Forever (17 page)

Sam frowned. “Do what you want with your own body, but I'm not going to mess with someone who can't give me his consent.”

Cole's expression was deeply aggrieved. “It's adrenaline, not prom sex.”

Sam's voice was stiff. “I am not going to risk killing Beck just to ask him why he didn't tell me he lived in Wyoming.”

It was the obvious answer, the one that Cole had to know that Sam would give. But Cole had that small, hard smile on his face again, barely there. “If we caught Beck and I made him human,” he said, “I might be able to start him back over, like Grace. Would you risk his life for that?”

Sam didn't answer.

“Tell me yes,” Cole said. “Tell me to find him, and I will.”

And this, I thought, was why Sam and Cole could not get along. Because when it came down to it, Cole made bad decisions for good reasons, and Sam couldn't justify that. Now, Cole dangled this tempting thing in front of Sam, this thing he wanted more than anything, along with the thing that he wanted the least. I wasn't sure which answer I wanted him to give.

I saw Sam swallow. Turning to me, he said softly, “What do I say?”

I didn't know what to tell him that he didn't already know. I crossed my arms. I could think of a thousand reasons for and against, but all of them started and ended with the wanting I saw on Sam's face now. “You have to be able to live with yourself,” I told him.

Cole said, “He'll die out there anyway, Sam.”

Sam turned away from both of us, his hands linked behind his head. He stared at the rows and rows of Beck's books.

Not looking at either of us, he said, “Fine. Yes. Find him.”

I met Cole's eyes and I held them.

Upstairs, the teakettle began to scream, and Sam wordlessly bounded up the stairs to silence it — a glad excuse, I thought, to leave the room. My stomach had an uncertain lump in it at the thought of trying to prompt Beck to shift. I'd forgotten too easily how much we risked every time we tried to learn more about ourselves.

“Cole,” I said, “Beck means everything to him. This isn't a game. Don't do anything you aren't sure of, okay?”

“I'm always sure of what I do,” he said. “Sometimes I was just never sure there was supposed to be a happy ending.”

• GRACE •

That first day back as me was odd. I couldn't settle without my clothing and my routine, knowing that the wolf that was me was still lurching around unpredictably inside my limbs. In a way, I was glad for the uncertainty of being a new wolf, because I knew that it would eventually settle into the same temperature-based shift that Sam had had when I met him. And I loved the cold. I didn't want to fear it.

In an attempt to settle myself into some kind of normalcy, I suggested that we make a proper dinner, which turned out to be more difficult than I'd expected. Sam and Cole had stocked the house with a strange combination of foods, most of which could be described as “microwavable” and few that could be described as “ingredients.” But I found the things for making pancakes and eggs — which was always an appropriate meal, I thought — and Sam moved in wordlessly to assist while Cole lay on the floor in the living room, staring at the ceiling.

I glanced over my shoulder. “What's he doing? Could I have the spatula?”

Sam passed the spatula to me. “His brain hurts him, I think.” He slid behind me to reach the plates, and for a moment, his body was pressed against mine, his hand on my waist to steady me. I felt a fierce rush of longing.

“Hey,” I said, and he turned, plates in hand. “Put those down and come back here.”

Sam started toward me but then, as he did, movement caught my eye.

“
Hst
— what's that?” I asked, my voice dropping to a whisper. “Stop!”

He froze and followed my gaze as I found what had caught my eye — an animal moving across the dark backyard. The grass was illuminated by the light coming from the two kitchen windows. For a moment, I lost sight of it, and then, there, by the covered barbecue grill.

For a moment, my heart felt light as a feather, because it was a white wolf. Olivia was a white wolf, and I hadn't seen her in so long.

But then Sam breathed, “Shelby,” and I saw as she moved that he was right. There was none of the lithe grace that Olivia had had as a wolf, and when the white wolf lifted her head, it was a darting, suspicious move. She looked at the house, her eyes definitely not Olivia's, and then she squatted and peed by the grill.

“Oh, nice,” I said.

Sam frowned.

We watched silently as Shelby made her way from the grill to another point in the middle of the yard, where she marked territory again. She was alone.

“I think she's getting worse,” Sam said. Outside the window, Shelby stood for a long moment, staring at the house. I felt, uncannily, that she was looking at us in the kitchen, though we had to be just motionless silhouettes to her, if we were anything. Even from here, though, I could see her hackles rising.

“She” — we both started as Cole's voice came from behind us — “is psychotic.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I've seen her about when I do the traps. She's brave and she's mean as hell.”

“Well, I knew that,” I said. With a little shudder, I remembered
without fondness the evening that she had thrown herself through a plate glass window to attack me. And then, her eyes in the lightning storm. “She's tried to kill me more times than I care to remember.”

“She's scared,” Sam interrupted softly. He was still watching Shelby, whose eyes were right on him, no one else. It was terribly eerie. “She's scared, and lonely, and angry, and jealous. With you, Grace, and Cole, and Olivia, the pack's changing really fast and she doesn't have much further to fall. She's losing everything.”

The last pancake I'd started was burning. I snatched the pan from the stove top. “I don't like her around here.”

“I don't … I don't think you have to worry,” Sam said. Shelby was still motionless, staring at his silhouette. “I think she blames me.”

Suddenly, Shelby started, at the same time that we heard Cole's voice across the backyard: “Clear off, you psychotic bitch!”

She slid off into the darkness as the back door slammed.

“Thanks, Cole,” I said. “That was incredibly subtle.”

“That,” replied Cole, “is one of my finest traits.”

Sam was still frowning out the window. “I wonder if she —”

The phone rang from the kitchen island, interrupting him, and Cole retrieved it. He made a face and then handed the handset to me without answering it.

The caller ID was Isabel's number. I said, “Hello?”

“Grace.” I waited for some comment on my humanness, something offhand and sarcastic. But she only said that:
Grace.

“Isabel,” I said back, just to say something. I glanced at Sam, who appeared puzzled, reflecting my expression.

“Is Sam still there with you?”

“Yeah. Do you … want to talk to him?”

“No. I just wanted to make sure that you —” Isabel stopped. There was a lot of noise behind her. “Grace, did Sam tell you they'd found a dead girl in the woods? Killed by wolves?”

I looked at Sam, but he couldn't hear what Isabel had said.

“No,” I said, uneasy.

“Grace. They know who she was.”

Everything inside me was very quiet.

Isabel said, “It was Olivia.”

Olivia.

Olivia.

Olivia.

I saw everything around me with perfect precision. There was a photograph on the fridge of a man standing beside a kayak and giving a peace sign. There was also a dingy magnet in the shape of a tooth with a dental office's name and number on it. Next to the fridge was a counter that had a few small nicks all the way down to some colorless surface. On it was an old glass Coca-Cola bottle that had a pencil and one of those pens that looked like a flower stuck in it. The kitchen tap dripped every eleven seconds, the drop of water running clockwise around the lip of the faucet before working up enough nerve to fall into the sink below. I'd never noticed how everything in this kitchen was a warm color. Browns and reds and oranges, all worked through the counters and cabinets and tiles and faded photographs stuck into the doors of the cabinets.

“What did you say?” Sam demanded. “What did you say to her?”

I couldn't figure out why he would ask me that when I hadn't said anything. I frowned at him and saw that he was holding the phone, which I didn't remember giving to him.

I thought,
I am a terrible friend because I don't hurt at all. I'm just here looking at the kitchen and thinking that if it were mine, I'd find a rug for it so my feet wouldn't be so cold on the bare floor. I must not have loved Olivia, then, because I don't even feel like crying. I am thinking about rugs and not about how she's dead.

“Grace,” Sam said. In the background, I saw Cole move off, holding the phone, talking into it. “What do you need from me?”

I thought it was a very strange question to ask. I just looked at him. “I'm okay,” I said.

Sam said, “You're not.”

“I am,” I said. “I'm not crying. I don't even feel like crying.”

He smoothed my hair back from my ears, pulling it behind my head like he was making a ponytail, holding it in his fist. Into my ear, he said, “But you will.”

I leaned my head on his shoulder; it seemed incredibly heavy just then, impossible to hold up. “I want to call people and find out if they're okay. I want to call Rachel,” I said. “I want to call John. I want to call Olivia.” Too late, I realized what I'd said, and I opened my mouth as if I could somehow take it back and insert something more logical.

“Oh, Grace,” Sam said, touching my chin, but his pity was a distant thing.

On the phone, I heard Cole say, in a completely different voice than I'd ever heard him use before, “Well, there's not much we can do about it now, is there?”

• SAM •

That night, Grace was the wakeful one. I felt like an empty cup, bobbing and tipping to admit rivulets of slumber; it was only a matter of time before it filled up enough to pull me under entirely.

My room was dark except for the Christmas lights strung around the ceiling, tiny constellations in a claustrophobic sky. I kept meaning to pull out the cord beside the bed and put us in darkness, but fatigue whispered in my ear and distracted me. I couldn't understand how I could be so tired after I'd finally slept the night before. It was like my body had reacquired its taste for sleep now that I had Grace back, and it couldn't get enough.

Grace sat next to me, her back leaned up against the wall, legs tangled in bedsheets, and ran the flat of her hand up and down my chest, which wasn't helping me feel any more awake.

“Hey,” I murmured, reaching up toward her with my hand, my fingertips just barely able to brush her shoulder. “Come down here with me and sleep.”

She stretched out her fingers and rested them on my mouth; her face was wistful and not like her, a mask of Grace worn by another girl in this half-light. “I can't stop thinking.” It was a familiar enough sentiment that I pushed up onto my elbows; her fingers slipped off my lips, back to my chest.

“You should be lying down,” I said. “That will help.”

Grace's expression was doleful and unsure; she was a little girl. I sat up the rest of the way and pulled her toward me. Together we lay back against my headboard, her head lying on my chest where her hand had been before. She smelled like my shampoo.

“I can't stop thinking about her,” Grace whispered, braver now that we weren't looking at each other. “And then I start thinking about how I'm supposed to be at home right now, and, Sam, I don't want to go back.”

I wasn't sure what to say to that. I didn't want her to go back, either, but I knew she wasn't supposed to be here. If she were human, cured, I would've told her that we had to go back and talk to her parents. We would've made it work; we would've made them understand that we were serious, and then I would have lived without her in my bed until she moved in on the proper terms. I would've hated it, but I'd have lived with it. I'd told her I wanted to do it right with her, and I still did.

But now there was no right. Now Grace was a girl who was also a wolf, and as long as she said that she didn't want to go back, and as long as I remained unsure of how her parents would react, this was where I wanted her. One day soon there would be hell to pay for these stolen moments together, but I didn't think we were wrong to have them. I ran my fingers through her hair until I hit a tiny knot and had to pull them out to start again. “I won't make you.”

“We have to figure it out eventually,” Grace said. “I wish I was eighteen. I wish I'd moved out a long time ago. I wish we were already married. I wish I didn't have to think of a lie.”

At least I wasn't the only one who thought that they wouldn't do well with the truth. “Nothing,” I said, with utmost certainty, “will get solved tonight.” After I said it, I recognized, with some irony, Grace's own reasoning, the statement that she had used many times before to try to lure me to sleep.

“It all just keeps going round and round and round,” Grace said. “Tell me a story.”

I stopped touching her hair because the repetitive comfort of it was making me fall asleep again. “A story?”

She said, “Like you told me about Beck teaching you to hunt.”

I tried to think of an anecdote, something that didn't need too much explaining. Something that would make her laugh. Every Beck story seemed tainted now, colored by doubt. Everything about him that I hadn't seen with my own eyes now felt apocryphal.

I cast about for another memory, and said, “That BMW wagon wasn't the first car Ulrik had. When I first came here, he had a little Ford Escort. It was brown. And very ugly.”

Grace sighed, as if this were a comforting start to a bedtime story. She fisted a handful of my T-shirt; the action woke me up instantly and guiltily made me think of at least four things that were not bedtime stories or selfless ways to comfort a grieving girl.

I swallowed and focused on my memory instead. “There was a lot wrong with it. When you went over bumps, it would scrape on the ground. The exhaust, I think. Once, Ulrik hit a possum in town and he dragged it all the way back home.”

Grace laughed a small, soundless laugh, the sort you laugh when you know you're expected to.

I pressed on. “It always smelled like something going wrong, too. Like brakes sticking or rubber burning or maybe just like he hadn't got all the possum off.” I paused, remembering all the trips I'd made in that car, sitting in the passenger seat, waiting in the car while Ulrik ran into the grocery store for some beer or standing beside the road as Beck swore at the silent engine and asked me why he hadn't just taken his own damn car. That was back in the days when Ulrik had been human a lot, when his bedroom had been right next to mine, and I used to get woken up by the sound of noisy lovemaking,
though I was pretty sure Ulrik was alone. I didn't tell Grace that part.

“It was the car that I used to drive to the bookstore,” I said. “Ulrik bought that BMW wagon from a guy who was selling roses by the side of the road in St. Paul, so I got the Escort. Two months after I'd gotten my license, I got a flat tire in it.” I'd been sixteen in the most naive sense of the word: simultaneously euphoric and terrified to be driving home from work by myself for the first time, and when the tire made an incredible noise that sounded like a gun going off by my head, I thought I might die.

“Did you know how to change tires?” Grace asked. She asked the question like she did.

“Not a chance. I had to pull it over in the slush by the side of the road and use the cell phone I'd just been given for my birthday to call Beck for help. First time I was using the phone, and it was to say I couldn't change a flat tire. Totally unmanning.”

Grace laughed again, softly. “Unmanning,” she repeated.

“Unmanning,” I assured her, glad to hear that little laugh. I thought back to the memory. Beck had been a long time getting there, dropped off by Ulrik on his way to work. Ignoring my bleak expression, Ulrik waved cheerily at me from the window of the BMW: “Later, boy-o!” His wagon vanished into the oncoming gloom, the taillights neon red in the snow gray world.

“So Beck arrived,” I said, aware then that I had included an anecdote with Beck after all, though I hadn't meant to. Maybe all of my anecdotes had Beck in them. “He said, ‘So you've killed the car, then?'

“He had been all bundled in coats and gloves and scarves, but despite them, he'd already been shivering. He'd whistled when he saw the comically deflated tire. ‘That's a beauty. You run over a moose?'”

“Had you?” Grace asked.

“No,” I said. “Beck made fun of me and showed me where the spare tire was and —”

I dropped off. I'd meant to tell the story of when Ulrik had finally sold the Escort, how he'd cooked four pounds of bacon and put it in the trunk when people came to look at it because he'd read that real estate agents baked cookies to sell houses to women. Instead I'd somehow gotten sidetracked in my drowsiness and the story I'd started now ended with Beck's smile vanishing in the time it took for headlights to come over the hill and disappear on the other side — with a pile of scarves and sweaters and gloves on the ground behind the Escort and me with a useless tire iron in my hand and the memory of Beck saying half my name as he shifted.

“And what?”

I tried to think if there was a way that I could spin the story, to make it more cheerful, but as I did, I remembered an aspect of it that I hadn't thought about for years. “Beck shifted. I was still there with the damn tire iron and still was just as dumb as before.”

It had just been me, picking up his coat and countless shirts from the ground, knocking the bulk of the gritty snow from them, throwing the lot of them in the back of the Escort. Allowing myself one good door slam. Then linking my arms behind my head and turning away from the road and the car. Because the loss of Beck had not yet begun to sting. The fact that I was stranded by the road, on the other hand, had sunk in immediately.

Grace made a quiet, sad noise, sorry for that Sam long ago, though it took that Sam a long time to realize what he'd really lost in those few minutes.

“I was there for a while, staring at all the useless junk in the back — like, Ulrik had a hockey mask in the trunk, and it kept on
looking at me like
You're an idiot, Sam Roth
. And then I heard this car pull up behind me — I totally forgot about this part until just now, Grace — and who do you think stopped to see if I needed help?”

Grace rubbed her nose on my shirt. “I don't know. Who?”

“Tom Culpeper,” I said.

“No!” Grace pulled back so that she could look at me. “Really?” Now she looked more like herself in the dim light, her hair mussed from lying on my chest and her eyes more alive, and my hand that rested on her waist wanted desperately to slide inside her shirt to map a course up the dip of her spine, to touch her shoulder blades and make her think only of me.

But it wasn't a bridge I would start across by myself. I didn't know where we stood. I was good at waiting.

“Yes,” I said, instead of kissing her. “Yes, it was Tom Culpeper.”

Grace lay back down on my chest. “That's crazy.”

“You're Geoffrey Beck's kid,” Tom Culpeper had observed. Even in the dim light, I had seen that his SUV was crusted with ice and sand and salt — snirt, Ulrik always called it, a combination of snow and dirt — and that the headlights cast a crooked path of light across me and the Escort. He had added, after some thought, “Sam, right? Looks like you need a hand.”

I remembered thinking at the time how relieving it was to hear my name said in such an ordinary voice, to wipe out the memory of how Beck had said it as he'd shifted.

“He helped me out,” I said. “He seemed different then, I guess. That must've been soon after they moved here.”

“Did he have Isabel with him?” Grace asked.

“I don't remember Isabel.” I considered. “I try really hard not to think of him as evil, Grace. Because of Isabel. I don't know what I would have thought of him, if not for the wolves.”

“If not for the wolves,” Grace said, “neither of us would've given him any thought at all.”

“This story was supposed to have bacon in it,” I admitted. “It was supposed to make you laugh.”

She sighed heavily, like the weight of the world had crushed the breath out of her, and I knew how she felt.

“That's okay. Turn off the lights,” she replied, reaching down to tug the comforter over both of us where we lay. She smelled faintly like wolf, and I didn't think she'd make it all the way through the night without shifting. “I'm ready for today to be over.”

Feeling far less sleepy than before, I dropped my arm off the side of the bed to pull the plug out of the wall. The room went dark and, after a moment, Grace whispered that she loved me, sounding a little sad. I wrapped my arms tightly around her shoulders, sorry that loving me was such a complicated thing.

Her breaths were already slowing as I whispered it back to her. But I didn't sleep. I stayed awake, thinking of Tom Culpeper and Beck, how the truth of them seemed so buried inside. I kept seeing Culpeper walking across the snow toward me, his nose already red from the cold, perfectly willing to help a boy he didn't know change a tire in the freezing evening. And between repeated flashes of that image, I kept seeing the wolves plunging out of the morning to shove my small body to the ground, to change my life forever.

Beck had done that. Beck had decided to take me. Long before my parents decided they didn't want me, he had planned to take me. They had just made it easy for him.

I didn't know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.

I didn't understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When
everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

In the middle of the night, Grace woke up, her eyes wide, her body shuddering. She said my name, just like Beck had said it all those years ago by the side of the road, and then, like Beck, she left me with nothing but an empty suit of clothing and one thousand unanswered questions.