I sat at the small dining table on Make Them Scream's tour bus. Liz lounged next to me on the couch, drumming her black-and-white painted fingernails on the plastic table.

We'd hit the road about thirty minutes ago. I'd just finished showering in the bus's tiny bathroom, and I was now dressed in my clean change of clothes—light wash ripped jean shorts, my favorite studded belt I'd had since I was sixteen and a distressed black tank top that said AC/DC on it.

Reggie, Make Them Scream's bassist, sat at the far end of the couch with his girlfriend Veronica on his lap. He had long, messy dreadlocks like he thought he was about to be inducted as the next member of Korn or something.

Veronica smacked gum between her teeth before popping a huge purple bubble that got stuck in her violet hair like a spider web.

"Oops," she said, clawing it out with her manicured fingernails. A dozen beaded bracelets of different colors jingled around her small wrist.

The bus bumped and creaked as we turned onto the main road. Veronica braced herself against the wall to keep from tumbling off Reggie's lap. He wrapped his arms around her tiny waist, holding her in place.

"Did you text your band yet to let them know you're riding with us, Allison?" Jake, their guitarist, asked. He scratched at his scruffy beard. His brown hair stuck out in tufts from beneath his black beanie. It was pulled down to just over the tips of his ears, revealing his lobes that were gauged to about the diameter of my index finger.

"Yeah, I told them," I lied, checking my phone. I had two new unread text messages and one missed call. I didn't want to see what Derek had to say, but I had to. My hands shook as I opened the messages.

Derek: Allison, where the fuck are you?

Derek: Pick up your phone.

I bit my lower lip as I quickly typed a response.

Me: Sorry, forgot to tell you. MTS invited me to ride with them so I am.

Me: We just left. See you in Denver.

Immediately, my phone rang, and I was so startled I tossed it in the air.

"Hey," Derek's voice said when I picked up. He was the only person I knew who still insisted on calling people. I hated talking on the phone. Why talk to someone when you could get the message across by typing? They got it right the first time with the telegraph machine.

"Hey . . ." I drew the word out because I didn't know what else to say.

"Well, thanks for the heads up." Anger simmered in Derek's tone. It wasn't the first time I'd done something like this without telling anyone—going off on a bender and disappearing for a day or two.

"I'm sorry," I said, wiping my sweaty hand on my leg.

"It's fine." He breathed out heavily into the receiver. "Hey, you see Blake at all last night?"

My heart skipped a beat, and my leg shook involuntarily. My foot rattled against the floor of the bus.

"After the show? No, why?"

"Just thought you might have. I know you and him are . . ." Derek trailed off.

I bit my lower lip as sweat prickled the back of my neck.

"Anyway," Derek finally continued, "Trev says Blake never made it to the party at the hotel last night, and now they can't find him anywhere."

"Fuck, I mean, he's probably just still drunk somewhere. You know how Blake is. I'm sure he'll turn up in an hour or so."

Derek breathed out again. "Yeah, probably."

"Look, I've got to go, but keep me in the loop, yeah?"

"Right." A pause. "See you in Denver, Ally."

The call cut out from the other end, and my heart leapt into my throat. The harsh bluntness in his tone hit me harder than I'd expected. I could take Derek being mad at me, but after everything I'd been through this morning, it was too much. I just wanted him to be there for me. I didn't want to be a disappointment anymore.

There was nothing I could do about it right now, though. I couldn't tell Derek what was actually going on. Sighing, I slipped my phone into the back pocket of my jean shorts and turned my eyes up. Reggie, Veronica, and Jake stared at me with contemplative curiosity. Veronica snapped a bubble of gum between her teeth. Liz looked at me like she was waiting for me to say something.

I held my breath, not knowing what to do. The roar of the bus's engine competed with the sound of Veronica's bubble-gumming. Who chewed gum anymore, anyway? That hadn't been a thing since, like, 2010. This chick not get the memo?

Based on her outfit choices, that might be the case. She still wore one of those nineties stretchy black chokers around her neck. I supposed I couldn't talk, though, being the girl wearing a studded belt I'd bought at Hot Topic ten years ago.

"So, are you a psychological liar, then?" Veronica asked, twirling a strand of violet hair around one finger.

"Pathological, babe," Reggie corrected her.

"That's what I said."

"No," I lied immediately.

"Likely story." Veronica grinned at me, displaying a set of perfectly straight teeth.

"So, Allison," Jake changed the subject, removing his black beanie from his head and twirling it around in his hands. "How much do you know about werewolves?"

"You serious right now?" A weird laugh croaked out of my throat like a hiccup. Sure, I'd just watched Liz shift into a fucking wolf, but the question still sounded absurd said out loud. "Fuck, well only what I've seen in movies. They howl at the moon a lot, that sort of shit."

Liz brought her hand up to her temple, shaking her head. "Okay, so you know nothing."

I shrugged and forced a laugh. "So . . . are all of you were-werewolves?"

Jake nodded. "All of us, except Veronica, that is."

"How . . ." I trailed off. "How did you become—"

"Werewolves are shape shifters," Jake cut me off when it was clear I wouldn't be able to formulate a useful question.

I raised an eyebrow at him. Was this conversation really happening right now?

Jake sighed and ran his hand back through his mess of brown hair. My eyes went to the tattoos covering his muscular arm. One of them showed an inverted crescent moon hanging over the face of a wolf like a halo. The wolf's mouth was open wide in a viscous snarl, exposing its teeth. I'd seen that image before. It'd been the design on the stage backdrop of one of the bands we toured with a lot—Wolfpack. They'd all died in a tragic bus accident a year or so ago. Had Jake gotten the tattoo as a tribute?

My eyes went back up to Jake's face as he continued to explain.

"We were originally created when the body and soul of wolf and human were joined together."

He paused, like he was trying to figure out what to say next, and I gave him a blank stare.

"Alex is better at explaining this, damnit," he finally muttered, glancing up towards the front of the bus where Alex was driving.

Alex had barely looked at me when I'd gotten on their bus this morning. I'd wanted to ask him about how the clean up went—at least thank him—but before I could figure out what to say, he declared that he was driving, and that we needed to get moving immediately or we would risk being late for the show. It didn't make much sense to me considering the show wasn't for another day and it was only a thirteen-hour drive from Minneapolis to Denver, but I didn't complain. The quicker we could put distance between me and Blake's corpse, the better.

"It was a curse," Liz continued when Jake stalled out. "In the beginning, the shifts were driven by the lunar cycle. Every full moon, our bodies would shift into the form of a wolf, and we would lose control to the night. The shifts were unintentional, uncontrolled and dangerous. But, through years of practice and companionship with the soul of the wolf we had been joined with, we were able to master control of it."

I nodded, trying to take it all in. I was understanding the words, but with everything that had gone down this morning, I had no energy left to be shocked by anything. Fog swam through my mind.

"So, the next thing you should know about werewolves is that we're immortal," Reggie picked up where Liz left off. "But, not in the sense you generally think of it. The way we keep our immortality is by switching bodies."

"Switching bodies?" I furrowed my brow and twisted my wet hair between my fingers. What was he getting at?

"Because we were originally created by the soul of a human and a wolf combined into one form," Jake started, "we have the ability to transfer our consciousness to other bodies as well."

Something dark and threatening glinted in his deep, brown eyes as he stared me down. But there was also something warm there. Something unsettlingly enticing. A chill rushed through me, his words sinking in.

"What are you saying?" I crossed my arms over my chest, suddenly wishing I hadn't agreed to come on this bus with them in the first place. They were essentially strangers to me. Why had I chosen to trust them over my own band—over friends I'd known for years?

My eyes flashed to the tattoo on Jake's arm again, and suddenly things clicked. The bus crash that had killed all the members of Wolfpack . . . that happened right at the end of the tour they'd gone on with Make Them Scream—the night they were supposed to play their final show. What if that hadn't been an accident. What if . . .

"So, you aren't really Make Them Scream?" I shouted, my heart racing in my chest. "You just stole their bodies! What happened to them?"

"That's not exactly how it works." Jake spun his black beanie around his hands again. "The existing consciousness doesn't go anywhere when we enter a new body."

"We're all still here," Liz said. "We just . . . join the pack, so the speak."

"When we were first cursed to share bodies with our wolf counterparts," Jake began, "the only way we were able to learn to control the curse was by unifying into one entity. After shifting to a new body, we share two consciousnesses until we are eventually able to rectify them together as one." He paused for a second, scratching at his scruffy beard. "We are essentially amalgamations of everyone we've ever been."

My head was officially spinning, and not just because he had used the word amalgamation in a sentence.

"Okay . . ." I clasped my temples, leaning with my elbows on the table in front of me. "So, what does this mean for me? How did I catch it? These strange blackouts . . . I've been having them for months. Am I shifting in each of them?"

"Not sure, but you certainly shifted last night," Liz said. "That may be the first time it went all the way. The other times might have been a shift in mental control, but not a physical shift."

"But why? Has another werewolf entered my body? Am I going to become a part of the . . . pack, too? Why is this happening to me?"

Liz shook her head. "No. What's happening to you is different." She breathed out heavily and glanced at Jake, Reggie and Veronica before finally turning her attention back to me. "The short answer to your question is, it shouldn't be happening."