“There.”
He was shuddering by the time I shut the door behind him, trapping us both in a stairwel the size of a closet. He had to crouch, one hand braced against the wal , for about ten seconds while I stood over him with my hand on the doorknob, waiting to see if I’d have to open the door for him as a wolf.
Final y, he stood up, smel ing wolfish but stil wearing his own face. “That’s the first time I’ve ever tried not to be a wolf,” he told me. Then he turned and went up the stairs without waiting for me to tel him where to go.
I fol owed him up the narrow stairway, everything about him invisible except for the flash of his hands on the loose rail. I had this feeling that he and I, in this moment, were a car crash, and instead of putting on the brakes, I was hitting the accelerator.
At the top of the stairs, Cole hesitated, but I didn’t. I took his hand and went past him, pul ing him after me to another set of stairs, leading him al the way up to my room in the attic. Cole ducked to keep from hitting his head on the steeply slanted wal s, and I turned and grabbed the back of his neck before he had time to straighten.
He smel ed incredibly of wolf, which my head read as a weird combination of Sam and Jack and Grace, and Beck’s house, but I didn’t care, because his mouth was a drug. Kissing him, al I could think about was needing to feel his lower lip between my lips and his hands gripping my body to him. Everything in me was tingling, alive. I couldn’t think about anything except the hungry way he kissed me back.
Far away downstairs, something thumped and smashed. Dad at work. It was a different planet, though, than this one with me and Cole. If Cole’s mouth transported me so far from my life, how much further would the rest of him take me? I reached for Cole’s jeans, my fingers fumbling over the waistband, and unbuttoned the button. Cole closed his eyes and sucked in a breath.
I broke away and backed onto my bed. My heart
was pounding a mil ion miles an hour, watching him, imagining his weight pressing me down into the mattress.
He didn’t fol ow me.
“Isabel,” he said. His hands hovered by his sides.
“What? ” I said. I was, again, out of breath, and he didn’t even look like he was breathing. I thought about how I’d jogged that morning, hadn’t been anywhere yet to reapply makeup, fix my hair. Was that it? I pushed myself up onto my elbows; my body was shaking. Something was rippling up inside of me that I couldn’t identify. “What, Cole? Spit it out.”
Cole just kept looking at me, standing there with his jeans unbuttoned and his hands half fisted by his sides. “I can’t do this.”
My voice came out derisive as I swept my eyes down him. “Doesn’t look that way.”
“I mean, I can’t do this anymore.” He buttoned his jeans and kept looking at me.
I wished he wouldn’t. I turned my face away so that I didn’t have to see the expression on his face. It felt condescending, whether or not he meant it that way. There wasn’t anything he could say that wouldn’t feel condescending.
“Isabel,” he continued, “don’t sulk. I want to. I real y want to.”
I didn’t say anything. I stared at a feather from one of my pil ows that had escaped onto my pale lavender bedspread.
“God, Isabel, don’t make this harder, okay? I’m trying to remember how to be a decent person, okay?
I’m trying to remember who I was before I couldn’t stand myself.”
“What, you didn’t screw girls back then?” I snarled. A fat tear ran out of one of my eyes.
I heard him move; when I glanced up, he had turned to look out the dormer window, his arms crossed over his chest. “I thought you said you were saving yourself.”
“What does that matter?”
“You don’t want to sleep with me. You don’t want to lose your virginity to some screwed-up singer. It’l make you hate yourself for the rest of your life. Sex does that. It’s pretty awesome that way.” His voice was bitter now.
“You just don’t want to feel anything, and it’l work great for about an hour. But then it’l be worse. Trust me.”
“Wel , you’re the expert,” I said. Another tear ran down my face. I hadn’t cried since the week that Jack died. I just wanted Cole to go. Of al the people I might have wanted to see me final y cry, Cole St. Clair, king of the world, was not one of them.
Cole braced his arms on either side of the window; the last of the light coming through the clouds just barely il uminated his face. Not looking at me, he said, “I cheated on my first girlfriend. A lot. While I was on tour. When I got back, we fought about something else, so I told her I’d cheated on her with so many girls I couldn’t remember their names. I told her that I’d seen enough now to know she wasn’t anything special. We broke up. I guess I broke up with her. She was my best friend’s sister, so I basical y forced them to choose between me and each other.” He laughed, a terrible, unfunny laugh. “And now Victor is out there in the woods somewhere, stuck as a wolf. Stuck as a guy becoming a wolf. I’m a great friend, aren’t I?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care about his ethical crisis.
“She was a virgin, too, Isabel,” Cole said, final y looking at me again. “She hates me. She hates herself. I don’t want to do that to you.”
I stared at him. “I didn’t ask for your help, did I?
Did I invite you here for therapy? I don’t need you to save me from myself. Or from you. How weak do you think I am?” For a brief moment, I didn’t think I was going to say it. Then I did. “I should’ve just left you to kil yourself.”
And again that face, always that face. Where he should have been looking at me like I’d hurt him, and there was…nothing.
Tears were burning down my cheeks, pricking when they met under my chin. I didn’t even know what I was crying for.
“You’re not that girl,” Cole said, sounding tired.
“Trust me, I’ve seen enough of them to know. Look. Don’t cry. You’re not that girl, either.”
“Oh, yeah? What girl am I?”
“I’l let you know when I figure it out. Just don’t cry.”
The fact that he was pointing out my crying made it suddenly intolerable for him to see me doing it. I closed my eyes. “Just get out. Get out of my room.”
When I opened them again, he was gone.
• COLE •
Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I’d felt as I came in real y meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn’t before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again.
I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house’s depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone.
What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wal or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up—successful mad scientists general y are—but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked…lived in.
I made a wrong turn on the way to the kitchen and found myself in the Museum of Natural Minnesota History instead: a massive, high-ceilinged room populated by an army of stuffed animals. There were so many that I would’ve doubted their realness, if not for the musty barnyard smel that fil ed the room. for the musty barnyard smel that fil ed the room. Weren’t there animal extinction laws in Minnesota?
Some of these animals looked pretty damned endangered; I’d never seen them in upstate New York, anyway. I peered at some sort of exotical y patterned wildcat, which peered back at me. I remembered a snatch of earlier conversation with Isabel, back when I’d first met her—something about how her father had a penchant for shooting.
Sure enough, there was a wolf perpetual y slinking by one of the wal s, glass eyes glittering in the dim room. Sam must�
��ve been rubbing off on me, because suddenly, it seemed like a particularly horrible way to die, far away from your real body. Like an astronaut dying in space.
I glanced around at the animals—the line between them and me felt very thin—and pushed out a door on the other side of the room, one that I hoped would lead me back toward the kitchen.
I was wrong again. This was a plush round room, elegantly lit by the dying sunset coming through windows that made up half of the curving wal s. At its center was a beautiful baby grand piano—and nothing else. Just the piano and the curving, burgundy wal s. It was a room just for music.
I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sung.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d missed it. I touched the edge of the piano; the smooth finish was cold beneath my fingertips. Somehow, right now, with the chil evening pressing in against the windows, waiting to change my skin, I was more human than I had been in a long time.
• ISABEL •
I sulked for a while and then pushed myself off the bed and got cleaned up in my tiny bathroom. After I’d fixed my face, I got up and went to the window that Cole had been looking out from, wondering how many miles away he was by now. To my surprise, I could see a flashlight cutting an erratic path through the deep blue evening, heading down through the woods, toward the mosaic clearing. Was it Cole? He couldn’t stay human in this weather, not when he’d been shuddering and close to the change before. My father?
I frowned at the enigmatic light, wondering if it meant trouble.
And then I heard the piano. I knew right off that it wasn’t my father, who didn’t even listen to music, and it had been months since my mother had played. Plus, it was not my mother’s delicate, precise playing. It was an unsettling, creeping melody that repeated again and again on the upper keys, the spare tinkering of someone who expected other instruments to fil in the rest.
It was at such odds with how I imagined Cole that I had to see him playing. I silently made my way downstairs to the music room and hesitated outside the door, leaning in just enough to see without being seen.
And there he was. Not properly sitting on the bench, but leaning across it on one knee like he hadn’t meant to stay that long. The musician’s fingers that I’d spotted earlier weren’t visible to me from this angle, but I didn’t need to see them. Al I had to see was his face. Unaware of an audience, lost in the repeated rhythm of the piano riff, lit by the evening, it was like al of Cole’s armor had fal en off. This was not the aggressively handsome, cocky guy that I had met a few days ago. This was just a boy getting to know a tune. He looked young and uncertain and endearing, and I felt betrayed that he was somehow getting himself together when I couldn’t.
Somehow, he was yet again being honest, sharing another secret, when I didn’t have anything I was wil ing another secret, when I didn’t have anything I was wil ing to give in return. For once, I saw something in his eyes. I saw that he was feeling again, and that whatever he was feeling was hurting him.
I wasn’t ready to hurt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
• SAM •
The way home from Duluth was a col age of red tail ights, highway signs suddenly looming out of the darkness only to disappear as quickly as they’d appeared, my voice coming out of the speakers and out of my mouth, Grace’s face il uminated in little flashes and flickers by oncoming headlights.
Grace’s eyes were half lidded with sleepiness, but I felt like I would never sleep again. I felt like this was the only day left in the world and I needed to be awake for it. I’d already told her about Cole, who he was, but I felt like there was more to say. I was probably annoying Grace, but she was being nice enough to not say anything about it. I said, again, “I thought he looked familiar. I just don’t understand why Beck would do it.”
Grace pul ed her hands inside her sleeves and sealed the ends with her fingers. Her skin looked bluish by the light of the radio’s display. “Maybe Beck didn’t know who he was. I mean, I only kind of knew who NARKOTIKA was. I only know their one song. The one about breaking faces, or whatever.”
“But he had to have an idea. Beck found him in Canada. While Cole was on tour. On tour. How long until someone in Mercy Fal s sees him and recognizes him? What if they come take him home and he turns into a wolf? Once he’s human for the summer, wil he just hide in the house and hope no one recognizes him?”
“Maybe,” Grace said. She dabbed her nose with a tissue, then bal ed the tissue up and stuffed it in her coat pocket. “Maybe he wants to stay lost and it won’t be a problem. I guess you should ask him. Or I could, since you don’t like him.”
“I just don’t trust him.” I ran my fingers back and forth across the steering wheel. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Grace lean her head against the car door and sigh. She didn’t look like herself.
Instantly, guilt flooded me. She’d worked so hard to make this the perfect day and I was ruining it. “Ah
—I’m sorry. I’m being an ingrate. I won’t worry about it anymore, okay? It can be tomorrow’s problem.”
“Liar.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m just sleepy, and I want you to be happy.”
I took one hand off the wheel to touch her hand where it lay on her lap. Her skin was very hot. “I am happy,” I said, although now I felt worse than before. I was torn between wanting to lift up her hand to see if it smel ed like wolf and wanting to leave it there and pretend that it didn’t.
“This one is my favorite,” she said softly. I didn’t realize what she meant until she clicked back to the beginning of a track as soon as it ended. On the CD, the other Sam, the now-unchangeable one who stayed forever young, sang I fell for her in summer, my lovely summer girl, while another unchangeable Sam sang close harmonies over the first one.
My heart thumped in my chest as headlights striped across the interior of the car before leaving it dark again. I couldn’t help but think about the last time I’d sung that song. Not in the studio, today, but the time before that. Sitting in a car as dark as pitch, like this one, my hand tangled in Grace’s hair as she drove, right before the windshield exploded and turned the night into a good-bye.
It was supposed to be a happy song. It seemed wrong that it was forever poisoned by that memory, no matter how wel things had turned out afterward. Beside me, Grace turned her face to rest her cheek on the seat. She looked tired and faraway. “Wil you fal asleep if I don’t entertain you?” she asked, with a vague smile.
“I’m okay,” I said.
Grace smiled at me, and tugged her jacket around her like a blanket. She kissed the air in my direction and closed her eyes. In the background, my voice sang I’d be happy with this summer if it’s all we ever had.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
• SAM •
The house was trashed. When I stepped into the living room, the first thing I saw was Cole with a broom and dustpan—a sight more ludicrous than him turning into a wolf—and then I saw shattered glass and tipped-over furniture behind him.
Grace said “Oh” behind me, in a sort of distressed way, and at the sound of her voice, Cole turned. He had the dignity to look surprised, though not enough to look apologetic.
I didn’t know what to say to him. Every time I thought I might eventual y work up some empathy and kindness toward him, he started some new fire. Did the rest of the house look like this? Or just every square inch of the living room?
Grace, however, looked at Cole, her hands stuck in her pockets, and said, “Problems?” in a light sort of way. With a smile in her voice.
And to my utter surprise, Cole smiled rueful y back at her, charming and now apologetic. “Herd of cats,” he said. “I’m taking care of it.” This last bit was with a glance in my direction, meant for me. Grace gave me a look that clearly said I was supposed to be nicer to him. I tried to remember if I’d ever been nice to him. I was sure I must’ve been, at the
beginning.
I looked back at Grace. In the brighter light of the kitchen, she looked pale and tired, petal-thin skin showing darkness below. She probably ought to be in bed. She probably ought to be home. I wondered what her parents must be thinking and when they were supposed to return. I asked her, “I’l get the vacuum?”
Meaning: Is it okay if I leave you with him?
Grace nodded firmly. “Good idea.”
• GRACE •
So this was Cole St. Clair. I’d never met a rock star before. I wasn’t real y disappointed, either. Even holding a broom and dustpan, he looked like a rock star, unreal and restless and unsafe. But I didn’t agree with Sam about Cole’s empty eyes. They looked ful enough to me. Not that I was the greatest at reading people.
I looked straight at him and said, “So you’re Cole.”
“You’re Grace,” he said, though I didn’t know how he would know.
he would know.
“Yes,” I said, and picked my way over to one of the living room chairs. I sank into it grateful y. I was beginning to feel like my body had been bludgeoned with rocks from the inside. I looked again at Cole. So this was the guy that Beck had hoped would take Sam’s place. He’d obviously had good taste with Sam, so I was wil ing to give Cole the benefit of the doubt. I glanced at the stairs, to make sure Sam wasn’t back yet from getting the vacuum, and said, “So. Is it what you expected?”
• COLE •
I liked Sam’s girlfriend before she even opened her mouth, and then even more when she did speak. She wasn’t what I’d expected, somehow, out of Sam’s girlfriend. She was pretty in an undramatic way, and she had this great voice: very calm and matter-of-fact and distinctive.
I didn’t understand her question at first. When I didn’t answer right away, she clarified, “Being a wolf?”
I kind of loved that she just came out and said it.
“Better,” I said, admitting the truth before I had time to censor it. She didn’t look disgusted, like Isabel had. So I looked straight at her and told her the rest of had. So I looked straight at her and told her the rest of the truth. “I became a wolf to lose myself, and that’s just what I got. Al I can think about when I’m a wolf is being with the other wolves. I don’t think about the future or the past or who I was. It doesn’t matter. Al that matters is that moment, and being with the other wolves, and just being a bal of heightened senses. No deadlines. No expectations. It’s amazing. It’s the best drug ever.”
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