Forever. Part 12

we founf her. was badf but cole pulle through likea hero.

thjought youd want to know. s It was hard to picture the words Cole and hero in the same sentence. Hero seemed to indicate some kind of gallantry. I tried to text back under the table, out of the view of helpful boy next to me and Dolly on the other side, saying just that I was at dinner listening to details and I'd talk later. Or come by. When I texted come by, I once again felt that twitch in my stomach, and a breathless rush of guilt, for no particular reason that I could name.

The singing stopped then, and there was clapping around me - Dolly had her hands up by her face and was clapping right by my ear - but my father and Marshall kept on talking, leaning on the table toward each other, as if there had never been any music.

My father's voice was clear: "-drive them out from the woods, like we did before, but with more manpower, state blessing, Wildlife Services and all that, and once they're north of Boundary Wood in the open, the helicopters and sharpshooters take over."

"Ninety percent success rate in Idaho, you said?" Marshall asked. He had a fork poised over an appetizer like he was taking notes with it.

"Then the rest don't matter," my father said. "Without the pack, they can't survive alone. Takes more than two wolves to take down enough game."

My phone vibrated again in my hands, and I flipped it open. Sam, again.

i thoughtshe was going to die isabel. i am so relievef it hurts.

I heard the boy across the table laughing and knew that he'd thrown something else at me that I hadn't felt. I didn't want to glance up at him because I'd just see his face against the wall where Jack's had been. Suddenly I knew that I was going to be sick. Not in the future, not in a "distinct possibility" way, but in a "right this moment I had to leave before I embarra.s.sed myself" way.

I pushed back my chair, jostling it into Dolly, who was in the middle of asking a stupid question. I wound my way through tables and singers and appetizers made out of sea creatures that didn't come from anywhere near Minnesota.

I got to the bathroom - one room, no stalls, all kitted out like a home bathroom instead of a restaurant bathroom - and shut myself inside. I leaned back against the wall, my hand over my mouth. But I wasn't sick. I started to cry.

I shouldn't have let myself, because I was going to have to go back out there, and I'd have a swollen, red nose and pink eyes and everyone would know - but I couldn't stop. It was like they were choking me, my tears. I had to gasp to breathe around them. My head was full of Jack sitting at the table, being a jerk, the sound of my father's voice talking about the sharpshooters in helicopters, the idea that Grace had nearly died without me even knowing it, stupid boys throwing stuff into my shirt, which was probably cut too low for a family dinner anyway, Cole looking down at me on the bed, and the thing that had set me off, Sam's honest, broken text about Grace.

Jack was gone, my father always got what he wanted, I wanted and hated Cole St. Clair, and no one, no one would ever feel that way about me, the way that Sam felt about Grace when he sent that text.

I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom now, my back up against the cupboard beneath the sink. I remembered just how scathing I had been when I'd found Cole ruined on the floor of Beck's house - not the last time, but when he'd told me he needed to get out of his body or kill himself. I'd thought he was so weak, so selfish, so self-indulgent. But I got it now. Right in that moment, if someone had said, Isabel, I can make it go away, take this pill ... I might have taken it.

There was a knock on the door.

"It's occupied," I said, angry that my voice sounded thick and unlike me.

"Isabel?" My mother's voice.

I had been crying so hard that my breath was. .h.i.tching. I tried to speak evenly. "I'll be out in a second."

The k.n.o.b turned. In my haste, I hadn't locked the door.

My mother stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. I looked down, humiliated. Her feet were the only thing I could see, inches from my own. She was wearing the shoes I'd bought her. That made me want to cry again, and when I tried to swallow my sob, it made an awful strangled sound.

My mother sat down on the bathroom floor next to me, her back to the sink as well. She smelled like roses, like me. She put her elbows up on her knees and rubbed a hand over her composed Dr. Culpeper face.

"I'll tell them you threw up," my mother said.

I put my head in my hands.

"I've had three gla.s.ses of wine. So I can't drive." She took out the keys and held them low enough that I could see them through the crack between my fingers. "But you can."

"What about Dad?"

"Dad can get a ride with Marshall. They're a good couple."

I looked up then. "They'll see me."

She shook her head. "We'll go out the door on this side. We don't have to go past the table. I'll call him." She used a tissue from her purse to dab my chin. "I hate this G.o.dd.a.m.n restaurant."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

She stood up and I took her hand so she could pull me up. "You shouldn't sit on the floor, though - it's filthy and you could pick up rotavirus or MRSA or something. Why do you have a piece of bread in your shirt?"

I picked the crumbs delicately out of my shirt. Standing next to each other in the mirror, my mother and I looked eerily similar, only my face was a tearful, disheveled ruin and hers was not. The exact opposite of the twelve months leading up to this point.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go before they start singing again."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

* GRACE *

I didn't remember being woken up. I just remembered being. I sat up, blinking against the harsh light, cupping my face in my hands and smoothing my skin. I ached - not like from a shift, but like I had been caught under a landslide. Beneath me, the floor was a cold and unforgiving tile. There was no window and a row of blinding lightbulbs above the sink made everything permanent daylight.

It took me a moment to pull myself together enough to look around and then another moment to process what I was seeing. A bathroom. A framed postcard of some mountains next to the sink. A gla.s.s-walled shower, no tub. A closed door. Recognition dawned all at once - this was the upstairs bathroom at Beck's house. Oh. What that meant hit me all at once: I'd made it back to Mercy Falls. I'd made it back to Sam.

Too stunned to be properly appreciative, I climbed to my feet. Beneath my toes, the tile of the floor was spread with mud and dirt. The color of it - a sick yellow - made me cough, choking on water that wasn't there.

Movement caught my eye, and I froze, my hand over my mouth. But it was just me: In the mirror, a naked version of Grace with a lot of ribs and wide eyes looked out, her mouth covered by fingers. I lowered my hand to touch my lowest rib and, as if on cue, my stomach growled.

"You look a little feral," I whispered to myself, just to watch my mouth move. I still sounded like me. That was good.

On the corner of the sink sat a pile of clothing, folded with the extreme tidiness of someone who generally either folded a lot of clothing or none at all. I recognized it from my backpack, the one I'd brought when I came to Beck's house however many months ago. I pulled on my favorite long-sleeved white T and a blue T-shirt over the top of it; they were like old friends. Then jeans and socks. No bra or shoes - they were both back at the hospital, or wherever things left behind at hospitals by bleeding girls went.

What it came down to was this: I was a girl who turned into a wolf, and I had almost died, and the thing that was going to bother me the most all day was that I was going to have to go around without a bra.

Underneath the clothing was a note. I felt a weird little tickle in my stomach when I saw Sam's familiar handwriting, all run together and barely legible.

GRACE - THIS IS POSSIBLY THE WORST THING I'VE EVER DONE, SHUT MY GIRLFRIEND IN MY BATHROOM. BUT WE DIDN'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO WITH YOU UNTIL YOU SHIFTED. I PUT YOUR CLOTHING IN HERE. DOOR'S NOT LOCKED SO YOU CAN JUST OPEN IT SOON AS YOU HAVE FINGERS. I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE YOU. - S Happiness. That's what the feeling was. I held the note in my hands and tried to remember the events he'd written about. I tried to remember being shut in here, being retrieved from the woods. It was like trying to remember an actor's name after being shown his vaguely familiar face. My thoughts danced maddeningly out of my reach. Nothing, nothing, and then - I was choking on the memory of darkness and mud. Shelby. I remembered Shelby. I had to swallow, hard, and I looked up at myself in the mirror again. My face was afraid, my hand pressed to my throat.

I didn't like what my face looked like afraid; it looked like some other girl I didn't recognize. I stood there and composed it carefully until the Grace in the mirror was the one I knew, and then I tried the doork.n.o.b. As Sam had said, it was unlocked, and I stepped into the hall.

I was surprised to find that it was night. I could hear the hum of appliances downstairs, the whisper of air through heating vents, the sounds an occupied house made when it thought no one was listening. I remembered that Sam's room was to my left, but its open doorway was dark. To my right, another door at the end of the hall stood open, and light spilled out into the hallway. I chose that option, padding past photographs of Beck and others smiling and, weirdly enough, a collection of socks nailed to the wall in an artistic pattern.

I peered into the bright doorway and found Beck's room. After half a second, I realized that I had no true reason to believe it to be Beck's room. It was all rich greens and blues, dark wood and simple patterns. A reading lamp on the bedside table illuminated a stack of biographies and a pair of reading gla.s.ses. There was nothing particularly identifying about it. It was just a very comfortable and simple room, in the same way that Beck seemed comfortable and simple.

But it wasn't Beck who lay on the mattress; it was Cole, sprawled crosswise, his feet dangling off the edge, toes pointing at the floor. A little leather book lay on its face beside him. On his other side was a mess of loose papers and photographs.

Cole looked asleep among the mess. I started to back out, but when my foot hit a creaky section of floor, he made a noise into the blue comforter.

"Are you awake?" I asked.

"Da."

He turned his face as I came around to the end of the bed. I felt like I was in a hotel room then, this nice, tidy, unfamiliar room with its spa.r.s.e color-coordination, glowing desk lamp, and its sense of abandonment.

Cole looked up at me. His face was always a shock: so good looking. I had to make a conscious effort to put that aside in order to be able to talk to him like a real person. He couldn't help what his face looked like. I was going to ask him where Sam was, but on second thought, that seemed pretty rude, to just use Cole as a signpost.

"Is this Beck's room?" I asked.

Cole stretched his arm out across the comforter toward me and made a thumbs-up.

"Why are you sleeping here?"

"I wasn't sleeping," Cole said. He rolled onto his back. "Sam never sleeps. I'm trying to learn his secrets."

I rested my b.u.t.t on the end of the bed, not quite sitting, not quite standing. The idea of Sam not sleeping made me a little sad. "Are his secrets in these papers?"

Cole laughed. His laugh was a short, percussive thing that seemed like it belonged on an alb.u.m. I thought it was a lonely sort of sound. "No, these are Beck's secrets." He groped out until his fingers reached the leather journal. "Beck's journal." He rested his other hand on some of the loose papers. I saw now that he was lying on even more of them. "Mortgage and wills and trust paperwork and dental records and prescriptions for drugs that Beck tried to cure the pack with."

I was surprised, a little, to hear that such things existed, but I shouldn't have been. Those weren't things that Sam generally would have sought out - facts were not the most interesting thing to him - and quite possibly it had been information he'd grown up knowing and already found not useful. "Do you think Beck would be very pleased that you were going through his stuff?" I softened the question with a smile.

Cole said, "He's not here." But then he seemed to think better of his short answer, because he said, voice earnest, "Beck said he wanted me to take over for him. Then he left. This is the only way I know how to learn anything. It beats the h.e.l.l out of reinventing the wheel."

"I thought Beck wanted Sam to take over for him?" Then I answered my own question. "Oh - I guess he thought that Sam wasn't changing back. That's why he recruited you."

Well, that was why he recruited someone. Why he had chosen Cole in specific was less certain. At some point he must have seen this guy in front of me and thought that he would make a good pack leader. At some point he must've seen something of himself in Cole. I thought I could see it, maybe. Sam had Beck's gestures, but Cole had ... the strength of Beck's personality? The confidence? There was something like the force of Beck's character in Cole; where Sam was kind, Cole was driven.

Again Cole laughed that same cynical laugh. And again, I heard the bravado in it, but, it was like Isabel, where I had learned that you took away the cynical bit and heard the truth: the weariness and the loneliness. I still missed a lot of the nuances that Sam picked up on, but it wasn't hard to hear when you were listening for it.

"Recruiting is such a n.o.ble-sounding verb," Cole said, sitting up, pulling his legs toward him to sit cross-legged. "It makes me think about men in uniforms and great causes and signing up to protect the American way. Beck didn't want me to die. That's why he chose me. He thought I was going to kill myself, and he thought he would save me."

I wasn't going to let him get away with that.

"People kill themselves every day," I said. "It's, like, thirty thousand Americans a year or something like that. Do you really think that's why he chose you? I don't. It's just not logical. Out of everyone in the world, obviously he picked you for a very specific reason, especially considering that you're famous and otherwise a risk. I mean, logic. Logic."

Cole smiled at me then, this sudden, broad thing that was pleasing in its realness. "I like you," he said. "You can stay."

"Where's Sam?"

"Downstairs."

"Thanks," I said. "Hey - has Olivia shown up here yet?"

His expression didn't change, signaling his ignorance as much as anything he could say. My heart sank, just a little. "Who?" he asked.

"One of the other wolves," I said. "One of my friends who was bitten last year. My age."

It pained me to think of her out in the woods going through the same thing I was.

Something strange flitted across Cole's face then, too fast for me to interpret it. I just wasn't that good at reading faces. He looked away from me, gathering up some of the papers, stacking them against his foot and then putting them down in such a way that they immediately became disorderly again. "Haven't seen her."

"Okay," I said. "I'd better go find Sam." I moved toward the door, feeling a strange little bubble of nerves in my rib cage. Sam was here, I was here, I was very firmly in my skin. I would be with him again. I was suddenly and irrationally afraid that I would see him and things would be different, somehow. That what I felt wouldn't match up with what I saw, or that he would've changed how he felt about me. What if we had to start all over again, from scratch? I was filled at the same time with the knowledge that my fears were completely unfounded and with the realization that they just weren't going to move until I saw Sam again.

"Grace," Cole said as I started to leave.

I stopped in the doorway.

He shrugged. "Never mind."

By the time I got out into the hall, Cole was already laid back on the bed, papers spread under him and over him and around him, surrounded by everything that Beck had left behind. He could have so easily looked lost, surrounded by all those memories and words, but instead, he looked buoyed, buffered by the pain that had come before him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

* ISABEL *

There was something about driving with my parents that always made me a worse driver. No matter how much time I'd spent with my hands gripped on a steering wheel, put a parental unit in the pa.s.senger seat and instantly I started braking too hard and turning too soon and hitting the wipers when I reached for the radio k.n.o.b. And though I'd never been one to talk to people who couldn't hear me (Sam Roth was turning out to be the notable exception to that), with a parent in the car, suddenly I found myself snarling at other drivers' poor vanity plate choices or grousing about their slowness or commenting on their signal light coming on a full two miles before they planned to turn off.

Which was why, when my headlights illuminated the truck-thing half-pulled off the road, its nose pointing into the ditch, I said, "Oh, stellar parking job there."

My mother, who'd become drowsy and benevolent from the wine and the hour, came to sudden attention. "Isabel, pull in behind them. They might need help."

I just wanted to get home so that I could call Sam or Cole and find out what was going on with Grace. We were two miles from the house; this felt a little unfair on the part of the universe. In the far-off edge of my headlights, the stopped vehicle looked a little disreputable. "Mom, you're the one who said to never stop in case I get raped or picked up by a Democrat."

Mom shook her head and pulled a compact out of her purse. "I never said that. That sounds like your father." She flipped down the visor to look at herself in the small, lighted mirror. "I would've said Libertarian."

I slowed to a crawl. The truck - it was turning out to be a truck with one of those tall caps over the bed, the kind that you probably have to show ID proving you're over fifty to buy - looked like it probably belonged to a drunk who'd stopped to puke.

"What would we do, anyway? We can't ... change a tire." I struggled to think of what would make someone pull over, other than puking.

"There's a cop," Mom said. Sure enough, I saw that a cop car was parked by the side of the road as well; its lights had been blocked by the hulking truck. She added casually, "They might need medical a.s.sistance."

Mom lived in hope of someone needing medical a.s.sistance. She was always very eager for someone to get hurt on the playground when I was little. She eyed line cooks at fast-food restaurants, waiting for a kitchen disaster to strike. In California, she used to stop at accidents all the time. As a superhero, her line was: "DOES ANYONE NEED A DOCTOR? I AM A DOCTOR!" My father told me once that I needed to go easy on her; she'd had a hard time getting her degree because of family issues, and she just liked the novelty of being able to tell people she was a doctor. Okay, fine, self-actualize yourself, but really, I thought she'd gotten over it.