The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group

Catherine Jinks

• Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780547574080

The author of The Reformed Vampire Support Group turns her talents to shapeshifters of the furry kind in this howling good read.
 
When Tobias Richard Vandevelde wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the night before, his horrified mother tells him that he was found unconscious. At Featherdale Wildlife Park. In a dingo pen. He assumes that his two best friends are somehow responsible, until the mysterious Reuben turns up, claiming that Toby has a rare and dangerous “condition.” Next thing he knows, Toby finds himself involved with a strange bunch of sickly insomniacs who seem convinced he needs their help. It’s not until he’s kidnapped and imprisoned that he starts to believe them—and to understand what being a paranormal monster really means.
 
“The satire isn’t all that’s biting in this darkly comedic sequel to The Reformed Vampire Support Group . . . Jinks has a few other surprises in store too.” — Kirkus Reviews
 
“Jinks has hold of a clever idea and a solid sense of humor.” — Publishers Weekly

Chapter One

You’ve probably heard of me. I’m the guy they found in a dingo pen at Featherdale Wildlife Park.

It was all over the news. If I’d been found in a playground, or on a beach, or by the side of the road, I wouldn’t have scored much coverage. Maybe I’d have ended up on page five of some local rag. But the whole dingo angle meant that I got national exposure. Hell, I got international exposure. People read about me in all kinds of places, like England and Canada and the United States. I know, because I checked. All I had to do was google “dingo pen” and—Pow! There I was.

Not that anyone mentioned my name, of course. Journalists aren’t supposed to identify teenagers. In the Sydney Morning Herald, this is all they said:

A 13-year-old boy is in a stable condition at Mount Druitt Hospital after being found unconscious in a dingo pen at Featherdale Wildlife Park, in western Sydney, early this morning. A park spokesperson says that a dingo in the same pen sustained minor injuries, which were probably inflicted by another dingo. Police are urging anyone with information about the incident to contact them.

As you can see, it wasn’t exactly a double-page spread. And just as well, too, because when I was found, I was in the buff. Naked. Yes, that’s right: I’d lost my gear. Don’t ask me how. All I know is that I’m the luckiest guy alive. Being Dingo Boy was bad enough, but being naked Dingo Boy would have been much, much worse. I wouldn’t have survived the jokes. Can you imagine the kind of abuse I’d have copped on my first day back at school? It would have been a massacre. That’s why I’m so relieved that nobody printed a word about the missing clothes. Or the damaged fence. Or the cuts and bruises. Either the newspapers weren’t interested or the police weren’t talking. (Both, probably.) And I never told anyone that I was naked. Not even my best friends. Especially not my best friends.

I mean, I’m not a complete idiot.

So there I was, in the dingo pen at Featherdale Wildlife Park, and I don’t remember a thing about it. Not one thing. I remember lying in my own bed at around 10:00 p.m., fiddling with a flashlight, and then I remember waking up in hospital. That’s all. I swear to God, I wasn’t fiddling with a tube of glue or a bottle of scotch; it was an ordinary flashlight. Next thing I knew, I was having a CT scan. I was stretched out on a gurney with my head in a machine.

No wonder I panicked.

“It’s all right. You’re all right,” people were saying. “Can you hear me? Toby? Your mum’s on her way.”

I think I might have mumbled something about breakfast as I tried to pull off my pulse oximeter. I was a bit confused. I was, in fact, semiconscious. That’s what Mum told me afterward—and when you’re semiconscious, it’s usually because you’ve damaged your head or your spine. In the ambulance on your way to hospital, you have to wear an oxygen mask and a neck collar. And once you reach the Emergency Department, they start checking you for things like leaking cerebral fluid. (Ugh.)

I wasn’t semiconscious for very long, though. At first I didn’t quite know where I was. I couldn’t understand why I was lying down or what all the beeping monitors were for. But the fog in my head soon cleared, and I realized that I was in trouble. Big trouble.

Again.

Just six months before, I’d been in the same Emergency Department with two broken fingers, after my friend Fergus and I had taped roller skates to a surfboard. (I don’t recommend grass-surfing, just in case you’re interested. It’s impossible to stand up.) So I recognized the swinging doors, and the funny smell, and the bed-curtains. Even a couple of the faces around me were vaguely familiar.

“What happened?” I asked as I was being wheeled around like a shopping trolley full of beer cans. “Did I get hurt?”

There was a doctor looming over me. I could see straight up her nose. “Don’t you remember?” she said.

“Nah.”

“What’s the last thing you can remember?”

“Umm . . .” I tried to think, but it wasn’t easy. Not while I was being poked and prodded by about a dozen different people.

“Do you have a headache?” someone inquired.

“No.”

“Do you feel sick in the stomach?”

“A bit.”

“Can you look over here, please, Toby? It is Toby, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Course.” At the time, I thought that they knew me from my previous visit. I was wrong, though. They were only calling me Toby because Mum had panicked. She’d walked into my bedroom at 6:00 a.m., seen my empty bed, searched the house, realized that I didn’t have my phone, and notified the police. I don’t suppose they were very concerned at that point. (It wasn’t as if I was five years old.) All the same, they’d asked for a name and description.

So when I showed up at Featherdale, without any ID, it didn’t really matter. The police were already on the lookout for a very tall, very skinny thirteen-year-old with brown hair, brown eyes, and big feet.

One of the nurses told me later that she hadn’t recognized me when I first came in because there was so much blood and dirt all over my face.

“Can you tell us your full name, Toby?” was the next question pitched at me, from somewhere off to my right.

“Uh—Tobias Richard Vandevelde.”

“And your address?”

I told them that, too. Then I spotted the big jagged cut on my leg.

“What happened?” I said with mounting alarm. “Is Mum all right?”

“Your mum’s fine. She’s on her way here now. The police called her.”

“The police?” This was bad news. This was terrible news. “Why? What have I done?”

“Nothing. As far as we know.”

“Then—”

“You’re breathing a bit fast, Toby, so what I’m going to do now is run a blood gas test . . .”

I couldn’t get a straight answer from any of them, but I didn’t want to make a fuss. Not while they were trying to figure out what was wrong with me. They kept asking if I was in pain, and if I could see properly, and if I knew what year it was, and then at last the crowd around my bed began to disperse. It didn’t take me long to realize that people were drifting away because I wasn’t going to die. I mean, I’d obviously been downgraded from someone who might spring a leak or pitch a fit at any moment to someone who could be safely left in a holding bay with a couple of machines and a really young doctor.

“Not all of these cuts are going to heal by themselves,” the really young doctor said cheerfully as he pulled out his box of catgut (or whatever it was). “We might give you a local before we stitch you up. Do you know when you had your last tetanus shot?”

Dumb question. Of course I didn’t. You’d be better off asking me how many eyelashes I have.

“No.”

“Fair enough.” He didn’t seem too surprised. “Maybe your mum can tell me.”

“Maybe I can tell you what?” said a voice—and all of a sudden, there was my mum. She’d obviously had a bad morning. Though she was dressed in her work clothes, with earrings and fancy shoes and her good handbag, she hadn’t put on her makeup or put in her contact lenses. And without makeup or contact lenses she looks like . . . well, she looks like a nun or something. It’s partly because she’s so pale and tired and washed out and partly because she wears chunky, librarian-style glasses.

“I’m Rowena Vandevelde,” she said. “Is there something you wanted to ask me?”

“Oh. Ah. Yes.” The very young doctor forgot to introduce himself. “I was wondering when Toby last had a tetanus shot?”

Mum knew the answer to that, of course. She also knew my Medicare number, and the exact date of my last hospital visit, and all the other boring details that I couldn’t have remembered in a million years. Because she’s a mother, right? It’s her job to keep track of that stuff.

I kind of tuned out while she was debriefing various people with clipboards. I might even have dozed off for a few minutes, because I was really tired. But I woke up quick smart when the very young doctor started jabbing needles into me. That was no fun, I can tell you. And it seemed to last forever, even though Mum tried to distract me with her questions.

The first thing she wanted to know was what happened.

“You tell me,” was all I could say.

“Don’t you remember?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing at all?”

I shook my head, then winced. “Ouch,” I complained.

And the very young doctor said, “Nearly finished.”

“What’s the last thing you do remember?” Mum queried. “Do you remember leaving the house?”

“No.” A sort of chill ran through me. “Is that what I did?”

“You weren’t in bed this morning.” Mum’s voice wobbled a bit, but she managed to hold it together. “They found you at Featherdale.”

“Featherdale?”

“In the dingo pen.”

I’d better explain that I live quite close to Featherdale Wildlife Park, so I’ve been there a few times. And I’ve seen the dingo pen.

“Oh, man,” I croaked. It was hard to believe. But one look at Mum’s face told me that she wasn’t kidding.

“Are you sure you don’t know how you got there, Toby?”

“Nope.”

“Do you remember going to bed?”

Casting my mind back, I could recall throwing off my quilt because it was so hot. I’d picked up my flashlight and shone it at the stickers on the ceiling. The fan had been whirling around and around overhead.

Could it have hypnotized me somehow?

“You weren’t very well,” Mum continued. “That’s why you went to bed earlier than usual.”

“Yeah.” It was true. I’d been feeling a bit off, though not in any specific way. I hadn’t been suffering from a headache or a sore throat or a nagging cough. I’d just felt bad. “My stomach’s still bothering me.”

“Dr. Passlow will be here soon,” the very young doctor remarked. “He’s the pediatrician. You can discuss those symptoms with him.” Then he patted my wrist. “All finished. Well done. You’re a real hero.”

As he packed up his catgut and his bits of bloodstained gauze, I tried and tried to recollect what had happened. I’m a light sleeper, so there’s no way I could have been dragged out of bed and carried off like a baby. If I’d left the house, I would have done it under my own steam.

But why? And how?

“You must have crawled out the window,” Mum volunteered, as if reading my mind. “All the geraniums underneath it were trampled.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” Though I didn’t even know what geraniums were, I figured they must have been important. Not to mention fragile. “I don’t remember that.”

“Listen, Toby.” Mum leaned forward. She looked like a total wreck—what with her twitching nerves and puffy, bloodshot eyes—but her voice was still sweet and calm. Even when she’s mad at me, she doesn’t sound as if she’s yelling or nagging. I guess it’s because she’s a speech therapist.

Maybe she’s spent so many years teaching people to talk nicely that she can’t stop doing it herself.

“If there’s something you don’t want to tell me,” she said, “you can always talk to a professional. A counselor. I know how easy it is to buy drugs these days—”

“Mum!”

“—and if you were experimenting—”

“I wasn’t.”

“—that would certainly explain what happened.”

“I wasn’t, Mum!”

“Are you sure?” She stared at me long and hard. “Think about it. Are you absolutely sure?”

I couldn’t be sure. That was the trouble. I couldn’t remember anything, so I couldn’t be sure of anything. Except, of course, that I don’t usually mess around with drugs. The only cigarette I’ve ever smoked made me really, really sick; I smoked it at school, during recess, and when the bell rang for class, I was too cheap to throw it away because it was only half finished. So I quickly smoked the rest—in about ten seconds flat.

Man, that was a bad idea. I nearly passed out. I thought I was going to die. (From nicotine poisoning?) Practically the same thing happened at Amin’s house when we discovered an ancient bottle of port in his garage. We tried to drink the whole lot before his dad came home, and I was puking for hours afterward.

That was when I decided there are better ways to have fun—like grass-surfing, for instance. I might have broken a few fingers doing it, but at least I had fun. Chugging port, on the other hand, isn’t fun. That stuff tastes like cough syrup. As for smoking cigarettes . . . well, I’d rather make stink-bombs any day.

“I couldn’t have been stoned.” Upon mulling things over, I was convinced of this. “I don’t have any drugs. Not even glue or smelly markers.” The thing about drugs is they’re expensive. Fergus has a brother called Liam who smokes a lot of marijuana, and he never lets Fergus sample his sta...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Chapter Twenty-Four
• Chapter Twenty-Five
• Chapter Twenty-Six
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
• Chapter Twenty-Nine
• Chapter Thirty
• Chapter Thirty-One
• About the Author