Feral Read online

  The worst part was that her eyes were still open. And there were still too many spaces between the branches that her killer had laid across her head. She’d see the next horrible thing that would come for her.

  Her ears perked against the sharp, rhythmic clatter of freezing rain hitting the trees as she waited for it—a growl, a sniff, the crunch of footsteps. Here she was, as she’d long feared, in the woods, with all those wild animals, all those yellow eyes, all that danger.

  She couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that more hurt was still to come.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  ONE

  The university library table feels clammy under Claire’s forearms as she waits, staring at the stacks of journals she’s pulled from the shelves. She drums her fingers in time to the evening rain that taps gently against the window behind her. It’s been raining for so long that everything—even the interior of the library—feels sort of limp and damp. Everything except for Claire’s growing annoyance. That feels hard and dry and hot, like a driveway in August.

  “Where are you?” she asks aloud, frowning at her phone. She’s been asking it for twenty minutes, long enough for the pouring rain to ease to barely a trickle. Now, when she asks, her voice almost pleads.

  The world feels funny, lopsided without Rachelle—Claire’s sidekick, as her father is always calling her. The two girls are so close, their edges have blurred; it’s nearly impossible to tell anymore where one leaves and the other picks up.

  When Claire’s phone finally vibrates, she lurches to get a look at the screen. Grnded Rachelle’s texted.

  Claire shakes her head. It’s the senior—the one Rachelle has been sneaking around to see because her dad isn’t wild about him.

  Claire texts back, Do I need 2 save u again?

  And she smiles, waiting for the response. Thinking of the way she had, in fact, just saved Rachelle from the freshman who had transferred to their school at the start of the second semester. He was a scrawny thing who bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked and wore a uniform two sizes too big—attempts, Claire suspected, to seem taller and more muscular than he really was.

  Claire and Rachelle actually tried to be nice to him, the first day he’d shoved his winter coat into the locker next to Rachelle’s—they’d introduced themselves, but he’d rolled his eyes. “Losers,” he’d muttered before pushing past them, into the hallway traffic.

  They would have ignored him after that, but he started watching Rachelle spin her lock every day between classes. Memorizing the stops.

  “Go ahead and watch,” Rachelle began to tell him. “It’s not like I have anything to steal. You have a burning desire to get your hands on my civics textbook?”

  He always tried to pretend it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t watching her at all. His peach-fuzz mustache wiggled nervously across his top lip as he passed a pencil box from his backpack to the top shelf of his locker and back again, like he was never quite sure of the best place to put it.

  “Really?” Rachelle finally asked one day. “A pencil box? With comic-book-looking lightning bolts? What is this, the second grade?”

  He flinched, his cheeks turning horrible shades of mortified.

  Claire and Rachelle were not usually that type of girl—as pretty as they both were, they could have wielded their looks as weapons. But they weren’t teasers, not bullies; they weren’t into high school torture.

  Still, though, the boy had been rude, and they felt justified, somehow, in tormenting him a little. The day Rachelle succeeded in turning his face red, she and Claire walked down the hall, arms linked at the elbows, in a flurry of laughter.

  But on a snowy day late in February, the drug dogs came, parading the hallways, sniffing locker doors while everybody was in class. Slobbering over the faint but distinct aroma of a secret that a student was trying to hide.

  When they barked, a lock was snipped free, and the cops found it: a pencil box covered in lightning bolts. Filled with white crystal meth. Packaged into neat little plastic jewelry bags. Maybe twenty of them. Intent to distribute. Only, they found it in Rachelle’s locker.

  Claire immediately swooped in to the rescue, as fearless as a superhero in a satin cape. Told their principal exactly what happened.

  The boy disappeared as an investigation was launched. His desk sat empty in every one of his classes.

  That might have been enough for anyone else, but not Claire Cain, high school winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award—already, for an article she wrote her freshman year. She was destined for great things, every one of her teachers swore, and now, in her sophomore year, the journalism instructor eagerly approved when Claire wanted to write a piece on the incident with Rachelle—which appeared in the school’s weekly paper and online. The story was picked up, too, by local news stations. Claire was on TV. And Rachelle was vindicated. Claire put a stop to any gossip surrounding Rachelle; it was her superpower. Awe trailed behind her in the hallways, because stopping gossip was a power all her classmates wished they had.

  Claire and Rachelle went to the movies to celebrate their victory. They bought the extra-large tub of popcorn, and Claire whispered to Rachelle about her freshman “boyfriend,” because they were that kind of close—Claire could tease Rachelle about anything, even something as serious as being framed for selling drugs, and know that Rachelle would never take it the wrong way.

  Remembering it all, Claire keeps staring at her phone, until the response finally comes: Next time.

  She laughs, because it’s true. She’d rescue Rachelle anytime.

  She decides to go ahead and photocopy the scholarly articles she’s already found in the general science journals that she knows so well, thanks to her father, the professor. She hugs the journals to her chest as she skips downstairs. She hogs the best copier on the first floor, not that the librarian minds. She is Claire Cain, after all, daughter of Dr. Cain, who received the Romer Prize back when he was still a predoctoral student; he is destined, everyone swears, for the Romer-Simpson Medal, the highest award given by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. They are alike that way, both of them racking up awards; they are both the academic type, and when Claire wins her Pulitzer, she just might thank the libraries at the University of Chicago.

  Claire chuckles at her silly fantasy as she shrugs on her coat and hoists her backpack onto her shoulder. Waves good-bye to the library assistant, a worn-thin college girl who smiles and waves back. Now that she’s snagged a few sources, she and Rachelle can brainstorm ideas for their paper later. The assignment isn’t due for two weeks, anyway.

  She heads straight for the door.

  And thinks nothing of the feet she hears on the tile, a student or a prof or a TA leaving right behind her. She even holds the door for him—the low “Thank you” says it’s a man. She thinks nothing of the others, either, clustered around the base of the front steps, smoking.

  Claire spends so much time at the university where her father teaches that it just seems natural for people to gather this way. College kids always linger around stairs and buildings, clustered, talking, laughing. Claire passes them, still feeling light about her texts with Rachelle: Next time. Rachelle loves her, needs her, as best friends do. Claire is needed. Knowing it makes the night air smell clean.

  The group out in front of the library lets go of the stairs and follows. But even this doesn’t seem odd. Not yet.

  The night feels far too cold to belong to early spring; Claire’s breath is visible—just as visible as the fog that’s building, laying like a gauzy curtain over items no more than five feet away. Her knees are going pink beneath her uniform skirt. Her nose tingles.

  The rain that had been dancing against the library windows is picking up again, but each drop feels sharp against her face. The rain is freezing. It’s already early April, but winter seems to be insisting
on one last good storm. The sidewalk beneath her is turning the kind of slippery that almost makes her feel as though the soles of her shoes have wheels.

  Claire hates the unsteady sensation.

  They laugh, the group behind her, as Claire walks down one street, rounds another corner. They shout big talk, egging each other on.

  Claire’s phone buzzes. Dad stuck in lab, her dad’s assistant has texted. Rain 2 freeze. Go home now. Take R with u.

  Claire slips her phone back in her pocket. When her father has his grad assistants text her, it means he’s completely unreachable. He’s locked the door of his lab and won’t be out again until he’s ready to die of starvation.

  He doesn’t know that Rachelle never showed. He doesn’t know Claire’s alone.

  Sure, she could go back to the library and call campus security, and she could have someone walk her, now that night is falling, to the science building. She could hang out with the grad assistant until her dad is ready to go home. But she suspects that by the time Dr. Cain finally pries himself out from his lab, the streets will be too slick for driving or walking. They’ll be stuck trying to figure out a way to sleep on his office furniture.

  Claire would rather sleep in her own bed.

  She passes block after block. The group behind her trails by only about six feet. Their shouts are getting louder. The ground slicker. Cars are sliding. Claire needs to get home, because soon cars will start skating right off the road, careening onto sidewalks, where they can knock her flat. In fact, she figures she’d be smart to go ahead and get away from the main thoroughfares, all those slippery roads and cars with no traction, not on ice.

  She turns down an alley—in Chicago, alleys are as common as trees, after all; they’ve never been the sinister shadow to her that they might have been had she grown up in another city. Passing by an empty garage, though, the laughter behind her starts to have a different ring to it. Sharper. A little mean.

  “Schoolgirl!” she hears one of them say, and the skin tightens on the back of her neck. Hairs turn into porcupine needles. She’s still in her uniform. They’re talking about her.

  She eyes the pavement, where she can see their long shadows swagger beneath the streetlights. She can smell their cigarettes. And something else—something metallic—the vague smell of danger.

  Her heart thumps hard enough that each beat makes her fingertips tingle.

  Now she does want to turn around, run back to the library. But the alley is so narrow, she’ll send herself straight into the arms of the group behind her if she pivots on her heel. The only thing she can do is walk straight ahead, searching for an escape to open up in front of her.

  Her eyes bounce about, between nearby streetlights and distant tree limbs that are all beginning to sparkle in the moonlight that peeks through the clouds, now that the ice is growing thicker. Icicles are beginning to form, dangling like stalactites from the edges of buildings. Freezing fog is accompanying the drizzle; when it lands, it sticks to all the cold surfaces. Before it settles, though, it creeps along the sidewalks like a cat on the hunt.

  It seems as though the entirety of Chicago has rushed inside, all of them shaking their heads in disbelief. “An ice storm in April,” they’re all saying, as they thunk saucepans onto stoves, boiling milk for hot cocoa. “Who’d have ever thought?”

  Claire speeds up, flexing the thighs that feel tight beneath the wintry chill. The footsteps behind her thunder in a way that makes Claire believe not only that the boys are trailing her, but that they know she’s now aware of being followed.

  They can smell her fear.

  She keeps eyeing the shadows that the streetlights draw long and lean at her side, noting that one of the figures behind her bobs up and down, obviously walking on the balls of his feet. A skinny kid, she can tell from the tiny shadows his arms make beneath the hiked-up sleeves of a coat. Skinnier than the rest. But wearing enormous clothes.

  “You like ratting us out?” one of them shouts. “You like ruining everything?”

  At this point, she starts to run.

  So do they.

  Claire screams, her arms pumping. But they’re so fast. She looks over her shoulder once, and she sees them, black faceless silhouettes surrounded by the fog. They run, and she can only think to dart straight into the arms of a parking lot, behind an apartment building.

  The lot is vacant, even though there are lights on in a few apartments. They will catch her, she thinks, if she doesn’t get out of this alley. Her only available option is a parking lot, behind an apartment building.

  Claire runs across the cracked pavement, because even though the cars aren’t parked here tonight, the edge of the apartment building is so close. She will race around the side of the building and be on a street with lights and the apartment building’s front entrance and she will run inside and the boys will not hurt her, not there, not when she screams in the lobby, making the worker at the front desk reach immediately for the phone: 911.

  But when she gets there, to the far edge that she expects to sprint around, finding her escape, there is no out. The brick building butts up against the next, without so much as an inch between.

  Claire pants, staring at her dead end. Still determined to save herself, she pulls her phone from her pocket and she dials 911.

  Before it connects, she can hear the feet behind her grow louder, closer. She knows that everyone inside the apartment building has closed their windows against the storm, and with their TVs on or their phones pressed against their heads or their earbuds in, they will never hear her, no matter how loud she screams.

  The phone finally begins to ring. But the feet are so close. There will not be time to tell the operator where she is.

  Claire tries, in that moment, to steel herself against what is about to come.

  She is frozen; she is caught. She stares at the seam between the two buildings, barricaded. She does nothing, just stands, and as seconds pulse, she knows there is no preparing herself for what they are about to do to her. There is no predicting it. She can guess, but her mind doesn’t work like theirs do; her imagination cannot come up with ways to hurt another human being.

  “911, what is the nature of your emergency?” the operator finally asks.

  “Please, God,” Claire whispers. “Don’t let me die.”

  The boys are here. They surround her; they kick her to the ground.

  Claire’s phone flies from her hand, strikes the brick wall, shatters.

  Shouts explode as her parka is shredded, the downy lining hitting the air like the insides of a feather pillow.

  She fights back, but there are so many hands, all of them punching and scratching and tearing her clothes. She claws against the pavement, trying to hoist herself onto her knees, trying to crawl. But they hit her, knocking her down. Her skin splits open. It doesn’t even feel as though she’s being cut—she feels as though their hands and their nails and their anger, it’s all tearing her, like she’s an old bedsheet being torn into rags. They rip an inch-thick section of hair straight out of her scalp. They shred her shirt, until it hangs in tatters. Until she’s in nothing more than her bra.

  One of them picks up a metal trash can. He dumps it, scattering slimy, foul-smelling refuse across her body. He slams the can against the back of her head, turning her skull into a gong. They laugh, take turns picking it up and throwing it on her over and over. The force of every blow turns so hard, so vicious, she doesn’t even know what they’re hitting her with anymore. She only knows that it can’t be their fists. And all the way through it, they’re shouting with glee, enjoying it.

  She presses her palm against the pavement, tries once more to pull herself forward. Even now, she’s trying to crawl away. But they strike her arm—the pain is so agonizing, she’s not sure if they hit her with something blunt—some sort of club—or something sharp, like an ax. She screams as their laughter and their cheers explode again.

  The same pain hits her legs. They’re crushing her, snapping h
er bones. She swears she can hear them break.

  The fingers of her right hand crunch when the boys begin to take turns stomping on them. Smashing them beneath their boots like cockroaches.

  Hands reach under her skirt. Fingers curl under the waistband of her underwear. And she knows. Beaten and broken and dizzy from so much pain and the loss of so much blood, she knows what’s coming. There’s no stopping it.

  The siren sounds like another cheer, at first. She’s still whimpering soft pleas to stop when the police jump from the car. And then, in that moment before the truly horrendous can happen, the hands disappear from under her skirt. Feet stomp about her—the gang and the police both. She listens to shouts and other bodies being thrown to the ground and cuffs rattling.

  The girl cop is the one who comes to Claire’s side. She has blond hair in a ponytail, Claire notices—it’s yellow like sweet corn. But she’s got kind of a thick body—like there are lots of hours at the gym under her uniform. She’s got that look of a woman who knows how to kick any guy who wants to rough her up to the curb. There’s a soft roundness about her face when she looks at Claire. She’s worried.

  The girl cop tries to push Claire’s hair from her clammy face. But her long hair is tangled in the blood on her chest and her arms. Her hair is smashed into her bleeding sores, and when the girl cop tries to push her hair away, she winds up tugging the strands from her wounds, and it’s like being sliced into all over again. Claire wails as the girl cop picks up her hand, and as other voices shout about calling the paramedics.

  The scream startles the girl cop, and she reaches up to grab hold of a small gold charm hanging from her own neck. She slips it off her head, puts the necklace in Claire’s hand. “It’s St. Jude,” she whispers. The patron saint of the Chicago police force—and lost causes.

  She frowns as she wraps her fingers around Claire’s wrist. Searching for a pulse. She shakes her head; her charm has failed. “It’s too late for you,” she tells Claire. “You’re dead.”