Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02]

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Now’s a good a time as any to get familiar with this place, then,” I told him. I stepped into the shed, my shoes making dusty shuffling noises on the worn wood floor. Everything was in place as far as I could see

  —blankets folded neatly beside the dormant television, watercooler fil ed to the top, and jugs lined up obediently behind it, waiting their turn. Everything was waiting for wolves to fal into humans.

  Cole stepped in after me, looking around at the bins and supplies with vague interest. Everything about him radiated disdain and restless energy. I wanted to ask him What did Beck see in you? Instead, I asked,

  “Is it what you expected?”

  Cole had one of the bins opened a few inches and was looking inside; he didn’t look away as he replied,

  “What?”

  “Being a wolf.”

  “I expected it to be worse,” he said, and now he looked at me, a sly smile on his face like he knew what I’d gone through to not be one. “Beck told me the pain was unbearable.”

  I picked up a dried leaf that we’d tracked into the shed. “Yeah, wel , the pain’s not the difficult part.”

  “Oh yeah?” Cole’s voice was knowing. It was like he wanted me to hate him. “What’s the difficult part, then?”

  I turned away from him. I real y didn’t want to answer. Because I didn’t think he’d care about the difficult part.

  Beck had picked him. I would not hate him. I would not. There had to have been something in there that Beck saw. Final y, I said, “One year, one of the wolves

  —Ulrik—he decided it would be a great idea to start growing Italian herbs from seeds in pots. Ulrik was always doing crazy crap like that.” I remembered him poking holes in the potting soil and dropping seeds in, tiny, dead-looking things disappearing into the deep black earth. “This had better work, dammit,” he had said amiably to me. I’d been standing by his elbow the entire time, getting in his way while I watched, moving only when his elbow accidental y prodded my chest.

  “Think you can stand any closer, Sam?” he’d asked. Now, to Cole, I added, “Beck thought Ulrik was crazy. He told him that basil was only two bucks a bunch at the store.”

  Cole raised one of his eyebrows at me, his expression clearly indicating that he was indulging me. I ignored his expression and said, “I watched Ulrik’s seeds every day for weeks, waiting for any little bit of green in the dirt, anything to tel me that there was life waiting to happen. And that’s it. That’s the difficult part,” I told Cole. “I am standing here in the shed, and I’m waiting to see if my seeds are going to poke out of the dirt. I don’t know if it’s too early to look for signs of life or if, this time, winter has claimed my family for good.”

  Cole stared at me. The contempt was gone from

  his expression, but he didn’t say anything. His face held something empty, something I didn’t know how to react to, so I didn’t say anything, either.

  There was no point in staying any longer. I did the last step while Cole hung back, checking the food bins to make sure no insects had gotten into them. I left my fingers hooked on the edge of the plastic bin for a moment as I listened. I didn’t know what I was listening for; there was only silence and more silence and more silence again. Even the cardinal outside the stil -open door had fal en quiet.

  Pretending Cole wasn’t there, I strained my ears like I had when I was a wolf, attempting to create a map of al the creatures in the nearby woods and the sounds that they made. But I heard nothing.

  Somewhere, there were wolves in these woods, but they were invisible to me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  • COLE •

  I was losing my grip on my human body, and I was glad.

  Sam made me uncomfortable. I had a couple of different personas that pretty much worked across the board for everyone I had ever met, but none of them seemed right for him. He was painful y, annoyingly earnest, and how was I supposed to respond to that?

  So I was relieved when we got back from the shed and he announced that he was going on a drive.

  “I’d ask if you wanted to come,” Sam said, “but you’re going to change soon.”

  He didn’t say how he came to this conclusion, but his nostrils pinched a bit, like he could smel me. A few moments later, the diesel engine of his Volkswagen thrummed noisily as it pul ed out of the driveway, leaving me alone in a house that changed moods with the time of day. The afternoon got cloudy and cold, and suddenly, the house was no longer a comforting den but a foreboding maze of graying rooms, something out of a fever dream. Likewise, my body wasn’t firmly human—but it wasn’t wolf, either. Instead it was a strange, middle territory—human body, wolf brain. Human memories seen through wolf eyes. At first I paced the hal s, the wal s pressing in, not real y believing Sam’s diagnosis. When I final y felt a hint of the shift in the creep of my nerves, I stood at the open back door and waited for the cold to take me. But I wasn’t there yet. So I shut the door and lay on my borrowed bed, feeling the gnaw of nausea and the crawl of my skin.

  Through the discomfort, I was intensely relieved. I had begun to think that I wasn’t going to change back into a wolf.

  But this miserable in-between—I got up, went to the back door again, stood in the frigid wind. I gave up after about ten minutes and retreated back to the couch, curling around the turmoil of my stomach. My mind darted through the gray hal s, though my body stayed stil . In my head, I walked down the hal , through unfamiliar rooms in shades of black and white. I felt Isabel’s col arbone under my hand, saw my skin losing its color as I became a wolf, felt the microphone in my fist, heard my father’s voice, saw him facing me across the dining room table.

  No. Anywhere but home. I would let my memories

  take me anywhere but there.

  Now I was at the photo studio with the rest of NARKOTIKA. It was our first big magazine spread. Wel , real y it was mine. The theme was “Under-18

  Success Stories,” and I was the poster child. The rest of NARKOTIKA was just there as supporting cast. They weren’t shooting us in the studio proper; instead the photographer and his assistant had taken us into the stairwel of the old building and were trying to capture the mood of the band’s music by draping us over the railings and standing us on different stairs. The stairwel smel ed like someone else’s lunch—fake bacon bits and salad dressing you’d never order and some mysterious spice that might have been old foot. I was coming off a high. It wasn’t my first one, but it was pretty damn close. These brand-new highs pushed me into a humming flight of euphoria that stil left me feeling a little guilty afterward. I had just written one of my best songs ever—“Break My Face (and Sel the Pieces),” destined to be my best-sel ing single

  —and I was in a great mood. I would’ve been in an even better mood if I hadn’t been there, because I wanted to be smel ing the outside air, thick with exhaust fumes and restaurant smel s and every thril ing city scent that told me I was somebody.

  “Cole. Cole. Hey, slick. Could you stand stil for me? Stand next to Jeremy for a second and look down over here. Jeremy, you look at him,” the photographer said. He was a paunchy, middle-aged guy, with an unevenly cut goatee that was going to bother me al day. His assistant was a twenty-something redheaded girl who had already confessed her love for me and thus became uninteresting. At seventeen, I hadn’t yet discovered that a sardonic smile could make girls take their shirts off.

  “I haven’t stopped,” Jeremy said. He sounded halfasleep. He always sounded half-asleep. Victor, on the other side of Jeremy, was smiling down at the ground just like the photographer had told him to.

  I wasn’t feeling the shot. How was shooting us looking over a balcony like some freaking Beatles album cover going to fit NARKOTIKA’s sound? So I shook my head and spit off the balcony and the photographer’s flash went off and he and his assistant stared at the viewfinder and looked annoyed. Another flash. Another annoyed look. The photographer came to the landing and stood six stairs down from us. His voice was cajoling.
“Okay, Cole, how about something with some life in it? You know, give me a smile. Imagine your best memory. Give me a smile you’d give your mom.”

  I raised an eyebrow and wondered if he was for real.

  The photographer seemed to have a flash of insight, because his voice raised as he said, “Imagine you’re onstage—”

  “You want life?” I asked. “ ‘Cause this isn’t it. Life is unexpected. Life is about risk. That’s what NARKOTIKA is, not some damn Boy Scout family picture. It’s—”

  And I leaped at him. I flew off the stairs, my arms spread out on either side, and I saw panic cross his face just as his assistant jerked her camera up and the flash blinded me.

  I crashed down on one foot and rol ed up against the brick wal of the stairwel , laughing my ass off. Nobody asked if I was okay. Jeremy was yawning, Victor was giving me the finger, and the photographer and the assistant were exclaiming over their viewfinder.

  “Have some inspiration,” I told them, and stood up.

  “You’re welcome.” I wasn’t even feeling any pain. After that, they let me do what I wanted for the shoot. Humming and singing my new song, I led them up and down the stairs, pressing my fingers against the wal like I was about to push it over; down to the lobby, where I stood in a potted plant; and final y into the al ey behind the studio, where I jumped on top of the car that had brought us from the hotel, leaving dents in the roof so the car would remember me. When the photographer cal ed it a day, his assistant came over to me and asked for my hand. I offered my palm, and she pul ed it around so that it faced the sky. Then she wrote her name and number on it while Victor watched from just behind her. Victor grabbed my shoulder as soon as she’d gone back inside. “What about Angie?” he demanded, with a half smile on his face like he knew I was going to give him an answer he liked.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  The smile disappeared, and he gripped the hand

  with the number on it. “I don’t think she’d be real y happy about this.”

  “Vic. Dude. None of your business.”

  “She’s my sister. It’s my business.”

  The conversation was definitely ruining my good mood. “Wel , then, here it is: Angie and I are over. We’ve been over so long, they’re teaching it in history classes. And it’s stil none of your business.”

  “You bastard,” Victor said. “You’re going to leave her like that? You ruin her life and just walk away?”

  It was really ruining my good mood. It was starting to feel like time for a needle or a beer or a razor. “Hey, I asked her. She said she’d rather go it alone.”

  “And you believed her? You know, you think you’re so good. You and your goddamn genius. You think you’re going to live forever like this? No one’s going to remember your face when you’re twenty. No one’s going to remember you.”

  He was deflating, though. He was almost done. If I said sorry or even just stayed quiet, he’d probably turn away and go back to the hotel.

  I waited a beat, and then I said, “At least the girls cal me by my name, dude.” I watched his face, a smirk on mine. “At least I’m not always ‘NARKOTIKA’s drummer.’”

  Victor punched me. It was a good punch, but not everything he had. In any case, I was stil standing, though I thought he’d probably split my lip. I could stil feel my face and I could stil remember what we were talking about. I looked at him.

  Jeremy appeared by Victor’s elbow, probably clued in by the sound of Victor’s fist smacking my face that this wasn’t one of our usual arguments.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Victor shouted, and he hit me again, right in the jaw, and this time I had to stagger to stay up. “Hit me, you piece of crap. Hit me.”

  “Boys,” Jeremy said, but didn’t move.

  Victor slammed his shoulder into my chest, one hundred and eighty pounds of repressed anger, and this time I crashed to the ground, a piece of asphalt grinding into my back. “You’re such a waste of space. Life is one big ego trip for you, you privileged son of a bitch.” He was kicking me now, and Jeremy was watching, arms crossed.

  “That’s enough,” Jeremy said.

  “I—want—to—smash—that—smile—off—your

  —face,” Victor said between kicks. He was out of breath now, and final y, one of his kicks threw him off balance and he fel heavily to the ground next to me. I stared up at the rectangle of gray-white sky above us, framed in by the dark buildings, and felt blood trickle from my nose. I thought about Angie back at home and the way she’d looked when she told me she’d rather go it alone, and I wished she could’ve watched Victor kick the crap out of me.

  Above me, Jeremy held out his camera phone and took a picture of the two of us lying on the asphalt in some city I couldn’t even remember the name of. Three weeks later, that photo of me flying off the stairs, Jeremy and Victor watching me, hit magazine stands and made the front page of the mag. My face was everywhere. No one was forgetting me anytime soon. I was everywhere.

  Later in the afternoon, lying on the floor of Beck’s house, the shift became urgent inside me, so insistent that I realized that my nausea earlier had only been pretend, nothing like the real thing, which bit and tore and ripped at my guts. I made my way again to the back door and opened it, standing and looking out at the grass. It was surprisingly warm outside, the overcast sky gone, but an occasional stiff breeze reminded me it was stil March. This time, when a cold gust of wind blew, it cut right through my human body to the wolf inside. Goose bumps raced across my skin. I stepped onto the concrete stoop and hesitated, wondering if I should go to the shed and leave my clothing there to make it easier to retrieve later. But the next gust sent me double with shudders. I wasn’t going to make it to the shed.

  My stomach groaned and pinched; I crouched and

  waited.

  But the shift didn’t come right away, like it had before. Having been human for almost a day now, my body was more sure of its form, and it didn’t seem like it wanted to give it up easily.

  C’mon, shift, I thought, as the wind pul ed another rack of shuddering from me. My stomach churned. I tried to remember that it was just a reaction to the shifting process; I didn’t real y need to throw up. If I just resisted the impulse, I’d be fine.

  I braced my fingers against the cold concrete, wil ing the wind to push me into a wolf. Out of the blue, I remembered Angie’s number, and I felt an irrational desire to go back inside and dial it, just to hear her say hel o before I hung up. I wondered what Victor was thinking right now, after al this.

  My chest ached.

  Get me out of this body. Get me out of Cole , I thought.

  But that was just one more thing out of my control.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  • GRACE •

  That night, there was nothing different about my bed without Sam there. There was nothing unfamiliar about the shape of the mattress. The sheets were no larger without him. I was no less tired without the steady sound of his breathing, and in the dark, I could not see the absence of his square shoulder beside me. The pil ow stil smel ed like him, like he’d gotten up to get his book and had forgotten to come back.

  But it made al the difference in the world.

  My stomach aching, an echo of the pain of last night, I pressed my face into his pil ow and tried not to remember those nights when I had thought he was gone for good. Imagining him over in Beck’s house now, I rol ed over and got my cel phone. But I didn’t dial his number, because, stupidly, al I could think of was when we were lying together and Sam was shivering and he said, Maybe we should rethink our lifestyle. Then I thought of him tel ing me to stay over here, not to come over and stay with him.

  Maybe he was glad to be over there, to have the excuse to be alone. Maybe he wasn’t. I didn’t know. I felt sick, sick, sick, in some new and terrible way that I couldn’t describe. I wanted to cry and felt foolish for it. I put my phone back on the nightstand and rol ed back into his pil ow and final y went to sleep.
/>   • SAM •

  I was an open wound.

  Restless, I roamed the hal s of the house, wanting to cal her again, afraid to get her in trouble, afraid of something nameless and huge. I paced until I was too tired to stand, and then I headed upstairs to my room. Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn’t underneath it.

  My thoughts festered inside me. I could not sleep. My mind slid away from the reality of the empty bed beside me and curved my thoughts into lyrics, my fingers imagining the frets they would press to find the tune.

  I’m an equation that only she solves / these Xs and Ys by other names called / My way of dividing is desperately flawed / as I multiply days without her. As the endless night crawled slowly by,

  As the endless night crawled slowly by,

  innumerable minutes piling one upon another without getting anywhere, the wolves began to howl and my head began to pound. One of the dul , slow aches that the meningitis had left as its legacy. I lay in the empty house and listened to the pack’s slow cries rise and fal with the pressure inside my skul .

  I had risked everything, and I had nothing to show for it but my open hand, lying empty and palm up toward the ceiling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  • GRACE •

  “I’m going for a walk,” I told Mom.

  No day had ever passed as slowly as this Saturday. Once upon a time, when I was younger, I would’ve been thril ed to have an entire day with my mother in the house; now, I felt restless, like I had a houseguest. She wasn’t real y keeping me from doing anything, but I didn’t feel like starting anything while she was around, either.

  Currently, Mom was delicately folded on the end of the couch, reading one of the books that Sam had left behind. When she heard my voice, her head whipped around and her entire body stiffened. “You’re what?”

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said, tempted to take Sam’s book out of her hands. “I’m bored out of my mind and I want to talk with Sam, but you guys won’t let me and I have to do something or I wil start throwing stuff around my room like an angry chimp.”