Forever (34 page)

• ISABEL •

Somehow, I'd never really believed it could come to this.

Cole.

The white wolf was still kicking, just one feeble back leg, but Cole — Cole was motionless at the place where he dropped.

My heart crashed in my chest. Tiny explosions of dirt tracked my father's shots farther up in the pack. Sam and Grace were galloping in earnest now, flat out toward the trees they would never reach. The remainder of the pack strung out behind them.

My first thought was a selfish one:
Why Cole out of all the wolves? Why the one I care about?

But then I saw that the ground was littered with bodies, that Cole was just one of half a dozen to fall. And he had thrown himself into all this, when he'd seen that Sam was in danger. He'd known what could —

I was too late.

The helicopter broke off to follow a straggler. The sun was a ferocious red disk at the edge of the horizon; it glinted off the identification letters on the side of the helicopter. The doors were open and behind the pilot, two men sat with their guns trained on the ground, one out each side. One of them was my father.

Certainty settled inside me.

I couldn't … I couldn't save Cole.

But I could save Sam and Grace. They were almost to the woods. So, so close. All they needed were a few more moments.

The straggler was dead. I didn't know who it was. The helicopter swung slowly back around for another approach. I glanced back at Cole; I hadn't realized how much I'd hoped that he was going to move until I saw that he hadn't. I couldn't see where in his body he'd been shot, but I saw that there was blood around him, and he lay very flat and small and very, very unfamous looking. At least he wasn't the wreck that some of the other wolves were. I couldn't have taken that.

It must have been fast. I told myself it had been fast.

My breath stuttered in my chest.

I couldn't think about that. I couldn't think about him being dead.

But I did.

And suddenly I didn't care that my father would be angry with me, that it would cause a million problems, that it would make every bit of progress we had seemed to be making go away.

I could stop this.

And as the helicopter came in again, I threw my SUV off the road and onto the scrubby ground, climbing up over a bit of embankment that was by the road here. The SUV was probably never really meant to be off road, and it was bouncing and making sounds like it was falling apart and souls of hell were trying to escape from its undercarriage, and I thought I was going to probably break an axle if such a thing was possible.

But despite the rattling and bumping, I was faster than the wolves, and so I drove into their midst, right between two of the pack members, scattering them and forcing them ahead of me.

Instantly, the shooting stopped. Dirt roiled up behind me in massive clouds, hiding the helicopter overhead from my view. In front of me, I could see the wolves leaping into the woods after Sam and Grace, one after another. I felt like my heart was going to explode.

The dust sank down around me. The helicopter hovered above me. Taking a deep breath, I opened my sunroof and stared out of it
toward the sky. There was still dust floating between us, but through the open sides of the copter, I knew my dad had seen me. Even that far up in the air, I knew that face. The shock and dismay and embarrassment all rolled up into one.

I didn't know what was going to happen now.

I wanted to cry, but I just keep staring up there until the very last wolf had disappeared into the woods.

My phone buzzed on the seat beside me. A text from my father's cell phone.

I texted back.

• SAM •

I shifted back to human with no ceremony. Like it wasn't a miracle. Just this: the sun on my back, the heat of the day, the werewolf running its course through my changeable veins, and then, Sam, the man.

I was at the lodge, and Koenig was waiting. Not remarking on my nakedness, he gave me a T-shirt and sweatpants from his car.

“There's a pump out back if you want to get cleaned up,” he said, though I couldn't be dirty. This skin I wore right now was freshly minted.

But I went around the back of the lodge, wondering at my stride, my hands, my slow human heartbeat. When the water started to spurt from the old metal pump, I realized my palms and knees were grubby from when I'd changed back.

I scrubbed my skin and put on the clothing and took a drink from the pump. By then, my thoughts were swirling back to me, and they were wild and swelling and uncertain. I had done it — I had led the pack here, I had shifted back to me, I had been a wolf and kept myself true, or if not all of myself, at least my heart.

It was impossible, but here I was, standing at the lodge, wearing my skin.

And then I saw Beck's death, and my breath was a ship pitching at sea, uneven and perilous.

I thought of Grace in the woods, both of us wolves. The feeling of running beside her, having what I'd dreamed of all of those years
before I'd known her properly as a girl. Those hours spent as wolves together were exactly what I'd imagined they'd be, no words to get in the way. I'd wanted winters of that, but I knew now that we were destined, again, to spend those cold months apart. Happiness was a shard rammed in between my ribs.

And then there was Cole.

This impossible thing had only been made possible because of him. I closed my eyes.

Koenig found me beside the pump. “Are you all right?”

I opened my eyes, slowly. “Where are the others?”

“In the woods.”

I nodded. They were probably finding someplace they felt safe enough to rest.

Koenig crossed his arms. “Good job.”

I looked into the woods. “Thanks.”

“Sam, I know you don't want to think about this right now, but they'll come back for the bodies,” he told me. “If you want to get th —”

“Grace will shift soon,” I said. “I want to wait for her.”

The truth was, I needed Grace. I couldn't go back there without her. And more than that, I needed to
see
her. I couldn't trust my wolf memories to know she was all right until I saw her.

Koenig didn't press me. We went into the lodge, and then he retrieved another set of clothing from his car and laid it outside of the lodge door like an offering. He returned with a styrofoam cup of convenience store coffee while drinking one of his own. It tasted awful, but I drank it, too grateful for the kindness to refuse.

Then I sat on one of the dusty chairs in our new home, my head in my hands, looking at the floor, sifting through my wolf memories. Remembering the last thing Cole had said to me:
I'll see you on the other side
.

And then there was a soft knock on the door, and it was Grace, dressed in a slightly too-large T-shirt and sweats. Everything I'd meant to say to her —
We lost Cole. Beck's dead. You're alive
— dissolved on my tongue.

“Thank you,” Grace said to Koenig.

“Saving people's lives,” Koenig said, “is my job.”

Then she crossed to me and hugged me, hard, while I buried my face in her shoulder. Finally, she pulled away and sighed. “Let's go get them.”

• SAM •

In comparison to our journey that morning, it took no time at all to get back to the field where the helicopter had found us.

And there Beck was, his body a wreck. There were all kinds of internal parts lying outside of him that I'd never considered him having.

“Sam,” Grace said to me.

His body was so flat and thin looking now, like it had nothing left in it. And maybe it didn't. Maybe it had all been annihilated from the blast. Those pieces, though. That he had dragged with him before he died. I remembered the bird that Shelby had killed in our driveway.

Sam.

The mouth was parted open, the tongue laying over teeth. Not like a dog would pant, but in a strange, unnatural way. The angle of the tongue made me think that the body must be stiff. Just like a dog hit by a car, really, just another dead body.

sam

say

his eyes, though

something

it had his eyes

sam

and I had so much left to say to him

you're scaring me

I would be fine. I was fine. It was like I had known all along that he would die. Be dead. That we would find his body like this, ruined and undone, that he would be gone from me and we would never fix what had been broken. I would not cry, because this was just the way it would be. He would be gone, but he had been gone before, and this wouldn't feel any different, this absolute gone, this forever gone, this gone without hope of spring and warm weather bringing him back to me.

I would feel nothing, because there was nothing to feel. I felt I'd lived this moment a thousand times, so many times that I had no energy or emotion left to bring to the scene. I tried out the idea in my head,
Beck is dead, Beck is dead, Beck is dead
, waiting for tears, for feeling, for anything.

The air smelled like spring around us, but it felt like winter.

• GRACE •

Sam just stood there, shaking, hands beside him, silent and staring down at the body at our feet. Something terrible in his face made tear after noiseless tear slide down my cheek.

“Sam,” I begged. “Please.”

Sam said, “I'm fine.”

And then he just crumpled gently to the ground. He was a curled form, hands up behind his head, pulling his face down to his knees, so far beyond crying that I didn't know what to do.

I crouched beside him and wrapped my arms around him. He shook and shook, but no tears came.

“Grace,” he whispered, and in that one word, I heard agony. He was running a hand through his hair again and again, knotting and releasing fistfuls of it in his palm, ceaseless. “Grace, help me. Help me.”

But I didn't know what to do.

• GRACE •

I used Koenig's phone to call Isabel.

Sam, Koenig, and I had spent an hour picking our way over the scrub, performing the morbid job of counting the wolf bodies and seeing if Sam recognized them. Seven wolves dead, including Beck. We hadn't gotten to Shelby's or Cole's bodies yet.

Sam stood a few feet away, looking out into the woods, his hands linked behind his head. As always, it was a gesture that was at once intensely Sam but also Beck. I didn't remember if I'd ever told Sam that. I didn't know if it would help or hurt to tell him now.

“Isabel,” I said.

Isabel just sighed.

“I know. What is it like for you there?”

Isabel's voice was unfamiliar. I thought maybe she'd been crying. “Oh, the usual. I'm grounded for the rest of my life, which is, like, until next week, because after that, they'll kill me. I'm in my room right now because I'm tired of screaming.”

That explained her voice.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Don't be. I got there a little late, didn't I?”

“Don't beat yourself up, Isabel. I know that's what you like to do, but you didn't owe the wolves anything, and you came anyway.”

She didn't say anything for a long time, and I wondered if she
believed me. Finally, she said, “And they're sending me to California to live with Nanna until they can sell the house.”

“What?”

I spoke so sharply that Sam looked over to me, frowning.

Isabel's voice had no intonation at all. “Yeah. I'm taking my finals and then I'm on a plane with my stuff. Isabel Culpeper. This is her noble end. Back to California with her tail between her legs. Do you think I'm weak for not just taking off?”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “If you can keep your parents, I think you ought to. Your parents love you, even if your dad is a jerk. It doesn't mean I don't want you to go.” Isabel in California? “I can't believe it. Are you sure they won't change their minds?”

She scoffed. It was a raw sound, a new wound.

“Tell her thank you,” Sam said.

“Sam says to tell you thank you.”

Isabel laughed.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
“For leaving the state?”

“For saving our lives.”

For a moment, we didn't say anything. From the direction of the lake, a loon cried. If I hadn't known, logically, that I had been here this morning, I wouldn't have remembered it. As a wolf, everything about this place looked different.

Isabel said, “Not everybody's lives.”

I didn't know what to say to that, because it was true. It wasn't really her fault, still, but I couldn't tell her it wasn't true. Instead, I said, “We're in the field. Where was Cole's — uhh — where did he —”

She interrupted, “There was a bank by the road. There should be my tire tracks. He was a few yards before that. I have to go. I have to —”

The phone went dead.

I sighed and closed my phone, relaying the information. Together we followed the directions, which led us to Shelby's body. It was
surprisingly unmolested, except for her face, which was so destroyed that I couldn't bring myself to look at it. There was a lot of blood.

I wanted to feel compassion for her, but all I could think was
She is the reason Cole is dead
.

“She's finally gone,” Sam said. “She died as a wolf. I think that would please her.”

All around Shelby's body, the grass was smeared and spattered and stained with red. I didn't know how far away Cole had died. Was this his blood? Sam was swallowing, looking at her, and I knew that he saw past the monster to something else. I couldn't.

Koenig muttered something about needing to make a phone call and moved off, giving us some distance.

I touched Sam's hand. He was standing in so much blood that it looked like he had been wounded himself. “Are you doing okay?”

He rubbed his own arms; it was getting cool again as the sun went down. “I didn't hate it, Grace.”

He didn't have to explain. I could still remember that feeling of joy at seeing him bound toward me as a wolf, even if I had no way to remember his name. I remembered exchanging images with him at the head of the pack. They all trusted him, like I did. I said softly, “Because you were better at it.”

He shook his head. “Because I knew it wasn't forever.”

I touched his hair and he bent his head to kiss me, quiet as a secret. I leaned on his chest and together we stood, buffered from the cold.

After several long minutes, Sam stepped back from me and looked at the woods. For a moment I thought he was listening, but of course, no wolves would howl from Boundary Wood now.

He said, “This is one of the last poems Ulrik had me memorize.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

At first, I didn't think that Sam was going to reply. His eyes were narrowed against the sun, looking out into the woods we'd escaped into an eternity ago, and then, into the woods we used to live in, an eternity before that. He was such a different person than the one that I had first met, bleeding on my back doorstep. That Sam had been shy, naive, gentle, lost in his songs and his words, and I'd always love that version of him. But it was okay, this change. That Sam couldn't have survived this. For that matter, the Grace I'd been then couldn't have.

Sam said, looking at Boundary Wood,

Our shadows were as tall as trees with nothing to block them. It was like we were on another planet, here in this scrubby area, shallow stretches of water suddenly glowing orange and pink, the exact same color of the sunset. I didn't know where else to look for Cole's body.
There was no sign of it for yards around, other than his blood, dotted on blades of grass and pooled in hollows.

“Maybe he dragged himself to the woods,” Sam said in a flat voice. “Instinct would tell him to hide, even if he was dying.”

My heart sped. “Do you think —”

“There's too much blood,” Sam replied. He didn't look at me. “Look at all of it. Think of how I couldn't even heal myself from a single shot in the neck. He couldn't have healed himself. I just hope … I just hope he wasn't afraid when he died.”

I didn't say what I was thinking: But we'd all been afraid.

Together, we combed the edge of the woods, just in case. Even as it fell dark, we kept looking, because we both knew that scent would help us more than our sight anyway.

But there was no sign of him. In the end, Cole St. Clair had done what he did best.

Disappeared.