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you want to be." He rubbed his face and leaned back, his upper body curving into itself.
    Zach took a deep breath. The brutality of what he'd just seen Mal inflict on himself on top of everything else had sucker-punched him. He breathed out and leaned in, touching his forehead to Mal's. "Hey. You don't know what I want." His heart raced, fear and something more.
    Mal's hand came up hesitantly, touched Zach's forearm, then wrapped around it finger at a time, taking it slow. He closed his eyes. "I wish you weren't here," he breathed. "You're in trouble because of me, aren't you?"
    Horror wrapped in some sort of macabre humor squeezed its way up into Zach's throat. He swallowed it back, trying his best not to open his mouth and blow everything.
    "Why do you do that? Take the blame for what's happening? They kidnapped us. You didn't do anything. You don't even know them. I'm the one who went with them last night."
    Mal pulled back, eyes narrowing, studying him. "Did they tell you anything?"
    "I'd have told you. Now stop staring at me and let me look at your ankle. You know I'm not thrilled with this nursemaid duty shit, so stop doing this crap to yourself."
    "No, I don't know that. That's all you've been doing, clucking over me."
    "Fuck you, I don't fucking cluck," Zach grumbled, hiding a smile when Mal snorted. "Grab the water jug. Ordinarily I wouldn't think this needs saying, but after what I just saw—stay close, okay? No more pulling. I don't ever want to see shit like that again."
    "I didn't think you talked a lot. Guess I was wrong."
    "You aren't wrong. I just talk to you more."
    "Why? You just talk more when you're nervous?"
    "Is there something to be nervous about?" Zach said wryly. "Stop with the twenty questions. I know you're hurting like hell. Shut up and let me see the damned leg."
    Mal threw him an irritated look and muttered something under his breath. Zach ignored him. They both settled on the packed dirt, side by side. Zach pushed Mal's jean leg up and examined his ankle.
    It was hard to make anything out because the white light from the window made the shadows black. Even after his vision adjusted, he couldn't tell anything because of all the blood. He poured water over Mal's ankle and saw multiple gouges shredding the flesh, skin swelling grotesquely tight around the chain. Blood welled in the cuts again as Zach watched. But for some reason it was the blood, dark and thick against Mal's dingy white sneaker, that affected him the most.
    This wasn't supposed to be happening to Mal. Zach understood the shit that happened to guys like him, but Mal had family. He was going to college. He was smart and funny, sarcastic and goofy and generous. He was supposed to lead the good life.   
    Zach finally gathered the courage to look at Mal's arm. Stared at it. Didn't touch it. The wound there had shrunk, the area in the center rough and reddened but no longer raw.
    Mal had been bitten less than twenty-four hours ago on campus. Not by a dog. By a wolf.
    Zach's fingers shook. His fingers rubbed compulsively at the blood on the sneaker, smearing it. Thinking. They'd told him the truth upstairs. Even some details.
    The first change always came with the waning moon. Chaining the whelps was a ritual that the pack followed whenever possible. The chains provoked their anger and accelerated the change, with the first prey there for the taking. 
    It all sounded crazy, easy to deny, but a part of him had believed from the minute they'd told him. And here was proof, or something near enough. Mal's arm would be completely healed in another twenty-four hours.
    He didn't know what to do. People wore their humanity like a coat of armor as if it guaranteed rationality, civility, but he'd seen plenty of monsters beneath the facade. Even his father. Especially his father. Zach barely knew Mal, but he trusted himself, his instincts. He believed with everything in him that Mal wasn't a monster, that it would kill him to become