Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever Page 33

  “Don’t be. I got there a little late, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Isabel. I know that’s what you like to do, but you didn’t owe the wolves anything, and you came anyway.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time, and I wondered if she believed me. Finally, she said, “And they’re sending me to California to live with Nanna until they can sell the house.”

  “What?”

  I spoke so sharply that Sam looked over to me, frowning.

  Isabel’s voice had no intonation at all. “Yeah. I’m taking my finals and then I’m on a plane with my stuff. Isabel Culpeper. This is her noble end. Back to California with her tail between her legs. Do you think I’m weak for not just taking off?”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “If you can keep your parents, I think you ought to. Your parents love you, even if your dad is a jerk. It doesn’t mean I don’t want you to go.” Isabel in California? “I can’t believe it. Are you sure they won’t change their minds?”

  She scoffed. It was a raw sound, a new wound.

  “Tell her thank you,” Sam said.

  “Sam says to tell you thank you.”

  Isabel laughed. Ha. Ha. Ha. “For leaving the state?”

  “For saving our lives.”

  For a moment, we didn’t say anything. From the direction of the lake, a loon cried. If I hadn’t known, logically, that I had been here this morning, I wouldn’t have remembered it. As a wolf, everything about this place looked different.

  Isabel said, “Not everybody’s lives.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, because it was true. It wasn’t really her fault, still, but I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t true. Instead, I said, “We’re in the field. Where was Cole’s — uhh — where did he —”

  She interrupted, “There was a bank by the road. There should be my tire tracks. He was a few yards before that. I have to go. I have to —”

  The phone went dead.

  I sighed and closed my phone, relaying the information. Together we followed the directions, which led us to Shelby’s body. It was surprisingly unmolested, except for her face, which was so destroyed that I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. There was a lot of blood.

  I wanted to feel compassion for her, but all I could think was She is the reason Cole is dead.

  “She’s finally gone,” Sam said. “She died as a wolf. I think that would please her.”

  All around Shelby’s body, the grass was smeared and spattered and stained with red. I didn’t know how far away Cole had died. Was this his blood? Sam was swallowing, looking at her, and I knew that he saw past the monster to something else. I couldn’t.

  Koenig muttered something about needing to make a phone call and moved off, giving us some distance.

  I touched Sam’s hand. He was standing in so much blood that it looked like he had been wounded himself. “Are you doing okay?”

  He rubbed his own arms; it was getting cool again as the sun went down. “I didn’t hate it, Grace.”

  He didn’t have to explain. I could still remember that feeling of joy at seeing him bound toward me as a wolf, even if I had no way to remember his name. I remembered exchanging images with him at the head of the pack. They all trusted him, like I did. I said softly, “Because you were better at it.”

  He shook his head. “Because I knew it wasn’t forever.”

  I touched his hair and he bent his head to kiss me, quiet as a secret. I leaned on his chest and together we stood, buffered from the cold.

  After several long minutes, Sam stepped back from me and looked at the woods. For a moment I thought he was listening, but of course, no wolves would howl from Boundary Wood now.

  He said, “This is one of the last poems Ulrik had me memorize.

  “endlich entschloss sich niemand

  und niemand klopfte

  und niemand sprang auf

  und niemand öffnete

  und da stand niemand

  und niemand trat ein

  und niemand sprach: willkomm

  und niemand antwortete: endlich”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  At first, I didn’t think that Sam was going to reply. His eyes were narrowed against the sun, looking out into the woods we’d escaped into an eternity ago, and then, into the woods we used to live in, an eternity before that. He was such a different person than the one that I had first met, bleeding on my back doorstep. That Sam had been shy, naive, gentle, lost in his songs and his words, and I’d always love that version of him. But it was okay, this change. That Sam couldn’t have survived this. For that matter, the Grace I’d been then couldn’t have.

  Sam said, looking at Boundary Wood,

  “at last no one decided

  and no one knocked

  and no one jumped up

  and no one opened

  and there stood no one

  and no one entered

  and no one said: welcome

  and no one answered: at last”

  Our shadows were as tall as trees with nothing to block them. It was like we were on another planet, here in this scrubby area, shallow stretches of water suddenly glowing orange and pink, the exact same color of the sunset. I didn’t know where else to look for Cole’s body. There was no sign of it for yards around, other than his blood, dotted on blades of grass and pooled in hollows.

  “Maybe he dragged himself to the woods,” Sam said in a flat voice. “Instinct would tell him to hide, even if he was dying.”

  My heart sped. “Do you think —”

  “There’s too much blood,” Sam replied. He didn’t look at me. “Look at all of it. Think of how I couldn’t even heal myself from a single shot in the neck. He couldn’t have healed himself. I just hope … I just hope he wasn’t afraid when he died.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking: But we’d all been afraid.

  Together, we combed the edge of the woods, just in case. Even as it fell dark, we kept looking, because we both knew that scent would help us more than our sight anyway.

  But there was no sign of him. In the end, Cole St. Clair had done what he did best.

  Disappeared.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  • ISABEL •

  When we first moved to this house, the piano room was the only room that I loved. I’d hated that we’d moved from California to a state equally far from both oceans my country had to offer. I hated the old, moldy smell of the house and the creepy woods around it. I’d hated how it made my angry brother even angrier. I hated the way my bedroom had slanted walls and the stairs creaked and the kitchen had ants, no matter how expensive the appliances were.

  But I’d loved the piano room. It was a round room made up half of windows and half of short wall sections painted deep burgundy. There wasn’t anything in the room but the piano, three chairs, and a chandelier that was amazingly non-tacky, given the rest of the house’s lighting decor.

  I didn’t play the piano, but I liked to sit on the bench, anyway, my back to the piano, and look out the windows into the woods. They didn’t seem creepy from inside, with a safe distance between me and them. There might have been monsters in them, but nothing that could contend with twenty yards of yard, an inch of glass, and a Steinway. The best way to experience nature, I’d thought.

  I still had days when I thought that was the best way to deal with it.

  Tonight, I ventured down from my bedroom, avoiding my parents, who were talking in hushed voices in the library, and crept into the piano room. I shut the door so that it wouldn’t make any sound and sat cross-legged on the bench. It was night, so there was nothing to see outside the windows except for the circle of grass lit by the back door light. It didn’t really matter that I couldn’t see the trees, though. There were no monsters in them anymore.

  I pulled my hoodie around me and drew my legs up to my chest, sitting sideways on the bench. It felt like I’d always been cold here in Minnesota. I kept waiting for it to get to summer
, but it never seemed to make it that far.

  California didn’t sound like a terrible idea at the moment. I wanted to dig myself into the sand and hibernate until I didn’t feel so hollow inside.

  When my phone rang, I jerked and slammed my elbow into the keyboard of the piano, which let out a low, agonized thud. I hadn’t realized the phone was still in my pocket.

  I pulled it out and looked at the caller ID — Beck’s house. I really wasn’t up for sounding like the Isabel that they knew. Why couldn’t they just give me one night?

  I put it to my ear. “What?”

  There was nothing on the other end. I checked to make sure the phone had a signal. “What? Hello? Is there anybody there?”

  “Da.”

  I had no bones left in my body. I slid off the bench, trying to hold the phone to my ear still, trying to hold my head up because my muscles felt completely unequal to the task. My heart was clubbing so painfully in my ears that it took me a moment to realize that if he’d said something else, I wouldn’t have heard it.

  “You,” I snarled, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was sure the rest of the sentence would come to me. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  He laughed then, that laugh that I’d heard at the clinic, and I started to cry.

  “Now Ringo and I have even more in common,” Cole said. “Your father’s shot both of us. How many people can say that? Are you choking on something?”

  I thought about picking myself back off the floor, but my legs were still unsteady. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing, Cole.”

  “I forgot to say that was who was calling.”

  “Where were you?”

  He made a dismissive noise. “In the woods. Regrowing my spleen or something. Also, parts of my thighs. I’m not sure my better parts work anymore. You’re welcome to come over and take a look under the hood.”

  “Cole,” I said, “I have to tell you something.”

  “I saw,” he replied. “I know what you did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He paused. “I know you are.”

  “Do Sam and Grace know you’re alive?”

  Cole said, “I’ll have a joyous reunion with them later. I needed to call you first.”

  For a moment, I let myself just bask in that last sentence. Memorized it for replaying in my head over and over later.

  “My parents are sending me back to California for what I did.” I didn’t know any way to say it other than just throwing it out there.

  Cole didn’t answer for a moment.

  “I’ve been to California,” he said finally. “Sort of a magical place. Dry heat and fire ants and gray imported cars with big engines. I’m imagining you next to a decorative cactus. You look delicious.”

  “I told Grace I didn’t want to go.”

  “Liar. You’re a California girl anyway,” he said. “You’re just an astronaut here.”

  I surprised myself by laughing.

  “What?”

  “Because you have only known me for, like, fourteen seconds, and seven of those were us making out, and you still know more about me than all of my friends here in this stupid place,” I said.

  Cole considered this. “Well, I’m an excellent judge of character.”

  Just the idea of him sitting over at Beck’s house, alive, made me want to smile, and then smile some more, and then start laughing and not stop. My parents could be angry at me for the rest of my life.

  “Cole,” I said. “Don’t lose this number.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  • GRACE •

  I remember lying in the snow, a small spot of red going cold, surrounded by wolves.

  “Are you sure this is the place?” I asked Sam. It was October, so the cold night air had pulled the green from the leaves and turned the underbrush red and brown. We stood in a small clearing. It was so small that I could stand in the middle and stretch my arms out to either side and touch a birch tree with one palm and brush the branches of a pine with the other, and I did.

  Sam’s voice was certain. “Yes, this is it.”

  “I remember it being larger.”

  I’d been smaller then, of course, and it had been snowy — everything seemed more vast in the snow. The wolves had dragged me from the tire swing to here, pinned me down, made me one of them. I’d been so close to dying.

  I turned slowly, waiting for recognition, for a flashback, for something to indicate that this really was the place. But the woods remained ordinary woods around me, and the clearing remained an ordinary clearing. If I’d been out walking by myself, I probably would have crossed it in a stride or two and not even considered it a clearing.

  Sam scuffed his feet through the leaves and ferns. “So your parents think you’re going to … Switzerland?”

  “Norway,” I corrected. “Rachel really is going, and I’m supposed to be going with her.”

  “Do you think they believed you?”

  “They don’t really have a reason not to. Rachel turned out to be very good at deception.”

  “Troubling,” Sam said, though he didn’t sound troubled.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  What I didn’t say, but we both knew, was that it wasn’t crucial that they believed me, anyway. I had turned eighteen and gotten my high school degree over the summer, as I’d promised, and they’d been decent to Sam and let me spend my days and evenings with him, as they’d promised, and now I was free to go to college or move out as I pleased. My bag was packed, actually, sitting in the trunk of Sam’s car in my parents’ driveway. Everything I needed to leave.

  The only problem was this: winter. I could feel it stirring in my limbs, turning knots in my stomach, coaxing me to shift into a wolf. There could be no college, no moving out, no Norway even, until I was sure I could stay human.

  I watched Sam crouch and sort through leaves on the forest floor. Something had caught his eye as he scuffled. “Do you remember that mosaic, at Isabel’s place?” I asked.

  Sam found what he was looking for, a bright yellow leaf shaped like a heart. He straightened and twirled it by the long stem. “I wonder what will happen to it now that the house is empty.”

  For a moment we were both quiet, standing close to each other in the small clearing, the familiar sensations of Boundary Wood around us. The trees here smelled like no other, mixed with wood smoke and the breeze over the lake. The leaves whispered against each other in a way that was subtly different from the leaves up on the peninsula. These branches had memories caught in them, red and dying in the cold nights, in a way that the other trees didn’t.

  One day, I supposed, those woods would be home and these woods would be the stranger.

  “Are you sure that you want to do this?” Sam asked softly.

  He meant the syringe of meningitis-tainted blood, of course, that was waiting for me back at the lodge. The same almost-cure that had helped Sam and killed Jack. If Cole’s theories were correct and I fought the meningitis as a wolf, it would slowly fight the werewolf inside me and make me human for good. If Cole was wrong and Sam’s survival had been random, I faced overwhelming odds.

  “I trust Cole,” I said. These days, he was a powerful force, a bigger person than when I first met him. Sam had said he was glad Cole was using his powers for good instead of evil. I was glad to see him turning the lodge into his castle. “Everything else he’s figured out has been right.”

  Part of me felt a prickle of loss, because some days, I loved being a wolf. I loved this feeling of knowing the woods, of being a part of them. The utter freedom of it. But more of me hated the oblivion, the confusion, the ache of wanting to know more but being unable to. For all that I loved being a wolf, I loved being Grace more.

  “What will you do while I’m gone?” I asked.

  Without answering, Sam reached for my left hand, and I let him have it. He twisted the stem of the leaf around my ring finger so that it made a bright yellow band. We both admired it.r />
  “I will miss you,” he said. Sam let go of the leaf and it drifted to the ground between us. He didn’t say that he was afraid that Cole was wrong, though I knew he was.

  I turned so that I was facing my parents’ house. I couldn’t see it through the trees; maybe once it was winter, it would be visible, but for now, it was hidden behind the fall leaves. I closed my eyes and let myself breathe in the scent of these trees once more. This was good-bye.

  “Grace?” Sam said, and I opened my eyes.

  He reached out his hand to me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It’s a little odd to be saying good-bye to a world I’ve lived in for almost four years, a series that changed my life pretty completely, but here I am. Now that I’ve come to the end of it, I figured it’s a good time to say something about the parts of my story that really exist outside the pages of the books.

  First of all, the wolves.

  I’ve tried to stay true to actual wolf behavior throughout the series (although I wouldn’t recommend kissing one anytime soon). For readers who’d like to find out more about wolf behavior, I recommend the documentary Living with Wolves as a good starting point. The roles of Ulrik and Paul and Salem are all standard ones in a real wolf pack: the peacemaker, the alpha, and the omega. The reality of pack dynamics is fascinating stuff.

  It’s also real that a wolf’s place in our world is highly debated. The hunt Tom Culpeper helped instigate is based on real wolf hunts staged in the western United States and Canada as ranchers and wolves struggle to find equilibrium. The facts remain — wolves are lovely but powerful predators and humans are jealous keepers of their territory and their livelihoods — so more wolves will meet their death at the end of a hunter’s gun or in the shadow of a helicopter before this is all done.

  Second of all, Mercy Falls, Minnesota.

  I’ve been told by many readers that it’s impossible to find on a map, and I’m sorry. Shiver originally took place in Ely, MN, which is a real place, then Bishop, MN, which is not, and finally Mercy Falls. In my head Mercy Falls is quite near Ely and the Boundary Waters. Outside of my head, it’s quite near nothing at all, as it doesn’t exist. That part of Minnesota, however, does host a very real population of gray wolves.