Wolfen by Alianne Donnelly Page A

her, as if
she was spoiled meat. They’d left her unharmed.
    “Nate and Connor protected the rest of us,” she said. “They
put themselves in danger every day to hunt for food so we could eat.” Except
they’d had a strange habit of whispering to each other a lot, and they’d never
brought back all that much, if anything.
    And then Nate had killed Tam.
    Sinna hugged herself, squeezing her eyes shut against that
memory. “Okay, so maybe they weren’t the best people, but the rest of them were
my friends.” Poor Isaac. He shouldn’t have died the way he did. And what would
happen to Amy and Matt now? And David! She remembered he’d tried to help her,
even though he had to have known it was useless. In the end, the weak,
vision-impaired “geek” had done more for her than the “pretty boy” who’d played
at being her hero.
    “No offense, little bit, but your definition of friendship
scares the shit out of me.”
    Bryce grunted in agreement. Sinna was beginning to
understand how he carried his meaning across by the different sounds and
gestures he made.
    Aiden frowned. “Question for you now. Something that’s been
bugging me since we got you out. Do you know what you are?”
    Sinna shook her head in confusion. “What do you mean?” The
food and water had eased some of her headache, but the weariness remained and impaired
her judgment. She was in a wide-open house in the middle of God-knew-where with
two muscle-bound behemoths who’d apparently saved her life, but couldn’t extend
the same courtesy to the rest of her group. Logic insisted there was a reason
for that, and not a particularly good one. Still, she was more afraid of the
open window than the two in the room with her.
    Aiden groaned and sat up, rubbing his face. “I can see this
is going to take a while.”
    Bryce, too, came around to face her, suddenly very interested
in the topic of discussion.
    “Okay!” Aiden said, psyching himself up. “You remember when
the con—the, uh, Grays took over?”
    She nodded.
    “Good. Where were you?”
    Sinna glanced from Aiden to Bryce and back. What did that
matter? “I was in San Francisco. At home.”
    “With who?”
    “Gerry, my den mother. That’s what I always called her. She
wasn’t my biological mother, though.”
    Aiden and Bryce shared a look. “What about before that?”
    Sinna’s face grew cold. Darkness. A hole in the ground,
thirteen stories deep. Climbing up one rung at a time. The cut on her arm
burning, tearing open, soaking her bandage with blood. She couldn’t see it; she
smelled it, though. Keep always looking up. See the light, your guiding
star. The dark at the bottom is where the monsters are.
    “Sinna?” This time his voice was softer.
    “It was a long time ago.”
    “I know,” he said, “but try to remember.”
    She didn’t want to! The shivers came back, and she hugged
her knees to her chest, feeling tears sting at her eyes.
    Bryce curled his hands over her shoulders, and she was so
out of it, she forgot to be afraid of him. “Calm.” He looked straight into her
eyes. “Calm.”
    Sinna swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. “Ch-Chernobyl,”
she said.
    His eyebrows twitched in a quicksilver frown, but he smoothed
it out and looked back at Aiden.
    “She must have been very young,” Aiden said. “I don’t
remember her either.”
    “You were there?” she asked.
    “Oh, yes.” Aiden’s mouth twisted. “We were created there.”
    Created . Not born . Gerry had used the same
word whenever Sinna had asked about her parents. She’d always said something
vague about them being the best of the strongest and the smartest. She’d called
Sinna her “little treasure.”
    Bryce ascertained her state of mind, then removed himself to
sit next to Aiden, who motioned for her to continue.
    “I don’t remember,” she said. “We had to climb up this dark
shaft, and when we came out, everything was dead and destroyed. We saw a
chopper taking off, and Gerry cursed at