Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02]

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Mom and Dad looked at each other, and for a single, stupid moment, I thought they were considering it.

  Then Mom said, “We don’t want you to be alone with him for that long. We don’t trust him anymore.”

  Or me. Just say it.

  But they didn’t.

  “The answer’s no, Grace,” Dad said. “You can see him tomorrow, and be glad that we’re al owing even that.”

  “Allowing that?” I demanded. My hands fisted the covers on either side of me. Anger was rising up in me

  —I felt my cheeks, hot as summer, and suddenly, I just couldn’t take it. “You’ve been ruling this particular part of the world via absentee bal ot for most of my teenage years, and now you just ride in here and say, Sorry, Grace, no, this little bit of life that you have managed to make for yourself, this person you’ve chosen, you should be happy we’re not taking that, too. ”

  Mom threw up her hands. “Oh, Grace, real y. Stop overreacting. As if we needed any more proof that you were not mature enough to be with him that much. You’re seventeen. You’ve got the rest of your life ahead of you. This is not the end of the world. In five years—”

  “Don’t—” I said.

  To my surprise, she didn’t.

  “Don’t tel me I’l have forgotten his name in five years or whatever you were about to say. Stop talking down to me.” I stood up, throwing my covers to the end of the bed as I did. “You two have been gone too long to pretend that you know what’s in my head. Why don’t you go to some dinner party or a gal ery opening or a late-night house showing or an al -day art show and hope that I’l be al right when you get back? Oh, that’s right. You already are. Pick one, guys. Parents or roommates. You can’t be one and then suddenly be the other.”

  There was a long pause. Mom was looking off into the corner of the room like there was a fantastic song playing in her head. Dad was frowning at me. Final y, he shook his head. “We’re having a serious talk when we get home, Grace. I don’t think it was fair of you to start this when you knew that we wouldn’t be able to stay here to finish it.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest, my hands fisted. He wouldn’t make me feel ashamed of what I’d said. He wouldn’t. I’d waited too long to say it.

  Mom looked at her watch, and the spel was broken.

  Dad was already heading out the door as he said,

  “We’l talk about this later. We have to go.”

  Mom added, sounding like she was mimicking something Dad had told her, “We’re trusting you to respect our authority.”

  But they weren’t real y trusting me with anything, because after they left, I walked into the kitchen and found that they’d taken my car keys.

  I didn’t care. I had another set they didn’t know about in my backpack. There was something invisible and dangerous lurking inside me, and I was done being good.

  I got to Beck’s house just after daybreak.

  “Sam?” I cal ed, but got no answer. The

  downstairs was clearly unoccupied, so I headed to the second floor. In no time at al I had found Sam’s bedroom. The sun was stil below the trees and only anemic gray light came through the window in the room, but it was enough for me to see evidence of life: the sheets tossed aside on the bed and a pair of jeans crumpled on the floor next to a pair of inside-out dark socks and a discarded T-shirt.

  For a long moment, I just stood by the bed, staring at the snarled sheets, and then I climbed in. The pil ow smel ed like Sam’s hair, and after nights of bad sleep without him, the bed felt like heaven. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew he’d be back. Already, it felt like I was with him again. My eyelids ached with sudden heaviness.

  Behind my closed eyes I felt a tangled grip of emotions and feelings and sensations. The everpresent ache in my stomach. The pang of envy when I thought of Olivia as a wolf. The rawness of anger at my parents. The crippling ferocity of missing Sam. The touch of lips to my forehead.

  Before I knew it, I had fal en asleep—or rather, I had woken up. It didn’t seem like any time at al had passed, but when I opened my eyes, I was facing the wal and the comforter was pul ed up around my shoulders.

  Usual y when I woke up someplace other than my

  bed—at my grandmother’s, or the few times I’d been in a hotel when I was younger—there was a moment of confusion as my body figured out why the light was different and the pil ow wasn’t mine. But opening my eyes in Sam’s room, it was just…opening my eyes. It was like my body had been unable to forget where I was even while I was sleeping.

  So when I rol ed back over to look into the rest of the room and saw birds dancing between me and the ceiling, there was no surprise. Just wonder. Dozens of origami birds of every shape, size, and color danced slowly in the air from the heating vents, life in slow motion. The now-bril iant light through the tal window cast moving bird-shaped shadows al around the room: on the ceiling, on the wal s, over the top of the stacks and shelves of books, across the comforter, across my face. It was beautiful.

  I wondered how long I’d slept. Also, I wondered where Sam was. Stretching my arms above my head, I realized I could hear the dul roar of the shower through the open door. Dimly, I heard Sam’s voice rise above the sound of the shower:

  All these perfect days, made of glass

  Put on the shelf where they can cast

  perfect shadows that stretch and grow

  on the imperfect days down below.

  He sang the line over again, twice, changing stretch and grow to shift and glow and then shift and grow. His voice sounded wet and echoey.

  I smiled, though there was no one to see it. The fight with my parents seemed like something that had happened to a longago Grace. Kicking back the blankets, I stood up, my head sending one of the birds into crazy orbit. I reached up to stil it and then moved among the birds, looking at what they were made of. The one that had knocked against my head was folded out of newsprint. Here was one folded out of a glossy magazine cover. Another from a paper beautiful y and intricately printed with flowers and leaves. One that looked like it had once been a tax worksheet. Another, misshapen and tiny, made out of two dol ar bil s taped together. A school report card from a correspondence school out of Maryland. So many stories and memories folded up for safekeeping; how like Sam to hang them al above him while he slept.

  I fingered the one that hung directly over his pil ow. A rumpled piece of notepaper covered with Sam’s handwriting, echoing the voice I now heard in the background. One of the scribbled lines was girl lying in the snow.

  I sighed. I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you’re not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was real y a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me.

  I smiled again, and the delicate birds danced around me.

  “Hi,” Sam said from the doorway. His voice was cautious, unsure of where we stood this morning, after our days apart. His hair was al stuck out and crazy from his shower, and he was wearing a col ared shirt that made him look weirdly formal, despite its rumpled, untucked appearance and his blue jeans. My mind was screaming: Sam, Sam, finally Sam.

  “Hi,” I said, and I couldn’t keep from grinning. I bit my lip, but my smile was stil there, and it only got bigger when Sam’s face reflected it back at me. I stood there among his birds, with the shape of my body stil impressed on the bed sheets beside me, the sun splashing over me and him, and my worries of last night seeming impossibly smal in comparison to the vast glow of this morning.

  I was suddenly overwhelmed by what an incredible person this boy was, standing in front of me, and by the fact that he was mine and I was his.

  “Right now,” Sam said—and I saw that he held the invoice for today’s studio time in his hand, folded into a invoice for
today’s studio time in his hand, folded into a bird with sun-washed wings—“it’s hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  • COLE •

  I couldn’t get the smel of her blood out of my nostrils. Sam was gone by the time I got to the house; the driveway was empty and the house felt echoey and hol ow. I burst into the downstairs bathroom—the bath mat was stil twisted from where Sam and I had struggled the night before—and turned the tap on as hot as I could get it. Then I stood in it and watched blood run down the drain. It looked black in the dul filtered light behind the shower curtain. Scrubbing my palms together and scratching my arms, I tried to get every last trace of the doe off me, but no matter how hard I worked my skin, I could stil smel her. And every time I caught a whiff of her scent, I saw her. That dark, resigned eye looking up at me while I stared at her insides.

  Then I remembered Victor looking up at me, lying on the floor of the shed, bitter, simultaneously Victor and wolf. My fault.

  It occurred to me then that I was the opposite of my father. Because I was very, very good at destroying things.

  I reached forward and turned the water

  temperature al the way to cold. There was a brief moment when there was enough hot water to make it the exact temperature of my body, turning me invisible. Then it became frigid. I swore and fought my instincts to jump out of the tub.

  Goose bumps rose immediately on my skin, so fast that they hurt, and I let my head fal back. The water coursed over my neck.

  Shift. Shift now.

  But the water wasn’t cold enough to force me to change; it was just cold enough to make my gut twist and nausea bubble through me. I used my foot to shut off the water.

  Why was I stil human?

  It didn’t make sense. If being a wolf was scientific, not magical, then it had to fol ow rules and logic. And the fact that the new wolves changed at different temperatures at different times…it didn’t make sense. My head was ful of Victor shifting back and forth, the white wolf watching me silently, sure in her wolf body, and me, pacing the hal s of the house, waiting to shift. I grabbed the hand towel from the sink and used it to dry myself as I riffled through the downstairs closets for clothing. I found a dark blue sweatshirt that said navy on it and some jeans that were a bit loose but didn’t fal off. The entire time that I was looking for clothing, my head hummed, turning over possibilities for new logic. Maybe Beck had been wrong about hot and cold

  being the cause of the shifts. Maybe they weren’t real y causes; maybe they were just catalysts. In which case there might be other ways to trigger the shift. I needed paper. I couldn’t think without writing my thoughts down.

  I got some paper from Beck’s office, and Beck’s day planner as wel . I sat down at the dining room table, pen in hand, the heat rushing out softly through the vents making me feel warm and drowsy. My brain instantly traveled back to my parents’ dining room table. I’d sat there every morning with my brainstorming notebook—my father’s idea—and I would do my homework or write song lyrics or journal on something I’d seen on the news. That was back when I’d been sure I was going to change the world.

  I thought about Victor, his eyes closed as he rode some new high. My mother’s face when I told her she could go to hel with Dad. The countless girls waking up to find out they’d slept with a ghost, because I was already gone, if not in actuality, in some spiraling trip contained in a bottle or syringe. The way that Angie had one hand pressed flat against her breastbone when I told her I’d cheated on her.

  Oh, yeah, I’d changed the world al right.

  I opened the day planner and browsed through it, not even real y reading, just skimming, looking for clues. There were little bits and pieces that might be useful but were meaningless on their own: I found one of the wolves dead today; I looked at her eyes but she was no one to me. Paul said she’d stopped shifting fourteen years ago. There was blood on her face. Smelled like hell. And Derek changed into a wolf for two hours in the heat of summer; Ulrik and I have been trying to work that one out all afternoon. A nd Why does Sam get so many fewer years than the rest of us? He is the best of all of us. Why does life have to be so unfair?

  My gaze dropped to my hand. There was stil a little bit of blood underneath the nail of my thumb. I didn’t think that blood could stay on your skin when you shifted; it would’ve been on my fur, anyway, not on my skin. So that meant that blood underneath my fingernail had gotten there after I’d become a human. In those unmeasured minutes after I got my human body back but before I’d become Cole again.

  I rested my head on the table; the wood seemed

  freezing cold on my skin. It seemed like far too much work to work out the werewolf logic. Even if I did—even if I figured out what real y made us shift and where our minds went when they weren’t fol owing our bodies

  —what was the point? To become a wolf forever? Al that work, just to preserve a life that I wouldn’t remember. A life not worth preserving.

  I knew from experience that there were easier ways to get rid of conscious thought. And I knew of one, one that until now I’d just been too cowardly to attempt, that worked permanently.

  I’d told Angie once. It was back before she hated me, I think. I’d been playing the keyboard, home from my first tour, when the whole world lay out before me like I was both king and conqueror, ful of possibilities. Angie didn’t know yet that I’d cheated on her during the tour. Or maybe she did. When I’d stopped playing, my fingers stil hovering over the keys, I said to her, “I’ve been thinking about kil ing myself.”

  Angie hadn’t looked up from her position in the old La-Z-Boy we kept in the garage. “Yeah, I guessed that. How’s that working out for you?”

  “It’s got its definite pros,” I replied. “I can only think of one con.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then she said, “Why would you say something like that, anyway? You want me to talk you out of it? The only person who can talk you out of or into that is yourself. You’re the genius. You know that. So that means you’re just saying it for effect.”

  “Bul ,” I said. “I real y wanted your advice. But whatever.”

  “What do you think I’m going to say? ‘You’re my boyfriend, go on, kill yourself. It’s a nice easy way out.

  ’ I’m sure that’s what I would say.”

  In my head, I was in a hotel letting some girl named Rochel e who I’d never see again slide my pants off, just because I could. I closed my eyes and let self-loathing gently sing a siren song to me. “I don’t know, Angie. I don’t know. I didn’t think. I just said what I was thinking, okay?”

  She bit her knuckle and looked at the floor for a moment. “Okay, how about this. Redemption. That’s the biggest con I can think of. You kil yourself, that’s the end. That’s the way you’l be remembered. That, and hel . You stil believe in that?”

  I’d lost my cross somewhere on the road. The chain had broken and now it was probably in some chain had broken and now it was probably in some gas station bathroom or tangled in hotel sheets or kept as some shining souvenir by someone I hadn’t meant to leave it with.

  “Yeah,” I said, because I stil believed in hel . It was heaven I wasn’t so sure about anymore.

  I didn’t mention it to her again. Because she was right: The only person who could talk me into it or out of it was me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  • GRACE •

  Every minute took us farther away from Mercy Fal s and everything in it.

  We took Sam’s car, because it was a diesel and

  got better mileage, but Sam let me drive, because he knew I liked to. The CD player stil had one of my Mozart CDs in it when we got in, but I switched it to the fuzzy indie alt-rock station I knew he liked. Sam blinked over at me in surprise, and I tried not to look too smug that I was learning his language. Slower, maybe, than he was learning mine, but stil , I was impressed with myself.

  The day was be
autiful and blue, the low areas of the road coated with a thin, pale mist that began to burn off as soon as the sun got above the trees. Some guy with a mel ow voice and persuasive guitar hummed out of the speakers; he reminded me of Sam. Beside me, Sam leaned his arm across the back of my seat to softly pinch one of the vertebrae in my neck, and murmured along to the lyrics with a voice that conveyed both fondness and familiarity. Despite my slightly achy limbs, it was hard to shake the feeling of utter rightness with the world.

  “Do you know what you’re going to sing?” I asked. Sam leaned his cheek on his outstretched arm and drew lazy circles on the back of my neck. “I don’t know. You sprang it on me suddenly. And I was a bit preoccupied with being ostracized for the last few days. I guess I wil sing—something. I may suck.”

  “I don’t think you wil suck. What were you singing in the shower?”

  He was unself-conscious as he answered, both endearing and unusual for him. I was beginning to realize that music was the only skin he was truly comfortable in. “Something new. Maybe something new. Wel …maybe something.”

  I got onto the interstate; this time of day, the road was lonely and we had the lanes to ourselves. “A baby song?”

  “A baby song. More like a fetal song. I don’t think it’s even got legs yet. Wait, I think I’m getting babies confused with tadpoles.”

  I struggled to think of what it was that developed first on babies and failed utterly to manage it in a timely enough manner for a comeback. So I just said, “About me?”

  “They’re al about you,” Sam said.

  “No pressure.”

  “Not for you. You get to just float along through life being Grace and I’m the one who has to run to keep up creatively and lyrical y with the ways you change. You’re not a fixed target, you know.”

  I frowned. I thought of myself as frustratingly unchangeable.

  “I know what you’re thinking. But you’re right here, aren’t you?” Sam asked, using his free hand to point a finger into the fuzzy seat of the car. “You fought to be with me instead of letting yourself get grounded for a week. That’s the stuff entire albums are based on.”