Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02]

by Maggie Stiefvater

  I wanted it, and my muscles burned and groaned. Pain split me

  I had no voice

  I was on fire.

  I sprang from the bed, shaking off my skin.

  • SAM •

  I jerked awake, stung by Grace’s scream. She was one hundred mil ion degrees, close enough to burn me but too far away for me to reach.

  “Grace!” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

  The sheets swept off my body as she rol ed away from me, crying out again. In the dim light, I could only see her shoulder, and I reached out for it, cupping her arm with my hand. She was drenched with sweat, and her skin trembled beneath my palm, an unstable, unfamiliar flutter.

  “Grace, wake up! Are you okay?” My heart was pounding so loud that it felt like I wouldn’t hear her even if she did answer.

  She thrashed beneath my touch and then bolted upright, eyes wild, body volatile and quivering. I didn’t know her.

  “Grace, talk to me,” I whispered, though

  whispering seemed pointless in light of her earlier scream.

  Grace stared at her hands with a kind of wonder. I laid the back of my hand on her forehead; she was appal ingly hot, hotter than I thought anyone could be. I laid my palms on both sides of her neck, and she shuddered as if they were ice.

  “I think you’re sick,” I said, my own stomach turning over. “You have a fever.”

  She spread her fingers wide and studied her shaking hands. “I dreamed—I dreamed I shifted. I thought I—”

  She suddenly let out a terrible wail and curled away from me, clutching her arms around her stomach. I didn’t know what to do.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. “I’m getting you some Tylenol or something. In the bathroom?”

  She just whimpered. It was terrifying.

  I leaned forward to see her face, and that’s when I smel ed it.

  She stank of wolf.

  Wolf, wolf, wolf.

  From Grace.

  The scent of wolf.

  It wasn’t possible. It had to be me. I prayed it was me.

  I turned my face into my own shoulder, inhaled. Lifted my hand to my nose, the one that had just touched her forehead.

  Wolf.

  My heart stopped.

  And then the door came open and light flooded in from the hal .

  “Grace?” Her father’s voice. The bedroom light came on, and his eyes found me sitting next to her.

  “Sam?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  • GRACE •

  I didn’t even see Dad come into the room. The first moment I realized he was there was when I heard his voice, far away, like sound through water.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Sam’s voice was a murmured soundtrack to the pain that burned through me. I hugged my pil ow and stared at the wal . I could see the diffuse shadow that Sam made and the sharper one of my father, closer to the hal lights. I watched them move back and forth, making one big shape and then two again.

  “Gra ce . Grace Brisbane. ” My father’s voice became louder again. “Don’t pretend I’m not here.”

  “Mr. Brisbane—” Sam started.

  “Do not— do not—‘Mr. Brisbane’ me,” Dad snapped. “I can’t believe you can look me in the face, when behind our backs—”

  I didn’t want to move because every movement made the fire inside me burn faster, but I couldn’t let him say that. I rol ed toward them, wincing at the thorns of pain that prickled through my stomach as I did.

  “Dad. No. Don’t say that to Sam. You don’t know.”

  “Don’t think I’m not furious with you, too!” Dad said. “You have completely, utterly betrayed our trust in you.”

  “Please,” Sam said, and now I saw that he was standing by the side of the bed in his sweatpants and T-shirt, fingers making white marks in his own arms. “I know you’re angry with me, and you can keep being angry with me and I don’t blame you, but there’s something wrong with Grace.”

  “What’s going on here?” Now Mom’s voice. Then,

  in a strange, disappointed tone that I knew would kil Sam, “Sam? I can’t believe it.”

  “Please, Mrs. Brisbane,” Sam said, although Mom had told him before to cal her Amy, and he normal y did, “Grace is real y, real y warm. She—”

  “Just get away from the bed. Where’s your car?”

  Dad’s voice fel into the background again, and I stared at the shape of the ceiling fan above me, imagining it coming on and drying the sweat on my forehead.

  Mom’s face appeared in front of me, and I felt her lay her hand on my forehead. “Sweetie, you do seem feverish. We heard you cry out.”

  “My stomach,” I murmured, careful not to open my mouth too wide, in case what was inside me crawled out.

  “I’m going to try to find the thermometer.” She vanished from my sight. I heard Dad’s and Sam’s voices going on and on and on. I didn’t know what they could possibly have to talk about. Mom reappeared.

  “Try to sit up, Grace.”

  I cried out as I did, claws scraping the inside of my skin. Mom handed me a glass of water while she peered at the thermometer.

  Sam, standing by the bedroom door, jerked around when the glass slid from my unprotesting hand and landed on the floor with a dul and distant sound. Mom stared at the glass, and then at me.

  My fingers stil in a circle, cupping an invisible glass, I whispered, “Mom, I think I’m real y sick.”

  “That’s it,” Dad said. “Sam, get your coat. I’m taking you to your car. Amy, take her temperature. I’l be back in a few minutes. I’l have my phone.”

  I turned my eyes toward Sam, and his expression pierced me. He said, “Please don’t ask me to leave her like this.” My breath came a little faster.

  “I’m not asking,” my father said. “I’m tel ing. If you ever want to be al owed to see my daughter again, you wil get out of my house right now, because I am tel ing you to.”

  Sam scrubbed his hands through his hair and then linked them behind his head, eyes closed. For a moment, it was like we al held our breaths, waiting to see what he would do. The tension in his body was written so clearly that an explosion seemed imminent. He opened his eyes, and when he spoke, I almost didn’t recognize his voice. “Don’t—don’t even say that. Don’t threaten me with that. I’l go. But don’t—” And he couldn’t even say anything else. I saw him swal ow, and I think I said his name, but he was already down the hal with my father fol owing him.

  A moment later, I thought I heard the engine of Dad’s car rev to life outside, but it was Mom’s car, and I was in it, and I felt like my fever was eating me alive. Outside the car window, the stars swam in the cold night sky above me as we drove, and I felt smal and alone and in pain. Sam Sam Sam Sam where are you?

  “Sweetie,” Mom said from the driver’s seat.

  “Sam’s not here.”

  I swal owed tears and watched the stars wheel out of sight.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  • SAM •

  The night that Grace went to the hospital without me was the night I final y turned my eyes back to the wolves.

  It was a night ful of tiny coincidences that col ided into something bigger. If Grace hadn’t gotten sick that night, if her parents had been out late as they usual y were, if they hadn’t discovered us, if I hadn’t gone back to Beck’s house, if Isabel hadn’t heard Cole outside her back door, if she hadn’t delivered Cole to me, if Cole hadn’t been equal parts junkie and asshole and genius—how would life have unfolded?

  Rilke says: “Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben”—“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”

  My hand already missed the weight of Grace’s.

  Nothing was the same after that night. Nothing. After I got into the car with Grace’s father, he drove me to the cluttered al ey behind the bookstore where my Volkswagen was parked, navigating careful y so that he didn�
��t rub his mirrors on the trash bins on either side. He pul ed to a stop just behind my car, his silent face il uminated by the flickering streetlight that hung from the second story of the store. I was silent, too, my mouth sealed shut with a toxic paste of guilt and anger. We sat there together, and the windshield wiper scraped suddenly across the windshield, making us both flinch. He had accidental y turned it to intermittent when he signaled to enter the al ey. He let it swipe the already-clear windshield once more before he seemed to remember to turn it off.

  Final y, without looking at me, he said, “Grace has always been perfect. In seventeen years, she has never gotten into trouble at school. She’s never done drugs or alcohol. She’s a straight-A student. She has always been absolutely perfect.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He went on. “Until now. We don’t need someone to come along and corrupt her. I don’t know you, Samuel, but I do know my daughter. And I know that this is al you. I am not trying to be threatening here, but I won’t have you ruining my daughter. I think you seriously need to reconsider your priorities before you see her again.”

  For a brief moment, I tried out words in my head, but everything I thought of was too vitriolic or honest for me to imagine saying. So I just got out into the frigid night with everything stil shut up inside me.

  After he had gone, waiting just long enough to make sure that my car started before he backed out onto the empty street, I sat in the Volkswagen with my hands folded in my lap and stared at the back door of the bookstore. It seemed like days ago that Grace and I had walked through it, me stil high with the memory of the studio invoice and her stil high with my reaction and the pleasure of knowing just what to get me. I couldn’t picture her smug face now, though. The only image my mind could pul up was the one of her twisting in pain on top of the sheets, face flushed, reeking of wolf.

  It’s only a fever.

  That’s what I told myself as I drove toward Beck’s, my headlights the only il umination in the pitch-black night, bending and flickering against the black tree trunks on either side of the road. Again and again I said it, even as my gut whispered that it wasn’t and my hands ached to jerk the wheel and drive right back to the Brisbane house.

  Halfway to Beck’s, I took out my cel phone and dialed Grace’s number. I knew it was a bad idea even as I did it, but I couldn’t help it.

  There was a pause, and then I heard her father’s voice instead of hers.

  “I’m only picking this up to tel you not to cal ,” he said. “Seriously, Samuel, if you know what’s good for you, you wil just leave it for tonight. I do not want to talk to you tonight. I do not want Grace talking to you. Just—”

  “I want to know how she is.” I thought about adding please, but couldn’t bring myself to.

  There was a pause, like he was listening to someone else. Then he said, “It’s just a fever. Don’t cal again. I’m trying real y hard to not say something I’l regret later.” This time I did hear someone’s voice in the background—Grace’s or her mother’s—and then the phone went dead.

  I was a paper boat drifting in a massive night ocean.

  I didn’t want to go to Beck’s, but I had nowhere else to go. I had no one else to go to. I was human, and without Grace, I had nothing but this car and a bookstore and a house ful of countless empty rooms. So I drove to Beck’s—I needed to stop thinking of it as Beck’s—and parked my car in the empty driveway. Once upon a time, I’d worked at the bookstore during the summers, when Beck was stil human and I stil lost my winters to being a wolf. I’d pul up in the summer evenings when it was stil light, because during the summers, it was never night, and I would get out of Beck’s car to the sounds of people laughing and the smel of the gril from the backyard. It felt strange to be stepping out into the stil night now, the cold prickling my skin, and knowing that al those voices from my past were trapped in the woods. Everyone but me.

  Grace.

  Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light, revealing the photographs stuck every which way al over the cabinets, and then switched on the hal light. In my head, I heard Beck say to my smal nine-year-old self, “Why do we need every light in the house on? Are you signaling to aliens?”

  And so I went through the house tonight and turned on every light, revealing a memory in every single room. The bathroom where I’d nearly turned into a wolf right after meeting Grace. The living room, where Paul and I had jammed with our guitars—his beat-up old Fender was stil propped against the mantle. The downstairs guest room, where Derek had stayed with a girlfriend from town before Beck had chewed him out for it. I turned on the lights to the basement stairs and the lights in the library down there, and then came back up to get the lights in Beck’s office that I’d missed. In the living room, I stopped just long enough to crank up the expensive stereo system that Ulrik had bought when I was ten so that I could “hear Jethro Tul the way it was meant to be heard.”

  Upstairs, I turned the knob on the floor lamp in Beck’s room, where he had almost never slept, preferring to store books and papers on his bed and instead fal asleep in a chair in the basement, some book facedown on his chest. Shelby’s room came to life under the dim yel ow ceiling light, pristine and unlived in, no personal possessions except for her old computer. I was tempted for a brief moment to smash in the monitor, just because I wanted to hit something, and if anyone deserved it, Shelby did, but it didn’t seem like there’d be any satisfaction in breaking it without her here to see me final y do it. Ulrik’s room looked like it had been frozen in time. One of his jackets was stil thrown across the bed next to a folded pair of jeans and an empty mug on the nightstand. Paul’s room was next, where he had a mason jar on the dresser with two teeth in it—one belonging to him, and one belonging to a dead white dog.

  I saved my own bedroom for last. Memories floated on strings from the ceiling. Books lined the wal s, stacked and sloped against the desk. The room smel ed stale and unused; the boy who had grown up in it hadn’t stayed here for a long time.

  I’d be staying in it now. One person rattling around in this house, waiting and hoping for the reappearance of the rest of his family.

  But just before I reached inside the dark room for the light switch on the wal , I heard the sound of an engine outside.

  I was no longer alone.

  “Are you trying to land airplanes?” Isabel asked me. She didn’t look real, standing in the middle of the living room in silky pajama bottoms and a padded white coat with a fur col ar. I had never seen her without makeup, and she looked a lot younger. “I could see the house from a mile away. You must have every light turned on.”

  I didn’t reply. I was stil trying to work out how Isabel had ended up here at four o’clock in the morning with the boy I’d last seen changing into a wolf in the middle of the kitchen floor. He stood there in a battered sweatshirt and jeans that hung on him like they belonged to someone else, his bare feet an alarming mottled shade, and his fingers hooked in his pockets as if their terrible swel ing and discoloration didn’t bother him. The way that he was looking at Isabel and the way she going out of her way not to look at him made it seem, impossibly, like they had some kind of history.

  “You’re frostbitten,” I said to the guy, because it was something to say that didn’t require much thought.

  “You need to warm up those fingers or you’re going to be very unhappy later. Isabel, you had to know that.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Isabel said. “But if my parents caught him in my house, he’d be dead, and that would make him even more unhappy. I decided the outside chance of them noticing my car missing in the middle of the night was a happier option.” If Isabel noticed me swal owing, she didn’t pause. “By the way, this is Sam. The Sam.” It took me a moment to realize that she was now talking to the cocky frostbitten guy.

  The Sam. I wondered what she’d told him about me. I looked at him. Again, the familiarity of his face pricked at me. It was not a real familiarity, like someone I had met i
n person, but more like the familiarity of meeting a person who looks like an actor whose name you can’t recal .

  “So you’re the one in charge now?” he said, with a smile that struck me as sardonic. “I’m Cole.”

  The one in charge now. That’s the way it was, wasn’t it?

  “Have you seen any of the other wolves change yet?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I thought it was too cold for me to be changing.”

  His grotesquely colored fingers were bothering me enough that I moved away from him and Isabel, toward the kitchen, where I found a bottle of ibuprofen. I tossed it toward Isabel, who surprised me by catching it. “It’s because you were just bitten. I mean, last year. Temperature doesn’t have so much to do with you shifting yet. It’s just going to be…unpredictable.”

  “Unpredictable,” echoed Cole.

  Sam, no, please, not again, stop—I blinked, and my mother’s voice was gone, back into the past where it belonged.

  “What are these for? Him?” Isabel held up the bottle of pil s and jerked her chin toward Cole. Again, I got that flash of history between them.

  “Yeah. It’s going to hurt like hel when he warms up his fingers,” I said. “That’l keep it bearable. Bathroom’s that way.”

  • ISABEL •

  Cole took the ibuprofen from me, but I could tel he wasn’t going to use it. Whether because he thought he was some macho tough guy or for religious reasons or what, I didn’t know. But when he went into the downstairs bathroom, I heard him hit the light switch and set down the pil bottle without opening it. Then I heard the water begin to run into the bath. Sam turned away with this strange, disgusted look on his face, and I knew that he didn’t like Cole.

  “So, Romulus,” I said, and Sam turned around, his yel ow eyes open wide. “Why are you here, al alone? I thought Grace would have to be surgical y removed from your side.” After spending the last hour with Cole, whose face revealed only the emotions he wanted me to see, it was strange to see undisguised pain on Sam’s face. His thick dark eyebrows showed misery al by themselves. It occurred to me that he and Grace might have had a fight.