Havoc Read Free Page B

the car in drive as I pulled on my seat belt. “Always good to see you, Em Dub.”
    It was strange. Spencer and I had always gone to school together. Skopamish wasn’t a very big city, and though we had new kids coming in and kids moving away every year, those of us who’d lived there our whole lives more or less knew of one another. But until a week before, I’d never really noticed Spencer as anything other than the short, funny kid who always hung around with Mikey Harris and Zach Nickerson and Dalton McKinney, cracking jokes and making wise. He wasn’t exactly what I’d considered my “type,” not that I’d had any real experience to tell me what my type was.
    Then, when all this started—the nighttime changes, this urge to sniff out things—his personal scent gripped me in ways I’d never felt before. His smell identified him in that strange, werewolf part of my brain as my “mate.”
    I didn’t tell him this, but sometimes when we were apart I wondered if maybe this was on purpose. We’d more or less figured out that we were “created” by scientists at BioZenith, one of whom knew full well he could get my attention by using chemical versions of male werewolf pheromones. I wondered if they wanted us to seek each other out and pair up.
    But when I was actually side by side with Spencer, it didn’t matter. I’d spent years alone in my room, watching movies and TV, wondering what it was like to be around a boy you felt a deep connection with. Now I knew—the flutteriness inside, the desire never to be apart. It wasn’t exactly “I shall watch you sleep for an eternity, my immortal love,” but I liked what it was. I didn’t want to overthink it and make it go away.
    Spencer pulled onto the street and began driving us to school. Checking his rearview mirror, he said, “Right, so you want to go first?”
    Hot air blasted from his vents. I unzipped my hoodie. “Well, not much to say. I woke up and a shadowman was there. I thought it’d just go away like all the other times, but then it was right in front of me. I freaked out and swung a lamp through it, and it made my hand freeze solid.”
    He cast me a concerned look. “Are you okay?”
    â€œI am, yeah,” I said. “It disappeared after chasing me around the room for a minute. What about you?”
    He didn’t answer for a moment, and his eyes glazed over. I looked ahead to see if he was watching anything in particular—and found that we were about to barrel straight past a stop sign and into a busy intersection.
    â€œHoly crap, Spencer!” I shouted, jumping back up in my seat, my fingers clutching the pleather beneath me.
    Blinking back to attention, he slammed on his brakes. We jerked forward into our seat belts as the tires screeched to a stop a few feet past the stop sign. A car that had the right of way zoomed past, the driver leaning on his horn.
    Spencer looked at me sheepishly, his hair fallen over his eyes. “Uh, sorry, I was trying to remember. I have trouble concentrating sometimes.”
    My eyes wide and heart pounding, I lowered myself back into my seat. “It’s all right. Just, you know, if the choice is to pay attention to the road or remember something, I say avoid heading down memory lane.”
    â€œSorry, Em Dub.”
    He leaned forward to look both ways, then turned us right. The pheromones swirled together with the hot air from the heater, and my limbs untensed.
    â€œOkay,” I said after a moment. “So, what did happen with you?”
    Eyes on the road, Spencer furrowed his brow. “It was basically the same as you. The shadowman followed me around my room while I tripped over computer parts, then it disappeared.”
    Despite the warmth of the front seats, I shivered. “Those things are ridiculously freaky. I mean, are they ghosts? Aliens? Why are they following us around