Free Werewolf Weekend by B. A. Frade, Stacia Deutsch Page A

“answering questions with more questions” thing, so I asked a question of my own:
    Aren’t those good reasons?
    Maybe. Maybe not.
    I considered what to write next and decided to just say what I believed:
    She’s a werewolf.
    Long pause, then the Scaremaster replied:
    I have a story for you.…
    I knew how it began. It was the same as the last two times.
    Once upon a time, there was a girl named Emma.…
    I sat in silence as the Scaremaster wrote out the whole tale. It was the longest one he’d told me, taking up five whole pages. Single-spaced. Mr. McCarthy would have been impressed.
    This time it sounded like I’d written it.
    It started in the park.
    I sat, mesmerized, as the Scaremaster wrote out the entire tale… until the ending.
    The final sentences were terrifying. Horrifying. Even scarier than my own severed-head story! Scarier than anything I’d ever read.
    I was shaking when…
    BAM!
    The window glass above me shattered.

Chapter Eleven
    When I recovered from the shock and found my nerve, I hurried to look outside. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Had I really thought things through, I would have stayed far, far away from that window. Danger was lurking all around me.
    But I wasn’t thinking. I was acting on impulse, and my impulse pushed me to investigate.
    The whole window, it turned out, hadn’t broken. There was a small, fractured hole in the middle, which made a web of shattered glass across the pane.
    With blood throbbing in my brain so hard I probably needed to see a doctor, I peered out the small open spot in the glass, careful not to cut myself.
    My heart was pounding against my ribs. I had a slamming headache from the throbbing. Every hair on my head was standing up by the root. I was scared. And yet my curiosity was bigger than my fear.
    I squinted into the darkness. By the light of the nearly full moon, I saw a slender figure on the grass, looking up at the window, eyes wide with a horror that matched mine.
    It wasn’t Cassie. Or a werewolf.
    To my great relief, it was Duke.
    By the horrified look on his face, he clearly couldn’t believe he’d tossed a rock and broken Sam’s window.
    And I couldn’t believe it was him. It took a few minutes for my brain to tell my body to relax. We stood like that, paralyzed, staring at each other.
    â€œDuke!” I said at last. The window was broken, but I still managed to push the frame up without damaging it further. “I need your help,” I told Duke.
    Once I had fully wrapped my head around him being there, I couldn’t control how happy I was to see him. It was like someone had thrown me a life vest in a rocky sea.
    â€œOh, it’s you, Emma.” He sounded so disappointed. “I thought you were Sam. I saw the shadow. I didn’t mean to break the glass. It was such a small stone.…” he said in an apologetic voice. “I just wanted her attention.” Then, “Where’s Sam?”
    â€œDownstairs with the cousins,” I said. “I have a problem.” I looked out at the tree in front of Sam’s room. “Think you can climb up and talk to me?”
    He stared at me as if I were the one who was a werewolf. “Are you nuts?” He waved his crutch in the air. “I’m not dumb enough to do that twice.”
    I considered climbing down that tree, but seeing that crutch made me reconsider. The truth was, I was more likely to end up with a broken neck than a leg. Asking Cassie to drive me to the hospital wasn’t an option.
    I decided calling down to him was worth the risk of Sam and the cousins overhearing below. Fingers crossed, they were all asleep anyway.
    â€œSo…” This was kind of hard to explain. “Duke, I think Sam is in danger.”
    He moved closer to the bottom of the window. “Really?” His face was illuminated in the moonlight.
    I blurted, “I think her cousin might be a