Forever. Part 7

Everything around me was solid black. Not the shape-filled black of my room at night, but the absolute depthless dark of a place with no light. Water splattered onto my bare skin, the driving sting of rain and then the heavier splash of water dripping from somewhere overhead.

All around me, I could hear the sound of the rain falling in a forest.

I was human.

I had no idea where I was.

Suddenly, light burst around me. Crouched and shaking, I had just enough time to see a forked snake of lightning strike beyond the black branches above me, my wet and dirty fingers outstretched before me, and the purple ghosts of tree trunks around me.

Then black.

I waited. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn't prepared when - The crack of thunder sounded like it came from somewhere inside me. It was so loud that I clapped my hands over my ears and ducked my head to my chest before the logical part of me took over. It was thunder. Thunder couldn't hurt me.

But my heart was loud in my ears.

I stood there in the blackness - it was so dark that it hurt - and wrapped my arms around my body. Every instinct in me was telling me to find shelter, to make myself safe.

And then, again: lightning.

A flash of purple sky, a gnarled hand of branches, and eyes.

I didn't breathe.

It was dark again.

Black.

I closed my eyes, and I could still see the figure in negative: a large animal, a few yards away. Eyes on me, unblinking.

Now the hairs on my arms were slowly p.r.i.c.kling, a slow, silent warning. Suddenly, all I could think about was that time when I was eleven. Sitting on the tire swing, reading. Glancing up and seeing eyes - and then being dragged from the swing.

Thunder, deafening.

I strained to hear the sound of an approach.

Lightning illuminated the world again. Two seconds of light, and there they were. Eyes, colorless as they reflected the lightning. A wolf. Three yards away.

It was Shelby.

The world went dark.

I started to run.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

* SAM *

I woke up.

I blinked, my eyes momentarily mystified by the brightness of my bedroom light in the middle of the night. Slowly, my thoughts a.s.sembled themselves, and I remembered leaving the light on, thinking I wouldn't be able to fall asleep.

But here I was, my eyes uncertain from sleep, my desk lamp casting lopsided shadows from one side of the room. My notebook had slid partially off my chest, all the words inside it off-kilter. Above me, the paper cranes spun on their strings in frantic, lumpy circles, animated by the air vent in the ceiling. They looked desperate to escape their individual worlds.

When it became obvious that I wasn't going back to sleep, I stretched my leg out and used my bare foot to turn on the CD player on the table at the end of my bed. Finger-picked guitar sounded through the speakers, each note in time with my heart. Lying sleepless in this bed reminded me of nights before Grace, when I'd lived in the house with Beck and the others. Back then, the population of paper cranes above me, scrawled with memories, had been in no danger of outgrowing their habitat as I slowly counted down toward my expiration date, the day when I'd lose myself to the woods. I'd stay awake long into the night, lost with wanting.

The longing then was abstract, though. I'd wanted something I knew I couldn't have: a life after September, a life after twenty, a life with more time spent Sam than wolf.

But now what I longed for wasn't an imagined future. It was a concrete memory of me slouched in the leather chair in the Brisbanes' study, a novel - The Children of Men - in my hand while Grace sat at the desk, biting the end of a pencil while doing homework. Saying nothing, because we didn't have to, just pleasantly intoxicated with the leather-scent of the chair around me and the vague smell of a roasted chicken hanging in the air and the sound of Grace sighing and turning her chair back and forth. Beside her, the radio hummed pop songs, top-40 hits that faded into the background until Grace tunelessly sang a refrain.

After a while, she lost interest in her homework and crawled into the chair with me. Make room, she said, though there was no way to make room. I protested when she pinched my thigh, trying to make herself fit into the seat beside me. Sorry for hurting you, she said right in my ear, but it wasn't really an apology, because you don't bite someone's earlobe to tell them you're sorry. I pinched her and she laughed as she pressed her face into my collarbone. One of her hands tunneled between the chair and my back to touch my shoulder blades. I pretended to read on and she pretended to rest against me, but she kept pinching my shoulder blade and I kept tickling her with my free hand, until she was laughing even as we kissed and kissed again.

There is no better taste than this: someone else's laughter in your mouth.

After a while, Grace fell asleep for real on my chest, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to follow her. Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths. The weight of her pinned my fleeting thoughts to the ground, and in that moment, I was more in the world than I'd ever been.

So now, looking at the paper cranes tugging urgently on their strings, I knew exactly what I wanted, because I'd had it.

I couldn't fall back asleep.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

* GRACE *

I couldn't outrun a wolf.

Neither of us could see very well in the dark, but Shelby had a wolf's sense of smell and a wolf's sense of hearing. I had bare feet tangled in thorns and blunt nails too short for attack and lungs that couldn't seem to get enough air. I felt powerless in this stormy wood. All I could think about was my memories of teeth in my collarbone, hot breath on my face, snow leaching my blood away from me.

Thunder cracked again, leaving behind the painfully fast crashing of my heart.

Panic wouldn't help.

Calm down, Grace.

I stumbled between lightning flashes, reaching out in front of me. Partially to spare myself from running into something, and partially in hopes of finding a tree with low enough branches to climb. That was the only advantage I had over Shelby - my fingers. But every tree here was either a skinny pine or a ma.s.sive oak - no branches for twenty or fifty feet.

And behind me, somewhere: Shelby.

Shelby knew I'd seen her and so now she didn't take care to be quiet. Though she couldn't see any better than me in the darkness, I could hear her still tracking toward me in between lightning flashes, guided by her sense of smell and hearing.

I was more scared when I didn't hear her than when I did.

Lightning flickered. I thought I saw - I froze, silent, waiting. I held my breath. My hair was plastered to my face and shoulders; a single wet strand was stuck to the corner of my mouth. It was easier to hold my breath than to resist the temptation to brush away that little bit of hair. Standing still, all I could think of were the small miseries: My feet hurt. The rain stung on my mud-smeared legs. I must have cut myself on unseen thorns. My stomach felt utterly empty.

I tried not to think about Shelby. I tried to concentrate on keeping my eyes locked on where I thought I'd seen my key to safety, so that when the lightning came again, I'd be able to map out a path.

Lightning flickered again, and this time I saw for certain what I thought I'd glimpsed earlier. Just barely, but it was there: the black outline of the shed where the pack kept supplies. It was several dozen yards to my right, above me, as if on a ridge. If I could make it there, I could slam that door in Shelby's face.

The forest went black and then thunder split the quiet. It was so loud that all other sound seemed to be sucked out of the world for a few seconds afterward.

In that noiseless dark, I bolted, hands in front of me, trying to stay true to the path to the shed. I heard Shelby behind me, close, snapping a branch as she jumped toward me. I felt more than heard her closeness. Her fur brushed my hand. I scrambled away and then I.

was falling my hands grasped air endless black falling I didn't realize that I was crying out until all my breath was stolen and the sound was cut off. I hit something frigid and solid and my lungs emptied all at once. I only had a moment to realize that what I'd hit was water before I got a mouthful of it.

There was no up or down, just blackness. Just water coating my mouth and skin. It was so cold. So cold. Color exploded in front of my eyes, just a symptom in this blackness. My brain crying for air.

I clawed my way to the surface and gasped. My mouth was full of gritty, liquid mud. I felt it oozing down my cheeks from my hair.

Thunder grumbled above me, the sound seeming to come from far away; I felt like I was in the middle of the earth. Shivering almost too much to stand, I stretched my legs out and felt for the bottom. There - when I stood, the water came to the tip of my chin. It was freezing cold and filthy, but at least I could keep my head above water without tiring. My shoulders shook with involuntary tremors. I was so cold.

Then, standing in that frigid water, I felt it. A slow, slow path of nausea that started in my stomach and crawled up my throat. The cold. It was pulling at me, telling my body to shift.

But I couldn't shift. As a wolf, I'd have to swim to keep my head above water. And I couldn't swim forever.

Maybe I could climb out. I half swam, half stumbled through the icy water, reaching out. There must be a way out of this. My hands jammed into a craggy dirt wall that was perfectly vertical, stretching up higher than I could reach. My stomach twisted inside me.

No, I told myself. No, you're not shifting, not now.

I made my way around the wall, feeling for a possible escape. The sides stretched up and away from me, endless. I tried to get purchase in them, but my fingers wouldn't dig into the packed dirt, and the roots gave way under my weight, sending me back into the mud. My skin trembled, both from cold and the impending shift. I sucked in my frozen lower lip to try to steady it.

I could cry for help, but no one would hear me.

But what else could I do? The fact was this: If I turned into a wolf, I'd die. I could only swim for so long. All of a sudden, it seemed like a horrifying way to die, all alone, in a body that no one would ever recognize.

The cold pulled at me, flowed into my veins, unlocking the disease inside me. No, no, no. But I couldn't resist it anymore; I could feel the pulse in my fingers pounding as the skin bubbled into another shape.

The water sloshed around me as my body began to tear itself apart.

I screamed Sam's name into the darkness until I couldn't remember how to speak.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

* SAM *

"This is where the magic happens," Cole said. "Are you going to put on your leotard now?"

We were by the back entrance to the Crooked Shelf, the bookstore where I sometimes lived. I'd slept badly with the thunderstorm, and after last night's news, I hadn't wanted to come in to work, but there had been no way to get off my shift on such short notice. So in I went. I had to admit that the normalcy of it was a.s.suaging my anxiety a little. Well, except for Cole. Every other day, I had left Cole behind when I went to work, and hadn't thought much of it. But this morning, I'd looked over while I was packing up and had seen him silently watching me getting ready to go, and I'd asked him if he wanted to come along. I didn't yet regret letting him come with me, but the morning was still young.

Cole squinted up at me from the base of the short stairs, arms braced on either stair rail, his hair a concerted mess. The uncomplicated morning light made him look disarming and at ease. Camouflage.

I echoed, "My leotard?"

"Yeah, your superhero s.h.i.t," Cole said. "Sam Roth, werewolf by night, book retail specialist by day. Don't you need a cape for that?"

"Yes," I replied, unlocking the door. "Literacy rate in this country's appalling; you need a cape to even sell a cookbook. You're going to stay in the back if someone comes in, right?"

"No one's going to recognize me in a bookstore," Cole said. "Is the front of the store as c.r.a.ppy looking as the back?"

All of the stores on Main shared the same back alley, cluttered with spray-painted Dumpsters, weeds that looked like half-grown saplings, and plastic bags that had escaped death to tangle around the bases of staircases. n.o.body came this way but owners and staff; I liked the disrepair because it was so far gone I didn't feel I had to try to clean it up.

"n.o.body ever sees this part," I said. "It doesn't matter if it's pretty."

"So it's like track six on an alb.u.m," Cole said. He smirked at some private joke. "So what's the plan, Stan?"

I pushed open the back door. "Plan? I have to work until noon. Isabel is supposed to come by sometime before then to tell me what she's found out since last night. Then, maybe, I'll put a bag on your head and we'll get lunch."

The back room was a mess of papers and boxes waiting to be put out for the trash. I had no taste for tidiness, and Karyn, the owner, had an arcane system of filing that made sense to no one but her. The first time Grace had seen the disorder, she'd been visibly horrified. Cole, on the other hand, just thoughtfully examined a box cutter and a stack of rubber-banded bookmarks while I turned the lights on.

"Put those back where you found them," I said.

As I did the business of opening up the store, Cole stalked around after me, his hands folded behind his back like a boy who'd been told not to break anything. He looked profoundly out of place here, a polished, aggressive predator moving amongst sunlit shelves that seemed folksy in comparison. I wondered if it was a conscious decision, his projected att.i.tude, or if it was a by-product of the person within. And I wondered how someone like him, a furious sun, was going to survive in someplace like Mercy Falls.

With Cole's intent eyes on me, I felt self-conscious as I unlocked the front door, set up the register, turned on the music overhead. I doubted that he really appreciated the aesthetics of the store, but I felt a small, fierce bit of pride as he looked around. There was so much of me here.

Cole's attention was on the carpeted stairs near the back of the store. He asked, "What's upstairs?"

"Poetry and some special editions." Also, memories of me and Grace that were too piercing to relive at the moment.

Cole pulled a chick lit novel from an endcap, studied it vaguely, and put it back. He'd been here five minutes and he was already restless. I glanced at my watch, looking to see how long I had until Karyn arrived to relieve me. Four hours suddenly seemed like a very long time. I tried to remember the philanthropic impulse that had driven me to bring Cole.

Just then, as I turned toward the checkout counter, I caught an image out of the corner of my eye. It was one of those brief glances where you're amazed, afterward, at how much you've managed to see during the brief second of eye contact. One of those glances that should've been just a forgotten blur but was instead a snapshot. And the snapshot was this: Amy Brisbane, Grace's mother, walking past the big gla.s.s picture window of the bookstore toward her art studio. She held one arm across her chest, gripping the strap of her purse as if each jerky stride might pull it free from her shoulder. She wore a gauzy, pale scarf and that blank expression people put on when they want to become invisible. And I knew, right then, from that face, that she had heard about the dead girl in the woods, and she was wondering if it was Grace.

I should tell her it wasn't.

Oh, but there were a mult.i.tude of small crimes the Brisbanes had committed. I could easily bring back the memory of Lewis Brisbane's fist connecting with my face in a hospital room. Of being thrown out of their house in the middle of the night. Of going precious days without seeing Grace because they'd suddenly discovered parenting principles. I'd had so little, and they'd taken it from me.