Linger

I lay down beside her, our hands still in a knot on her stomach, shoulder to shoulder, and together we looked up through the flock of happy memories flying above us, caught in this room. The Christmas lights winked above us; when the swaying wings eclipsed the bulbs, it made me feel like we were moving, rocking on a giant boat, looking up at unfamiliar constellations.

It was time.

I closed my eyes. “What is happening with you?”

Grace was quiet for so long that I started to doubt that I’d said my question out loud. Then she said, “I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m afraid to go to sleep.”

My heart didn’t so much skip a beat as slow to a crawl. “What does it feel like?”

“It hurts to talk,” she whispered. “And my stomach—it really…” She laid my hand flat on her stomach and then put her hand on top of mine. “Sam, I’m afraid.”

It almost hurt too much to speak after her confession. I said, softly, because it was all I could manage, “It’s from the wolves. Do you think you caught it from that wolf, somehow?”

“I think it is a wolf,” Grace said. “I think it’s the wolf that I never was. That’s what it feels like. It feels like I want to shift, but I never do.”

My mind riffled rapidly through everything I’d ever heard about the wolves and our brilliantly destructive disease, but there was no precedent for this. Grace was the only one of her kind.

“Tell me,” she said, “do you still feel it? The wolf inside you? Or is it gone now?”

I sighed and leaned to rest my forehead against her cheek. Of course it was still there. Of course it was. “Grace, I’m going to take you to the hospital. We’ll make them find out what’s wrong with you. I don’t care what we have to tell them to make them believe.”

Grace said, “I don’t want to die in a hospital.”

“You’re not going to die,” I told her, lifting my head to look at her. “I’m not done writing songs about you yet.”

Her mouth smiled on one side, and then she tugged me down so she could rest her head on my chest as she closed her eyes.

I didn’t close mine. I watched her and I watched the birds’ shadows flit across her face, and I…wanted. I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hall and burst out of the house.

An hour later, Grace started throwing up blood.

I couldn’t call 911 and help her at the same time, so I left her curled up against the hallway wall, a thin trail of her own blood showing our path from the bedroom, while I stood in the doorway with the phone, never taking my eyes off her.

Cole—I didn’t remember calling for him—appeared at the top of the stairs and silently brought towels.

“Sam,” Grace said, voice miserable and thin, “my hair.”

It was the smallest thing in the world, blood on the ends of her hair. It was the biggest thing in the world, her being out of control. While Cole helped Grace press a towel to her nose and mouth, I clumsily pulled her hair back into a ponytail, out of the way. Then, when we heard the ambulance pull into the drive, we helped her to her feet and tried to get her downstairs without her throwing up again. The birds fluttered and flapped around us as we hurried out, like they wanted to come with us, but their strings were too short.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

• GRACE •

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.

And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren’t special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant forever.

Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying good-bye behind a cracked windshield.

A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam’s smile.

It was a life I didn’t want to leave behind.

It was a life I didn’t want to forget.

I wasn’t done with it yet. There was so much more to say.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

• SAM •

Flickering lights

anonymous doors

my heart escaping in drips

i ‘m still waking up

but she’s still sleeping

this ICU is

hotel for the dead

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

• COLE •

I didn’t know why I went with Sam to the hospital. I knew I could get recognized—though the odds seemed slim of anyone recognizing me with my stubbled face and the bags under my eyes. I also knew I could shift, if my body decided to succumb to the whims of the cold. But as Sam went to put his key into his car door to follow the ambulance, he’d looked at his bloody hand for a long second, and he’d had to try twice to get the key in the lock.

I had been hanging back, ready to disappear if it felt like the black morning cold would jerk me into a wolf, but when I saw Sam’s hand, I stepped forward and took the key.

“Get in,” I said, jerking my head toward the passenger seat.

And he did.

So here I was, standing in the hospital room of a girl I barely knew with a guy I knew only slightly better, and I still wasn’t quite sure why I cared. The room was full of people—two doctors, a guy who I thought was a surgeon, and an absolute army of nurses. There was a lot of hushed talking back and forth, with enough technical jargon to gag a maggot, but I got the gist of it: They had no idea what was going on, and Grace was dying.

They wouldn’t let Sam stand next to her, so he sat in a chair in the corner, his elbows on his knees and his face crumpled in one of his hands.

I didn’t know what to do, either, so I stood beside him, wondering if, before I’d been bitten, I would’ve been able to smell all the death that hung in the air of the ICU.

A cell phone rang at my feet, a brisk, businesslike tone, and I realized it was coming from Sam’s pocket. In slow motion, Sam took it out and then looked at the front of the phone.

“It’s Isabel,” he said, hoarse. “I can’t talk to her.”

I took it from his unresisting hands and answered it. “Isabel.”

“Cole?” Isabel asked. “Is this Cole?”

“Yeah.”

And then, the most sincere words I had ever heard out of Isabel’s mouth: “Oh, no.”

I didn’t say anything. But the noise behind me must have said it all.

“Are you at the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“What are they saying?”

“What you said. They have no idea.”

Isabel swore softly, over and over again. “How bad is it, Cole? Can you tell me?”

“Sam’s right here.”

“Great,” Isabel said, harshly. “That’s just great.”

Suddenly, one of the nurses said, “Watch—!”

Grace half sat up, just enough to throw up more blood, all over the front of the nurse who had just spoken. The nurse matter-of-factly stepped back to scrub off her hands as another nurse took her place, with a towel for Grace.

Grace fell back onto the bed. She said something that the nurses couldn’t catch.

“What, honey?”

“Sam,” Grace wailed, a horrible sound both animal and human, hideously reminiscent of the doe’s scream. Sam jerked to his feet just as a man and a woman pushed their way into the already-crowded room.

I saw one of the nurses open her mouth to protest the intrusion as the couple headed straight for us, but she didn’t have time to say anything before the man said, “You son of a bitch,” and punched Sam in the mouth.

CHAPTER FIFTY

• SAM •

Lewis Brisbane’s punch took several moments to start hurting, like my body couldn’t believe what had just happened to it. By the time the pain started to finally take hold, my hearing was buzzing and popping in my left ear, and I had to grab for the wall to keep from falling back over a chair. I was still sick from the sound of Grace’s voice.

For a single fragment of a moment, I caught a perfectly clear image of Grace’s mother watching, face blank as if waiting for an expression to land on it, doing nothing, and then Grace’s dad swung at me again.

“I’ll kill you,” Grace’s dad said.

I just stared at his fist, my ears still hissing from the first punch. Most of my mind was still with Grace, in the hospital bed, and what little I had left to devote to Lewis Brisbane couldn’t quite believe he was going to punch me again. I didn’t even flinch.

Before his fist connected again, her dad staggered back, struggling to keep his footing, and as my vision and hearing came back, all in a rush, I saw Cole dragging him backward. Like he was nothing but a bag of potatoes.

“Easy, big guy,” Cole said. Then, to the nurses: “What are you staring at? Help the guy he just punched.” I shook my head a little at the nurses’ offer of ice but accepted a towel for my busted forehead. As I did, I heard Cole say to Mr. Brisbane, “I’m going to let you go. Don’t make me get us both thrown out of this hospital.”

I stood there, watching Grace’s parents force their way to the side of the bed, and I didn’t know what to do. Everything solid in my life was fracturing, and I didn’t know where I belonged right now.

I saw Cole staring at me, and somehow his stare reminded me of the towel in my hand and the slow tickle of the blood as it welled from my skin. I lifted the towel to my head. Raising my arm made colorful dots spiral at the edge of my vision.

At my elbow, a nurse said, “I’m sorry—Sam? But since you’re not an immediate relative, you can’t stay in here. They’ve asked us to have you leave.”

I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.

The nurse made a face. “I really am sorry.” She glanced to Grace’s parents and back to me. “You did good bringing her in here.”

I closed my eyes; I could still see the swirling colors when I did. I had an idea that if I didn’t sit down soon, my body was going to do it for me. “Can I tell her I’m going?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said one of the other nurses, darting past with something in her arms. “Let her think he’s still here. He can come back if—” she stopped herself before adding, “Tell him to stay close.”

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

“Come on,” Cole said. He looked back over his shoulder at Mr. Brisbane, who was looking at me with a complicated expression as I left. Cole pointed at him and said, “You’re a son of a bitch. He belongs here more than you do.”

But love isn’t quantifiable on paper, so I had to leave Grace behind.