Linger

It was brilliant, surreal, exhausting. I was beginning to feel how little sleep I’d gotten the night before.

“Why don’t you take five?” Dmitra suggested after a few hours. “I’ll work on mixing what we’ve done so far and you can get up, piss, get some coffee. You’re starting to sound a little flat, and your girlfriend looks like she misses you.”

Through the headphones, I heard Grace say indignantly, “I was just sitting here!”

I grinned and slid the headphones off. Leaving both them and my guitar behind, I came back into the main room. Grace, looking as exhausted as I felt, lounged on the sofa with the dog at her feet. I stood next to her while Dmitra showed me the shape of my voice on the computer screen. Grace hugged my hips and rested her cheek on my leg. “You sound amazing from out here.”

Dmitra clicked a button, and my voice, compressed and harmonized and beautified, came through the speakers. I sounded—not like me. No…like me. But me, if I was on a radio. Me from outside myself. I stuffed my hands into my armpits, listening. If it was that easy to make a guy sound like a proper singer, you’d think everybody would be in the studio.

“It’s brilliant,” I told her. “Whatever you’ve done. It sounds brilliant.”

Dmitra didn’t turn around as she kept clicking and sliding. “That’s all you, baby. I haven’t really done much yet.”

I didn’t believe her. “Right. Yeah. Hey, where is the bathroom?”

Grace jerked her chin toward the hall. “Turn left at the kitchen.”

I ran a hand over Grace’s head and tweaked her ear with my fingers until she released me, and then I headed down the rat’s maze of halls past the kitchenette. Now, in the hallway, lined with framed and signed album covers, I could smell the cigarette smoke. On the way back from the bathroom, I took my time going back to the studio, looking at the albums and signatures. Karyn might’ve believed that you could tell everything about someone by what sort of books they read, but I knew that you could tell even more by the music they listened to. If the wall was to be believed, Dmitra’s tastes seemed to run toward electronica and dance. She had an impressive collection that I could admire even if the bands weren’t really my thing. I made a note to joke with her about her impressive selection of Swedish album covers when I got back to the studio.

Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn’t. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn’t consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something’s out of place before you’ve bothered to properly look.

I felt that happening now. I saw Cole’s face, or something that reminded me of it, though I didn’t know where. I turned back to the wall and swept my eyes across the album covers again. Slower, this time. Scanning the artwork, the printed titles and artists, looking for what had triggered the image.

And there it was. Bigger than the others, because it was not an album cover but rather the glossy front of a magazine. On it, a guy leaped at the viewer, and behind it crouched his band members, staring at him. It was a famous cover. I remembered seeing it before. I remembered noticing the way the guy jumped toward the camera with his limbs completely outstretched, like the flight was all that mattered, like he didn’t care what happened when he landed. I remembered, too, the main headline on the magazine, done in the same font that the band used on their album—BREAKING OUT: THE FRONT MAN OF NARKOTIKA TALKS ABOUT SUCCESS BEFORE 18.

But I had not remembered the guy having Cole’s face.

I closed my eyes for a single moment, the cover still branded in my vision. Please, I thought. Please let it just be an uncanny resemblance. Please don’t let Beck have infected someone famous.

I opened my eyes, and Cole was still there. And behind him, out of focus, because the camera only cared about Cole, was Victor.

I made my way slowly to the studio; they were listening to another one of my tracks, which sounded even better than the last. But it seemed suddenly disconnected from my life. My real life, the one that was dictated by the rise and fall of the temperature, even now that my skin was firmly human.

“Dmitra,” I said, and she turned around. Grace looked up, too, frowning at something in my voice. “What’s the name of the front man of NARKOTIKA?”

I’d already seen all the proof I needed, but I didn’t think I would really believe it until I heard someone say it out loud.

Dmitra’s face cracked into a grin, softer than she’d been the entire time we’d been in the studio. “Oh, man, that was a great concert. He is crazy as a fox, but that band was…” She shook her head and seemed to remember that I’d asked a question. “Cole St. Clair. He’s been missing for months.”

Cole.

Cole was Cole St. Clair.

And I had thought that my yellow eyes were hard to hide behind.

It meant there were thousands of eyes out there looking for him, waiting to recognize him.

And when they’d found him, they’d find all of us.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

• ISABEL •

“Where do you want me to drop you off? Back at Beck’s house?”

We were sitting in my SUV, which was parked in the far corner of the Kenny’s parking lot so no rednecks would open their car doors into it. I was trying not to look at Cole, who seemed huge in the front seat, his presence taking up far more room than his physical body.

“Don’t do that,” Cole said.

I slid my eyes toward him. “Do what?”

“Don’t pretend like nothing happened,” he said. “Ask me about it.”

The afternoon light was dying quickly. A long, dark cloud slashed through the sky in the west. Not a rain cloud for us. Just bad weather on its way somewhere else.

I sighed. I didn’t know if I wanted to know. It seemed to me that knowing would be more work than not knowing. But it wasn’t like we could really put the genie back in the lamp now that it was out, could we? “Does it matter?”

Cole said, “I want you to know.”

Now I looked at him, at his dangerously handsome face that even now called, in unsafe and dulcet tones, Isabel, kiss me, lose yourself in me. It was a sad face, once you knew to look for it. “Do you really?”

“I have to know if anybody other than ten-year-olds know who I am,” Cole said. “Or I really will have to kill myself.”

I gave him a withering look.

“Should I guess?” I asked. Without waiting for him to answer, I remembered his deft fingers and thought of his pretty face and said, “Keyboardist for a boy band.”

“Lead singer of NARKOTIKA,” Cole said.

I waited a long beat, waited for him to say kidding.

But he didn’t.

• COLE •

Her face didn’t change. Maybe my target audience really was preteens. It was all very anticlimactic.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Just because I didn’t recognize your face doesn’t mean I haven’t heard your music. Everyone and Jesus has heard your music.”

I didn’t say anything. What was there to say, really? The entire conversation felt very déjà vu or something; like I’d known all along I was going to have it with her, here in her car, the afternoon growing cold under the clouds.

“What?” Isabel asked, leaning over to look me straight in the face. “What? You think I give a crap about you being a rock star?”

“It’s not about the music,” I said.

Isabel pressed her finger into the crook of my elbow, on my track marks. “Let me guess. Drugs, girls, lots of swearing. What is there about you that you haven’t already told me? This morning you were lying naked on the floor and telling me you wanted to kill yourself. So, what, you think that me knowing you’re lead singer of omigod NARKOTIKA is going to change anything?”

“Yeah. No.” I didn’t know what I was. Relieved? Disappointed? Did I want it to change things?

“What do you want me to say?” Isabel asked me. “‘You’re going to corrupt me, get out of my car’? Too late. I’m already way beyond your influence.”

At that, I laughed, though I felt bad for doing it because I knew she’d take it as an insult, though really it wasn’t. “Oh, believe me, you are not. There are tiny, dirty rabbit holes that you have not been down that I have. I have taken people down into those tunnels with me, and they’ve never come out.”

I was right. She was offended. She thought I found her naive.

“I’m not trying to piss you off. I’m just giving you fair warning. I’m far more famous for that than my music.” Her face had gone utterly frosty, so I thought I was getting through to her. “I am, quite possibly, utterly incapable of making a decision that is not self-serving in absolutely every way.”

Now Isabel started to laugh, a high, cruel laugh that was so sure of itself that it kind of turned me on. She put the car in reverse. “I keep waiting for you to tell me something that I don’t already know.”

• ISABEL •

I took Cole home, knowing full well it was a bad idea—and maybe doing it because it was a bad idea. By the time we got there, it was a dazzling evening, almost tacky in its beauty, the entire sky painted a color pink that I’d only ever seen here in northern Minnesota.

We were back where we’d first met, only now we knew each other’s names. There was a car parked in the driveway: my dad’s smoke blue BMW.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said as I pulled up on the other side of the circular driveway and put the SUV in park. “That’s my dad. It’s a weekend, so he’ll be in the basement with some hard liquor to keep him company. He won’t even know we’re home.”

Cole didn’t comment, just slid out of the car, into the chilly, cloud-covered air. He rubbed his arms and looked at me, his eyes blank and dark in the shadows. “Hurry,” he said.

I felt the bite of the wind and knew what he meant. I didn’t want him to be a wolf right now, so I grabbed his arm and turned him toward the side door, the one that opened right at the base of the second staircase. “There.”

He was shuddering by the time I shut the door behind him, trapping us both in a stairwell the size of a closet. He had to crouch, one hand braced against the wall, for about ten seconds while I stood over him with my hand on the doorknob, waiting to see if I’d have to open the door for him as a wolf.

Finally, he stood up, smelling wolfish but still wearing his own face. “That’s the first time I’ve ever tried not to be a wolf,” he told me. Then he turned and went up the stairs without waiting for me to tell him where to go.

I followed him up the narrow stairway, everything about him invisible except for the flash of his hands on the loose rail. I had this feeling that he and I, in this moment, were a car crash, and instead of putting on the brakes, I was hitting the accelerator.

At the top of the stairs, Cole hesitated, but I didn’t. I took his hand and went past him, pulling him after me to another set of stairs, leading him all the way up to my room in the attic. Cole ducked to keep from hitting his head on the steeply slanted walls, and I turned and grabbed the back of his neck before he had time to straighten.