by C. D. Bell
She nodded at Chayton. “I feel it,” she said.
“Wolves and rye have a sacred relationship,” Chayton explained. “You can come in here and feel things go quiet. Your feelings, your desire, your drive—everything that turns you into a wolf—it comes to a stop when you’re in here. If you’re stuck as a wolf, come find this place. If you need to change but can’t, rye can help. Any rye will do it—young, old—but dry and tall like this is the best, just ready to be harvested. This is your sanctuary.
“That gray wolf you saw there last night was one like you, but older, more experienced. He knew what he was doing. You can bet he’s managing things with rye, keeping his experience mellow and under control.”
“He was a…a human?”
Chayton shrugged. “Clearly. And he’s been a shape-shifter for a while, given the serious street cred he must have. The alpha’s not going to sniff noses with just anybody.”
“Were the aggressive wolves that attacked us people also?” Nessa asked.
“Those wolves, no, unless there are some seriously scary people walking around. If they were, chances are I’d know them already via Mike.”
“Your friend at the garage?”
“Yeah, at the garage, that’s right,” Chayton said in a way that made Nessa suddenly guess that the garage was not really a garage, that there was something else going on there, something sinister and secret. “Those wolves with the teeth. Watch out for them. There’s something not right about them.”
“Are you worried?” Nessa asked.
“Yeah I’m worried,” he said, like Nessa had asked a stupid question. “I’ve been hearing stuff from my connections in the natural world, and I knew something was going on. I didn’t know the extent of it until you started talking about them last night.”
“What about Billy Lark?” Nessa asked. “Why did the wolves bring me to his house?”
“I don’t know,” Chayton said. “Next time you transform, go back there. Sniff around a little more. A wolf can find out more through one good whiff than Uncle Sam can from the last decade of wiretapping all our phones.”
“Maybe that other wolf, the one with the street cred, could,” she said.
“But he wasn’t picked for this,” Chayton said. “You were.” He removed a knife from his pocket, opened the blade, and cut a few stalks of the rye. “Take this.” He passed it to Nessa. “Take it home. Put it somewhere where it will dry, and when it’s ready, you can arrange it in a circle somewhere safe, when you are alone. This will allow you to transform when you need to. And most important, return to human form as well.”
“You mean, not just at certain moons?”
“Yes,” Chayton said, simply. “Though it will always be easier when the moon is new or full.”
Nessa found herself laughing.
Chayton raised his eyebrows sardonically. “You find this funny?”
“A little,” Nessa said. “I’m just laughing, thinking of the look on my friends’ faces when you came to get me on your motorcycle.”
“The rye is relaxing you,” Chayton said. “It will do that. It’s like the drumming.” He shrugged and smiled. “Tell me what the wolves have been saying to you.”
“What they’ve been saying?” Nessa laughed again. “I told you, I can’t really understand them.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Do you speak their language?” Nessa asked.
“Not the way you will be able to soon. Or I assume you will be able to, once you realize they’re talking.” He took a deep breath. “Wolves speak to each other all the time. They’re as much in communication with one another as we are. Like us, they use both body language and vocalizations, but they also use scent.”
“I knew that,” Nessa said defensively.
“Don’t expect to hear words,” Chayton went on. “Expect to hear intention. Let the sounds, or postures, or scents that you detect pass right through the language centers of your brain and land instead in the parts of you that process emotion. Understand what a wolf is feeling, and you will know what the wolf is trying to say.”
Nessa took her mind back to her night with the wolves during the new moon. “They seemed happy,” she said. “The first time. We were all happy. It was just so much fun. This might sound stupid, but we were all just playing together. They were yipping and whining and stuff, and we all sang together, but no one seemed worried or scared.”
“That sounds like a ceremonial celebration, a welcoming of you.”
“Then the other time, they were…scared.” Nessa was surprised that she’d found this word lurking in the back of her now-relaxed brain. “Before the aggressive wolves found us even,” she went on. “They seemed like they had a purpose, somewhere to be.”
“That’s something you’ll need to find out from them. You’ll need to know what the wolves mean for you to do. If they’re leaving tracks near you, that might mean they want to protect you from something. It might also mean they want you to follow the trail, to find something.”
Nessa shook her head. “I barely feel like I can protect myself.”
“Maybe that’s what’s holding you back,” Chayton said. “Your worry that you will not survive, that’s keeping you from giving your whole self over to the wolves.”
“It sounds like what I do when I race—I hold back because I never know how much I’m going to need to store up for the end.”
Chayton nodded toward her injured ankle. “That was really stupid, running today,” he said.
“No it wasn’t,” Nessa said. “Running is what I do. It’s my ticket out of here.”
“No,” Chayton said. “Wolf is what you do now. You have to understand that. And let’s just hope that next time you encounter that aggressive wolf, you’re not running on an injury. Wolves are amazing at recognizing when an animal is compromised. They can smell the weakness.”
“You think I’m an animal that wolf was…hunting?” Nessa said.
Chayton looked her dead on. “Wolves are always hunting.”
Nessa felt weak suddenly. In spite of the warmth and comfort she felt in the field of rye, she’d been standing on her ankle too long. She could feel it beginning to throb.
Chayton ended the lesson there. “That’s enough for tonight,” he said, leading her back in the direction of the bike. For a fleeting second, Nessa wanted to tell Chayton that sometimes she wondered if being a wolf was a kind of cheating, that it was giving her an unfair speed advantage in cross-country. But Chayton had already resolved that issue. Wolf is what she did now. She had no choice.
As she stepped out of the field, Nessa pulled Chayton’s flannel shirt tighter around her body. “Can we find somewhere to go that’s warm, maybe?” she said. “I’m freezing.”
Chayton gave her a look of disbelief.
“I know, I know,” Nessa grumbled. “I’m not exactly one-with-nature, wolf-girl material.”
“You said it, not me,” he commented.
But then Chayton seemed to relent. “Come on,” he said, finding a blanket in the box for her to drape over her shoulders. “I’ll take you home.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Over the next two nights, Nessa’s life became a tunnel. States was exactly two weeks away. She just had to get there and, on the way, make it through one more transformation, which she was hoping would be light because it came on a new moon, not on the full.
But first, she had to survive yet another ride on the Rumor Express. As if her performance at Homecoming, the doping accusations, and Cassian’s romantic interest had not been enough, now she’d been seen disappearing from the school parking lot on the back of a Harley, driven by a long-haired Native American man.
“How do you know Chayton?” Luc asked one day.
The question took Nessa by surprise. “He’s just a friend,” Nessa said.
“Oh, yeah?” Luc said, clearly skeptical. “You know his other friends?”
Now that Nessa’s ankle had healed, she was running out in front wit
h Luc most of the time at practice, though she had the feeling that if he got going in a full sprint, he’d still be able to leave her in his dust.
“Do you?” she said.
“Yeah, of course,” Luc said, sounding offended and sarcastic in a way that came as a complete mystery to Nessa. “We’re both First Nation. Of course we know each other.”
“Oh, come on,” Nessa said. “You asked me.”
“Okay, fine,” Luc said. “He cured my cousin’s acne. He sat with him and lit some stuff on fire and started chanting, and by the end of it that guy was soaked in sweat.”
“How was the acne?”
“It got a lot better, actually,” Luc said. “But my dad had also gotten him to give up sugar.” Luc’s laugh came out as a little snort. “My dad’s an engineer—kind of the last person to get into all that shaman stuff.”
“What do you think? Do you think Chayton cured your cousin?”
“I have no idea,” Luc said. “What do you think? You know Chayton better than me.”
Vivian must have been more worried about the Dutch Chem study than she’d admitted because she decided to take Nate to his next appointment.
She came back flushed and happy, a smile of relief on her face. Swinging her bulky purse off her shoulder and on to the end of the kitchen counter, a gesture that had meant “Mom’s home” for as long as Nessa could remember, Vivian said, “I want you to know that I had a long talk with Dr. Raab about the details of the study. There’s really nothing for you to worry about.”
“Did he show you the straps on the tables?” Nessa asked.
“He’d just had them removed,” she said. “Ann Lark had said something about it. It really is amazing, the level of care these kids are getting. They screen their blood for any sign of the pathogens that might result from the Dutch Chem contamination, plus we know they’re all on an intensive vitamin regimen, and they’re being screened for every possible disease. He told me one kid showed early genetic markers for Hodgkin’s, and they were able to do an intervention that would have needed to be much more invasive if they’d waited until the child was an adult.”
“Genetic markers?” Nessa said. They had done a unit on the human genome project in her Bio class freshman year, and she knew what was involved with genetic analysis—it was more than just adding a solution from a dropper and seeing what happened. It was centrifuges and computers. “They’re analyzing the kids’ genes? Isn’t that really expensive?”
Vivian pulled a tightly wrapped package of frozen sausage out of the freezer, snipping off the metal clips on the ends and dumping it into a bowl to defrost in the microwave. “They’ve got funding,” she said. “The research they’re doing, he wasn’t saying it, but I think they’re trying to find a cure for cancer. And did you know that for any kid in the study with a sibling born after the study began—the clinic is paying to bank that child’s umbilical cord blood? That’s something you have to do privately, and most people can’t afford—it’s thousands of dollars, and then you pay to store the blood for years on top of that.”
“Did he say anything about Paravida?” Nessa asked. “Was Mrs. Lark there?”
Vivian shrugged. “He didn’t mention Paravida. You might have misheard. And I didn’t see Ann today. But Cassian Thomas was there with his little sister. He said to say hello. I didn’t realize you were friends with him. He seemed a little surprised I didn’t know more about how much you two have been seeing each other.”
“Yeah,” Nessa said, too busy trying to work out whether or not she should still be worried to pick up on her mom’s interest in Cassian.
Vivian had never been one to pressure her kids to cop to their social lives, something that generally worked to Delphine’s advantage, not Nessa’s. She let the subject drop now, passing Nessa a colander of washed potatoes to chop and talking about a cat she’d helped treat at Dr. Morgan’s. Nessa put the conversation about the clinic on pause. But she wasn’t done asking questions.
The fact that three runners from Tether High’s team—Luc, Nessa, and Cynthia—had qualified to compete at States was a big deal. Coach Hoffman would drive the three runners down the night before in his ancient Dodge minivan—they were staying in Midland, the small city not far from Detroit where the meet would be held. The student council had chartered a bus to bring other supporters down that day and they had gotten so much interest, they then chartered another, putting together a pancake supper on Sunday night to help defray the costs.
Nessa was seated between Luc and Cynthia on the dais at the fundraiser, up in front with Coach Hoffman, Principal Sarakoski, and Tether’s mayor, Dan Miller, Tim’s dad. Standing in line for pancakes, Nessa had been greeted by kids she knew, kids she didn’t know, and adults from the town. There was a hand-painted sign that read Run Like You Mean It, and one of the town selectwomen gave a speech about how Nessa, Luc, and Cynthia should be seen as fitness inspirations for everyone living in Tether.
Cynthia leaned across Nessa to whisper to Luc, “Is this your first time being some lady’s source of inspiration?”
“I thought I was yours already,” Luc whispered back. Which was a remark Nessa had no idea how to interpret, though Cynthia laughed and sat back in her seat like a cat that had just swallowed a songbird.
Nessa found herself thinking that of all the great mammal predators, wasn’t it strange that most of them—lions, tigers, cheetahs, panthers, leopards, cougars—were a form of giant cat, and only one, the wolf, was a relative of the dog?
But before the race that Saturday, Nessa had to confront the new moon. “I just want to be able to think about the race and not have to think about wolf stuff,” Nessa complained to Bree, when they were walking down the deserted school hallways to the bathrooms.
“Are you feeling anything yet?” Bree said. She looked at her watch. “It’s only three days away.”
“I don’t feel as much as I did before,” Nessa said. “Maybe it’s the rye.”
Nessa had made a sachet out of the rye Chayton had cut for her, and she slept with it under her pillow. She carried another one in her backpack and a third in her pants pocket. She was feeling calmer than she had before. Her hearing was getting sharper, smells were coming in stronger, and she felt restless in the ways she had in the days leading up to the other transformations, but she didn’t feel quite so out of control. “I’m just really hoping those scary wolves aren’t waiting for me,” Nessa said.
Nessa had been reading up on wolf aggression, learning as much as she could about why a wolf would be out on its own, challenging others, looking for fights. But still, the wolf’s attacking her made no sense. Usually wolves laid down a lot of scents, letting others know they were near, giving them ample opportunity to avoid a fight.
“Do you think they were trying to take over the pack’s hunting grounds?” Bree said.
“What else could it be?” Nessa said. “That’s how wolves survive, right? They come into a pack, kill the alpha, and assert themselves as the new leader.”
“But didn’t Chayton make it sound like he had no idea what those wolves were doing?”
“Chayton doesn’t know everything,” Nessa said.
Bree cocked her head. “He knows a lot.”
“Yeah, but he’s the one saying I have to figure out what the pack is looking for. He thinks they’re going to tell me. Which is crazy, right? I mean, they took me to Billy’s house. Who knows why? Maybe he was throwing them scraps of food out his windows.”
“Maybe Chayton wants you to ask them. Maybe that’s why he’s trying to tell you how to listen to them more. How to talk.”
“Yeah, right,” Nessa said, feeling suddenly overwhelmed at the idea of talking to a wolf, of making herself understood. It was impossible. “They’re going to be all…” Nessa made a combination of barking and whimpering sounds. “And I’m going to be like, ‘Farmer Bent is threatening to cut down your sacred tree of life? Oh, no, we have to stop him!’”
Bree leveled a gaze at Nessa. �
��That’s the plot of Avatar.”
“Right,” Nessa said. “My bad.”
“If Chayton thinks you can figure it out, you’re going to be able to figure it out. And speaking of figuring out mysterious men,” Bree raised her eyebrows, “what’s going on with Cassian?”
“Nothing really.” Nessa shrugged. “I don’t know, to be honest.”
“But, but—” Bree spluttered. “Why? He took you out! Two months ago, your face would have exploded just thinking about going on a date with Cassian, and now, you’re all like, ‘I don’t know, I’m just not feeling it…’ Nessa, he’s like the Harvard University of boys, and he’s offering you early admission.”
“I think you might need some help with that metaphor.”
“I think you might need some help with your priorities,” Bree countered. “I’m just saying, Nessa, and I think you agree: dating Cassian is one for the bucket list. It would be like, high school, done, check. Memories made. Goals achieved. Ambitions realized. Now you can get old and have babies or go make a difference in the world and know that you have lived.”
Nessa shook her head and smiled at her funny best friend. She didn’t know why she wasn’t feeling more for Cassian. It puzzled her. She liked him well enough when she was with him—and the memory of kissing him could still make her blush. She had had a crush on him from afar since ninth grade. It was just that when she wasn’t with him, she sometimes forgot that he existed.
“Maybe I just don’t like being chased,” she said, hearing how arrogant that sounded. She glared at Bree, who was rolling her eyes. “By super hot high school guys or by super scary aggressive wolves.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The new moon was scheduled to rise at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. When Nessa woke up at 4:30 a.m., she looked out of her bedroom window and saw that Chayton was standing outside at the curb, leaning against his bike, his arms crossed in leather sleeves. Slipping into track pants and an old pair of running shoes, Nessa snuck through the bedroom hallway, opened the front door noiselessly, then tiptoed down the driveway.