“Hey.” Sam caught my arm, looking at my face sideways, as if searching for tears. “You look sad.”
I turned in a slow circle; the air seemed dappled and vibrant around me. I said, “I used to always imagine coming here, when I was younger. I just can’t figure out how I would’ve seen it.” I probably wasn’t making any sense, but I kept talking, trying to reason it out. “The woods behind my house don’t look like this. No birches. No yellow leaves. I don’t know how I would recognize it.”
“Maybe someone told you about it.”
“I think I would remember someone telling me every little detail about this part of the woods, down to the color of the glittering air. I don’t even know how someone could’ve told me all that.”
Sam said, “I told you. Wolves have funny ways of communicating. Showing each other pictures when they’re close to one another.”
I turned back to where he was standing, a dark blot against the light, and gave him a look. “You aren’t going to stop, are you?”
Sam just gazed at me steadily, the silent lupine stare that I knew so well, sad and intent.
“Why do you keep bringing it back up?”
“You were bitten.” He walked in a slow circle around me, scuffing up leaves with his foot, glancing at me underneath his dark eyebrows.
“So?”
“So it’s about who you are. It’s about you being one of us. You couldn’t have recognized this place if you weren’t a wolf, too, Grace. Only one of us would’ve been able to see what I showed you.” His voice was so serious, his eyes so intense. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t even talk to you right now if you weren’t like us. We aren’t supposed to talk about who we are with regular people. It’s not as if we have a ton of rules to live by, but Beck told me that’s one rule we just don’t break.”
That didn’t make sense to me. “Why not?”
Sam didn’t say anything, but his fingers touched his neck where he’d been shot; as he did, I saw the pale, shiny scars on his wrist. It seemed wrong for someone as gentle as Sam to have to always wear evidence of human violence. I shivered in the growing chill of the afternoon. Sam’s voice was soft. “Beck’s told me stories. People kill us in all kinds of awful ways. We die in labs and we get shot and we get poisoned. It might be science that changes us, Grace, but all people see is magic. I believe Beck. We can’t tell people who aren’t like us.”
I said, “I don’t change, Sam. I’m not really like you.” Disappointment stuck a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.
He didn’t answer. We stood together in the wood for a long moment before he sighed and spoke again.
“After you were bitten, I knew what would happen. I waited for you to change, every night, so I could bring you back and keep you from getting hurt.” A chilly gust of wind lifted his hair and sent a shower of golden leaves glimmering down around him. He spread out his arms, letting them fall into his hands. He looked like a dark angel in an eternal autumn wood. “Did you know you get one happy day for every one you catch?”
I didn’t know what he meant, even after he opened his fist to show me the quivering leaves crumpled in his palm.
“One happy day for every falling leaf you catch.” Sam’s voice was low.
I watched the edges of the leaves slowly unfold, fluttering in the breeze. “How long did you wait?”
It would’ve been unbearably romantic if he’d had the courage to look into my face and say it, but instead, he dropped his eyes to the ground and scuffed his boot in the leaves—countless possibilities for happy days—on the ground. “I haven’t stopped.”
And I should’ve said something romantic, too, but I didn’t have the courage, either. So instead, I watched the shy way he was chewing his lip and studying the leaves, and said, “That must’ve been very boring.”
Sam laughed, a funny, self-deprecating laugh. “You did read a lot. And spent too much time just inside the kitchen window, where I couldn’t see you very well.”
“And not enough time mostly na**d in front of my bedroom window?” I teased.
Sam turned bright red. “That,” he said, “is so not the point of this conversation.”
I smiled sweetly at his embarrassment, beginning to walk again, kicking up golden leaves. I heard him scuffing leaves behind me. “And what was the point of it again?”
“Forget it!” Sam said. “Do you like this place or not?”
I stopped in my tracks, spinning to face him. “Hey.” I pointed at him; he raised his eyebrows and stopped in his tracks. “You didn’t think Jack would be here at all, did you?”
His thick dark eyebrows went up even farther.
“Did you really intend to look for him at all?”
He held his hands up as if in surrender. “What do you want me to say?”
“You were trying to see if I would recognize it, weren’t you?” I took another step, closing the distance between us. I could feel the heat of his body, even without touching him, in the increasing cold of the day. “You told me about this wood somehow. How did you show it to me?”
“I keep trying to tell you. You won’t listen. Because you’re stubborn. It’s how we speak—it’s the only words we have. Just pictures. Just simple little pictures. You have changed, Grace. Just not your skin. I want you to believe me.” His hands were still raised, but he was starting to grin at me in the failing light.
“So you only brought me here to see this.” I stepped forward again, and he stepped back.
“Do you like it?”
“Under false pretenses.” Another step forward; another back. The grin widened.
“So do you like it?”
“When you knew we wouldn’t come across anybody else.”
His teeth flashed in his grin. “Do you like it?”
I punched my hands into his chest. “You know I love it. You knew I would.” I went to punch him again, and he grabbed my wrists. For a moment we stood there like that, him looking down at me with the grin half-caught on his face, and me looking up at him: Still Life with Boy and Girl. It would’ve been the perfect moment to kiss me, but he didn’t. He just looked at me and looked at me, and by the time I realized I could just as easily kiss him, I noticed that his grin was slipping away.
Sam slowly lowered my wrists and released them. “I’m glad,” he said, very quietly.
My arms still hung by my sides, right where Sam had put them. I frowned at him. “You were supposed to kiss me.”
“I thought about it.”
I just kept looking at the soft, sad shape of his lips, looking just like his voice sounded. I was probably staring, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted him to kiss me and how stupid it was to want it so badly. “Why don’t you?”
He leaned over and gave me the lightest of kisses. His lips, cool and dry, ever so polite and incredibly maddening. “I have to get inside soon,” he whispered. “It’s getting cold.”
For the first time I paid attention to the icy wind that cut through my long sleeves. One of the frigid gusts hurled thousands of fallen leaves back into the air, and for a single second, I thought I smelled wolf.
Sam shuddered.
Squinting at his face in the dim light, I realized suddenly that his eyes were afraid.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE • SAM
37°F
We didn’t run back to the house. Running would’ve meant acknowledging something that I wasn’t ready to face in front of her—something that I was. Instead, we walked with a giant’s strides, dried leaves and branches snapping under our feet, our breaths drowning out the other sounds of the evening. Cold snaked under my collar, tightening my skin into goose bumps.
If I didn’t let go of her hand, I’d be all right.
A wrong turn would lead us away from the house, but I couldn’t concentrate on the trees around me. My vision flashed with jerky memories of humans shifting into wolves, hundreds of shifts over my years with the pack. The memory of the first time I’d seen Beck shift was vivid in my mind—more real than the screaming red sunset through the trees in front of Grace and me. I remembered the frigid white light streaming in the living room windows of Beck’s house, and I remembered the shaking line of his shoulders as he braced his arms against the back of the sofa.
I stood beside him, looking up, no words in my mouth.
“Take him out!” Beck shouted, his face toward the hallway but his eyes half-closed. “Ulrik, take Sam out of here!”
Ulrik’s fingers around my arm then were as tight as Grace’s fingers around my hand were now, pulling me through the woods, leading us back over the trail we’d left earlier. Night crouched in the trees, waiting to overtake us, cold and black. But Grace didn’t look away from the sun glowing through the trees as she headed toward it.
The brilliant nimbus of the sun half blinded me, making stark silhouettes of the trees, and suddenly I was seven again. I saw the star pattern of my old bedspread so clearly that I stumbled. My fingers clutched the fabric, balling and tearing it under my grip.
“Mama!” My voice broke on the second syllable. “Mama, I’m going to be sick!”
I was tangled on the floor in blankets and noise and puke, shaking and clawing at the floor, trying to hold on to something, when my mother came to the bedroom door, a familiar silhouette. I looked at her, my cheek resting against the floor, and I started to say her name, but no sound came out.
She dropped to her knees and she watched me change for the first time.
“Finally,” Grace said, tearing my brain back to the woods around us. She sounded out of breath, as if we’d been running. “There it is.”
I couldn’t let Grace see me change. I couldn’t change now.
I followed Grace’s gaze to the back of Beck’s house, a flash of warm red-brown in this chilly blue evening.