Lightning illuminated the world again. Two seconds of light, and there they were. Eyes, colorless as they reflected the lightning. A wolf. Three yards away.
It was Shelby.
The world went dark.
I started to run.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SAM
I woke up.
I blinked, my eyes momentarily mystified by the brightness of my bedroom light in the middle of the night. Slowly, my thoughts assembled themselves, and I remembered leaving the light on, thinking I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.
But here I was, my eyes uncertain from sleep, my desk lamp casting lopsided shadows from one side of the room. My notebook had slid partially off my chest, all the words inside it off-kilter. Above me, the paper cranes spun on their strings in frantic, lumpy circles, animated by the air vent in the ceiling. They looked desperate to escape their individual worlds.
When it became obvious that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I stretched my leg out and used my bare foot to turn on the CD player on the table at the end of my bed. Finger-picked guitar sounded through the speakers, each note in time with my heart. Lying sleepless in this bed reminded me of nights before Grace, when I’d lived in the house with Beck and the others. Back then, the population of paper cranes above me, scrawled with memories, had been in no danger of outgrowing their habitat as I slowly counted down toward my expiration date, the day when I’d lose myself to the woods. I’d stay awake long into the night, lost with wanting.
The longing then was abstract, though. I’d wanted something I knew I couldn’t have: a life after September, a life after twenty, a life with more time spent Sam than wolf.
But now what I longed for wasn’t an imagined future. It was a concrete memory of me slouched in the leather chair in the Brisbanes’ study, a novel — The Children of Men — in my hand while Grace sat at the desk, biting the end of a pencil while doing homework. Saying nothing, because we didn’t have to, just pleasantly intoxicated with the leather-scent of the chair around me and the vague smell of a roasted chicken hanging in the air and the sound of Grace sighing and turning her chair back and forth. Beside her, the radio hummed pop songs, top-40 hits that faded into the background until Grace tunelessly sang a refrain.
After a while, she lost interest in her homework and crawled into the chair with me. Make room, she said, though there was no way to make room. I protested when she pinched my thigh, trying to make herself fit into the seat beside me. Sorry for hurting you, she said right in my ear, but it wasn’t really an apology, because you don’t bite someone’s earlobe to tell them you’re sorry. I pinched her and she laughed as she pressed her face into my collarbone. One of her hands tunneled between the chair and my back to touch my shoulder blades. I pretended to read on and she pretended to rest against me, but she kept pinching my shoulder blade and I kept tickling her with my free hand, until she was laughing even as we kissed and kissed again.
There is no better taste than this: someone else’s laughter in your mouth.
After a while, Grace fell asleep for real on my chest, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to follow her. Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths. The weight of her pinned my fleeting thoughts to the ground, and in that moment, I was more in the world than I’d ever been.
So now, looking at the paper cranes tugging urgently on their strings, I knew exactly what I wanted, because I’d had it.
I couldn’t fall back asleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GRACE
I couldn’t outrun a wolf.
Neither of us could see very well in the dark, but Shelby had a wolf’s sense of smell and a wolf’s sense of hearing. I had bare feet tangled in thorns and blunt nails too short for attack and lungs that couldn’t seem to get enough air. I felt powerless in this stormy wood. All I could think about was my memories of teeth in my collarbone, hot breath on my face, snow leaching my blood away from me.
Thunder cracked again, leaving behind the painfully fast crashing of my heart.
Panic wouldn’t help.
Calm down, Grace.
I stumbled between lightning flashes, reaching out in front of me. Partially to spare myself from running into something, and partially in hopes of finding a tree with low enough branches to climb. That was the only advantage I had over Shelby — my fingers. But every tree here was either a skinny pine or a massive oak — no branches for twenty or fifty feet.
And behind me, somewhere: Shelby.
Shelby knew I’d seen her and so now she didn’t take care to be quiet. Though she couldn’t see any better than me in the darkness, I could hear her still tracking toward me in between lightning flashes, guided by her sense of smell and hearing.
I was more scared when I didn’t hear her than when I did.
Lightning flickered. I thought I saw —
I froze, silent, waiting. I held my breath. My hair was plastered to my face and shoulders; a single wet strand was stuck to the corner of my mouth. It was easier to hold my breath than to resist the temptation to brush away that little bit of hair. Standing still, all I could think of were the small miseries: My feet hurt. The rain stung on my mud-smeared legs. I must have cut myself on unseen thorns. My stomach felt utterly empty.
I tried not to think about Shelby. I tried to concentrate on keeping my eyes locked on where I thought I’d seen my key to safety, so that when the lightning came again, I’d be able to map out a path.
Lightning flickered again, and this time I saw for certain what I thought I’d glimpsed earlier. Just barely, but it was there: the black outline of the shed where the pack kept supplies. It was several dozen yards to my right, above me, as if on a ridge. If I could make it there, I could slam that door in Shelby’s face.
The forest went black and then thunder split the quiet. It was so loud that all other sound seemed to be sucked out of the world for a few seconds afterward.
In that noiseless dark, I bolted, hands in front of me, trying to stay true to the path to the shed. I heard Shelby behind me, close, snapping a branch as she jumped toward me. I felt more than heard her closeness. Her fur brushed my hand. I scrambled away and then
I
falling
my hands grasped air
endless black
falling
I didn’t realize that I was crying out until all my breath was stolen and the sound was cut off. I hit something frigid and solid and my lungs emptied all at once. I only had a moment to realize that what I’d hit was water before I got a mouthful of it.
There was no up or down, just blackness. Just water coating my mouth and skin. It was so cold. So cold. Color exploded in front of my eyes, just a symptom in this blackness. My brain crying for air.
I clawed my way to the surface and gasped. My mouth was full of gritty, liquid mud. I felt it oozing down my cheeks from my hair.
Thunder grumbled above me, the sound seeming to come from far away; I felt like I was in the middle of the earth. Shivering almost too much to stand, I stretched my legs out and felt for the bottom. There — when I stood, the water came to the tip of my chin. It was freezing cold and filthy, but at least I could keep my head above water without tiring. My shoulders shook with involuntary tremors. I was so cold.
Then, standing in that frigid water, I felt it. A slow, slow path of nausea that started in my stomach and crawled up my throat. The cold. It was pulling at me, telling my body to shift.
But I couldn’t shift. As a wolf, I’d have to swim to keep my head above water. And I couldn’t swim forever.
Maybe I could climb out. I half swam, half stumbled through the icy water, reaching out. There must be a way out of this. My hands jammed into a craggy dirt wall that was perfectly vertical, stretching up higher than I could reach. My stomach twisted inside me.
No, I told myself. No, you’re not shifting, not now.
I made my way around the wall, feeling for a possible escape. The sides stretched up and away from me, endless. I tried to get purchase in them, but my fingers wouldn’t dig into the packed dirt, and the roots gave way under my weight, sending me back into the mud. My skin trembled, both from cold and the impending shift. I sucked in my frozen lower lip to try to steady it.
I could cry for help, but no one would hear me.
But what else could I do? The fact was this: If I turned into a wolf, I’d die. I could only swim for so long. All of a sudden, it seemed like a horrifying way to die, all alone, in a body that no one would ever recognize.
The cold pulled at me, flowed into my veins, unlocking the disease inside me. No, no, no. But I couldn’t resist it anymore; I could feel the pulse in my fingers pounding as the skin bubbled into another shape.
The water sloshed around me as my body began to tear itself apart.
I screamed Sam’s name into the darkness until I couldn’t remember how to speak.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SAM
“This is where the magic happens,” Cole said. “Are you going to put on your leotard now?”
We were by the back entrance to the Crooked Shelf, the bookstore where I sometimes lived. I’d slept badly with the thunderstorm, and after last night’s news, I hadn’t wanted to come in to work, but there had been no way to get off my shift on such short notice. So in I went. I had to admit that the normalcy of it was assuaging my anxiety a little. Well, except for Cole. Every other day, I had left Cole behind when I went to work, and hadn’t thought much of it. But this morning, I’d looked over while I was packing up and had seen him silently watching me getting ready to go, and I’d asked him if he wanted to come along. I didn’t yet regret letting him come with me, but the morning was still young.
Cole squinted up at me from the base of the short stairs, arms braced on either stair rail, his hair a concerted mess. The uncomplicated morning light made him look disarming and at ease. Camouflage.
I echoed, “My leotard?”
“Yeah, your superhero shit,” Cole said. “Sam Roth, werewolf by night, book retail specialist by day. Don’t you need a cape for that?”
“Yes,” I replied, unlocking the door. “Literacy rate in this country’s appalling; you need a cape to even sell a cookbook. You’re going to stay in the back if someone comes in, right?”
“No one’s going to recognize me in a bookstore,” Cole said. “Is the front of the store as crappy looking as the back?”
All of the stores on Main shared the same back alley, cluttered with spray-painted Dumpsters, weeds that looked like half-grown saplings, and plastic bags that had escaped death to tangle around the bases of staircases. Nobody came this way but owners and staff; I liked the disrepair because it was so far gone I didn’t feel I had to try to clean it up.
“Nobody ever sees this part,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s pretty.”
“So it’s like track six on an album,” Cole said. He smirked at some private joke. “So what’s the plan, Stan?”
I pushed open the back door. “Plan? I have to work until noon. Isabel is supposed to come by sometime before then to tell me what she’s found out since last night. Then, maybe, I’ll put a bag on your head and we’ll get lunch.”