Ascension by Kelley Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

time passed, he no longer seemed to take the pleasure in it that he once had and preferred to carry on as if Jeremy wasn’t there, which suited us all just fine.
     
    I started high school at thirteen. As concerned as Jeremy was about my social maturity, I think he was more concerned about me getting bored if I didn’t find school challenging enough, so he applied to have me start a year early at a private school outside Syracuse . At first, the school balked. They didn’t like to advance anyone that way, particularly someone who’d been home schooled. But, as Jeremy argued, having been born in January, I was only a few weeks younger than some other kids who would be starting ninth grade that fall. Still, they hemmed and they hawwed, and they put me through a whole battery of tests. Then they gave me an IQ test. When they didn’t believe the results of the first one, they administered a second. Then they declared I was indeed ready for high school.
    School wasn’t nearly the hell I’d expected. Yes, I’d rather have stayed home with Jeremy, but this gave me the opportunity to further study human behavior and develop my public face. I even made a few friends—not the "come on over after school and we’ll listen to my 45s" kind of friends, but school chums, classmates I could eat lunch with or team up with for joint projects. These friends invariably came from the fringes of teenage society, the kids who were too smart, too overweight, too homely or just too odd to fit in. With these outsiders, I could feel some kinship, even if they weren’t werewolves.
     
    Gregory died when I was fourteen. Since his injury, he’d never regained his full physical strength and had always been more prone to illness than most werewolves. One night he went to bed and didn’t wake up. Outside his family, Jeremy was the only one who seemed to grieve his passing.
     
    The next landmark of my life came at fifteen, when I killed my first mutt. In the Pack, one’s first mutt kill is considered a rite of passage, something to be celebrated with a night of drinking and carousing. I was too young for either drinking or the Pack’s version of "carousing", which usually involved women. It didn’t matter because I told no one that I’d passed this landmark, not even Nick. I kept it to myself because I didn’t consider it an event worthy of commemoration. I wasn’t proud of what I’d done. Nor was I ashamed of it. The need to kill trespassing mutts was an unavoidable fact of my life, and I accepted it as such, with no emotion either way.
    It happened in late spring. Antonio and Nick had come up for the weekend. Nick and I were now old enough to stay home alone, so Antonio and Jeremy had gone to Syracuse for some drinking and . . . carousing, and we didn’t expect them back before the wee hours of morning.
    Nick and I spent the evening hanging out, talking—mostly him talking, mostly about girls. He’d snuck over a few copies of Playboy , and we went through those. I didn’t really "get" it, but I played along with his enthusiasm. When it came to sex, I was a late bloomer. I’d begun filling out and putting on some muscle heft, helped by the weight set that Jeremy had bought for my fourteenth birthday. I’d also shot up a few inches. In the past year or so, I’d begun showing the first signs that, while I might never be as tall as Jeremy or as muscular as Antonio, I wouldn’t be the runt of the litter forever.
    In other areas of puberty, though, I lagged behind. My voice only cracked when I lost my temper and shouted loudly enough to strain my vocal cords, and the only excess hair I had came when I Changed. Sex and desire were things I understood only as hypothetical concepts. So, although I felt no physical reaction on seeing the Playboy centerfolds, I seconded Nick’s opinion that they were "hot" and tried very hard to keep my attention off the articles, and on the pictorials.
    After eating everything that Jeremy left out for us,