I knew I should ask her what was happening, but I wanted just one more minute of peace. One more moment before we faced the truth. So I asked a question that I knew, now, had no correct answer. A question that belonged to a different couple, with a different future. “When we’re married, can we go to the ocean? I’ve never been.”
“When we’re married,” she said, and it didn’t sound like a lie, though her voice was soft and sad,
“we can go to al the oceans. Just to say that we did.”
I lay down beside her, our hands stil in a knot on her stomach, shoulder to shoulder, and together we looked up through the flock of happy memories flying above us, caught in this room. The Christmas lights winked above us; when the swaying wings eclipsed the bulbs, it made me feel like we were moving, rocking on a giant boat, looking up at unfamiliar constel ations. It was time.
I closed my eyes. “What is happening with you?”
Grace was quiet for so long that I started to doubt that I’d said my question out loud. Then she said, “I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m afraid to go to sleep.”
My heart didn’t so much skip a beat as slow to a crawl. “What does it feel like?”
“It hurts to talk,” she whispered. “And my stomach
—it real y…” She laid my hand flat on her stomach and then put her hand on top of mine. “Sam, I’m afraid.”
It almost hurt too much to speak after her confession. I said, softly, because it was al I could manage, “It’s from the wolves. Do you think you caught it from that wolf, somehow?”
“I think it is a wolf,” Grace said. “I think it’s the wolf that I never was. That’s what it feels like. It feels like I want to shift, but I never do.”
My mind riffled rapidly through everything I’d ever heard about the wolves and our bril iantly destructive disease, but there was no precedent for this. Grace was the only one of her kind.
“Tel me,” she said, “do you stil feel it? The wolf inside you? Or is it gone now?”
I sighed and leaned to rest my forehead against her cheek. Of course it was stil there. Of course it was.
“Grace, I’m going to take you to the hospital. We’l make them find out what’s wrong with you. I don’t care what we have to tel them to make them believe.”
Grace said, “I don’t want to die in a hospital.”
“You’re not going to die,” I told her, lifting my head to look at her. “I’m not done writing songs about you yet.”
Her mouth smiled on one side, and then she tugged me down so she could rest her head on my chest as she closed her eyes.
I didn’t close mine. I watched her and I watched the birds’ shadows flit across her face, and I…wanted. I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hal and burst out of the house.
An hour later, Grace started throwing up blood. I couldn’t cal 911 and help her at the same time, so I left her curled up against the hal way wal , a thin trail of her own blood showing our path from the bedroom, while I stood in the doorway with the phone, never taking my eyes off her.
Cole—I didn’t remember cal ing for him
—appeared at the top of the stairs and silently brought towels.
“Sam,” Grace said, voice miserable and thin, “my hair.”
It was the smal est thing in the world, blood on the ends of her hair. It was the biggest thing in the world, her being out of control. While Cole helped Grace press a towel to her nose and mouth, I clumsily pul ed her hair back into a ponytail, out of the way. Then, when we heard the ambulance pul into the drive, we helped her to her feet and tried to get her downstairs without her throwing up again. The birds fluttered and flapped around us as we hurried out, like they wanted to come with us, but their strings were too short.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
• GRACE •
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved al the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of al .
And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren’t special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant forever.
Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being
dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying good-bye behind a cracked windshield.
A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of col ege applications, the thril of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam’s smile.
It was a life I didn’t want to leave behind.
It was a life I didn’t want to forget.
I wasn’t done with it yet. There was so much more to say.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
• SAM •
Flickering lights
anonymous doors
my heart escaping in drips
i ‘m still waking up
but she’s still sleeping
this ICU is
hotel for the dead
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
• COLE •
I didn’t know why I went with Sam to the hospital. I knew I could get recognized—though the odds seemed slim of anyone recognizing me with my stubbled face and the bags under my eyes. I also knew I could shift, if my body decided to succumb to the whims of the cold. But as Sam went to put his key into his car door to fol ow the ambulance, he’d looked at his bloody hand for a long second, and he’d had to try twice to get the key in the lock.
I had been hanging back, ready to disappear if it felt like the black morning cold would jerk me into a wolf, but when I saw Sam’s hand, I stepped forward and took the key.
“Get in,” I said, jerking my head toward the passenger seat.
And he did.
So here I was, standing in the hospital room of a girl I barely knew with a guy I knew only slightly better, and I stil wasn’t quite sure why I cared. The room was ful of people—two doctors, a guy who I thought was a surgeon, and an absolute army of nurses. There was a lot of hushed talking back and forth, with enough technical jargon to gag a maggot, but I got the gist of it: They had no idea what was going on, and Grace was dying.
They wouldn’t let Sam stand next to her, so he sat in a chair in the corner, his elbows on his knees and his face crumpled in one of his hands.
I didn’t know what to do, either, so I stood beside him, wondering if, before I’d been bitten, I would’ve been able to smel al the death that hung in the air of the ICU.
A cel phone rang at my feet, a brisk, businesslike tone, and I realized it was coming from Sam’s pocket. In slow motion, Sam took it out and then looked at the front of the phone.
“It’s Isabel,” he said, hoarse. “I can’t talk to her.”
I took it from his unresisting hands and answered it. “Isabel.”
“Cole?” Isabel asked. “Is this Cole?”
“Yeah.”
And then, the most sincere words I had ever heard out of Isabel’s mouth: “Oh, no.”
I didn’t say anything. But the noise behind me must have said it al .
“Are you at the hospital?”
“Yeah.”
“What are they saying?”
“What you said. They have no idea.”
Isabel swore softly, over and over again. “How bad is it, Cole? Can you tel me?”
“Sam’s right here.”
“Great,” Isabel said, harshly. “That’s just great.”
Suddenly, one of the nurses said, “Watch—!”
Grace half sat up, just enough to throw up more blood, al over the front of the nurse who had just spoken. The nurse matter-of-factly stepped back to scrub off her hands as another nurs
e took her place, with a towel for Grace.
Grace fel back onto the bed. She said something that the nurses couldn’t catch.
“What, honey?”
“Sam,” Grace wailed, a horrible sound both animal and human, hideously reminiscent of the doe’s scream. Sam jerked to his feet just as a man and a woman pushed their way into the already-crowded room.
I saw one of the nurses open her mouth to protest the intrusion as the couple headed straight for us, but she didn’t have time to say anything before the man said, “You son of a bitch,” and punched Sam in the mouth.
CHAPTER FIFTY
• SAM •
Lewis Brisbane’s punch took several moments to start hurting, like my body couldn’t believe what had just happened to it. By the time the pain started to final y take hold, my hearing was buzzing and popping in my left ear, and I had to grab for the wal to keep from fal ing back over a chair. I was stil sick from the sound of Grace’s voice.
For a single fragment of a moment, I caught a perfectly clear image of Grace’s mother watching, face blank as if waiting for an expression to land on it, doing nothing, and then Grace’s dad swung at me again.
“I’l kil you,” Grace’s dad said.
I just stared at his fist, my ears stil hissing from the first punch. Most of my mind was stil with Grace, in the hospital bed, and what little I had left to devote to Lewis Brisbane couldn’t quite believe he was going to punch me again. I didn’t even flinch.
Before his fist connected again, her dad
staggered back, struggling to keep his footing, and as my vision and hearing came back, al in a rush, I saw Cole dragging him backward. Like he was nothing but a bag of potatoes.
“Easy, big guy,” Cole said. Then, to the nurses:
“What are you staring at? Help the guy he just punched.” I shook my head a little at the nurses’ offer of ice but accepted a towel for my busted forehead. As I did, I heard Cole say to Mr. Brisbane, “I’m going to let you go. Don’t make me get us both thrown out of this hospital.”
I stood there, watching Grace’s parents force their way to the side of the bed, and I didn’t know what to do. Everything solid in my life was fracturing, and I didn’t know where I belonged right now.
I saw Cole staring at me, and somehow his stare reminded me of the towel in my hand and the slow tickle of the blood as it wel ed from my skin. I lifted the towel to my head. Raising my arm made colorful dots spiral at the edge of my vision.
At my elbow, a nurse said, “I’m sorry—Sam? But
since you’re not an immediate relative, you can’t stay in here. They’ve asked us to have you leave.”
I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.
The nurse made a face. “I really am sorry.” She The nurse made a face. “I really am sorry.” She glanced to Grace’s parents and back to me. “You did good bringing her in here.”
I closed my eyes; I could stil see the swirling colors when I did. I had an idea that if I didn’t sit down soon, my body was going to do it for me. “Can I tel her I’m going?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said one of the other nurses, darting past with something in her arms.
“Let her think he’s stil here. He can come back if—”
she stopped herself before adding, “Tel him to stay close.”
For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
“Come on,” Cole said. He looked back over his shoulder at Mr. Brisbane, who was looking at me with a complicated expression as I left. Cole pointed at him and said, “You’re a son of a bitch. He belongs here more than you do.”
But love isn’t quantifiable on paper, so I had to leave Grace behind.
• COLE •
By the time Isabel got to the hospital, dawn was just starting to seep through the warped glass of the cafeteria windows.
Grace was dying. I’d gotten that much out of the nurses before I left. She was throwing up al her blood and they were giving her vitamin K and transfusions to slow it down, but eventual y, she was going to die. I hadn’t told Sam yet, but I thought he knew.
Isabel slapped a napkin down onto the table in front of me, next to Sam’s stained towel. It took me a moment to recognize the napkin as my scribbled flow chart from the diner. It said meth in large letters, reminding me how much I’d told Isabel. She threw herself down into the plastic chair opposite me; everything about her screamed angry angry angry. She wasn’t wearing any makeup except for a smudged heavy line of mascara around each eye that looked like it had been there a while.
“Where’s Sam?”
I gestured to the cafeteria windows. Sam was a darker blot against the stil -dark sky. His arms were linked behind his head as he stared out into nothing. Everything else had moved in this room as time passed: the light across the freakishly orange wal s as the sun slowly rose, the chairs back and forth as hospital staff came and left with their breakfasts, the janitor with his mop and WET FLOOR sign. Sam was the pil ar they al pivoted around.
Isabel fired another question. “Why are you here?”
I stil didn’t know. I shrugged. “To help.”
“Then help,” Isabel said, and pushed the napkin closer to me. Louder, she said, “Sam.”
He lowered his hands but didn’t turn around. Frankly, I was surprised he’d moved at al .
“Sam,” she repeated, and this time, he did turn toward us. She pointed at the self-service bar and cashier at the other end of the room. “Get us some coffee.”
I didn’t know what was more amazing: that Isabel had just told him to get coffee, or that he did, albeit with no expression whatsoever. I turned my gaze back to Isabel. “Wow. Just when I think I’ve seen you at your coldest.”
“That was me being nice,” Isabel snapped. “What good is he doing, staring outside?”
“I don’t know, remembering al the great days he and his girlfriend had, before she dies.”
Isabel looked me right in the eye. “Do you think that wil help you with Victor? Because it never real y saves me when I think about Jack.” She pressed a finger into the napkin. “Talk to me. About this.”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with Grace.
”
Sam set two coffee cups down, one in front of me and one in front of Isabel. Nothing for himself.
“What’s wrong with Grace is the same thing that kil ed that wolf that you and Grace found,” Sam said, his voice sounding gritty, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “That smel is just too distinctive. It’s the same thing.”
He stood by the table, as if sitting down would mean that he was agreeing to something.
I looked at Isabel. “What makes you think that I can do something these doctors can’t?”
“Because you’re a genius,” Isabel said.
“These people are geniuses,” I replied.
Sam said, “Because you know.”
Isabel pushed the napkin at me again. And once
again, it was my father and me at the dining room table, and he was presenting me with a problem. Or I was sitting in one of his col ege classes when I was sixteen, and he was looking at my written work beside my solutions, searching for signs that I would fol ow in his footsteps. Or it was me at one of his award presentations with the ironed shirts and old school ties surrounding me, and my father tel ing them, in a voice that stood for no argument, that I was going to be great.
I thought of just that simple gesture from earlier, when Sam had laid his hand on Grace’s col arbone. I thought of Victor.
I took the napkin.
“I’m going to need more paper,” I said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
• SAM •
There was no longer night than this: Cole and I in the cafeteria, going over every detail of the wolves until Cole’s brain was ful and he sent both Isabel and me away so that he could sit at a table with his head in his hands and a p
iece of paper in front of him. It seemed amazing to me that everything I wanted, everything I’d ever wanted, hung on the shoulders of Cole St. Clair, sitting at a plastic table with a scribbled-on napkin, but what else did I have?
I escaped from the cafeteria to sit outside her room, my back to the wal , my head in my hands. Against my wil , I was memorizing everything about these wal s, this place, this night.
I had no hope that they would let me in to see her. So al I prayed for was that they would not come out to tel me that she was gone. I prayed for the door not to open. Just stay alive.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
• SAM •
Isabel came and got me and dragged me through the morningbusy hal s to an empty stairwel where Cole waited for me. He was ful of restless energy, his hands in two fists that he kept knocking lightly against each other, one on top of the other.
“Okay, I can’t promise anything,” Cole said. “I am just guessing here. But I have a—a theory. The thing is that, even if I’m right, I can’t be proved right. Just wrong, real y.” When I didn’t say anything, he said,
“What is the big thing in common between Grace and that wolf?” He waited. I guessed I was supposed to answer.
“The smel .”
Isabel said, “That’s what I thought, too. Though it’s pretty obvious, once Cole pointed it out.”
“The shifting,” Cole said. “Both the wolf and Grace haven’t shifted for—what—a decade or more? That’s the magic number for when wolves that don’t shift anymore die, right? I know you said that that was the natural life span of a wolf, but I don’t think that’s it. I think that every wolf that’s died without shifting has died like that wolf— of something. Not old age. And I think that’s what’s kil ing Grace.”
“The wolf she never was,” I said, suddenly remembering something she’d said the night before.
“Exactly,” Cole said. “I think that they die because they aren’t shifting anymore. I don’t think shifting is the curse. I think whatever it is that is tel ing our bodies to shift is the bad guy here.”
Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02] Page 27