Linger (14 page)

• GRACE •

“I'm going for a walk,” I told Mom.

No day had ever passed as slowly as this Saturday. Once upon a time, when I was younger, I would've been thrilled to have an entire day with my mother in the house; now, I felt restless, like I had a houseguest. She wasn't really keeping me from doing anything, but I didn't feel like starting anything while she was around, either.

Currently, Mom was delicately folded on the end of the couch, reading one of the books that Sam had left behind. When she heard my voice, her head whipped around and her entire body stiffened. “You're
what
?”

“I'm going for a walk,” I said, tempted to take Sam's book out of her hands. “I'm bored out of my mind and I want to talk with Sam, but you guys won't let me and I have to do something or I will start throwing stuff around my room like an angry chimp.”

The truth was that without school or Sam, I needed to be outside. That's what I had always done in the summers before Sam — fled to the tire swing in the backyard, book in hand,
needing the sound of the woods to fill the empty, restless space inside me.

“If you go chimp, I'm not cleaning your room,” Mom warned. “And you can't go outside. You were just in the hospital two nights ago.”

“For a fever that is now gone,” I pointed out. Just beyond her, I could see the sky, deep blue and warm-looking, and, beneath it, the somehow pregnant-looking branches of the trees reaching into the blue. Everything in me itched to be outside, smelling the oncoming spring. The living room felt gray and muted in comparison. “Plus, vitamin D is great for sick people like myself. I won't stay out long.”

When she didn't say anything, I found my clogs where I'd left them in the hall and slid them on. As I did, silence hung between us, speaking more strongly to what had happened that night than our few exchanged words had.

Mom looked profoundly uncomfortable. “Grace, I think we should talk. About” — she paused — “you and Sam.”

“Oh, let's not.” My voice conveyed exactly how much enthusiasm I had for the suggestion.

“I don't want to do it, either,” she said, closing the book without checking the page number, which reminded me again of Sam, who always checked his page number, or folded the book temporarily closed around one of his fingers, before looking up to speak. Mom continued, “But I have to talk to you about it, and if you talk to me, then I'll tell your father you did, and you won't have to talk to
him
.”

I didn't see why I had to talk to either of them. Until now, they hadn't cared what I did with myself or where I was when
they were gone, and in a year, I'd be in college or at the very least out from under their roof. I thought about bolting but instead crossed my arms and faced her, waiting.

Mom got right to it. She asked, “Are you using protection?”

My cheeks burned. “Mom.”

But she didn't back down. “Are you?”

“Yes. But that's not how it is.”

Mom raised an eyebrow. “Oh, it isn't? How is it, then?”

“I mean that's not just how it is. It's —” I struggled to find words to explain, to convey just why her questions and her tone made me instantly bristle. “I mean, he's not just a boy, Mom. We're —”

But I didn't know how to finish the thought with her looking at me, her eyebrow already lifted in disbelief. I didn't know how I was supposed to tell her things like
love
and
forever
, and it struck me just then that I didn't want to. That sort of truth was something that you had to earn.

“You're what? In love?” The way Mom said it cheapened it. “You're seventeen, Grace. How old is he? Eighteen? How long have you known him? Months. Look — you've never had a boyfriend before. You're in lust as much as anything else. Sleeping together doesn't mean you're in love. It means you're in lust.”

“You sleep with Dad. Aren't you two in love?”

Mom rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “We're
married
.”

Why was I even bothering? “This entire conversation will sound pretty stupid when Sam and I are visiting you at the old folks' home,” I said, coldly.

“Well, I sincerely hope it does,” Mom replied. And then she smiled, lightly, like the conversation was just casual chatter. Like we'd just made arrangements to go to a mother-daughter dance. “But I doubt we'll even remember it. Sam will probably be nothing more than a prom picture. I remember what I was like at seventeen and, believe me, it was not love that was in the air. Luckily for me, I had some common sense. Otherwise you might've had more siblings. I remember, when I was your age —”

“Mom!” I snapped, my entire face hot. “I am not you. I am
nothing like you
. You have
no idea
what goes on in my head, or how my brain works, or whether or not I'm in love with Sam or vice versa. So don't even try to have this conversation with me. Don't even — ugh. You know what? I'm done.”

I snatched my forbidden phone from where it sat on the kitchen counter, got my coat, and stomped out. I slid the back door shut behind me and walked off the deck without looking back. Snapping at Mom should have made me feel guilty, but I couldn't feel one ounce of contrition.

I missed Sam so badly that it hurt.

• SAM •

By the time I got done at the store, the day was freakishly warm, even warmer than the day before. The sun was warm on my cheeks when I got back to Beck's house and opened the car door. I stepped out and stretched my hands as far as they could go, closing my eyes until I felt like I was falling. In between gusts of wind, the air around me felt like the same temperature as my body, and it made it seem like I had no skin at all, like I was suspended, a spirit.

Birds, convinced that this afternoon meant that fickle spring had finally returned for good, shrilled excited love songs to one another from the bushes around the house. A song welled in me, too, the lyrics silent as I mouthed them, trying them out.

It reminded me of the warm spring days that used to unfold me from my wolf form, days when I was so happy to get my fingers back.

It seemed so wrong to be alone right now.

I would check the shed again. I hadn't seen Cole yet today, but I knew he had to be human somewhere, with this kind of weather. And it was warm enough that at least one of the other new wolves might have changed as well. And it was something practical to do instead of listlessly wandering inside the house, waiting for tomorrow and wondering if I really was going to the studio, and if Grace was really coming with me.

Plus, Grace would've wanted me to watch for Olivia.

I knew someone was inside the shed as soon as I got within a few feet of it; the door was ajar, and I heard the sound of movement from inside. My sense of smell was nowhere near what it had been when I was a wolf, but my nose still conveyed to me that whoever was inside was one of us; the musky scent of the pack was only partially obscured by the scent of human sweat. As a wolf, I would've been able to tell exactly which pack member it was. Now, as a human, I was blind.

So I walked to the door and knocked the back of my knuckles on it three times. “Cole? All decent in there?” I asked.

“Sam?” Cole's voice sounded — relieved? It seemed odd for him. I heard the scrabbling of claws, then a groan. I felt the fine hairs on the back of my neck prickle to attention.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, cautiously pushing the door open. Inside the shed, it absolutely reeked of wolf, as if the walls
bled with the smell. First I saw Cole, clothed, standing by the bins, one of his knuckles pressed against his lip in an uncertain gesture. And then I followed his eyes to the corner of the shed and saw a guy crumpled there, half covered by a bright blue polar fleece blanket.

“Who is
that
?” I whispered.

Cole removed his knuckle and looked away from both me and the figure in the corner.

“Victor,” he said flatly.

At the name, the guy turned his face to look at us. Light brown hair, knotted and curled around his cheekbones. Maybe a few years older than me. My mind instantly went to the last time I'd seen him. Sitting in the back of Beck's Tahoe, wrists zip tied, looking at me. His lips silently forming the word
help
.

“Do you know each other?” I asked.

Victor shut his eyes, his shoulders shuddering, and then he said, “I — hold on —”

While I blinked, he shook out of his skin and into a pale gray wolf with dark facial markings, faster than I'd ever seen any of us shift. It was not quite effortless, but it worked naturally, like a snake rubbing out of its skin or a cicada stepping out of the brittle shell of its former self. No gagging. No pain. None of the agony of every other shift I'd ever witnessed or experienced.

The wolf shook itself, fluffing its coat, staring balefully up at me with Victor's brown eyes. I started to move away from the door, to give him an easy exit, but Cole said, voice strange, “Don't bother.”

And then, as if on cue, the wolf sat down on its haunches
hard, ears trembling. He yawned, whining as he did, and then his whole body shook violently.

Cole and I turned our faces away at the same time, just as Victor gasped audibly, shifting back into his human form. Just like that. In and out. My mind couldn't quite grasp it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him tug up the blanket. More for the warmth than for the privacy, I was guessing.

Victor said, softly, “God
dammit
.”

I looked at Cole, who had an utterly blank expression on his face, one that I was learning accompanied anything that mattered.

“Victor?” I said. “I'm Sam. Do you remember me?”

He was crouched on the floor now, rocking back and forth on his heels like he wasn't sure if he should sit or kneel. That and the shape of his mouth told me that he was in pain. He said, “I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe.” He shot a glance at Cole, and Cole winced slightly.

“Well, I'm Beck's son,” I said. Close enough to the truth and faster to spit out. “I'll help you, if I can.”

• COLE •

Sam was handling Victor a lot better than I had. I'd only stood and stared by the door, waiting to let him out if he managed to stay a wolf.

“That was … How do you shift that quickly?” Sam asked him.

Victor grimaced, glancing from Sam to me and back to Sam again. I could tell it was taking a big effort on his part to keep
his voice steady. “It's worse from wolf to me. From me to wolf is easy. Too easy, man. I keep shifting back even though it's warm. That's what does it, right?”

“This is the hottest day we've had so far,” Sam answered. “It's not supposed to be this warm the rest of the week.”

“God,” Victor said, “I didn't think it would be like this.”

Sam looked at me, as if I had anything to do with anything. He stepped around me to get a folding chair, then sat down across from Victor. Suddenly, he reminded me of Beck. Everything about him was saying
interest
and
concern
and
sincerity
, from the curve of his shoulders to the lowering of his eyebrows over his heavy-lidded eyes. I couldn't remember if that was how Sam had first looked at me. I couldn't remember the first thing I'd said to him.

“Is this the first time you've shifted back?” he asked Victor.

Victor nodded. “That I can remember, anyway.” He stared at me then, and I was very aware of my human body. At how I was just standing there, not in pain, not a wolf, just standing there.

Sam went on, like the whole thing was just a walk in the park, perfectly normal, “Are you hungry?”

“I —” Victor started. “Wait. I'm s —”

And he slid back to a wolf.

I could tell from the shock on Sam's face and the way he pressed a finger to one of his eyebrows that this wasn't normal, which made me feel a little better about finding the entire situation completely messed up. Victor the wolf stood there, eyeing the doorway and me and Sam, ears pricked and posture stiff.

I stared at Victor, remembering sitting in the hotel room after I'd met Beck, remembered saying,
You ready for the next big thing, Vic?

“Cole,” Sam said, not looking away from him. “How many times? How long have you been here?”

I shrugged, trying to look casual about it. “A half hour. He's been going back and forth the entire time. Is this normal?”

“No,” Sam said emphatically, still looking at the wolf, who had crouched down close to the floor, staring back at him. “No, this isn't normal. If it's warm enough for him to stay human, he should be able to stay human for longer. Not this — I mean …” He trailed off as the wolf stood back up again.

Sam moved his knees away from Victor, in case he wanted to bolt, but suddenly Victor's ears flagged, and he began to tremble again. We both turned our faces away until he had changed into a human and had time to pull a blanket back over himself.

Victor groaned, lightly, and pressed his forehead into his hand.

Sam turned back around. “Does it hurt?”

“Ugh. Not a lot.” He paused, shrugged his shoulders up by his ears, and kept them there. “God, I've been doing this all day. I just want to know when it will stop.” He wouldn't look at me; his truthfulness was for Sam.

Sam said, “I wish I had an answer for you, Victor. Something is keeping you from staying in one form, and I don't know what it is.”

Victor asked, “Is this the best it gets? I mean, I'm caught, right? This is what I get for listening to you, Cole. I should've figured out a long time ago that this is always how it goes.”

But he still wasn't looking at me.

I remembered that day back in the hotel. Victor was crashing badly from one of his highs. These new lows of his were so
low that even I, in my studied disinterest, could see that one day he wouldn't be able to climb back out of them. I'd been trying to help him when I convinced him to become a wolf with me. It wasn't entirely selfish. It wasn't just because I didn't want to try it alone.

If Sam hadn't been around, I would've told Victor that.

Sam knocked Victor's shoulder with a fist. “Hey. It's different when you're new. Everybody starts out unstable, and then we even out. Yeah, it's crap now, and you're taking crap to a whole new level, but when it gets really warm, this'll be behind you.”

Victor looked bleakly at Sam, a face I'd seen a million times before because I had created it. Finally, he looked at me. “This should be you, you bastard,” he said, and then he uncurled into a wolf again.

Sam threw up his hands, his palms open like an entreaty, and said, utterly frustrated,
“How — how — how …”
I realized how carefully he had been controlling his features and voice. It made my mind twist, almost as much as seeing Victor shift, to hear Sam go from oozing calm to being a hot mess. It meant that Sam had been perfectly capable of presenting a benevolent mask to me all along, but that he had
chosen
not to. Somehow it changed the entire way I thought of him.

Maybe that's what made me speak up. “Something is overriding the temperature,” I said. “That's what I think. The heat is making him become human, but something else is telling his body to shift to wolf.”

Sam looked at me. Not disbelieving, but not believing, either. “What else could do that?” he asked.

I looked at Victor, despising him for making this complicated. How hard would it have been to follow me into the wolf and back out, like he was supposed to? I wished I'd never come to the damned shed.

“Something in his brain chemistry?” I said. “Victor has a pituitary problem. Maybe the way it imbalances his levels is interfering with how he shifts.”

Sam gave me a weird look then, but before he could say anything, the pale wolf's legs began to quiver. I looked away and then Victor was human again. Just like that.

• SAM •

I felt like I was watching the transformation of two people: Victor to wolf, and Cole to someone else. I was the only one standing here, staying the same.

I couldn't bring myself to leave Victor by himself like this, and so I stayed, and Cole stayed, too, minutes turning into hours while we waited for him to stabilize.

“There's no way to reverse it,” Victor said flatly as the day began to ebb, not really a question.

I tried not to stiffen as my mind flashed back through the winter before I had rejoined Grace. Lying on the forest floor, fingers dug into the ground, head splitting open. Standing ankle deep in the snow, throwing up until I couldn't stand. Convulsed with fever, eyes shut against the agony of the light, praying for death.

“No,” I said.

Cole's eyes were sharp on me, hearing my lie. I wanted to ask him,
If this is your friend, why am I the one sitting here next to him instead of you?

As we sat there, waiting for Victor's next transformation, cooler air and dimming light stole in through the open door, evidence of the temperature dropping as the sun went down.

“Victor, I don't know how to make you stay human right now,” I said. “But I think it's probably cold enough that if I got you outside, you'd probably stay a wolf. Do you want that? Do you want a break from shifting, even if it's not as you?”

Victor said, “Oh my God, yes,” with such feeling that it stung.

“And who knows,” I added. “Maybe once you get more stable, you'll —”

But there was no point finishing the sentence because Victor was already a wolf again, scrambling back from his proximity to me. “Cole!” I said hurriedly, jumping up. Cole jerked to life, pulling open the door. I was rewarded with a gush of cold air that made me wince, and the wolf shot out into the woods, tail low and ears flattened against his head.

I joined Cole in the doorway, watching Victor dart through the trees before stopping a safe distance away to gaze at us. Bare branches above his head trembled in the fitful breeze, touching the tips of his ears, but he didn't look away from us. We watched each other for several long minutes.

He stayed a wolf. I thought this feeling inside me was relief for him, but it pinched. I was already thinking about the next warm day and what would happen then.

I realized that Cole still stood beside me, his head cocked to one side, eyes on Victor.

Without thinking, I said, “If that's how you treat your friends when they need you, I'd hate to see how you treat other people.”

Cole didn't exactly smile, but the edges of his mouth tightened into a vague expression that lived somewhere between contempt and disinterest. He didn't look away from Victor, but there was no compassion in his eyes.

I fought the desire to say something else,
any
thing else to get him to reply. I wanted him to hurt for Victor.