Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever Read online

  Beck crouched in front of one of the space heaters, not taking his gaze from me. “Maybe, after all this, there isn’t anything to say. Ah, I …” He shook his head a little and looked at the floor. His feet were pale and scarred. Something about them looked like a kid’s feet.

  The room was silent. Everyone was watching me, as if the next move was up to me. But his question was mine: What did I say, in ten minutes? There were a thousand things that needed to be said. That I didn’t know how to help Grace, now that she was a wolf. That Olivia had died, the police were watching me, Cole holds our fates in vials, what do we do, how do we save ourselves, how do I be Sam when winter means the same things as the summer?

  My voice was rough and low when I spoke. “Were you driving?”

  “Yeah,” Beck said softly. “Yeah, you would want to know that, wouldn’t you?”

  I had my hands in my pockets. Part of me wanted to take them out and cross them, but I didn’t want to look anxious. Grace looked like she was moving even though she was standing still, like she wanted to move but her feet hadn’t made up their mind yet. I wanted her here with me. I didn’t want her to hear his answer. I was made of impossibilities.

  Beck swallowed again. When he looked back up at me, his expression was a white flag. Surrendering the truth. Offering himself up for judgment. He said, “Ulrik was driving.”

  I heard myself make a sound — barely audible — as I turned my face away. I wanted to get one of my boxes out of my head and climb into it, but Beck was the one who had told me about the boxes in the first place. So instead, I had this. Me lying in the snow with my skin gaping at the sky and there was a wolf, and it was Beck.

  I couldn’t think of it.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of it.

  I closed my eyes, and it was still there.

  A touch on my elbow made my eyes open. It was Grace, looking carefully at my face, holding my elbow as if it were made of glass.

  “Ulrik was driving,” Beck said again, and his voice got a little louder. “Paul and I were the wolves. I — I didn’t trust Ulrik to stay focused. Paul didn’t want to do it. I bullied him. I know you don’t have to forgive me. I haven’t. No matter how much right I do after that, what I did to you will always have been wrong.” He stopped. Took a long, shaky breath.

  I didn’t know this Beck.

  Grace whispered in my ear, “At least look at him, Sam. You don’t know when you’ll see him again.”

  Because she asked, I looked at him.

  “When I thought you didn’t have another year, I —” Beck didn’t finish. He shook his head, like clearing his thoughts. “I never thought that the woods would take you before me. And now I had to do it again — find someone to take care of us. But, listen to me, Sam. I tried to do it right this time.”

  He was still watching me for a reaction. I didn’t have one. I was apart from this. I was somewhere else. I could find, if I tried now, a collection of words to pull into lyrics. Something that would remove me from this moment and take me somewhere else.

  Beck saw it. He knew me, like no one else knew me, not even Grace, yet. He said, “Don’t — Sam. Don’t go away. Listen: I have to tell you this. I had eleven years worth of memories to reenact, Sam, eleven years of the look on your face every time you realized you were about to shift. Eleven years of you asking me if you really had to do it this year. Eleven years of —”

  He stopped then, and put his hand over his mouth, shaking fingers holding his jaw. He was so much less than the Beck I’d last seen. This was not the Beck of summer. This was the Beck of a dying year. There was none of the power in his body now; it was all in his eyes.

  Suddenly, Cole’s voice punched through the room. “Sam, you know I was trying to kill myself when he found me. I was getting really good at it, too.” His eyes were on me, a challenge, unflinching. “I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him. He didn’t force me. Victor, either. We both chose it. It wasn’t like you.”

  I knew this was true. I knew that there had been and probably always would be two Coles: the Cole who silenced the crowd with a smile and the Cole who whispered songs about finding his Alps. And I knew that Beck, somehow, in pulling Cole from the stage, had unearthed that second, quieter Cole, and given him a chance to live.

  And me, too. Beck had bitten me, but it had been my parents, not him, who’d destroyed me. I had come to him as a crushed piece of paper that he had slowly smoothed. It wasn’t just Cole that he’d rebuilt.

  There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all the original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?

  “Okay,” Beck said, voice taking a moment to solidify. “Okay. If I only have ten minutes, Sam, this is what I want to say. You’re not the best of us. You’re more than that. You’re better than all of us. If I only have ten minutes, I would tell you to go out there and live. I’d say … please take your guitar and sing your songs to as many people as you can. Please fold a thousand more of those damn birds of yours. Please kiss that girl a million times.”

  Beck suddenly broke off and ducked his head down to his knees; he clenched his hands on the back of his skull. I saw the muscles in his back twitching. Not lifting his head, he whispered, “And please forget all about me. I wish I had been better, but I wasn’t. Please forget about me.”

  His hands were still white-knuckled fists on the back of his head.

  So many ways to say good-bye.

  I said, “I don’t want to.”

  Beck lifted his head. His pulse was beating visibly in his neck, fast and hard.

  Grace let go of me, and I knew that she meant to send me off, down the stairs. She was right. I went down the stairs, two at a time. Beck tried to stand, unsuccessfully, at the same time that I knelt swiftly down to meet him. Our foreheads were almost touching. Beck was shivering, hard.

  So many days before this, it had been Beck crouching to meet me, me shivering on the floor.

  I felt as unsteady as Beck, just then. It was like I’d unfolded all my paper crane memories and found something unfamiliar printed on them. Somehow along the way, hope had been folded into one of those birds. My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

  I was done being afraid. It had started that night, me and my guitar in the bathtub, and it would end with me disappearing into a wolf again. I wouldn’t be afraid.

  “Dammit,” Beck whispered, soft as a sigh. The heat was losing its grip on him. We were forehead to forehead again, father and son, Beck and Sam, the way it had always been. He was every devil and every angel.

  I said, “Tell me you want us to cure you.”

  Beck’s fingertips were white and then red, pushed against the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly, and I knew he was saying it for me, just me. “Do what it takes.” He looked up at Cole. “Cole, you are —”

  And then his skin tore, violently, and I leaped to push the heater out of his way before Beck crashed to the floor, jerking.

  Cole stepped forward and pushed a second needle into the crook of Beck’s arm.

  And in that split second, as Beck’s face turned toward the ceiling, his eyes unchanging, I saw my own face.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  • COLE •

  EPINEPHRINE/PSEUDOEPHEDRINE MIX 7

  METHOD: INTRAVENOUS INJECTION

  RESULT: SUCCESSFUL

  (SIDE EFFECTS: NONE)

  (NOTE: ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS STILL DICTATE SHIFT BACK TO WOLF)

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  • SAM •

  I felt dirty after Beck shifted back, like I’d been complicit in a crime. I was reminded so acutely of my life before, when I’d hidden from the winter and when I’d had my family, that I could feel my thoughts slipping away
to protect me. I wasn’t the only one, apparently: Cole announced that he was “going for a drive” and left in Ulrik’s old BMW. After he’d gone, Grace trailed after me as I made bread as if my life depended on it, and then I left her watching the oven as I went to shower. To scrub the memories off me. To remind myself that, for now, I had my hands and my human skin and my face.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in there when I heard the bathroom door open and close.

  “This is good,” Grace said. The closed toilet lid creaked as she tried to find a way to make it a comfortable seat. “Good job, Sam.”

  I couldn’t see her, but I could smell the bread. I was oddly discomfited by the knowledge that she was in the room while I was standing there under the running water. Somehow taking a shower with her in the room was more intimate than sex. I felt about one thousand times more naked, even behind the dark shower curtain.

  I looked at the bar of soap in my hand. I applied it to my ribs. “Thanks.”

  Grace was quiet, inches away on the other side of the curtain. I couldn’t see her, so she couldn’t see me.

  “Are you all clean in there?” Grace asked.

  “Oh my God, Grace,” I replied, and she laughed.

  There was another pause. I washed between my fingers. One of my fingernails was battered from rubbing against a guitar string. I studied it to see if I needed to do something about it; it was hard to properly diagnose it in the orange half-light provided by the shower curtain.

  “Rachel said she would go with me, tomorrow, to see my parents,” Grace said. “Tomorrow night. That’s when she’s free.”

  “Are you nervous?” I was nervous, and I wasn’t even going, by Grace’s request.

  “I dunno. It just has to happen. It’ll get you off the hook. Plus, I need to be officially alive for Olivia’s funeral. Rachel said they cremated her.” She stopped. There was a long space full of nothing but the water hitting me and the tile. She said, “This bread is excellent.”

  I got it. Subject change. “Ulrik taught me how to make it.”

  “What a talented guy. Speaks with a German accent and makes bread.” On the other side, she poked the shower curtain; when it touched my bare hip, I shied away in an undignified fashion. “You know, this could be us, in five years.”

  I had no body parts left to clean. I was a prisoner in the shower unless I could reach my towel from behind the curtain or persuade Grace to hand it to me. I didn’t think she would hand it to me. “Making bread with a German accent?” I suggested.

  “That’s exactly what I meant,” she said. I heard the withering tone in her voice. I was glad to hear it. I could use levity at the moment.

  “Will you give me my towel?”

  “You have to come and get it.”

  “Vixen,” I muttered. There was hot water left. I stood in it and looked at the uneven grout on the tiles under the showerhead. My fingers were getting pruney and the hair on my legs had stuck together to form soaked, matted arrows toward my feet.

  “Sam?” Grace said. “Do you think Cole’s right about the cure? About the meningitis working if you have it while you’re a wolf? Do you think I should try it?”

  This was too hard of a question to answer after the evening with Beck. Yes, I wanted her cured. I wanted more proof than me, though, that it would work. I wanted something to make the fate Jack had suffered a lower percentage of the possible outcomes. I had risked everything for this, but now that it came to it for Grace, I didn’t want her to do the same. But how could she have a normal life without it?

  “I don’t know. I want more information.” It sounded formal, like something I’d say to Koenig. I am collecting more data.

  “I mean, we don’t have to worry about it until winter, anyway,” she said. “I was just wondering if you felt cured.”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t feel cured. I felt like what Cole said — almost cured. A war survivor with a phantom limb. I still felt that wolf that I’d been: living in my cells, sleeping uneasily, waiting to be coaxed out by weather or a rush of adrenaline or a needle in my veins. I didn’t know if that was real or suggested. I didn’t know if one day I would feel secure in my skin, taking my human body for granted.

  “You look cured,” Grace said.

  Just her face was visible at the end of the shower curtain, looking in at me. She grinned and I yelled. Grace reached in just far enough to shut off the tap.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, whipping the shower curtain open all the way and presenting me with my towel, “this is the sort of thing you’ll have to put up with in your old age.”

  I stood there, dripping, feeling utterly ridiculous, Grace standing opposite, smiling with her challenge. There was nothing for it but to get over the awkwardness. Instead of taking the towel, I took her chin with my wet fingers and kissed her. Water from my hair ran down my cheeks and onto our lips. I was getting her shirt all wet, but she didn’t seem to mind. A lifetime of this seemed rather appealing. I said gallantly, “That better be a promise.”

  Grace stepped into the shower in her sock feet and wrapped her arms around my damp chest. “It’s a guarantee.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  • ISABEL •

  I heard a soft knock on the mudroom door. Stepping over boots and a trowel and a bag of bird seed, I opened it.

  Cole St. Clair stood in the black rectangle of the doorway, his hands in his pockets.

  “Ask me in,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  • GRACE •

  It was properly dark by the time Rachel and I got to my parents’ house on Sunday night. Rachel, due to fascinating driving habits frowned upon by the Minnesota State Police, didn’t have a driver’s license, so I had had to pick her up. She’d showed me a beaded purse with a smiley face on the side by means of a hello and smiled a thin white smile in the dark. It was the dark, I thought, that made it so surreal to be pulling up in my parents’ driveway. Because with only the porch light to illuminate the front of the rambler and a corner of the drive, everything about the house looked precisely the same as the night that I left.

  I pulled up the parking brake beside the car I’d gotten with the insurance money from my last one — I remembered, all of a sudden, yet another night, the one when a deer had smashed through my Bronco’s windshield and I’d thought that I was losing Sam to the wolves for good. That seemed like a million nights ago and hours ago at the same time. Tonight felt like a beginning and an ending.

  Next to me, Rachel opened her beaded smiley face purse and removed some strawberry lip gloss. She applied two coats of fruity armor with fierce determination, and ferociously zipped it back into the purse. Then we marched to the front door, sisters in battle, the sounds of our shoes on the concrete sidewalk our only war cry. I didn’t have a key, so I had to knock.

  Now that I was here, I really didn’t want to go through with it.

  Rachel looked at me. She said, “You’re like my favorite older sister, which doesn’t make sense, because you’re the same age as me.”

  I was flattered, but I said, “Rachel, you say weird things.”

  We both laughed, and our laughs were uncertain creations with almost no sound.

  Rachel dabbed her lips on her sleeve; in the yellow glow offered by the moth-filled porch light, I saw evidence of where she’d done it earlier, a small collection of kisses on her cuff.

  I tried to think of what to say. I tried to think of which of them would open the door. It was almost nine. Maybe neither of them would open it. Maybe —

  It was Dad who opened the door. Before he had a chance to react to the fact that it was me, my mother shouted from the living room, “Don’t let the kitten out!”

  Dad stared at Rachel and then at me, and in the meantime, a brown tabby cat the size of a rabbit crept around the doorjamb and shot into the yard beyond us. I felt ridiculously betrayed by the presence of the cat. Their only daughter had disappeared and they’d gotten a kitten to replace me
?

  And it was the first thing I said. “You got a cat?”

  My father was shocked enough by my presence that he answered honestly. “Your mother was lonely.”

  “Cats are very low maintenance.” It was not the warmest of replies, but he hadn’t exactly delivered the warmest of opening lines, either. I had expected, somehow, to find evidence of my absence on his face, but he looked as he always did. My father sold expensive real estate and he looked like he sold expensive real estate. He had well-groomed hair from the ’80s and a smile that encouraged sizable down payments. I didn’t know what I was expecting. Bloodshot eyes or pouches beneath his eyes or ten years added to him or weight gain or weight loss — just some concrete evidence of time passing without me, and it not being easy for him. That was all I wanted. Concrete proof of their anguish. Anything to prove that I was making the wrong decision confronting them tonight. But there was nothing. I sort of wanted to just go then. They’d seen me. They knew I was alive. I’d done my job.

  But then my mother came around the corner of the hall. “Who is that?” She froze. “Grace?” And her voice broke on that one syllable, so I knew I was coming in after all.

  Before I had time to decide if I was ready for a hug, I was in one, my mother’s arms so tightly around my neck and my face pressed into the fuzz of her sweater. I heard her say, God thank you Grace thank you. She was either laughing or crying, but when I pulled back I couldn’t see either a smile or tears. Her lower lip trembled. I hugged my arms to keep them still.

  I hadn’t thought coming back would be so hard.

  I ended up sitting at the breakfast table with my parents across from me. There were a lot of memories living at this table, usually me sitting by myself, but fond nonetheless. Nostalgic, anyway. The kitchen smelled weird, though, like too much take-out food, odors from eating it, storing it, throwing it away. Never quite the same as the smell you got from actually using a kitchen to cook. The unfamiliar scent made the experience seem dreamlike, foreign and familiar all at once.