Linger

I stared at Victor, remembering sitting in the hotel room after I’d met Beck, remembered saying, You ready for the next big thing, Vic?

“Cole,” Sam said, not looking away from him. “How many times? How long have you been here?”

I shrugged, trying to look casual about it. “A half hour. He’s been going back and forth the entire time. Is this normal?”

“No,” Sam said emphatically, still looking at the wolf, who had crouched down close to the floor, staring back at him. “No, this isn’t normal. If it’s warm enough for him to stay human, he should be able to stay human for longer. Not this—I mean…” He trailed off as the wolf stood back up again.

Sam moved his knees away from Victor, in case he wanted to bolt, but suddenly Victor’s ears flagged, and he began to tremble again. We both turned our faces away until he had changed into a human and had time to pull a blanket back over himself.

Victor groaned, lightly, and pressed his forehead into his hand.

Sam turned back around. “Does it hurt?”

“Ugh. Not a lot.” He paused, shrugged his shoulders up by his ears, and kept them there. “God, I’ve been doing this all day. I just want to know when it will stop.” He wouldn’t look at me; his truthfulness was for Sam.

Sam said, “I wish I had an answer for you, Victor. Something is keeping you from staying in one form, and I don’t know what it is.”

Victor asked, “Is this the best it gets? I mean, I’m caught, right? This is what I get for listening to you, Cole. I should’ve figured out a long time ago that this is always how it goes.”

But he still wasn’t looking at me.

I remembered that day back in the hotel. Victor was crashing badly from one of his highs. These new lows of his were so low that even I, in my studied disinterest, could see that one day he wouldn’t be able to climb back out of them. I’d been trying to help him when I convinced him to become a wolf with me. It wasn’t entirely selfish. It wasn’t just because I didn’t want to try it alone.

If Sam hadn’t been around, I would’ve told Victor that.

Sam knocked Victor’s shoulder with a fist. “Hey. It’s different when you’re new. Everybody starts out unstable, and then we even out. Yeah, it’s crap now, and you’re taking crap to a whole new level, but when it gets really warm, this’ll be behind you.”

Victor looked bleakly at Sam, a face I’d seen a million times before because I had created it. Finally, he looked at me. “This should be you, you bastard,” he said, and then he uncurled into a wolf again.

Sam threw up his hands, his palms open like an entreaty, and said, utterly frustrated, “How—how—how…” I realized how carefully he had been controlling his features and voice. It made my mind twist, almost as much as seeing Victor shift, to hear Sam go from oozing calm to being a hot mess. It meant that Sam had been perfectly capable of presenting a benevolent mask to me all along, but that he had chosen not to. Somehow it changed the entire way I thought of him.

Maybe that’s what made me speak up. “Something is over-riding the temperature,” I said. “That’s what I think. The heat is making him become human, but something else is telling his body to shift to wolf.”

Sam looked at me. Not disbelieving, but not believing, either. “What else could do that?” he asked.

I looked at Victor, despising him for making this complicated. How hard would it have been to follow me into the wolf and back out, like he was supposed to? I wished I’d never come to the damned shed.

“Something in his brain chemistry?” I said. “Victor has a pituitary problem. Maybe the way it imbalances his levels is interfering with how he shifts.”

Sam gave me a weird look then, but before he could say anything, the pale wolf’s legs began to quiver. I looked away and then Victor was human again. Just like that.

• SAM •

I felt like I was watching the transformation of two people: Victor to wolf, and Cole to someone else. I was the only one standing here, staying the same.

I couldn’t bring myself to leave Victor by himself like this, and so I stayed, and Cole stayed, too, minutes turning into hours while we waited for him to stabilize.

“There’s no way to reverse it,” Victor said flatly as the day began to ebb, not really a question.

I tried not to stiffen as my mind flashed back through the winter before I had rejoined Grace. Lying on the forest floor, fingers dug into the ground, head splitting open. Standing ankle deep in the snow, throwing up until I couldn’t stand. Convulsed with fever, eyes shut against the agony of the light, praying for death.

“No,” I said.

Cole’s eyes were sharp on me, hearing my lie. I wanted to ask him, If this is your friend, why am I the one sitting here next to him instead of you?

As we sat there, waiting for Victor’s next transformation, cooler air and dimming light stole in through the open door, evidence of the temperature dropping as the sun went down.

“Victor, I don’t know how to make you stay human right now,” I said. “But I think it’s probably cold enough that if I got you outside, you’d probably stay a wolf. Do you want that? Do you want a break from shifting, even if it’s not as you?”

Victor said, “Oh my God, yes,” with such feeling that it stung.

“And who knows,” I added. “Maybe once you get more stable, you’ll—”

But there was no point finishing the sentence because Victor was already a wolf again, scrambling back from his proximity to me. “Cole!” I said hurriedly, jumping up. Cole jerked to life, pulling open the door. I was rewarded with a gush of cold air that made me wince, and the wolf shot out into the woods, tail low and ears flattened against his head.

I joined Cole in the doorway, watching Victor dart through the trees before stopping a safe distance away to gaze at us. Bare branches above his head trembled in the fitful breeze, touching the tips of his ears, but he didn’t look away from us. We watched each other for several long minutes.

He stayed a wolf. I thought this feeling inside me was relief for him, but it pinched. I was already thinking about the next warm day and what would happen then.

I realized that Cole still stood beside me, his head cocked to one side, eyes on Victor.

Without thinking, I said, “If that’s how you treat your friends when they need you, I’d hate to see how you treat other people.”

Cole didn’t exactly smile, but the edges of his mouth tightened into a vague expression that lived somewhere between contempt and disinterest. He didn’t look away from Victor, but there was no compassion in his eyes.

I fought the desire to say something else, anything else to get him to reply. I wanted him to hurt for Victor.

“He was right,” Cole said from beside me, his eyes still on Victor. “That should be me.”

I couldn’t quite believe I’d heard him right. I’d underestimated him.

But then Cole added, “I’m the one who wants to get the hell out of this body.”

Somehow, Cole never stopped amazing me.

I regarded him and said coldly, “And to think I thought for two seconds there that you gave a damn about Victor. It’s all about your problems, you becoming a wolf. You just can’t wait to get out of your own head, can you?”

“If you were in here, you might want that, too,” Cole said, and now he did smile, a cruel, lopsided thing that crawled farther up one side of his face than the other. “I can’t be the only one who wants the wolf.”

He wasn’t.

Shelby had preferred it, too. Broken Shelby, barely human, even when she wore the face of a girl.

“You are,” I said.

Cole’s smile broke into a silent laugh. “You’re so naive, Ringo. How well did you know Beck?”

I looked at him, at his condescending expression, and I just wanted him gone. I wished Beck had never brought him back. He should’ve left Cole and Victor in Canada or wherever they’d come from.

“Well enough to know that he made a way better human than you ever will,” I said. Cole’s expression didn’t change; it was like unkind words didn’t make it to his ears. I clenched and unclenched my teeth, angry that I’d let him get to me.

“Wanting to be a wolf doesn’t automatically make you a bad person,” Cole said, voice mild. “And wanting to be human doesn’t make you a good one.”

I was fifteen again, sitting in my room in Beck’s house, arms wrapped around my legs, hiding from the wolf inside me. Winter had already stolen Beck the week before, and Ulrik would be gone soon as well. Then me and my books and guitar would lay untouched until spring, just as Beck’s books already lay abandoned. Forgotten in the self-oblivion that was the wolf.

I didn’t want to have this conversation with Cole. I said, “Are you going to shift soon?”

“Not a chance.”

“Then please go back to the house. I’m cleaning this place up.” I paused. And then, as much to convince me as him, “And it’s what you did to Victor that makes you a bad person. Not wanting to be a wolf.”

Cole looked at me, the same blank expression on his face, and then he headed back toward the house. I turned away from him and went back into the shed.

Like Beck had done before me, I folded up the blanket Victor had left behind and swept out the dust and hair from the floor, and then I checked the watercooler and went through the food bins and made a note of what needed to be added to them. I went to the notepad that we kept by the boat battery—a list of scrawled names, sometimes with a date beside them, sometimes with a description of the trees, because they told time when we couldn’t. Beck’s way of keeping track of who was human and when.

The open page was still of last year’s names, ending with Beck’s, a far shorter list than that of the year before, which was in turn a shorter list than that of the year before it. I swallowed and flipped to the next page. I wrote the year on top and added Victor’s name and the date beside it. Cole’s name really ought to have been on there, too, but I doubted Beck had explained how we logged ourselves in. I didn’t want to add Cole’s name. It would mean officially admitting him to the pack, to my family, and I didn’t want to.

For a long time I stood looking at that blank page with just Victor’s name on it, and then I added my own.

I knew it didn’t belong there anymore, not really, but it was a list of who was human, right?

And who was more human than me?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

• GRACE •

I headed into the trees.

The woods were still dormant and leafless, but the warmer air woke up a cacophony of damp spring smells that had been masked by the cold. Birds trilled at one another overhead, flicking from underbrush to higher branches, leaving shaking boughs in their wake.

I felt it in my bones: I was home.

Only a few yards into the wood, I heard the underbrush crackling behind me. My heart raced as I paused, interrupting the squish and crackle of the forest floor beneath my feet. Again, I heard the rustle again, no closer but no farther, either. I didn’t turn, but I knew it had to be a wolf. I felt no fear—only companionship.