Forever. Part 15

Cole armed himself with the broom from beside the fridge. I opted for a knife from the wooden block on the counter. Sam gave us both bemused looks and went empty-handed.

We stood outside the door, waiting for another noise. A moment later, another crash sounded out, this one louder than before, dinging off metal. Cole looked at me and raised his eyebrows, and at the same time, he opened the door and I reached in to hit the garage light.

And there was: nothing.

We looked at each other, mystified.

Into the garage, I said, "Is there anybody in here?"

Cole, sounding betrayed, said to Sam, "I can't believe there was another car here all along and you didn't tell me."

The garage was, like most garages, filled to capacity with weird and smelly things that you didn't want to keep in the house. Most of the s.p.a.ce was filled by a c.r.a.ppy red BMW station wagon, dusty with the lack of use, but there were also the requisite lawn mower, a workbench covered with small metal soldiers, and a Wyoming license plate above the door that said BECK 89.

My eyes were drawn back to the station wagon.

I said, "Shh. Look!"

There was a weed whacker leaning askew against the hood of the car. I stepped into the garage ahead of the boys to lean it back up, and then noticed the slightly ajar hood. I pressed an experimental hand on it. "Was this like this before?"

"Yes. For the last decade," Sam said, joining me. The BMW was not a thing of beauty, and the garage still smelled like whatever fluid it had been leaking last. He pointed to a crate of tools knocked over by the rear fender of the BMW. "That wasn't like that, though."

"Also," Cole said, "listen."

I heard what Cole had heard: a sort of scuffling underneath the car.

I started down but Sam caught my arm and knelt down himself to look.

"For crying out loud," he said. "It's a racc.o.o.n."

"Poor thing," I said.

"It could be a rabid baby-killer," Cole told me primly.

"Shut up," Sam said pleasantly, still peering under the vehicle. "I'm wondering how to get it out."

Cole stepped past me, holding the broom like a staff. "I'm more interested in how it got in."

He walked around the back of the car to the side door of the garage, which was slightly open. He tapped on the open door. "Sherlock found a clue."

* SAM *

I said, "Sherlock should figure out how to get this guy out."

"Or girl," Cole said, and Grace regarded him approvingly. Holding the knife from the kitchen, she looked stark and s.e.xy and like someone I didn't a.s.sociate with her body. Her repartee with Cole maybe should've made me jealous, but instead it made me glad - evidence, more than anything else, that I was starting to think of Cole as a friend. Everyone harbored the secret fantasy that everyone who was friends with them would also be friends with each other.

I padded to the front of the garage, grit pressing uncomfortably into the bottom of my bare feet, and tugged the garage door open. It rolled up into the ceiling with a terrific crash and the dark driveway with my Volkswagen spread out before me. It was an eerie and lonesome landscape. The cool night air, scented with new leaves and buds, bit at my arms and toes, and some potent combination of the cool breeze and the wide, wide night quickened my blood and called to me. I was momentarily lost with the force of my wanting.

With some effort, I turned back to Cole and Grace. Cole was already poking experimentally around the bottom of the car with the broomstick, but Grace was looking out into the night with an expression that I felt mirrored mine. Something like contemplation and yearning. She caught me looking at her and her face didn't change. I felt like - I felt like she knew how I felt. For the first time in a very long time, I remembered waiting in the woods for her to shift, waiting for us both to be wolves at the same time.

"Come on, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Cole said to the animal under the car. "I was having an excellent dream."

"Should I be on the other side with something else?" Grace asked, her eyes on me just a second longer before she turned back.

"A knife is a bit excessive," I suggested, stepping away from the garage door. "There's a push broom over there."

She looked at the knife before setting it down on a birdbath - another failed grounds beautification attempt by Beck.

"I hate racc.o.o.ns," observed Cole. "This is why your idea of moving the wolves is somewhat problematic, Grace."

Grace, armed with a push broom, inserted the bristly end under the car with grim efficiency. "I hardly find this to be an apt comparison."

I could see the masked nose of the racc.o.o.n poking out from under the BMW. In a sudden rush, it bolted away from Cole's broomstick and ran directly by the open garage door to hide behind a watering can on the other side of the car.

"Why, you dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Cole said wonderingly.

Grace walked over and pushed on the watering can, gently. There was a moment's hesitation, and the racc.o.o.n bolted directly back under the car. Again, completely bypa.s.sing the open door. Grace, an ardent disciple of logic, threw up her free hand. "The door is right there. It's the entire wall."

Cole, looking a bit more enthusiastic than the job called for, rummaged around beneath the car with the broomstick again. Duly terrified by this onslaught, the racc.o.o.n bolted back to the watering can. The smell of its fear was strong as the rank scent of its coat, and vaguely contagious.

"This," Cole said, the broomstick braced on the ground beside him, looking like Moses in sweatpants, "is the reason racc.o.o.ns don't take over the planet."

"This," I said, "is the reason we keep getting shot at."

Grace looked down at the racc.o.o.n where it was huddled in the corner. Her expression was pitying. "No complicated logic."

"No spatial sense," I said. "Wolves have plenty of complicated logic. Just no human logic. No spatial sense. No sense of time. No sense of boundaries. Boundary Wood is too small for us."

"So we move the wolves someplace better," Grace said. "Someplace with a better human-to-acre ratio. Someplace with fewer Tom Culpepers."

"There are always Tom Culpepers," I said at the same time that Cole said it, and Grace smiled ruefully at both of us.

"It would have to be pretty remote," I said. "And it couldn't be private property, unless it was ours, and I don't think we're that rich. And it couldn't have existing wolves already, or there's a good chance they'd kill a lot of us in the beginning. And there would have to be prey there, or we'd just die of starvation anyway. Plus, I'm not sure how you'd catch twenty-odd wolves. Cole's been trying and he's not had much luck even getting one."

Grace had her stubborn face on, which meant she was losing her sense of humor as well. "Better idea?"

I shrugged.

Cole scratched his bare chest with the end of the broomstick and said, "Well, you know, they've been moved before."

He had both Grace's and my undivided attention.

Cole said, tone lazy, infinitely used to slowly doling out things other people wanted to hear, "Beck's journal starts when he's a wolf. But the journal doesn't start in Minnesota."

"Okay," Grace said, "I'll bite. Where?"

Cole pointed the broomstick at the license plate above the door, BECK 89. "Then the real wolf population started to come back and, like Ringo here said, started killing the part-time wolves, and he decided their only option was to move."

I felt an odd sense of betrayal. It wasn't that Beck had ever lied to me about where he'd come from - I was sure I'd never asked him directly if he'd always been here in Minnesota. And it wasn't like that license plate wasn't in plain sight. It was just - Wyoming. Cole, benevolent interloper that he was, knew things about Beck that I didn't. Part of me said it was because Cole had the b.a.l.l.s to read Beck's journal. But another part of me said that I shouldn't have had to.

"So does it say how he did it?" I asked.

Cole gave me an odd look. "A little."

"A little how?"

"Only said that Hannah helped them a lot."

"I've never heard of Hannah," I said. I was aware that I sounded wary.

"You wouldn't have," Cole said. Again he had that funny expression. "Beck said that she hadn't been a wolf very long, but she couldn't seem to stay human as long as the others. She stopped shifting that year after they moved. He said she seemed more capable of holding human thoughts when she was a wolf than the others. Not much. But remembered faces and returned to places she'd been as a human, but as a wolf."

Now I knew why he was looking at me. Grace was looking at me, too. I looked away. "Let's get this racc.o.o.n out of here."

We stood there in silence for a few moments, a little trippy with sleep loss, until I realized that I heard movement from closer to me. I hesitated for a moment, my head c.o.c.ked, listening to identify the source.

"Oh, hey," I noted. Crouched behind a plastic garbage can, right beside me, was a second, larger racc.o.o.n, looking up at me with leery eyes. Far better at hiding than the first one, obviously, as I had been completely unaware of its presence. Grace craned her neck, trying to see over the car what I was looking at.

I didn't have anything in my hands but my hands, so that's what I used. I reached down and took the handle of the garbage can. And very slowly, I pushed it toward the wall, forcing the racc.o.o.n out the other side.

Instantly, the racc.o.o.n tore along the wall and straight out the door into the night. No pause. Just straight out the garage door.

"Two of them?" Grace asked. "Th -" She stopped as the first racc.o.o.n, inspired by the success of the escaping racc.o.o.n, bolted out after it, no detours to watering cans along the way.

"Pf," she said. "As long as there's not a third. Now it figures out the concept of the door."

I headed to the garage door to close it, but as I did, I caught a glimpse of Cole. He was staring out after the racc.o.o.ns, his eyebrows pulled together in a face that, for once, wasn't arranged to best affect the viewer.

Grace started to speak and then followed my gaze to Cole. She fell quiet.

For a full minute, we were silent. In the distance, the wolves had begun to howl, and the hair on my neck was crawling.

"There's our answer," Cole said. "That's what Hannah did. That's how we get the wolves out of the woods." He turned to look at me. "One of us has to lead them out."

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

* GRACE *

It felt like camp when I woke up in the morning.

When I was thirteen, my grandmother had paid for me to go to summer camp for two weeks. Camp Blue Sky for Girls. I'd loved it - two weeks with every moment planned out, every day accounted for, ready-made purpose printed out on colored 8.5" 11" fliers poked in our cubby holes each morning. It was the opposite of life with my parents, who laughed at the idea of schedules. It was fantastic and the first time I realized that there might be other right ways to happiness than the one prescribed by my parents. But the thing about camp was that it wasn't home. My toothbrush was grubby from being poked into the small pocket of my backpack by a mother who forgot to buy plastic baggies before I left. The bunk bed crushed my shoulder uncomfortably when I tried to sleep. Dinner was good but salty and just a little too far away from lunch, and unlike at home, I couldn't just go to the kitchen and get some pretzels. It was fun and different and just that tiny bit wrong that made it disconcerting.

So here I was at Beck's house, in Sam's bedroom. It wasn't properly home - home still conjured up the memory of pillows that smelled like my shampoo, and my beat-up old copies of John Buchan novels that I'd gotten from a library sale so they were doubly dear, and the running-water-shaving-sound of my father getting ready for work, and the radio speaking to itself in low, earnest tones in the study, and the endlessly comfortable logic of my own routine. Did that home even exist for me anymore?

Sitting up in Sam's bed, I was sleep-stupid and surprised to find him lying beside me, rolled up to the wall with his fingers splayed against it. I couldn't remember a morning I'd ever woken up before him, and feeling a bit neurotic, I watched him until I saw his chest rise and fall under his ratty T-shirt.

I climbed out of the bed, expecting him to wake up at any moment, half hoping he would, half hoping he wouldn't, but he remained in his crooked little sleeping pose, looking like he'd been tossed onto the bed.

I had that toxic combination of not enough sleep and too much wakefulness pumping through me, so it took me longer than I would've thought to make it out to the hallway and then another moment to remember where the bathroom was, and when I got there, I had no hairbrush and no toothbrush and the only thing I could find to wear was one of Sam's T-shirts with a logo on it from a band I didn't recognize. So I used his toothbrush, telling myself with every stroke across my teeth that this was no grosser than kissing him, and almost believing it. I found his hairbrush next to a disreputable-looking razor and used one but not the other.

I looked in the mirror. It felt like I was living life on the wrong side of it. Time pa.s.sing didn't mean anything here. I said, "I want to tell Rachel I'm alive."

It didn't sound unreasonable, until I started thinking about how it could go wrong.

I checked back in the bedroom - Sam was still sleeping - and headed downstairs. Part of me wanted him to be awake, but the other part of me liked this quiet feeling of being both alone and not lonely. It reminded me of all the times I'd sat reading or doing homework with Sam in the same room. Together but silent, two moons in companionable orbit.

Downstairs, I found Cole sprawled on the couch, sleeping with one arm stretched above his head. Remembering that there was a coffeepot in the bas.e.m.e.nt, I tiptoed down the hall and crept down the stairs.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was a cozy but somewhat disorienting place - draftless and windowless, all the light coming from lamps, making it impossible to tell the time. It was strange to be back in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and I felt a weird, misplaced sense of sadness. The last time I'd been down here had been after the car crash, talking with Beck after Sam had shifted into a wolf. I'd thought he was gone forever. Now it was Beck who was lost.

I started the coffeepot and sat in the chair I'd sat in when I spoke to Beck. Behind his empty chair stretched the bookshelves with the hundreds of books he'd never read again. Every wall was covered with them; the coffeepot was nestled on the few inches of shelf not occupied by books. I wondered how many there were. Were there ten in a foot of shelf s.p.a.ce? Maybe one thousand books. Maybe more than that. Even from here, I could see that they were tidily organized, non-fiction by subject, battered novels by author.

I wanted a library like this by the time I was Beck's age. Not this library. A cave of words that I'd made myself. I didn't know if that would be possible now.

Sighing, I stood and browsed the shelves until I found that Beck had a few education books, and then I sat on the floor with them, carefully setting my coffee mug beside me. I wasn't sure how long I'd been reading when I heard the stairs creak softly. Glancing up, I saw a set of bare feet descending: Cole, looking musty and sleep-tussled, a line in the side of his face where the couch pillow had pressed into it.

"Hi, Brisbane," he said.

"Hi," I said. "St. Clair."

Cole unplugged the coffeepot and brought the entire thing over to the floor where I was. He topped my coffee up and poured a cup for himself, silent and solemn during the entire process. Then he turned his head to read the t.i.tles of the books I'd pulled out.

"Distance learning, eh? Heady stuff first thing in the morning."

I ducked my head. "This is all Beck had."

Cole read further. "Acing the CLEP test. Legitimate online degrees. How to be an educated werewolf without leaving the comfort of your own bas.e.m.e.nt. Bothers you, doesn't it? School, I mean."

I glanced up at him. I hadn't thought I sounded upset. I hadn't thought I was that upset. "No. Okay, yeah. It does. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to finish high school. I like studying." I realized after I'd said it that Cole had chosen NARKOTIKA over college. I wasn't sure how to explain the thrill I used to get when I considered college. I wasn't sure how to describe the antic.i.p.ation when I looked at course catalogs - all those possibilities - or just the sheer pleasure of opening up a new notebook and a new textbook next to it. The appeal of being someplace with a bunch of other people who also liked studying. Of having a tiny apartment that I could rule like a queen, my way, all the time. Feeling a little silly, I added, "I guess that sounds corny, doesn't it."