“It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes,” said Mr. Surujpaul, as he handed out the quiz.

Argus took a quick look around, then shifted his desk a few inches to his right, closer to Ayris’s desk.

Mr. Surujpaul placed the test on Argus’s desk and moved on down the row.

Argus took a look at it.

Nothing. His mind was a blank. Sweat dampened his clothes. Maybe he could take math again in summer school, but the thought made him sigh. He loved spending the summer in the forest, running and hunting all day and night. Summer school was unthinkable.

He took another look around and suddenly saw the way out he’d been hoping for. Ayris was left-handed and, as she did her work, Argus had a clear view of her answers.

Coolly, calmly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Argus shifted his entire body to the right, then looked at Ayris’s paper. The first answer was there for him, clear as day. He looked away then—careful not to make it look as if he were cheating—and copied the answer onto his own paper.

He looked right again. Answer number two.

Again and again, he copied Ayris’s work until they were both finished. But instead of putting his pencil down, Argus kept on scribbling, putting in phony corrections and intentionally getting one of the questions wrong.

“Okay, time’s up,” Mr. Surujpaul said. “Pass your quiz to the person in front of you. First person in the row, give your quiz to the person at the back.”

Mr. Surujpaul went over the answers. Argus Brock had gotten every question right, but one.

Argus breathed a sigh of relief.

Another math class had come and gone.

* * *

Phyllis had spent the early part of the morning on the phone with Doctor Katz and then gone into Redstone to buy some fresh meat. Ground beef was a poor substitute for the fresh kill that the wolf was used to in the wild, but it was easy to eat and made hiding medicine and vitamins a snap. Now that she had prepared the wolf’s meal, it was time to see if the animal was strong enough to eat it.

The moment Phyllis opened the door to the backyard, there was movement in the trees. She was startled by the noise of the werewolf darting back into the safety of the forest. “Poor thing,” she said, under her breath. “It must be worried sick.”

She wondered if the werewolf might want something to eat as well, since it hadn’t moved from the backyard since it arrived. The least she could do was offer it some food and a bowl of water.