)

Ben’s cruiser was idling at the top of the next rise. I squeezed my eyes shut, swallowing back the animal instinct to run. Instead, I opened the door.

“Has August ever gotten sick before?” Ben asked once the dry, scrubby Texas hills were flying by. “Maybe when he was little? Did your parents ever—”

“I don’t remember,” I said sharply, clenching my fingers until my nails dug into my palms. My heartrate accelerated, the wolf clawing just beneath my skin. I never thought about that day. Never thought about the accident. Couldn’t.

Ben glanced over, brow furrowed. We rode the rest of the way to the hospital in silence.

August lay curled on his side, a plastic tube taped to the back of his hand, looking smaller than I’d ever seen him. Sofia stood over him, fingers sifting through his hair, eyes ever trained on the door. Always the Tracer. A lump the size of a softball clogged in the back of my throat. I gripped the cold metal bedrail, watching a furrow form in August’s forehead as he fought to breathe. I tried to speak, the words choking in my throat. And then, to my horror, hot tears welled up. Humiliated, I scrubbed at my face.

Pack laws weren’t the same as human. Ferals who couldn’t be brought back from insanity were destroyed. Your right to property or position within werewolf society extended only to what you and those loyal to you could hold. Where did that leave a six-year-old boy with an illness none of us had ever seen?

Images slammed into my skull. A sliced-up banana for my Cheerios. A man with square-framed glasses hunched over a laptop. Reminders not to miss the bus. My backpack slumped by the door. A police officer crouched down, her young face soft with concern—

All of it, gone.

Gone.

Gone.

I wadded everything up into a tight ball, dark and toxic as a cancer. The nightmares. The stomachaches. Everything that kept me up at night. None of it mattered. Only one thing did.

Two months later, in the old county courthouse downtown built of pink Texas granite, I stood beside my brother before a judge. By then August had suffered two more episodes. Sofia had taken him to Dallas to see a doctor. A supply of veterinary painkillers sat in the medicine cabinet at all times.

I couldn’t have said for sure when it happened. Maybe after that day in the hospital. Maybe because of that stupid cinnamon-peanut-butter-banana sandwich. More likely it was the day I caught Ben crying out in the barn where my brothers wouldn’t hear. But somewhere along the way, between nights catching fireflies, family dinners where Brody and Cal fought over the last fish fillet, and trips to the Dairy Queen after Ben got off from work, the Caldwell place had started feeling like someplace I could see myself calling home.

And so when the judge asked if this was what I wanted, I answered without hesitation.

And became Ethan Kirby Caldwell.

9

Ethan

FLASHING RED AND BLUE LIGHTS lit up the night sky outside the trailer park. We were escorted past the police barricade on foot, wind from the fire thrashing the tall cottonwoods that lined either side of the long gravel drive. I threw an arm up, smoke and hot ash stinging my eyes. Hayden kept her head down, her dark ponytail whipping against my cheek.

Yeah, she was pissed. I’d promised her my brothers and I would handle this, keep her safe. Keep her sister safe. And instead we’d been going at it in the bathroom at a club while someone torched her place. All because I destroyed everything I touched.