Linger

It was Ulrik who found me.

“Ah, Junge,” he said in a sad voice, running a hand over his shaved head as he looked around. I blinked at him blankly, somehow surprised that he was not my mother or father. “How long have you been in here?”

I was curled in the corner of the shed, staring at my bloody fingers, my brain slowly drifting out of my wolf thoughts and into fragmented human ones. Bins and their lids were scattered across the shed, and the boom box lay in the middle of the floor, the cord jerked from the wall. There was dried blood smeared on the floor, with prints both wolf and human through it. Chips and peelings from the door made a violent confetti, surrounded by torn bags of chips and pretzels, their ruined contents abandoned, uneaten.

Ulrik crossed the floor, his boots crunching softly across the fine sand of potato chips, and he stopped halfway to me as I shrank back. My vision danced, showing me by turns the trashed shed and my old bedroom, strewn with bed linens and shredded books.

He reached a hand toward me. “Come on, get up. Let’s get you inside.”

But I didn’t move. I looked again at my blunted nails, bloody splinters shoved beneath them. I was lost in the small world of my fingertips, the shallow ridges of whorls outlined delicately with red, a single banded wolf hair caught in my blood. My gaze slid to the lumpy new scars on my wrists, spotted with crimson.

“Sam,” Ulrik said.

I didn’t lift my eyes to him. I had used all my words and all my strength trying to get out, and now I couldn’t bring myself to want to stand.

“I’m not Beck,” he said, voice helpless. “I don’t know what he does to make you snap out of this, okay? I don’t know how to speak your language, Junge. What are you thinking? Just look at me.”

He was right. Beck had a way of pulling me back to reality, but Beck was not there. Ulrik finally picked me up, my body limp as a corpse in his arms, and carried me all the way back to the house. I didn’t speak or eat or move until Beck shifted and came into the house—even now, I still didn’t know if it had been hours or days.

Beck didn’t come straight to me. Instead he went into the kitchen and clanged some pots. When he came back out to the living room, where I hid in the corner of the sofa, he had a plate of eggs.

“I made you food,” he said.

The eggs were exactly the way I liked them. I looked at them instead of Beck’s face and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Beck said. “You didn’t know any better. And Ulrik was the only one who liked those damn Doritos. You did us all a favor.”

He set the plate down on the sofa beside me and went down the hall into his study. After a minute, I took the eggs and slid silently down the hall after him. Sitting down outside the open study door, I listened to the erratic patter of Beck’s fingers on his keyboard as I ate.

That was back when I was still broken. It was back when I thought I’d have Beck forever.

“Hi, Ringo.”

Cole’s voice brought me back to the here and now, years later, no longer a nine-year-old guided by benevolent guardians. He stood at my elbow as I faced the shed door.

“I see you’re still human,” I said, more surprised than my voice let on. “What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to become a wolf.”

A nasty chill ran down my skin at that, remembering fighting the wolf inside. Remembering the turn in my stomach before the shift. The sick feeling just when I lost myself. I didn’t reply. Instead, I pushed open the door to the shed, fumbling for the light. The space smelled musty, unused; memories and dust motes suspended in the stale air. Behind me, a cardinal made its squeaking-sneaker noise again and again, but otherwise, there was no sound.

“Now’s a good a time as any to get familiar with this place, then,” I told him. I stepped into the shed, my shoes making dusty shuffling noises on the worn wood floor. Everything was in place as far as I could see—blankets folded neatly beside the dormant television, watercooler filled to the top, and jugs lined up obediently behind it, waiting their turn. Everything was waiting for wolves to fall into humans.

Cole stepped in after me, looking around at the bins and supplies with vague interest. Everything about him radiated disdain and restless energy. I wanted to ask him What did Beck see in you? Instead, I asked, “Is it what you expected?”

Cole had one of the bins opened a few inches and was looking inside; he didn’t look away as he replied, “What?”

“Being a wolf.”

“I expected it to be worse,” he said, and now he looked at me, a sly smile on his face like he knew what I’d gone through to not be one. “Beck told me the pain was unbearable.”

I picked up a dried leaf that we’d tracked into the shed. “Yeah, well, the pain’s not the difficult part.”

“Oh yeah?” Cole’s voice was knowing. It was like he wanted me to hate him. “What’s the difficult part, then?”

I turned away from him. I really didn’t want to answer. Because I didn’t think he’d care about the difficult part.

Beck had picked him. I would not hate him. I would not. There had to have been something in there that Beck saw. Finally, I said, “One year, one of the wolves—Ulrik—he decided it would be a great idea to start growing Italian herbs from seeds in pots. Ulrik was always doing crazy crap like that.” I remembered him poking holes in the potting soil and dropping seeds in, tiny, dead-looking things disappearing into the deep black earth. “This had better work, dammit,” he had said amiably to me. I’d been standing by his elbow the entire time, getting in his way while I watched, moving only when his elbow accidentally prodded my chest. “Think you can stand any closer, Sam?” he’d asked. Now, to Cole, I added, “Beck thought Ulrik was crazy. He told him that basil was only two bucks a bunch at the store.”

Cole raised one of his eyebrows at me, his expression clearly indicating that he was indulging me.

I ignored his expression and said, “I watched Ulrik’s seeds every day for weeks, waiting for any little bit of green in the dirt, anything to tell me that there was life waiting to happen. And that’s it. That’s the difficult part,” I told Cole. “I am standing here in the shed, and I’m waiting to see if my seeds are going to poke out of the dirt. I don’t know if it’s too early to look for signs of life or if, this time, winter has claimed my family for good.”

Cole stared at me. The contempt was gone from his expression, but he didn’t say anything. His face held something empty, something I didn’t know how to react to, so I didn’t say anything, either.

There was no point in staying any longer. I did the last step while Cole hung back, checking the food bins to make sure no insects had gotten into them. I left my fingers hooked on the edge of the plastic bin for a moment as I listened. I didn’t know what I was listening for; there was only silence and more silence and more silence again. Even the cardinal outside the still-open door had fallen quiet.

Pretending Cole wasn’t there, I strained my ears like I had when I was a wolf, attempting to create a map of all the creatures in the nearby woods and the sounds that they made. But I heard nothing.

Somewhere, there were wolves in these woods, but they were invisible to me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

• COLE •

I was losing my grip on my human body, and I was glad.

Sam made me uncomfortable. I had a couple of different personas that pretty much worked across the board for everyone I had ever met, but none of them seemed right for him. He was painfully, annoyingly earnest, and how was I supposed to respond to that?

So I was relieved when we got back from the shed and he announced that he was going on a drive.

“I’d ask if you wanted to come,” Sam said, “but you’re going to change soon.”

He didn’t say how he came to this conclusion, but his nostrils pinched a bit, like he could smell me. A few moments later, the diesel engine of his Volkswagen thrummed noisily as it pulled out of the driveway, leaving me alone in a house that changed moods with the time of day. The afternoon got cloudy and cold, and suddenly, the house was no longer a comforting den but a foreboding maze of graying rooms, something out of a fever dream. Likewise, my body wasn’t firmly human—but it wasn’t wolf, either. Instead it was a strange, middle territory—human body, wolf brain. Human memories seen through wolf eyes. At first I paced the halls, the walls pressing in, not really believing Sam’s diagnosis. When I finally felt a hint of the shift in the creep of my nerves, I stood at the open back door and waited for the cold to take me. But I wasn’t there yet. So I shut the door and lay on my borrowed bed, feeling the gnaw of nausea and the crawl of my skin.

Through the discomfort, I was intensely relieved.

I had begun to think that I wasn’t going to change back into a wolf.

But this miserable in-between—I got up, went to the back door again, stood in the frigid wind. I gave up after about ten minutes and retreated back to the couch, curling around the turmoil of my stomach. My mind darted through the gray halls, though my body stayed still. In my head, I walked down the hall, through unfamiliar rooms in shades of black and white. I felt Isabel’s collarbone under my hand, saw my skin losing its color as I became a wolf, felt the microphone in my fist, heard my father’s voice, saw him facing me across the dining room table.

No. Anywhere but home. I would let my memories take me anywhere but there.

Now I was at the photo studio with the rest of NARKOTIKA. It was our first big magazine spread. Well, really it was mine. The theme was “Under-18 Success Stories,” and I was the poster child. The rest of NARKOTIKA was just there as supporting cast.

They weren’t shooting us in the studio proper; instead the photographer and his assistant had taken us into the stairwell of the old building and were trying to capture the mood of the band’s music by draping us over the railings and standing us on different stairs. The stairwell smelled like someone else’s lunch—fake bacon bits and salad dressing you’d never order and some mysterious spice that might have been old foot.

I was coming off a high. It wasn’t my first one, but it was pretty damn close. These brand-new highs pushed me into a humming flight of euphoria that still left me feeling a little guilty afterward. I had just written one of my best songs ever—“Break My Face (and Sell the Pieces),” destined to be my best-selling single—and I was in a great mood. I would’ve been in an even better mood if I hadn’t been there, because I wanted to be smelling the outside air, thick with exhaust fumes and restaurant smells and every thrilling city scent that told me I was somebody.

“Cole. Cole. Hey, slick. Could you stand still for me? Stand next to Jeremy for a second and look down over here. Jeremy, you look at him,” the photographer said. He was a paunchy, middle-aged guy, with an unevenly cut goatee that was going to bother me all day. His assistant was a twenty-something redheaded girl who had already confessed her love for me and thus became uninteresting. At seventeen, I hadn’t yet discovered that a sardonic smile could make girls take their shirts off.