Linger

I must have been just staring at him, because he added, hurriedly, “But I don’t want you to have to wait, Grace. I don’t want to keep you from going ahead because I can’t make up my mind.”

Feeling childish, I said, “We could go someplace together.”

The kettle whistled. Sam pulled it from the heat as he said, “I somehow doubt that the same college will be ideal for a budding math genius and a boy in love with moody poetry. I suppose it’s possible.” He stared out the kitchen window at the frozen gray woods. “I don’t know if I can really leave, though. At all. Who will take care of the pack?”

“I thought that was why the new wolves were made,” I said. The words sounded strange in my mouth. Callous. As if the pack dynamic were an artificial, engineered thing, which of course it wasn’t. Nobody knew what the newcomers were like. Nobody but Beck, of course, but he wasn’t talking.

Sam rubbed his forehead, pressing his palm over his eyes; he did it a lot since he’d come back. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I know that’s what they’re for.”

“He would’ve wanted you to go,” I said. “And I still think we could find a school together.”

Sam looked at me, his fingers still pressed into his temple as if he’d forgotten they were there. “I’d like that.” He paused. “I’d really like—I’d like to meet the new wolves and see what kind of people they are, though. It’ll make me feel better. Maybe I’ll go after that. After I’m sure everything’s taken care of here.”

I put a jagged line through Pick a college. “I’ll wait for you,” I said.

“Not forever,” Sam said.

“No, if you turn out to be useless, I’ll go without you.” I tapped my pencil on my teeth. “I think we should look around for the new wolves tomorrow. And Olivia. I’ll call Isabel and ask her about the wolves she saw in her woods.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sam said. He returned to his list at the table and added something to it. Then he smiled at me and spun the index card so that I could read it right side up.

Listen to Grace.

• SAM •

Later, I thought of the things I could have added to the list of resolutions, things I’d wanted back before I realized what being a wolf meant for my future. Things like Write a novel and Find a band and Get a degree in obscure poetry in translation and Travel the world. It felt indulgent and fanciful to be considering those things now after reminding myself for so long that they were impossible.

I tried to imagine myself filling out a college application. Writing a synopsis. Tacking a sign saying drummers wanted on the corkboard opposite Beck’s post office box. The words danced in my head, dazzling in their sudden nearness. I wanted to add them to my index card of resolutions, but I just…couldn’t.

That night, while Grace showered, I got out the card and looked at it again. And I wrote:

Believe in my cure.

CHAPTER FIVE

• COLE •

I was human.

I was bleary, exhausted, confused. I didn’t know where I was. I knew I’d lost more time since I’d last been awake; I must’ve shifted back to a wolf again. Groaning, I rolled onto my back and clenched and unclenched my fists, trying out my strength.

The early morning forest was absolutely freezing, mist hanging in the air, turning everything light gold. Close to me, the damp trunks of pine trees jutted from the haze, black and severe. Within a few feet, they turned to pastel blue and then disappeared entirely in the white fog.

I was lying in the damn mud; I could feel my shoulders coated and crackling with it. When I lifted my hand to brush off my skin, my fingers were coated as well—a thin, anemic clay that looked like baby poop. My hands stank like the lake, and sure enough, I could hear water slowly lapping very close to my left side. I reached out a hand and felt more mud, then water on my fingertips.

How did I get here? I remembered running with the pack, then shifting, but I couldn’t remember making it to the shore. I must’ve shifted back again. To wolf, and then to human. The logic of it—or rather, the lack of logic—was maddening. Beck had told me the shifts would get more controlled, eventually. So where was the control?

I lay there, my muscles starting to tremble, the cold pinching my skin, and knew that I was going to shift back to a wolf soon. God, I was tired. Stretching my shaking hands above my head, I marveled at the smooth, unmarked skin of my arms, most of the scarring of my former life gone. I was being reborn in five-minute intervals.

I heard movement in the woods near me, and I turned my face, my cheek against the ground, to see if it belonged to a threat. Close by, a white wolf watched me, halfway behind a tree, her coat tinted gold and pink in the rising morning sun. Her green eyes, strangely pensive, met mine for a long moment. There was something about the way she was looking at me that felt unfamiliar. Human eyes without judgment or jealousy or pity or anger; just silent consideration.

I didn’t know how it made me feel.

“What are you looking at?” I snarled.

Without a sound, she slid into the mist.

My body jerked on its own accord, and my skin twisted into another form.

I didn’t know how much time I’d spent as a wolf this go-round. Was it minutes? Hours? Days? It was late morning. I didn’t feel human, but I wasn’t wolf, either. I hovered somewhere in between, my mind skating from memory to present and back to memory again, past and present equally lucid.

Somehow my brain darted from my seventeenth birthday to the night my heart stopped beating at Club Josephine. And that’s where it stayed. Not a night I would’ve chosen to relive.

This was who I was, before I was a wolf: I was Cole St. Clair, and I was NARKOTIKA.

Outside, the Toronto night was cold enough to ice over puddles and choke you with your own frigid breath, but inside the warehouse that was Club Josephine, it was hot as Hades, and it would be even hotter upstairs with the crowd.

And there was a hell of a crowd.

It was a huge deal, but it was a gig I didn’t even want to do. There wasn’t really any other kind these days. They all ran together until all I could remember were gigs where I was high and gigs where I wasn’t and gigs where I had to pee the whole time. Even when I was playing the music on the stage, I was still chasing something—some idea of life and fame that I’d imagined for myself when I was sixteen—but I was losing interest in actually finding it.

While I was carrying in my keyboard, some girl who called herself Jackie gave us some pills I’d never seen before.

“Cole,” she whispered in my ear, as if she knew me instead of just my name. “Cole, this will take you places you haven’t been.”

“Baby,” I said, shifting my duffle so that I wouldn’t hit it on the rat’s maze of walls beneath the dance floor, “it takes a lot to do that these days.”

She smiled wide, teeth tinted yellow in the dull light, like she knew a secret. She smelled like lemons. “Don’t worry—I know what you need.”

I almost laughed, but instead I turned away, shouldering my way through a half-closed door. I looked over Jackie’s high-lighted hair to shout, “Vic, c’mon!” I dropped my gaze back to her. “Are you on it?”

Jackie ran a finger up my arm, tracing around the tight sleeve of my T-shirt. “I’d be doing more than just smiling at you if I was.”

I reached down and touched her hand, tapping it until she understood what I meant and opened her palm. It was empty, but she reached into the pocket of her jeans to pull out a wad of plastic wrap. Inside, I saw a collection of electric-green pills, each stamped with two Ts. They got an A-plus for pretty factor, but who knew what they were.

In my pocket, my phone buzzed. Normally I would’ve let it go to voicemail, but Jackie, standing two inches away from me, breathing my air, gave me an incentive to interrupt the conversation. I fished the phone out and put it against my ear. “Da.”

“Cole, I’m glad I got you.” It was Berlin, my agent. His voice was gritty and fast as always. “Listen to this: ‘NARKOTIKA takes the scene by force with their latest album, 13all. Brilliant but frenetic front man Cole St. Clair, thought by many to be losing his edge’—sorry, man, that’s just what they said—‘comes back stronger than ever with this release, proving that his first release, at sixteen, was no fluke. The three—’ are you listening, Cole?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you should. This is Elliot Fry saying this,” Berlin said. When I didn’t reply, he said, “Remember, Elliot Fry, who called you a surly, overactive toddler with a keyboard? That Elliot Fry. Now you guys are golden. Total turnaround. You’ve arrived, man.”

“Brilliant,” I said, and hung up on him. I turned to Jackie. “I’ll take the whole bag. Tell Victor. He’s my purse.”

So Victor paid for them. But I’d asked for them, so I guess it was still my fault.

Or maybe it was Jackie’s, for not telling us what they were, but that was Club Josephine for you. The place to find the new high before anyone knew how high it took you. Unnamed pills, brand-new powders, shining mysterious nectar in vials. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d made Victor do.

Back in the dim lounge, waiting to go on, Victor swallowed one of the green pills with a beer while Jeremy-my-body-is-a-temple watched him and drank green tea. I took a few of them with a Pepsi. I don’t know how many. I was feeling pretty bitter about the transaction by the time we got onto the stage. Jackie’s stuff was letting me down—I was feeling absolutely nothing. We started our set, and the crowd was wild, pressed up against the stage, arms outstretched, screaming our name.

Behind his drums, Victor screamed back at them. He was high as a kite, so whatever Jackie had sold us had done it for him. But then it never took as much to get Victor high. The strobes lit up bits and pieces of the audience—a neck here, a flash of lips, a thigh wrapped around another dancer. My head pounded in time with the beat that Victor laid down, my heart scudding double time. I reached up to slide my headset from my neck to my ears, my fingers brushing the hot skin of my neck, and girls began to scream my name.

There was this one girl my eyes kept finding for some reason, skin stark white against her black tank top. She howled my name as if it was physically painful for her, her pupils dilated so wide that her eyes looked black and depthless. She reminded me of Victor’s sister inexplicably, something about the curve of her nose or the way her jeans were slung so low, held up by nothing but the suggestion of hips, though there was no way Angie would be anywhere near a club like this.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like being there. There was no longer a rush at hearing my name screamed, and the music wasn’t as loud as my heart, so it hardly seemed important.

This was where I was supposed to come in, singing to break the nonstop take-you-to-the-moon pattern of Victor’s beat, but I didn’t feel like it, and Victor was too gone to notice. He was dancing in place, fixed to the ground only by the drumsticks in his hands.