Linger

“I already told you that he’s like Beck’s son and he’s basically taking over for him. What more do you want to know? It’s not like I’m his girlfriend.” But her voice was admiring; she liked him. I didn’t know what I thought of him yet.

I said the thing that had been bugging me since I’d met him. “It’s cold. He’s human.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, Beck led me to believe that was a pretty hard thing to accomplish, if not impossible.”

Isabel seemed to be contemplating something—I saw a tiny, silent battle waging in her eyes—and finally she shrugged and said, “He’s cured. He gave himself a high fever and it cured him.” This was a clue of some kind. To Isabel. Something in her voice wasn’t quite right when she said it, but I wasn’t sure how it fit into the overall picture.

“I thought Beck wanted us—the new ones—to take care of the pack because there aren’t many left who turn human for long enough,” I said. Truthfully, I was relieved. I didn’t want responsibility; I wanted to slide into the darkness of a wolf’s skin for as much time as possible. “Why didn’t he just cure everybody?

“He didn’t know Sam was cured. If he’d known, he would’ve never made more wolves. And the cure doesn’t work for everybody.” Now Isabel’s voice was out-and-out hard, and I felt like I was somehow no longer a part of the conversation I’d started.

“Good thing I don’t want to be cured, then,” I said lightly.

She looked at me, and her voice was contemptuous. “Good thing.”

Suddenly I felt sort of done. Like in the end, she was going to see the truth about me no matter what I said, because that was what she did. She was going to see that when you took away NARKOTIKA, I was just Cole St. Clair, and inside me was absolutely nothing.

I felt the familiar hollow hunger inside, like my soul was rotting.

I wanted a fix. I needed to find a needle to slide under my skin or a pill to dissolve under my tongue.

No. What I needed was to be a wolf again.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Isabel asked, suddenly, and I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized I’d shut them. Her gaze was intense.

“Of what?”

“Of losing yourself?”

I told her the truth: “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

• ISABEL •

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I didn’t expect him to be honest with me. I wasn’t sure where we could go from here, because I wasn’t prepared to return the favor.

He lifted a dripping hand from the water, his fingertips a little wrinkled.

“You want to see if my fingers are done?” he asked.

Something in my stomach turned over as I took his wet hand and ran my fingers from his palm to his fingertips. His eyes were half-closed, and when I was through, he took his hand back and sat up, making the water slosh and crest around him. He leaned his hands on the edge of the bathtub, putting his face at my eye level. I knew we were going to kiss again and I knew that we shouldn’t, because he was already at rock bottom and I was getting there, too, but I couldn’t help myself. I was starving for him.

His mouth tasted like wolf and salt, and when he put his hand at the base of my neck to pull me closer, lukewarm water trailed down my collarbone into my shirt and between my breasts.

“Ow,” he said into my mouth, and I pulled back. But he didn’t appear particularly concerned as he looked down at his shoulder, where my nails had broken the skin. I was still aching from kissing him, and this time, at least, he seemed to feel it, too, because when he dragged his still slightly damp hand flat down my neck to my breastbone, stopping just short of broaching the line of my camisole, I felt the wanting in the pressure of his fingertips.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Find a bed,” he said.

“I’m not sleeping with you.” The high of the kiss was starting to wear off, and it was like the first time I’d met him all over again. Why did I let him get to me? What was wrong with me? I stood up, got my coat off the counter, and put it back on. Suddenly, I was horribly afraid that Sam would know that we’d kissed.

“And again I’m left feeling like I must be a bad kisser,” Cole said.

“I need to go home,” I told him. “I have school tomorrow—today. I have to be home before my dad leaves for work.”

“A really bad kisser.”

“Just say thanks for your fingers and toes.” I had my hand on the doorknob. “And let’s leave it at that.”

Cole should’ve been looking at me like I was crazy, but he was just looking at me. Like he didn’t seem to get that this was a rejection.

“Thanks for my fingers and toes,” he said.

I shut the bathroom door behind me and left the house without finding Sam. It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I remembered how Cole had told me that he was hoping to lose himself. It made me feel better to think that he was broken.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

• COLE •

I woke up human, though the sheets were twisted and smelled of wolf.

After Isabel left the night before, Sam had led me past a pile of linens that had clearly just been torn from a bed, and set me up in a downstairs bedroom. The entire room was so yellow that it looked like the sun had thrown up on the walls and wiped its mouth afterward on the dresser and curtains. But it had a freshly made bed in the middle of the room, and that was all that mattered.

“Good night,” Sam said, voice cool but not hostile.

I didn’t reply. I was already under the covers, dead to the world, dreaming of nothing.

Now, blinking in the late morning sunshine, I left the bed unmade and padded into the living room, which looked entirely different in the daylight. All reds and tartans made brilliant by the sun pouring in the wall of windows behind me. It looked comfortable. Not at all like the stiff gothic perfection of Isabel’s house.

In the kitchen, photos were stuck every which way on the cabinets, a mess of tape and pushpins and smiling faces. I immediately found Beck in dozens of them, and Sam, too, looking like a stop-motion video as he aged in each one. No Isabel.

The faces, for the most part, were all happy and grinning and comfortable, like they were making the best of a strange life. There were photos of grilling and canoeing and playing guitars together, but it was pretty obvious that they all took place either in this house or in the immediate vicinity of Mercy Falls. It was like there were two messages being given out by the cabinets of photos: We are a family, and You are a prisoner.

You chose this, I reminded myself. The truth was, I hadn’t given much thought to the times in between being a wolf. I hadn’t really given much thought to anything.

“How are your fingers?”

My muscles tensed for a second before I recognized the voice as Sam’s. I turned toward it and found him standing in the wide doorway to the kitchen, a cup of tea in his hand, the light from behind haloing his shoulders. His eyes had a shadowed look that was equal parts sleep deprivation and uncertainty about me.

It was a weird and surprisingly freeing feeling, to have someone not take you at face value.

To answer his question, I lifted my hands beside my head and wiggled my fingers, a gesture with cavalier overtones that I hadn’t initially intended.

Sam’s unnervingly yellow eyes—I never got used to them—kept looking, looking at me, waging a battle with himself. Finally he said in a flat voice, “There’s cereal and eggs and milk.”

I raised an eyebrow.

Sam’s shoulders had already ducked as he started to retreat back into the hall, but my raised eyebrow stopped him. He closed his eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “Okay, this.” He set his mug on the island between us and crossed his arms. “This: Why are you here?”

The pugilistic tone made me like him slightly better. It offset his stupid floppy hair and sad, fake-looking eyes. Evidence of a spine was a good thing.

“To be a wolf,” I said, flippant. “Which, coincidentally, isn’t the reason you’re here, if rumors are true.”

Sam’s eyes flicked to the photos behind me, so many of them containing him, and then back to my face. “It doesn’t matter why I’m here. This is my home.”

“I see that,” I replied. I could’ve helped him out, but I didn’t see the point.

Sam considered for a moment. I could actually see him mentally reviewing how much effort he wanted to put into the conversation. “Look. I’m not normally a jerk. But I’m having a really hard time understanding why someone would choose this life. If you could explain that to me, we’d be a lot closer to getting along.”

I held out my hands as if I were presenting something. When I did that at shows, the audience went wild, because it meant I was about to sing something new. Victor would’ve gotten the reference and laughed. Sam didn’t have the context, so he just looked at my hands until I said, “To make a fresh start, Ringo. The same reason your man Beck did it.”

Sam’s expression went totally flat. “But you chose this. On purpose.”

Clearly Beck had given Sam a different story of his genesis than the one he’d given me; I wondered which one was real. I wasn’t about to get into a lengthy discussion with Sam, however, who was looking at me like he expected me to debunk Santa Claus next. “Yeah, I did. Make of that what you will. Now can I get some breakfast, or what?”

Sam shook his head—not like he was angry, but like he was shaking gnats away from his thoughts. He glanced at his watch. “Yeah. Whatever. I’ve got to get to work.” He stepped past me, not meeting my eyes, and then checked himself. He went back into the kitchen and jotted something on a Post-it note, which he then smacked onto the door of the fridge. “That’s my cell and my work. Call me if you need me.”

It was clearly killing him to be nice to me, but still, he was. An ingrained sense of politeness? Duty? What was it? I wasn’t really a fan of nice people.

Sam started again to head out, but he stopped again, in the doorway, his car keys jingling. “You’ll probably change back soon. When the sun goes down, anyway, or if you’re outside too long. So try to stick around here, okay? So no one will see you shift?”

I smiled thinly at him. “Sure thing.”

Sam looked like he was going to say something else, but then he just pressed two fingers to his temple and grimaced. The gesture said all the things that Sam hadn’t: He had plenty of problems, and I was just another one of them.

I was enjoying being not-famous more than I’d expected.

• ISABEL •

When Grace wasn’t in school on Monday, I ducked into the girls’ bathroom and called her during lunch. And got her mom. At least, I was pretty sure it was her mother.

“Hello?” The voice that answered was obviously not Grace’s.

“Uh, hello?” I tried not to sound too snarky, in case it really was her mom. “I was calling for Grace.” Okay, so I couldn’t keep all the attitude out of my voice. But seriously.