Hope hurt more than the cold.
Maybe it wasn’t Jack I should’ve been looking for.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE • SAM
53°F
Once I’d let myself think that Beck might still be human, the idea possessed me. I slept badly, my mind skipping over all the ways I could try to track him down. Doubts crowded in there, too—it could’ve been any of the pack members that had gotten the mail or bought milk—but I couldn’t help it. Hope won over all of it. At breakfast the next morning, I chatted with Grace about her calculus homework—it looked entirely incomprehensible to me—and about her rich, hyper friend Rachel and about whether or not turtles had teeth, but really, what I was thinking about was Beck.
After I dropped Grace off at school, I tried for a brief moment to pretend that I wasn’t heading straight back to Beck’s house.
He wasn’t there. I already knew that.
But it couldn’t hurt to just check again.
On the way over, I kept thinking about what Grace had said the other night about the electricity and the milk in the fridge. Maybe, just maybe, Beck would be there, relieving me of the responsibility of Jack and eliminating the unbearable weight of being the last one of my kind. Even if the house was still empty, I could still get some more clothing and my other copy of Rilke and walk through the rooms, smelling the memories of kinship.
I remembered three short years ago, back when more of us were in our prime, able to return to our real, human forms at the first kiss of spring’s warmth. The house was full then—Paul, Shelby, Ulrik, Beck, Derek, and even crazy Salem were human at the same time. Spiraling through insanity together made it seem more sane.
I slowed as I headed down Beck’s road, my heart jumping as I saw a vehicle pulling into his driveway, and then sinking when I saw that it was an unfamiliar Tahoe. Brake lights glowed dully in the gray day, and I rolled down my window to try and catch a bit of scent. Before I’d caught anything, I heard the driver’s-side door open and shut on the far side of the SUV. Then the breeze played the driver’s scent right to me, clean and vaguely smoky.
Beck. I parked the Bronco on the side of the road and jumped out, grinning as I saw him come around the side of the SUV. His eyes widened for a moment, and then he grinned, too, an expression that his smile-lined face fell into easily.
“Sam!” Beck’s voice held something weird—surprise, I think. His grin widened. “Sam, thank God. Come here!”
He hugged me and patted my back in that touchy-feely way that he always managed to pull off without seeming gropey. Must’ve come from being a lawyer; he knew how to schmooze people. I couldn’t help but notice that he was wider around the middle; not from fat. I don’t know how many shirts he must’ve been wearing underneath his coat to keep himself warm enough to be human, but I saw the mismatched collars of at least two. “Where have you been?”
“I—” I was about to tell him the whole story in a nutshell of getting shot, meeting Grace, seeing Jack, but I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t. Certainly it wasn’t because of Beck, who was watching me earnestly with his intense blue eyes. It was something, some strange scent, faint but familiar, that was making my muscles clench and pasting my tongue to the top of my mouth. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this. My answer came out more guarded than I’d intended. “I’ve been around. Not here. You weren’t here, either, I noticed.”
“Nope,” Beck admitted. He headed around to the back of the Tahoe. I noticed then that the van was filthy—thick with dirt. Dirt that smelled of somewhere else, stuffed up into the wheel wells and splattered along the fenders. “Salem and I were up in Canada.”
So that’s why I hadn’t seen Salem anywhere recently. Salem had always been problematic: He wasn’t quite right as a human, so he wasn’t quite right when he was a wolf, either. I was pretty sure Salem was the one who had dragged Grace from her swing. How Beck had managed a car trip with him was beyond me. Why he managed a car trip with him was even further beyond me.
“You smell like hospital.” Beck squinted at me. “And you look like hell.”
“Thanks,” I said. Guess I was telling after all. I really didn’t think the hospital smell could still linger after a week, but Beck’s wrinkled nose said otherwise. “I was shot.”
Beck pushed his fingers against his lips and spoke through them. “God. Where? Nowhere that’d make me blush, I hope.”
I gestured to my neck. “Nowhere near that interesting.”
“Is everything okay?”
He meant were we still okay? Did anybody know? There’s a girl. She’s amazing. She knows, but it’s okay. I tried out the words in my head, but there wasn’t any way to make them sound all right. I just kept hearing Beck tell me how we couldn’t trust our secret with anyone but us. So I just shrugged. “As okay as we ever are.”
And then my stomach dropped out from under me. He was going to smell Grace in the house.
“God, Sam,” Beck said. “Why didn’t you call my cell? When you were shot?”
“I don’t have your number. For this year’s phone.” Every year, we got new phones, since we didn’t use them over the winter.
Another look that I didn’t like. Sympathy. No, pity. I pretended not to see it.
Beck fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “Here, take this. It’s Salem’s. Like he’s going to use it anymore.”
“Bark once for yes, twice for no?”
Beck grinned. “Exactly. Anyway, it’s got my number in its brain already. So use it. You might have to buy a charger for it.”
I thought he was about to ask me where I’d been staying, and I didn’t want to answer. So instead I jerked my chin toward the Tahoe. “So why all the dirt? Why the trip?” I knocked a fist on the side of the car, and to my surprise, something knocked back inside. More like a thud. Like a kick. I raised an eyebrow. “Is Salem in here?”
“He’s back in the woods. He changed in Canada, the bastard, I had to bring him back like that and he sheds like it’s going out of style. And you know, I think he’s crazy.”
Beck and I both laughed at that—as if that needed to be said.
I looked back to the place where I’d felt the thump against my fist. “So what’s thumping?”
Beck raised his eyebrows. “The future. Want to see?”
I shrugged and stepped back so he could open the doors to the back. If I thought I was prepared for what was inside, I was wrong in about forty different ways.
The backseats of the Tahoe were folded down to make more room, and inside the extended trunk were three bodies. Humans. One was sitting awkwardly against the back of the seats, one was curled into a fetal position, and the other lay crookedly alongside the door. Their hands were all zip tied.
I stared, and the boy sitting against the seats stared back, his eyes bloodshot. My age, maybe a little younger. Red was smeared along his arms, and I saw now that it continued all over the inside of the vehicle. And then I smelled them: the metallic stink of blood, the sweaty odor of fear, the earthy scent that matched the dirt on the outside of the Tahoe. And wolf, wolf, everywhere—Beck, Salem, and unfamiliar wolves.
The girl curled into a ball was shuddering, and when I squinted at the boy, staring back at me in the darkness, I saw that he was shivering, too, his fingers clenching and unclenching one another in a tangled knot of fear.
“Help,” he said.
I fell back, several feet into the driveway, my knees weak beneath me. I covered my mouth, then came closer to stare at them. The boy’s eyes pleaded.
I was vaguely aware that Beck was standing nearby, just watching me, but I couldn’t stop looking back at those kids. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “No. No. These kids have been bitten. Beck, they’ve been bitten.”
I spun, laced my hands behind my head, spun back to look at the three of them again. The boy shuddered violently, but his eyes never left mine. Help. “Oh, hell, Beck. What have you done? What the hell have you done?”
“Are you finished yet?” Beck asked calmly.
I turned again, squeezing my eyes shut and then open again. “Finished? How can I be finished? Beck, these kids are changing.”
“I’m not going to talk to you until you’re done.”
“Beck, are you seeing this?” I leaned against the Tahoe, looking in at the girl, fingers clawed into the bloodstained carpet of the back. She was maybe eighteen, wearing a tight tie-dyed shirt. I pushed off, backing away, as if that would make them disappear. “What is going on?”
In the back of the car, the boy began to groan, pushing his face into his bound wrists. His skin was dusky as he began to change in earnest.
I turned away. I couldn’t watch. Not remembering what it was like, those first days. I just kept my fingers laced behind my head and pressed my arms against my ears like a vise grip, saying, Oh hell oh hell oh hell, over and over until I convinced myself I couldn’t hear his wails. They weren’t even calls for help; maybe he already sensed that Beck’s house was too isolated for anyone to hear him. Or maybe he’d given up.
“Will you help me take them inside?” Beck asked.
I spun to face him, seeing a wolf stepping from the too-large zip ties and a shirt, growling and starting back as tie-dye-girl moaned at his feet. In an instant, Beck had leaped into the back of the SUV, lithe and animal, and had thrown the wolf onto its back. He grabbed its jaws with one hand and stared into the wolf’s eyes. “Don’t even think of fighting,” he snarled at the wolf. “You aren’t in charge here.”
Beck dropped the wolf’s muzzle, and its head hit the carpet with a dull thud, unprotesting. The wolf was beginning to shake again; already getting ready to change back again.
God. I couldn’t watch this. It was as bad as going through it myself all over again, never sure which skin I’d be wearing. I looked away, to Beck. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”