Forever. Part 11

* GRACE *

I was dead, floating in water deeper than me and wider than me.

I was bubbling breath clay in my mouth black-star vision a moment then a moment then I was Grace.

I was floating, dead in water colder than me and stronger than me.

Stay awake.

The warmth of his body tugged at my skin ripped Please, if you can understand me I was inside out everything was yellow, gold, smeared over my skin Stay awake I.

was awake I.

was.

* COLE *

The pit was eerily silent when I got to it, and I half expected, for some reason, to find both Sam and Grace dead. Once upon a time, I would've stolen that feeling and written a song, but that time was long gone.

And they weren't dead. Sam looked up at me when I crept to the edge of the hole. His hair was plastered to his head in the sort of unstudied disarray that hands normally lifted to fix without thinking, but of course Sam had no hands free. His shoulders shook with the cold and he ducked his chin to his chest as he shuddered. If I hadn't known what he held in his arms, I would have never guessed that small, dark form was a live animal.

"Heads up," I said.

Sam looked up just as I dropped the two bins down. He winced as water exploded upward, splattering my skin with cold drops. I felt the wolf inside me jerk at the sensation, dissipating almost instantly. It was a weird reminder that eventually, I'd turn back into a wolf, and not because I'd stuck myself with a needle or otherwise experimented on myself. Eventually I'd shift because I couldn't help it.

"C-cole?" Sam asked. He sounded bewildered.

"Stand on the bins. One might be enough. How heavy is she?"

"N-not."

"Then you can hand her up to me." I waited while he moved stiffly through the water to the closest bin. It was bobbing on the surface; he was going to have to push it under the surface and turn it upside down in order for it to be a step. He tried to lean to grab the edge of it while still holding Grace; her head flopped away from his chest, limp and unresponsive. It was clear that he couldn't manipulate the bin without putting Grace down, and to put Grace down was to drown her.

Sam stood there, just staring at the floating bin, his arms tremoring under Grace. He was absolutely motionless. His head was tilted slightly to the side, regarding the water or something just past it. Both of his shoulders were slanted steeply to point at the ground. Victor had trained me to recognize what that meant. Giving up was the same in every language.

There are times that you sat back and let others play their solo and there are times you got up and took control of the music. And the truth is, I've never looked as good sitting still.

I said, "Watch - !" and not really giving Sam a chance to react, I slid down into the hole. There was a brief moment of utter vertigo, where my body wasn't sure how much farther I was falling and when I needed to brace myself, and then I caught my arm on the side just before pitching under the surface of the liquid mud. "Hot d.a.m.n," I breathed, because the water was cold, cold, cold.

Behind a layer of grit, Sam's face was uncertain, but he saw what I meant to do. "B-better hurry."

"You think?" I said. Sam was right, though - the cold water was jerking and twisting and poking fingers at me, prodding for the wolf inside me. I tipped the first bin and water poured into it, the weight tugging it down beneath the surface. Working by feel, trying to hold my twisting stomach still inside me, I turned the bin and pushed it into the sludge at the bottom. I reached for the other, let it fill with water, stacked it sideways on top. Grabbed the floating lid and pressed it on top.

"H-hold it steady," Sam said. "L-let me get her and ..."

He didn't finish, but he didn't have to. He shifted her in his arms and stepped onto the first bin. I reached out with my free hand to steady him. His arm was the exact temperature of the mud. Grace looked like a dead dog in his arms as he climbed onto the next. The bins teetered precariously; I was the only thing keeping them from tumbling under his weight.

"Fast," I hissed. G.o.d, the water was cold; I couldn't get used to it. I was going to turn into a wolf, and no I was not going to, not right now - I gripped the edge of the bins. Sam was on the bin with Grace and his shoulder was at the edge of the pit. He closed his eyes for a bare second. He whispered sorry, and then tossed the wolf's body up and out of the pit, onto dry ground. It was only a few feet, but I saw that it pained him. He turned to me. He was still shaking with the cold.

I was so close to wolf that I could taste it in my mouth.

"You come out first," Sam said, his teeth gritted to keep his voice steadier. "I don't want you to change."

It wasn't really me who mattered, wasn't me who absolutely had to climb out of this hole, but Sam didn't leave room for argument. He clambered off the bins and splashed heavily into the water beside me. There was a knot the size of my head in my guts, clenching and unclenching. I felt like my fingers were inside my diaphragm, tiptoeing their way up my throat.

"Climb," Sam said.

My scalp crept and crawled. Sam reached out and grabbed my jaw, hard enough that his fingertips were painful against my jawbone. He stared into my eyes, and I could feel the wolf in me responding to that challenge, this unspoken instinct that lent force to his command. I didn't know this Sam.

"Climb," he ordered. "Get out!"

And said like that, I had to. I crawled up the bins, my body twitching, my fingers finding the edge of the sinkhole. Every second that I was out of the water I felt more human and less wolf, though I could smell the stink of myself, of the near-shift. It washed over me every time I turned my head. Pausing a bit to gather my senses, I slithered out of the sinkhole on my stomach. It was not the s.e.xiest move I'd ever performed, but I was impressed nonetheless. A few feet away, Grace lay on her side, motionless but breathing.

Below me, Sam climbed unsteadily onto the first bin and waited a long moment to find his balance.

"I ... I'm only going to have a second before this thing falls," Sam said. "Can you -"

"Got it," I replied.

He was wrong; he had less than a second. He had only barely made it onto the second bin, crouching, when they began to tip below him. He reached up and, almost in the same moment, I grabbed his arm. The bins fell back into the water below, the splash more m.u.f.fled than I would've expected, as Sam swung his other arm up for me to grab. I braced myself against the soggy edge of the sinkhole and backed up. It was a good thing that Sam was a gangly guy with limbs made of twigs, because otherwise we would've both ended up back in the pit.

Then it was over. I was leaning back on my arms, out of breath. Not a single part of me untouched by the slimy mud of the sinkhole. Sam sat beside Grace, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking at the small b.a.l.l.s of clay that formed when he did. The wolf lay quietly next to him, breaths fast and jerky.

Sam said, "You didn't have to come down there."

"Yes, I did," I said.

I looked up and found him already looking back at me. In the dark of the woods, his eyes looked very pale. So strikingly wolf's eyes. I remembered him grabbing my jaw and telling me to climb, appealing to my wolf instincts if nothing else. The last time someone had stared me in the face like that, ordered me to listen and to focus through the change, it had been the first time I'd shifted. The voice had been Geoffrey Beck's.

Sam reached out and touched Grace's side; I saw his fingers move as they traced the ribs hidden beneath the fur. "There's a poem that goes like this," he said. "Wie lange braucht man jeden Tag, bis man sich kennt."

He kept touching the wolf's ribs, his eyebrows furrowed, until the wolf lifted its head slightly, uneasy. Sam put his hands in his lap. "It means 'how long it takes us, each day, to know each other.' I haven't really been fair to you."

Sam was saying it didn't matter, but it kind of did, too. "Save your kraut poetry for Grace," I said, after a pause. "You're getting your weird all over me."

"I'm serious," Sam said.

I said, not looking at him, "I'm serious, too. Even cured, you're really incredibly abnormal."

Sam wasn't laughing. "Take the apology, Cole, and I won't say anything about it again."

"Fine," I said, standing up and tossing him the towel. "Apology accepted. In your defense, I didn't really deserve 'fair.'"

Sam carefully tucked the towel around the wolf's body. She jerked away at his touch, but she was too tired to really react. "It's not the way I was brought up," he said finally. "People shouldn't have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty."

I thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would have gone down differently with Isabel here. She would've disagreed. But that was because, with Isabel, cruelty and kindness were sometimes the same thing.

"Anyway," Sam said. But he didn't say anything else. He scooped up Grace's body, all wrapped tightly in the towel so that she couldn't move even if she found the strength. He started toward the house.

Instead of following him, I walked back to the edge of the sinkhole and looked in. The bins still floated in the thin mud below, so covered in the dirty paste that it was impossible to see their original color. There was no motion on the surface of the water, nothing to betray its depth.

I spit into the hole. The mud was so thick it didn't even ripple outward where my spit landed. It would've been h.e.l.l to die in. It occurred to me that every single way I'd tried to die had been an easy way. It hadn't seemed like it at the time, when I lay on the floor and said enoughenoughenoughenoughjustgetmeout to no one. I had never really considered that it was a privilege to die as Cole and not as something else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

* ISABEL *

There was this thing that my parents used to do to me and Jack, before Jack died. They'd pick a time when we were most likely to be doing something that we wanted to be doing, sometimes homework but more often plans with friends - opening night of a movie you were dying to see was always a likely time - and then they would kidnap us.

They would take us to Il Pomodoro. That is "The Tomato" for those of you who, like me, do not speak cornball. Il Pomodoro was an hour and a half away from Mercy Falls in the middle of nowhere, which was saying a lot, because Mercy Falls was also the middle of nowhere. Why travel from one non-destination to another? Because while most people knew my father as a hard-a.s.sed trial lawyer who eviscerated his opponents with the ease of a velociraptor on speed, I knew the truth, which was that my father turned into a melting kitten in the hands of Italian men who served him garlic breadsticks while a tenor warbled sweetly in the background.

So, having just powered through a school day, dying to be done so that I could drive over to Beck's house to see what Sam and Cole were up to, with a million other things on my mind, I should have realized that it was a prime parental kidnapping environment. But it had been over a year. I was unprepared and my defenses were down.

I had no sooner stepped out of the school than my phone rang. Of course it was my father, so I had to pick it up or risk his righteous wrath. Flipping the phone open, I waved Mackenzie on; she wiggled her fingers over her shoulder without looking back at me.

"Yeah, what," I said, hitting the b.u.t.ton on my keys to see how far away I could be and still unlock the car.

"Come right back home when you're done," my father said. I heard the hiss of running water behind him and the snap of a makeup case. "We're going to Il Pomodoro tonight and we're leaving as soon as you get here."

"Are you serious?" I asked. "I have homework and I have to be up early tomorrow. You can go without me; it'll be romantic."

My father laughed with ruthless mirth: Ha. Ha. Ha. "We're going with a group, Isabel. A little celebration party, as it were. Everyone wants to visit with you. It's been a long time." My mother's voice murmured in the background. "Your mother says that if you go, she'll pay for the oil change on your vehicle."

I jerked open the door on my SUV and scowled at the puddle I was standing in. Everything was soggy this week. Warm air rushed out of the car, a sign that it was spring - it had actually gotten warm enough to heat the inside of the car while it was shut up. "She already promised me that for taking her dry cleaning the other day."

My father relayed this information to my mother. There was a pause. "She is saying that she will take you to Duluth for something called high/lowlights. Wait, is this about your hair? I'm not really a fan of -"

"I really don't want to go," I interrupted him. "I had plans." Then a thought occurred to me. "What are you celebrating again? Is this about the wolf hunt?"

"Well, yes, but we won't be talking about that all night," my father said. "It will be fun. We'll -"

"Good. Fine. I'll go. Tell mom I need a haircut more than color. Not with that doofus guy she likes, either. He makes me look like a soccer mom. I think he learned how to do hair from nineties sitcoms." I climbed into my car and started it, trying not to think about the evening ahead of me. The things I did for Grace and Sam that I would never do for anybody else.

"This makes me happy, Isabel," my father said. I frowned at the steering wheel. But I kind of believed him.

Every time we came to Il Pomodoro, I wondered how it had managed to suck in my parents. We were Californians, for crying out loud, who should know a quality culinary experience when we saw one. And yet here we were at a red-and-white-checked table listening to some poor college graduate sing opera at the end of our table while we perused the menu and snacked on four different kinds of bread, none of which looked Italian and all of which looked Minnesotan. The room was dark and the ceiling was low and made of acoustic tile. It was an Italian American tomb with a side of pesto.

I had done my best to stick to my father during the seating process, because there were about fifteen people, and the whole point of coming to this thing was to be close enough to hear what he said. Still, I ended up with a woman named Dolly sitting between us. Her son, who looked like he'd done his hair by standing backward in a wind tunnel, sat on the other side of me. I picked at the ends of my breadstick and tried not to let my elbows touch either of my neighbors.

There was a flash as something flew across the table, landing directly inside the neckline of my shirt, nestling on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Across from me, a fellow wind-tunnel survivor - a brother, maybe - was smirking and shooting glances at my neighbor. Dolly was oblivious, talking across my father to my mother on the other side of him.

I leaned across the table toward the crumb-thrower. "Do that again," I said, loud enough to be heard over the opera singer, Dolly, my mother, and the smell of the breadsticks, "and I will sell your firstborn child to the devil."

When I sat back, the boy next to me said, "He's annoying, sorry." But I could tell that what he really meant was What a great conversation starter, thanks, bro! Of course, Grace would have said, Maybe he was just being nice, because Grace thought nice things about people. Jack would have agreed with me, though.

Actually, it was really hard not to think about how the last time I'd been here, Jack had been sitting across the table from me, the rows and rows of wine bottles behind him, just like the kid across the table from me now. Jack had been a jerk that night, even though I tried not to remember that part. It felt like I wasn't missing him properly if I let myself remember how much I'd despised him sometimes. Instead I tried to remember what he looked like when he was grinning and dirty in the driveway, though these days it felt more like I was remembering a memory of a memory of his smile instead of remembering the smile itself. When I thought too hard about that, it made me feel weightless and untethered.

The opera singer ceased singing, to polite applause, and moved to the small stage on the side of the restaurant, where she conferred with another person in an equally demoralizing costume. My father took the opportunity to knock his spoon against his gla.s.s.

"A toast, for those of us who are drinking tonight," he said. Not really standing, just half rising. "To Marshall, for believing this could be done. And to Jack, who can't be here with us tonight" - he paused, then said - "but would be bugging us for a gla.s.s of his own if he were."

I thought it was a c.r.a.ppy toast, even if it was true, but I let Dolly and the neighbor boy knock their gla.s.ses against my water gla.s.s. I sneered at the boy across the table and withdrew my gla.s.s before he could lift his to mine. I'd get the crumb out of my shirt later.

Marshall sat at the end of the table, and his voice boomed in a way that my father's didn't. He had a carrying, congressional sort of voice, the kind that sounded good saying things like Less of a tax burden on the middle cla.s.s and Thank you for your donation and Honey, could you bring me my sweater with the duck on it? He said, conversational and resonant, "Did you know that you folks have the most dangerous wolves in North America?" He smiled, broad and pleased to share this information with us. His tie was loosened like he was here among friends, not working. "Until the Mercy Falls pack became active, there had been only two confirmed fatal wolf attacks in North America. Total. On humans, of course. Out west, they had quite a few livestock taken down, that's for sure, that's why they put that two hundred twenty wolf quota out there in Idaho."

"That's how many wolves the hunters could take?" asked Dolly.

"You betcha," Marshall said, a Minnesota accent presenting itself so unexpectedly that I was surprised.

"That seems like a lot of wolves," Dolly replied. "Do we have that many wolves here?"

My father broke in smoothly; in comparison to Marshall, he sounded more elegant, more cultured. Of course we were sitting in Il Pomodoro, so how cultured could he be, but still. "Oh, no, they estimate the Mercy Falls pack to be only twenty or thirty animals. At most."

I wondered how Sam would take this conversation. I wondered what he and Cole had decided to do, if anything. I remembered that strange, resolute look on Sam's face in the store, and it made me feel hollow and incomplete.

"Well, what makes our pack so dangerous, then?" Dolly wondered, her chin resting in a circle of her fingers. She was performing a trick that I'd done often enough to recognize. The interested ignorance routine was excellent for commanding attention.

"Familiarity with humans," my father answered. He made a gesture at one of the waiters: We're ready. "The big thing that keeps wolves away is fear, and once they have no fear, they're just large, territorial predators. There have, in the past, in Europe, India, been wolf packs that were notorious man-killers." There was no trace of emotion in his voice: When he said man-killer, he was not thinking Jack-killer. My father had a purpose now, a mission, and as long as he was focused on that, he would be fine. This was the old Dad, powerful and frustrating, but ultimately someone to be proud of and awed by. I hadn't seen this version of my father since before Jack died.

I realized bitterly that if it hadn't been Sam and Grace and Cole at stake, I would've been happy at this moment, even sitting in Il Pomodoro. My mother and father, smiling and chatting like old times. Just a small price to pay for all this. I could have my parents back - but I had to lose all of my real, true friends.

"Oh, no, they have significant populations in Canada," my father was explaining to the man across from him.

"It's not a numbers game," Marshall added, because no one was going to say it if he didn't. No one had any real response to that. We all jumped in surprise as the singer began again. I saw Marshall's mouth clearly form My G.o.d, but you couldn't hear him over the rushing soprano.

At the same time that I felt my phone vibrate against my leg, something tickled at my shirt collar. I looked up to see the muppet across the table grinning stupidly at me, having launched another crumb into my shirt. The music was too loud to say something to him this time, which was good, because everything I could think of involved four-letter words. Moreover, every time I looked to his side of the table, I thought again about Jack sitting here with us and how now we were all sitting around talking about the animals that had killed him and not about how he would never be sitting in this restaurant again. I jerked when something touched me again, this time my hair. It was the boy next to me, his fingers next to my temple.

"-got some in your hair," the guy shouted over the singing. I held up my hand like Stop, just stop.

My father was leaning over the table toward Marshall, engaged in a benevolent shouting match, trying to be heard over something that sounded a lot like Bizet. I heard him shout, "From the air, you can see everything." I retrieved my phone and flipped it open. Seeing Sam's number made me feel a strange knot of nerves in my stomach. He'd sent me a text, full of typos.