I wrote Get a job. He wrote Keep loving my job. I wrote Stay madly in love. He wrote Stay human.
“Because I’ll always be madly in love,” he said, looking at his index card instead of my face.
I kept looking at him, his eyes hidden behind his lashes, until he lifted them back up to me.
“So are you going to put Pick a college on there again?” he asked.
“Are you?” I asked back, keeping my voice light. The question felt loaded — we were edging into the first conversation that really addressed what life would look like this side of winter, now that Sam could live a real life. The closest college to Mercy Falls was in Duluth, an hour away, and all of my other, pre-Sam choices were even farther.
“I asked first.”
“Sure,” I said, sounding glib rather than carefree. I scribbled down Pick a college in a hand that looked completely different from the rest of my list. “Now, are you?” My heart was unexpectedly thrumming with something like panic.
But instead of answering, Sam stood and went to the kitchen. I swiveled to watch him put on the teakettle. He brought down two mugs from the cabinet over the stove; for some reason, the familiarity of this easy movement filled me with affection. I fought the urge to go stand behind him and wrap my arms around his chest.
“Beck wanted me to go to law school,” Sam said, fingering the edge of my favorite robin’s-egg-blue mug. “He never told me, but I heard him tell Ulrik.”
“It’s hard to imagine you as a lawyer,” I said.
Sam smiled a self-deprecating smile and shook his head. “I can’t imagine myself as a lawyer, either. I can’t imagine myself as anything yet, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds … terrible. Like I have no ambition.” Again, his eyebrows drew together, pensive. “But this idea of a future is really new to me. Until this month, I never thought I could go to college. I don’t want to rush into it.”
I must have been just staring at him, because he added, hurriedly, “But I don’t want you to have to wait, Grace. I don’t want to keep you from going ahead because I can’t make up my mind.”
Feeling childish, I said, “We could go someplace together.”
The kettle whistled. Sam pulled it from the heat as he said, “I somehow doubt that the same college will be ideal for a budding math genius and a boy in love with moody poetry. I suppose it’s possible.” He stared out the kitchen window at the frozen gray woods. “I don’t know if I can really leave, though. At all. Who will take care of the pack?”
“I thought that was why the new wolves were made,” I said. The words sounded strange in my mouth. Callous. As if the pack dynamic were an artificial, engineered thing, which of course it wasn’t. Nobody knew what the newcomers were like. Nobody but Beck, of course, but he wasn’t talking.
Sam rubbed his forehead, pressing his palm over his eyes; he did it a lot since he’d come back. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I know that’s what they’re for.”
“He would’ve wanted you to go,” I said. “And I still think we could find a school together.”
Sam looked at me, his fingers still pressed into his temple as if he’d forgotten they were there. “I’d like that.” He paused. “I’d really like — I’d like to meet the new wolves and see what kind of people they are, though. It’ll make me feel better. Maybe I’ll go after that. After I’m sure everything’s taken care of here.”
I put a jagged line through Pick a college. “I’ll wait for you,” I said.
“Not forever,” Sam said.
“No, if you turn out to be useless, I’ll go without you.” I tapped my pencil on my teeth. “I think we should look around for the new wolves tomorrow. And Olivia. I’ll call Isabel and ask her about the wolves she saw in her woods.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Sam said. He returned to his list at the table and added something to it. Then he smiled at me and spun the index card so that I could read it right side up.
Listen to Grace.
• SAM •
Later, I thought of the things I could have added to the list of resolutions, things I’d wanted back before I realized what being a wolf meant for my future. Things like Write a novel and Find a band and Get a degree in obscure poetry in translation and Travel the world. It felt indulgent and fanciful to be considering those things now after reminding myself for so long that they were impossible.
I tried to imagine myself filling out a college application. Writing a synopsis. Tacking a sign saying DRUMMERS WANTED on the corkboard opposite Beck’s post office box. The words danced in my head, dazzling in their sudden nearness. I wanted to add them to my index card of resolutions, but I just … couldn’t.
That night, while Grace showered, I got out the card and looked at it again. And I wrote:
Believe in my cure.
• COLE •
I was human.
I was bleary, exhausted, confused. I didn’t know where I was. I knew I’d lost more time since I’d last been awake; I must’ve shifted back to a wolf again. Groaning, I rolled onto my back and clenched and unclenched my fists, trying out my strength.
The early morning forest was absolutely freezing, mist hanging in the air, turning everything light gold. Close to me, the damp trunks of pine trees jutted from the haze, black and severe. Within a few feet, they turned to pastel blue and then disappeared entirely in the white fog.
I was lying in the damn mud; I could feel my shoulders coated and crackling with it. When I lifted my hand to brush off my skin, my fingers were coated as well — a thin, anemic clay that looked like baby poop. My hands stank like the lake, and sure enough, I could hear water slowly lapping very close to my left side. I reached out a hand and felt more mud, then water on my fingertips.
How did I get here? I remembered running with the pack, then shifting, but I couldn’t remember making it to the shore. I must’ve shifted back again. To wolf, and then to human. The logic of it — or rather, the lack of logic — was maddening. Beck had told me the shifts would get more controlled, eventually. So where was the control?
I lay there, my muscles starting to tremble, the cold pinching my skin, and knew that I was going to shift back to a wolf soon. God, I was tired. Stretching my shaking hands above my head, I marveled at the smooth, unmarked skin of my arms, most of the scarring of my former life gone. I was being reborn in five-minute intervals.
I heard movement in the woods near me, and I turned my face, my cheek against the ground, to see if it belonged to a threat. Close by, a white wolf watched me, halfway behind a tree, her coat tinted gold and pink in the rising morning sun. Her green eyes, strangely pensive, met mine for a long moment. There was something about the way she was looking at me that felt unfamiliar. Human eyes without judgment or jealousy or pity or anger; just silent consideration.
I didn’t know how it made me feel.
“What are you looking at?” I snarled.
Without a sound, she slid into the mist.
My body jerked on its own accord, and my skin twisted into another form.
I didn’t know how much time I’d spent as a wolf this go-round. Was it minutes? Hours? Days? It was late morning. I didn’t feel human, but I wasn’t wolf, either. I hovered somewhere in between, my mind skating from memory to present and back to memory again, past and present equally lucid.
Somehow my brain darted from my seventeenth birthday to the night my heart stopped beating at Club Josephine. And that’s where it stayed. Not a night I would’ve chosen to relive.
This was who I was, before I was a wolf: I was Cole St. Clair, and I was NARKOTIKA.
Outside, the Toronto night was cold enough to ice over puddles and choke you with your own frigid breath, but inside the warehouse that was Club Josephine, it was hot as Hades, and it would be even hotter upstairs with the crowd.
And there was a hell of a crowd.
It was a huge deal, but it was a gig I didn’t even want to do. There wasn’t really any other kind these days. They all ran together until all
I could remember were gigs where I was high and gigs where I wasn’t and gigs where I had to pee the whole time. Even when I was playing the music on the stage, I was still chasing something — some idea of life and fame that I’d imagined for myself when I was sixteen — but I was losing interest in actually finding it.
While I was carrying in my keyboard, some girl who called herself Jackie gave us some pills I’d never seen before.
“Cole,” she whispered in my ear, as if she knew me instead of just my name. “Cole, this will take you places you haven’t been.”
“Baby,” I said, shifting my duffle so that I wouldn’t hit it on the rat’s maze of walls beneath the dance floor, “it takes a lot to do that these days.”
She smiled wide, teeth tinted yellow in the dull light, like she knew a secret. She smelled like lemons. “Don’t worry — I know what you need.”
I almost laughed, but instead I turned away, shouldering my way through a half-closed door. I looked over Jackie’s highlighted hair to shout, “Vic, c’mon!” I dropped my gaze back to her. “Are you on it?”
Jackie ran a finger up my arm, tracing around the tight sleeve of my T-shirt. “I’d be doing more than just smiling at you if I was.”
I reached down and touched her hand, tapping it until she understood what I meant and opened her palm. It was empty, but she reached into the pocket of her jeans to pull out a wad of plastic wrap. Inside, I saw a collection of electric-green pills, each stamped with two Ts. They got an A-plus for pretty factor, but who knew what they were.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. Normally I would’ve let it go to voicemail, but Jackie, standing two inches away from me, breathing my air, gave me an incentive to interrupt the conversation. I fished the phone out and put it against my ear. “Da.”
“Cole, I’m glad I got you.” It was Berlin, my agent. His voice was gritty and fast as always. “Listen to this: ‘NARKOTIKA takes the scene by force with their latest album, 13all. Brilliant but frenetic front man Cole St. Clair, thought by many to be losing his edge’ — sorry, man, that’s just what they said — ‘comes back stronger than ever with this release, proving that his first release, at sixteen, was no fluke. The three —’ are you listening, Cole?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you should. This is Elliot Fry saying this,” Berlin said. When I didn’t reply, he said, “Remember, Elliot Fry, who called you a surly, overactive toddler with a keyboard? That Elliot Fry. Now you guys are golden. Total turnaround. You’ve arrived, man.”
“Brilliant,” I said, and hung up on him. I turned to Jackie. “I’ll take the whole bag. Tell Victor. He’s my purse.”
So Victor paid for them. But I’d asked for them, so I guess it was still my fault.
Or maybe it was Jackie’s, for not telling us what they were, but that was Club Josephine for you. The place to find the new high before anyone knew how high it took you. Unnamed pills, brand-new powders, shining mysterious nectar in vials. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d made Victor do.
Back in the dim lounge, waiting to go on, Victor swallowed one of the green pills with a beer while Jeremy-my-body-is-a-temple watched him and drank green tea. I took a few of them with a Pepsi. I don’t know how many. I was feeling pretty bitter about the transaction by the time we got onto the stage. Jackie’s stuff was letting me down — I was feeling absolutely nothing. We started our set, and the crowd was wild, pressed up against the stage, arms outstretched, screaming our name.
Behind his drums, Victor screamed back at them. He was high as a kite, so whatever Jackie had sold us had done it for him. But then it never took as much to get Victor high. The strobes lit up bits and pieces of the audience — a neck here, a flash of lips, a thigh wrapped around another dancer. My head pounded in time with the beat that Victor laid down, my heart scudding double time. I reached up to slide my headset from my neck to my ears, my fingers brushing the hot skin of my neck, and girls began to scream my name.
There was this one girl my eyes kept finding for some reason, skin stark white against her black tank top. She howled my name as if it was physically painful for her, her pupils dilated so wide that her eyes looked black and depthless. She reminded me of Victor’s sister inexplicably, something about the curve of her nose or the way her jeans were slung so low, held up by nothing but the suggestion of hips, though there was no way Angie would be anywhere near a club like this.
Suddenly I didn’t feel like being there. There was no longer a rush at hearing my name screamed, and the music wasn’t as loud as my heart, so it hardly seemed important.
This was where I was supposed to come in, singing to break the nonstop take-you-to-the-moon pattern of Victor’s beat, but I didn’t feel like it, and Victor was too gone to notice. He was dancing in place, fixed to the ground only by the drumsticks in his hands.
Right in front of me, among a throng of bare midriffs and sweaty arms thrust into the air, there was a guy who didn’t move. Illuminated sporadically by the strobes and lasers, I was fascinated by how he stayed still, despite the press of bodies all around him. He held his ground and watched me, his eyebrows drawn down low over his eyes.
When I looked back at him, I remembered again that scent of home, far away from Toronto.
I wondered if he was real. I wondered if anything in this whole damned place was real.
He crossed his arms over his chest, watching me while my heart scrabbled to escape.
I should have been paying more attention to keeping it in my chest. My pulse sped, and then my heart burst free in an explosion of heat; my face smacked against the keyboard, which wailed out a pulse of sound. I grabbed for the keys with a hand that no longer belonged to me.
Lying on the stage, my cheek setting fire to the ground, I saw Victor giving me this withering look, like he’d finally noticed that I’d missed my cue.
And then I closed my eyes on the stage of Club Josephine.
I was done being NARKOTIKA. I was done being Cole St. Clair.
• GRACE •
“You know,” Isabel said, “when I told you to call me on the weekend, I didn’t mean for you to call me so we could go tramping through the trees in subfreezing temperatures.”
She frowned at me, looking pale and oddly at home in these cold spring woods, wearing a white parka with a fur-lined hood that framed her slender face and icy eyes, a sort of lost Nordic princess.
“It’s not subfreezing,” I said, knocking a clod of soft snow off the sole of my boot. “All things considered, it’s not bad. And you wanted to get out of the house, didn’t you?”
It really wasn’t bad. It was warm enough that the snow had mostly melted in the areas where the sun could reach, and it was only under the trees that patches remained. The few degrees of extra warmth lent a gentler look to the landscape, infusing the grays of winter with color. Though the cold still numbed the end of my nose, my fingers were snug inside their gloves.
“You should be leading the way, actually,” I said. “You’re the one who’s seen them here.” These woods that stretched behind Isabel’s parents’ house were unfamiliar to me. A lot of pines and some kind of straight-up-and-down, gray-barked trees that I didn’t know. I was sure Sam would’ve been able to identify them.
“Well, it’s not like I’ve gone jaunting in the woods after them before,” Isabel replied, but she walked a little faster until she was caught up with me and we were walking side by side, separated by a yard or two, stepping over fallen logs and underbrush. “I just know they always appeared on that side of the yard, and I’ve heard them howl in the direction of the lake.”
“Two Island Lake?” I asked. “Is that far from here?”
“Feels far,” Isabel complained. “So what is it we’re doing here? Scaring wolves away? Looking for Olivia? If I had known Sam was going to squeal to you like a little girl about this, I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“All of the above,” I said. “Except the squealing bit. Sam’s just worried. I don’t think that’s
unreasonable.”
“Right. Whatever. Do you think there’s a real chance Olivia could’ve changed already? Because if there’s not, maybe we could take a morning stroll back to my car to get a coffee somewhere instead.”
I pushed a branch out of my way and squinted; I thought I could see the shimmer of water through the trees. “Sam said it’s not too early for a new wolf to change, at least for a little bit. When it gets to be a warm snap. Like today. Maybe.”
“Okay, but we’re getting coffee after we don’t find her.” Isabel pointed. “Look, the lake’s up there. Happy?”
“Mmm hmm.” I frowned, noticing suddenly that the trees were different than before. Evenly spaced and farther apart, with tangled, soft, relatively new growth for underbrush. I stopped short when I saw color peeking out of the dull brown thatch at our feet. A crocus — a little finger of purple with an almost-hidden throat of yellow. A few inches away, I spied more bright green shoots coming up through the old leaves, and two more blossoms. Signs of spring — and, more than that, signs of human occupation — in the middle of the forest. I felt like kneeling to touch the petals of the crocus, to confirm that they were real. But Isabel’s watchful eyes kept me standing. “What is this place?”
Isabel stepped over a branch to stand beside me and looked down at the patch of brave little flowers. “Oh, that. Back in the glory days of our house, before we lived here, I guess the owners had a walkway down to the lake and a little garden thing here. There are benches closer to the water, and a statue.”
“Can we see it?” I asked, fascinated by the idea of a hidden, overgrown world.
“We’re here. There’s one of the benches.” Isabel led me a few feet closer to the pond and kicked a concrete bench with her boot. It was streaked with thin green moss and the occasional flattened bloom of orange lichen, and I might not have noticed it without Isabel’s direction. Once I knew where to look, however, it was easy to see what the shape of the sitting area had been — there was another bench a few feet away, and a small statue of a woman with her hands brought up to her mouth as if with wonder, her face pointed toward the lake. More flower bulbs, their shoots bright green and rubbery-looking, poked up around the statue’s base and the benches, and I saw a few more crocuses in the patchy snow beyond. Beside me, Isabel scuffed her foot through the leaves. “And look, down here. This is stone under here. Like a patio or something, I guess. I found it last year.”
Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) Page 32