Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Dirt kicked up around them, scattershot, and before I understood what it was, Beck fell. He scrambled back up again, biting at his spine, falling again. There was another crackle, barely audible over the helicopter, and this time, he went down and stayed down. His body was a wreck, in pieces.

  I couldn’t think about it. Beck. He was jerking, snapping, scrabbling without getting up. Not shifting. Dying. His body was too ruined to heal itself.

  I couldn’t look.

  I couldn’t look away.

  Sam jerked to a halt, and I saw his mouth form a whimper that I couldn’t hear from here. We were both transfixed; Beck could not die. He was a giant.

  He was dead.

  Taking advantage of Sam’s distraction, Shelby hurled herself against his side, shoving him to the ground. They rolled and came up painted with mud. I tried to send Sam images, telling him to shake her off and get on the move, but he wasn’t listening, either because he couldn’t see anything but Beck or because Shelby was taking all his concentration.

  I should have killed her.

  Ahead of them, the helicopter was still flying slowly after the wolves. There was another explosion of dirt, and then another, but no wolf fell this time. I only had a moment to think Maybe Beck will be the only one when a wolf in the middle of the pack fell mid-stride, rolling and twitching. It took several long minutes for the two guns in the helicopter to finish the job.

  This was a disaster.

  I’d led the wolves out of the woods to be picked off slowly, one at a time, death in seven slow bullets.

  The helicopter banked. I would have loved to think that it was abandoning the chase, but I knew it was just coming back around to get a better shot on the wolves again. The pack was badly scattered from fear; with Sam fighting with Shelby, they had virtually ceased all forward movement. The wolves were so close to the woods, though. They could almost make it to cover, if they could just move. They just needed some moments without that helicopter terrifying them.

  But we didn’t have moments. And with Sam and Shelby separated from the rest of the pack, I knew that they were the next to go.

  I could still see Beck’s death.

  I couldn’t let that happen to Sam.

  I didn’t even think. My shadow, stretched out in front of me, dug into the pocket of my cargo pants at the same time I did. I flipped out the syringe, pulled the cap off with my teeth, and jabbed it into my vein. No time to consider it. No time to feel noble. Just — a rapid, jagged surge of pain through me and then the silent push of the adrenaline helping speed the shift. I was a world of agony and then, I was a wolf, and I was running.

  Shelby. Kill Shelby. Save Sam.

  That was all I had to remember, and the words were already sliding away when I hit Shelby with everything I had. I was nothing but my jaws and my snarl. My teeth snagged around her eye just like I’d learned from her. She twisted and snapped, knowing that this time I was playing for keeps. There was no anger in my attack. Just relentless determination. This was what our fight should have been earlier.

  Blood filled my mouth, either Shelby’s or mine, from my tongue. I tossed an image to Sam: Get out. I wanted him up with Grace. I wanted him away from me, back with the pack, one of many instead of a solitary, nonmoving target.

  Why wouldn’t he leave me? GET OUT. I couldn’t make it any more of a request. There were ways to convince him, but my mind no longer catalogued them. Then an image from Grace came back to us. The pack, directionless, scattering, the woods so close, but so far out of reach without him. The helicopter was returning. Beck was dead. They were terrified. Him. They needed him. She needed him.

  He didn’t want to leave me behind.

  I let go of Shelby to snarl at him with everything in me. His ears flagged, and then he was gone.

  Everything in me wished I was going with him.

  Shelby lurched to follow, but I tore her down again. We rolled across the grit and the rocks. I had dirt in my mouth and eyes. She was furious. Over and over, she sent me the same images, almost overpowering me with the weight of her fear, jealousy, anger. Again and again, she sent me images. Her killing Sam. Her killing Grace. Her scrabbling her way to the top of the pack.

  I grabbed on to her throat. There was no joy in this revenge. She twisted, but I hung on, because I had to.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  • GRACE •

  The pack was completely disoriented. At first, my wolf had sent me images, and strangely enough, so had the boy who ran with us. Now, we had neither, and I had to regroup them as best as I could, but I wasn’t him. I had only just learned to be a wolf myself. He needed to be the one to pull them together. But his own misery was humming too loudly in my head to allow room for anything else. Beck, Beck, Beck, which now, somehow, I understood was the name of the first wolf to fall. My wolf wanted to go back to Beck’s body, but I had already seen the images passed to me. His body destroyed, little to support that he was ever a living creature. He was gone.

  The thundering vehicle, black against the sky, was approaching again, deafening. It was a leisurely predator, taking its time to cover us.

  I frantically passed my wolf an image of the pack stabilizing under our guidance, escaping into the cover of the trees. All the while I darted around the wolves closest to me, goading them into moving again, pushing them toward the trees. As my wolf loped to meet me, his images were a wall of sights and sounds that I couldn’t interpret. I caught one in a hundred. None of them made sense, strung together. And still, here came the monster from over the trees.

  My wolf sent me an urgent, scattered thought.

  Cole. Shelby.

  And maybe because of the force of the thought, or maybe because the sun was warming me and I felt some shadow of someone else I used to be inside me, I knew who he meant.

  I looked back over my shoulder, still half running sideways to keep from losing momentum. There, sure enough, were Cole and Shelby, locked in a fight breathtaking in its savagery. They were almost too far away for me to see clearly, way down on the flat slope we were on. But there wasn’t anything to block my view when the black creature roared through the air behind them.

  There was a series of pops, barely distinguishable from the rumbling above, and then Shelby released Cole.

  He scrambled back from her as she lashed out, directionless. Right before she crumpled, she turned toward me. Her face was a red mess, or perhaps it was a red mess where her face used to be.

  The helicopter roared low.

  A second later, Cole fell, too.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  • 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.

  get out of there

  I texted back.

  when you do

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  • 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.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  • 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 terrib
le 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.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  • 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.