I trotted up the driveway, staying alert for any signs of movement on the grounds so I didn’t get surprised again. Now that I was here, I felt like a total idiot. Why hadn’t I gotten the silverware out of Jonah’s car? I had nothing to protect myself with, and I needed to remedy that fast. When I searched my pockets, all I found was a lone mitten, a pocket pharmaceutical guide, and a spork. I had no idea how the spork had gotten in there and no hope that it would withstand a werewolf attack, but holding it made me feel marginally better.

  I rang the bell, looking over my shoulder with paranoia. I was ready for anything except for the trophy wife who opened the door. She was scary tan, obviously surgically enhanced, and had glossy black bangs that hung over her eyes, almost completely obscuring her vision.

  When I recovered from the shock, I said, “I’m looking for Sebastian, please.”

  “Huh?” She looked genuinely confused.

  “Sebastian? I need to see him. Now.” I made a mental note to not use any big words and strain the few brain cells she had left.

  “You’re blue.”

  I took a deep, calming breath. “I know.”

  “Upstairs.”

  She jerked her thumb toward the stairs, like I needed to be instructed on how to get from the first floor to the second. Then again, idiocy was probably common in her usual social circle, so I tried not to take offense. I stepped into a foyer as large as the first floor of my house, complete with a fountain full of koi.

  The trophy wife jiggled back down the hall to whatever cavernous depths she had come from. Once she was gone, I went upstairs and was faced with a long hallway with a row of identical white doors on either side, all of which were closed. I figured I might as well start with the ones closest to the stairs, because I didn’t want to get boxed in by a werewolf. I felt pretty impressed with myself for thinking of that. I hadn’t spent all that time listening to Jonah play DORK, aka Dragons of Roargan Kross, for nothing; apparently, I’d picked up some battle tactics along the way.

  Of course, this meant I was a bigger dork than I thought.

  I took a deep breath and flung the first door open. A millisecond after I committed to this course of action, I realized I could be barging into Sebastian’s bedroom. If I was wrong, if Rocky had been coincidentally kidnapped by a different werewolf altogether, this could be bad. I could accidentally walk in on him in his underwear. I’d need therapy for the rest of my life.

  Luckily, the room turned out to be a guest room. A nauseatingly frilly one.

  I shut the door on Frillville and moved down the hall. This time, I knocked first. I figured I had a better chance of keeping Sebastian calm if I didn’t embarrass him by barging in. If I could keep him from wolfing out, maybe we could settle this without a fight.

  Behind the second door was a bedroom that had obviously been a guy’s at one time, so I entered cautiously. It was uninhabited except for the hordes of scantily clad bikini models staring at me from the walls. And the ceiling. I had the intense urge to get a Sharpie and draw mustaches on them, but I didn’t.

  The final door on this side of the hall. No answer to my knock. But when I cracked it open, I immediately knew I’d found the right place. I could sense the geekiness before I could even see inside. It smelled like stale Mountain Dew. I pushed the door open the rest of the way, and it was like walking into my own room, only done in darker colors and about twice the size. There were books and papers strewn across every available surface. On the desk beside the door sat a copy of my favorite anatomy book, balanced precariously atop a rack of test-tube-shaped lights, and I automatically moved it. Fire hazard. Besides, that book was too good to go up in smoke.

  I didn’t see Sebastian or Rocky. It was probably too much to hope that he’d be sitting on the bed, waiting for me to show up so he could surrender and return my best friend safe and sound.

  “Sebastian?” I called, pitching my voice low.

  There were two doors on the left-hand wall. I arbitrarily picked the one on the left. But by this time, I was sick of the whole door-opening production. I didn’t exactly fling it open, but I didn’t knock, either.

  It was a bathroom. Sebastian stood in front of the foggy mirror in his underwear, shaving. When I barged in, he immediately sliced his cheek open.

  “Ow!” he yelled, clapping his hand to the cut.

  “Superfluous hair!” I shouted, pointing at him. “I knew it!”

  He didn’t seem to know where to put his hands. One was on his cheek, staunching the blood. The other hovered between his tighty-whities and his concave chest, trying to cover them both but completely failing. Finally he grabbed a towel, smearing blood all over the pristine white cotton, and wrapped it around himself.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Where’s my best friend, you bastard?” I shot back.

  “Who?”

  He only looked confused. I could sympathize; I was a little foozled myself. I’d expected him to go all werebotty, but he was mousy, as usual. Maybe his bots were broken.

  “You abducted my best friend from my house. Or don’t you remember?” I said.

  “What? I don’t—What are you talking about?” he sputtered.

  “Give me your hand. I want to see something.”

  He held out his hand automatically. I bet I could have gotten him to jump up and down on one leg and make chicken noises if I’d wanted. He was just that spineless. I found it increasingly more difficult to picture him as any kind of killer, even an accidental one.

  I didn’t see any signs of abnormal hair growth, but he had fine white-blond hair, so it was hard to tell. He snatched his hand back before I could feel for stubble.

  “Well?” he asked, growing a spine at the most inopportune time. “Are you satisfied now? Because I’d like you to go so I can put some pants on.”

  “I … you can’t …” I couldn’t stop stammering. I tell him my friend got abducted, and he’s concerned about his pants? I didn’t understand what the heck was going on in his head, so I went on the offensive. “I’ll go as soon as you tell me what’s up with the nanobots.”

  “How did you—the—what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It wasn’t the most convincing act I’d ever seen.

  “Nanobots.” I enunciated the word carefully. “I know you have them, and I know they got Holly killed. And the other guy—that’s her brother, right? And now my friend got taken by someone affected by the bots. So you can either spill the whole story or I’m telling the police. By the way, my friends know where I am, so getting rid of me isn’t going to help your situation.”

  Yeah, that last bit was a blatant lie, but he didn’t even seem to notice. Apparently, I was better at lying to werewolves than I was to my parents. Not like I tried to lie to them often, but it happened from time to time.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  He didn’t respond, so I pressed my advantage. I got right up in his face, even if it did put me uncomfortably close to his underwear. I had no time for prissiness.

  Although I reserved the right to barf retroactively.

  “How exactly did it go?” I asked, pinning him with my eyes. “You got sick of all the jocks picking on you and figured you’d show them for once? So you injected yourself with untested nanobots. That’s not smart, dude, and you know that. The potential side effects are staggering. I mean, you’ve seen Spider-Man, right? You should damn well know better.”

  “That’s not how it went at all,” he said, but he couldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Yeah?” I snorted. “Then why are you shaving off all the hair?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The hair, you idiot. The nanos cause extreme hypertrichosis.”

  I grabbed his arm and yanked it toward me. Unfortunately, said arm was holding up the towel, which slithered to the floor too quickly for him to grab. I had proof. I wasn’t letting it go, even if it was wearing uncomfortably tight underwear.

  “See, you’re shaving it off.…”

  But then I stopped. His arm had a smattering of fine blond hairs on it. No stubble. Nothing like the furry stuff I’d pulled out of Bryan or the samples I’d taken from the scene of the attack. Not at all.

  Was I actually wrong about something science-related? The thought made me all shaky and breathless, like the girl in a vampire romance. I sank down to a squat and tried not to flip out, because then I would have to stage an intervention on myself.

  I’d thought I was over all those worries about my potential hackness once I’d defeated the zombies, but they all came flooding back. Because really, what did I know? I’d cured Grable’s disease, true, but that didn’t exactly make me the high school equivalent of Alexander Fleming. I was back to hackdom again; you’d think I would have been used to it by now.

  The bath mat I crouched on was an ugly tan color, at odds with the rampant lacy crapness infesting the rest of the house. The bathroom itself burgeoned with pink lace: the curtains on the window, the rose-printed soap holder, even the frill-covered tissue box. It was an anomaly, this bath mat, but I couldn’t get my hacky brain to make sense of it.

  “Kate?” Sebastian folded his arms and looked at me with a stern expression. “Are you on drugs?”

  I looked up at him, and that simple head motion threw my crouch entirely off balance. I put one hand down to steady myself. The bath mat felt coarse underneath my fingers, and I jerked instinctively away from its yucky crunchiness. Something stuck to my fingers, and I whipped them around wildly trying to get it off, like maybe it was infective or something. Tufts of tan fluff scattered across the floor; I could see a pile of it under the vanity.

  That bath mat was covered entirely with hair. And I’d just touched it.

  I leapt off the mat, shoved an increasingly bewildered Sebastian out of the way, and washed my hands. Twice. In scalding water. Not that I thought the hair was going to do anything to me, but I didn’t exactly know what part of Sebastian’s body this hair came from.

  “What the heck is wrong with you?” he asked, picking the towel up and wrapping it around himself again. I noticed bits of hair stuck to the towel, but I didn’t mention them because he might drop it again, and my overstressed psyche couldn’t take much more of that.

  “Sebastian?” I tried to sound all logical and not entirely grossed out. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, why do you have a bath mat covered in human hair?”

  Sebastian and I stood in his bathroom. Actually, that’s not quite descriptive enough. We glared at each other over a hairy bath mat, and he was wearing only a pair of undies and a towel. It wasn’t exactly the kind of situation I expected to find myself in when I’d gotten out of bed that morning.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but we both knew he was lying.

  “This!” I waved my hand, which despite the vigorous washing still had little strands of hair stuck to it. “The hair. On your bath mat. The nanos stimulate hair growth, don’t they? One of my friends turned into a werewolf and threw me into a wall yesterday. Rocky is missing. So I do not have any patience left. You better start talking right now, damn it, or I’m calling the cops.”

  His shoulders slumped at the mere mention of the police. The towel slumped too, but I kept my eyes glued firmly to his face.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. But it’s not what you think.”

  “Of course it isn’t. You injected yourself with untested nanomachines by accident. Whoops.”

  I was awfully proud at the amount of sarcasm I managed to pack into those few words, but he didn’t even seem to notice. Unappreciated again.

  “I didn’t use the nanobots on myself. I was going to, but my girlfriend talked some sense into me first.” He met my eyes for the first time since I’d burst into his bathroom. “You’ve got to believe me. I’ll admit that I took them from Nanotech; I thought maybe it would change things. Look at me. I’m twenty-two and I still live with my parents. My only social interaction is on Roargan Kross. I’m tired of being a nerd. You know what I mean.”

  I resented the implication that I was somewhere in his league. “Actually, Sebastian, I have no freaking clue.” I scowled, but I didn’t yell because I remembered all too well what a wuss he was. He’d devolve into a quivering blob of primordial jelly, which would be cool to experiment on but not so helpful when it came to extracting information on the nanobot front. “But go on. I assume Holly was your girlfriend?”

  He nodded, and his face started to scrunch up in what I’d begun to recognize as his pre-breakdown expression. I quickly changed the subject. “Okay. So you stole the nanobots from work. And then what happened?”

  “My brother took them. I was in here with the syringe, trying to get up the courage to use them on myself, but Holly talked me out of it. I decided to return them to work so no one would ever know they were gone in the first place. But my brother overheard us. His bedroom’s right next to mine. He took the bots from me by force and used them on himself.”

  “He sounds like a great guy,” I said.

  “I didn’t know what to do. But nothing happened right away, and I started hoping they hadn’t worked. We’d never used them on humans, you know. But the next morning, he came in and threw me into the wall.” He paused, rubbing his head.

  “I feel your pain. Trust me.”

  “He came home from school early, ranting about throwing encyclopedias. I would have thought he was hallucinating except that he’d miraculously grown fur; it was still growing so fast that I literally watched it get longer. He wanted to know about the bots, kept rambling about how great he felt and how strong he was. And he kept talking about recruiting, like he was some kind of supervillain or something. He held me up by the throat, and I couldn’t breathe. So I told him everything.”

  “What do you mean, everything?”

  “I’ll give you the documentation so you can read for yourself. The nanobots enhance muscular response, making people faster and stronger. He was particularly interested to know that they’re bloodborne.”

  I snorted. “Of course. He wants to start his own pack. I take it he’s a Twi-hard?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “Then Holly’s brother Herbie came into town to visit, and we were hanging out at the coffee shop one night while Holly was working. My brother showed up and started pushing me around, and Herbie threatened to call the cops. My brother just snapped, and he tore Herbie apart with his bare hands. I saw it; I was right there, and I guess I dropped Dr. Burr’s ID when I ran. He’s always leaving it places, and I’d found it on the floor on my way out of work and meant to give it back to him.

  “Anyway. You have no idea how scared I was. I came back here and locked myself in my room. Holly didn’t know anything, but my brother was convinced that she was going to turn him in. He was in here ranting and raving about it. I think the bots are making him paranoid. And then he killed her too. I know he did.”

  He broke off, his lower lip quivering. Part of me felt bad for him, but mostly I wanted to spin him around and check for a spine. There had to be one in there somewhere.

  “So why not go to the police?” I asked.

  He gave me a don’t-be-an-idiot look, which under the circumstances was the most insulting thing he could have possibly done. I wasn’t the one who stole potentially dangerous nanomaterials. And then there was the part where he was voluntarily standing on a bath mat covered in his brother’s hair. That went beyond stupidity and into psychosis territory.

  “Isn’t that obvious?” he asked. “I don’t want to die too.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s say that I believe you. What do you plan to do about it?”

  “Do?” His eyes widened. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing: I’m installing three dead bolts on my bedroom door, and I’ve got food supplies stashed under my bed. I’m locking myself in until he burns out. It’s got to happen sometime; his body’s on metabolic overload. The bots are hypersensitive to adrenaline; we found out in the animal testing. The more he produces, the quicker he’ll burn out. So all I’ve got to do is wait.”

  “And then what? He dies?”

  Sebastian shrugged uncomfortably. “Anything’s possible.”

  I stood there for a minute, thinking hard. Or trying to, anyway. The bare-chestedness was really distracting. “Do us both a favor and put on some clothes, will you?”

  He looked down, like somehow he’d forgotten the fact that he was standing there in his undies. I didn’t know how; I certainly hadn’t been able to forget it. He wiped the dried blood off his face and put on some pants. A shirt would have been nice, but I wasn’t about to ask for miracles.

  After he got dressed, he turned to me for further instructions. I was ready.

  “First, I need that documentation you mentioned before.”

  He handed over a heavy notebook bound with a pink plastic spiral. “If somebody catches you with this, I’m going to be in big trouble. That’s proprietary information, you know.”

  I glared at him. “If someone catches me, this binder will be the least of your troubles. You understand?”

  “Yes.” He hung his head.

  “All right. Do you have any idea where I can find your brother?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

  “Well, you’re no help,” I said. “I’m going now. If you see your brother, call me.”

  I rummaged through the junk on his desk without bothering to ask first, because he didn’t have the spine to say no to anything as far as I could tell. Finally, I found a pen. I scribbled my number on the back of an envelope and tacked it to his wall, where he couldn’t lose it without really making an effort.

  Something was bothering me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I had the feeling that I was missing something important, like a mental itch I couldn’t quite reach. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a lot on my mind. Rocky was still missing, and Bryan was a werewolf, and Jonah probably had a concussion, and my relationship with Aaron was possibly over, and I had to figure out how to deactivate the nanobots without killing anybody, especially myself. And if that wasn’t enough, I was officially late for Rockathon setup. Kiki was probably going to throttle me if someone else didn’t get there first.

 

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