Forever. Part 2

The car and my arms were covered with suds, and I didn't bother to dry off. I just threw my phone on the pa.s.senger seat and turned the key in the ignition. As I backed out, I was in such a hurry that I revved the engine up high, high, high as I shifted gears from reverse to first, my foot slipping on the clutch. The ascending engine note matched the beat of my heart.

Overhead, the sky was huge and blue and filled with white clouds painted with thin ice crystals too far above the earth for me to feel, here on the warm ground. I was ten minutes down the road before I realized I had forgotten to roll up the windows; the air had dried the soap on my arms to white streaks. I met another car on the highway and pa.s.sed it in a no pa.s.sing zone.

In ten minutes, I would have Grace in my pa.s.senger seat. Everything would be all right. I could already feel her fingers laced in mine, her cheek pressed against my neck. It felt like years since I'd had my arms wrapped around her body, my hands pressed up against her rib cage. Ages since I'd kissed her. Lifetimes since I'd heard her laugh.

I ached with the weight of my hope. I fixated on the incredibly inconsequential fact that for two months, Cole and I had been living on dinners of jelly sandwiches and canned tuna and frozen burritos. Once Grace was back, we would do better. I thought we had a jar of spaghetti sauce and some dried pasta. It seemed incredibly important to have a proper dinner for her return.

Every minute closer to her. In the back of my head, nagging concerns pressed, and the biggest ones involved Grace's parents. They were certain that I'd had something to do with her disappearance, since she'd fought with them about me right before she shifted. In the two months that she'd been gone, the police had been out to search my car and question me. Grace's mother found excuses to walk by the bookstore when I was working, staring in the window while I pretended not to see. Articles about Grace's and Olivia's disappearances ran in the local paper, and they said everything about me but my name.

Deep down, I knew that this - Grace as a wolf, her parents as enemies, me in Mercy Falls in this newly minted body - was a Gordian knot, impossible to untangle and lay straight. But surely if I had Grace, it would work out.

I nearly drove by Ben's Fish and Tackle, a nondescript building mostly hidden by scrubby pines. The Volkswagen lurched as I pulled into the parking lot; the potholes in the gravel were deep and filled with muddy water that I heard splashing up on the undercarriage. Scanning the lot as I pulled in, I slowed. There were a few U-Hauls parked behind the building. And there, beside them, near the trees - I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and climbed out, leaving it running. I stepped over a wooden railroad tie and stopped. At my feet, in the wet gra.s.s, lay a flowered dress. A few feet away from me, I saw an abandoned clog, and another yard beyond it, lying on its side, its mate. I took a deep breath, then knelt to pick up the dress. Balled in my hand, the fabric was scented softly with the memory of Grace. I straightened and swallowed.

From here, I could see the side of the Volkswagen, covered in filth from the parking lot. It was as if I had never washed it.

I climbed back behind the wheel, laying the dress in the backseat, and then I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth, breathing the same breaths over and over again, my elbows braced against the wheel. I sat there for several long moments, looking out over the dash at the left-behind set of shoes.

It had been so much easier when I was the wolf.

CHAPTER FOUR.

* COLE *

This was who I was, now that I was a werewolf: I was Cole St. Clair, and I used to be NARKOTIKA.

I had thought there'd be nothing left of me, once you took away the pounding ba.s.s of NARKOTIKA and the screams of a few hundred thousand fans and a calendar black with tour dates. But here it was, months later, and it turned out that there was fresh skin underneath the scab I'd picked off. Now, I was a fan of the simple pleasures in life: grilled cheese sandwiches without black flecks on the crust, jeans that didn't pinch the better parts of me, an inch of vodka, ten to twelve hours of sleep.

I wasn't sure how Isabel fit into this.

The thing was, I could go most of my week without thinking about grilled cheese and vodka. But I couldn't seem to say the same thing about Isabel. It wasn't like fantastic daydreams, either, the good sort of tease. It was more like jock itch. If you were really busy, you could almost forget about it, but then when you stopped moving, it was murder.

Almost two months and not a breath from her, despite a number of extremely entertaining voicemails on my part.

Voicemail #1: "Hi, Isabel Culpeper. I am lying in my bed, looking at the ceiling. I am mostly naked. I am thinking of ... your mother. Call me."

And now she called?

No way.

I couldn't stay in the house with the phone looking at me like that, so I got my shoes and headed out into the afternoon. Since I'd taken Grace away from the hospital, I'd started digging further into discovering what made us wolves. Here in the bush, there was no way to look at us under the microscope and get real answers. But I'd planned out a few experiments that didn't require a lab - just luck, my body, and some b.a.l.l.s. And one of said experiments would really run better if I could get my hands on one of the other wolves. So I'd been making forays into the forest. Actually, reccies. That was what Victor used to call our late-night convenience store runs to buy hasty meals constructed of plastic and dried cheese flavoring. I was performing reccies into Boundary Wood, in the name of science. I felt compelled to finish what I'd started.

Voicemail #2: The first minute and thirty seconds of "I've Gotta Get a Message to You" by the Bee Gees.

Today, the weather was warm and I could smell absolutely everything that had ever peed in the woods. I struck off on my usual path.

Cole, it's me.

G.o.d, I was going crazy. If it wasn't Isabel's voice, it was Victor's, and it was getting a little crowded inside my head. If I wasn't imagining removing Isabel's bra, I was willing the phone to ring, and if I wasn't doing that, I was remembering Isabel's father chucking Victor's dead body onto the driveway. In between them and Sam, I was living with three ghosts.

Voicemail #3: "I'm bored. I need to be entertained. Sam is moping. I may kill him with his own guitar. It would give me something to do and also make him say something. Two birds with one stone! I find all these old expressions unnecessarily violent. Like, ring around the rosy. That's about the plague, did you know? Of course you did. The plague is, like, your older cousin. Hey, does Sam talk to you? He says jack s.h.i.t to me. G.o.d, I'm bored. Call me."

Snares. I was going to think about my experiments instead. Catching a wolf was turning out to be incredibly complicated. Using objects found in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Beck's house, I'd rigged up a huge number of snares, traps, crates, and lures, and had caught an equally huge number of animals. Not a single member of Canis lupus. It was hard to say which was more aggravating - catching yet another useless animal or figuring out a way to get it out of the trap or snare without losing a hand or an eye.

I was getting very fast.

Cole, it's me.

I couldn't believe that after all this time, she had called back, and her first words hadn't been some form of apology. Maybe that part was coming next, and I'd missed it by hanging up.

Voicemail #4: "Hotel California" by the Eagles, in its entirety, with every instance of the word California replaced with Minnesota.

I kicked a rotten log and watched it explode into a dozen black shards on the rain-soaked forest floor. So I'd refused to sleep with Isabel. My first decent act in several years. No good deed goes unpunished, my mother used to say. It was her motto. Probably she felt that way about changing my diapers now.

I hoped Isabel was still staring at her phone. I hoped she'd called back one hundred times since I'd gone outside. I hoped she felt infected like I did.

Voicemail #5: "Hi, this is Cole St. Clair. Want to know two true things? One, you're never picking up this phone. Two, I'm never going to stop leaving long messages. It's like therapy. Gotta talk to someone. Hey, you know what I figured out today? Victor's dead. I figured it out yesterday, too. Every day I figure it out again. I don't know what I'm doing here. I feel like there's no one I can -"

I checked my traps. Everything was coated in mud from the rain that had kept me in the house for the past several days. The ground was slop under my feet and my traps were useless. Nothing in the one on the ridge. A racc.o.o.n in the one near the road. Nothing in the one in the ravine. And the trap near the shed, a new sort of snare, was completely demolished, the pegs ripped from the ground, trip wires everywhere, small trees snapped, and all the food eaten. It looked like I'd tried to trap Cthulhu.

What I needed was to think like a wolf, which was remarkably hard to do when I wasn't one.

I gathered up the ruined bits of snare and headed back to the shed to see if I could find what I needed to rebuild it. There was nothing wrong with life that some wire cutters couldn't fix.

Cole, it's me.

I wasn't going to call her back.

I smelled something dead. Not yet rotting, but soon.

I hadn't done anything wrong. Isabel could call me the twenty times that I'd called her.

Voicemail #6: "So, yeah, I'm sorry. That last message went a little pear-shaped. You like that expression? Sam said it the other day. Hey, try this theory on for size: I think he's a dead British housewife reincarnated into a Beatle's body. You know, I used to know this band that put on fake British accents for their shows. Boy, did they suck, aside from being a.s.sholes. I can't remember their name now. I'm either getting senile or I've done enough to my brain that stuff's falling out. Not so fair of me to make this one-sided, is it? I'm always talking about myself in these things. So, how are you, Isabel Rosemary Culpeper? Smile lately? Hot Toddies. That was the name of the band. The Hot Toddies."

I swore as a bit of wire from the snare in my hand cut my palm. It took me several moments to get my hands free of the mess of metal and wood. I dropped it onto the ground in front of me and stared at it. That piece of c.r.a.p wasn't catching anything anytime soon. I could just walk away. n.o.body had asked me to play Science Guy.

There was nothing saying that I couldn't just take off. I wouldn't be a wolf again until winter, and I could be hundreds of miles away by then. I could even go back home. Except that home was just the place where my black Mustang was parked. I belonged there just about as much as I belonged here with Beck's wolves.

I thought about Grace's genuine smile. About Sam's trust in my theory. About knowing that Grace had lived because of me. There was something vaguely glorious about having a purpose again.

I put my b.l.o.o.d.y palm to my mouth and sucked on the cut. Then I leaned over and picked all the pieces back up again.

Voicemail #20: "I wish you'd answer."

CHAPTER FIVE.

* GRACE *

I watched him.

I lay in the damp underbrush, my tail tucked close to me, sore and wary, but I couldn't seem to leave him behind. The light crept lower, gilding the bottom of the leaves around me, but still, he remained. His shouts and the ferocity of my fascination made me shiver. I clamped my chin onto my front paws, laid my ears back against my head. The breeze carried his scent to me. I knew it. Everything in me knew it.

I wanted to be found.

I needed to bolt.

His voice moved far away and then closer and then far again. At times the boy was so far I almost couldn't hear him. I half rose, thinking of following. Then the birds would grow quieter as he approached again and I would hurriedly crouch back into the leaves that hid me. Each pa.s.s was wider and wider, the s.p.a.ce between his coming and going longer. And I only grew more anxious.

Could I follow him?

He came back again, after a long period of almost quiet. This time, the boy was so close that I could see him from where I lay, hidden and motionless. I thought, for a moment, that he saw me, but his expression stayed focused on some point beyond me. The shape of his eyes made my stomach turn uncertainly. Something inside me tugged and pulled, aching once again. He cupped his hands around his mouth, called into the woods.

If I stood, he would see me for certain. The force of wanting to be seen, of wanting to approach him, made me whine under my breath. I almost knew what he wanted. I almost knew - "Grace?"

The word pierced me.

The boy still didn't see me. He'd just tossed his voice out into the emptiness, waiting for a reply.

I was too afraid. Instincts pinned me to the ground. Grace. The word echoed inside me, losing meaning with each repet.i.tion.

He turned, head bowed, and picked his way slowly away from me, toward the slanted light that marked the edge of the woods. Something like panic rose up inside me. Grace. I was losing the shape of the word. I was losing something. I was lost. I - I stood up. If he turned, I was unmistakable now, a dark gray wolf against the black trees. I needed him to stay. If he stayed, maybe it would ease this terrible feeling inside me. The force of standing there, in plain sight, so close to him, made my legs quiver beneath me.

All he had to do was turn around.

But he didn't. He just kept walking, carrying the something that I'd lost with him, carrying the meaning of that word - Grace - never knowing how close he'd been.

And I remained, silently watching him leave me behind.

CHAPTER SIX.

* SAM *

I lived in a war zone.

When I pulled into the driveway, the music slapped its hands against the car windows. The air outside the house thumped with a booming ba.s.s line; the entire building was a speaker. The closest neighbors were acres away, so they were spared the symptoms of the disease that was Cole St. Clair. Cole's very being was so big that it couldn't be contained by four walls. It bled out the windows, crashed out of the stereo, shouted out suddenly in the middle of the night. When you took away the stage, you still had the rock star.

Since he'd come to live in Beck's house - no, my house - Cole had terraformed it into an alien landscape. It was as if he couldn't help destroying things; chaos was a side effect to his very presence. He spread every single CD case in the house over the living room floor, left the television turned to infomercials, burned something sticky into the bottom of a skillet and then abandoned it on the stove top. The floorboards in the downstairs hallway were lined with deep dimples and claw marks that led from Cole's room to the bathroom and back again, a lupine alphabet. He'd inexplicably take every gla.s.s out of the cupboard and organize them by size on the counter, leaving all the cabinet doors hanging open, or watch a dozen old '80s movies halfway through and leave the ca.s.settes unrewound on the floor in front of the VCR he'd excavated from somewhere in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

I made the mistake of taking it personally, the first time I came home to the mess. It took me weeks to realize that it wasn't about me. It was about him. For Cole, it was always about him.

I got out of the Volkswagen and headed toward the house. I wasn't planning on being here long enough to worry about Cole's music. I had a very specific list of items to retrieve before I went back out again. Flashlight. Benadryl. The wire crate from the garage. I'd stop by the store to get some ground beef to put the drugs in.

I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was just - there were so many ways to effortlessly die as a wolf, just one moment too long on a highway, a few days without a successful hunt, one paw too far into the backyard of a drunk redneck with a rifle.

I could feel that I was going to lose her.

I couldn't go another night with that in my head.

When I opened the back door, the ba.s.s line resolved itself into music. The singer, voice distorted by volume, shouted to me: "Suffocate suffocate suffocate." The timbre of the voice seemed familiar, and all at once I realized that this was NARKOTIKA, played loud enough for me to mistake the throbbing electronic backbeat for my heartbeat. My breastbone hummed with it.

I didn't bother to call out for him; he wouldn't be able to hear me. The lights he'd left on laid down a history of his comings and goings: through the kitchen, down the hall to his room, the downstairs bathroom, and into the living room where the sound system was. I momentarily considered tracking him down, but I didn't have time to hunt for him as well as Grace. I found a flashlight in the cabinet by the fridge and a banana from the island, and headed toward the hall. I promptly tripped over Cole's shoes, caked in mud, lying haphazardly in the doorway from the kitchen to the hall. I saw now that the kitchen floor was covered with dirt, the dull yellow lights illuminating where Cole's pacing had painted an ouroboros of filthy footprints in front of the cabinets.

I rubbed a hand through my hair. I thought of a swearword but didn't say it. What would Beck have done with Cole?

I was reminded, suddenly, of the dog that Ulrik had brought home from work once, a mostly grown Rottweiler inexplicably named Chauffeur. It weighed as much as I did, was a bit mangy around the hips, and sported a very friendly disposition. Ulrik was all smiles, talking about guard dogs and Schutzhund and how I would grow to love Chauffeur like a brother. Within an hour of its arrival, Chauffeur ate four pounds of ground beef, chewed the cover off a biography of Margaret Thatcher - I think it ate most of the first chapter as well - and left a steaming pile of c.r.a.p on the couch. Beck said, "Get that d.a.m.n langolier out of here."

Ulrik called Beck a Wichser and left with the dog. Beck told me not to say Wichser because it was what ignorant German men said when they knew they were wrong, and a few hours later, Ulrik returned, sans Chauffeur. I never did sit on that side of the couch again.

But I couldn't kick Cole out. He had nowhere to go but down from here. Anyway, it wasn't so much that Cole was intolerable. It was that Cole, undiluted, taken neat with nothing to cut through the loudness of him, was intolerable.

This house had been so different when it had been filled with people.

The living room went silent for two seconds as the song ended and then the speakers busted out another NARKOTIKA song. Cole's voice exploded through the hall, louder and brasher than real life: Break me into pieces small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, baby I never thought that you would save me break a piece for your friends break a piece just for luck break a piece sell it sell it break me break me My hearing wasn't as sensitive as it was when I was a wolf, but it was still better than most people's. The music was like an a.s.sault, something physical to push past.

The living room was empty - I'd turn the music off when I got back downstairs - and I jogged through it to get to the stairs. I knew there was an a.s.sortment of medicines in the downstairs bathroom's cabinet, but I couldn't get to them. The downstairs bathroom with its tub held too many memories for me to get through. Luckily, Beck, sensitive to my past, kept another store of medicines in the upstairs bathroom where there was no tub.

Even up here, I could feel the ba.s.s vibrating under my feet. I shut the door behind me and allowed myself the small comfort of rinsing the dried car-washing suds from my arms before I opened the mirror-fronted cabinet. The cabinet was full of the vaguely distasteful evidence of other people, as most shared bathroom cabinets were. Ointments and other people's toothpaste and pills for terms and conditions that no longer applied and hairbrushes with hair not my color in the bristles and mouthwash that had probably expired two years before. I should clean it out. I would get around to it.

I gingerly removed the Benadryl, and as I closed the cabinet, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My hair was longer than I'd ever let it get before, my yellow eyes lighter than ever against the dark circles beneath them. But it wasn't my hair or the color of my eyes that had caught my attention. There was something in my expression that I didn't recognize, something at once helpless and failing; whoever this Sam was, I didn't know him.

I s.n.a.t.c.hed the flashlight and the banana off the corner of the sink. Every minute I spent here, Grace could be getting farther away.

I trotted down the stairs, two at a time, into the seething music. The living room was still empty so I crossed the floor to turn the stereo off. It was a strange place, the lamps by the tartan sofas casting shadows in every direction, no one here to listen to the fury exploding from the speakers. It was the lamps, more than the emptiness, that made me uncomfortable. They were slightly mismatched, with dark wood bases and cream shades; Beck had brought them back one day and Paul had declared that the house now officially looked like his grandmother's. Maybe because of that, the lamps never got used; we always used the brighter ceiling light instead, which made the faded reds in the couch less sad and kept the night outside. But now, the twin pools of lamplight reminded me of spotlights on a stage.

I stopped next to the couch.