“Time to wake up,” I said, and stuck my finger in her ear.
Grace squealed and smacked at me. She was up.
Our mornings together were beginning to have the comfort of routine. While Grace, still dogged by sleep, stumbled toward the shower, I put a bagel in the toaster for each of us and convinced the coffeemaker to do something that sounded like making coffee. Back in her bedroom, I listened to Grace sing tunelessly in the shower while I pulled on my jeans and checked her drawers for socks that didn’t look too girly for me to borrow.
I heard my breathing stop without feeling it. Photographs, nestled amongst her neatly folded socks. Pictures of the wolves. Of us. Carefully, I lifted the stack out of the drawer and retreated to the bed. Turning my back to the door as if I were doing something illicit, I paged through the pictures with slow fingers. There was something fascinating about seeing these images with my human eyes. Some of the wolves I could attach human names to; the older ones who had always changed before me. Beck, big, bulky, blue-gray. Paul, black and clean-looking. Ulrik, brownish-gray. Salem, with his notched ear and running eye. I sighed, though I didn’t know why.
The door behind me opened, letting in a gust of steam that smelled like Grace’s soap. Grace stepped behind me and rested her head on my shoulder; I breathed in the scent of her.
“Looking at yourself?” she asked.
My fingers, flicking between the photos, froze. “I’m in here?”
Grace came round the side of the bed and sat down facing me. “Of course. Most of them are of you—you don’t recognize yourself? Oh. Of course you wouldn’t. Tell me who’s who.”
Slower, I paged through the images again as she shifted to sit next to me, the bed groaning with her movements. “That’s Beck. He’s always taken care of the new wolves.” Though there’d only been two newly made wolves since me: Christa and the wolf that she’d created, Derek. The fact was, I wasn’t used to younger newcomers—our pack usually grew by other, older wolves finding us, not by the addition of savagely born newbies like Jack. “Beck’s like a father to me.” It sounded weird to say it like that, even if it was true. I’d never had to explain it to anyone before. He had been the one to take me under his wing after I’d escaped from my house, and the one who carefully glued the fragments of my sanity back together.
“I could tell how you felt about him,” Grace said, and she sounded surprised at her own intuition. “Your voice is different whenever you talk about him.”
“It is?” Now it was my turn to be surprised. “Different how?”
She shrugged, looking a little shy. “I dunno. Proud, I guess. I think it’s sweet. Who’s that?”
“Shelby,” I said, and there was no pride in my voice for her. “I told you about her before.”
Grace watched my face.
The memory of the last time Shelby and I had seen each other made my gut twist uncomfortably. “She and I don’t see things the same way. She thinks being a wolf is a gift.”
Beside me, Grace nodded, and I was grateful to leave it at that.
I flipped through the next few photographs, more of Shelby and Beck, until I paused at Paul’s black form. “That’s Paul. He’s our pack leader when we’re wolves. That’s Ulrik next to him.” I pointed to the brown-gray wolf beside Paul. “Ulrik’s like a crazy uncle, sort of. A German one. He swears a lot.”
“Sounds great.”
“He’s a lot of fun.” Actually, I should’ve said was a lot of fun. I didn’t know if this had been his last year, or if he might still have another summer in him. I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off, and the way he held on to his German accent, like he couldn’t be Ulrik without it.
“Are you okay?” Grace asked, frowning at me.
I shook my head, staring at the wolves in the photographs, so clearly animals when seen through my human eyes. My family. Me. My future. Somehow, the photographs blurred a line I wasn’t ready to cross yet.
I realized Grace had her arm around my shoulder, her cheek leaning against me, comforting me even though she couldn’t possibly understand what was bothering me.
“I wish you could’ve met them,” I said, “when everybody was human.” I didn’t know how to explain to her what an enormous part of me they were, their voices and faces as humans, and their scents and forms as wolves. How lost I felt now, the only one wearing human skin.
“Tell me something about them,” Grace said, her voice muffled against my T-shirt.
I let my mind flit over memories. “Beck taught me how to hunt when I was eight. I hated it.” I remembered standing in Beck’s living room, staring out at the first ice-covered tree branches of the winter, brilliant and winking in the morning sun. The backyard seemed like a dangerous and alien planet.
“Why did you hate it?” Grace asked.
“I didn’t like the sight of blood. I didn’t like hurting things. I was eight.” In my memories, I seemed small, ribby, innocent. I had spent all of the previous summer letting myself believe that this winter, with Beck, would be different, that I wouldn’t change and that I’d go on eating the eggs Beck cooked for me forever. But as the nights grew colder and even short trips outside made my muscles shake, I knew the time was coming soon when I wouldn’t be able to avoid the change, and that Beck wouldn’t be around to cook much longer. But that didn’t mean I would go willingly.
“Why hunt, then?” Grace asked, ever logical. “Why not just leave food out for yourselves?”
“Ha. I asked Beck that same question, and Ulrik said, ‘Ja, and the raccoons and possums, too?’”
Grace laughed, unduly delighted by my lousy impression of Ulrik’s accent.
I felt a rush of warmth in my cheeks; it felt good to talk to her about the pack. I loved the glow in her eyes, the curious quirk in her mouth—she knew what I was and she wanted to know more. But that didn’t mean it was right to tell her, someone outside the pack. Beck had always said, The only people we have to protect us is us. But Beck didn’t know Grace. And Grace wasn’t only human. She may not have changed, but she had been bitten. She was wolf on the inside. She had to be.
“So what happened?” Grace asked. “What did you hunt?”
“Bunnies, of course,” I replied. “Beck took me out while Paul waited in a van to collect me afterward in case I was unstable enough to change back.” I couldn’t forget how Beck had stopped me by the door before we went out, bending double so he could look into my face. I was motionless, trying not to think about changing bodies and snapping a rabbit’s neck between my teeth. About saying good-bye to Beck for the winter. He had taken my thin shoulder in his hand and said, “Sam, I’m sorry. Don’t be scared.”
I hadn’t said anything, because I was thinking it was cold, and Beck wouldn’t change back after the hunt, and then I’d have no one who knew how to cook my eggs right. Beck made perfect eggs. More than that. Beck kept me Sam. Back then, with the scars on my wrists still so fresh, I’d been so dangerously close to fracturing into something that was neither human nor wolf.
“What are you thinking about?” Grace asked. “You stopped talking.”
I looked up; I hadn’t realized I’d looked away from her. “Changing.”
Grace’s chin pressed into my shoulder as she looked into my face; her voice was hesitant. She asked me a question she’d asked me before. “Does it hurt?”
I thought of the slow, agonizing process of the change, the bending of muscles, the bulging of skin, the grinding of bones. The adults had always tried to hide their shifts from me, wanting to protect me. But it wasn’t seeing them change that scared me—the sight only made me pity them, since even Beck groaned with the pain of it. It was changing myself that terrified me, even now. Forgetting Sam.
I was a bad liar, so I didn’t bother to try. “Yes.”
“It kind of makes me sad to think of you having to do that as a little kid,” Grace said. She was frowning at me, blinking too-shiny eyes. “Actually, it bothers me a lot. Poor little Sam.” She touched my chin with a finger; I leaned into her hand.
I remembered being so proud that I hadn’t cried while I changed that time, unlike when I was younger and my parents had watched me, eyes round with horror. I remembered Beck the wolf, bounding away and leading me into the woods, and I remembered the warm, bitter sensation of my first kill on my muzzle. I had changed back again after Paul, bundled up in a coat and hat, had retrieved me. It was in the van on the way home that loneliness hit me. I was alone; Beck wouldn’t be human again that year.
Now, it was like I was eight years old all over again, alone and newly scarred. My chest ached, my breath squeezed out of me.
“Show me what I look like,” I asked Grace, tilting the photos toward her. “Please.”
I let her take the stack from my hand and watched her face light up as she flipped through the pictures, looking for one in particular. “There. That one’s my favorite of you.”
I looked at the photo she had handed me. A wolf looked back at me, wearing my eyes, a still wolf watching from the woods, sunlight touching the edges of its fur. I looked and looked, waiting for it to mean something. Waiting for a prickling of recognition. It seemed unfair that the other wolves’ identities were so clear to me in their photographs, but that mine was hidden. What was it in this photo, in that wolf, that made Grace’s eyes light up?
What if it wasn’t me? What if she was in love with some other wolf and she only thought it was me? How would I ever know?
Grace was oblivious to my doubts and misread my silence for fascination. She unfolded her legs and stood up, facing me, then ran a hand through my hair. She lifted her palm to her nose, inhaling deeply. “You know, you still smell like you do when you’re a wolf.”
And just like that, she’d said maybe the one thing that could’ve made me feel better. I handed her the photo on her way out.