Forever (24 page)

• SAM •

I didn't realize how accustomed I'd become to a lack of routine until we had one. Somehow, with Grace back in the house and Cole's scientific exploration more focused, our lives took on a sheen of normalcy. I became diurnal again. The kitchen once more became a place for eating; on the counter, prescription drug bottles and scribbled notes were slowly exchanged for cereal boxes and coffee mugs with rings in the bottom. Grace shifted only once in three days, and even then just for a few hours, returning shakily to bed after shutting herself in the bathroom for the duration. The days felt shorter, somehow, when night and sleeping came on a schedule. I went to work and sold books to whispering customers and came home with the feeling of a condemned man given a few days' reprieve. Cole spent his days trying to trap wolves and fell asleep in a different bedroom each night. In the mornings, I caught Grace putting out pans of stale granola for the pair of raccoons, and in the evenings, I caught her wistfully looking at college websites and chatting with Rachel. We were all hunting for something elusive and impossible.

The wolf hunt was on the news most nights.

But I was — not quite happy. Pending happy. I knew this was not really my life; it was a borrowed life. One that I was temporarily wearing until I could sort out my own. The date of the wolf hunt felt far away and implausible, but it was impossible to forget. Just because I couldn't think of what to do didn't mean that something didn't need to be done.

On Wednesday, I called Koenig and asked him if he could give me directions to the peninsula so I could properly investigate its potential. That's what I said — “properly investigate.” Koenig always seemed to have that effect on me.

“I think,” Koenig said, with an emphasis on
think
that indicated he really meant
know
, “that it would be better if I took you out there. Wouldn't want you getting the wrong peninsula. I can do Saturday.”

I didn't realize that he had made a joke until we'd hung up, and then I felt bad for not laughing.

On Thursday, the newspaper called. What did I have to say about the Grace Brisbane missing persons case?

Nothing, that was what I had to say. Actually, what I had said to my guitar the night before was

But the song wasn't ready for public consumption, so I just hung up the phone without saying anything else.

On Friday, Grace told me that she was coming with Koenig and me to the peninsula. “I want Koenig to see me,” she said. She was sitting on my bed matching socks while I tried out different ways of folding towels. “If he knows I'm alive, there can't be a missing persons case.”

Uncertainty made an indigestible lump in my stomach. The possibilities sown by that action seemed to grow rapid and fierce. “He'll say you have to go back to your parents.”

“Then we'll go see them,” Grace said. She threw a sock with a hole in it to the end of the bed. “Peninsula first, then them.”

“Grace?” I said, but I wasn't sure what I was asking her.

“They're never home,” she said recklessly. “If they're home, me
talking to them was meant to be. Sam, don't give me that look. I'm tired of this …
not knowing
. I can't relax, waiting for the ax to fall. I'm not going to have people suspecting you of — of — whatever it is they think you did. Kidnapped me. Killed me. Whatever. I can't fix very much these days, but I can fix that. I can't take the idea of them thinking of you that way.”

“But your parents …”

Grace made a massive ball of socks without mates between her hands. I wondered if I'd unknowingly been wandering about all this time in socks that didn't quite match. “They only have a couple of months until I'm eighteen, Sam, and then they can't say anything about what I do. They can choose the hard way and lose me forever as soon as my birthday rolls around, or they can be reasonable and we can one day be on speaking terms with them again. Maybe. Is it true that Dad punched you? Cole says he punched you.”

She read the response in my face.

“Yeah,” she said, and she sighed, the first evidence that this topic held any pain for her. “And that is why I'm not going to have a problem having this conversation with them.”

“I hate confrontation,” I muttered. It was possibly the most unnecessary thing I had ever said.

“I don't understand,” Grace said, stretching out her legs, “how a guy who never seems to wear any socks has so many ones that don't match.”

We both looked at my bare feet. She reached out her hand as if she could possibly reach my toes from where she sat. I grabbed her hand and kissed her palm instead. Her hand smelled like butter and flour and home.

“Okay,” I said. “We'll do it your way. Koenig, then your parents.”

“It's better to have a plan,” she said.

I didn't know if that was true. But it felt true.

• ISABEL •

I hadn't forgotten about Grace's request for me to find out about summer school, but it took me quite awhile to figure out how to go about tracking down the answer. It wasn't as if I could pretend it was for me, and the more precise my questions got, the more I'd draw suspicion. In the end, I figured out a solution by accident. Emptying out my backpack, I found an old note from Ms. McKay, my favorite teacher from last year. Which wasn't saying much, but still. This particular note dated from my “problematic period” — my mother's words — and in it, Ms. McKay let me know that she would be happy to help me if I would let her. It reminded me that Ms. McKay was good at answering questions without asking any of her own.

Unfortunately, everyone else also knew this about Ms. McKay, so there was always a line to see her after last period. She didn't have an office, just the English classroom, so to an outsider, it looked like five students were waiting desperately to get in there and learn some Chaucer.

The door opened and closed as Hayley Olsen left the classroom and the girl in front of me went in. I moved forward one step and leaned against the wall. I hoped Grace knew how much I did for her. I could have been at home doing nothing by now. Daydreaming. The quality of my daydreams had improved exponentially as of late.

Footsteps slapped up behind me, followed by a sound that was unmistakably a backpack hitting the ground. I glanced back.

Rachel.

Rachel was like a caricature of a teen. There was something incredibly self-aware with the way she presented herself: the stripes, the quirky smocks, the braids and the twisted knobs she put her hair into. Everything about her said
quirky, fun, silly, naive.
But, this: There was innocence and there was projected innocence. I had nothing against either, but I liked to know what I was dealing with. Rachel knew darn well how she wanted people to see her, and that was what she gave them. She wasn't an idiot.

Rachel saw me looking but pretended not to. My suspicion had already settled, however.

“Fancy seeing you here,” I said.

Rachel flashed me a grimace that lasted about as long as a movie frame; too fast for the human eye to properly perceive. “Fancy.”

I leaned toward her, my voice lowered. “You wouldn't be here to talk about
Grace
, would you?”

Her eyes widened. “I'm already seeing a counselor, but that's none of your business.”

She was good.

“Right. I'm sure you are. So you aren't going in to confess anything to Ms. McKay about her or the wolves,” I said. “Because that would be so incredibly dumb, I can't begin to tell you.”

Rachel's face cleared suddenly. “You know.”

I just gave her a look.

“So it really is true.” Rachel rubbed her upper arm and studied the floor.

“I've seen it.”

Rachel sighed. “Who else knows?”

“Nobody. It's staying that way, right?”

The door opened and closed. The student in front of me went in; I was next. Rachel made an annoyed noise. “Look, I didn't do my
English reading! That's why I'm here. Not for anything about Grace. Wait. That means that you
are
here for her.”

I wasn't sure how she'd managed to come to that conclusion, but it didn't change the fact that she was right. For half a second, I considered telling Rachel that Grace had asked me to find out about summer school for her, mostly because I wanted to rub in that Grace had trusted me first and I was shallow that way, but it wouldn't really be useful.

“Just finding out about some graduating credits,” I said.

We stood in the awkward silence of people who had a friend in common and not much else. Students passed down the other side of the hall, laughing and making weird noises because they were guys and that was mostly what high school boys did. The school continued to smell like burritos. I continued to devise my method of questioning Ms. McKay.

Rachel, leaning against the wall and looking at the lockers on the other side of the hall, said, “Makes the world seem bigger, doesn't it?”

The naïveté of the question irritated me, somehow. “It's just another way to die.”

Rachel looked at the side of my head. “You really do default to bitch, don't you? That'll only work as long as you're young and hot. After that, you'll only be able to teach AP History.”

I looked at her and narrowed my eyes. I said, “I could say the same for
quirky
.”

Rachel smiled a wide, wide smile, her most innocent one yet. “So what you're saying is you think I'm hot.”

Okay, Rachel was all right. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of a smile back, but I felt my eyes giving me away. The door opened. We regarded each other. As far as allies went, I guessed Grace could do worse.

As I went in to see Ms. McKay, I thought that Rachel actually was right. The world seemed bigger every day.

• COLE •

Another day, another night. We — Sam and I — were in the QuikMart a few miles away from the house, the sky black as hell above us. Mercy Falls proper was still another mile away; this convenience store was mostly for the oh-shit-I-forgot-to-get-milk moments. Which was exactly why we were at the QuikMart. Well, it's why Sam was there. Partially because we had no milk and partially because I was beginning to learn that Sam didn't sleep without someone there to tell him to, and I wasn't about to tell him. Normally this would fall to Grace, but Isabel had just called with the exact model of the helicopter that would be carrying the sharpshooters and we were all a little on edge. Grace and Sam had engaged in a wordless argument that somehow managed to involve only their eyes and then she had won, because she started making scones, and Sam had sulked on the couch with his guitar. If she and Sam ever had kids, they'd be gluten-intolerant out of self-defense.

Scones required milk.

So Sam was here for milk because the grocery store closed at nine. I, on the other hand, was at the QuikMart because if I spent another second in Beck's house, I was going to break something. I was figuring out more about the wolf science every day, but the hunt was almost here. In a few days, my experiments would be about as useful as medical research on the dodo bird.

Which brought us to QuikMart at eleven
P.M
. Inside the store, I
pointed to a rack of condoms and Sam gave me a look completely devoid of humor. He'd worn too few or too many to see the amusement in it.

I broke off to navigate the aisles of the store, full of nervous energy. This crappy little service station felt like the real world. The real world, months after I'd murdered NARKOTIKA by disappearing with Victor. The real world where I smiled at security cameras and somewhere, they might smile back at me. Country music wailed low through speakers hung next to the sign for the bathrooms (
FOR
PAYING
CUSTOMERS ONLY
). The plate glass windows were painted with the green-black night that only lived outside of service stations. No one was awake but us, and I'd never been more awake. I browsed candy bars that sounded better than they tasted, checked tabloids for mention of me out of habit, looked at the racks of overpriced cold medications that no longer had the ability to impair either my ability to sleep or drive, and realized there was nothing here in this store that I wanted.

In my pocket, I felt the weight of the little black Mustang Isabel had given me. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I slid the car out and drove it over racks to where Sam stood in front of the milk case, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Though he faced the milk, his face wore an undirected frown, his thoughts consumed by a problem somewhere else.

“Two percent is a nice compromise between skim and whole, if you're having problems deciding,” I said. I kind of wanted Sam to ask me about the Mustang, to ask what the hell I was doing with it. I was thinking about Isabel, about shifting into a wolf for the first time, about the black sky pressing against the windows outside.

Sam said, “We're running out of time, Cole.”

The electronic bell of the QuikMart door opening kept him from saying more, or me from answering him. I didn't turn to look, but some sort of instinct made the skin crawl at the back of my neck.
Sam had not turned his head, either, but I saw that his expression had changed. Sharpened.
That
was what I was subconsciously reacting to.

In my head, memories flashed. Wolves in the woods, ears pricked and swiveling, suddenly at attention. Air sharp in our nostrils, scent of deer on the breeze, time to hunt. The wordless agreement that it was time to act.

By the counter, I heard the murmur of voices as the newcomer and the clerk exchanged greetings. Sam put his hand on the handle of the cooler but didn't open it. He said, “Maybe we don't actually need milk.”

• SAM •

It was John Marx, Olivia's older brother.

Speaking with John had never been easy for me — we barely knew each other, and every encounter we'd ever had had been on tense terms. And now his sister was dead and Grace was missing. I wished we hadn't come. There was nothing to do but to carry on as usual. John wasn't quite in line; he was staring at the gum. I slouched up to the counter beside him. I could smell alcohol, which was depressing, because John had seemed so young before.

“Hi,” I said, barely audible, just so I got credit for saying it.

John did the man-nod, a curt jerk of the head. “How are you doing.” It was not a question.

“Three twenty-one,” the clerk told me. He was a slight man with permanently lowered eyes. I counted out bills. I didn't look at John. I prayed that he didn't recognize Cole. I eyed the security camera, watching all of us.

“Did you know that this is Sam Roth?” John asked. There was silence until the clerk realized that John was talking to him.

The clerk darted a glance up at my damning yellow eyes and then back down to the bills I'd placed on the counter, before replying politely, “No, I didn't.”

He knew who I was. Everyone knew. I felt a surge of friendliness toward the clerk.

“Thanks,” I told him as I took my change, grateful for more than the coins. Cole pushed off the counter next to me. Time to go.

“Aren't you going to say anything?” John asked me. I heard misery in his voice.

My heart jerked inside me as I turned toward him. “I'm sorry about Olivia.”

“Tell me why she died,” John said. He took a step toward me, unsteady. A breath laced with some kind of alcohol — hard, neat, and recent, by the odor — gusted toward me. “Tell me why she was there.”

I held a hand out, palm toward the ground. A sort of
That close is good. No closer.
“John, I don't kn —”

John swatted my hand away, and at that gesture, I saw Cole move restlessly. “Don't lie to me. I know it's you. I
know
it is.”

This was a little easier. I couldn't lie, but this didn't require one. “It wasn't me. I didn't have anything to do with her being there.”

The clerk said, “Good conversation to take outside!”

Cole opened the door. Night air rushed in.

John seized a mighty handful of my T-shirt at the shoulder. “Where's Grace? Why out of everyone in the world, why my sister, why Grace? Why them, you sick —”

And I saw in his face or heard in his voice or felt in that grip on my shirt what he was going to do next, so when he swung at me, I lifted an arm and deflected his blow. I couldn't do any more than that. I wasn't going to fight him, not over this. Not when he'd swallowed so much sadness that his words slurred.

“Okay, outside,” the clerk said. “Conversation outside. Bye! Have a nice night!”

“John,” I said, my arm throbbing where his fist had landed. Adrenaline pumped through me: John's anxiety, Cole's tension, my own readiness feeding it. “I'm sorry. But this isn't going to help.”

“Damn straight,” John said, and lunged for me.

Cole was suddenly between us.

“We're all done here,” he said. He was no taller than either me or John, but he towered. He was looking at my face, judging my reaction. “Let's not make things ugly in this man's store.”

John, an arm's length away, on the other side of Cole, stared at me, eyes hollowed out like a statue's. “I liked you, when I first met you,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”

I felt sick.

“Let's go,” I told Cole. I said to the clerk, “Thanks again.”

Cole turned away from John, his movements wound tight.

Just as the door swung shut, John's voice slid after us. “Everybody knows what you did, Sam Roth.”

The night air smelled like gasoline and wood smoke. Somewhere, there was a fire. I felt like I could feel the wolf inside me burning in my gut.

“People just love to hit you,” Cole said, still all energy. My mood fed off Cole's and vice versa, and we were wolves, both of us. I was buzzing and weightless. The Volkswagen wasn't parked far away, just at the end of the parking spaces. There was a long, pale key scratch on the driver's side. At least I knew running into John was no coincidence. A fluorescent reflection of the convenience store glowed in its paint. Neither of us got in.

“It has to be you,” Cole said. He'd opened the passenger door and stood on the running board, leaning over the roof at me. “The one
who leads the wolves out. I've tried; I can't hold a thought while I'm a wolf.”

I looked at him. My fingers tingled. I'd forgotten the milk inside the store. I kept thinking of John swinging at me, Cole charging between us, the night living inside me. Feeling like I did, right now, I couldn't say,
No, I can't do it
, because anything felt possible.

I said, “I don't want to go back. I can't do that.”

Cole laughed, just a single
ha
. “You're gonna shift eventually, Ringo. You're not totally cured yet. Might as well save the world while you're at it.”

I wanted to say,
Please don't make me do this
, but what meaning would that have to Cole, who had done that and worse to himself?

“You're assuming they would listen to me,” I said.

Cole lifted his hands off the roof of the Volkswagen; cloudy fingerprints evaporated seconds after he did. “We all listen to you, Sam.” He jumped to the pavement. “You just don't always talk to us.”