Linger

The destruction was so bizarre that it had to be intentional—books lying facedown in smears of water, pages ripped out; dented cans of food rolled against the walls; an empty wine bottle stuck upside down in a potted plant; paint shredded off the walls.

And then I heard the sounds again, scrabbling and smashing, and before I could react, a wolf came staggering down the hall to my left, ricocheting off the wall as it headed toward me. It was starting to become clear how the living room had gotten to its current state.

“Holy—” I said, and stepped backward into the kitchen. But it didn’t seem like the wolf was interested in attack; water sheeted off its sides as it made its erratic way down the hall. It seemed oddly small in this context, its gray-brown fur soaked and slicked against its body, no scarier than a dog. The wolf got a few feet away and then looked up at me with insolent green eyes.

“Cole,” I breathed, my heart doing a double thump. “You crazy bastard.”

To my surprise, he flinched at the sound of my voice. It reminded me that he was, after all, only a wolf, and that his instincts must have been screaming about my presence between him and his exit.

I backed up, but before I could decide whether I should try to get the back door open for him, Cole began to twitch. By the time he was a few feet away from me, he was full-out convulsing and twisting and retching. I took a few steps back so he wouldn’t puke on my nice running shoes and crossed my arms over my chest to watch him shift.

Cole scraped some new claw marks into the wall—Sam was going to love that so much—as he jerked on his side. Then, his body did magic. His skin bubbled and stretched, and I saw his long wolf mouth open wide in pain. He rolled onto his back, panting.

Newly human, he lay stretched on the floor, like a whale washed up on shore, arms marked up with faint pink memories of wounds. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.

My stomach jerked. Cole had his face back again, but his eyes were still feral, lost in his wolf thoughts. Finally, he blinked, and his eyebrows ordered themselves in a way that told me he was really seeing me.

“Cool trick, right?” he said, his voice a little thick.

“I’ve seen better,” I said coolly. “What are you doing?”

Cole didn’t move, except to unfist his hands and stretch out his fingers. “Science experiments. On myself. Long, distinguished history of that.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Possibly,” Cole allowed, with a lazy smile. “I’m not sure if shifting metabolizes some of my blood alcohol. I don’t feel too bad, though. Why are you here?”

I pressed my lips together. “I’m not. I mean, I was just going.”

Cole stretched his arm in my direction. “Don’t go.”

“Because this looks like such a great time,” I said.

“Help me figure it out,” he said. “Help me figure out how to stay a wolf.”

In my mind, I was sitting again at the foot of my brother’s bed, my brother who had risked everything to stay human. I was watching him lose sensation in his fingers and his toes and whimper with the pain of his brain exploding. I didn’t have words to describe my disgust for Cole at that moment.

“Figure it out yourself,” I said.

“I can’t,” Cole told me, still lying on his back, looking at me upside down. “I can only get myself to shift, but it doesn’t stick. The cold’s a trigger, but so’s adrenaline, I think. I tried an ice bath, but that didn’t work until I cut myself, too, for the adrenaline. But it won’t stick. I keep changing back.”

“Boo hoo,” I said. “Sam’s going to be pissed when he sees what you’ve done to his house.” I turned to go.

“Isabel, please.” Cole’s voice followed me, even if his body didn’t. “If I can’t make myself a wolf, I’m going to kill myself.”

I stopped. Didn’t turn around.

“I’m not trying to say it to manipulate you, okay? It’s just the truth.” He hesitated. “I’ve got to get out, somehow, and it’s one or the other. I just can’t—I need to figure this out, Isabel. You know more about the wolves. Please just help me with this.”

I turned around. He was still lying on the floor, one hand over his chest, the other hand outstretched, reaching for me. I said, “All you’re doing is asking me to help you kill yourself. Don’t pretend it’s anything else. What do you think it really is if you become a wolf forever?”

Cole closed his eyes. “Then help me do that.”

I laughed. I heard how cruel my laugh sounded, but I didn’t soften it. “Let me tell you something, Cole. I sat in this house, this very house”—I pointed to the floor as he opened his eyes—“in that room and I watched my brother die. I didn’t do anything about it. You know how he died? He was bitten, and he was trying to keep from turning into a werewolf. I arranged for him to be injected with bacterial meningitis, which proceeded to give him a fever off the charts, basically set his brain on fire, destroyed his fingers and toes, and finally killed him. I didn’t take him to the hospital because I knew that he would rather die than be a werewolf. And in the end, he got that wish.”

Cole stared at me. That same dead look he’d given me before. I expected him to have a reaction, but there was nothing. His eyes were dull. Empty.

“I’m only telling you this so you know that I have wanted to escape about a hundred thousand times since then. I’ve thought about drinking—hey, it works for my mom—or drugs—hey, it works for my mom—and I’ve thought about taking one of my dad’s eight million guns and putting it to my head and blowing my brains out. Sad part? Not even because I miss Jack. I mean, I do, but that’s not why I want to do it. It’s because I feel so damn guilty about how I killed him. I killed him. And some days I just can’t live with that. But I do. Because that’s life, Cole. Life’s pain. You just have to get over as much of it as you can.”

Cole said, simply, “I don’t want to.”

It seemed like he always sprang honesty on me when I least expected it. I knew it was making me empathize with him, even when I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it any more than I could help kissing him before. I crossed my arms again; I felt like he was trying to pull a confession out of me. And I didn’t know if I had any more to confess.

• COLE •

I was lying here, ruined, on the floor, and I had been so certain that today was the day I’d finally get up the nerve to end it.

And then it wasn’t. Because somehow, watching her face when she talked about her brother, I just didn’t feel the urgency anymore. I felt like I had been a balloon getting larger and larger, waiting to pop, and she had come in and burst herself first. And somehow that had let the air out of both of us.

It felt like everyone in this house had a reason to escape, and I was the only one trying to. I was so tired.

“I didn’t realize you were actually human,” I said. “As in, with actual emotions.”

“Unfortunately.”

I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure where I went from here.

She said, “You know what I don’t want to do anymore? Watch you lying there naked.” I rolled my eyes toward her and she added, “It’s like you never wear clothes. You’re always naked when I see you. Are you really stuck as a human?”

I nodded; the sound of my skull rubbing on the floor was loud inside my head.

“Good, then you won’t do anything embarrassing while we’re out. Get some clothes; let’s go get some coffee.”

I shot her a look that clearly said, Oh, that will help. She smiled her thin, cruel smile and said, “If you still feel like killing yourself after caffeine, there will be plenty of time left in the day.”

“Ungh,” I grunted as I got to my feet. I was taken aback by this perspective, standing, looking around at the hall and living room that I had trashed. I hadn’t expected to be doing this again. My spine hurt like hell from shifting so many times in quick succession. “Better be some pretty amazing coffee.”

“It’s not great,” Isabel admitted. She had a weird look on her face now that I was standing: relief? “But for the middle of nowhere, it’s definitely better than what one would expect. Wear something comfortable. It’s three miles back to my car.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

• SAM •

The studio was unimpressive from the outside. It was a squat, tired-looking rambler with a squat, tired-looking blue minivan parked in the driveway. An unmoving Labrador retriever lay in the unoccupied part of the driveway, so Grace parked on the street. She eyed the precipitous angle of the street and wrenched up the parking brake.

“Is that dog dead?” she asked. “Do you think this is really the place?”

I pointed to the bumper stickers on the minivan, all local Duluth indie bands currently in vogue: Finding the Monkey, The Wentz, Alien LifeForms. I hadn’t heard any of them—they were too small to get radio play—but their names were tossed around enough in local advertisements for me to recognize them. “Yeah, I think so.”

“If we get kidnapped by weird hippies, I’m blaming you,” she said, opening her door. A rush of cold morning air got sucked into the car, smelling of city: exhaust, asphalt, the indefinable scent of a lot of people living in a lot of buildings.

“You picked the place.”

Grace blew a raspberry at me and got out. For a moment she seemed a little unsteady on her feet, but she recovered quickly, clearly not wanting me to see it.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Couldn’t be okayer,” she said, popping the trunk.

When I reached down to get my guitar case, nerves punched me in the stomach, surprising me not by their presence but by the fact that they took so long to get there. I gripped the handle of my guitar case and hoped I wouldn’t forget all of my chords.

We headed up to the front door. The dog didn’t lift its head.

“I think it is dead,” Grace said.

“I think it’s one of those things to hide keys under,” I told her.

Grace hooked her fingers in my jean pocket. I was about to knock on the front door when I saw a tiny wooden plaque with permanent-marker lettering: STUDIO ENTRANCE AROUND BACK.

So we went around the back of the rambler, where cracked concrete stairs too wide to easily fit our steps led us to an exposed basement and a hand-lettered sign that said ANARCHY RECORDING, INC. ENTRANCE HERE. Below it was a planter with some limp pansies that had been put out too early and battered by frost.

I turned to Grace. “ ‘Anarchy, Incorporated.’ That’s ironic.”

Grace gave me a withering look and rapped on the door. I wiped a suddenly clammy palm on my jeans.

The door opened, revealing another Labrador, this one very much alive, and a twenty-something girl with a red bandanna tied around her head. She was so interesting-looking and unpretty that she actually traveled through ugly to someplace on the other side that was almost as good as pretty: huge, beaked nose, sleepy-looking dark brown eyes, and sharp cheekbones. Her black hair was pulled up in a half a dozen interconnected braids coiled on top of her head, like a Mediterranean Princess Leia.