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had a real haircut, eaten in a nice restaurant, gone to a concert, or kissed a boy.
    Now I’d done all those things, and more. Prairie had been there for me every step of the way. She knew when I was afraid and she always made time for me, whether it was to take me on my first visit to a real doctor, to teach me how to ride public transportation, or to help me balance my checkbook. She’d created our new lives with great care, making my safety her foremost concern. And she’d been right to worry, even as I chafed under her rules, even as I broke them, even as I resented her for loving me enough to keep me safe. She’d given me everything, and I’d thrown it away.
    As the Chicago skyline came into view outside the train window, I picked out the Sears Tower, the Hancock building, all the landmarks I’d come to love in the brief time that Prairie and I had lived with Anna and Kaz, and wondered if I was a city girl now.
    But deep down I knew that despite my new confidence, my new look, I still didn’t know who or what I was.
    I got off the train hoping Kaz would be waiting for me—and knowing that he wouldn’t. We had learned to be a lot more careful than that. I kept my sunglasses on, an expensivepair that had been a recent splurge on a shopping trip with Prairie, and walked purposefully in the direction of the shops lining the edges of the train station. I pretended to windowshop, pausing in front of a little store jammed with racks of costume jewelry.
    I lost track of how long I’d been standing there. A minute, two, five. I watched the reflection in the polished glass, a thousand people with a thousand different destinations.
    “Hailey.”
    I had been waiting for his voice, but I still jumped; my thoughts fell away and I blinked and spun around and there he was, right in front of me, and for a moment I forgot everything else.
    “Kaz,” I managed to whisper, and then I was lost in his arms.

“G IT UP ,” R ATTLER S IKES muttered, his lips inches away from Derek Pollitt’s freckled ear. It had been no problem letting himself in through a poorly secured ground-level window at Derek’s place, which was really just the basement of his mother’s crumbling ranch house on the west end of town, not far from the old Pack’n’Save they’d shut down when they built the Walmart Supercenter over in Casey. Kids took potshots at the sides of the Pack’n’Save building now, and spun donuts in the parking lot on days when slate skies left a slick layer of ice on the pavement.
    Rattler himself had let out some of his extra energy there a few times on days when all that power inside him felt like it wanted to itch its way out and leave him twitching and empty, days when he felt like it controlled him rather than the other way around. He didn’t like that feeling, no, not one bit.Days like that he split wood for hours, working in the freezing cold with no shirt on, feeling the splinters bounce off his torso, smug in the knowledge that they’d leave no mark on him. Or he shot a couple dozen rounds at the n in the abandoned store’s sign from across the parking lot, feeling the restlessness ease its way back down with every shot that met its mark.
    Which was all of them.
    Today, though, he hadn’t come over to this side of town meaning to shoot anything. He’d shot enough yesterday. He’d seen them coming, waited stealthy and still in the corner of the parlor, and sure enough, in they came sneakin’, too dumb to know what they were up against. Rattler nailed one of them in the heart and the other between the eyes, and weren’t they a sight, tumbling to the floor like the cowards they were.
    The thrill of the blood hunt was still in his fingers, making them sure and strong. And now he was about to sign himself up a lieutenant.
    If that was what it was called, anyway. Rattler had never been in the service, didn’t know anyone who’d served, and made the mental connection only because it sounded like a