Linger (15 page)

“He was right,” Cole said from beside me, his eyes still on Victor. “That should be me.”

I couldn't quite believe I'd heard him right. I'd underestimated him.

But then Cole added, “I'm the one who wants to get the hell out of this body.”

Somehow, Cole never stopped amazing me.

I regarded him and said coldly, “And to think I thought for two seconds there that you gave a damn about Victor. It's all about your problems,
you
becoming a wolf. You just can't wait to get out of your own head, can you?”

“If you were in here, you might want that, too,” Cole said, and now he did smile, a cruel, lopsided thing that crawled farther up one side of his face than the other. “I can't be the only one who wants the wolf.”

He wasn't.

Shelby had preferred it, too. Broken Shelby, barely human, even when she wore the face of a girl.

“You are,” I said.

Cole's smile broke into a silent laugh. “You're so naive, Ringo. How well did you know Beck?”

I looked at him, at his condescending expression, and I just wanted him gone. I wished Beck had never brought him back. He should've left Cole and Victor in Canada or wherever they'd come from.

“Well enough to know that he made a way better human than you ever will,” I said. Cole's expression didn't change; it was like unkind words didn't make it to his ears. I clenched and unclenched my teeth, angry that I'd let him get to me.

“Wanting to be a wolf doesn't automatically make you a bad person,” Cole said, voice mild. “And wanting to be human doesn't make you a good one.”

I was fifteen again, sitting in my room in Beck's house, arms wrapped around my legs, hiding from the wolf inside me. Winter had already stolen Beck the week before, and Ulrik would be gone soon as well. Then me and my books and guitar would lay untouched until spring, just as Beck's books already lay abandoned. Forgotten in the self-oblivion that was the wolf.

I didn't want to have this conversation with Cole. I said, “Are you going to shift soon?”

“Not a chance.”

“Then please go back to the house. I'm cleaning this place up.” I paused. And then, as much to convince me as him, “And it's what you did to Victor that makes you a bad person. Not wanting to be a wolf.”

Cole looked at me, the same blank expression on his face, and then he headed back toward the house. I turned away from him and went back into the shed.

Like Beck had done before me, I folded up the blanket Victor had left behind and swept out the dust and hair from the floor, and then I checked the watercooler and went through the food bins and made a note of what needed to be added to them. I went to the notepad that we kept by the boat battery — a list of scrawled names, sometimes with a date beside them, sometimes with a description of the trees, because they told time when we couldn't. Beck's way of keeping track of who was human and when.

The open page was still of last year's names, ending with Beck's, a far shorter list than that of the year before, which was in turn a shorter list than that of the year before it. I swallowed and flipped to the next page. I wrote the year on top and added Victor's name and the date beside it. Cole's name really ought to have been on there, too, but I doubted Beck had explained how we logged ourselves in. I didn't want to add Cole's name. It would mean officially admitting him to the pack, to my family, and I didn't want to.

For a long time I stood looking at that blank page with just Victor's name on it, and then I added my own.

I knew it didn't belong there anymore, not really, but it was a list of who was human, right?

And who was more human than me?

• GRACE •

I headed into the trees.

The woods were still dormant and leafless, but the warmer air woke up a cacophony of damp spring smells that had been masked by the cold. Birds trilled at one another overhead, flicking from underbrush to higher branches, leaving shaking boughs in their wake.

I felt it in my bones: I was home.

Only a few yards into the wood, I heard the underbrush crackling behind me. My heart raced as I paused, interrupting the squish and crackle of the forest floor beneath my feet. Again, I heard the rustle again, no closer but no farther, either. I didn't turn, but I knew it had to be a wolf. I felt no fear — only companionship.

I heard the occasional stir of leaves as the wolf moved to follow me. Still not very close — just observing me from a careful distance. Part of me wanted to see which wolf it was, but the other part was too thrilled by the presence of a wolf to risk scaring it off. So we just walked together, me with steady progress
and the wolf with intermittent bursts of movement to keep up with me.

The sun that shot through the still-naked branches above was warm on my shoulders, and I stretched out my hands on either side of me as I walked, soaking in as much of it as I could, trying to erase the feel of last night's fever. It felt like the further I got from my anger, the more I could feel that something wasn't right inside me.

Stepping through the underbrush, I remembered Sam taking me to the golden clearing in the woods and wished he was here with me now, listening to the unfamiliar racing of my heart. It wasn't like we spent all of our time together or like I didn't know how to occupy myself without him — he had his bookstore work and I had school and tutoring — but right now, I felt uneasy. Yes, the fever was gone, but I didn't feel like it was gone for good. I felt as if I could still sense it singing restlessly in my blood, waiting to reappear the next time the wolves called.

I kept walking. Here the trees were sparser, new saplings discouraged by the presence of the massive pine trees. The smell of the lake was stronger, and I saw a wolf paw print in the soft dirt of the forest floor. Underneath the dull green of the pines, I wrapped my arms around myself, cold without the sun on me.

To my left side, I saw a flash of movement: a brown-gray coat, the same color as the trunks of the pine trees. Finally, I saw the wolf who'd been accompanying me as he paused long enough for me to get a good look at him. He didn't flinch when
I took in his bright green, human eyes and the curious tilt to his ears. Beyond him, I saw the sparkle of the lake through the trees.

Are you one of the new wolves?
I wondered in my head, but I didn't say it aloud, in case my voice startled him. He tilted his face upward, and I saw his nose working in my direction. I felt I knew what he wanted: I slowly lifted a hand in his direction, proffering my palm. He recoiled, as if from the scent, not from the movement, because after he had jerked back, his nose continued working.

I didn't have to bring my palm to my own nose to know what he was smelling, because I could still smell it myself. The sweet, rotten scent of almonds, trapped between my fingers and under my nails. It seemed more ominous than the fever itself had. It seemed to say,
This is more than just a fever
.

My heart thumped in my chest, although I still wasn't afraid of the brown-coated wolf. I crouched on the forest floor and clutched my arms around my knees, my limbs suddenly shaky with either knowledge or fever.

I heard an explosion of sound as several birds burst from the underbrush; both the brown wolf and I flinched. A gray wolf, the cause of the birds' surprise, slunk closer. He was larger than the brown wolf but not as brave; his eyes held interest but the set of both his ears and his tail were wary as he crept closer. His nose, too, twitched, scenting the air as he approached.

Motionless, I watched as a black wolf — I recognized him as Paul — appeared behind the gray one, followed by another wolf I didn't know. They moved like a school of fish, constantly touching, jostling, communicating without words. Soon there
were six wolves, all keeping their distance, all watching me, all scenting the air.

Inside me, the wordless
something
that had given me my fever and slicked my skin with this scent hummed. Not painful, not at the moment, but not
right
, either. I knew why I wanted Sam so badly now.

I was afraid.

The wolves circled me, wary of my human form but curious of the smell. Maybe they were waiting for me to shift.

But I couldn't shift. This was my body, for better or for worse, no matter how hard the
something
inside me groaned and burned and begged to be released.

The last time I had been in these woods, surrounded by wolves, I had been prey. I had been helpless, pinned to the ground by the weight of my own blood, staring at the winter sky. They had been animals and I had been human. Now the line wasn't so distinct. There was no threat of attack from them. Just worried curiosity.

I moved, gingerly, to stretch out my stiff arms, and one of the wolves whined, high and anxious, like a mother dog to her pup.

I felt as if the fever was waking inside of me.

Isabel had told me that her mother, a doctor, once said that terminal patients often seemed to have an eerie sense of their condition, even before it was diagnosed. At the time, I'd scoffed, but now I knew what she meant — because I
felt
it.

There was something really wrong with me, something I didn't think doctors would know how to fix, and these wolves knew it.

I huddled under the trees, my arms wrapped around my legs again, and watched the wolves watching me. After several long moments, the large gray wolf, never taking his eyes from mine, sank to his haunches, slowly, as if he might change his mind at any moment. It was utterly unnatural. Utterly unwolflike.

I held my breath.

Then the black wolf glanced to the gray wolf and back at me before lying down as well, resting his head on his paws. He rolled his eyes toward me, ears still tilted watchfully. One by one, the wolves all lay down, forming a loose circle around me. The forest was still as the wolves remained, protective and patient. Waiting with me for something none of us had words for.

Far away, a loon called, eerie and slow. They always sounded plaintive to me. Like they were calling for someone they didn't expect to answer.

The black wolf — Paul — stretched his nose to me, nostrils moving slightly, and he whined. The sound was a soft, breathy echo of the loon, anxious and uncertain.

Just under my skin, something stretched and strained. My body felt like a battleground for an invisible war.

Surrounded by wolves, I sat on the forest floor as the sun sank in the sky and the shadows of the pines grew, and I wondered how much time I had.

• GRACE •

Eventually, the wolves left me.

I sat there, alone, trying to feel every cell of my body, trying to understand what was happening inside. The phone rang — Isabel.

I answered. I had to return to the real world, even if it wasn't as real as I wanted it to be.

“Rachel was very happy to point out that you'd asked her, not me, to pick up your homework and copy notes for you,” Isabel said after I said hello.

“She's in more of my cla —”

“Save it. I don't care; I didn't want the extra work of picking stuff up, anyway. I was more amused by the idea that she'd think that it was a status symbol.” Isabel did sound amused; I felt a little bad for Rachel. “Anyway, I was calling to find out how infectious you are.”

How could I explain how I felt? And to Isabel?

I couldn't.

I answered her truthfully by making it a narrow truth.

“I don't think I am infectious,” I said. “Why?”

“I want to go someplace with you, but I don't want to get the bubonic plague if I do.”

“Come to the backyard,” I told her. “I'm in the woods.”

Isabel's voice managed to convey equal parts disgust and disbelief. “The. Woods. Of course, I should've known; that's where sick people always go. Personally, I would rather go someplace and let off some steam with some good nonproductive retail therapy, but I guess the woods would be a rewarding and socially acceptable alternative. All the kids are doing it now. Should I bring skis? A tent?”

“Just you,” I said.

“Do I want to know what you were doing in the woods?” she asked.

“I was walking,” I told her. The truth, but not all of it.

I didn't know how to tell her the rest.

 

Later, Isabel had to shout for me beside the trees a few times and wait a few minutes for me to come out of the darkening forest, but I didn't feel guilty about it — I was still too lost in the revelation I'd had while surrounded by the wolves.

“Aren't you supposed to be dying or something?” Isabel demanded as soon as she saw me picking my way back in the direction of my house. I'd made my point with my mother; now it was time to go back, and I figured she wouldn't try to initiate a serious conversation if I had someone else in tow.

Isabel stood by the bird feeder, hands shoved in her pockets, the fur-lined hood on her shoulders hunched up around her ears. As I approached, her eyes flicked between me and a faded white stain of bird poop on the edge of the feeder. It was clearly
bothering her. She was done up in full Isabel style — slashed haircut brutally and beautifully styled around her face and her eyes ink stained and dramatic. She really had been planning on going someplace with me; I did feel a little guilty, then, as if I'd refused her for frivolous reasons. Her voice was a few degrees colder than the air. “What part of your treatment involves trooping out through the woods when it's thirty-seven degrees outside?”

It
was
getting pretty cold; the ends of my fingers were bright pink. “Is it thirty-seven? It wasn't when I went out.”

“Well, it is now,” Isabel said. “I saw your mom when I was walking back here, and tried to convince her to let you go for a panini in Duluth tonight, but she said no. I'm trying not to take it personally.” She wrinkled her nose when I came up alongside her, and together we headed back toward the house.

“Yeah, I'm trying to ignore how mad I am at her right now,” I confessed. Isabel waited for me to slide the back door open for her. She didn't comment on my anger, and I didn't expect her to; Isabel was always angry at her parents, so I doubted it even registered on her radar as unusual. “I can fake paninis here, sort of. I don't really have good bread for it.” I didn't really want to, though.

“I'd rather wait for the real thing,” Isabel said. “Let's order pizza.”

“Ordering pizza” in Mercy Falls meant calling up the local pizza joint, Mario's, and paying a six-dollar delivery charge. A price too dear after Sam's studio visit.

“I'm broke,” I said regretfully.

“I'm not,” Isabel replied.

She said this just as we came inside, and Mom, who was still parked on the couch with Sam's book, looked up sharply. Good. I hoped she thought we were talking about her.

I looked at Isabel. “Why don't we go to my room? Are we getting —?”

Isabel waved a hand at me to be quiet; she was already on the phone with Mario's, ordering a large cheese and mushroom pizza. She kicked off her fat-heeled boots on the back-door mat and followed me into my room, flirting effortlessly with whoever was on the other end of the phone as she did.

In my room, it seemed hideously warm in comparison to outside. I started to peel off my sweater as Isabel clicked her phone off and crashed sideways on the bed. She said, “We're getting free toppings. Bet me we're getting free toppings.”

“I don't have to bet,” I said. “That was practically phone sex on an extra-thin crust.”

“It's what I do,” Isabel said. “So look. I didn't bring my homework. I basically did it in my free period in school.”

I gave her a look. “If you crap out of school now, you won't get into a good college, and then you'll be stuck here in Mercy Falls forever.” Unlike Rachel and Isabel, I wasn't filled with horror at that idea. But I knew that neither of them could imagine worse fates.

Isabel made a face. “Thanks, Mom. I'll keep that in mind.”

I shrugged and tugged out the book that Rachel had brought over earlier. “Well, I
do
have homework, and I want to get into college. At the very least, I have to do my reading for history tonight. Is that okay?”

Isabel laid her cheek on my comforter and closed her eyes. “You don't have to entertain me. It's enough to get out of the house.”

I sat down at the head of the bed; the movement jostled Isabel but she kept her eyes shut. If Sam were here, and if he were me, he would have asked Isabel how bad things were and if she was doing okay. It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask the question before I'd met him, but I'd heard him ask things like that often enough now to know how it was done.

“How are things?” I asked. It felt weird in my mouth, like it must not sound as sincere as when Sam asked it.

Isabel made a loud, bored noise and opened her eyes. “That's what my mom's therapist asks.” She stretched in a way that defined the word
languorous
and said, “I'm getting something to drink. Do you guys have soda?”

I was sort of relieved to be let off the hook so easily and wondered if I was supposed to ask again. Sam might have. I couldn't think like him for that long, though, so I just said, “There are some in the door of the fridge, and some in the drawer on the right.”

“You want any?” Isabel asked, sliding off the bed. One of my bookmarks had fallen to the floor and stuck to her bare foot, and she made a triangle of one of her legs while she pulled it off.

I considered. My stomach felt a little twisty. “Ginger ale, if there's any left.”

Isabel stalked out of the room and returned with a can of regular soda and a can of ginger ale, which she handed to me.
She clicked on the clock radio by the bed stand; it began humming out Sam's favorite alt station, a little fuzzy because it was from somewhere south of Duluth. I sighed; it wasn't my favorite music, but it reminded me of him, even more than his book sitting on the bed stand or his forgotten backpack on the floor beside my shelves. Missing him seemed bigger now that the sun was almost down.

“I feel like I'm at an open-mic night,” Isabel said, and switched to a stronger Duluth pop station. She stretched on her stomach next to me where Sam would normally lie and popped the top of her soda. “What are you looking at? Read. I'm just chilling.”

She seemed to mean it, so there was no reason for me to not open my history text. I didn't want to read, though. I just wanted to curl my arms around myself and lie on my bed and miss Sam.

• ISABEL •

It was nice at first, just lying in bed doing nothing, with no parents or memories intruding. The radio played quietly next to me, and Grace frowned at her book, turning her pages forward and occasionally backward to frown harder at something. Her mother clunked around in the rest of the house, and the smell of burnt toast wafted under the door. It was comfortingly someone else's life. And it was nice to be with a friend but not have to talk. I could almost ignore the fact of Grace's illness.

After a while, I reached across to the nightstand, where a book with tattered edges lay by the clock radio. I couldn't
imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it. The cover said it was poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, with facing translations from the German. It didn't sound riveting, and I generally relegated poetry to one of the lower circles of hell, but I didn't have anything else to do, so I picked it up and opened it.

It fell open to a dog-eared page marked up with blue handwriting in the margins, and a few lines underlined: “
Ah, to whom can we fall apart? Not to angels, nor men, and even the most clever of animals see that we are not surely at home in our interpreted world
,” and next to them was written, in ropey handwriting I didn't recognize,
findigen = knowing, gedeuteten = interpreted?
and other notes and random bits of German. I lifted the page closer to me to look at a tiny notation in the corner and realized that the book must've been Sam's, because it smelled like Beck's house. That scent brought back a rush of memories: Jack lying in a bed, seeing him turn into a wolf in front of my eyes, watching him die.

My eyes dropped again to the page.
“Oh and night, the night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.”

I didn't think I liked poetry any better than before I'd picked up the book. I set the volume back down on the nightstand and laid my cheek on the bedspread stretched over the pillow. This must have been the side that Sam slept on when he snuck in here, because I recognized his scent. How ballsy he had been to come here night after night, just to be with Grace. I imagined him lying right here, Grace next to him. I had seen them kiss before — the way that Sam's hands pressed on Grace's
back when he thought no one would see and the way that the hardness of Grace's face disappeared entirely when he did. It was easy to picture them lying together here, kissing, tangled. Sharing breath, lips pressed urgently against necks and shoulders and fingertips. I felt hungry suddenly, for something that I didn't have and couldn't name. It made me think of Cole's hand on my collarbone and how his breath had been so hot in my mouth, and suddenly I was sure that I was going to call him or find him tomorrow if such a thing was possible.

I pushed myself back up onto my elbows, trying to pull my brain from thoughts clouded with hands on hips and the smell of Sam on the pillow, and said, “I wonder what Sam's doing right now.”

Grace had a page pinched between two fingers; she wasn't quite frowning — my words had wiped the frown off her face and replaced it with something more uncertain. I kicked myself for saying what I was actually thinking.

Grace gently laid down the page and smoothed it. Then she pressed her fingers to one of her flushed cheeks and smoothed the skin down to her chin with the same gesture. Finally, she said, “He said he'd try to call me tonight.”

She was still looking at me in that blank, unsure way, so I added, “I was just wondering if any of the wolves are human right now, besides him. I met one of them.” It was a line close enough to the truth that no bishops would blush while delivering it.

Grace's face cleared. “I know. He told me about one. You really met him?”

What the hell.
I told her. “I brought him to Beck's the night you went to the hospital.”

Her eyes widened, but before she had time to ask me more, the doorbell sounded — a loud, obnoxious bell that went on and on in multiple tones.

“Pizza!” her mom shouted, her voice too bright, and anything else Grace and I might have said to each other was lost.

• GRACE •

The pizza arrived and Isabel gave a piece to Mom, which I wouldn't have done, and Mom retreated to her studio so we could have the living room. By now, the sky was black outside the glass door to the deck, and it was impossible to tell if it was seven
P.M.
or midnight. I sat on one end of the couch with a plate in my lap and a single piece of pizza staring back at me, and Isabel sat on the other end with two pieces on her plate. She blotted her pieces delicately with a paper towel, careful not to disturb the mushrooms. In the background,
Pretty Woman
was on and Julia Roberts's character was shopping at stores that Isabel would look at home in. The pizza lay in its box on the coffee table in between us and the television. There was a mountain of toppings.

“Eat, Grace,” Isabel said. She offered me the roll of paper towels.

I looked at the pizza and tried to imagine it as food. It was amazing how just a single slice of cheese and mushroom pizza lying on a plate, with oozing, greasy strings of mozzarella trailing from it, could do what a walk in the woods hadn't: make me feel utterly sick. Looking at the food, my stomach was rolling inside me, but it was more than nausea. It was whatever had
consumed me before: the fever that wasn't a fever. The sickness that was more than just a headache, more than just a stomachache. The illness that was me, somehow.

Isabel was looking at me, and I knew a question was coming. But I didn't really want to open my mouth. The vague something I'd felt in the woods was chewing at my belly now, and I was afraid of what I would say if I spoke.