Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02]

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “I feel like I’m at an open-mic night,” Isabel said, and switched to a stronger Duluth pop station. She stretched on her stomach next to me where Sam would normal y lie and popped the top of her soda. “What are you looking at? Read. I’m just chil ing.”

  She seemed to mean it, so there was no reason

  for me to not open my history text. I didn’t want to read, though. I just wanted to curl my arms around myself and lie on my bed and miss Sam.

  • ISABEL •

  It was nice at first, just lying in bed doing nothing, with no parents or memories intruding. The radio played quietly next to me, and Grace frowned at her book, turning her pages forward and occasional y backward to frown harder at something. Her mother clunked around in the rest of the house, and the smel of burnt toast wafted under the door. It was comfortingly someone else’s life. And it was nice to be with a friend but not have to talk. I could almost ignore the fact of Grace’s il ness.

  After a while, I reached across to the nightstand, where a book with tattered edges lay by the clock radio. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it. The cover said it was poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, with facing translations from the German. It didn’t sound riveting, and I general y relegated poetry to one of the lower circles of hel , but I didn’t have anything else to do, so I picked it up and opened it.

  It fel open to a dog-eared page marked up with blue handwriting in the margins, and a few lines underlined: “Ah, to whom can we fall apart? Not to angels, nor men, and even the most clever of animals see that we are not surely at home in our interpreted world,” and next to them was written, in ropey handwriting I didn’t recognize, findigen =

  knowing, gedeuteten = interpreted? and other notes and random bits of German. I lifted the page closer to me to look at a tiny notation in the corner and realized that the book must’ve been Sam’s, because it smel ed like Beck’s house. That scent brought back a rush of memories: Jack lying in a bed, seeing him turn into a wolf in front of my eyes, watching him die.

  My eyes dropped again to the page. “Oh and night, the night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.”

  I didn’t think I liked poetry any better than before I’d picked up the book. I set the volume back down on the nightstand and laid my cheek on the bedspread stretched over the pil ow. This must have been the side that Sam slept on when he snuck in here, because I recognized his scent. How bal sy he had been to come here night after night, just to be with Grace. I imagined him lying right here, Grace next to him. I had seen them kiss before—the way that Sam’s hands pressed on Grace’s back when he thought no one would see and the way that the hardness of Grace’s face disappeared entirely when he did. It was easy to picture them lying together here, kissing, tangled. Sharing breath, lips pressed urgently against necks and shoulders and fingertips. I felt hungry suddenly, for something that I didn’t have and couldn’t name. It made me think of Cole’s hand on my col arbone and how his breath had been so hot in my mouth, and suddenly I was sure that I was going to cal him or find him tomorrow if such a thing was possible.

  I pushed myself back up onto my elbows, trying to pul my brain from thoughts clouded with hands on hips and the smel of Sam on the pil ow, and said, “I wonder what Sam’s doing right now.”

  Grace had a page pinched between two fingers; she wasn’t quite frowning—my words had wiped the frown off her face and replaced it with something more uncertain. I kicked myself for saying what I was actual y thinking.

  Grace gently laid down the page and smoothed it. Then she pressed her fingers to one of her flushed cheeks and smoothed the skin down to her chin with the same gesture. Final y, she said, “He said he’d try to cal me tonight.”

  She was stil looking at me in that blank, unsure way, so I added, “I was just wondering if any of the wolves are human right now, besides him. I met one of them.” It was a line close enough to the truth that no bishops would blush while delivering it.

  Grace’s face cleared. “I know. He told me about one. You real y met him?”

  What the hell. I told her. “I brought him to Beck’s the night you went to the hospital.”

  Her eyes widened, but before she had time to ask me more, the doorbel sounded—a loud, obnoxious bel that went on and on in multiple tones.

  “Pizza!” her mom shouted, her voice too bright, and anything else Grace and I might have said to each other was lost.

  • GRACE •

  The pizza arrived and Isabel gave a piece to Mom, which I wouldn’t have done, and Mom retreated to her studio so we could have the living room. By now, the sky was black outside the glass door to the deck, and it was impossible to tel if it was seven p.m. or midnight. I sat on one end of the couch with a plate in my lap and a single piece of pizza staring back at me, and Isabel sat on the other end with two pieces on her plate. She blotted her pieces delicately with a paper towel, careful not to disturb the mushrooms. In the background, Pretty Woman was on and Julia Roberts’s character was shopping at stores that Isabel would look at home in. The pizza lay in its box on the coffee table in between us and the television. There was a mountain of toppings.

  “Eat, Grace,” Isabel said. She offered me the rol of paper towels.

  I looked at the pizza and tried to imagine it as food. It was amazing how just a single slice of cheese and mushroom pizza lying on a plate, with oozing, greasy strings of mozzarel a trailing from it, could do what a walk in the woods hadn’t: make me feel utterly sick. Looking at the food, my stomach was rol ing inside me, but it was more than nausea. It was whatever had consumed me before: the fever that wasn’t a fever. The sickness that was more than just a headache, more than just a stomachache. The il ness that was me, somehow.

  Isabel was looking at me, and I knew a question was coming. But I didn’t real y want to open my mouth. The vague something I’d felt in the woods was chewing at my bel y now, and I was afraid of what I would say if I spoke.

  The pizza sat in front of me, looking like nothing I could imagine swal owing.

  I felt so much more vulnerable than I’d felt in the woods with the wolves around me. I didn’t want Isabel with me now. Not Mom. I wanted Sam.

  • ISABEL •

  Grace looked gray. She was staring at her pizza as if she was waiting for it to bite her, and final y she said, her hand on her stomach, “I’l be right back.”

  She pushed up off the couch, a little lethargic, and headed into the kitchen. When she returned, holding another ginger ale and a palm ful of pil s, I asked, “Are you feeling sick again?” I turned down the volume on the television a little, even though it was my favorite part of the movie.

  Grace tipped al the pil s into her mouth and swal owed them with a quick, efficient slug of ginger ale. “A little. People feel sicker in the evenings, right?

  That’s what I read.”

  I looked at her. I thought that probably she knew. I thought probably she was already thinking what I was thinking, but I didn’t want to say it. Instead, I asked,

  “What did they tel you at the hospital?”

  “That it was just a fever. Just the flu,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew she was remembering tel ing me about when she first got bitten. How she had thought she had the flu. How we both knew that it hadn’t been the flu then.

  So, final y, I said the thing that had been bothering me since I’d gotten to her house. “Grace, you smel . Like that wolf we found. You know this has to do with the wolves.”

  She rubbed a single finger back and forth on the rim of her plate where the decorative swirl was, as if she would rub it right off. “I know.”

  The phone rang, just then, and we both knew who it was. Grace looked at me and her fingers al went perfectly stil .

  “Don’t tel Sam,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  • SAM •

  That night, becau
se I couldn’t sleep, I made bread. Most of my sleeplessness was because of Grace;

  the idea of going up to bed and lying there alone, waiting for sleep again, was completely intolerable. But part of it was because Cole was stil in the house. He was so ful of restless energy—pacing the floor, trying out the sound system, sitting on the couch, watching television, then jumping up—that I was, too. It was like being in the presence of an exploding star.

  So, bread making. It was something I had learned from Ulrik, who was a tremendous bread snob. He refused to eat most store-bought bread, and combined with the fact that when I was ten, I refused to eat anything but bread, a lot of baking got done that year. Beck thought we were both impossible, and wouldn’t have anything to do with our neuroses. So that meant plenty of mornings were spent in each other’s company, me on the floor leaning against the kitchen cabinets, curled around the guitar that Paul had gifted me, and Ulrik pounding some dough into submission and swearing pleasantly about me being in the way. One day not long into the year, Ulrik pul ed me to my feet to have me make the dough; it was also the same day that Beck had found out about Ulrik’s doctor’s appointment, a memory I’d been considering since I’d seen Victor struggling to stay human. Beck came storming into the kitchen, clearly furious, while Paul drifted in behind him, hovering in the door, looking less like he was concerned and more like he was hoping for an interesting col ision.

  “Tel me that Paul is a liar,” Beck announced, while Ulrik handed me a can of yeast. “Tel me you did not go to a doctor.”

  Paul looked like he was about to bust out laughing, and Ulrik looked pretty close to that as wel . Beck raised his hands up like he wanted to strangle Ulrik. “You did. You real y went. You crazy bastard. I told you it wouldn’t do any good.”

  Paul final y started laughing as Ulrik grinned. Paul said, “Tel him what he gave you, Ulrik. Tel him what he wrote you.”

  But Ulrik seemed to realize that Beck wouldn’t get the punch line, so, stil smiling, he just pointed toward the fridge and said, “Milk, Sam.”

  “Haldol,” said Paul. “He goes in for werewolfism, comes out with a script for antipsychotics.”

  “You think this is funny?” Beck demanded.

  Ulrik final y looked at Beck and made a so what gesture with one hand. “Come on, Beck. He thought I was crazy. I told him everything that was going on—that I turned into a wolf in the winter, and the—the—what is it?—nauseous? nausea?—and the date I turned back into a human this year. Al the symptoms. I told him the honest-to-God truth, and he listened and nodded and wrote me a script for a crazy drug.”

  “Where did you go?” Beck asked. “Which

  hospital?”

  “St. Paul.” He and Paul hooted at Beck’s expression. “What, you thought I marched into Mercy Fal s General and told them I was a werewolf?”

  Beck wasn’t amused. “So—just like that? He didn’t believe you? Draw blood? Anything?”

  Ulrik snorted and, forgetting that I was supposed to be making the dough, started adding flour. “He couldn’t get me out the door fast enough. Like crazy was catching.”

  Paul said, “I wish I could’ve been there.”

  Beck shook his head. “You two are idiots.” But his voice was now fond as he pushed past Paul, out of the kitchen. “How many times do I have to tel you, you want a doctor to believe you, you’re gonna have to bite them.”

  Paul and Ulrik exchanged looks. “Is he serious?”

  Paul asked Ulrik.

  “I don’t think so,” Ulrik said.

  The conversation drifted to something else as Ulrik finished the dough and put it in to rise, but I never forgot the lesson for the day: Doctors weren’t likely to be any help in this particular battle of ours.

  My mind returned to Victor. I couldn’t shake the image of him sliding effortlessly from human to wolf and back again.

  Apparently, Cole couldn’t, either, because he walked into the kitchen and hiked himself up onto the center island with an annoyed expression. He wrinkled his nose at the heavy yeast scent in the kitchen and said, “I should be surprised that you’re baking, but I’m not. So, I’m again struck with the unfairness that Victor can’t stay human and I can’t stay wolf. Should be the other way around.”

  I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice as I replied, “Yeah. I get it. You want to be a wolf. You do not want to be Cole. You want to be a wolf. You’ve made it real y clear. Wel , I have no magic formula to make you stay a wolf. Sorry.” I noticed that he had a bottle of whiskey sitting on the countertop next to him. “Where did that come from?”

  “Cabinet,” Cole said. His voice was pleasant.

  “Why does it bother you so much?”

  “I’m not real y crazy about you getting drunk.”

  “I’m not real y crazy about being sober,” Cole replied. “I mean, you never real y said what your big problem was with me wanting to be a wolf.”

  I turned away from him to the sink to scrub the flour off my hands; it became gluey between my fingers as the water hit it. I considered what I wanted to say, while I slowly scrubbed both hands clean. “I went through a lot of trouble to stay human. I know someone who died trying. I would give anything to have the rest of my family back right now, but they have to spend the winter in those woods, not even remembering who they are. Being human is a…” I was going to say extraordinary privilege but thought it sounded too grandiose.

  “There’s no meaning to life as a wolf. If you don’t have memories, it’s like you never existed. You can’t leave anything behind. I mean—how can I defend humanity?

  It’s al that matters. Why would you throw that away?”

  I didn’t mention Shelby. Shelby, the only other person I’d ever known who wanted to be a wolf. I knew why she had abandoned her human life. Didn’t mean that I agreed with it, though. I hoped she’d gotten her wish and was a wolf for good now.

  Cole took a mouthful of whiskey and winced as he swal owed it. “You already answered the question right in there. The not remembering bit. Avoidance is a wonderful therapy.”

  I turned to face him. He seemed unreal in this kitchen. Most people had an acquired kind of beauty

  —they became better-looking the longer you knew them and the better you loved them. But Cole had unfairly skipped to the end of the game, al jaggedly handsome and Hol ywood-looking, not needing any love to get there.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a good reason.”

  “Don’t you?” Cole asked curiously. I was surprised to see that there was no malice in his expression, just vague interest. “Then why do you piss in the upstairs bathroom?”

  I looked at him.

  “Oh, you didn’t think I noticed it? Yeah. You always go upstairs to pee. I mean, I guess it could be because the downstairs bathroom is gross, but it seems fine to me.” Cole jumped down from the counter, slightly unsteady when he landed. “So seems to me you’re avoiding that tub. Am I right?”

  I didn’t see how he could know my backstory, but I guessed it wasn’t a secret. Maybe Beck had even told him, though it made me feel a little weird to think that he had. “That’s pretty minor,” I said. “Avoiding a bathtub because your parents tried to kil you in one isn’t the same as avoiding your entire life by becoming a wolf.”

  Cole smiled widely at me. The alcohol was making him an extremely jovial Cole. “I’l make you a deal, Ringo. You stop avoiding that bathtub and I’l stop avoiding my life.”

  “Yeah, right.” The only time I’d been in a tub since my parents was when Grace had put me in one to get me warm last winter. But at that point, I’d been halfway to a wolf. I barely even knew where I was. And it was Grace, who I trusted. Not Cole.

  “No, seriously. I’m a very goal-oriented person,”

  Cole said. “Happiness, I think, comes from achieving goals, right? God, this stuff is good.” He put the whiskey down on the counter. “I feel überwarm and fuzzy. So what do you say? You jump in that bathtub and I
devote myself to keeping myself and Victor human? I mean, since the tub is such a minor thing?”

  I smiled rueful y. He had known al along that there was no danger of me getting close to that bathroom.

  “Touché,” I said, randomly remembering the last time I’d heard the expression: Isabel standing in the bookstore, drinking my green tea. It seemed like years ago.

  • COLE •

  I smiled broadly at him. I was infused with the pleasant, slow warmth that could only be achieved through the consumption of hard liquor. I told him, “You see, we are both majorly messed up, Ringo. Issues up the wazoo.”

  Sam just looked at me. He didn’t real y look like Ringo; more like a sleepy, yel ow-eyed John Lennon, if we were being specific, but “John” wasn’t as catchy of a name to cal him. I felt a sudden rush of compassion toward him. Poor kid couldn’t even piss downstairs because his parents had tried to kil him. Seemed pretty harsh.

  “Feel like an intervention?” I asked. “I think tonight feels like a good night for an intervention, man.”

  “Thanks, I’l deal with my issues on my own,” Sam said.

  “C’mon.” I offered him the bottle of whiskey, but he shook his head. “It’l make you relax,” I informed him.

  “Enough of this and you’l be paddling that tub to China.

  ”

  Sam’s voice was slightly less friendly. “Not tonight.

  ”

  “Dude,” I said, “I am trying to bond here. I am trying to help you. I am trying to help me.” I took his arm in a comradely way. Sam pul ed at my grip, but not like he meant it. I tugged him toward the kitchen door.

  “Cole,” Sam said, “you’re completely smashed. Let go.”

  “And I’m tel ing you that this entire process would be easier if you were, too. Are you reconsidering the whiskey option?” We were in the hal now. Sam tugged again.

  “I’m not. Cole. Come on. Are you serious?” He jerked at my grip. We were a few feet away from the bathroom door now. Sam bucked, and I had to use both my arms to keep him moving forward. He was surprisingly strong; I hadn’t thought someone as weedy-looking as him could put up such a good fight.