“Hardly funny.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Granted.”
Sam reached over and touched my cheek. “But I’d be willing to try it. For you. To stay with you.”
He said it so simply, so unaffectedly, that it took me a moment to get the statement’s full impact. I wanted to say something, but I felt like I had no breath at all.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Grace. It’s not good enough anymore to watch you from the woods, not now that I’ve been with you—the real thing. I can’t just watch anymore. I’d rather risk whatever could happen—”
“Death—”
“Yeah, death—than watch all this slip away. I can’t do that, Grace. I want to try. Only—I think I’d have to be human for it to have a chance. It doesn’t seem like you could kill the wolf while you were the wolf.”
I was trembling. Not because it was cold, but because it sounded possible. Horrible, deadly, awful—possible. And I wanted it. I wanted to never have to give up this feeling of his fingers on my cheek or the sad sound of his voice. I should’ve told him, No, it’s not worth it, but that would’ve been a lie of such epic proportions that I couldn’t do it.
“Grace,” Sam said, abruptly. “If you want me.”
“What?” I said, and then realized what he had said. It seemed impossible that he had to ask. I couldn’t be that hard to read. Then I realized—stupid, slow me—that he wanted to hear it. He told me all the time how he felt, and I was just…stoic. I don’t think I’d ever told him. “Of course I do. Sam, I love you, you know I do. I’ve loved you for years. You know that.”
Sam curled his arms around himself. “I do. But I wanted to hear you say it.” He reached toward my hand before realizing I couldn’t take it off the wheel; instead he made a knot of my hair around his fingers and rested his fingertips against my neck. I imagined I could feel his pulse and my pulse syncing up through that tiny bit of contact. This could be mine forever.
He slouched back in his seat, looking tired, and leaned his face on his shoulder to look at me while he played with my hair. He started to hum a song, and then, after a few bars, he sang it. Quietly, sort of half-sung, half-spoken, incredibly gentle. I didn’t catch all the words, but it was about his summer girl. Me. Maybe his forever girl. His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an icecovered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me.
The Bronco lurched violently, and a heartbeat later, I saw the deer roll up over the hood. A crack raced across the windshield, exploding a second later into a thousand spiderwebbed fractures. I hit the brake, but nothing happened. Not even a whisper of a response.
Turn, Sam said, or maybe I imagined him saying it, but when I turned the wheel, the Bronco kept going straight, sliding, sliding, sliding. I remembered, in the back of my head, my dad saying, Steer into the skid, and I did, but it was too late.
There was a sound like a bone breaking, and there was a dead deer on the car and in the car and glass was everywhere and God, a tree shoved through my hood, and there was blood on my knuckles from the glass, and I was shaking and Sam was looking at me with this look on his face like oh, no, and then I realized that the car wasn’t running and there was frigid air trickling in the jagged hole in the windshield.
I wasted a moment staring at him. Then I tried the engine, which wouldn’t even respond when I turned the key. I said: “We call 911. They’ll come get us.”
Sam’s mouth made a sad little line, and he nodded, as if that really would work. I punched in the number and reported the accident, talking fast, trying to guess where we might be, and then I took off my coat, careful not to drag the sleeves over my bloody knuckles, and I threw it on top of Sam. He sat quietly, unmoving, as I grabbed a blanket from the backseat and threw it on top of him, too, and then I slid across the seat and leaned against him, hoping to lend my body heat to him.
“Call Beck, please,” Sam said, and I did. I put it on speakerphone and set it on the dash.
“Grace?” Beck’s voice.
“Beck,” Sam said. “It’s me.”
There was a pause, and then, “Sam. I—”
“There’s no time,” Sam said. “We’ve hit a deer. We’re wrecked.”
“God. Where are you? Is the car running?”
“Too far. We called 911. The engine’s dead.” Sam gave Beck a moment to realize what that meant. “Beck, I’m sorry I didn’t come by. There are things I need to say—”
“No, listen to me first, Sam. Those kids. I need you to know I recruited them. They knew. They knew all along. I didn’t do it against their will. Not like you. I’m so sorry, Sam. I’ve never stopped being sorry.”
The words were meaningless to me, but obviously not to Sam. His eyes were too bright, and he blinked. “I don’t regret it. I love you, Beck.”
“I love you, too, Sam. You’re the best of us, and nothing can change that.”
Sam shuddered, the first sign I’d seen of the cold acting on him. “I have to go,” he said. “There’s no more time.”
“Good-bye, Sam.”
“Bye, Beck.”
Sam nodded to me and I hit the END button.
For a second he was still, blinking. Then he shook off all the blankets and coats so that his arms were free and he wrapped them around me as tightly as he could. I felt him shuddering, shuddering against me as he buried his face in my hair.
I said, uselessly, “Sam, don’t go.”
Sam cupped my face in his hands and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were yellow, sad, wolf, mine. “These stay the same. Remember that when you look at me. Remember it’s me. Please.”
Please don’t go.
Sam let go of me and spread out his arms, gripping the dash with one hand and the back of his seat with the other. He bowed his head and I watched his shoulders ripple and shake, watched the silent agony of the change until that one soft, awful cry, just when he lost himself.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE • SAM
33°F
crashing into the trembling void
stretching my hand to you
losing myself to frigid regret
is this fragile love
a way
to say
good-bye
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR • GRACE
32°F
When the paramedics arrived, I was curled on the passenger seat in a pile of coats, my hands pressed against my face.
“Miss, are you all right?”
I didn’t answer, just put my hands on my lap and looked at my fingers, covered with bloody tears.
“Miss, are you alone?”
I nodded.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE • SAM
32°F
I watched her, like I’d always watched her.
Thoughts were slippery and transient, faint scents on a frigid wind, too far away to catch.
She sat just outside the wood near the swing, curled small, until the cold shook her, and still she didn’t move. For a long time, I didn’t know what she was doing.
I watched her. Part of me wanted to go to her, though instinct sang against it. The desire sparked a thought which sparked a memory of golden woods, days floating around me and falling around me, days lying still and crumpled on the ground.
But I realized then what she was doing, folded there, trembling with the vicious cold. She was waiting, waiting for the cold to shake her into another form. Maybe that unfamiliar scent I caught from her was hope.
She waited to change, and I waited to change, and we both wanted what we couldn’t have.
Finally, night crept across the yard, lengthening the shadows, pulling them out of the woods until they covered the whole world.
I watched her.
The door opened. I shrank farther into the dark. A man came out, pulled the girl from the ground. The light from the house glistened off the frozen tracks on her face.
I watched her. Thoughts, distant, fled with her absence. After she disappeared into the house, there was only this: longing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX • GRACE
34°F
Their howls were the hardest thing to bear.
As terrible as the days were, the nights were worse; days were just listless preparations to somehow make it through another night populated by their voices. I lay in bed and hugged his pillow until there was no more of his scent caught in it. I slept in his chair in Dad’s study until it had my shape instead of his. I walked barefoot through the house in a private grief I couldn’t share with anyone.
The only person I could share with, Olivia, couldn’t be reached by phone, and my car—the car I couldn’t even bear to think of—was useless and broken.
And so it was just me in the house and the hours stretched out before me and the unchanging, leafless trees of Boundary Wood outside my window.
The night I heard him howl was the worst. The others began first, like they had for the last three nights. I sank down into the leather chair in Dad’s study, buried my face in the last Samscented T-shirt of his that I had, and pretended that it was just a recording of wolves, not real wolves. Not real people. And then, for the first time since the crash, I heard his howl join in with them.
It tore my heart out, because I heard his voice. The wolves sang slowly behind him, bittersweet harmony, but all I heard was Sam. His howl trembled, rose, fell in anguish.
I listened for a long time. I prayed for them to stop, to leave me alone, but at the same time I was desperately afraid that they would. Long after the other voices had dropped away, Sam kept howling, very soft and slow.
When he finally fell silent, the night felt dead.
Sitting still was intolerable. I stood up, paced, clenched and unclenched my hands into fists. Finally I took the guitar that Sam had played and I screamed and smashed it into pieces on Dad’s desk.
When Dad came down from his room, he found me sitting in the middle of a sea of splintered wood and snapped strings, like a boat carrying music had crashed on a rocky shore.