Jonah rolled down the passenger-side window to wave at me. “You’re in the back,” he yelled.

  I threw my backpack in and myself in after it.

  “So,” Dad said, pulling away from the curb, “what are we eating tonight, Kate? Indian? Mexican? Or did you go for one of our old standbys?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dad.”

  He arched his brows at me in the rearview mirror. “You were in charge of making the reservations for Mom’s welcome home dinner. Please don’t tell me you forgot.”

  “Fine,” I growled. “I won’t tell you.”

  It didn’t take long to find the number for Shalimar, Mom’s favorite Indian restaurant, on my phone. And it was easy to get a reservation, since it was only Thursday.

  “Done.” I snapped my phone closed and stared out the window for the rest of the drive while Dad and Jonah discussed Mythbusters episodes in excruciating detail.

  The sulking got pretty tough to maintain once we parked in the short-term lot and made our way into the crowded airport terminal. It was impossible not to get excited; I hadn’t seen my mom in six months except for on the computer screen. She’d wanted to come back after the zombie fiasco, but by that time it was all over, and it just didn’t seem to make sense to screw up her sabbatical just so she could come hold my hand.

  Now I couldn’t wait to see her.

  That explains why I found myself running as soon as she cleared security, like I was an actress in one of those movies where everyone’s dashing into each other’s arms in slo-mo while violins play in the background. She threw her arms around me. I had to lean a little to put my head on her shoulder. That was new.

  I didn’t let go until Dad cleared his throat.

  “I missed you,” I said, pulling back. I would have let go entirely, but she snagged the sleeve of my coat first. Her eyes were keen beneath thick, slightly smudged glasses.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  This was my chance to vent, and I knew I should take it. It made a lot more sense than huffing around like a drama queen. But this really wasn’t the time or the place for it. Jonah and Dad were waiting impatiently; they’d missed her too. And besides, I could take care of myself.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Welcome home.”

  But I made a mental note to unload as soon as I got the chance. Mom tended to give pretty good advice when you could get her head out of a beaker. Unfortunately, I could barely get a word in edgewise over the next hour, because Jonah had to give her a play-by-play rundown of everything he’d done in the past six months, like we hadn’t been Skyping with her twice a week the entire time she’d been gone. By the time he was done monopolizing her, I was already halfway through my tandoori chicken.

  “I wonder what’s in the dessert case today,” Dad said, pushing his chair back from the table.

  Jonah stood up. “Wait for me. Man, I hope they have that fig and honey ice cream.”

  “I think I’ll follow.” Dad patted Mom’s hand. “Give you two girls a chance to catch up too.”

  Mom’s eyes followed them as they crossed the restaurant and started loudly debating the contents of the stuffed dessert case. I noticed wrinkles on her face that I’d never seen before, and her wild curly hair was longer than it had been when she’d left. Somehow, the differences seemed bigger now that I was seeing her in person.

  “You’ve been quiet tonight.” She took a sip of her lassi and looked me over.

  “I guess I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “I’d been hoping that Aaron would be joining us. I’ve heard so much about him that I feel like I know him already.”

  The lump in my throat was very tough to swallow. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen, Mom. Things aren’t going too well with us right now.”

  In the background, I could hear my dad interrogating the waitstaff on the differences between Indian and American ice cream in an embarrassingly loud voice.

  “Do you ever have a hard time balancing it all?” I blurted out. “Because I suck at it. It feels like the minute I fix one thing, something else has gone to crap. I feel like I must not be trying hard enough.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” she smiled. “But yes, I find it tough to say no to things. Which explains why I took the visiting professorship in Germany. I loved the work, but being away from all of you was miserable.”

  “So I just have to deal with it?”

  “No, you have to figure out what you’re willing to sacrifice. I’ll never keep the cleanest house. I have a small number of friends, but they’re the ones who really mean a lot to me. I’m terrible at trivia. I don’t watch TV or craft or take up hobbies unless I’m really interested in them. The bulk of my time is reserved for the two things I love the most—my family and my job.”

  “It’s that easy, huh?”

  “Well,” she said, the corners of her mouth quirking up, “it’s not exactly rocket science.”

  “Did someone say ‘rocket science’?” Dad walked back to our table and planted a kiss on Mom’s cheek. “Coincidentally, I happen to be a rocket scientist! Did you know that?”

  “Yes, dear.” Mom grinned at me.

  I forced a smile. Maybe she was right—all I had to do was prioritize. And repair my relationship, organize a fund-raiser, solve a medical mystery, and catch a murderer.

  Easy.

  Mom drove me to the morgue on Friday, so I didn’t have to ride the bus. I really needed to talk to Aaron, but I supposed a couple of hours wasn’t really going to make that much of a difference.

  I’d woken up with a clear plan, so I felt pretty good as I pushed open the door to the morgue. I’d check to see if either of our two corpses had the skin ants like Bryan. I’d find out if there had been hairs at either of the other crime scenes. And then I’d amaze Aaron with my powers of deduction, and he’d realize I was the only girl for him. There were holes in this plan, but I was willing to improvise.

  Dr. Burr was not part of said plan, so when I pushed open the door and saw him washing his hands at the prep sink, I nearly fell over.

  “Dr. Burr?” I gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Working.” He shut off the faucets with his elbows and meticulously dried his hands with a paper towel. “There was another attack behind a restaurant on Wednesday. Apparently, some enterprising soul did a crichoidectomy with a pen cap right in the middle of the parking lot and saved the fellow’s life. The detectives found hair that matched a few strands found at the other scene. They released me last night and cleared me to autopsy the bodies. I’m quite motivated to catch this killer, given all the inconvenience he’s caused us.”

  It was so good to see him that I was getting a little teary. It seemed silly to get all overemotional over a guy had who mentored me for about fifteen minutes so far, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “I’m rather surprised to see you.” But he didn’t look upset; he smiled at me instead. “I figured you would have run for surgery by now.”

  “I wanted to see an autopsy.”

  “Well, now’s your chance. Sebastian called in sick today. The stress has gotten to him, poor boy. Between this job and his internship over at Nanotech Industries, I think he works too hard.”

  “I didn’t realize he worked somewhere else,” I said, but I wasn’t really paying attention, because I was in the process of putting on my very own sterile gown. And nitrile gloves. And a face mask. I looked like a real doctor, and it was every bit as awesome as I’d thought it would be.

  For a while, I got lost in a haze of tissue condition and safety precautions and proper incision techniques. I wasn’t allowed to do any cutting by myself, especially on the murder victims, but Dr. Burr put his hand over mine and guided the scalpel for me. And really, he didn’t have to do much guiding. It was like my hand knew exactly where to go and how much pressure to bear.

  We autopsied Herbie first, although Dr. Burr was still calling him John Doe. I wasn’t so sure how he’d react to the news that I was investigating on my own, so I made sure not to let anything slip. And then we did Holly. By the time it was all over, we were staring at each other in complete and utter confusion.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Dr. Burr said for the umpteenth time, throwing up his hands.

  “Tell me about it.” I paced back and forth, chewing on the end of my braid. “Okay, let’s talk it out. Maybe we’ll come up with something.” He gestured for me to go on. “Here’s what we know. Both of the deceased were victims of brutal attacks. The police reports note extensive blood loss and open wounds. Their injuries were presumably enough to kill them. But on autopsy, both victims are found to be in perfect health, with no signs of bruising and not a single break of the skin. Not even a shaving nick.”

  “Holly supposedly had her appendix out, according to her medical records, but there’s no scar and the appendix is present. I’ll double check with the mother once she arrives later today,” added Dr. Burr. “I’ve seen a few cases in which they’ve grown back, but it’s rare.”

  “Right. So either the police were hallucinating, or somehow the injuries healed themselves.…”

  Dr. Burr jerked to attention, looking at my face. “You’ve just thought of something.”

  “Maybe.”

  I moved forward, hesitantly putting my fingers to Holly’s neck, her arms, her hips. The skin was cold but pliant. I didn’t feel anything moving around inside her, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. If she had whatever Bryan had, the ants had already done their job. They’d fixed everything.

  “Well?” Dr. Burr prompted.

  “Let me try one more thing.” I pulled off my gloves and dumped them into the infectious waste bin. “Do you have a magnet handy?”

  Now he was really looking curious, but he went into the storage room and pulled a magnet off the fridge. It said, Pathologists—WE SEE DEAD PEOPLE.

  I snorted. “Funny. Now let’s see if this works or not.”

  When I set the magnet down on the specimen tray next to the vials of blood we’d taken from Holly, nothing happened. This had to work; I moved the magnet a little closer. And then the vial of blood rolled across the tray and stuck to the magnet with a clack.

  “Magnetic blood?” asked Dr. Burr, his voice hushed with awe.

  “Exactly.”

  The door buzzer picked that moment to go off, and we stared at it with identical expressions of exasperation. Dr. Burr got up to answer it, mumbling words under his breath that I was sure my delicate underage ears didn’t need to hear.

  “I hope this is good,” he said into the intercom.

  “Dr. Burr?” came the crackle-voiced reply. “This is Detective Lynn Despain. I was hoping to talk to you.”

  It felt like the universe was telling me to spill everything. So after she came in, I did.

  Well, not everything everything. I skipped the relationship bits and the neurotic bits and the part where I got thrown out of the hospital, but I told them everything else about the magnetic blood and the mutant hair and the accelerated healing. All of it.

  “And, you know,” I said, “I’m pretty logical, and I don’t believe in ghosts and stuff. But this really does sound like the werewolf legends, doesn’t it? You’ve got the hair and the super strength and the super speed and the healing. The only thing that doesn’t fit is the blood.”

  Dr. Burr patted my hand. “I’m sure we can come up with another explanation, Kate. I’ll send the blood to toxicology. Perhaps this is a very extreme case of lead poisoning.”

  But Despain didn’t seem so sure. “I wouldn’t write her off just yet, Doc,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a logical cause underlying it, just as there was with the zombie phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.

  “I’m going to tell our lab techs about this and see what they can come up with,” she said. “We’ll look into this, Kate. In the meantime, let me get you back to school.”

  I should have been relieved, right? School was where I belonged, especially if I intended to set some priorities. I needed to see Aaron and Rocky and Kiki and to be a normal teenager for a while.

  But I wasn’t relieved at all.

  When Despain dropped me off in her squad car, I made my way toward the front doors of the school. But as soon as she was out of sight, I veered off into the parking lot. Luckily, it was the middle of fifth period, and too cold for anyone to eat out in the quad. Otherwise, there would have been no way for me to sneak off unseen.

  Jonah had given me a copy of his keys after I’d left my backpack in his car over the weekend one time and woke him up before noon. He was going to regret that when he found out that I took his car. But desperate times require desperate measures. Like driving without a license and semi-stealing your brother’s car.

  I still couldn’t believe his luck. I had a cruddy old car, not like I was complaining as long as it got me from point A to B without breaking down. But he’d lucked into a cute, if aged, two-door convertible. And it was all because I’d cured the son of the guy who ran the local used-car dealership during the zombie apocalypse. Sure, Jonah drove me around since I was still license-impaired, but that didn’t change the fact that the car should have been mine.

  So I drove off, über-tempted to put the hood down. But it was starting to snow—little flakes that couldn’t decide if they wanted to fall down or fly sideways. I decided against it.

  At the intersection of Wills and State, I hesitated. Left toward my house or right toward the hospital? I flicked on the left-hand blinker. Maybe Bryan was conscious. Maybe he’d seen his attacker.

  Maybe he could identify them, werewolf or no.

  Skipping school was a little nerve-wracking, but I’d done it during the zombie outbreak, and it seemed to me that the key was to act like you were exactly where you were supposed to be. So I walked into the hospital without looking back. As I emerged from the elevator onto Bryan’s floor, I heard a loud buzzing from the nurses’ station. “Looks like that darned sensor on bed twelve slipped off again,” someone was saying. “Do we have another one somewhere?”

  I walked up to the desk just in time to see two nurses disappear into the back. Perfect. I went to Bryan’s room. The light above the door beeped and flashed incessantly. Because I was a genius, I concluded that he must be in bed twelve with the malfunctioning sensor. Of course, the number twelve on the door didn’t hurt.

  I silently thanked the gods that my epilepsy was under control; otherwise, those flashy lights would have probably sent me into total neurological meltdown. And then the nurses would have sent me down to Emergency, where some sleep-deprived intern would tell me what I already knew, which was that I had just had a seizure. Then I would make some smart-ass comment about how I already knew that because I had more than five brain cells, and then he’d burst into tears and leave the room. I knew these things. I had experience.

  So it was a really good thing I hadn’t had a seizure in months.

  I reached the door, turned the handle, and pushed it open, since that’s pretty much standard operating procedure as far as doors are concerned. A monstrosity leapt out at me. It looked like Bryan, if you added about seventeen pounds of dark brown hair and a Klingon forehead. His face was all bulgy and distorted. I couldn’t decide if his teeth were elongated or if they just looked that way because he was baring them at me.

  He was a werewolf. Jonah was never going to let me hear the end of this, assuming that I lived. And if I died, he’d probably taunt me via Ouija board.

  Before I realized what was happening, Bryan barreled into me, forcing all the air from my chest in a high-pitched squeak. My very brief martial arts training flashed through my mind; I knew I ought to roll, or strike, or grapple, or something other than be thrown around like a rag doll. I settled for stumbling backward, trying to suck air into my lungs.

  He grabbed me by the arms and slammed me against the wall. My vision swam, and when it cleared, his face was inches from mine. His nostrils flared as he took in my scent, but his eyes showed no sign of recognition or even coherent thought. His brow was drawn down into a simian squint, giving him an almost Cro-Magnon look underneath the fur.

  “Bryan,” I said softly. “It’s me. Kate. I’m your friend. I’m here to help you.”

  He growled, deep and low in his throat. I heard footsteps coming down the hall, shouts of alarm that sounded like they were coming from miles away. He threw me toward the nurses’ station, and I sailed through the air in what felt like slow motion. I had way too much time to contemplate how badly it was going to hurt when I landed. And then the world exploded with pain.

  I came to with my cheek pillowed on cold tile. You’d think that would have been uncomfortable, but my head wouldn’t stop throbbing, so the chill felt pretty good. There was something in my eye; I wiped it off with a shaky hand. It tinted my fingers blue. And my arm was all blue too. Peachy.

  “Oh my god!” someone exclaimed, and I heard rapid footsteps coming in my direction. I wanted to warn whoever it is that there was a werewolf on the loose, but I couldn’t make my mouth work yet.

  A blob came into my field of vision, but without my glasses, I had no idea who it was. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Bryan—unless he was trying to fake me out by putting on a pair of hot pink scrubs. I tried to focus, but I’d whacked my head pretty hard during the struggle. And when I say “struggle,” I mean “part where I got my butt kicked.”

  It was the same nurse who had thrown me out before. She checked my pulse with a gentle hand. I did nothing. Frankly, I was content to lie there on the floor for the next eternity, or at least until my head stopped hurting.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked. I nodded and immediately regretted it.

  Another nurse came running down the hall, and there was a rapid exchange of details between them before she went off to call for a gurney to take me down to the ER. A third nurse ran into Bryan’s room and then down the hallway. She was probably calling security to notify them of a missing patient. I didn’t think they’d catch him, but it was a nice thought.

 

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