I shot her a look that clearly said, Oh, that will help. She smiled her thin, cruel smile and said, “If you stil feel like kil ing yourself after caffeine, there wil be plenty of time left in the day.”
“Ungh,” I grunted as I got to my feet. I was taken aback by this perspective, standing, looking around at the hal and living room that I had trashed. I hadn’t expected to be doing this again. My spine hurt like hel from shifting so many times in quick succession.
“Better be some pretty amazing coffee.”
“It’s not great,” Isabel admitted. She had a weird look on her face now that I was standing: relief? “But for the middle of nowhere, it’s definitely better than what one would expect. Wear something comfortable. It’s three miles back to my car.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
• SAM •
The studio was unimpressive from the outside. It was a squat, tired-looking rambler with a squat, tired-looking blue minivan parked in the driveway. An unmoving Labrador retriever lay in the unoccupied part of the driveway, so Grace parked on the street. She eyed the precipitous angle of the street and wrenched up the parking brake.
“Is that dog dead?” she asked. “Do you think this is real y the place?”
I pointed to the bumper stickers on the minivan, al local Duluth indie bands currently in vogue: Finding the Monkey, The Wentz, Alien LifeForms. I hadn’t heard any of them—they were too smal to get radio play
—but their names were tossed around enough in local advertisements for me to recognize them. “Yeah, I think so.”
“If we get kidnapped by weird hippies, I’m blaming you,” she said, opening her door. A rush of cold morning air got sucked into the car, smel ing of city: exhaust, asphalt, the indefinable scent of a lot of people living in a lot of buildings.
“You picked the place.”
Grace blew a raspberry at me and got out. For a moment she seemed a little unsteady on her feet, but she recovered quickly, clearly not wanting me to see it.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be okayer,” she said, popping the trunk. When I reached down to get my guitar case, nerves punched me in the stomach, surprising me not by their presence but by the fact that they took so long to get there. I gripped the handle of my guitar case and hoped I wouldn’t forget al of my chords.
We headed up to the front door. The dog didn’t lift its head.
“I think it is dead,” Grace said.
“I think it’s one of those things to hide keys under,”
I told her.
Grace hooked her fingers in my jean pocket. I was about to knock on the front door when I saw a tiny wooden plaque with permanent-marker lettering: STUDIO ENTRANCE AROUND BACK.
So we went around the back of the rambler, where cracked concrete stairs too wide to easily fit our steps led us to an exposed basement and a hand-lettered sign
that
said ANARCHY RECORDING, INC.
ENTRANCE HERE. Below it was a planter with some limp pansies that had been put out too early and battered by frost.
I turned to Grace. “ ‘Anarchy, Incorporated.’ That’s ironic.”
Grace gave me a withering look and rapped on the door. I wiped a suddenly clammy palm on my jeans. The door opened, revealing another Labrador, this one very much alive, and a twenty-something girl with a red bandanna tied around her head. She was so interesting-looking
and unpretty that she actual y
traveled through ugly to someplace on the other side that was almost as good as pretty: huge, beaked nose, sleepy-looking
dark
brown
eyes,
and
sharp
cheekbones. Her black hair was pul ed up in a half a dozen interconnected braids coiled on top of her head, like a Mediterranean Princess Leia.
“Sam and Grace? Come on in.” Her voice was gorgeous and complicated, a smoker’s voice, though the smel pouring from inside was coffee, not cigarettes. Grace, suddenly motivated, stepped into the studio, fol owing the scent of caffeine like a rat after the Pied Piper.
Once the door was shut behind us, it was no longer the basement of a shabby rambler but a high-tech escape pod in some other universe. We faced a wal of mixing boards and computer monitors; the entire room was dark and muted by soundproofing; recessed lighting il uminated the keypads and a chic low black sofa. One of the wal s was glass and looked into a dark, soundproofed room with an upright piano and an assortment of microphones in it.
“I’m Dmitra,” the girl with the braids said, reaching a hand out to shake. She looked unflinchingly at me at the same time that I lifted my gaze from her nose to her eyes, and just like that, we had made an unspoken pact: She would not stare at my yel ow eyes because I would not stare at her nose. “Are you Sam or Grace?”
I smiled at her straight-faced delivery and shook her hand. “Sam Roth. Nice to meet you.”
Dmitra shook hands with Grace, who was making
friends with the Labrador, and said, “What are we doing today, kids?”
Grace looked at me. I said, “Demo, I guess.”
“You guess? What sort of instrumentation are we looking at?”
I lifted the guitar case a few inches.
“Okay,” she said. “You done this before?”
“Nope.”
“A virgin. Sometimes just what you need,” Dmitra said.
She reminded me a little of Beck. Even though she was smiling and joking, I could tel that she was watching and judging and making decisions about me and Grace as she did. Beck did that, too: gave the impression of intimacy while he was real y deciding whether or not you were worth his time.
“You’l be in there, then,” she continued. “Do you want to get some coffee before we get started?”
Grace made a beeline for the kitchenette that Dmitra indicated. While she did, Dmitra asked me,
“What do you listen to?”
I set my guitar case on the sofa and extracted my guitar. I tried not to sound too pretentious. “A lot of indie rock. The Shins, El iott Smith, José González. Damien Rice. Gutter Twins. Stuff like that.”
“El iott Smith,” Dmitra repeated, as if I hadn’t said anything else. “I see.”
Grace reappeared with an ugly mug with a deer painted on it, as Dmitra did something with the computer that may or may not have been as useful as she was making it look. Final y, she directed me into the other room. She gave me an audience of microphones, one for my voice, one for my guitar, both leaning attentively toward me, and handed me a set of headphones.
“So we can talk to you,” she said, disappearing back into the other room. Grace lingered, her hand on the Labrador’s head beside her.
My fingers felt grimy and inadequate to the task ahead of them; the headphones smel ed like they’d been worn by too many heads. From my perch on the chair, I looked plaintively up at Grace, who looked beautiful and peaked in the strange recessed lighting, like an edgy magazine model. I realized I hadn’t asked her how she was feeling that morning. If she was stil sick. I remembered her losing her footing outside the car and taking care to make sure I didn’t see. I swal owed, my throat clinging to itself, and asked instead, “Can we get a dog?”
“We can,” Grace said, magnanimously. “But I wil not walk it in the morning. Because I wil be sleeping.”
“I never sleep,” I said. “I’l do it.”
I jumped as Dmitra’s voice came through the headphones. “Would you just sing and play a little bit so that I can set up the levels?”
Grace leaned over and kissed the top of my head, careful not to spil her coffee into my lap. “Good luck.”
I sort of wanted her to stay here while I sang, to remind me of why I was here, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be the same to sing songs about missing her while looking at her, so I let her go.
• GRACE •
I took my place on the sofa and tried to pretend that Dmitra didn’t intimidate me. She didn’t make smal tal
k while she was rummaging on the mixing board, and I didn’t know if talking would bother her, so I just sat there and watched her work.
Honestly, I was glad for the break in the conversation, the opportunity to be silent. My head was beginning its same slow thrumming, the strange heat spreading through my body again. Talking through the headache made my teeth ache; the warmth of the dul pain gathered in my throat and in my nostrils. I dabbed a tissue on my nose, but it was dry.
Just keep it together for today , I told myself. Today isn’t about you.
I would not ruin the day for Sam. So I sat on the sofa and ignored my body the best I could and listened.
Sam had turned his back so that he faced away from us while he tuned his guitar, his shoulders hunched around the instrument.
“Sing for me for a moment,” Dmitra said, and I saw him turn his head when he heard her voice in his headphones.
He
launched
into
some
rapid
fingerpicking piece that I’d never heard him play before, and began to sing. His very first note wavered, a hint of nerves, and then it was gone, disappearing into his voice, breathy and earnest. The song was this heart-breaking piece about loss and saying good-bye
—I thought at first that it was about Beck, or even about me, and then I realized it was about Sam:
One thousand ways to say good-bye
One thousand ways to cry
One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside
I say good-bye good-bye good-bye
I shout it out so loud
‘Cause the next time that I find my voice I might not remember how.
Hearing it coming out of speakers instead of Sam made it seem entirely different, like I had never heard him before. For some reason, my face just wanted to smile and smile. It felt wrong to be so proud of something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, but I couldn’t help myself. In front of the mixing board, Dmitra had gone stil , her fingers poised over the top of sliders. Her head was cocked, listening, and then she said, without turning around to face me, “We might end up with something good today.”
I just kept smiling, because I’d known that al along.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
• ISABEL •
At three in the afternoon, we had Kenny’s to ourselves. It stil smel ed like the morning’s greasy breakfast offerings: cheap bacon, soggy hash browns, and a vague cigarette odor, despite the lack of a smoking section.
Across the booth from me, Cole slouched, his legs long enough that I kept accidental y hitting them with my feet. I didn’t think he looked like he belonged in this hick diner any more than I did. He looked like he’d been put together by a swank designer who knew what he was doing—his distinctive features were brutal and purposeful, sharp enough to hurt yourself on. The booth seemed soft and faded around him, almost comical y old-fashioned and country in comparison, like someone had dropped him here for a tongue-in-cheek photo shoot. I was sort of fascinated by his hands
—hard-looking hands, al steep angles and prominent veins running across the back of them. I watched the deft way that his fingers moved while he did mundane things like putting sugar in his coffee.
“You a musician?” I asked.
Cole looked at me from under his eyebrows; something about the question bothered him, but he was too good to reveal much. “Yeah,” he said.
“What kind?”
He made the kind of face real musicians make when they’re asked about their music. His voice was self-deprecating when he said, “Just a bit of everything. Keyboards, I guess.”
“We have a piano at my house,” I said.
Cole looked at his hands. “Don’t real y do it anymore.” And then he fel silent again, and it was that silence, heavy and growing and poisonous, that rested on the table between us.
I made a face that he didn’t see because he didn’t bother lifting his eyes. I wasn’t big on making smal talk. I considered cal ing Grace to ask her what I should say to a reticent suicidal werewolf, but I’d left my phone somewhere. Car, maybe.
“What are you looking at?” I demanded final y, not expecting an answer.
To my surprise, Cole stretched one hand out toward me, extending his fingers so that his thumb was closest, and he regarded it with an expression of wonder and revulsion. His voice echoed his expression. “This morning, when I became me again, there was a dead deer in front of me. Not real y dead. She was looking at me”—and now he met my eye, to see my reaction—“but she couldn’t get up, because before I’d shifted, I’d ripped her open. And I guess, wel , I guess I was eating her alive. And I guess I kept doing it after, because my hands…they were covered with her guts.”
He looked down at his thumb, and now I saw that there was a smal ridge of brown beneath the nail. The end of his thumb trembled, so slightly that I almost didn’t see it. He said, “I can’t get it off.”
I rested my hand on the table, palm up, and when he didn’t understand what I wanted, I stretched my arm a few inches farther and took his fingers in mine. With my other hand, I got my nail clipper out of my purse. I flicked out the hook and slid it under his nail, scraping the bit of brown out.
I blew the grit off the table, put the clippers back in my purse, and let him have his hand back.
He left it where it was, between us, palm down, fingers spread out and pressed against the tabletop as if it were an animal poised for flight.
Cole said, “I don’t think your brother was your fault.
”
I rol ed my eyes. “Thanks, Grace.”
“Huh?”
“Grace. Sam’s girlfriend. She says that, too. But she wasn’t there. Anyway, the guy she tried to save that way lived. She can afford to be generous. Why are we talking about this?”
“Because you made me walk three miles for a cup of old coffee. Tel me why meningitis.”
“Because meningitis gives you a fever.” His blank look told me that I was starting in the wrong place.
“Grace was bitten as a kid. But she never shifted, because her idiot father locked her in the car on a hot day and nearly fried her. We decided that maybe you could replicate that effect with a high fever, and we couldn’t think of anything better than meningitis.”
“With a thirty-five percent survival rate,” Cole said.
“Ten to thirty percent,” I corrected. “And I already told you—it cured Sam. It kil ed Jack.”
“Jack is your brother?”
“Was, yeah.”
“And you injected him?”
“No, Grace did. But I got the infected blood to give to him.”
Cole looked impatient. “I don’t even have to bother to tel you why your guilt is self-indulgent, then.”
One of my eyebrows shot up. “I don’t—”
“Shhh,” he said. He drew his outstretched hand back toward his coffee mug and stared at the salt and pepper shakers. “I’m thinking. So Sam never shifts at al ?”
“No. The fever cooked the wolf out of him, or something.”
Cole shook his head without looking up. “That doesn’t make sense. That shouldn’t have worked. That’s like saying you shiver when you’re cold and you sweat when you’re hot, and so to stop you from shivering for the rest of your life, we’re going to put you in a pizza oven for a couple minutes.”
“Wel , I don’t know what to tel you. This was supposed to be Sam’s last year, and he should’ve been a wolf right now. The fever worked.”
He frowned up at me. “I wouldn’t say the fever worked. I would say that something about meningitis made him stop shifting. And I’d say something about getting shut in a car made Grace stop shifting. Those are maybe true. But saying that the fever did it? You can’t prove that.”
“Listen to you, Mr. Science Guy.”
“My father—”
“The mad scientist,” I interjected.
“Yes, the mad scientist. He used to tel a joke in his class
es. It’s about a frog. I think it’s a frog. It might be a grasshopper. Let’s go with frog. A scientist has a frog and he says, ‘Jump, frog.’ The frog jumps ten feet. The scientist writes down Frog jumps ten feet. Then the scientist chops off one of the frog’s legs and says,
‘Jump, frog,’ and the frog jumps five feet. The scientist writes Cut off one leg, frog jumps five feet. Then he chops off another leg, and says, ‘Jump,’ and the frog jumps two feet. The scientist writes down Cut off two legs, frog jumps two feet. Then he cuts off al the frog’s legs and says, ‘Jump,’ and the frog just lies there. The scientist writes down the conclusions of the test: Cutting off all a frog’s legs makes the subject go deaf. ” Cole looked at me. “Do you get it?”
I was indignant. “I’m not a total idiot. You think we jumped to the wrong conclusion. But it worked. What does it matter?”
“Nothing, I guess, for Sam, if it’s working,” Cole said. “But I just don’t think that Beck had it right. He told me that cold made us wolves and hot made us humans. But if that was true, the new wolves like me wouldn’t be unstable. You can’t make rules and then say that they don’t real y count just because your body doesn’t know them yet. Science doesn’t work that way.
”
I considered. “So you think that’s more frog logic?”
Cole said, “I don’t know. That’s what I was thinking about when you came. I was trying to see if I could trigger the shift in a way other than cold.”
“With adrenaline. And stupidity.”
“Right. This is what I’m thinking, and I could be wrong. I think that it’s not real y cold that makes you shift. I think it’s the way your brain reacts to cold that tel s your body to shift. Two entirely different things. One is the real temperature. The other one is the temperature your brain says it is.” Cole’s fingers headed toward his napkin and then stopped. “I feel like I could think better with paper.”
“No paper, but—” I handed him a pen out of my purse.
His entire face changed from when I had first found him. He leaned over the napkin and drew a little flowchart. “See…cold drops your temperature and tel s your hypothalamus to keep you warm. That’s why you shiver. The hypothalamus does al kinds of other fun things, too, like…tel s you whether or not you’re a morning person, and tel s your body to make adrenaline, and how fat you should be, and—”
Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02] Page 20