Forever. Part 27

"New York," Koenig said. He looked back to the road. "It's a New York exchange."

This information didn't enlighten Sam. He shrugged.

I opened the phone and put it to my ear. "h.e.l.lo?"

The voice on the other side was light and male. "Oh - right. h.e.l.lo. Is Cole around?"

Sam blinked at me, and I could tell that he could hear the voice as well.

"I think you have a wrong number," I said. Immediately, my brain processed what this meant - Cole had used Sam's phone to call somewhere. Home? Would Cole have done that?

The voice was not perturbed. His voice was lazy and slippery, like a melting pat of b.u.t.ter. "No, I don't. But I understand. This is Jeremy. We were in a band together."

"With this person I don't know," I replied.

"Yes," Jeremy said. "I have something I would like you to tell Cole St. Clair, if you would. I'd like you to tell him I have given him the best present in the world, and it took quite a lot of effort on my part, so I'd appreciate if he didn't just tear the wrapping off and then throw it away."

"I'm listening."

"In eighteen minutes, the present is going to air on Vilkas's radio spot. Cole's parents will be listening, too, I've made sure of that. Do you have that?"

"Vilkas? What station is that on?" I asked. "Not that I'm saying anything."

"I know what it is," Koenig said, not looking up from the road. "Rick Vilkas."

"That's the one," Jeremy said, overhearing him. "Someone has excellent taste. You sure that Cole isn't around?"

"He really isn't," I said.

"Will you tell me something? When I last saw our intrepid hero Cole St. Clair, he was not in the best of places. In fact, I might say he was in the worst of them. All I want to know is, is he happy?"

I thought about what I knew of Cole. I thought about what it meant that he had a friend who cared that much about him. Cole could not have ever been terrible through and through, if someone cared this much about him from his past life. Or maybe he was just so great before he got terrible that he had a friend that rode that through to the other side. It sort of changed the way I thought about Cole, and sort of didn't. "Getting there."

There was a pause, and then Jeremy said, "And Victor?"

I didn't say anything at all. Neither did Jeremy. Koenig turned the radio on, the volume down, and began to tune it.

Jeremy said, "They both died a long time ago. I was there to see it. You ever watched a friend die in his own skin? Ahh. Well, you can only raise so many of the dead. Getting there." It took me a second to realize that he was repeating my answer from before. "I'll take that. Tell him to listen to Vilkas, if you would. He changed my life. I won't forget that."

"I never said I knew where he was," I said.

"I know it," Jeremy replied. "I won't forget that, either."

The phone went quiet in my hand. I met Sam's eyes. The almost-summer sun was bright on his face and turned his eyes shockingly, eerily yellow. For half a second, I wondered if his parents would have tried to kill a brown-eyed boy, a blue-eyed boy. Any son that didn't have wolf's eyes already.

"Call Cole," Sam said.

I dialed Beck's house. The phone rang and rang, and just as I was about to give up, the phone clicked, and a second later, "Da?"

"Cole," I said, "turn on the radio."

CHAPTER FIFTY.

* COLE *

When I started everything, and by everything, I mean life, suicide was a joke. If I have to ride in that car with you, I'll slash my wrists with a b.u.t.ter knife. It was as real as a unicorn. No, less real than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it's funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV.

Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole, and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you'd been exposed, you didn't talk about it. Wouldn't want to put other people off their feed.

It wasn't until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possibility I will download this alb.u.m because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.

Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.

I looked good when I sang the end.

It took NARKOTIKA to make suicide a goal. A reward for services rendered. By the time they knew how to say NARKOTIKA in Russia, j.a.pan, and Iowa, everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

I had thought I had come to Minnesota to die.

At two fifteen in the afternoon, Rick Vilkas had just finished his first commercial break. He was a music G.o.d who'd had us play live on his show and then asked me to sign a poster for his wife, who he said would only make love to our song "Sinking Ship (Going Down)." I'd written Rock the boat under my picture and signed my name. Rick Vilkas's on-air persona was confidant, best friend over beer, pa.s.sing along a secret in a low voice with an elbow in your side.

His voice now, coming through speakers in Beck's living room, was intimate. "Everyone who listens to this show knows - h.e.l.l, everyone who listens to the radio knows - Cole St. Clair, front man of NARKOTIKA and d.a.m.ned fine songwriter, has been missing for what - almost a year? ten months? somewhere in there. Oh, I know, I know - my producer, he's rolling his eyes. Say what you like, Buddy, he might have been a number one screwup, but he could write a song."

There it was, my name on the radio. I was sure it had been on the radio plenty of times in the past year, but this was the first time I'd been there for it. I waited to feel something - a sting of regret, guilt, agony - but there was nothing. NARKOTIKA was an ex-girlfriend whose photo no longer had the power to evoke emotion.

Vilkas continued, "Well, it looks like we have some news, and we're the first to break it. Cole St. Clair's not dead, folks. He's not being held captive by a pack of fangirls or my wife, either. We've got a statement from his agent right now that says that St. Clair had a medical complication related to drug abuse - fancy that, did you people imagine that the lead singer of NARKOTIKA might have a substance abuse problem? - and that he went with his bandmate for some under-the-radar treatment and rehab out of the country. Says here he's back in the States but is asking to be left alone while he 'figures out what to do next.' There you have it, folks. Cole St. Clair. He's alive. No, no, don't thank me now. Thank me later. Let's hope for a reunion tour, right? Make my wife happy. Take all the time you need, Cole, if you're listening. Rock'll wait."

Vilkas played one of our songs. I turned the radio off and rubbed my hand over my mouth. My legs were cramped from crouching in front of the stereo.

Six months ago, there would have been nothing worse in this world. There had been nothing I wanted more than to be thought missing or dead, unless it was to actually be missing or dead.

On the couch behind me, Isabel said, "So now you're officially reborn."

I turned the radio back on so I could catch the end of the song. One of my hands lay open on my knee and it felt like the whole world lay on my palm. The day felt like a prison break.

"Yes," I said. "Looks that way."

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE.

* SAM *

As soon as I saw the peninsula, I knew it was the solution.

It wasn't that the entrance was exceedingly propitious. There was a rough-hewn log entranceway with the words KNIFE LAKE LODGE burned into it, and on either side of that was stockade fencing. Koenig swore softly over the combination lock on the gate until it yielded, and then he showed us how the stockade fence gave way to box wire fencing U-nailed to evergreen trees every few feet. He was polite and matter-of-fact, like a realtor showing potential clients an expensive piece of land.

"What happens when it gets to the water?" I asked. Beside me, Grace slapped a mosquito. There were a lot of them, despite the chill. I was glad that we'd come so early in the day, because the air had teeth up here.

Koenig gave the wire a tug; it remained snugly pinned to the ragged bark of the pine. "It goes a couple of yards into the lake, like I said. Did I say that before? Would you like to take a look?"

I wasn't sure if I wanted to take a look. I didn't know what I was looking for. Overhead, a thrush called continuously, sounding like a rusty swing set in motion. Slightly farther away, I could hear another bird singing like someone rolling their r's, and beyond that one, another bird keening, and beyond that, another still - the kind of dense, endless layers of trees and birds that you got when there was not a human footprint in hundreds and hundreds of acres. Standing in this old conifer forest, long-since abandoned by people, I smelled a herd of deer and creeping beavers and small rodents turning over rocky soil, and as nervous excitement tapped through my veins, I felt more wolf than I had in a long time.

"I do," Grace said. "If you don't mind."

"It's why we're here," Koenig said, and set off through the trees, sure-footed as always. "Don't forget to check yourself for ticks when we're all through."

I trailed after, content to let Grace look at the concrete details of life while I walked through the forest and tried to imagine the pack here. These woods were dense and difficult to walk through; the ground was covered with ferns that hid dips and rocks. The fence was enough to keep out large animals, so unlike Boundary Wood, there were no natural paths worn through the underbrush. The wolves would have no compet.i.tion here. No danger. Koenig was right; if the wolves were to be moved, you couldn't ask for a better place.

Grace squeezed my elbow, making so much noise on the way to me that I realized I had been left far behind. "Sam," she said, and she was breathless, as if she might have been thinking the same thing I was. "Did you see the lodge?"

"I was looking at the ferns," I said.

She grabbed hold of my arm and laughed, a clear, happy laugh that I hadn't heard in a long time. "Ferns," she repeated, and hugged my arm. "Crazy boy. Come over here."

Holding hands felt strangely fanciful when done in the presence of Koenig, possibly because it was the first thing he looked at when we emerged in the clearing that held the lodge. He had put a baseball cap on his head to ward off deer flies in the open area - which somehow managed to make him look more formal, not less - and stood in front of a faded wooden cabin that seemed enormous to me. It was all windows and rough-hewn timber and looked like something tourists imagined Minnesota looked like.

"That's the lodge?"

Koenig led the way, kicking debris off the concrete pad in front of the building. "Yeah. It used to be a lot nicer."

I had been expecting - no, not even expecting, merely hoping for - a tiny cabin, some remnant of the resort's former life that members of the pack could shelter in when they became human. Somehow, when Koenig had said resort, I hadn't thought he'd really meant it. I'd thought it was a slightly aggrandized retelling of a failed family business. This must have been something to look at when it was first built.

Grace pulled her hand away from me so she could investigate better. She peered in a dusty window, cupping her hands against the gla.s.s. A vine rested on top of her head; the rest of it crawled up the side of the lodge. She stood in ankle-deep weeds that had sprung up in the crack between the concrete pad and the foundation. She looked very tidy in comparison, clean jeans, one of my windbreakers, her blond hair spread over her shoulders. "Seems pretty nice to me," Grace said, forever endearing her to me.

It seemed to endear her to Koenig, too. Once he realized she wasn't being sarcastic, he said, "I suppose so. There's no power here, though, not anymore. I guess you could get it put back on, but you'd have to have meter guys come out here then, once a month."

Grace, her face still smushed against the gla.s.s, said, "Oh, that sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. That's a big fireplace in there, though, isn't it? You could make it livable without power, if you were clever." I stood next to her and pressed my face against the window. Inside, I saw a dim great room dominated by a ma.s.sive fireplace. Everything looked gray and abandoned: rugs made colorless by dust, a dead potted plant, a mounted animal head rendered unidentifiable by age. It was an abandoned hotel lobby, a snapshot of the t.i.tanic under the ocean. A small cabin seemed more manageable all of a sudden.

"Can I go look at the rest of the land?" I asked, drawing back from the gla.s.s. I pulled Grace gently away from the climbing vine; it was poison ivy.

"Be my guest," Koenig said. Then, after a pause, he said, "Sam?" There was a cautious note to the way he said it that made me think I wasn't going to like what he said next.

"Yes, sir?" I asked. The sir slipped out before I even thought about it, and Grace didn't even glance over in my direction at it, just looked at Koenig herself. It was that sort of way that he'd said, Sam?

"Geoffrey Beck is your legal adoptive father, correct?"

"Yes," I said. My heart jerked in my chest at the question, not because my answer was a lie, but because I didn't understand why he was asking it. Maybe he was going to change his mind about helping us. I tried to sound nonchalant. "Why do you ask?"

"I am trying to decide if I regard what he did to you as a crime," Koenig said.

Even though we were far out of context, here in Nowhere, Minnesota, I knew what he meant. This was what he meant: me, pinned in a s...o...b..nk in front of an ordinary house, wolf breath hot on my face. Now my heart was really going. Maybe he had never intended to help us. Maybe this entire trip, every single conversation, had been to incriminate Beck. How did I know what this was about? My face felt hot; maybe it had been naive of me to think that a cop would so willingly help us.

I held Koenig's gaze though my pulse was fast. "He couldn't know that my parents would try to kill me."

"Ah, but that makes it more odious, I believe," Koenig replied, so quickly that he must've known how I would counter him. "If they hadn't tried to kill you and removed themselves from the picture, what were his intentions? Kidnapping? Would he have taken you if they hadn't made it easy?"

Grace interrupted, "You can't charge someone for something they might have done."

I glanced at her. I wondered if she was thinking the same things I was.

Koenig continued, "But he did have those two wolves attack Sam, with an intent to harm."

"Not harm," I muttered, but I looked away.

Koenig's voice was grave. "I consider what he did to you harm. Would you walk up to someone else's child, Grace, and bite them?"

Grace made a face.

"How about you, Sam? No? Just because most of the world doesn't know about the weapon that Geoffrey Beck used on you doesn't make it less of an a.s.sault."

On the one hand, I knew he was right, but on the other was the Beck that I knew, the Beck who had made me who I was. If Grace thought I was a kind person, a generous one, it was because I had learned it from Beck. If he was a monster, surely I should have become a tiny monster in his image? All of these years, I had known the facts of my coming to the pack. The slow car, the wolves, the death of Sam Roth, son of middle-cla.s.s parents in Duluth, one of whom had worked in the post office, the other of whom had worked in an office doing nothing that looked like work to a seven-year-old. As an adult looking back, the wolf attack was clearly no accident. And as an adult, I knew Beck was behind it. That he'd engineered it - "engineer" was such a purposeful word, hard to mitigate.

"Did he do anything else to you, Sam?" Koenig asked.

For one long minute, I didn't realize what he meant. Then my head jerked up. "No!"

Koenig just looked at me, reproachful. I hated him then for taking Beck away from me, but I hated Beck more, for being so easily taken. I missed right and wrong and nothing in between.

"Stop," I said. "Just stop. Please?"

Grace said gently, "Beck's a wolf now. I think you'd find it very hard to prosecute him, and even if you did, I think he's serving his sentence right now."

"I'm sorry." Koenig held up his hands as if I were pointing a weapon at him. "Cop-brain. You're right. I just - never mind. It's very hard to get it out of your mind, once you start thinking about it. Your story. The pack's story. Do you want to go inside the lodge? I'm going inside for a moment. I want to make sure there is nothing in there that any family members might be tempted to come back for."

"I'm going to walk first," I said. I felt hollow with relief, that Koenig was really as he seemed. Everything about this plan felt fragile. "If that's okay."