Linger

Her mom sounded vaguely suspicious as she said, “Okay.”

“Let me just get my sweater,” Grace said. She came over to the glass door of the deck, silently unlocking it as she got her sweater off the back of the kitchen table with her other hand. I saw her mouth Sorry to me. A little louder, she said, “It’s cold in here.”

I counted to twenty after they’d left the kitchen, and let myself in. I was shuddering uncontrollably with the cold, but I was still Sam.

I had all the evidence I needed that my cure was real, but I was still waiting for the punch line.

• GRACE •

Sam was still shaking so badly by the time I met him in my room that I completely forgot about my lingering headache. I shoved my bedroom door shut without turning on the light and followed the sound of his voice to the bed.

“M-m-maybe we need to rethink our lifestyle choices,” he whispered to me, teeth chattering, as I climbed into bed and wrapped my arms around him. My fingers brushed against the goose bumps that covered his arms; I could feel them even through the fabric of his shirt.

I tugged the blanket up to cover both of our heads and pressed my face against the frigid skin of his neck. It felt selfish to say it out loud. “I don’t want to sleep without you.”

He curled into a tiny ball—his feet, even through his socks, were freezing against my bare legs—and mumbled, “Me neither. B-but we have our whole—” His words piled up on top of one another; he had to stop and rub his hand over his lips to warm them before he went on. “Our whole lives ahead of us. To be together.”

“Our whole lives, starting now,” I said. Outside my bedroom door, I heard my dad’s voice—he must’ve gotten home just as I came into the room—and listened to my parents’ voices as they climbed up the stairs to their room, noisy and jostling against each other. For a brief moment, I envied their freedom to come and go as they pleased, no school, no parents, no rules. “I mean, you don’t have to stay here, if it makes you uncomfortable. If you don’t want to.” I paused. “I didn’t mean for that to sound so clingy.”

Sam rolled over to face me. I couldn’t see anything but the glint of his eyes in the darkness. “I’ll never get tired of this. I just didn’t want to get you in trouble. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to ask me to go. If it gets too difficult.”

I touched his cold cheek with my hand; it felt good against my skin. “You can be pretty stupid sometimes for such a smart guy.” I felt his smile curve against my palm as he pushed his body closer to mine.

“Either you’re really hot,” Sam said, “or I’m really cold.”

“Duh, I’m hot,” I whispered. “Soooo hot.”

Sam laughed soundlessly—a little, shaky, exhaling sound.

I reached down to clutch his fingers in mine; we held them like that, smashed between our bodies in a knot, until his fingers stopped feeling so frigid.

“Tell me about the new wolf,” I said.

Sam went still beside me. “There’s something wrong with him. He wasn’t afraid of me.”

“That’s weird.”

“It made me wonder what kind of person would choose to be a wolf. They must all be crazy, Grace, every one of Beck’s new wolves. Who would choose that?”

Now it was my turn to go still. I wondered if Sam remembered lying beside me last year, just like this, and me confessing that I wished I changed, too, to go with him. No, not just to go with him. To feel what it was like, to be one of the wolves, so simple and magical and elemental. I thought about Olivia again, now a white wolf, darting between trees with the rest of the pack, and something inside me felt a little raw. “Maybe they just love wolves,” I said finally. “And their lives weren’t so great.”

Sam’s body was right beside me, but his hand in mine was slack and I saw that his eyes were closed. His thoughts were far, far away from me, untouchable. Finally, he said, “I don’t trust him, Grace. I just feel like no good will come from these new wolves. I just…I wish Beck hadn’t done it. I wish he’d known to wait.”

“Go to sleep,” I told him, though I knew he wouldn’t. “Don’t worry about what might happen.”

But I knew he wouldn’t do that, either.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

• GRACE •

“Back again, Grace?”

The nurse looked up as I walked into her office. The three chairs that sat opposite her desk were full—one student’s head lolled back in a sleep posture too embarrassing to not be real, and the other two kids were reading. Mrs. Sanders was pretty famous for letting kids who were overwhelmed with life hang out in her office, which was fine until someone who had a pounding headache and just wanted to sit down walked in and found all the waiting chairs full.

I came around to the front of her desk and crossed my arms across my chest. I felt like humming along to the throb of the ache in my head. Rubbing my hand over my face—a gesture that suddenly and fiercely reminded me of Sam—I said, “I’m sorry to bother you for something so dumb again, but my head is just killing me.”

“Well, you do look pretty miserable,” Mrs. Sanders agreed. She got up and gestured to the wheeled chair behind her desk. “Why don’t you sit down while I track down a thermometer? You’re a little flushed, too.”

“Thanks,” I said gratefully, and took her place as she headed into the other room. It felt odd being here. Not just in her chair, with her solitaire game still up on the computer and the pictures of her kids looking back at me from the desk, but in the nurse’s office at all. This was only the second time I’d been here, and it was only a few days since my last visit. I’d waited outside the door for Olivia a few times, but never actually been inside as a patient, blinking under the fluorescent lights and wondering if I was getting sick.

Without Mrs. Sanders there, I didn’t feel like I needed to appear stoic, and I pinched the top of my nose, trying to put pressure on the center of the headache. It was the same as the other headaches I’d been getting recently, a dull, radiating pain that burned along my cheekbones. They were headaches that seemed to threaten more: I kept waiting to get a runny nose or a cough or something.

Mrs. Sanders reappeared with a thermometer, and I hurriedly dropped my hand from my face. “Open, dear,” she instructed me, which I would’ve found funny any other time, because Mrs. Sanders did not strike me as a “dear” sort. “I have a feeling you’re coming down with something.”

I accepted the thermometer and put it under my tongue; the plastic sleeve on it felt sharp edged and slimy in my mouth. I was going to observe that I rarely got sick, but I couldn’t open my mouth. Mrs. Sanders chatted about classes with the two awake students on the chairs while three minutes dragged by, and then she returned and slid the thermometer out.

“I thought they made high-speed thermometers now,” I said.

“For pediatrics. They figure you high school hellions have enough patience to use the cheap ones.” She read the thermometer. “You have a bit of a temperature. Teeny. You probably have a virus. There’s a lot of it going around with the temperature going up and down. You want me to call someone to pick you up?”

I momentarily thought about the joy of escaping school and snuggling in Sam’s arms for the rest of the afternoon. But he was working and I had a test in Chemistry, so I sighed and admitted the truth: I was not really sick enough to justify leaving. “There’s not that much of the school day left. And I have a test.”

She made a face. “A stoic. I approve. Well, here. I’m really not supposed to do this without getting ahold of your parents, but—” She stood beside me and opened one of her desk drawers. There was a bunch of loose change, her car keys, and a bottle of acetaminophen in there. Shaking two of the pills into my palm, she said, “That’ll kick that temperature in the butt and probably take care of your headache, too.”

“Thanks,” I said, relinquishing her chair to her. “No offense, but hopefully I won’t be back in here this week.”

“This office is a cultural and social hot spot!” Mrs. Sanders said, feigning shock. “Take care.”

I swallowed the acetaminophen and chased it with some water from the cooler by the door, then headed back to class. I could barely feel my headache. By the end of last period, the acetaminophen had done the trick. Mrs. Sanders was probably right. This nagging sensation of something more was just a virus.

I tried to tell myself that was all it was.

CHAPTER TWELVE

• COLE •

I didn’t think I was supposed to be human right now.

Sleet cut into my bare skin, so cold that it felt hot. My fingertips were like clubs; I couldn’t feel anything in them. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying on the frozen ground, but it was long enough for sleet to have melted in the small of my back.

I was shaking almost too badly to stand, unsteady on my legs as I tried to figure out why I had changed back from a wolf. Before now, my stints as a human had been during warmer days and had been mercifully brief. This was a frigid evening—maybe six or seven o’clock, judging from the sun glowing orange through the leafless tree line.

I didn’t have time to wonder at the instability of my condition. I was trembling from the cold, but I didn’t feel even a hint of nausea in my stomach, or the twist of my skin that meant I was about to change into a wolf. I knew, with sinking certainty, that I was stuck in this body, at least for the moment. Which meant I needed to find shelter—I was stark naked, and I wasn’t about to wait for frostbite to set in. Too many extremities that I preferred not to lose.

Wrapping my arms around myself, I took stock of my surroundings. Behind me, the lake reflected brilliant specks of light. I squinted into the dim forest ahead of me and could see the statue that overlooked the lake, and beyond the statue, the concrete benches. That meant I was within walking distance of the huge house I’d seen earlier.

So now I had a destination. Hopefully nobody was home.

I didn’t see any cars in the driveway, so luck was with me so far.

“Damn, damn, damn,” I muttered under my breath as I winced my way across the gravel to the back door. There were just enough nerves working in my bare feet for me to feel the stones cutting into the cold flesh. I healed quicker now than I had before, back when I was still just Cole, but it didn’t make the initial bite of the stone any less painful.

I tried the back door—unlocked. Truly the Man Upstairs was smiling down on me. I made a note to send a card. Pushing open the door, I stepped into a cluttered mudroom that smelled like barbecue sauce. For a moment, I just stood there, shivering, briefly paralyzed by the memory of barbecue. My stomach—a lot flatter and harder than it had been the last time I’d been human—growled at me, and for a brief, brief moment, I thought about finding the kitchen and stealing food.

The idea of wanting something that bad made my lips curve into a smile. And then my painfully cold feet reminded me why I was here. Clothing first. Then food. I headed out of the mudroom and into a dim hallway.