Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever Read online

There were some things you could not take from me. Some things that I just could not bear to give up.

  Grace

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  • COLE •

  Two thirty-four A.M.

  I was alone.

  The lake stretched out beside the parking area, the still water reflecting a mirror-perfect image of the imperfect moon. Somewhere on the other side of the water was the Culpeper property.

  I wasn’t going to think about that.

  Two thirty-five A.M.

  I was alone.

  It was possible that Sam wasn’t coming.

  • ISABEL •

  It was three twenty-one A.M. and there was no one at Beck’s house. I found a pile of clothing and an abandoned syringe by the back door, and inside, Sam’s cell phone sitting on the kitchen island — no wonder my call hadn’t been picked up. They were gone. They’d done just what I said to do — gone through with Cole’s plan without any of my help. I walked through the rooms downstairs, my boots clicking on the hardwood floor, though if there was anyone there, I was sure they would’ve answered me.

  At the end of the hall was the room Jack had died in. I reached in and turned on the bedroom light. Instantly the room turned the same abusive shade of yellow I remembered from before. It was clear that this was Cole’s room now. A pair of sweatpants walked across the floor unattended. Glasses and bowls and pens and papers covered every available horizontal surface. The bed was unmade, and riding on the crest of rumpled bedspread was a bound leather book, like a journal or diary.

  I climbed into the bed — it smelled like Cole that day he’d come over and had been trying to smell nice — and lay on my back, thinking of Jack dying right here. It was a hard memory to conjure, and it wasn’t strong enough to bring emotion with it. That made me feel simultaneously relieved and sad; I was losing him.

  After a few moments, I reached over and picked up the journal. A pen was put in it to hold the page. The idea that Cole might have his private thoughts written down was strange to me; I didn’t think he could really be honest, even on paper.

  I opened it up and scanned the pages. It was at the same time nothing that I expected and everything. Honesty, but no emotions. A bland chronology of Cole’s life for the past month. Words jumped out at me.

  Seizure. Chills. Moderate success. Uncontrollable shaking of hands, approx. two hours. Shifted for twenty-seven minutes. Vomiting extensive; suggest fasting?

  It was what was unwritten that I wanted from this journal. Not what I needed, but what I wanted. I paged through, looking to see if his entries became wordier, but they didn’t. I did find what I needed, however, on the last page: Meet at Two Island parking area, then up 169 then north on Knife Lake.

  It would take me awhile to find where they meant on Two Island Lake; it was massive. But now I knew where to start.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  • GRACE •

  And now, finally, here he was, as I remembered him, after all this time.

  I was standing in a woods made out of white-barked trees when he found me. My howls to him had gathered two other pack members by the time that we got within sight of each other. The closer we got, the more anxious I became; it was difficult to howl instead of whimper. The others tried to console me, but I kept showing them images of his eyes, trying to convey — something. I couldn’t believe it was really his voice. Not until I saw his eyes.

  And then, there he was, panting, uncertain. He trotted into the clearing and hesitated when he saw the other two wolves flanking me. But his scent apparently identified him to them, and a flurry of images passed between us, him playing, him hunting, him among the pack.

  I bounded to him, my tail up, ears pricked, ecstatic and quivering. He threw me an image so strong that it brought me up short. It was the trees around us, the white tree trunks with the black weals up the side, the leaves falling, humans standing among them.

  I threw one back, me galloping here to find him, using his voice to guide me ever closer.

  But again, he threw me the image.

  I didn’t understand. Was this a warning — were these humans coming? Was it a memory? Had he seen them?

  The image shifted, twisted: a boy and a girl, leaves in hands, the image soaked in wanting, longing. The boy had my wolf’s eyes. Something inside me hurt.

  Grace.

  I whined softly.

  I didn’t understand, and now I felt that familiar pang of loss and hollowness inside me.

  Grace.

  It was a sound that meant nothing and everything. My wolf stepped carefully toward me, waiting for my ears to prick before he licked my chin and nosed my ears and muzzle. I felt like I had been waiting for a lifetime for him to be here; I was trembling with it. I couldn’t stop pressing against him, pushing my nose against his cheek, but it was okay, because he was just as insistent. Affection required touching and jostling.

  Now, finally, he sent me an image that I could comprehend: us, our heads thrown back, singing together, calling the other wolves from all over the woods. It was toned with urgency, with danger. Those were both things that I was familiar with.

  He tipped his head back and howled. It was a long, keening wail, sad and clear, and it went further toward making me understand that word Grace than his images had. After a moment, I opened my mouth and howled as well.

  Together, our voices were louder. The other wolves pressed in against us, nosing, whimpering, and, finally, howling.

  There wasn’t a place in the woods you wouldn’t hear us.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  • COLE •

  It was five fifteen A.M.

  I was so tired that I couldn’t imagine sleeping. I was that tired that made your hands shake and your eyes see lights at the corners of your vision, movement where there was none.

  Sam was not here.

  What a strange world this was, that I could come here to lose everything about myself, and instead lose everything but me. It was possible that I’d thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God’s fence. It would be, after all, a divinely ironic punishment to watch me learn to care and then destroy the things I cared about.

  I didn’t know what I would do if this didn’t work. I realized, then, that somewhere along the way, I’d started to think that Sam could really do it. There hadn’t been a part of me, even a small part, that had believed otherwise, and so now this feeling I felt rumbling in my chest was disappointment and betrayal.

  I couldn’t go back to that empty house. It was nothing without the people in it. And I couldn’t go back home to New York. It hadn’t been home for a long time. I was a man without a country. Somewhere along the way, I’d become the pack.

  I blinked, rubbed my eyes. There was movement at the edge of my vision again, miscellaneous floaters, consolation prizes for actual sight in this dim light. I rubbed again, rested my head against the steering wheel.

  But the movement was real.

  It was Sam, his yellow eyes regarding the car warily.

  And behind him were the wolves.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  • SAM •

  Everything about this was wrong. We were in the open, we were bunched together, we were too near the vehicle. Instincts made my hackles rise. The light of the moon glowed inside the mist, making the world artificially bright. A few of the wolves started to retreat back into the darkness of the trees, but I broke into a run, herding them back snugly by the lake. Images flashed briefly into my mind: us, by the lake, all together. Me and her.

  Grace. Grace. finding the wolves. the lake.

  I’d done those things. What now? There was no what now.

  Grace could smell my anxiety. She nosed my muzzle, leaned into me, but I wasn’t comforted.

  The pack was restless. I had to break off again to drive a few stragglers back to the lake. The white she-wolf — Shelby — snarled at me but didn’t attack. The wolves kept looking up to the vehicle; there was a person in it.

  What
now, what now?

  I was torn by the unknown.

  Sam.

  I jerked. Recognition rang through me.

  Sam, are you listening?

  Then, clearly, an image. The wolves running down the road, freedom ahead, and something — something menacing behind.

  I swiveled my ears, trying to find the direction of the information. I turned back to the vehicle; my gaze was met by the young man’s steady one. Again, I got the image, even more clearly this time. Danger coming. The pack pelting down the road. I took the image, honed it, threw it to the other wolves.

  Grace’s head instantly snapped up from where she was doing my job: keeping a wolf from wandering back into the trees. Across two dozen moving bodies, I met her gaze and held it for the briefest of moments.

  In my paws, I could feel the vibration of something unfamiliar. Something approaching.

  Grace tossed another image to me. A suggestion. The pack, me at the head, leading them away from whatever threat promised to arrive from behind us. Her alongside, driving them after me.

  I couldn’t mistrust that image being sent to me from the car, because it came with this, again and again: Sam. And that made it all right, even if I couldn’t quite hold the entire concept of it in my head.

  I sent an image to the pack. Not a request. An order: us moving. Them following me.

  By all rights, the orders should have been given by Paul, the black wolf, and any others punished for their subordination.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then, we broke into a run, nearly simultaneously. It was like we were on a hunt, only whatever we chased was too far away to see.

  Every wolf listened to me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  • COLE •

  It was working.

  The moment I started to follow in the Volkswagen, though, they scattered and it took them a long moment to regroup. It was almost dawn; we didn’t have the time for them to get used to the car. So I got out, tossing images as best I could — I was getting better, though I had to be close — and I ran on foot. Not stupidly close to them; I stayed on the shoulder of the road mostly, to keep my bearings, and they were dozens of yards away. I just tried to stay close enough to keep tabs on their direction. I couldn’t believe I’d cursed their slowness before. If they’d been more focused, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Instead, here I was, running with them, almost part of the pack again, as they coursed along under the waning moonlight. I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got tired. Right now, fueled by adrenaline, I couldn’t imagine it.

  And I had to say, even as a cynic, it was something to see the wolves, leaping and jumping and ducking and surging with each other. And it was something else again to see Sam and Grace.

  I was able to send images to Sam, sure, but it obviously took an effort for him to understand. Sam and Grace, on the other hand, both wolves, with their connection — Sam would barely turn his head and Grace would fall back to encourage a wolf that had stopped to investigate a fascinating smell. Or Grace would intercept one of my images and translate it for Sam with a flick of her tail, and suddenly they would have changed directions as I wanted them to. And always, as they ran, though there was an urgency to the pack, Sam and Grace were touching, nosing, bumping against each other. Everything they had as humans translated.

  Here was the problem, though: North of Boundary Wood, there was a large, flat tract of land covered only with scrub trees. As long as the wolves were crossing it to the next stretch of woods, they were easy targets. I’d driven past it before, and it hadn’t seemed like too wide of an area. But that was me in a car going fifty-eight miles an hour. Now we were on foot going maybe six, eight miles an hour. And the edge of the horizon was pinking as the sun contemplated coming up.

  Too soon. Or maybe we were too late. The scrub stretched out for miles ahead of us. There was no way that the wolves would be across it by the time the sun came up. The only thing I could hope for was that the helicopter was slow to get started. That it started on the far side of Boundary Wood and was more concerned with why there didn’t seem to be any wolves in it anymore. If we were lucky, that would be how it worked. If the world were fair.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  • ISABEL •

  By the time I found the Volkswagen, abandoned in the parking lot by the lake, it was dawn. I swore at Cole for leaving Sam’s phone behind, for leaving the car behind, but then I saw that the pack had left cluttered tracks in the dew. More wolf prints than I’d ever seen before. How many was that? Ten wolves? Twenty? The brush was beaten down where they’d waited, and then the prints led back out to the road. Like the journal had said. Heading up 169.

  I was so pumped to know that I was on the right track that I didn’t realize, at first, what it meant that I could see the tracks so clearly. The sun was coming up, which meant we were running out of time. No, we were already out of time, unless the wolves were well away from the woods. There was a big, ugly stretch of alien wasteland on 169 leading out of Boundary Wood and Mercy Falls. If the wolves got caught there, they’d be totally exposed to my father and his enterprising rifle.

  All I could think was that things would be fine if only I could get to the wolves. So I sent the SUV speeding down the road. I was freezing, I realized; even though it wasn’t that cold, just normal early-morning chill, I couldn’t seem to keep warm. I cranked up the heater and gripped the steering wheel. I didn’t pass any traffic — who would be out on this hick road at dawn except for wolves and the people hunting them, anyway? I wasn’t sure which category that put me in.

  And there, suddenly, were the wolves. In the half-light of dawn, they were dark spots against the scrubby ground, only presenting themselves as different shades of gray and black when I got closer. Of course, they were smack-dab in the middle of the alien wasteland, strung out in a long, orderly line, two and three across, perfect targets. As I got closer, I saw the wolf that was Grace up at the front — no way could I forget the shape of her body and the length of her legs and the way she carried her head — and next to her, Sam. I saw a white wolf, and for a brief, confused moment, thought it was Olivia. But then I remembered, and realized it must be Shelby, the crazy wolf that had followed us to the clinic so long ago. The other wolves were strangers to me. Just wolves.

  And there, far ahead of me, running by the side of the road, a human. The low sun stretched his shadow out one hundred times taller than him. Cole St. Clair, running alongside the wolves, sidestepping debris on the roadside every so often and sometimes jumping the ditch for a few strides and then back again. He held his arms out for balance as he leaped, unself-conscious, like a boy. There was something so fiercely big about the gesture of Cole running with the wolves that it made the last thing I said to him ring in my ears. Shame warmed me when nothing else could.

  I had a new goal. I was going to tell him sorry, after all this.

  It occurred to me then that something in my dash was rattling. I pressed my hand on the dashboard, then on my door panel, trying to locate it.

  And then I realized it wasn’t coming from inside the SUV at all. I rolled down the driver’s side window.

  From the direction of the woods, I heard the sound of the helicopter blades beating the air as it approached.

  • COLE •

  The next part happened so quickly, I couldn’t really keep any of the events straight or make them make sense.

  There was the thump thump thump of the helicopter, every thump coming twice as often as the crashing of my heart in my ears. It was fast, compared to us, and low, and louder than an explosion. In this light, it was black against the sky; even as a human, it looked like a monster to me. It felt like death. Something in me prickled, a wary premonition. The tempo of the blades exactly matched one of my old songs, and the lyrics sprang into my head, unbidden. I am expendable.

  The effect on the wolves was immediate. The sound hit them first, and they began to move erratically, bunching together and spr
eading. Then, as the helicopter itself came closer, they twisted their heads up as they ran. Now there were tails tucked between legs, ears flattened.

  Terror.

  There was no cover. The people in the helicopter hadn’t seen me here, or if they had, I didn’t interest them. Sam’s head was half-turned toward me, listening for my direction. Grace was close by, trying to keep the wolves together as they panicked. I kept throwing out the image of making it to the woods on the other side of this open ground, but the trees seemed far away and out of reach.

  I took in the wolves, the helicopter, the ground, trying to formulate some new plan, something that could save them in the next twenty seconds. I saw Shelby lagging near the back. She was worrying at Beck, who had been guiding the wolves from the rear. He snapped at her, but she was relentless. Like a mosquito, returning again and again. For so long, she’d been unable to challenge anyone in the pack because of him, and now, when he was distracted, she was making her move. She and Beck were falling farther behind the rest of the pack. I wished I’d fought better when I’d met her in the woods before. I wished I’d killed her.

  Sam somehow sensed that Beck was falling behind, and so he lagged, too, leaving Grace to lead. His eyes were on Beck.

  The sound of the helicopter was so loud, so all-consuming, that it felt like I had never heard anything else. I stopped running.

  And that was when it all started to go too fast. Sam snarled at Shelby, and she abandoned Beck as if she had never cared about attacking him. For a moment, I thought that Sam’s authority had won out.

  Then she threw herself at Beck.

  I thought I’d sent a warning.

  I should have sent a warning. It would have been too late, anyway, even if they were listening to me.