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chuckled. “Love is cheesy sometimes. Give me the message.”
    “Tell him it’s—it’s not like he’s not with me every moment of every day, because he is. He’s in my heart. I don’t have to see him.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. “See? Cheesy.”
    Dad put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a gentle shake. “I’m sure he’ll understand,” he assured me in the same tone he used when he tried to bolster my spirits before a math exam. He was just as convincing about the odds of success.
    I needed to believe it. “He’ll be smart—stay away?”
    He folded, snorting. “No guarantees. Love makes people crazy.”
    “Look around. I’ve got plenty of crazy. What I need is smart .”
    Jessie
    But Pietr seemed more capable of delivering crazy. Maybe it was like his brother Max had said: Smart didn’t come easy to a seventeen-year-old guy with a girlfriend.
    That night he tapped on my window again. Hadn’t Dad delivered my message? I raced over, ignoring the all-seeing eye of the camera. It meant nothing the way the wind howled. There would be only moments between Pietr’s appearance, the scattering of his scent, and the warning call of the dogs as they barreled after their quarry, my guards on their heels.
    Dammit .
    I tore a sheet of paper from my journal and scrawled a note, which I pressed to the glass.
    I love you, but run and DON’T come back!
    Thank goodness for werewolf night vision. I tugged the paper away.
    His mouth moved, carefully, as he enunciated each word.
    “You love me?”
    Oh, holy crap! Smart—I needed smart ! I tore the paper away and scribbled.
    YES! Don’t be stupid—RUN!
    I underlined “ DON’T come back! ” and flattened the paper out.
    He stood there, puzzling at it. I flipped it around, wondering how soon the dogs would be on him. My writing was barely legible. Trembling I circled the key words.
    YES! and DON’T come back!
    The dogs began their keening cry. When I finally pulled the paper back down I saw Pietr’s reply—his handprint wanting mine—pushed into the fog left by his breath.
    I rested my hand against the print and leaned my forehead on the glass until all sign of his visit had faded away.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Alexi
    True to her belief she could get us in to see Mother soon, Wanda arranged a meeting time for us and so we found ourselves retracing a path we were beginning to know well.
    After promising to hand over the single baby tooth the family had kept, we were allowed entry to the bunker that looked, from all outward appearances, to be a Colonial farmhouse with a rapidly failing border of aromatic herbs.
    In. Down. The numbers were the same: the same number of steps. The same number of doors, locks, and cameras, but still I counted them to better burn them into my memory, to make their existence second nature so that when we came to free Mother we would not trip over ourselves or tangle and fall in the dark, victims of our own feet and some misstep.
    The only thing that seemed to change was the code they typed into the door at the bottom of the stairs. I’d caught it, memorized it, played it back in my mind, but each time we visited, it was new. If I could determine a pattern, then I could predict the next round of numbers. But it seemed some things were truly random. Perhaps sometimes there was no pattern—no way to anticipate an opponent’s next move.
    The concept frustrated me beyond all logic.
    I understood that when we came to free her we would need a way past the interior doors, a way I could not yet provide.
    We walked through a long fluorescent-lined cement hall of a buried tractor trailer and through the cubicle-filled office area that branched into the underground science lab and the broad room where Mother was kept in a clear-walled environment that offered no privacy and made the rarely occupied office cubicles look inviting.
    Behind me—because they still insisted I go first, like some substandard bodyshield—Pietr’s breathing wavered as