Linger

• COLE •

By the time Isabel got to the hospital, dawn was just starting to seep through the warped glass of the cafeteria windows.

Grace was dying. I’d gotten that much out of the nurses before I left. She was throwing up all her blood and they were giving her vitamin K and transfusions to slow it down, but eventually, she was going to die.

I hadn’t told Sam yet, but I thought he knew.

Isabel slapped a napkin down onto the table in front of me, next to Sam’s stained towel. It took me a moment to recognize the napkin as my scribbled flow chart from the diner. It said meth in large letters, reminding me how much I’d told Isabel. She threw herself down into the plastic chair opposite me; everything about her screamed angry angry angry. She wasn’t wearing any makeup except for a smudged heavy line of mascara around each eye that looked like it had been there a while.

“Where’s Sam?”

I gestured to the cafeteria windows. Sam was a darker blot against the still-dark sky. His arms were linked behind his head as he stared out into nothing. Everything else had moved in this room as time passed: the light across the freakishly orange walls as the sun slowly rose, the chairs back and forth as hospital staff came and left with their breakfasts, the janitor with his mop and WET FLOOR sign. Sam was the pillar they all pivoted around.

Isabel fired another question. “Why are you here?”

I still didn’t know. I shrugged. “To help.”

“Then help,” Isabel said, and pushed the napkin closer to me. Louder, she said, “Sam.”

He lowered his hands but didn’t turn around. Frankly, I was surprised he’d moved at all.

“Sam,” she repeated, and this time, he did turn toward us. She pointed at the self-service bar and cashier at the other end of the room. “Get us some coffee.”

I didn’t know what was more amazing: that Isabel had just told him to get coffee, or that he did, albeit with no expression whatsoever. I turned my gaze back to Isabel. “Wow. Just when I think I’ve seen you at your coldest.”

“That was me being nice,” Isabel snapped. “What good is he doing, staring outside?”

“I don’t know, remembering all the great days he and his girlfriend had, before she dies.”

Isabel looked me right in the eye. “Do you think that will help you with Victor? Because it never really saves me when I think about Jack.” She pressed a finger into the napkin. “Talk to me. About this.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with Grace.”

Sam set two coffee cups down, one in front of me and one in front of Isabel. Nothing for himself.

“What’s wrong with Grace is the same thing that killed that wolf that you and Grace found,” Sam said, his voice sounding gritty, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “That smell is just too distinctive. It’s the same thing.”

He stood by the table, as if sitting down would mean that he was agreeing to something.

I looked at Isabel. “What makes you think that I can do something these doctors can’t?”

“Because you’re a genius,” Isabel said.

“These people are geniuses,” I replied.

Sam said, “Because you know.”

Isabel pushed the napkin at me again. And once again, it was my father and me at the dining room table, and he was presenting me with a problem. Or I was sitting in one of his college classes when I was sixteen, and he was looking at my written work beside my solutions, searching for signs that I would follow in his footsteps. Or it was me at one of his award presentations with the ironed shirts and old school ties surrounding me, and my father telling them, in a voice that stood for no argument, that I was going to be great.

I thought of just that simple gesture from earlier, when Sam had laid his hand on Grace’s collarbone.

I thought of Victor.

I took the napkin.

“I’m going to need more paper,” I said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

• SAM •

There was no longer night than this: Cole and I in the cafeteria, going over every detail of the wolves until Cole’s brain was full and he sent both Isabel and me away so that he could sit at a table with his head in his hands and a piece of paper in front of him. It seemed amazing to me that everything I wanted, everything I’d ever wanted, hung on the shoulders of Cole St. Clair, sitting at a plastic table with a scribbled-on napkin, but what else did I have?

I escaped from the cafeteria to sit outside her room, my back to the wall, my head in my hands. Against my will, I was memorizing everything about these walls, this place, this night.

I had no hope that they would let me in to see her.

So all I prayed for was that they would not come out to tell me that she was gone. I prayed for the door not to open. Just stay alive.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

• SAM •

Isabel came and got me and dragged me through the morningbusy halls to an empty stairwell where Cole waited for me. He was full of restless energy, his hands in two fists that he kept knocking lightly against each other, one on top of the other.

“Okay, I can’t promise anything,” Cole said. “I am just guessing here. But I have a—a theory. The thing is that, even if I’m right, I can’t be proved right. Just wrong, really.” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “What is the big thing in common between Grace and that wolf?” He waited. I guessed I was supposed to answer.

“The smell.”

Isabel said, “That’s what I thought, too. Though it’s pretty obvious, once Cole pointed it out.”

“The shifting,” Cole said. “Both the wolf and Grace haven’t shifted for—what—a decade or more? That’s the magic number for when wolves that don’t shift anymore die, right? I know you said that that was the natural life span of a wolf, but I don’t think that’s it. I think that every wolf that’s died without shifting has died like that wolf—of something. Not old age. And I think that’s what’s killing Grace.”

“The wolf she never was,” I said, suddenly remembering something she’d said the night before.

“Exactly,” Cole said. “I think that they die because they aren’t shifting anymore. I don’t think shifting is the curse. I think whatever it is that is telling our bodies to shift is the bad guy here.”

I blinked.

“It’s not the same thing,” Cole said. “If the shifting is the disease, it’s one thing. If you’re shifting because of the disease, it’s something else entirely. So here’s my theory, and this is such crap science, I don’t have to tell you. It’s science without microscopes, blood tests, or reality. Anyway. Grace was bitten. When she’s bitten, wolf toxin, for lack of a better term, is introduced. Whatever it is in this wolf spit is really bad for you. Let’s say that shifting is the good guy, and that something about this wolf spit initiates a defensive response in your body—shifting, to purge the toxin. Every time you shift, the toxin’s put at bay. And for some reason, these shifts are timed with the weather. Unless, of course—”

“You stop yourself from shifting,” Isabel said.

“Yeah.” Cole glanced up toward the bottom of the stairwell, toward Grace’s floor. “If you somehow destroy your body’s ability to use hot and cold as a trigger, you look cured, but you’re not. You’re…festering.”

I was tired, and I was not a science person. Cole could’ve told me that wolf toxin made you lay eggs and I would’ve thought it sounded reasonable at this point. “Okay. So it sounds fine, if vague. What’s the upshot? What are you suggesting?”

“I think she needs to shift,” Cole said.

It took me too long to realize what he was saying. “Become a wolf?”

Cole shrugged. “If I’m right.”

“Are you right?”

“I don’t know.”

I closed my eyes. Without opening them, I asked, “And I’m guessing you have a theory on how to get her to shift.”

Oh, God, Grace. I couldn’t believe what I was saying.

Cole said, “Simplest is easiest.”

I had a sudden image in my head of Grace’s brown eyes looking out from a wolf’s face. I wrapped my arms around myself.

“She needs to get bitten again.”

My eyes flew open and I stared at Cole. “Bitten.”

Cole made a face. “It’s an educated guess. Something got messed up in the shifting chain of command, and if you reintroduced the original trigger, it might start her over from square one. Only this time don’t cook her in the car.”

Everything in me rebelled against the idea. Of losing Grace, losing what made her Grace. Of attacking her while she was dying. Of making decisions like this, on the fly, because there was no time. I said, “But it takes weeks or months to shift after you get bitten.”

“I think that’s how long it takes for the toxin to build up initially,” Cole said. “But she’s already there, obviously. If I’m right, she’d shift immediately.”

I linked my arms behind my head and turned away from Cole and Isabel, staring at the pale blue concrete wall. “If you’re wrong?”

“She has wolf spit in an open wound”—Cole paused, then added, “that she’ll probably bleed to death from right now, because it sounds like the toxin is destroying her ability to clot.”

They let me pace for several long moments, and then Isabel, a low voice out of the silence said, “If you’re right, Sam’s going to die, too.”

“Yes,” Cole said, in such an even way that I knew he’d already considered that. “If I’m right, when Sam gets ten or thirteen years down the road, his cure won’t be a cure, either.”

Could I believe the science concocted in a hospital cafeteria over lukewarm coffee and crumpled napkins?

It was all I had.

I turned, finally, and looked at Isabel. With her smudged makeup, her hair rumpled, her shoulders hunched up with uncertainty, she looked like an entirely different girl, trying to wear an Isabel disguise.

I asked, “How would we get into the room?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

• ISABEL •

It fell to me to get Grace’s parents out of the room. They hated Sam, so he was out, and Cole’s brawn would be needed elsewhere, so he was out. It occurred to me, as I clicked down the hallway to Grace’s room, that we were counting on Cole’s solution not working. Because if it did, we were all going to be in big trouble.

I waited for a nurse to exit Grace’s room, and then I opened the door a crack. I was in luck; only her mom was sitting by her bed, looking out the window instead of at Grace. I tried not to look at Grace, who lay silent and white, her head turned limply to the side.

“Mrs. Brisbane?” I asked in my best schoolgirl voice.

She looked up, and I noted, with some satisfaction for Grace’s benefit, that her eyes were red. “Isabel?”

I said, “I came as soon as I heard. Could I—could I talk to you about something?”