Another pause before Beck answered, sounding tired and unlike himself.
“Just leave me alone, Ulrik, okay? Just leave me alone.”
The next day Beck told me I didn’t have to do my school-work if I didn’t want to, and he went driving by himself. I waited until he was gone, and then I did the work, anyway.
Now, I wished more than anything that Beck was here with me. I turned the key in the lock, knowing what I’d find — a box stuffed with months’ worth of envelopes and probably a slip to collect more from behind the desk.
But when I opened the box, there were two lonely letters and some junk fliers.
Someone had been here. Recently.
“Do you mind if I go by Olivia’s?” Grace asked, climbing into the car, bringing in a rush of cold air with her. In the passenger seat, I recoiled, and she hurriedly shut the door behind her. She said, “Sorry about that. It got really cold, didn’t it? Anyway, I don’t want to, you know, actually go inside. Just drive by. Rachel said that a wolf had been scratching around Olivia’s house. So maybe we could pick up a trail near there?”
“Go for it,” I said. Taking her hand from where it rested, I kissed her fingertips before replacing it on the wheel. I slouched down in my seat and got my translation of Rilke I’d brought to read while I waited for her.
Grace’s lips lifted slightly at my touch, but she didn’t say anything as she pulled out of the lot. I watched her face, etched into concentration, mouth set in a firm line, and waited to see if she was ready to say what was on her mind. When she didn’t, I picked up the volume of Rilke and slouched down in my seat.
“What are you reading?” Grace asked, after a long space of silence.
I was fairly certain that pragmatic Grace would not have heard of Rilke. “Poetry.”
Grace sighed and gazed out at the dead white sky that seemed to press down on the road before us. “I don’t get poetry.” She seemed to realize her statement might offend, because she hurriedly added, “Maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff.”
“You’re probably just reading it wrong,” I said. I’d seen Grace’s to-be-read pile: nonfiction, books about things, not about how things were described. “You have to listen to the pattern of the words, not just what they’re saying. Like a song.” When she frowned, I paged through my book and scooted closer to her on the bench seat, so that our hip bones were pressed together.
Grace glanced down at the page. “That’s not even in English!”
“Some of them are,” I said. I sighed, remembering. “Ulrik was using Rilke to teach me German. And now I’m going to use it to teach you poetry.”
“Clearly a foreign language,” Grace said.
“Clearly,” I agreed. “Listen to this. ‘Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe.’”
Grace’s face was puzzled. She chewed her lip in a cute, frustrated sort of way. “So what’s it mean?”
“That’s not the point. The point is what it sounds like. Not just what it means.” I struggled to find words for what I meant. What I wanted to do was remind her of how she’d fallen in love with me as a wolf. Without words. Seeing beyond the obvious meaning of my wolf skin to what was inside. To whatever it was that made me Sam, always.
“Read it again,” Grace said.
I read it again.
She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel. “It sounds sad,” she said. “You’re smiling — I must be right.”
I flipped to the English translation. “‘What then would I do with my lips? With my night? With my day? I have no’ — bah. I don’t like this translation. I’m going to get my other one from the house tomorrow. But yeah, it’s sad.”
“Do I get a prize?”
“Maybe,” I said, and slid my hand underneath one of hers, twining our fingers. Without looking away from the road, she lifted our tangled fingers to her mouth. She kissed my index finger and then put it between her teeth, biting down softly.
She glanced over at me, her eyes holding an unspoken challenge.
I was completely caught. I wanted to tell her to pull over right then because I needed to kiss her.
But then I saw a wolf.
“Grace. Stop — stop the car!”
She jerked her head around, trying to see what I saw, but the wolf had already jumped the ditch on the side of the road and headed into the sparse woods.
“Grace, stop,” I said. “Jack.”
She hit the brakes; the Bronco shimmied back and forth as she guided it to the shoulder. I didn’t wait for the car to stop. Just shoved open the door and stumbled out, my ankles crying out as I slammed onto the frozen ground. I scanned the woods in front of me. Clouds of sharp-smelling smoke drifted through the trees, mingling with the heavy white clouds that pushed down from above; someone was burning leaves on the other side of the woods. Through the smoke, I saw the blue-gray wolf hesitating in the woods ahead of me, not sure he was being pursued. Cold air clawed at my skin, and the wolf looked over his shoulder at me. Hazel eyes. Jack. It had to be.
And then he was gone, just like that, plunging into the smoke. I jumped after him, taking the ditch by the side of the road in one leap and running over the cold, hard stubble of the dying winter woods.
As I leaped into the forest, I heard Jack crashing ahead of me, more interested in escape than stealth. I could smell the stink of fear as he bolted ahead of me. The wood smoke was heavier here, and it was hard to tell where the smoke ended and the sky began, snared in the bare branches overhead. Jack was half-invisible in front of me, faster and nimbler than me on his four legs, and impervious to the cold.
My fingers, half-numb, stabbed with pain, and cold pinched the skin of my neck and twisted my gut. I was losing sight of the wolf ahead of me; the one inside me seemed closer all of a sudden.
“Sam!” Grace shouted. She grabbed the back of my shirt, pulling me to a stop, and threw her coat around me. I was coughing, gasping for air and trying to swallow the wolf rising up in me. Wrapping her arms around me as I shuddered, she said, “What were you thinking? What were you —”
She didn’t finish. She pulled me back through the woods, both of us stumbling, my knees buckling. I slowed, especially when we got to the ditch, but Grace didn’t falter, hooking my elbow to haul me up to the Bronco.
Inside, I buried my cold face into the hot skin of her neck and let her wrap her arms around me as I shook uncontrollably. I was acutely aware of the tips of my fingers, of each little pin-prick of pain throbbing individually.
“What were you doing?” Grace demanded, squeezing me hard enough to force the breath out of me. “Sam, you can’t do that! It’s freezing out there! What did you think you were going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said into her neck, balling my hands into fists between us to get them warm. I didn’t know. I just knew that Jack was an unknown, and that I didn’t know what kind of person he was, what sort of a wolf he was. “I don’t know,” I said again.
“Sam, it’s not worth it,” Grace said, and she pressed her face, hard, against my head. “What if you’d changed?” Her fingers were tight on the sleeves of my shirt, and now her voice was breathy. “What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” I said, truthfully. I sat back, finally warm enough to stop shivering. I pressed my hands against the heating vents. “I’m sorry.”
For a long moment, there wasn’t any sound but the uneven rumbling of the idling engine. Then Grace said, “Isabel talked to me today. She’s Jack’s sister.” She paused. “She said she’d talked to him.”
I didn’t say anything, just curled my fingers tighter over the vents as if I could physically grab the heat.
“But you can’t just go running after him. It’s getting too cold, and it’s not worth the risk. Promise me you won’t do anything like that again?”
I dropped my eyes. I couldn’t look at her when she sounded like she did now. I said, “What about Isabel?
Tell me what she said.”
Grace sighed. “I don’t know. She knows Jack’s alive. She thinks the wolves have something to do with it. She thinks I know something. What should we do?”
I pressed my forehead against my hands. “I don’t know. I wish Beck were here.”
I thought about the two lonely envelopes in the post office box and the wolf in the woods and my still-tingling fingertips. Maybe Beck was here.
Hope hurt more than the cold.
Maybe it wasn’t Jack I should’ve been looking for.
Once I’d let myself think that Beck might still be human, the idea possessed me. I slept badly, my mind skipping over all the ways I could try to track him down. Doubts crowded in there, too — it could’ve been any of the pack members that had gotten the mail or bought milk — but I couldn’t help it. Hope won over all of it. At breakfast the next morning, I chatted with Grace about her calculus homework — it looked entirely incomprehensible to me — and about her rich, hyper friend Rachel and about whether or not turtles had teeth, but really, what I was thinking about was Beck.
After I dropped Grace off at school, I tried for a brief moment to pretend that I wasn’t heading straight back to Beck’s house.
He wasn’t there. I already knew that.
But it couldn’t hurt to just check again.
On the way over, I kept thinking about what Grace had said the other night about the electricity and the milk in the fridge. Maybe, just maybe, Beck would be there, relieving me of the responsibility of Jack and eliminating the unbearable weight of being the last one of my kind. Even if the house was still empty, I could still get some more clothing and my other copy of Rilke and walk through the rooms, smelling the memories of kinship.
I remembered three short years ago, back when more of us were in our prime, able to return to our real, human forms at the first kiss of spring’s warmth. The house was full then — Paul, Shelby, Ulrik, Beck, Derek, and even crazy Salem were human at the same time. Spiraling through insanity together made it seem more sane.
I slowed as I headed down Beck’s road, my heart jumping as I saw a vehicle pulling into his driveway, and then sinking when I saw that it was an unfamiliar Tahoe. Brake lights glowed dully in the gray day, and I rolled down my window to try and catch a bit of scent. Before I’d caught anything, I heard the driver’s-side door open and shut on the far side of the SUV. Then the breeze played the driver’s scent right to me, clean and vaguely smoky.
Beck. I parked the Bronco on the side of the road and jumped out, grinning as I saw him come around the side of the SUV. His eyes widened for a moment, and then he grinned, too, an expression that his smile-lined face fell into easily.
“Sam!” Beck’s voice held something weird — surprise, I think. His grin widened. “Sam, thank God. Come here!”
He hugged me and patted my back in that touchy-feely way that he always managed to pull off without seeming gropey. Must’ve come from being a lawyer; he knew how to schmooze people. I couldn’t help but notice that he was wider around the middle; not from fat. I don’t know how many shirts he must’ve been wearing underneath his coat to keep himself warm enough to be human, but I saw the mismatched collars of at least two. “Where have you been?”
“I —” I was about to tell him the whole story in a nutshell of getting shot, meeting Grace, seeing Jack, but I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t. Certainly it wasn’t because of Beck, who was watching me earnestly with his intense blue eyes. It was something, some strange scent, faint but familiar, that was making my muscles clench and pasting my tongue to the top of my mouth. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this. My answer came out more guarded than I’d intended. “I’ve been around. Not here. You weren’t here, either, I noticed.”
“Nope,” Beck admitted. He headed around to the back of the Tahoe. I noticed then that the van was filthy — thick with dirt. Dirt that smelled of somewhere else, stuffed up into the wheel wells and splattered along the fenders. “Salem and I were up in Canada.”
So that’s why I hadn’t seen Salem anywhere recently. Salem had always been problematic: He wasn’t quite right as a human, so he wasn’t quite right when he was a wolf, either. I was pretty sure Salem was the one who had dragged Grace from her swing. How Beck had managed a car trip with him was beyond me. Why he managed a car trip with him was even further beyond me.
“You smell like hospital.” Beck squinted at me. “And you look like hell.”
“Thanks,” I said. Guess I was telling after all. I really didn’t think the hospital smell could still linger after a week, but Beck’s wrinkled nose said otherwise. “I was shot.”
Beck pushed his fingers against his lips and spoke through them. “God. Where? Nowhere that’d make me blush, I hope.”
I gestured to my neck. “Nowhere near that interesting.”
“Is everything okay?”
He meant were we still okay? Did anybody know? There’s a girl. She’s amazing. She knows, but it’s okay. I tried out the words in my head, but there wasn’t any way to make them sound all right. I just kept hearing Beck tell me how we couldn’t trust our secret with anyone but us. So I just shrugged. “As okay as we ever are.”
And then my stomach dropped out from under me. He was going to smell Grace in the house.
“God, Sam,” Beck said. “Why didn’t you call my cell? When you were shot?”
“I don’t have your number. For this year’s phone.” Every year, we got new phones, since we didn’t use them over the winter.
Another look that I didn’t like. Sympathy. No, pity. I pretended not to see it.
Beck fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “Here, take this. It’s Salem’s. Like he’s going to use it anymore.”
“Bark once for yes, twice for no?”
Beck grinned. “Exactly. Anyway, it’s got my number in its brain already. So use it. You might have to buy a charger for it.”
I thought he was about to ask me where I’d been staying, and I didn’t want to answer. So instead I jerked my chin toward the Tahoe. “So why all the dirt? Why the trip?” I knocked a fist on the side of the car, and to my surprise, something knocked back inside. More like a thud. Like a kick. I raised an eyebrow. “Is Salem in here?”
“He’s back in the woods. He changed in Canada, the bastard, I had to bring him back like that and he sheds like it’s going out of style. And you know, I think he’s crazy.”
Beck and I both laughed at that — as if that needed to be said.
I looked back to the place where I’d felt the thump against my fist. “So what’s thumping?”
Beck raised his eyebrows. “The future. Want to see?”
I shrugged and stepped back so he could open the doors to the back. If I thought I was prepared for what was inside, I was wrong in about forty different ways.
The backseats of the Tahoe were folded down to make more room, and inside the extended trunk were three bodies. Humans. One was sitting awkwardly against the back of the seats, one was curled into a fetal position, and the other lay crookedly alongside the door. Their hands were all zip tied.
I stared, and the boy sitting against the seats stared back, his eyes bloodshot. My age, maybe a little younger. Red was smeared along his arms, and I saw now that it continued all over the inside of the vehicle. And then I smelled them: the metallic stink of blood, the sweaty odor of fear, the earthy scent that matched the dirt on the outside of the Tahoe. And wolf, wolf, every where — Beck, Salem, and unfamiliar wolves.
The girl curled into a ball was shuddering, and when I squinted at the boy, staring back at me in the darkness, I saw that he was shivering, too, his fingers clenching and unclenching one another in a tangled knot of fear.
“Help,” he said.
I fell back, several feet into the driveway, my knees weak beneath me. I covered my mouth, then came closer to stare at them. The boy’s eyes pleaded.
I was vaguely aware that Beck was sta
nding nearby, just watching me, but I couldn’t stop looking back at those kids. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “No. No. These kids have been bitten. Beck, they’ve been bitten.”
I spun, laced my hands behind my head, spun back to look at the three of them again. The boy shuddered violently, but his eyes never left mine. Help. “Oh, hell, Beck. What have you done? What the hell have you done?”
“Are you finished yet?” Beck asked calmly.
I turned again, squeezing my eyes shut and then open again. “Finished? How can I be finished? Beck, these kids are changing.”
“I’m not going to talk to you until you’re done.”
“Beck, are you seeing this?” I leaned against the Tahoe, looking in at the girl, fingers clawed into the bloodstained carpet of the back. She was maybe eighteen, wearing a tight tie-dyed shirt. I pushed off, backing away, as if that would make them disappear. “What is going on?”
In the back of the car, the boy began to groan, pushing his face into his bound wrists. His skin was dusky as he began to change in earnest.
I turned away. I couldn’t watch. Not remembering what it was like, those first days. I just kept my fingers laced behind my head and pressed my arms against my ears like a vise grip, saying, Oh hell oh hell oh hell, over and over until I convinced myself I couldn’t hear his wails. They weren’t even calls for help; maybe he already sensed that Beck’s house was too isolated for anyone to hear him. Or maybe he’d given up.
“Will you help me take them inside?” Beck asked.
I spun to face him, seeing a wolf stepping from the too-large zip ties and a shirt, growling and starting back as tie-dye-girl moaned at his feet. In an instant, Beck had leaped into the back of the SUV, lithe and animal, and had thrown the wolf onto its back. He grabbed its jaws with one hand and stared into the wolf’s eyes. “Don’t even think of fighting,” he snarled at the wolf. “You aren’t in charge here.”
Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) Page 14