“You can read each other’s minds?” Grace asked, incredulous.
I shook my head vigorously. “No. I—it’s hard to explain as a hu—as me. It’s just a way of talking, but our brains are different as wolves. There’s no abstract concepts, really. Things like time, and names, and complicated emotions are all out of the question. Really, it’s for things like hunting or warning each other of danger.”
“And what did you see about Jack?”
I lowered my eyes. It felt strange, recalling a wolf memory from a human mind. I flipped through the blurry images in my head, recognizing now that the red blotches on the wolves’ coats were bullet wounds, and that the stains on their lips were Jack’s blood. “Some of the wolves showed me something about being hit by him. A—gun? He must have had a BB gun. He was wearing a red shirt.” Wolves saw color poorly, but red we could see.
“Why would he do that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. That’s not the sort of thing we told each other.”
Grace was quiet, still thinking about Jack, I suppose. We sat in the close silence until I started to wonder whether she was upset. Then she spoke. “So you never get to open Christmas presents.”
I looked at her, not knowing how to respond. Christmas was something that happened in another life, one before the wolves.
Grace looked down at the steering wheel. “I was just thinking that you were never around in the summer, and I always loved Christmas, because I knew you’d always be there. In the woods. As a wolf. I guess it’s because it’s cold, right? But that must mean that you never get to open Christmas presents.”
I shook my head. I changed too early now to even see Christmas decorations in stores.
Grace frowned at the steering wheel. “Do you think of me when you’re a wolf?”
When I was a wolf, I was a memory of a boy, struggling to hold on to meaningless words. I didn’t want to tell her the truth: that I couldn’t remember her name.
“I think of the way you smell,” I said, truthfully. I reached over and lifted a few strands of her hair to my nose. The scent of her shampoo reminded me of the scent of her skin. I swallowed and let her hair fall back down to her shoulder.
Grace’s eyes followed my hand from her shoulder to my lap, and I saw her swallow, too. The obvious question—when I would change back again—hung between us, but neither of us put words to it. I wasn’t ready to tell her yet. My chest ached at the thought of leaving all this behind.
“So,” she said again, and put her hand on the steering wheel. “Do you know how to drive?”
I pulled my wallet from my jeans pocket and proffered it. “The State of Minnesota seems to think so.”
She extracted my driver’s license, held it up against the steering wheel, and read out loud: “Samuel K. Roth.” She added, with some surprise, “This is an actual license. You must really be real.”
I laughed. “You still doubt it?”
Instead of answering, Grace handed my wallet back and asked, “Is that your real name? Aren’t you supposedly dead, like Jack?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this, but I answered anyway. “It wasn’t the same. I wasn’t bitten as badly, and some strangers saved me from being dragged off. Nobody pronounced me dead, like they did with Jack. So, yes, that’s my real name.”
Grace looked thoughtful, and I wondered what she was thinking. Then, abruptly, she looked at me, expression dark. “So your parents know what you are, right? That’s why they—” She stopped and sort of half closed her eyes. I could see her swallowing again.
“It makes you sick for weeks afterward,” I said, rescuing her from finishing the sentence. “The wolf toxin, I guess. While it’s changing you. I couldn’t stop shifting back and forth, no matter how warm or cold I was.” I paused, the memories flickering through my head like photos from someone else’s camera. “They thought I was possessed. Then it got warm and I improved—became stable, I mean, and they thought I was cured. Saved, I suppose. Until winter. For a while they tried to get the church to do something about me. Finally they decided to do something themselves. They’re both serving life sentences now. They didn’t realize that we’re harder to kill than most people.”
Grace’s face was nearing a pale shade of green and the knuckles on her hand clutching the steering wheel had turned white. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I really was. “Let’s talk about cars. Is this one your betrothed? I mean, assuming it runs okay? I don’t know anything about cars, but I can at least pretend. ‘Runs okay’ sounds like something someone would say if they knew what they were talking about, right?”
She seized the subject, petting the steering wheel. “I do like it.”
“It’s very ugly,” I said generously. “But it looks as though it would laugh at snow. And, if you hit a deer, it would just hiccup and keep going.”
Grace added, “Plus, it’s got a pretty appealing front seat. I mean, I can just—” Grace leaned across the bench seat toward me, lightly resting one of her hands on my leg. Now she was an inch away from me, close enough that I felt the heat of her breath on my lips. Close enough that I could feel her waiting for me to lean into her, too.
In my head, an image flashed of Grace in her backyard, her hand outstretched, imploring me to come to her. But I couldn’t, then. I was in another world, one that demanded I keep my distance. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I still lived in that world, bound by its rules. My human skin was only mocking me, taunting me with riches that would vanish at the first freeze.
I sat back from her, and looked away before I could see her disappointment. The silence was thick around us. “Tell me about after you were bitten,” I said, just to say something. “Did you get sick?”
Grace leaned back in her seat and sighed. I wondered how many times I’d disappointed her before. “I don’t know. It seems like such a long time ago. I guess—maybe. I remember having the flu right afterward.”
After I was bitten, it had felt like the flu, too. Exhaustion, hot and cold shakes, nausea burning the back of my throat, bones aching to change form.
Grace shrugged. “That was the year I got locked in the car, too. It was a month or two after the attack. It was spring, but it was really hot. My dad took me along with him to run some errands, because I guess I was too young to leave behind.” She glanced at me to see if I was listening. I was.
“Anyway, I had the flu, I guess, and I was just stupid with sleep. So on the way home I fell asleep in the backseat…and the next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital. I guess Dad had gotten home and gotten the groceries out and forgotten about me. Just left me locked in the car, I guess. They said I tried to get out, but I don’t remember that, really. I don’t remember anything until the hospital, where the nurse was saying that it was the hottest May day on record for MercyFalls. The doctor told my dad the heat in the car should’ve killed me, so I’m a miracle girl. How’s that for responsible parenting?”
I shook my head in disbelief. There was a brief silence that gave me enough time to notice the consternation in her expression and remind me that I sincerely regretted not kissing her a moment ago. I thought about saying Show me what you meant earlier, when you said that you liked this front seat. But I couldn’t imagine my mouth forming those words, so instead I just took her hand and ran my finger along her palm and between her fingers, tracing the lines in her hand and letting my skin memorize her fingerprints.
Grace made a small sound of appreciation and closed her eyes as my fingers whispered circles on her skin. Somehow this was almost better than kissing.
Both of us jerked when someone tapped on the glass on my side of the car. The tow-truck driver and car-lot owner stood there, peering in at us. His voice came through, muffled by the glass. “You find what you were looking for?”
Grace reached across and rolled down the window. She was talking to him but looking at me, gaze intense, when she said, “Absolutely.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN • GRACE
38°F
That night, Sam stayed in my bed again, chastely perched on the farthest edge of the mattress, but somehow, during the night, our bodies migrated together. I half woke early in the morning, long before dawn, the room washed clean by pale moonlight, and found that I was pressed up against Sam’s back, my hands balled up to my chest like a mummy. I could just barely see the dark curve of his shoulder, and something about the shape it made, the gesture it suggested, filled me with a sort of fierce, awful affection. His body was warm and he smelled so good—like wolf, and trees, and home—that I buried my face in his shoulder and closed my eyes again. He made a soft noise and rolled his shoulders back against me, pressing closer.
Right before I drifted back to sleep again, my breathing slowing to match his, I had a brief, burning thought: I can’t live without this.
There had to be a cure.
CHAPTER NINETEEN • GRACE
72°F
The next day was unseasonably fair, too beautiful to be going to school, but I couldn’t skip a second day without coming up with a really good excuse. It wasn’t that I’d get too far behind; it just seemed that when you never miss school for a certain length of time, people tend to notice when you do. Rachel had already called twice and left an ominous voicemail saying I’d picked the wrong day to cut class, Grace Brisbane! Olivia hadn’t called since our argument in the hall, so I guessed that meant we weren’t on speaking terms.
Sam drove me to school in the Bronco while I hastily caught up on some of my English homework I hadn’t done the day before. Once he’d parked, I opened the door, letting in a gust of unseasonably warm air. Sam turned his face toward the open door, his eyes half-closed.
“I love this weather. I feel so me.”
Watching him bask in the sun, winter seemed a million miles away, and I couldn’t imagine him leaving me. I wanted to memorize the crooked line of his nose for later daydreaming. For a moment, I felt an irrational stab of guilt that my feelings for Sam were replacing those that I’d had for my wolf—until I remembered that he was my wolf. All over again, I had the weird sensation of the ground shifting beneath me at the fact of his existence, immediately followed by relief. My obsession was so—easy now. The only thing I had to explain to my friends was where my new boyfriend had come from.