Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02]

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “No, it does not,” I said. “You’re making this stuff up.”

  “I am not.” Cole’s expression was earnest. “This was polite dinner table conversation where I grew up.”

  He added another box to his napkin flowchart. “So let’s pretend there’s another little box here of things that cold makes your hypothalamus do.” He wrote Become a wolf in the new box he’d drawn; the napkin tore a bit as he did.

  I turned the napkin around so that his handwriting

  —jagged, erratic letters piled on top of one another

  —was right side up for me. “So how does meningitis fit into this?”

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t know. But it might explain why I’m human right now.” Without turning the napkin around again, he wrote, in big block letters across his hypothalamus box: METH.

  I looked at him.

  He didn’t look away. His eyes looked very, very green with the afternoon light on them. “You know how they say drugs mess up your brain? Wel , I’m thinking they were right.”

  I kept looking at him, and saw he was so obviously waiting for me to remark on his drug-life past. Instead, I said, “Tel me about your father.”

  • COLE •

  I don’t know why I told her about my father. She wasn’t exactly the most sympathetic audience. But maybe that was why I told her.

  I didn’t tel her the first part, which was this: Once upon a time, before being a new wolf tied up in the back of a Tahoe, before Club Josephine, before NARKOTIKA, there was a boy named Cole St. Clair, and he could do anything. And the weight of that possibility was so unbearable that he crushed himself before it had a chance to.

  Instead, I said, “Once upon a time, I was the son of a mad scientist. A legend. He was a child prodigy and then he was a teen genius and then he was a scientific demigod. He was a geneticist. He made people’s babies prettier.”

  Isabel didn’t say That’s not so bad. She just frowned.

  “And that was fine,” I said. And it had been fine. I remembered photographs of me sitting on his shoulders while the ocean surf rushed around his calves. I remembered word games tossed back and forth in the car. I remembered chess pieces, pawns forth in the car. I remembered chess pieces, pawns lying in piles by the side of the board. “He was gone a lot—but hey, I didn’t care about that. Everything was great when he was home, and my brother and I had good childhoods. Yeah, everything was great, until we started to get older.”

  It was hard to remember the first time Mom said it, but I’m pretty sure that was the moment it al started to fal apart.

  “Don’t hold me in suspense,” Isabel said

  sarcastical y. “What did he do?”

  “Not him,” I said. “Me. What did I do.”

  What had I done? I must’ve commented cleverly on something in the newspaper, done wel enough in school to get bumped forward a grade, solved some puzzle they hadn’t thought I could solve. One day, Mom said for the first time, half a smile on her long, plain face that always looked tired—perhaps from being married to greatness for so long—“Guess who he’s taking after.”

  The beginning of the end.

  I shrugged. “I left my brother behind in school. My dad wanted me to come to the lab with him. He wanted me to take col ege classes. He wanted me to be him.” I stopped, thinking of al the times I’d disappointed him. Silence was always, always worse than shouting. “I wasn’t him. He was a genius. I’m not.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It wasn’t, to me. But it was to him. He wanted to know why I didn’t even try. Why it was I went running the other way.”

  “What was the other way?” Isabel asked.

  I stared at her, silent.

  “Don’t give me that look. I’m not trying to find out who you are. I don’t care who you are. I just want to know why it is you are the way you are.”

  Just then, the end of the table jostled, and I looked up into the bright, pimpled faces of three preteen girls. They had three matching pairs of half-moon eyes curved up in three matching expressions of excitement. The faces were unfamiliar but their postures were not; I immediately knew, with sinking certainty, what they were going to say.

  Isabel looked at them. “Uh, hel o, if this is about Girl Scout cookies, you can leave. Actual y, if it’s about anything, you can leave.”

  The ringleader preteen, who had hoop earrings

  —ankle holders, Victor had cal ed them—thrust a pink notebook at me. “I cannot believe it. I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it! Would you sign that? Please?”

  The other two chorused “omigod” softly.

  I guess what I should’ve been feeling was dread at being recognized. But al I could think while looking at them was that I’d agonized in a hotel room to write these brutal, nuanced songs, and my fan base was three squealing ten-year-old girls wearing High School Musical T-shirts. NARKOTIKA for kindergartners. I looked at them and said, “Excuse me?”

  Their faces fel , just a little, but the girl with the hoop earrings didn’t withdraw the notepad. “Please,”

  she said. “Would you autograph it? We won’t bother you after that, I swear. I died when I heard ‘Break My Face.’ It’s my ringtone. I love it so bad. It’s, like, the best song, ever. I cried when you went missing. I didn’t eat for days. And I added my signature to the petition for people who believed you were stil alive. Oh my God, I can’t even believe it. You’re alive. ”

  One of the girls behind her was actual y crying, blinded by the sheer emotional good fortune of finding me with my heart stil beating.

  “Oh,” I said, and proceeded to lie smoothly. “You think I’m—yeah. I get that a lot. It’s been a while. But no, I’m not.” I felt Isabel’s eyes on me.

  “What?” Now the hoop-earring girl’s face fel . “You look just like him. Real y cute.” She flushed a shade of red so deep it had to be painful.

  “Thanks.” Please just go away.

  Hoop-earring girl said, “You’re real y not him?”

  “I’m real y not. You don’t know how much I’ve heard that, since the news story.” I shrugged apologetical y.

  “Can I at least take a picture with my phone?” she asked. “Just so I can tel my friends about it?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, uneasy.

  “That means get out of here ,” Isabel said. “Like, now.”

  The girls shot Isabel foul looks before turning and huddling around one another. We could stil hear their voices clearly. “He looks just like him,” one of the girls said wistful y.

  “I think it is him,” hoop-earring girl said. “He just doesn’t want to be bothered. He ran away to escape the tabloids.”

  Isabel’s eyes burned on me, waiting for an answer.

  “Mistaken identity,” I told her.

  The girls had gotten back to their seats. Hoopearring girl looked over the back of the booth and said,

  “I love you anyway, Cole!” before ducking back down. The other two girls squealed.

  The other two girls squealed.

  Isabel said, “Cole?”

  Cole. I was back where I started. Cole St. Clair. As we left, the girls took my pic with their cel phones, anyway.

  Beginning. of. the. end.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  • SAM •

  I had never worked so hard on my music as I did the first two hours in the studio: Once Dmitra had decided that I wasn’t an El iott Smith wannabe, she shifted into high gear. We went over verses once, twice, three times, sometimes just trying a different arrangement, sometimes recording additional strumming guitar to go over my fingerpicking, sometimes adding percussive effects. On some tracks, I recorded over my voice with harmonies, sometimes more than once, until I was my very own pack of Sams crooning in polyphonic splendor.

  It was bril iant, surreal, exhausting. I was beginning to feel how little sleep I’d gotten the night before.

  “Why don’t you take five?” Dmitra suggested after a few hour
s. “I’l work on mixing what we’ve done so far and you can get up, piss, get some coffee. You’re starting to sound a little flat, and your girlfriend looks like she misses you.”

  Through the headphones, I heard Grace say indignantly, “I was just sitting here!”

  I grinned and slid the headphones off. Leaving both them and my guitar behind, I came back into the main room. Grace, looking as exhausted as I felt, lounged on the sofa with the dog at her feet. I stood next to her while Dmitra showed me the shape of my voice on the computer screen. Grace hugged my hips and rested her cheek on my leg. “You sound amazing from out here.”

  Dmitra clicked a button, and my voice,

  compressed and harmonized and beautified, came through the speakers. I sounded—not like me. No

  …like me. But me, if I was on a radio. Me from outside myself. I stuffed my hands into my armpits, listening. If it was that easy to make a guy sound like a proper singer, you’d think everybody would be in the studio.

  “It’s bril iant,” I told her. “Whatever you’ve done. It sounds bril iant.”

  Dmitra didn’t turn around as she kept clicking and sliding. “That’s al you, baby. I haven’t real y done much yet.”

  I didn’t believe her. “Right. Yeah. Hey, where is the bathroom?”

  Grace jerked her chin toward the hal . “Turn left at the kitchen.”

  I ran a hand over Grace’s head and tweaked her

  ear with my fingers until she released me, and then I headed down the rat’s maze of hal s past the kitchenette. Now, in the hal way, lined with framed and signed album covers, I could smel the cigarette smoke. On the way back from the bathroom, I took my time going back to the studio, looking at the albums and signatures. Karyn might’ve believed that you could tel everything about someone by what sort of books they read, but I knew that you could tel even more by the music they listened to. If the wal was to be believed, Dmitra’s tastes seemed to run toward electronica and dance. She had an impressive col ection that I could admire even if the bands weren’t real y my thing. I made a note to joke with her about her impressive selection of Swedish album covers when I got back to the studio.

  Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn’t. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn’t consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something’s out of place before you’ve bothered to properly look.

  I felt that happening now. I saw Cole’s face, or something that reminded me of it, though I didn’t know where. I turned back to the wal and swept my eyes across the album covers again. Slower, this time. Scanning the artwork, the printed titles and artists, looking for what had triggered the image.

  And there it was. Bigger than the others, because it was not an album cover but rather the glossy front of a magazine. On it, a guy leaped at the viewer, and behind it crouched his band members, staring at him. It was a famous cover. I remembered seeing it before. I remembered noticing the way the guy jumped toward the camera with his limbs completely outstretched, like the flight was al that mattered, like he didn’t care what happened when he landed. I remembered, too, the main headline on the magazine, done in the same font that the band used on their album—BREAKING OUT: THE

  FRONT MAN OF NARKOTIKA TALKS ABOUT SUCCESS BEFORE

  18.

  But I had not remembered the guy having Cole’s

  face.

  I closed my eyes for a single moment, the cover stil branded in my vision. Please, I thought. Please let it just be an uncanny resemblance. Please don’t let Beck have infected someone famous.

  I opened my eyes, and Cole was stil there. And behind him, out of focus, because the camera only cared about Cole, was Victor.

  I made my way slowly to the studio; they were listening to another one of my tracks, which sounded even better than the last. But it seemed suddenly disconnected from my life. My real life, the one that was dictated by the rise and fal of the temperature, even now that my skin was firmly human.

  “Dmitra,” I said, and she turned around. Grace looked up, too, frowning at something in my voice.

  “What’s the name of the front man of NARKOTIKA?”

  I’d already seen al the proof I needed, but I didn’t think I would real y believe it until I heard someone say it out loud.

  Dmitra’s face cracked into a grin, softer than she’d been the entire time we’d been in the studio.

  “Oh, man, that was a great concert. He is crazy as a fox, but that band was…” She shook her head and seemed to remember that I’d asked a question. “Cole St. Clair. He’s been missing for months.”

  Cole.

  Cole was Cole St. Clair.

  And I had thought that my yel ow eyes were hard to hide behind.

  It meant there were thousands of eyes out there looking for him, waiting to recognize him.

  And when they’d found him, they’d find al of us.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  • ISABEL •

  “Where do you want me to drop you off? Back at Beck’s house?”

  We were sitting in my SUV, which was parked in

  the far corner of the Kenny’s parking lot so no rednecks would open their car doors into it. I was trying not to look at Cole, who seemed huge in the front seat, his presence taking up far more room than his physical body.

  “Don’t do that,” Cole said.

  I slid my eyes toward him. “Do what?”

  “Don’t pretend like nothing happened,” he said.

  “Ask me about it.”

  The afternoon light was dying quickly. A long, dark cloud slashed through the sky in the west. Not a rain cloud for us. Just bad weather on its way somewhere else.

  I sighed. I didn’t know if I wanted to know. It seemed to me that knowing would be more work than not knowing. But it wasn’t like we could real y put the genie back in the lamp now that it was out, could we?

  “Does it matter?”

  Cole said, “I want you to know.”

  Now I looked at him, at his dangerously handsome face that even now cal ed, in unsafe and dulcet tones, Isabel, kiss me, lose yourself in me. It was a sad face, once you knew to look for it. “Do you real y?”

  “I have to know if anybody other than ten-year-olds know who I am,” Cole said. “Or I real y wil have to kil myself.”

  I gave him a withering look.

  “Should I guess?” I asked. Without waiting for him to answer, I remembered his deft fingers and thought of his pretty face and said, “Keyboardist for a boy band.”

  “Lead singer of NARKOTIKA,” Cole said.

  I waited a long beat, waited for him to say kidding. But he didn’t.

  • COLE •

  Her face didn’t change. Maybe my target audience real y was preteens. It was al very anticlimactic.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Just because I didn’t recognize your face doesn’t mean I haven’t heard your music. Everyone and Jesus has heard your music.”

  I didn’t say anything. What was there to say, real y? The entire conversation felt very déjà vu or something; like I’d known al along I was going to have it with her, here in her car, the afternoon growing cold under the clouds.

  “What?” Isabel asked, leaning over to look me straight in the face. “What? You think I give a crap about you being a rock star?”

  “It’s not about the music,” I said.

  Isabel pressed her finger into the crook of my elbow, on my track marks. “Let me guess. Drugs, girls, lots of swearing. What is there about you that you haven’t already told me? This morning you were lying naked on the floor and tel ing me you wanted to kil yourself. So, what, you think that me knowing you’re lead singer of omigod NARKOTIKA is going to change anything?”

  “Yeah. No.” I didn’t know what I was. Relieved?

  Disappointed? Did I want it to change things?

  “What do you want me to say?” Isabel asked me.

  “‘You’re going to corrupt me, get out of my
car’ ? Too late. I’m already way beyond your influence.”

  At that, I laughed, though I felt bad for doing it because I knew she’d take it as an insult, though real y it wasn’t. “Oh, believe me, you are not. There are tiny, dirty rabbit holes that you have not been down that I have. I have taken people down into those tunnels with me, and they’ve never come out.”

  I was right. She was offended. She thought I found her naive.

  “I’m not trying to piss you off. I’m just giving you fair warning. I’m far more famous for that than my music.”

  Her face had gone utterly frosty, so I thought I was getting through to her. “I am, quite possibly, utterly incapable of making a decision that is not self-serving in absolutely every way.”

  Now Isabel started to laugh, a high, cruel laugh that was so sure of itself that it kind of turned me on. She put the car in reverse. “I keep waiting for you to tel me something that I don’t already know.”

  • ISABEL •

  I took Cole home, knowing ful wel it was a bad idea

  —and maybe doing it because it was a bad idea. By the time we got there, it was a dazzling evening, almost tacky in its beauty, the entire sky painted a color pink that I’d only ever seen here in northern Minnesota. We were back where we’d first met, only now we

  knew each other’s names. There was a car parked in the driveway: my dad’s smoke blue BMW.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said as I pul ed up on the other side of the circular driveway and put the SUV in park. “That’s my dad. It’s a weekend, so he’l be in the basement with some hard liquor to keep him company. He won’t even know we’re home.”

  Cole didn’t comment, just slid out of the car, into the chil y, cloud-covered air. He rubbed his arms and looked at me, his eyes blank and dark in the shadows.

  “Hurry,” he said.

  I felt the bite of the wind and knew what he meant. I didn’t want him to be a wolf right now, so I grabbed his arm and turned him toward the side door, the one that opened right at the base of the second staircase.