The gulf between Tom and Andrew had not been bridged. In fact, Hannah suspected it had grown, even though now, at fifteen years old, Tom and Andrew fought much more rarely than they had at thirteen. Or if they did fight, they did it quietly, where Hannah could not hear them.

The thought that had struck Hannah earlier – that a powerful, invisible force was moving her family in directions none of them could control – was an ever-present part of her life now. Tom and Andrew did talk to each other sometimes, but the lighthearted joking and jostling that Hannah had grown up with was gone. They still slept in the same room, but neither of them was happy about it.

“Twins are supposed to be best friends,” Hannah had told them once. She had believed it at the time.

Even Hannah felt herself being moved by the mysterious force, no matter how hard she tried to resist it. Sometimes her parents would say things – tell her that her skirt was too short, or that she needed to remember to bring sneakers to school for P.E., or that she’d almost forgotten to take her Moon Pill – and a kind of white-hot blindness would overtake her, gushing like lava from her mouth, until their faces turned hard and red and she was sent upstairs to think about what she had done. She would pace up and down her bedroom floor, hating everything, until the force subsided. Sometimes it didn’t subside for days.

Hannah’s school life was different, too. To start with, the people had changed. It wasn’t just the little changes that had cropped up somewhere around the time they had turned eleven, either. The girls suddenly had hips to make up for their awkward new strides in height. The boys had shadows under their chins, and their voices came out in croaks.

And Hannah wasn’t an exception. Overnight, it seemed, she had turned long and thin and gangly, never quite sure what she was going to bump into or trip over next. She didn’t think she was much like the girls who had emerged from the summer looking sophisticated and grown-up. Her feet seemed too big for her body, and a colony of pimples had sprung up on her chin.

Her teachers appeared both irritated and unsurprised by the changes in their pupils. They started to assign them more homework and began to mutter under their breaths about how high school was going to be a rude shock unless they got their lives in order immediately. Hannah spent a lot of time staring out the window and passing notes with Ella. They didn’t have much to write about, other than upcoming school dances and who might take them (Jeremy Pryce still didn’t seem interested, to Hannah’s regret). Still, it was better than listening to Warren drone on about European topography.

Every so often their notes were confiscated, and Hannah and Ella were given detention. This earned Hannah deep sighs and tedious lectures from her parents.

“School,” said her father, “is important. Especially for you.”

“I know that’s what you think,” snapped Hannah.

“It’s a fact. Do you want to live in our basement for the rest of your life?”

“I’m going to live here forever because me and Ella pass notes sometimes,” said Hannah flatly. “Yep, that sounds right to me.”

Her father’s face reddened. “You’re grounded for a week. Not because you passed notes, but because you suddenly seem incapable of showing respect. To me and to your teachers.”

Hannah didn’t know what to say to that, so she slammed the door in his face instead. That got her an extra three days of being grounded, but she couldn’t make herself feel sorry. He deserved it.

***

The full moon that December was a source of extreme irritation for Hannah. For the first time since the Cobhams had left Wisconsin, Aunt Marissa was coming to visit, and she was bringing her new boyfriend, Daniel. She would be arriving on the twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve. The full moon was on the twenty-third.

Things got worse when Hannah found out that Chloe’s family would be having a caroling party that afternoon. Chloe’s family was quite well-to-do, and they were pulling out all the stops. Chloe had talked at length about the ice sculptures that were being delivered, the chocolate fountain they had rented, the Christmas trees they had decorated in each room of the house. Everyone that Chloe liked from Hannah’s class was invited. Ella, Aimee, Seb, Min, Ross – even Jeremy Pryce had been asked (and was going, according to the rumor mill.) Hannah was invited too, but it wasn’t as if that made any difference.

“No,” said her mother, looking unhappy.

“Why not?” demanded Hannah. “It’s at four. The moon doesn’t rise until after ten – I even checked – and I’ll be gone hours before then.”

“For the same reason we don’t let you go to school on those days. You’re never up to it. Do you remember how bad your headache was last month?”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“You hardly got off the couch.”

“I’ll get off the couch for Chloe’s Christmas party. The chocolate fountain will cure me.”

“Fine,” said her mother. “If you don’t want to think about yourself, think about other people.”

“Other people are going to Chloe’s party.”

“Exactly,” said her mother. “We don’t know Chloe’s family very well. We don’t know who the guests are going to be. We don’t know how they feel about lycanthropy. We can’t say for sure that nothing’s going to happen –”

Hannah opened her mouth, appalled. “I’m not going to transform at Chloe’s house!”

“I know you’re not, and there are other people who know that, but it can make people nervous, sweetie. I won’t have people talking about you; I won’t have them thinking that you’re –”

“That I’m what?” snarled Hannah. “They can think whatever they want. I don’t care.”

“I care,” said her mother, “and you are not going. Even if that means I have to lock you in.”

She didn’t – Hannah tested the door and checked – but she did spend the entire day at her side, allowing her no more than five minutes alone at a time. Four o’clock came and went. The old black-and-white films Aunt Marissa had sent blared from the TV. Hannah’s head pounded; a tingly kind of fury coursed through every vein. She put a couch pillow over her face so that her mother wouldn’t notice the way her eyes were starting to swim. She punched different places on the sofa, but it didn’t help.

“Think about Harry,” said her mother soothingly, putting a soft arm around Hannah’s shoulders. “He can’t go, either.”

“He doesn’t want to go,” said Hannah, her face still planted in the pillow. “He doesn’t like big parties. It’s not the same.”

She was almost relieved when the time came to go into the study and transform. She rejected all offers of DVDs and games with her brothers, since the only thing she really wanted to do was brood. She allowed her parents to check on her, forced the stiff, awkward wolf legs up the stairs, and headed toward her room.

She was almost there when the wolf’s keen ears picked up the sound of hushed, angry male voices.

“– not my fault if Dungeons and Dragons is more important to you than, like, actually having friends –” said one of her older brothers.

“– not my fault if smoking behind the gym is more important to you than not being a complete dickhead –” said the other.

“How many friends do you even have? Still just the two?”

“How many brain cells do you even have? Still just the two?”

Hannah changed direction almost immediately. For a few seconds, she stood in front of their door, ears pricked, wondering whether she should eavesdrop a little more first. What on earth had Andrew meant when he’d said Tom had been smoking? Smoking what? He’d never mentioned anything about that. She’d have liked to hear what he was going to say.

But the urge to stop this in its tracks – whatever it was – was too strong for Hannah to wait more than a moment. She was lucky that the door was slightly ajar. She shoved her way in. They noticed her when she growled.

They gazed at her in an identical, squinty-eyed way.

“This isn’t a great time, Han,” said Andrew slowly. “We’re – Tom and I are trying to come to an agreement on something.”

“And you think she’s going to interrupt that?” said Tom, laughing in a way that wasn’t laughing at all. “She can’t even talk, and it’s not like we were actually agreeing on anything anyway. Come on, Hannah, get up on my bed. We’ll hang out for a while.”

It was a good thing Tom had the lower bunk. Hannah jumped up on it and settled herself on his comforter. She gave her brothers a steady, disapproving glare, to show that she’d heard what they’d said and would accept no more of it. They sighed, but they didn’t start arguing again. Hannah supposed it would be hard to do anything when a wolf was staring you in the face. Even if you knew it was really your sister.

“I’m sorry if we disturbed you,” said Andrew quietly.

Hannah did not take her eyes off his face. They had to understand.

“Well, I’m not,” said Tom. “It needed to be said.”

“What – you had to insult me?” Andrew took his eyes off Hannah. “You had to prove just how much of an asshole you’ve become?”

“I’m the asshole?” Tom laughed again. “I’m not the one who thinks he’s better than everyone else.”

Hannah spent a long moment trying to think of what to do. Maybe snapping directly at Tom and Andrew’s faces. Maybe jumping off the bed and stalking out of the room. Maybe just staring at them for the rest of the night.

She thought, and then something funny happened: The wolf’s left front leg went numb. Hannah shook it a little, but it made no difference. In fact, the numbness spread until it had taken over her right front leg, too.

“Hannah?” said Andrew. “Are you okay?”

Hannah turned, to give him a different kind of stare, a more reassuring one. But as her body turned, something in her head turned, too. And the numbness spread – and spread – and spread – until her whole body felt light and unsteady and wrong.

And suddenly she didn’t know where she was anymore.

***

Hannah opened her eyes.

No – they weren’t her eyes. They were still the wolf’s eyes; it was still night; the moon was still up. Andrew’s robot clock shone neon yellow from its place on the desk. Eleven-thirty. So about half an hour had passed, then, since –

Hannah jolted upwards. The room looked different. Bits of Tom and Andrew’s blue-striped carpet had been torn out; she could see wooden floorboards from beneath it. A pile of high school textbooks lay splayed and scattered across the floor, their covers bent. The worksheets beside them had been shredded to ribbons. One of Tom’s pillows had been ripped across the middle, releasing an explosion of downy white feathers.

Tom and Andrew themselves were nowhere to be seen.

A terrible feeling crept inside Hannah, not unlike the numbness she had felt half an hour before.

She looked at the door. Someone had closed it. Everyone knew she was no match for doorknobs on transformation nights. Her parents had explained to her brothers that they were not to shut any of the doors in the house unless they wanted privacy in their own bedrooms.

And yet someone had closed the door.

Hannah approached it and listened as hard as she could. She could just make out the sound of her parents’ voices, which were talking at a strange, rapid speed. She knew she would have been able to understand everything they were saying if they were closer, so they must be downstairs. She could hear Tom and Andrew’s voices, too, filling in the spaces where her parents paused. They were all together, then. Talking.

Hannah felt sick.

She spent the rest of the night trying to put the room back together. There was only so much she could do in her current state, but if they saw what the wolf had done –

No. She wouldn’t let that happen. She managed to get the feathers into the wastebasket by picking them up with the wolf’s enormous jaws, which took an agonizingly long time. She stacked up the textbooks and shoved the ruined worksheets behind them. There was nothing she could do about the carpet, so she tried to place things strategically around the damage. Maybe by the time her parents noticed, they would just assume it was Tom’s fault.

When Hannah had cleaned up the best she could, she jumped up on Tom’s bed again and squirmed around until she was under the covers, her head placed squarely on his pillow. It was an uncomfortable way to sleep as a wolf, but for the rest of tonight, she was going to be as human as she could possibly manage.