The Shuddering

yelled.
    Wearing a look of terrified confusion, Jane jumped at the order and blindly did what she was told, her eyes brimming over with frightened tears.
    Ryan shoved Sawyer away from the door and across the kitchen. They scrambled into the walk-in pantry at the mouth of the hallway, Jane already inside, wide-eyed and terrified, her face a mask of bewildered dread. Oona ran in behind them, her tailbetween her legs, and Ryan slammed the door closed, searching for something to use as a barricade, but there was nothing. All the shelves were secured to the walls, immovable.
    “What happened?” Jane asked, her voice shrill with fear. “Where’s Lauren?” When Ryan didn’t answer her, Jane’s dread bloomed into hysteria. “ Where’s Lauren?! ” she screamed, clawing at her brother’s chest, trying to move him away from the door. Sawyer caught her by her arms, pulling her back. She thrashed against his grasp, twisting as she attempted escape, the blood from his fresh dog bite smearing across her arms as she tried to wriggle free. “Tell me where she is!” she demanded, her tone crackling with a desperate rage Sawyer had never heard before, one that made him feel numb. “Let me go!” Jane screamed, trying to escape Sawyer’s grasp. “I need to go get her!”
    A flash of Jane running out into the snow: those things falling onto her, snarling, fighting over which one of them got the best piece of his first love. His stomach twisted, the sudden burn of nausea threatening to double him over where he stood.
    “No,” he said.
    Lauren was dead.
    “You can’t.”
    She was dead .
    “We need to stay here.” His voice cracked.
    April was still out there. Scared. Alone.
    Ryan pressed his back to the door and slid down it, his head in his hands.
    “She’s gone, Janey,” Sawyer said, his voice warbling with emotion. “Lauren’s gone.”
    Jane stood motionless in his grasp, as though the life had gone out of her within a blink.
    Sawyer’s heart twisted, burning in his chest, his wounded arm throbbing in time with his pulse. He looked away, unable tostop picturing April out there, freezing, hiding from those things. But he couldn’t go out there. If he did, Jane would follow. Jane twisted away from him, crashed to her knees, and sobbed into Ryan’s shoulder. Her cry tore through Sawyer, punching him in the heart.
    “What happened?” she sobbed. “What happened to Ren, Ryan? What did you do to her?” She shook him, trying to get a response.
    “Wolves,” Sawyer said, his throat dry, closing around that lie. But it was all he could do to keep everything from falling apart. “A pack of them. It wasn’t his fault.”
    “Then why are we in the pantry?” she screamed. “Why aren’t you going out there to get April?”
    He swallowed against the questioning. How was he supposed to answer that?
    “You’re lying!” she wailed, turning on her brother again, her fists beating against his arm. “Why aren’t we going out there? Why are we locked inside like this?”
    Again, there was no response from Ryan. He was catatonic, lost in his own grief, drowning in guilt.
    “What was it?” she asked, turning her attention to Sawyer instead. “You saw it, didn’t you?”
    Sawyer shook his head faintly. “I only saw them for a second. I was too busy looking…” at Lauren . His words faded before he could finish.
    She turned her attention back to her brother. “Tell me what happened,” she sobbed. “Please.”
    Finally Ryan spoke, a reply so ominous it made the hair on Sawyer’s arms stand on end.
    “If I told you what happened, you would never leave this room again.”



CHAPTER NINE
    H e was trying to make sense of it, but all Sawyer kept seeing was that thing staring at him, those giant teeth clacking together as it stood in Lauren’s blood. There had been a pack of them, whatever the hell those things were, and while they had been grouped together, they had fought one another, suggesting a definite pecking order. But he couldn’t see past Lauren’s body, cracked open, dying.
    But when he had set eyes on her, he hadn’t seen Jane’s blonde-haired friend, but April Bennett, the girl he’d met in a vintage record store, the girl who had been reading the back of a Bauhaus album when he had spotted her from across the shop. She had disappeared while he flipped through vintage new-wave vinyl, and when he stepped out onto the sidewalk with a paper bag full of records tucked beneath his arm, she was