Free Destiny and Deception by Shannon Delany Page B

some of her expectations for me were set a bit too high, considering current circumstances. Derek topped my list of the probably unforgivable.
    He had been psychically feeding on both friends and competitors, a vampire of sorts without the need for blood—and most recently feeding on me—his hunger growing along with his other powers. He had also been one of the Rusakovas’ greatest obstacles in freeing their mother from a group believed to be CIA. And he had nearly … I stood, glancing at Amy, who waited patiently by my locker. He had nearly done to me what Amy’s ex had so willingly done to her.
    The one thing that made the difference in my case?
    The guy who was sure to have wanted to have made the same difference for Amy: Maximilian Rusakova—Pietr’s biological brother, Russian-American werewolf, and the guy with the reputation of previously being Junction’s stud and number-one player.
    Max sidled over, careful to stay in Amy’s view and not spook her. Max did that now, taking extra precautions, being calmer and cooler, on her behalf. “Hey,” he whispered. Leaning over, he kissed her forehead.
    She smiled at him, a hint of what used to be her old self showing in the tilt of her lips before it faded away.
    “Yeah, it is awful,” the other anonymous friend agreed. I turned to take a look. They had stopped in the middle of the hall, the crowd of students passing on their way to homeroom thin at best because of the odd illnesses striking down student after student. “I mean, what are we going to do for a football team next year?”
    I snorted and rolled my eyes at Max and Amy. Small-town priorities still overrode reason. It was oddly reassuring. We may have werewolves, Mafia, and all sorts of weird phenomena showing up in Junction, but we still obsessed over the success of our football team.
    I shouldered my backpack and looked up and down the hallway. “Pietr?” I asked.
    “He’ll be here,” Max responded mysteriously. “He’s just…”
    Amy glanced at the clock in the hall. “Running late?”
    What could I say? Not long since his final change and Pietr had definitely changed. Pietr had lost the ability to hear the invisible internal clock he had become so attuned to because it was so rapidly ticking down the time until his inevitably early death.
    That countdown had ceased with the taking of the cure. Pietr’s life span had increased once more to normal parameters—whatever normal parameters really were. I wasn’t the best to ask about normal life spans since my mother’s life had been cut short, because of the actions of one of Derek’s more amazing puppets.
    “Oh, great,” Amy hissed, pressing into Max’s side. “Here she comes.”
    Flouncing her way down the hall in a short skirt and heels came my ex–best friend and recent nemesis, Junction’s self-appointed Queen Bee and head of the mean girls: Sarah Luxom.
    Other than the tiny scar marring her forehead as proof of her involvement in the car crash that stole my mother’s life and had threatened to wreck my own along with it, Sarah looked perfect. As always.
    She walked straight up to me. “Hello, Jessie.”
    My lips puckered at the usage of my name. She had called me Jessica for so long now it seemed odd we could get to the point of Jessie. Amy called me Jessie; Max and Cat and their adopted oldest brother, Alexi, called me Jessie; as did my father; his girlfriend, Wanda; and my pesky little sister, Annabelle Lee. To Pietr, I was (and always had been) Jess.
    The same name my mother used for me.
    But to the troublemakers in my life, I was Jessica. As Shakespeare wrote: what’s in a name? So accepting Jessie from Sarah’s carefully colored lips would take some getting used to. But somehow … I looked at her and thought about the night we destroyed the company and watched Derek die. Somehow I thought I could adjust to it, knowing what I did now about who had been pulling Sarah’s strings all along.
    Like a shadow cast across my