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 pul ed it from the heat as he said, “I somehow doubt that the same col ege wil 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 real y leave, though. At al . Who wil take care of the pack?”
“I thought that was why the new wolves were made,” I said. The words sounded strange in my mouth. Cal ous. 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 stil think we could find a school together.”
Sam looked at me, his fingers stil pressed into his temple as if he’d forgotten they were there. “I’d like that.” He paused. “I’d real y like—I’d like to meet the new wolves and see what kind of people they are, though. It’l make me feel better. Maybe I’l go after that. After I’m sure everything’s taken care of here.”
I put a jagged line through Pick a college. “I’l wait for you,” I said.
“Not forever,” Sam said.
“No, if you turn out to be useless, I’l go without you.” I tapped my pencil on my teeth. “I think we should look around for the new wolves tomorrow. And Olivia. I’l cal 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 fil ing out a col ege 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.
CHAPTER FIVE
• 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 rol ed 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 wel —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 control ed, eventual y. 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 goround. 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 equal y 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 hel of a crowd.
It was a huge deal, but it was a gig I didn’t even want to do. There wasn’t real y any other kind these days. They al ran together until al 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 stil chasing something—some idea of life and fame that I’d imagined for myself when I was sixteen—but I was losing interest in actual y finding it.
While I was carrying in my keyboard, some girl who cal ed herself Jackie gave us some pil s I’d never seen before.
“Cole,” she whispered in my ear, as if she knew me instead of just my name. “Cole, this wil 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 wal s beneath the dance floor,
“it takes a lot to do that these days.”
She smiled wide, teeth tinted yel ow in the dul light, like she knew a secret. She smel ed 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 high-lighted 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 pul out a wad of plastic wrap. Inside, I saw a col ection of electric-green pil s, each stamped with two T s. They got an A-plus for pretty factor, but who knew what they were.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. Normal y 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. H
is voice was gritty and fast as always. “Listen to this:
‘NARKOTIKA takes the scene by force with their latest album, 13all. Bril iant 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.
“Wel , you should. This is El iot Fry saying this,”
Berlin said. When I didn’t reply, he said, “Remember, El iot Fry, who cal ed you a surly, overactive toddler with a keyboard? That El iot Fry. Now you guys are golden. Total turnaround. You’ve arrived, man.”
“Bril iant,” I said, and hung up on him. I turned to Jackie. “I’l take the whole bag. Tel Victor. He’s my purse.”
So Victor paid for them. But I’d asked for them, so I guess it was stil my fault.
Or maybe it was Jackie’s, for not tel ing 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 pil s, 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 swal owed one of the green pil s 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 physical y 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. Il uminated sporadical y by the strobes and lasers, I was fascinated by how he stayed stil , despite the press of bodies al 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 final y 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.
CHAPTER SIX
• GRACE •
“You know,” Isabel said, “when I told you to cal me on the weekend, I didn’t mean for you to cal 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. “Al things considered, it’s not bad. And you wanted to get out of the house, didn’t you?”
It real y 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 stil numbed the end of my nose, my fingers were snug inside their gloves.
“You should be leading the way, actual y,” 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.
“Wel , 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 fal en 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.”
“Al 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 strol 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 dul brown thatch at our feet. A crocus—a little finger of purple with an almost-hidden throat of yel ow. 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 smal 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.”
I kicked at the leaves like she did, and sure enough, my toe scuffed stone. Our true purpose momentarily forgotten, I scraped at the leaves, uncovering a wet, dirty patch of ground. “Isabel, this isn’t just stone. Look. It’s a…a…” I couldn’t think of what to cal the swirling pattern of stones.
“Mosaic,” Isabel finished, looking down at the complicated circles at her feet.
I knelt and scraped a few of the stones bare with a stick. They were mostly natural colored, but there were a few chips of bril iant blue or red tiles in there as wel . I uncovered more of the mosaic, revealing a swirling pattern with a smiling, archaic-looking sun in the middle. It made me feel odd, this shining face hidden under matted rotting leaves. “Sam would love this,” I said.
“Where is he?” Isabel asked.
“Checking out the woods behind Beck’s house. He should’ve come with us.” I could already picture the curve of his eyebrows, close over his eyes, as he saw the mosaic and the statue for the first time. This was the sort of thing Sam lived for.
An object beneath the bench before me caught my attention, however, pul ing me back to the real world. A slender, dul white…bone. I reached out and picked it up, looking at the gnaw marks on it. As I did, I realized there were more scattered around the bench, half buried in the leaves. Pushed partway underneath the bench was a glass bowl, stained and chipped, but obviously no antique. It took me only half a moment to realize what it was.
Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02] Page 3