“Tom loaned it to me to clean my rifle after we were out. I know I should clean it more, but I just don’t think about it when I’m not using it.”
“Tom Culpeper?” I said.
He withdrew his head from the cabinet, bottle in hand. “Yes.”
“You went shooting with Tom Culpeper? That was you the other day?” My cheeks were beginning to feel hot. I prayed for him to say no.
Dad gave me a look. The sort that was usually followed by him saying something like Grace, you’re usually so reasonable. “Something had to be done, Grace.”
“You were part of that hunting party? The one that went after the wolves?” I demanded. “I can’t believe that you—” The image of Dad creeping through the trees, rifle in hand, the wolves fleeing before him, was suddenly too strong, and I had to stop.
“Grace, I did it for you, too,” he said.
My voice came out very low. “Did you shoot any of them?”
Dad seemed to realize that the question was important. “Warning shots,” he said.
I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. I shook my head and turned away.
“Don’t sulk,” Dad said. He kissed my cheek—I remained motionless as he did—and gathered up his coffee and briefcase. “Be good. See you later.”
Standing in the kitchen, hands cupped around the blue mug, I listened as Dad’s Taurus rumbled to life in the driveway and then faded slowly away. After he’d gone, the house settled into its familiar silence, both comforting and depressing. It could’ve been any other morning, just the quiet and the coffee in my hands—but it wasn’t. Dad’s voice—warning shots—still hung in the air.
He knew how I felt about the wolves, and he’d gone behind my back and made plans with Tom Culpeper, anyway.
The betrayal stung.
A soft noise from the doorway caught my attention. Sam stood in the hallway, his hair wet and spiky from a shower, his eyes on me. There was a question written on his face, but I didn’t say anything. I was wondering what Dad would do if he knew about Sam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR • GRACE
52°F
I spent the better part of the morning and afternoon slogging through my English homework while Sam stretched on the couch, a novel in hand. It was a vague sort of torture to be in the same room with him but separated quite effectively by an English textbook. After several hours only punctuated by a brief lunch break, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I feel like I’m wasting our time together,” I confessed.
Sam didn’t answer, and I realized he hadn’t heard me. I repeated my statement, and he blinked, eyes slowly focusing on me as he returned from whatever world he’d been in. He said, “I’m happy just to be here with you. That’s enough.”
I studied his face for a long moment, trying to decide if he really meant it.
Noting his page number, Sam folded the novel shut with careful fingers and said, “Do you want to go somewhere? If you’ve gotten enough done, we can go poke around Beck’s house, to see if Jack’s made his way back over there.”
I liked the idea. Ever since Jack’s appearance at school, I’d felt uneasy about where and how he might turn up next. “Do you think he’ll be there?”
“I don’t know. The new wolves always seemed to find their way there, and that’s where the pack tends to live, in that stretch of Boundary Wood behind the house,” Sam said. “It’d be nice to think he’d finally found his way to the pack.” His face looked worried then, but he stopped short of saying why. I knew why I wanted Jack to fit in with the pack—I didn’t want anyone exposing the wolves for what they were. But Sam seemed to be concerned about something more, something bigger and more nameless.
In the golden afternoon light, I drove the Bronco to Beck’s house while Sam navigated. We had to follow the winding road around Boundary Wood for a good thirty-five minutes to get to the house. I hadn’t realized how far the wood stretched until we drove all the way around it. I guess it made sense; how could you hide an entire pack of wolves without hundreds of unpopulated acres to help? I pulled the Bronco into the driveway, squinting up at the brick facade. The dark windows looked like closed eyes; the house was overwhelmingly empty. When Sam cracked his door open, the sweet smell of the pines that stood guard around the yard filled my nostrils.
“Nice house.” I stared at the tall windows glinting in the afternoon sun. A brick house of this size could easily look imposing, but there was an atmosphere about the property that seemed disarming—maybe the sprawling, unevenly cut hedges out front or the weathered bird feeder that looked as if it had grown out of the lawn. It was a comfortable sort of place. It looked like the sort of place that would create a boy like Sam. I asked, “How did Beck get it?”
He frowned. “The house? He used to be a lawyer for rich old guys, so he’s got money. He bought it for the pack.”
“That’s awfully generous of him,” I said. I shut the car door. “Crap.”
Sam leaned over the hood of the Bronco toward me. “What?”
“I just locked the keys in the car. My brain was on autopilot.”
Sam shrugged dismissively. “Beck’s got a slim-jim in the house. We can get it when we get back from the woods.”
“A slim-jim? How intriguing,” I said, grinning at him. “I like a man with hidden depths.”
“Well, you’ve got one,” Sam replied. He jerked his head toward the trees in the backyard. “Are you ready to head in?”
The idea was both compelling and terrifying. I hadn’t been in the woods since the night of the hunt, and before that, the evening I’d seen Jack pinned by the other wolves. It seemed like my only memories of these woods were of violence.
I realized Sam was holding his hand out toward me. “Are you afraid?”
I wondered if there was a way to take his hand without admitting my fear. Not fear, really. Just some emotion that crawled along my skin and lifted the hairs on my arms. It was cool weather, not the barren dead of winter. Plenty of food for the wolves without them having to attack us. Wolves are shy creatures.
Sam took my hand; his grip was firm and his skin warm against mine in the cool autumn air. His eyes studied me, large and luminescent in the afternoon glow, and for a moment I was caught in his gaze, remembering those eyes studying me from a wolf’s face. “We don’t have to look for him now,” he said.
“I want to go.” It was true. Part of me wanted to see where Sam lived in these cold months, when he wasn’t lingering at the edge of our yard. And part of me, the part that ached with loss when the pack howled at night, was begging to follow that faint scent of the pack into the woods. All of that outweighed any bit of me that was anxious. To prove my willingness, I headed toward the backyard, nearing the edge of the woods, still holding Sam’s hand.
“They’ll stay away from us,” Sam said, as if he still had to convince me. “Jack’s the only one who would approach us.”
I looked over to him with a crooked eyebrow. “Yeah, about that. He’s not going to come at us all slathering and horror movie, is he?”
“It doesn’t make you a monster. It just takes away your inhi- bitions,” Sam said. “Did he slather a lot when he was in school?”
Like the rest of the school, I had heard the story about how Jack had put some kid in the hospital after a party; I had dismissed it as gossip until I’d seen the guy for myself, walking the halls with half his face still swollen. Jack didn’t need a transformation to become a monster.
I made a face. “He slathered a bit, yeah.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Sam said, “I don’t think he’s here. But I still hope he is.”
So we went into the woods. This was a different sort of forest from the one that bordered my parents’ yard. These trees were pressed tightly together, the underbrush crammed between the trunks as if holding them upright. Brambles caught on my jeans, and Sam kept stopping to pick burrs off our ankles. We saw no sign of Jack, or any of the wolves, during our slow progress. In truth, I didn’t think Sam was doing a very good job of scanning the woods around us. I made a big show of looking around so I could pretend I didn’t notice him glancing at me every few seconds.
It didn’t take me long to get a headful of burrs, tugging my hairs painfully as they worked their way into knots.
Sam stopped me to pick at the burrs. “It gets better,” he promised. It was sweet that he thought I would get put out enough to go back to the car. As if I had anything better to do than feel him carefully worry the barbs of the burrs out of my hair.
“I’m not worried about that,” I assured him. “I’m just thinking we’d never know if there was anyone else here. The woods go on forever.”
Sam ran his fingers through my hair as if he were checking for more burrs, though I knew they were all gone, and he probably did, too. He paused, smiling at me, and then inhaled deeply. “Doesn’t smell like we’re alone.”
He looked at me, and I knew he was waiting for me to verify—to admit that if I tried, I could smell the scent of the pack’s hidden life all around us. Instead, I reached for his hand again. “Lead the way, bloodhound.”
Sam’s expression turned a bit wistful, but he led me through the underbrush, up a gradual hill. As he promised, it got better. The thorns thinned out and the trees grew taller and straighter, their branches not beginning until a few feet over our heads. The white, peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold. I turned to Sam, and his eyes reflected the same brilliant yellow back at me.
I stopped in my tracks. It was my woods. The golden woods I’d always imagined running away to. Sam, watching my face, dropped his hand out of mine and stepped back to look at me.
“Home,” he said. I think he was waiting for me to say something. Or maybe he wasn’t waiting for me to say something. Maybe he saw it on my face. I didn’t have anything to say—I just looked around at the shimmering light and the leaves hanging on the branches like feathers.