Running With the Pack Read Online Free PDF Page A

smack him right back down. T.J. wouldn’t let him. All he had to do was stare.
    “You’ll be on your own,” Alex said. “You won’t like that. You’ll never make it.”
    T.J.’s mouth widened in a grin that showed teeth. He shouldn’t taunt Alex. He ought to just roll over on his belly like the others. But he shook his head.
    “I’ve done it before,” he said. “I can do it again.”
    And the wolf rose up, standing in place of the scared kid he used to be.
    They could all jump him. He looked at the door and tried not to think of it, pushing all his other senses—ears, nose, even the soles of his feet—out, trying to guess when the rest of them would attack. He’d run. That was his plan.
    “You don’t really want to leave,” Alex said, still with the laugh hiding in his voice.
    T.J. looked around at all of them, meeting each person’s gaze. The others looked away. They’d all come here by accident, through werewolf attacks, or by design—recruited and brought to the cage. T.J., on the other hand, had come to them alone, and he could leave that way. Maybe they didn’t mind it here, but one of these days, T.J. would fight back. Maybe he’d win against Alex and become the alpha of this pack. Maybe he’d lose, and Alex would kill him. But they could all see that fight coming.
    Which was maybe why they let him walk out the door without another argument. And rather than feeling afraid, T.J. felt like he’d won a battle.
    He hadn’t been brave enough to live out his old life. But he’d been brave enough to stick his hand in that cage.
    Before he left the area, he had one more thing to do. Just to be sure.
    A different guy was working at the clinic, which was just as well. “Have you ever had an HIV test before?” the staffer said.
    “Yeah. Here, in fact. About eight months ago.”
    “Oh? What was the result? Is there a reason you’re back? Let me look it up.”
    T.J. gave the guy his name, and he looked it up. Found the two positives, and T.J. wanted to snarl at him for the look of pity he showed.
    “Sir,” he said kindly—condescendingly. “With a result like this you should have come back sooner for counseling. There’s a lot of help available—”
    “The results were wrong,” T.J. said. “I want another test. Please.”
    He relented and took T.J. into the exam room, went through the ritual, drew the blood, and asked T.J. to wait. The previous times, it had taken a half an hour or so. The guy came back on schedule, wearing a baffled expression.
    “It’s negative,” the staffer said.
    T.J. exalted, a howl growing in his chest.
    The staffer shook his head. “I don’t understand. I’ve seen false positives—but two false positives in a row? That’s so unlikely.”
    “I knew it,” T.J. said. “I knew it was wrong.”
    He gave the guy a smile that showed teeth and walked out.

SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE
    STEVE DUFFY

    24-H OUR DENTIST said the sign, in Mandarin and English. Hayden tried to put out of his mind that awful old joke of his father’s, when’s your appointment, tooth-hurtee , and stepped inside. Though it was close on midnight, the streets were still bustling, tangy with exhaust fumes and the smell of the all-night noodle stalls. Inside the frosted-glass and brushed-metal reception area it was air conditioned and monastically quiet. The nurse who answered the buzzer installed him in a futuristic bucket chair, discreetly indicating the selection of reading matter spread on a nearby coffee table. Running, for the hundredth time that day, his tongue along the edges of his teeth, Hayden noticed with little or no surprise that among the magazines was the very issue of Scientific American he’d been reading on the plane, back at the start of it all.
    “M IRACLE ” C HINESE D ENTAL T REATMENT T O U NDERGO T RIALS IN W EST , announced the headline. Trapped in mid-flight hiatus, equi-distant between London and Hong Kong, Hayden had been leafing through the magazine like the