Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever Read online

  There was a pause. She hadn’t expected me to say anything, maybe. Or maybe she just hadn’t expected me to disagree. “That’s not true,” she said.

  “I believe what she told me. I saw her cry over you guys. That was real. Grace isn’t dramatic.”

  “She never asked for more,” Amy said.

  Now I looked at Amy — fixed her with my yellow eyes. I knew it made her uncomfortable; it made everyone uncomfortable. “Really?”

  Amy held my gaze for a few seconds and then looked away. I thought she was probably wishing she had left me on the sidewalk.

  But when she looked back, her cheeks were wet and her nose was getting unbecomingly red. “Okay, Sam. No bullshit, right? I know there were times I was selfish. There were times I saw what I wanted to see. But it goes both ways, Sam — Grace wasn’t the warmest daughter in the world, either.” She turned away to wipe her nose on her blouse.

  “Do you love her?” I asked.

  She rested her cheek against her shoulder. “More than she loves me.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how much Grace loved her parents. I wished I was with her instead of here, in this studio, not knowing what to say.

  Amy walked to the adjacent bathroom. I heard her blow her nose loudly before she returned from the bathroom. She stopped several feet away from me, dabbing her nose with a tissue. She had the weird look on her face that people get when they’re about to be more serious than they are used to.

  “Do you love her?” she asked.

  I felt my ears burn, though I wasn’t embarrassed by how I felt. “I’m here,” I said.

  She chewed her lip and nodded at the floor. Then, not looking at me, she asked, “Where is she?”

  I didn’t move.

  After a long moment, she lifted her eyes to me. “Lewis thinks you killed her.”

  It didn’t feel like anything. Not yet. Right now, they were just words.

  “Because of your past,” she said. “He said that you were too quiet and strange, and that your parents had messed you up. That there was no way you couldn’t be ruined after that, and that you’d killed Grace when you found out he wouldn’t let her see you again.”

  My hands wanted to make themselves into fists by my sides, but I thought that would look bad, so I forced them to hang, loose. They felt like deadweights at my sides, swollen and not belonging to my body. All the while, Amy was watching me, gauging my reaction.

  I knew she wanted words, but I didn’t have any that I wanted to say. I just shook my head.

  She smiled a sad little smile. “I don’t think you did. But then — where is she, Sam?”

  Uneasiness budded slowly inside me. I didn’t know if it was from the conversation, or the paint fumes, or Cole back at the store by himself, but it was there, nonetheless.

  “I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

  Grace’s mom touched my arm. “If you find her before we do,” she said, “tell her I love her.”

  I thought of Grace and that empty dress balled in my hand. Grace, far, far away and unreachable in the woods.

  “No matter what?” I asked, though I didn’t think she could possibly say it in a way that would convince me. I separated my hands; I realized I had been rubbing a thumb over one of my scarred wrists.

  Amy’s voice was firm. “No matter what.”

  And I didn’t believe her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  • ISABEL •

  The problem with Cole St. Clair is that you could believe everything he said, and, also, you couldn’t believe anything he said. Because he was just so grandiose that it was easy to believe he could accomplish the impossible. But he was also such an incredible dirtbag that you couldn’t really trust a single thing he said, either.

  The problem was that I wanted to believe him.

  Cole hooked his fingers in his back pockets, as if proving that he wasn’t going to touch me unless I made the first move. With all the books behind him, he looked like one of those posters you see in libraries, the ones with celebrities advocating literacy. COLE ST. CLAIR SAYS NEVER STOP READING! He looked like he was enjoying himself up there on the moral high ground.

  And he looked damn good.

  I was reminded suddenly of a case that my dad had worked on. I didn’t really remember the details properly — it was probably several different cases run together, actually — just some loser who’d been convicted of something in the past and was now being accused of something else. And my mom had said something like Give him the benefit of the doubt. I’d never forgotten my father’s reply, because it was the first and only clever thing I thought he’d ever said: People don’t change who they are. They only change what they do with it.

  So if my father was right, it meant that behind those earnest green eyes staring into mine, it was the same old Cole, perfectly capable of being that person he was before, lying on the floor drunk out of his mind and working up the nerve to kill himself. I didn’t know if I could take that.

  I said finally, “And your cure for werewolfism was … epilepsy?” Cole made a disinterested noise. “Oh, that was just a side effect. I’ll fix it.”

  “You could have died.”

  He smiled, the wide, gorgeous smile that he knew very well was wide and gorgeous. “But I didn’t.”

  “I don’t think that counts,” I said, “as not being suicidal.”

  Cole’s tone was dismissive. “Taking risks is not being suicidal. Otherwise, skydivers need serious help.”

  “Skydivers have parachutes or whatever the hell it is skydivers have!”

  Cole shrugged. “And I had you and Sam.”

  “We didn’t even know that you —” I broke off, because my phone was ringing. I stepped away from Cole to look at it. My dad. If there had ever been a time to let it go through to voicemail, this was it, but after my parents’ tirade yesterday, I had to pick it up.

  I was aware of Cole’s eyes on me as I flipped the phone open. “Yeah, what?”

  “Isabel?” My father’s voice was both surprised and … buoyant.

  “Unless you have another daughter,” I replied. “Which would explain a lot.”

  My father acted like I hadn’t spoken. He still sounded suspiciously good-tempered. “I dialed your number by accident. I meant to call your mother.”

  “Well, no, you got me. What were you calling her for? You sound high,” I said. Cole’s eyebrows jerked up.

  “Language,” my father replied automatically. “Marshall just called me. The girl was the last straw. He’s got word that our wolf pack is coming off the protected list and they’re setting up an aerial hunt. The state’s going to do it — no rednecks with rifles this time. We’re talking helicopters. They’re going to do it properly, like Idaho.”

  I said, “It’s definitely happening?”

  “Just a question of when they can schedule it,” my father said. “Collect the resources and manpower and all that.”

  Somehow, that last sentence drove it home for me — “resources and manpower” was such a bullshit Marshall phrase that I could imagine my father repeating the words after hearing them on the phone only minutes before.

  This was it.

  Cole’s face had changed from the lazily handsome expression he’d worn before. Now, something in my voice or face must have tipped him off, because he was looking at me in a sharp, intense way that made me feel exposed. I turned my face away.

  I asked my father, “Do you have any idea of when? I mean, at all?”

  He was talking to someone else. They were laughing and he was laughing back. “What? Oh, Isabel, I can’t talk. A month, maybe, they said. We’re working on moving it up, though — it’s a question of the helo pilot and getting the area pinned down, I think. I’ll see you when I get home. Hey — why aren’t you in school?”

  I said, “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, well, you didn’t have to pick up in school,” my father said. I heard a man say his name in the background. “I have to g
o. Bye, pumpkin.”

  I snapped the phone shut and stared at the books in front of me. There was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt face-out.

  “Pumpkin,” Cole said.

  “Don’t start.”

  I turned and we just looked at each other. I wasn’t sure how much he’d heard. It didn’t take much to get the gist. There was still something about Cole’s face that was making me feel weird. Like before, life had always been a little joke that he found a little funny but mostly lame. But right now, in the face of this new information, this Cole was — uncertain. Just for two seconds, it was like I saw all the way down to the inside of him, and then the door dinged open and that Cole was gone.

  Sam stood in the doorway of the store, the door slowly swinging shut behind him.

  “Bad news, Ringo,” Cole said. “We’re going to die.”

  Sam looked at me, a question in his eyes.

  “My dad did it,” I said. “The hunt’s going through. They’re waiting on the helo pilot.”

  Sam stood there by the front door for a long, long moment, his jaw working slightly. There was something odd and resolute about his expression. Behind him, the back of the open sign said CLOSED.

  The silence stretched out so long that I was about to say something, and then Sam said, with strange formality, “I’m getting Grace out of those woods. The others, too, but she’s my priority.”

  Cole looked up at that. “I think I can help you there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  • SAM •

  The woods were slimy and still from days of rain. Cole led the way, the certainty in his steps proving how often he’d taken the paths. Isabel had reluctantly left for school, and when Karyn had arrived to replace me, Cole and I had headed back to Beck’s house as quickly as we could. While we were in the car, Cole had told me his brilliant idea for catching Grace: traps.

  I couldn’t quite believe that all this time that I’d thought Cole was spending his days trashing the house, he’d also been trying to trap animals. Wolves. I supposed everything about Cole was so unpredictable that I couldn’t be legitimately surprised.

  “How many of these things do you have?” I asked, as we picked through the woods. I could have been thinking about Isabel’s news, the impending hunt, but I focused on making my way through the trees. The world was so damp that it took quite a bit of concentration. Water from last night’s storm dripped on me as I used branches for handholds, and my feet slid sideways beneath me.

  “Five,” Cole said, stopping to knock his shoe on a tree trunk; chunks of mud fell out the treads. “Ish.”

  “‘Ish’?”

  Cole kept walking. “I’m making one for Tom Culpeper next,” he said, without turning around.

  I couldn’t say I disagreed.

  “And what is it you’re planning on doing, if you catch one?”

  Cole made an exaggerated noise of disgust as he stepped over a pile of old deer droppings. “Find out what makes us shift. And find out if you’re really cured.”

  I was surprised that he hadn’t asked me for a blood sample yet.

  “Maybe,” Cole said thoughtfully, “I’ll enlist you for a bit of benign experimentation next.”

  Apparently I was getting to know him better than I thought. “Maybe not,” I said.

  As we walked, I suddenly caught a whiff of something that reminded me of Shelby. I stopped, turned in a slow circle, stepped carefully over a whiplike, bright green branch of thorns at my feet.

  “What are you doing, Ringo?” Cole asked, stopping to wait.

  “I thought I smelled …” I broke off. I didn’t know how to explain.

  “The white wolf? The pissy one?”

  I looked at him, and his expression was canny.

  “Yes. Shelby,” I said. I couldn’t find whatever scent it was that I’d caught before. “She’s bad news. Have you seen her recently?”

  Cole nodded, terse. I felt a knot of disappointment settle, cold and undigested, in my stomach. I hadn’t seen Shelby in months now, and I had hoped, optimistically, that she’d abandoned the woods. It wasn’t unheard of for wolves to leave their packs. Most packs had a scapegoat, picked on and driven away from food, pushed outside of the pack hierarchy, and they’d often travel hundreds of miles to start another pack, somewhere far away from their tormentors.

  Once upon a time, Salem, an older wolf I’d never known as a human, had been the omega of the Boundary Wood pack. But I had seen enough of Shelby when I was clawing my way through the meningitis to know that she had fallen low in Paul’s eyes and thus low in the pack. It was as if he knew, somehow, what she had done to me and Grace.

  “Bad news how?” Cole asked.

  I didn’t want to tell him. To talk about Shelby was to take the memories of her out of the boxes I’d carefully put them away in, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that. I said warily, “Shelby prefers being a wolf. She … had a bad childhood, somewhere, and she isn’t quite right.” As soon as I said the words, I hated them, because it was the same thing that Grace’s mom had just said about me.

  Cole grunted. “Just the way Beck likes them.” He turned away and began to walk, vaguely following the trail Shelby had left behind, and after a moment, I did, too, though I was lost in my thoughts.

  I remembered Beck bringing Shelby home. Telling us all to give her time, give her space, give her something that she needed but we couldn’t offer. Months had gone by, then, a warm day, like this. Beck had said, Could you go see what Shelby’s gotten up to? He didn’t really think she was up to something, or he would’ve gone himself.

  I’d found her outside, crouched by the driveway. She started when she heard me approach, but when she saw it was me, she turned back around, unconcerned. I was like air to her: neither good nor bad. Just there. So she didn’t react when I walked directly up to where she crouched, her white-blond hair hiding her face.

  She had a pencil in her hand, and she was using it to scry in bits of innards, stretching loops of intestines straight with the tip of the pencil. They looked like worms. There was some metallic green and oily-looking organ nestled among them. At the other end of the guts, a few inches away, a starling jerked and bicycled its legs, upright on its chest and then its side, held fast to Shelby’s pencil by the grip of its own intestines.

  “This is what we do to them, when we eat them,” Shelby had said. I remember just standing there, trying to hear any trace of emotion in her voice. She pointed to the bird’s mangled chest cavity with another pencil she held in her other hand. I remembered that it was one of my pencils, from my room. Batman. Freshly sharpened. The idea of her in my room felt more real and horrifying than the tortured animal kicking up dust on the edge of the concrete drive.

  “Did you do that?” I asked. I knew she had.

  As if I hadn’t spoken, Shelby said, “This is where its brain is. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.”

  She pointed to the starling’s eye. I could see the tip of the pencil resting directly on the shining black surface and something inside me clenched, bracing itself. The starling lay perfectly still. Its pulse was visible in its exposed innards.

  “No —” I said.

  Shelby stuck my Batman pencil through the starling’s eye. She smiled at it, a faraway smile that had nothing to do with joy. Her gaze shifted in my direction though she didn’t turn her head.

  I stood there, my heart racing as if I was the one who’d been attacked. My breath came in uneven, sick jerks. Looking at Shelby and the starling, black and white and red, it was hard to remember what happiness felt like.

  I had never told Beck.

  Shame made me a prisoner. I hadn’t stopped her. It had been my pencil. And in penance, I never forgot that image. I carried it with me, and it was a thousand times heavier than the weight of that little bird’s body.

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

  I wished Shelby was dead. I wished tha
t this scent, the one that both Cole and I were following, was just a phantom of her, a relic instead of a promise. Once upon a time, it would have been good enough for her to just leave the woods in search of another pack, but I was not that Sam anymore. Now, I hoped she was someplace she could never return from.

  But the scent of her, lingering in the damp underbrush, was too strong. She was alive. She’d been here. Recently.

  I stopped then, listening.

  “Cole,” I said.

  He stopped immediately, something in my voice warning him. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the grumbling, alive smell of the woods waking up as they warmed. Birds shouting from tree to tree. Far away, outside the woods, a dog barking, sounding like a yodel. And then — a distant, faint, anxious sound. If we hadn’t stopped, the noise of our feet would’ve obliterated it. But now, clearly, I heard the whistling, whimpering sound of a wolf in distress.

  “One of your traps?” I asked Cole softly.

  He shook his head.

  The sound came again. Something like misgiving tugged in my stomach. I didn’t think it was Shelby.

  I held my finger to my lips and he jerked his chin to show he understood. If there was an injured animal, I didn’t want to drive it away before we could help.

  We were suddenly wolves ourselves, in human skins — soundless and watchful. As when I had hunted, my strides were long and low, my feet barely clearing the forest floor. My stealth wasn’t something I had to consciously recollect. I just pulled away my humanness, and there it was, just underneath, waiting for me to recall it back to the surface.

  Beneath my feet, the ground was slick and slimy with the wet clay and sand. As I descended into a shallow ravine, arms outstretched for balance, my shoes slid, leaving behind misshapen prints. I stopped. Listened. I heard Cole hiss as he struggled to keep his balance behind me. The sound of the wolf’s whimper came again. The distress in it plucked something deep inside me. I crept closer.