Linger

“Sam and Grace? Come on in.” Her voice was gorgeous and complicated, a smoker’s voice, though the smell pouring from inside was coffee, not cigarettes. Grace, suddenly motivated, stepped into the studio, following the scent of caffeine like a rat after the Pied Piper.

Once the door was shut behind us, it was no longer the basement of a shabby rambler but a high-tech escape pod in some other universe. We faced a wall of mixing boards and computer monitors; the entire room was dark and muted by soundproofing; recessed lighting illuminated the keypads and a chic low black sofa. One of the walls was glass and looked into a dark, soundproofed room with an upright piano and an assortment of microphones in it.

“I’m Dmitra,” the girl with the braids said, reaching a hand out to shake. She looked unflinchingly at me at the same time that I lifted my gaze from her nose to her eyes, and just like that, we had made an unspoken pact: She would not stare at my yellow eyes because I would not stare at her nose. “Are you Sam or Grace?”

I smiled at her straight-faced delivery and shook her hand. “Sam Roth. Nice to meet you.”

Dmitra shook hands with Grace, who was making friends with the Labrador, and said, “What are we doing today, kids?”

Grace looked at me. I said, “Demo, I guess.”

“You guess? What sort of instrumentation are we looking at?”

I lifted the guitar case a few inches.

“Okay,” she said. “You done this before?”

“Nope.”

“A virgin. Sometimes just what you need,” Dmitra said.

She reminded me a little of Beck. Even though she was smiling and joking, I could tell that she was watching and judging and making decisions about me and Grace as she did. Beck did that, too: gave the impression of intimacy while he was really deciding whether or not you were worth his time.

“You’ll be in there, then,” she continued. “Do you want to get some coffee before we get started?”

Grace made a beeline for the kitchenette that Dmitra indicated. While she did, Dmitra asked me, “What do you listen to?”

I set my guitar case on the sofa and extracted my guitar. I tried not to sound too pretentious. “A lot of indie rock. The Shins, Elliott Smith, José González. Damien Rice. Gutter Twins. Stuff like that.”

“Elliott Smith,” Dmitra repeated, as if I hadn’t said anything else. “I see.”

Grace reappeared with an ugly mug with a deer painted on it, as Dmitra did something with the computer that may or may not have been as useful as she was making it look. Finally, she directed me into the other room. She gave me an audience of microphones, one for my voice, one for my guitar, both leaning attentively toward me, and handed me a set of headphones.

“So we can talk to you,” she said, disappearing back into the other room. Grace lingered, her hand on the Labrador’s head beside her.

My fingers felt grimy and inadequate to the task ahead of them; the headphones smelled like they’d been worn by too many heads. From my perch on the chair, I looked plaintively up at Grace, who looked beautiful and peaked in the strange recessed lighting, like an edgy magazine model. I realized I hadn’t asked her how she was feeling that morning. If she was still sick. I remembered her losing her footing outside the car and taking care to make sure I didn’t see. I swallowed, my throat clinging to itself, and asked instead, “Can we get a dog?”

“We can,” Grace said, magnanimously. “But I will not walk it in the morning. Because I will be sleeping.”

“I never sleep,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I jumped as Dmitra’s voice came through the headphones. “Would you just sing and play a little bit so that I can set up the levels?”

Grace leaned over and kissed the top of my head, careful not to spill her coffee into my lap. “Good luck.”

I sort of wanted her to stay here while I sang, to remind me of why I was here, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be the same to sing songs about missing her while looking at her, so I let her go.

• GRACE •

I took my place on the sofa and tried to pretend that Dmitra didn’t intimidate me. She didn’t make small talk while she was rummaging on the mixing board, and I didn’t know if talking would bother her, so I just sat there and watched her work.

Honestly, I was glad for the break in the conversation, the opportunity to be silent. My head was beginning its same slow thrumming, the strange heat spreading through my body again. Talking through the headache made my teeth ache; the warmth of the dull pain gathered in my throat and in my nostrils. I dabbed a tissue on my nose, but it was dry.

Just keep it together for today, I told myself. Today isn’t about you.

I would not ruin the day for Sam. So I sat on the sofa and ignored my body the best I could and listened.

Sam had turned his back so that he faced away from us while he tuned his guitar, his shoulders hunched around the instrument.

“Sing for me for a moment,” Dmitra said, and I saw him turn his head when he heard her voice in his headphones. He launched into some rapid fingerpicking piece that I’d never heard him play before, and began to sing. His very first note wavered, a hint of nerves, and then it was gone, disappearing into his voice, breathy and earnest. The song was this heart-breaking piece about loss and saying good-bye—I thought at first that it was about Beck, or even about me, and then I realized it was about Sam:

One thousand ways to say good-bye

One thousand ways to cry

One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside

I say good-bye good-bye good-bye

I shout it out so loud

‘Cause the next time that I find my voice I might not remember how.

Hearing it coming out of speakers instead of Sam made it seem entirely different, like I had never heard him before. For some reason, my face just wanted to smile and smile. It felt wrong to be so proud of something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, but I couldn’t help myself. In front of the mixing board, Dmitra had gone still, her fingers poised over the top of sliders. Her head was cocked, listening, and then she said, without turning around to face me, “We might end up with something good today.”

I just kept smiling, because I’d known that all along.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

• ISABEL •

At three in the afternoon, we had Kenny’s to ourselves. It still smelled like the morning’s greasy breakfast offerings: cheap bacon, soggy hash browns, and a vague cigarette odor, despite the lack of a smoking section.

Across the booth from me, Cole slouched, his legs long enough that I kept accidentally hitting them with my feet. I didn’t think he looked like he belonged in this hick diner any more than I did. He looked like he’d been put together by a swank designer who knew what he was doing—his distinctive features were brutal and purposeful, sharp enough to hurt yourself on. The booth seemed soft and faded around him, almost comically old-fashioned and country in comparison, like someone had dropped him here for a tongue-in-cheek photo shoot. I was sort of fascinated by his hands—hard-looking hands, all steep angles and prominent veins running across the back of them. I watched the deft way that his fingers moved while he did mundane things like putting sugar in his coffee.

“You a musician?” I asked.

Cole looked at me from under his eyebrows; something about the question bothered him, but he was too good to reveal much. “Yeah,” he said.

“What kind?”

He made the kind of face real musicians make when they’re asked about their music. His voice was self-deprecating when he said, “Just a bit of everything. Keyboards, I guess.”

“We have a piano at my house,” I said.

Cole looked at his hands. “Don’t really do it anymore.” And then he fell silent again, and it was that silence, heavy and growing and poisonous, that rested on the table between us.

I made a face that he didn’t see because he didn’t bother lifting his eyes. I wasn’t big on making small talk. I considered calling Grace to ask her what I should say to a reticent suicidal werewolf, but I’d left my phone somewhere. Car, maybe.

“What are you looking at?” I demanded finally, not expecting an answer.

To my surprise, Cole stretched one hand out toward me, extending his fingers so that his thumb was closest, and he regarded it with an expression of wonder and revulsion. His voice echoed his expression. “This morning, when I became me again, there was a dead deer in front of me. Not really dead. She was looking at me”—and now he met my eye, to see my reaction—“but she couldn’t get up, because before I’d shifted, I’d ripped her open. And I guess, well, I guess I was eating her alive. And I guess I kept doing it after, because my hands…they were covered with her guts.”

He looked down at his thumb, and now I saw that there was a small ridge of brown beneath the nail. The end of his thumb trembled, so slightly that I almost didn’t see it. He said, “I can’t get it off.”

I rested my hand on the table, palm up, and when he didn’t understand what I wanted, I stretched my arm a few inches farther and took his fingers in mine. With my other hand, I got my nail clipper out of my purse. I flicked out the hook and slid it under his nail, scraping the bit of brown out.

I blew the grit off the table, put the clippers back in my purse, and let him have his hand back.

He left it where it was, between us, palm down, fingers spread out and pressed against the tabletop as if it were an animal poised for flight.

Cole said, “I don’t think your brother was your fault.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, Grace.”

“Huh?”

“Grace. Sam’s girlfriend. She says that, too. But she wasn’t there. Anyway, the guy she tried to save that way lived. She can afford to be generous. Why are we talking about this?”

“Because you made me walk three miles for a cup of old coffee. Tell me why meningitis.”

“Because meningitis gives you a fever.” His blank look told me that I was starting in the wrong place. “Grace was bitten as a kid. But she never shifted, because her idiot father locked her in the car on a hot day and nearly fried her. We decided that maybe you could replicate that effect with a high fever, and we couldn’t think of anything better than meningitis.”

“With a thirty-five percent survival rate,” Cole said.

“Ten to thirty percent,” I corrected. “And I already told you—it cured Sam. It killed Jack.”

“Jack is your brother?”

“Was, yeah.”

“And you injected him?”

“No, Grace did. But I got the infected blood to give to him.”

Cole looked impatient. “I don’t even have to bother to tell you why your guilt is self-indulgent, then.”

One of my eyebrows shot up. “I don’t—”

“Shhh,” he said. He drew his outstretched hand back toward his coffee mug and stared at the salt and pepper shakers. “I’m thinking. So Sam never shifts at all?”

“No. The fever cooked the wolf out of him, or something.”