Linger

I fingered the one that hung directly over his pillow. A rumpled piece of notepaper covered with Sam’s handwriting, echoing the voice I now heard in the background. One of the scribbled lines was girl lying in the snow.

I sighed. I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you’re not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was really a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me.

I smiled again, and the delicate birds danced around me.

“Hi,” Sam said from the doorway. His voice was cautious, unsure of where we stood this morning, after our days apart. His hair was all stuck out and crazy from his shower, and he was wearing a collared shirt that made him look weirdly formal, despite its rumpled, untucked appearance and his blue jeans. My mind was screaming: Sam, Sam, finally Sam.

“Hi,” I said, and I couldn’t keep from grinning. I bit my lip, but my smile was still there, and it only got bigger when Sam’s face reflected it back at me. I stood there among his birds, with the shape of my body still impressed on the bed sheets beside me, the sun splashing over me and him, and my worries of last night seeming impossibly small in comparison to the vast glow of this morning.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by what an incredible person this boy was, standing in front of me, and by the fact that he was mine and I was his.

“Right now,” Sam said—and I saw that he held the invoice for today’s studio time in his hand, folded into a bird with sun-washed wings—“it’s hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

• COLE •

I couldn’t get the smell of her blood out of my nostrils.

Sam was gone by the time I got to the house; the driveway was empty and the house felt echoey and hollow. I burst into the downstairs bathroom—the bath mat was still twisted from where Sam and I had struggled the night before—and turned the tap on as hot as I could get it. Then I stood in it and watched blood run down the drain. It looked black in the dull filtered light behind the shower curtain. Scrubbing my palms together and scratching my arms, I tried to get every last trace of the doe off me, but no matter how hard I worked my skin, I could still smell her. And every time I caught a whiff of her scent, I saw her. That dark, resigned eye looking up at me while I stared at her insides.

Then I remembered Victor looking up at me, lying on the floor of the shed, bitter, simultaneously Victor and wolf. My fault.

It occurred to me then that I was the opposite of my father. Because I was very, very good at destroying things.

I reached forward and turned the water temperature all the way to cold. There was a brief moment when there was enough hot water to make it the exact temperature of my body, turning me invisible. Then it became frigid. I swore and fought my instincts to jump out of the tub.

Goose bumps rose immediately on my skin, so fast that they hurt, and I let my head fall back. The water coursed over my neck.

Shift. Shift now.

But the water wasn’t cold enough to force me to change; it was just cold enough to make my gut twist and nausea bubble through me. I used my foot to shut off the water.

Why was I still human?

It didn’t make sense. If being a wolf was scientific, not magical, then it had to follow rules and logic. And the fact that the new wolves changed at different temperatures at different times…it didn’t make sense. My head was full of Victor shifting back and forth, the white wolf watching me silently, sure in her wolf body, and me, pacing the halls of the house, waiting to shift. I grabbed the hand towel from the sink and used it to dry myself as I riffled through the downstairs closets for clothing. I found a dark blue sweatshirt that said navy on it and some jeans that were a bit loose but didn’t fall off. The entire time that I was looking for clothing, my head hummed, turning over possibilities for new logic.

Maybe Beck had been wrong about hot and cold being the cause of the shifts. Maybe they weren’t really causes; maybe they were just catalysts. In which case there might be other ways to trigger the shift.

I needed paper. I couldn’t think without writing my thoughts down.

I got some paper from Beck’s office, and Beck’s day planner as well. I sat down at the dining room table, pen in hand, the heat rushing out softly through the vents making me feel warm and drowsy. My brain instantly traveled back to my parents’ dining room table. I’d sat there every morning with my brainstorming notebook—my father’s idea—and I would do my homework or write song lyrics or journal on something I’d seen on the news. That was back when I’d been sure I was going to change the world.

I thought about Victor, his eyes closed as he rode some new high. My mother’s face when I told her she could go to hell with Dad. The countless girls waking up to find out they’d slept with a ghost, because I was already gone, if not in actuality, in some spiraling trip contained in a bottle or syringe. The way that Angie had one hand pressed flat against her breastbone when I told her I’d cheated on her.

Oh, yeah, I’d changed the world all right.

I opened the day planner and browsed through it, not even really reading, just skimming, looking for clues. There were little bits and pieces that might be useful but were meaningless on their own: I found one of the wolves dead today; I looked at her eyes but she was no one to me. Paul said she’d stopped shifting fourteen years ago. There was blood on her face. Smelled like hell. And Derek changed into a wolf for two hours in the heat of summer; Ulrik and I have been trying to work that one out all afternoon. And Why does Sam get so many fewer years than the rest of us? He is the best of all of us. Why does life have to be so unfair?

My gaze dropped to my hand. There was still a little bit of blood underneath the nail of my thumb. I didn’t think that blood could stay on your skin when you shifted; it would’ve been on my fur, anyway, not on my skin. So that meant that blood underneath my fingernail had gotten there after I’d become a human. In those unmeasured minutes after I got my human body back but before I’d become Cole again.

I rested my head on the table; the wood seemed freezing cold on my skin. It seemed like far too much work to work out the werewolf logic. Even if I did—even if I figured out what really made us shift and where our minds went when they weren’t following our bodies—what was the point? To become a wolf forever? All that work, just to preserve a life that I wouldn’t remember. A life not worth preserving.

I knew from experience that there were easier ways to get rid of conscious thought. And I knew of one, one that until now I’d just been too cowardly to attempt, that worked permanently.

I’d told Angie once. It was back before she hated me, I think. I’d been playing the keyboard, home from my first tour, when the whole world lay out before me like I was both king and conqueror, full of possibilities. Angie didn’t know yet that I’d cheated on her during the tour. Or maybe she did. When I’d stopped playing, my fingers still hovering over the keys, I said to her, “I’ve been thinking about killing myself.”

Angie hadn’t looked up from her position in the old La-Z-Boy we kept in the garage. “Yeah, I guessed that. How’s that working out for you?”

“It’s got its definite pros,” I replied. “I can only think of one con.”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then she said, “Why would you say something like that, anyway? You want me to talk you out of it? The only person who can talk you out of or into that is yourself. You’re the genius. You know that. So that means you’re just saying it for effect.”

“Bull,” I said. “I really wanted your advice. But whatever.”

“What do you think I’m going to say? ‘You’re my boyfriend, go on, kill yourself. It’s a nice easy way out.’ I’m sure that’s what I would say.”

In my head, I was in a hotel letting some girl named Rochelle who I’d never see again slide my pants off, just because I could. I closed my eyes and let self-loathing gently sing a siren song to me. “I don’t know, Angie. I don’t know. I didn’t think. I just said what I was thinking, okay?”

She bit her knuckle and looked at the floor for a moment. “Okay, how about this. Redemption. That’s the biggest con I can think of. You kill yourself, that’s the end. That’s the way you’ll be remembered. That, and hell. You still believe in that?”

I’d lost my cross somewhere on the road. The chain had broken and now it was probably in some gas station bathroom or tangled in hotel sheets or kept as some shining souvenir by someone I hadn’t meant to leave it with.

“Yeah,” I said, because I still believed in hell. It was heaven I wasn’t so sure about anymore.

I didn’t mention it to her again. Because she was right: The only person who could talk me into it or out of it was me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

• GRACE •

Every minute took us farther away from Mercy Falls and everything in it.

We took Sam’s car, because it was a diesel and got better mileage, but Sam let me drive, because he knew I liked to. The CD player still had one of my Mozart CDs in it when we got in, but I switched it to the fuzzy indie alt-rock station I knew he liked. Sam blinked over at me in surprise, and I tried not to look too smug that I was learning his language. Slower, maybe, than he was learning mine, but still, I was impressed with myself.

The day was beautiful and blue, the low areas of the road coated with a thin, pale mist that began to burn off as soon as the sun got above the trees. Some guy with a mellow voice and persuasive guitar hummed out of the speakers; he reminded me of Sam. Beside me, Sam leaned his arm across the back of my seat to softly pinch one of the vertebrae in my neck, and murmured along to the lyrics with a voice that conveyed both fondness and familiarity. Despite my slightly achy limbs, it was hard to shake the feeling of utter rightness with the world.

“Do you know what you’re going to sing?” I asked.

Sam leaned his cheek on his outstretched arm and drew lazy circles on the back of my neck. “I don’t know. You sprang it on me suddenly. And I was a bit preoccupied with being ostracized for the last few days. I guess I will sing—something. I may suck.”

“I don’t think you will suck. What were you singing in the shower?”

He was unself-conscious as he answered, both endearing and unusual for him. I was beginning to realize that music was the only skin he was truly comfortable in. “Something new. Maybe something new. Well…maybe something.”

I got onto the interstate; this time of day, the road was lonely and we had the lanes to ourselves. “A baby song?”

“A baby song. More like a fetal song. I don’t think it’s even got legs yet. Wait, I think I’m getting babies confused with tadpoles.”

I struggled to think of what it was that developed first on babies and failed utterly to manage it in a timely enough manner for a comeback. So I just said, “About me?”