Last time on Summoning, Derek is a werewolf. More importantly, someone’s about to discover Chloe and in short order, that the other two escaped.

Chloe, to my surprise, actually has a plan. She smears dirt on her face, musses her hair and clothes and stumbles out of the bushes trying to put on Derek’s shoe. The punishment for making out with Derek is just getting yelled at by her aunt, after all. Derek can run if they try to transfer him, and as long as Simon finds his father someone will come back to help them.

“Derek? Is this his?” I cast a surreptitious glance over my shoulder, into the bushes, drawing her attention there. “I—I haven’t seen Derek since dinner. Is h-he out here, too?”
“Oh, I’m sure he is. Long gone, I suppose, with Simon and Rae. Making their escape while you stand guard and provide a diversion.”

Well shit.

Unfortunately Chloe’s used up that moment of intelligence.

“Wh-what?” That time the stammer wasn’t faked. “E-escape? N-no. Derek and I were …” I gestured at the bushes. “He knew the code so we came outside to be alone and . . . you know.”

Chloe let me explain to you about lying.

If you were really making out with Derek, and lying about it, and someone accused you of something totally different that also would, upon being checked, turn out to be obviously not true so you have nothing to worry about, you would not respond to that by admitting to the thing you were lying about.

Good responses include boggling at her, asking what she’s talking about, “Simon and Rae? But she said she hated him-” and pretty much anything other than immediately confessing to something more minor.

Another good response is “Derek I changed my mind, get me over the fence!”

Dr. Gill demands to know what the ghosts told her.

“Did they tell you his secrets? His discoveries? I’ll make sure no one knows you ran away. I’ll say I found you asleep in the TV room. Just tell me everything those ghosts said.”

Seriously, now is time for Derek and crippling. You’ve got a werewolf, use it.

Luckily Derek’s more on the ball.

Dr. Gill only had time to see a shadow passing over her. She turned, mouth opening. Derek landed right in front of her. Her arms flew up, and she let out a shriek, falling back, but she was still in mid-turn and tripped over her own feet. As she went down, she fumbled for something in her pocket. Derek dove and pinned her arm as she pulled out a two-way radio. It flew onto the grass. Her skull smacked into the cement pad.
I ran forward. Derek was already crouching at her side, checking her pulse.
“She’s fine,” he said, exhaling with relief. “Just unconscious. Come on. Before she wakes up.”

Once again – being knocked unconscious is not harmless! Derek is welcome to feel relief he didn’t accidentally kill her, but no one with a passing knowledge of human anatomy would ever be saying “fine, just unconscious” like this.

You know, what the hell was Gill’s plan, anyway? If they knew she was a necromancer the whole time and wanted to know about Lyle’s experiments, why spend their time punishing her every time she tried to do ghost stuff? Unless Gill only realized when she found the reburied bodies, but the problem with that is it requires Chloe to be there by accident, when we’ve been assuming the concentration of supernatural kids means they’re being deliberately collected there. And Gill was promising to lie about Chloe being outside – so is Gill the only one who knows about Lyle? Because otherwise she and the others should all be in agreement about wanting to know this stuff.

Also, why didn’t Gill try to talk earlier in a less threatening manner? The first thing Chloe would have learned from the ghosts is the horrible experiments on people like her part, which if she was anyone other than the dumbasses that populate this book, would have led to her assuming that anyone interested in those experiments might plan to do the same to her. She and Gill are supposed to meet daily. Gill could easily have requested to talk to her privately and tried to weasel it out of Chloe back then.

Anyway, they run. Sirens start after crossing two yards. I guess Gill woke up fast.

After a moment, I said, “Dr. Gill knows about the bodies. When I raised them, she must not have been holed up in her office like we thought. She knows I can contact the dead, and about Samuel Lyle, and—”
“Later.”

Uh, Derek was right there, he should have heard the whole conversation.

I guess you could read this as Chloe forgetting that fact and Derek meaning they’ll talk about what to do with this knowledge later, but very sloppily written if so.

“A werewolf.”
I tried to say it casually, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded. I didn’t want to sound freaked out because that was exactly what he expected—why he hadn’t told me the truth. I told myself it was no different than being a necromancer or a sorcerer or a half-demon. But it was.

How, exactly? Does the author just have some phobia of werewolves that she’s expecting the rest of us to share? They’re just big dogs! Zombie apocalypse girl and demonspawn are higher on my personal list of worries. Seriously, one’s half wolf and the other one is half the incarnation of evil and torture.

As the silence stretched, I knew I should say something. If he’d told me he was a half-demon, I’d be peppering him with questions, and when I didn’t now, my silence damned him as something different than us, something less natural, something . . . worse.

No really, what the fuck. Can anyone make sense of this?

Anyway, Derek says that the change wasn’t supposed to happen until eighteen, despite the fact that eighteen is an arbitrary number that our culture happened to pick for partial adulthood and it’s a ridiculous coincidence it’d match up with anything else’s actual development.

Anyway, they keep going.

This chapter had action but a closer look shows plot deserted us after the opening. There’s the revelation that actually, Gill and maybe the whole place knew Chloe was a necromancer, but the rest of this is just rehashing what we already know – Derek’s a werewolf, Derek’s super-strong, Derek wasn’t expecting to change so soon. And even the revelation is pretty watered down by now. I’ve been yelling at Chloe to get the hell out for chapters now. Most of the shock of the comment comes from Gill admitting it so baldly, but it’s been the likely option for some time now.

Well. We’re finally approaching the end of this abomination of literature. I promised Gemma next, though I think I’ll be doing several chapters at a time, and then perhaps a summation of the other two books for this series if my loathing meter goes down enough to handle it, and at some point WWZ. And, of course, January will be a month of hate on the subject of the Pokemon category.

I should probably reopen the poll. You people evidently have awful, awful taste, but I wanted to do this one as well, so clearly we’re both failures at book picking. Vote for something with worldbuilding this time, though.