Chapter 2 The Voice That Shouldn’t Exist

"You're late," Collins said, stepping out of the dark like the shadows themselves had been holding him in place, waiting for me.

"You're insane," I replied quietly. "Do you know what happens if anyone sees me out here with you?"

"Worse things are already happening right now, Sonia. You just don't know about them yet."

Midnight air pressed cold against my skin, the east training hall looming behind him like a shape that had teeth and knew how to use them. I'd snuck past two dorm monitors and a security patrol to get here, and every instinct in my body was screaming that I should turn around and pretend this conversation never happened.

I didn't turn around.

Four days ago I'd been the most hated girl in werewolf history. Tonight I was standing in the dark with the brother of the boy I supposedly murdered, holding a folded piece of paper that could either clear my name or bury me deeper than any headline ever had. There was no way through this where I walked away untouched. There never had been, not since the moment Wesley's claws came at my throat instead of my shoulder.

"Talk," I said. "You've got five minutes before I go back to bed and forget this ever happened."

"You won't forget it. Not after tonight." He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper, holding it out to me like it burned his fingers to touch it. "This is a copy of my brother's private medical file. The real one. Not the one the academy released to the press."

My hands shook taking it from him. "Why would you have this?"

"Because I stole it three hours ago from a locked office, and if anyone finds out, I'm as good as dead too." His eyes, so much like Wesley's it made my chest hurt, held mine without blinking. "Read it."

I unfolded the paper with fingers that didn't want to cooperate, moonlight barely enough to make out the words. Medical terminology, dates, signatures I didn't recognize. Then I found the line that made the whole world tilt sideways for the second time in four days.

Time of death: three days prior to championship match.

"This isn't real," I said in utter shock and disbelief. "This can't be real."

"I wish it wasn't." His voice cracked, just once, just enough to prove he wasn't as controlled as he wanted me to believe. "My brother was already dead, Sonia. Three days before you ever stepped onto that field. Whatever you fought that night, whatever looked at you and talked to you and told you it wasn't your fault, it wasn't Wesley. Not really."

"Then what was it?"

"I don't know." He said it so quietly I almost missed it, and a boy who always knew everything admitting he didn't know anything scared me worse than the file in my hands. "But I intend to find out, and I need you to help me."

"You're asking the wrong person. I don't know the first thing about necromancy, or dark magic, or whatever this is." I shoved the paper back toward him, my hands still shaking. "You're an Alpha's son. You have resources I couldn't dream of. Lawyers, trackers, pack enforcers who'd tear this academy apart for you without asking a single question. Why come to me?"

"Because every one of those people answers to my family first and the truth second." He didn't take the paper back. "My mother wants this buried before the pack council convenes. My father hasn't spoken Wesley's name once since the funeral arrangements were made, like saying it out loud might make people start asking questions he doesn't want answered. Everyone around me has already decided what story they're going to tell. You're the only person left who hasn't decided anything yet, because you're too busy trying to survive being hated by an entire species."

"That's not exactly comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true." He finally reached out and took the paper back, folding it with careful hands, like it was the last piece of his brother he had left to hold onto. "I need someone who'll ask the questions nobody wants asked. Someone the killer already thinks they've dealt with. That's you, Sonia. Whether you like it or not."

"Help you how? I'm the one everyone thinks murdered him."

"You didn't murder anyone. You killed a stranger wearing my brother's face, three days after my brother was already gone. That's not the same crime, Sonia. That's not even the same species of crime." He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the heat rolling off him despite the cold. "Someone kept his body walking and talking for three days after his heart stopped. Someone made sure it would be you standing across from him when it finally went down. I want to know who, and I want to know why, and you are the only living person who spoke to that thing in its final minutes."

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to stop the shaking. "Why are you trusting me with this? I killed him. Even if it wasn't really him, I still did it."

"Because you have no reason to lie to me. Every single person in this academy has a reason. My family's rivals want this to destroy the Waverly name. My family's allies want it buried so it doesn't destroy their own reputations by association. The academy wants it to disappear so their championship isn't remembered as a murder scene." His throat worked, though I could see him fighting to keep his voice steady. "You're the only one with nothing to gain from whichever truth we find. That makes you the only one I can trust to actually look for it."

Somewhere behind the training hall, a branch cracked. We both froze.

"Did you hear that?" I whispered.

"Get down." Collins grabbed my wrist and pulled me behind the stone wall bordering the training grounds, his body pressing close to mine in the dark, both of us barely breathing. Footsteps moved through the grass on the other side, slow, deliberate, the kind of walk that belonged to someone who wasn't supposed to be here either.

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was certain whoever was out there could hear it. Collins's hand found mine in the dark, not gentle, not romantic, just the desperate grip of two people who both understood that being caught here together could end both our lives in very different but equally final ways. I could feel him counting his own heartbeat against my palm, could feel the exact moment his breathing shifted from controlled to ragged.

"Someone's watching us," I breathed.

"Or someone followed one of us." His grip on my wrist hadn't loosened. "Sonia, if anyone connects us, if anyone knows we've spoken, we're both in danger. Whoever did this to Wesley isn't finished. He was a message. And messages don't stop until somebody answers them the way the sender intended."

The footsteps stopped directly on the other side of the wall.

Silence stretched between us so complete I could hear my own heartbeat hammering against my ribs, could hear Collins's breath catching beside me, could hear the strange quiet of someone waiting to see if we would move first.

Then a voice spoke from the darkness, calm, familiar, and utterly wrong in a way that turned my blood to ice water.

"I told you not to trust her, Collins."

Wesley's voice.

Collins went rigid beside me, his hand crushing my wrist hard enough to bruise, and when I turned to look at his face in the moonlight, I saw an expression there I hadn't seen since the moment his brother's body hit the grass in front of twenty thousand screaming witnesses.

Pure, undiluted terror.

"That's not possible," Collins whispered. "That's not possible, he's dead, I saw the reports, I held the…"

He couldn't even finish the sentence, his whole body shaking now, and I realized in that moment that whatever courage had carried him through stealing that file and meeting me in the dark had run out completely the second his brother's voice reached his ears again.

"Come out where I can see you," the voice said, closer now, moving around the wall toward us with footsteps that sounded exactly like the boy I had killed with my own hands four nights ago on that field, in front of the entire world. "Both of you. We have a great deal to discuss about what happens to people who go digging where I've told them not to."

I looked at Collins. Collins looked at me.

And somewhere in the dark behind that wall, whatever wore Wesley Waverly's voice was walking closer with every single passing second we spent frozen in place, deciding which one of us it wanted to reach first, and neither of us moved fast enough to stop it.