Linger

“Maybe it was old age,” I said. My friend Rachel had had a dog when we first met: a grizzled old golden retriever with a muzzle painted snowy white by age.

“The wolf doesn’t look old,” Isabel said.

“Sam said that the wolves die after about fifteen years of not shifting back and forth,” I said. “Maybe that’s what happened.”

I lifted the wolf’s muzzle to see if I could spot any telltale gray or white hairs on it. I heard Isabel’s disgusted noise before I saw the reason for it. Dried red blood stained the wolf’s muzzle—I thought it might be from a previous kill, until I realized that the side of the wolf’s jaw that had been resting on the ground was caked with blood, too. It was the wolf’s blood.

I swallowed again, feeling a little sick. I didn’t really want Isabel thinking I was queasy, though, so I said, “Hit by a car and came here?”

Isabel made a noise in the back of her throat, either disgust or contempt. “No. Look at the nose.”

She was right; there were twin trails of blood coming from the wolf’s nostrils, running down to join the old smear across the lips.

I couldn’t seem to stop looking at it. If Isabel hadn’t been there, I don’t know how long I would’ve crouched there, its muzzle in my hands, looking at this wolf—this person—who had died with his own blood crusted on his face.

But Isabel was there. So I laid the wolf’s face carefully back onto the ground. With one gloved finger, I stroked the smooth hair on the side of the wolf’s face. Morbidly, I wanted to look at the other side again, the bloody one.

“Do you think there was something wrong with it?” I asked.

“Ya think?” Isabel replied. Then she shrugged. “Could just be a nosebleed. Do wolves get nosebleeds? They can make you yak if you look up when you have one.”

My stomach was tight with misgiving.

“Grace. Come on. Head trauma could do that, too. Or animals picking at it after it died. Or any number of disgusting things to think about before lunch. Point is, it’s dead. The end.”

I looked at the lifeless gray eye. “Maybe we should bury it.”

“Maybe we can have coffee first,” Isabel said.

I stood up, brushing the dirt off my knees. I had the nagging feeling you get when you leave something undone, a prickling anxiety. Maybe Sam would know more. I kept my voice light and said, “Okay. Let’s go get warmed up and I’ll call Sam. He can come look at it afterward.”

“Wait,” Isabel said. She got out her cell phone, aimed it at the wolf, and clicked a photo. “Let’s try using our brains. Welcome to technology, Grace.”

I looked at the screen on her phone. The wolf’s face, glazed with blood in real life, looked ordinary and unharmed through the cell phone’s view. If I hadn’t seen the wolf in the flesh, I would’ve never known there was anything wrong.

CHAPTER SEVEN

• SAM •

I had been sitting at Kenny’s for about fifteen minutes, watching the waitress attending to the customers in the other booths like a bee visiting and revisiting flowers, when Grace tapped on the other side of the streaked glass. She was a backlit silhouette against the bright blue sky, and I could just glimpse the slender white of her smile, and saw her kiss the air at me before she and Isabel headed around to the front of the diner.

A moment later, Grace, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, slid into the cracked red booth beside me, her jeans squelching on the perpetually greasy surface. She was about to touch my face before she kissed me, and I recoiled.

“What? Do I stink?” she asked, not sounding particularly bothered. She laid her cell phone and car keys on the table in front of her and reached across me for the menus by the wall.

Leaning away, I pointed to her gloves. “You do, actually. Your gloves smell like that wolf. Not in a good way.”

“Thanks for the backup, wolf-man,” Isabel said. When Grace offered her a menu, she shook her head emphatically and added, “The whole car smelled like wet dog.”

I wasn’t sure about the wet-dog label; yes, I smelled the normal, musky wolf odor on Grace’s gloves, but there was something else to it—an unpleasant undercurrent that rankled my stillheightened sense of smell.

Grace said, “Sheesh. I’ll put them in the car. You don’t have to give me that about-to-hurl look. If the waitress comes, order me a coffee and something that involves bacon, okay?”

While she was gone, Isabel and I sat in a kind of uneasy silence filled by a Motown song playing overhead and the clattering of plates in the kitchen. I studied the shape of the saltshaker’s warped shadow across the container of sugar packets. Isabel examined the chunky cuff of her sweater and the way it rested on the table. Finally, she said, “You made another bird thing.”

I picked up the crane that I’d folded out of my napkin while I was waiting. It was lumpy and imperfect because the napkin hadn’t been quite square. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

I rubbed my nose, trying to rid it of the scent of the wolf. “I don’t know. There’s a Japanese legend that if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish.”

Isabel’s permanently arched right eyebrow made her smile look inadvertently cruel. “You have a wish?”

“No,” I said, as Grace sat back down beside me. “All of my wishes have already been granted.”

“What were you wishing for?” Grace interrupted.

“To kiss you,” I said to her. She leaned toward me, offering her neck, and I kissed her just behind her ear, pretending I couldn’t still smell the almond scent of the wolf on her skin. Isabel’s eyes narrowed, though her lips stayed curved up, and I knew that, somehow, she had seen my reaction.

I looked away as the waitress came and took our order. Grace ordered coffee and a BLT. I got the soup of the day and tea. Isabel just ordered coffee, taking a bag of granola out of her small leather purse after the waitress had gone.

“Food allergy?” I asked.

“Hick allergy,” Isabel said. “Grease allergy. Where I used to live, we had real coffeehouses. When I say panini here, everyone says Bless you.”

Grace laughed and took my napkin crane; she made it flap its wings. “We’ll make a panini run to Duluth some day, Isabel. Until then, bacon will do you good.”

Isabel made a face like she didn’t much agree with Grace. “If by good, you mean cellulite and zits, sure. So, Sam, what’s the deal on this corpse, anyway? Grace said that you said something about wolves getting fifteen years after they stop shifting.”

“Nice, Isabel,” Grace muttered, casting a sideways glance at me to see what my expression was at the word corpse. But she’d already told me over the phone that the wolf wasn’t Beck, Paul, or Ulrik, so I didn’t react.

Isabel shrugged, unapologetic, and flipped open her phone. She pushed it across the table to me. “Visual aid number one.”

The phone scraped across invisible crumbs on the table as I spun it right side up. My stomach gripped in a fist when I saw the wolf on the screen, clearly dead, but my grief lacked force. I had never known this wolf as a human.

“I think you’re right,” I said. “Because I’ve only ever known this wolf as a wolf. It must’ve been from old age.”

“I don’t think this was a natural death,” said Grace. “Plus, there were no white hairs on the muzzle.”

I lifted my shoulders. “I just know what Beck told me. That we get…got”—I struggled with tense, since I wasn’t one of them anymore—“ten or fifteen years after we stopped shifting. A wolf’s natural life span.”

“There was blood coming out of the wolf’s nose,” Grace said almost angrily, like it annoyed her to say it.

I slanted the screen back and forth, squinting at the muzzle. I didn’t see anything on the blurry screen to suggest a violent death.

“It wasn’t a lot,” Grace said, in response to my frown. “Did any of the other wolves that died ever have blood on their faces?”

I struggled to remember the various wolves that had died while I was living in Beck’s house. It was a blur of memories—Beck and Paul with tarps and shovels, Ulrik singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” at the top of his lungs. “I don’t really remember any of them clearly. Maybe this wolf got knocked in the head.” I deliberately didn’t allow myself to think about the person behind the wolf’s pelt.

Grace didn’t say anything else as the waitress set down our drinks and food. For a long moment there was silence as I doctored my tea and Isabel did the same to her coffee. Grace studied her BLT pensively.

Isabel said, “For a hick diner, they have really good coffee.” Part of me appreciated the fact that she didn’t even look to see if the waitress was within earshot before she said it—the sheer insensitivity was somehow rewarding to watch. But most of me was glad that I was sitting next to Grace instead, who shot Isabel a look that said Sometimes I don’t know why I hang out with you.

“Uh-oh,” I said, glimpsing the opening door. “Incoming.”

It was John Marx, Olivia’s older brother.

I wasn’t really looking forward to talking to him, and at first it appeared that I wouldn’t have to, because John didn’t seem to see us. He went straight to the counter and pulled out a stool, hunching his tall frame as he leaned on his elbows. Before he even ordered, the waitress brought him a coffee.

“John’s hot,” Isabel observed, with a voice that indicated that it was possibly a drawback.

“Isabel,” hissed Grace. “Maybe turn down the insensitivity meter slightly?”

Isabel pursed her lips. “What? Olivia’s not dead.”

“I’m going to go ask him to come over and sit with us,” Grace said.

“Oh, no, please don’t,” I said. “It’s going to involve lying, and I’m not good at that.”

“But I am,” Grace said. “He looks pitiful. I’ll be right back.”

And so she returned a minute later with John and slid back in next to me. John stood at the end of the table, looking slightly uncomfortable as Isabel waited just a moment too long to make room for him on her side of the booth.

“So how are you?” Grace asked sympathetically, leaning her elbows on the table. I might have been imagining the leading tone to her voice, but I didn’t think so. I’d heard that sound before, when she asked a question she already knew the answer to, and liked what she knew.

John glanced at Isabel, who was leaning away from him, in a fairly tactless way, arm against the windowsill. Then he leaned toward me and Grace. “I got an e-mail from Olivia.”

“An e-mail?” Grace echoed. Her voice conveyed just the right combination of hope, disbelief, and frailty. Just what you’d expect from a grieving girl who was hoping her best friend was still alive. Only Grace knew Olivia was still alive.

I shot her a look.

Grace ignored me, still looking, all innocent and intense, at John. “What did it say?”