Of course I knew it wasn’t really a sixth sense. It was just me, acknowledging that there was more to my senses than I normally let on. I gave in to them and they became efficient, sharpened. As it reached me, the breeze seemed to carry the information of a stack of maps, telling me which animals had traveled where and how long ago. My ears picked up faint sounds that before had gone unnoticed: the rustling of a twig as a bird built a nest overhead, the soft step of a deer dozens of feet away.
I felt like I was home.
The woods rang with an unfamiliar cry, out of place in this world. I hesitated, listening. The whimper came again, louder than before.
Rounding a pine tree, I came upon the source: three wolves. It was the white wolf and the black pack leader; the sight of the she-wolf made my stomach twist with nerves. The two of them had pounced on a third wolf, a scraggly young male with an almost-blue tint to his gray coat and an ugly, healing wound on his shoulder. The other two wolves were pinning him to the leafy ground in a show of dominance; they all froze when they saw me. The pinned male twisted his head to stare at me, eyes entreating. My heart thudded in my chest. I knew those eyes. I remembered them from school; I remembered them from the local news.
“Jack?” I whispered.
The pinned wolf whistled pitifully through his nostrils. I just kept staring at those eyes. Hazel. Did wolves have hazel eyes? Maybe they did. Why did they look so wrong? As I stared at them, that one word just kept singing through my head: human, human, human.
With a snarl in my direction, the she-wolf let him up. She snapped at his side, pushing him away from me. Her eyes were on me the entire time, daring me to stop her, and something in me told me that maybe I should have tried. But by the time my thoughts stopped spinning and I remembered the pocketknife in my jeans, the three wolves were already dark smudges in the distant trees.
Without the wolf’s eyes before me, I had to wonder if I’d imagined the likeness to Jack’s. After all, it had been two weeks since I’d seen Jack in person, and I’d never really paid close attention to him. I could have been misremembering his eyes. What was I thinking, anyway? That he’d turned into a wolf?
I let out a deep breath. Actually, that was what I was thinking. I didn’t think I had forgotten Jack’s eyes. Or his voice. And I hadn’t imagined the human scream or the desperate howl. I just knew it was Jack, in the way I’d known how to find my way through the trees.
There was a knot in my stomach. Nerves. Anticipation. I didn’t think Jack was the only secret these woods held.
That night I lay in bed and stared at the window, my blinds pulled up so I could see the night sky. One thousand brilliant stars punched holes in my consciousness, pricking me with longing. I could stare at the stars for hours, their infinite number and depth pulling me into a part of myself that I ignored during the day.
Outside, deep in the woods, I heard a long, keening wail, and then another, as the wolves began to howl. More voices pitched in, some low and mournful, others high and short, an eerie and beautiful chorus. I knew my wolf’s howl; his rich tone sang out above the others as if begging me to hear it.
My heart ached inside me, torn between wanting them to stop and wishing they would go on forever. I imagined myself there among them in the golden wood, watching them tilt their heads back and howl underneath a sky of endless stars. I blinked a tear away, feeling foolish and miserable, but I didn’t go to sleep until every wolf had fallen silent.
CHAPTER TEN • GRACE
60°F
“Do you think we need to take the book home—you know, Exploring Guts, or whatever it’s called?” I asked Olivia. “For the reading? Or can I leave it here?”
She shoved her locker shut, her arms full of books. She was wearing reading glasses, complete with a chain on the ear pieces so that she could hang them around her neck. On Olivia, the look kind of worked, in a sort of charming librarian way. “It’s a lot of reading. I’m bringing it.”
I reached back into my locker for the textbook. Behind us, the hall hummed with noise as students packed up and headed home. All day long, I’d tried to work up the nerve to tell Olivia about the wolves. Normally I wouldn’t have had to think about it, but after our almost-fight the day before, the moment hadn’t seemed to come up. And now the day was over. I took a deep breath. “I saw the wolves yesterday.”
Olivia paged idly through the book on top of her stack, not realizing how momentous my confession was. “Which ones?”
“The nasty she-wolf, the black one, and a new one.” I debated again whether or not to tell her. She was way more interested in the wolves than Rachel was, and I didn’t know who else to talk to. Even inside my head, the words sounded crazy. But since the evening before, the secret had surrounded me, tight around my chest and throat. I let the words spill out, my voice low. “Olivia, this is going to sound stupid. The new wolf—I think something happened when the wolves attacked Jack.”
She just stared at me.
“Jack Culpeper,” I said.
“I know who you meant.” Olivia frowned at the front of her locker.
Her knotted eyebrows were making me regret starting the conversation. I sighed. “I thought I saw him in the woods. Jack. As a…” I hesitated.
“Wolf?” Olivia clicked her heels together—I’d never known anyone to actually do that, outside of The Wizard of Oz—and spun on them to face me with a raised eyebrow. “You’re crazy.” I could barely hear her over the students pressed all around us in the hall. “I mean, it’s a nice fantasy, and I can see why you’d want to believe it—but you’re crazy. Sorry.”
I leaned in close, although the hall was so loud that even I had to struggle to hear our conversation. “Olive, I know what I saw. They were Jack’s eyes. It was his voice.” Of course, her doubt made me doubt, but I wasn’t about to admit that. “I think the wolves turned him into one of them. Wait—what do you mean? About me wanting to believe it?”
Olivia gave me a long look before setting off toward our homeroom. “Grace, seriously. Don’t think I don’t know what this is about.”
“What is this about?”
She answered with another question. “Are they all were-wolves then?”
“What? The whole pack? I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.” It hadn’t occurred to me. It should have, but it hadn’t. It was impossible. That those long absences were because my wolf vanished into human form? The idea was immediately unbearable, only because I wanted it to be true so badly that it hurt.
“Yeah, sure you didn’t. Don’t you think this obsession is getting kind of creepy, Grace?”
My reply sounded more defensive than I meant it to. “I’m not obsessed.”
Students shot annoyed looks at us as Olivia stopped in the hall and put a finger on her chin. “Hmm, it’s all you think about, all you talk about, and all you want us to talk about. What in the world would we call something like that? Oh, yeah! An obsession!”
“I’m just interested,” I snapped. “And I thought you were, too.”
“I am interested in them. Just not like all-consuming, involving, whatever, interested. I don’t fantasize about being one.” Her eyes were narrowed behind her reading glasses. “We’re not thirteen anymore, but you haven’t seemed to figure that out yet.”
I didn’t say anything. All I could think was that she was being tremendously unfair, but I didn’t feel like telling her that. I didn’t want to say anything to her. I wanted to walk away and leave her standing there in the hallway. But I didn’t. Instead, I kept my voice super flat and even. “Sorry to have bored you for so long. Must’ve killed you to look entertained.”
Olivia grimaced. “Seriously, Grace. I’m not trying to be a jerk. But you’re being impossible.”
“No, you’re just telling me that I’m creepy obsessed with something that’s important to me. That’s very”—the word I wanted took too long to surface in my head and ruined the effect—“philanthropic of you. Thanks for the help.”
“Oh, grow up,” snapped Olivia, and pushed around me.
The hallway seemed too quiet after she’d gone, and my cheeks felt hot. Instead of heading home, I trailed back into my empty homeroom, flopped into a chair, and put my head in my hands. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fought with Olivia. I’d looked at every photograph she’d ever taken. I’d listened to countless rants about her family and the pressure to perform. She owed it to me to at least hear me out.
My thoughts were cut short by the sound of cork heels squelching into the room. The scent of expensive perfume hit me a second before I lifted my eyes to Isabel Culpeper standing over my desk.
“I heard that you guys were talking about the wolves yesterday with that cop.” Isabel’s voice was pleasant, but the expression in her eyes belied her tone. The sympathy conjured up by her presence vanished at her words. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you’re innocently misinformed and not out-and-out retarded. I heard you’re telling people the wolves aren’t a problem. You must not have heard the newsflash: Those animals killed my brother.”
“I’m sorry about Jack,” I said, automatically wanting to jump to my wolf’s defense. For a second, I thought about Jack’s eyes and what a revelation like that might mean to Isabel, but I discounted the idea almost immediately. If Olivia thought I was crazy for believing in werewolves, Isabel would probably be on the phone to the local mental institution before I could even finish a sentence.
“Shut. Up,” Isabel interrupted my thoughts. “I know you’re about to tell me the wolves aren’t dangerous. Well, obviously they are. And obviously, someone’s going to have to do something about that.”
My mind flicked to the conversation in the classroom: Tom Culpeper and his stuffed animals. I imagined my wolf, stuffed and glassy-eyed. “You don’t know that the wolves did it. He could’ve been—” I stopped. I knew the wolves had done it. “Look, something went really wrong. But it could’ve been just one wolf. The odds are that the rest of the pack had nothing to do with—”