“If you were in here, you might want that, too,” Cole said, and now he did smile, a cruel, lopsided thing that crawled farther up one side of his face than the other. “I can’t be the only one who wants the wolf.”
He wasn’t.
Shelby had preferred it, too. Broken Shelby, barely human, even when she wore the face of a girl.
“You are,” I said.
Cole’s smile broke into a silent laugh. “You’re so naive, Ringo. How well did you know Beck?”
I looked at him, at his condescending expression, and I just wanted him gone. I wished Beck had never brought him back. He should’ve left Cole and Victor in Canada or wherever they’d come from.
“Well enough to know that he made a way better human than you ever will,” I said. Cole’s expression didn’t change; it was like unkind words didn’t make it to his ears. I clenched and unclenched my teeth, angry that I’d let him get to me.
“Wanting to be a wolf doesn’t automatically make you a bad person,” Cole said, voice mild. “And wanting to be human doesn’t make you a good one.”
I was fifteen again, sitting in my room in Beck’s house, arms wrapped around my legs, hiding from the wolf inside me. Winter had already stolen Beck the week before, and Ulrik would be gone soon as well.
Then me and my books and guitar would lay untouched until spring, just as Beck’s books already lay abandoned. Forgotten in the self-oblivion that was the wolf.
I didn’t want to have this conversation with Cole. I said, “Are you going to shift soon?”
“Not a chance.”
“Then please go back to the house. I’m cleaning this place up.” I paused. And then, as much to convince me as him, “And it’s what you did to Victor that makes you a bad person. Not wanting to be a wolf.”
Cole looked at me, the same blank expression on his face, and then he headed back toward the house. I turned away from him and went back into the shed.
Like Beck had done before me, I folded up the blanket Victor had left behind and swept out the dust and hair from the floor, and then I checked the watercooler and went through the food bins and made a note of what needed to be added to them. I went to the notepad that we kept by the boat battery—a list of scrawled names, sometimes with a date beside them, sometimes with a description of the trees, because they told time when we couldn’t. Beck’s way of keeping track of who was human and when.
The open page was still of last year’s names, ending with Beck’s, a far shorter list than that of the year before, which was in turn a shorter list than that of the year before it. I swallowed and flipped to the next page. I wrote the year on top and added Victor’s name and the date beside it. Cole’s name really ought to have been on there, too, but I doubted Beck had explained how we logged ourselves in. I didn’t want to add Cole’s name. It would mean officially admitting him to the pack, to my family, and I didn’t want to.
For a long time I stood looking at that blank page with just Victor’s name on it, and then I added my own.
I knew it didn’t belong there anymore, not really, but it was a list of who was human, right?
And who was more human than me?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
• GRACE • I headed into the trees.
The woods were still dormant and leafless, but the warmer air woke up a cacophony of damp spring smells that had been masked by the cold. Birds trilled at one another overhead, flicking from underbrush to higher branches, leaving shaking boughs in their wake.
I felt it in my bones: I was home.
Only a few yards into the wood, I heard the underbrush crackling behind me. My heart raced as I paused, interrupting the squish and crackle of the forest floor beneath my feet. Again, I heard the rustle again, no closer but no farther, either. I didn’t turn, but I knew it had to be a wolf. I felt no fear—only companionship.
I heard the occasional stir of leaves as the wolf moved to follow me. Still not very close—just observing me from a careful distance. Part of me wanted to see which wolf it was, but the other part was too thrilled by the presence of a wolf to risk scaring it off. So we just walked together, me with steady progress and the wolf with intermittent bursts of movement to keep up with me.
The sun that shot through the still-naked branches above was warm on my shoulders, and I stretched out my hands on either side of me as I walked, soaking in as much of it as I could, trying to erase the feel of last night’s fever. It felt like the further I got from my anger, the more I could feel that something wasn’t right inside me.
Stepping through the underbrush, I remembered Sam taking me to the golden clearing in the woods and wished he was here with me now, listening to the unfamiliar racing of my heart. It wasn’t like we spent all of our time together or like I didn’t know how to occupy myself without him—he had his bookstore work and I had school and tutoring—but right now, I felt uneasy.
Yes, the fever was gone, but I didn’t feel like it was gone for good. I felt as if I could still sense it singing restlessly in my blood, waiting to reappear the next time the wolves called.
I kept walking. Here the trees were sparser, new saplings discouraged by the presence of the massive pine trees. The smell of the lake was stronger, and I saw a wolf paw print in the soft dirt of the forest floor.
Underneath the dull green of the pines, I wrapped my arms around myself, cold without the sun on me.
To my left side, I saw a flash of movement: a brown-gray coat, the same color as the trunks of the pine trees. Finally, I saw the wolf who’d been accompanying me as he paused long enough for me to get a good look at him. He didn’t flinch when I took in his bright green, human eyes and the curious tilt to his ears. Beyond him, I saw the sparkle of the lake through the trees.
Are you one of the new wolves? I wondered in my head, but I didn’t say it aloud, in case my voice startled him. He tilted his face upward, and I saw his nose working in my direction. I felt I knew what he wanted: I slowly lifted a hand in his direction, proffering my palm.
He recoiled, as if from the scent, not from the movement, because after he had jerked back, his nose continued working.
I didn’t have to bring my palm to my own nose to know what he was smelling, because I could still smell it myself. The sweet, rotten scent of almonds, trapped between my fingers and under my nails. It seemed more ominous than the fever itself had. It seemed to say, This is more than just a fever.
My heart thumped in my chest, although I still wasn’t afraid of the brown-coated wolf. I crouched on the forest floor and clutched my arms around my knees, my limbs suddenly shaky with either knowledge or fever.
I heard an explosion of sound as several birds burst from the underbrush; both the brown wolf and I flinched. A gray wolf, the cause of the birds’ surprise, slunk closer. He was larger than the brown wolf but not as brave; his eyes held interest but the set of both his ears and his tail were wary as he crept closer. His nose, too, twitched, scenting the air as he approached.
Motionless, I watched as a black wolf—I recognized him as Paul—appeared behind the gray one, followed by another wolf I didn’t know. They moved like a school of fish, constantly touching, jostling, communicating without words. Soon there were six wolves, all keeping their distance, all watching me, all scenting the air.
Inside me, the wordless something that had given me my fever and slicked my skin with this scent hummed. Not painful, not at the moment, but not right, either. I knew why I wanted Sam so badly now.
I was afraid.
The wolves circled me, wary of my human form but curious of the smell. Maybe they were waiting for me to shift.
But I couldn’t shift. This was my body, for better or for worse, no matter how hard the something inside me groaned and burned and begged to be released.
The last time I had been in these woods, surrounded by wolves, I had been prey. I had been helpless, pinned to the ground by the weight of my own blood, staring at the winter sky. They had been animals and I had been human. Now the line wasn’t so distinct.
There was no threat of attack from them. Just worried curiosity.
I moved, gingerly, to stretch out my stiff arms, and one of the wolves whined, high and anxious, like a mother dog to her pup.
I felt as if the fever was waking inside of me.
Isabel had told me that her mother, a doctor, once said that terminal patients often seemed to have an eerie sense of their condition, even before it was diagnosed. At the time, I’d scoffed, but now I knew what she meant—because I felt it.
There was something really wrong with me, something I didn’t think doctors would know how to fix, and these wolves knew it.
I huddled under the trees, my arms wrapped around my legs again, and watched the wolves watching me. After several long moments, the large gray wolf, never taking his eyes from mine, sank to his haunches, slowly, as if he might change his mind at any moment. It was utterly unnatural. Utterly unwolflike.
I held my breath.