For a long moment, I just stood by the bed, staring at the snarled sheets, and then I climbed in. The pillow smelled like Sam’s hair, and after nights of bad sleep without him, the bed felt like heaven. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew he’d be back. Already, it felt like I was with him again. My eyelids ached with sudden heaviness.
Behind my closed eyes I felt a tangled grip of emotions and feelings and sensations. The everpresent ache in my stomach. The pang of envy when I thought of Olivia as a wolf. The rawness of anger at my parents. The crippling ferocity of missing Sam. The touch of lips to my forehead.
Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep—or rather, I had woken up. It didn’t seem like any time at all had passed, but when I opened my eyes, I was facing the wall and the comforter was pulled up around my shoulders.
Usually when I woke up someplace other than my bed—at my grandmother’s, or the few times I’d been in a hotel when I was younger—there was a moment of confusion as my body figured out why the light was different and the pillow wasn’t mine. But opening my eyes in Sam’s room, it was just…opening my eyes. It was like my body had been unable to forget where I was even while I was sleeping.
So when I rolled back over to look into the rest of the room and saw birds dancing between me and the ceiling, there was no surprise. Just wonder. Dozens of origami birds of every shape, size, and color danced slowly in the air from the heating vents, life in slow motion. The now-brilliant light through the tall window cast moving bird-shaped shadows all around the room: on the ceiling, on the walls, over the top of the stacks and shelves of books, across the comforter, across my face. It was beautiful.
I wondered how long I’d slept. Also, I wondered where Sam was. Stretching my arms above my head, I realized I could hear the dull roar of the shower through the open door. Dimly, I heard Sam’s voice rise above the sound of the shower: All these perfect days, made of glass Put on the shelf where they can cast perfect shadows that stretch and grow on the imperfect days down below.
He sang the line over again, twice, changing stretch and grow to shift and glow and then shift and grow. His voice sounded wet and echoey.
I smiled, though there was no one to see it. The fight with my parents seemed like something that had happened to a longago Grace. Kicking back the blankets, I stood up, my head sending one of the birds into crazy orbit. I reached up to still it and then moved among the birds, looking at what they were made of.
The one that had knocked against my head was folded out of newsprint. Here was one folded out of a glossy magazine cover. Another from a paper beautifully and intricately printed with flowers and leaves. One that looked like it had once been a tax worksheet. Another, misshapen and tiny, made out of two dollar bills taped together. A school report card from a correspondence school out of Maryland. So many stories and memories folded up for safekeeping; how like Sam to hang them all above him while he slept.
I fingered the one that hung directly over his pillow.
A rumpled piece of notepaper covered with Sam’s handwriting, echoing the voice I now heard in the background. One of the scribbled lines was girl lying in the snow.
I sighed. I had a weird, empty feeling inside me.
Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you’re not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was really a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me.
I smiled again, and the delicate birds danced around me.
“Hi,” Sam said from the doorway. His voice was cautious, unsure of where we stood this morning, after our days apart. His hair was all stuck out and crazy from his shower, and he was wearing a collared shirt that made him look weirdly formal, despite its rumpled, untucked appearance and his blue jeans. My mind was screaming: Sam, Sam, finally Sam.
“Hi,” I said, and I couldn’t keep from grinning. I bit my lip, but my smile was still there, and it only got bigger when Sam’s face reflected it back at me. I stood there among his birds, with the shape of my body still impressed on the bed sheets beside me, the sun splashing over me and him, and my worries of last night seeming impossibly small in comparison to the vast glow of this morning.
I was suddenly overwhelmed by what an incredible person this boy was, standing in front of me, and by the fact that he was mine and I was his.
“Right now,” Sam said—and I saw that he held the invoice for today’s studio time in his hand, folded into a invoice for today’s studio time in his hand, folded into a bird with sun-washed wings—“it’s hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
• COLE • I couldn’t get the smell of her blood out of my nostrils.
Sam was gone by the time I got to the house; the driveway was empty and the house felt echoey and hollow. I burst into the downstairs bathroom—the bath mat was still twisted from where Sam and I had struggled the night before—and turned the tap on as hot as I could get it. Then I stood in it and watched blood run down the drain. It looked black in the dull filtered light behind the shower curtain. Scrubbing my palms together and scratching my arms, I tried to get every last trace of the doe off me, but no matter how hard I worked my skin, I could still smell her. And every time I caught a whiff of her scent, I saw her. That dark, resigned eye looking up at me while I stared at her insides.
Then I remembered Victor looking up at me, lying on the floor of the shed, bitter, simultaneously Victor and wolf. My fault.
It occurred to me then that I was the opposite of my father. Because I was very, very good at destroying things.
I reached forward and turned the water temperature all the way to cold. There was a brief moment when there was enough hot water to make it the exact temperature of my body, turning me invisible.
Then it became frigid. I swore and fought my instincts to jump out of the tub.
Goose bumps rose immediately on my skin, so fast that they hurt, and I let my head fall back. The water coursed over my neck.
Shift. Shift now.
But the water wasn’t cold enough to force me to change; it was just cold enough to make my gut twist and nausea bubble through me. I used my foot to shut off the water.
Why was I still human?
It didn’t make sense. If being a wolf was scientific, not magical, then it had to follow rules and logic. And the fact that the new wolves changed at different temperatures at different times…it didn’t make sense.
My head was full of Victor shifting back and forth, the white wolf watching me silently, sure in her wolf body, and me, pacing the halls of the house, waiting to shift. I grabbed the hand towel from the sink and used it to dry myself as I riffled through the downstairs closets for clothing. I found a dark blue sweatshirt that said navy on it and some jeans that were a bit loose but didn’t fall off. The entire time that I was looking for clothing, my head hummed, turning over possibilities for new logic.
Maybe Beck had been wrong about hot and cold being the cause of the shifts. Maybe they weren’t really causes; maybe they were just catalysts. In which case there might be other ways to trigger the shift.
I needed paper. I couldn’t think without writing my thoughts down.
I got some paper from Beck’s office, and Beck’s day planner as well. I sat down at the dining room table, pen in hand, the heat rushing out softly through the vents making me feel warm and drowsy. My brain instantly traveled back to my parents’ dining room table. I’d sat there every morning with my brainstorming notebook—my father’s idea—and I would do my homework or write song lyrics or journal on something I’d seen on the news. That was back when I’d been sure I was going to change the world.
I thought about Victor, his eyes closed as he rode some new high. My mother’s face when I told her she could go to hell with Dad. The countless girls waking up to find out they’d slept with a ghost, because I was already gone, if not in actuality, in some spiraling trip contained in a bottle or syringe. The way that Angie had one hand pressed flat against her breastbone when I told her I’d cheated on her.
Oh, yeah, I’d changed the world all right.
I opened the day planner and browsed through it, not even really reading, just skimming, looking for clues. There were little bits and pieces that might be useful but were meaningless on their own: I found one of the wolves dead today; I looked at her eyes but she was no one to me. Paul said she’d stopped shifting fourteen years ago. There was blood on her face. Smelled like hell. And Derek changed into a wolf for two hours in the heat of summer; Ulrik and I have been trying to work that one out all afternoon.
A nd Why does Sam get so many fewer years than the rest of us? He is the best of all of us. Why does life have to be so unfair?
My gaze dropped to my hand. There was still a little bit of blood underneath the nail of my thumb. I didn’t think that blood could stay on your skin when you shifted; it would’ve been on my fur, anyway, not on my skin. So that meant that blood underneath my fingernail had gotten there after I’d become a human. In those unmeasured minutes after I got my human body back but before I’d become Cole again.
I rested my head on the table; the wood seemed freezing cold on my skin. It seemed like far too much work to work out the werewolf logic. Even if I did—even if I figured out what really made us shift and where our minds went when they weren’t following our bodies —what was the point? To become a wolf forever? All that work, just to preserve a life that I wouldn’t remember. A life not worth preserving.
I knew from experience that there were easier ways to get rid of conscious thought. And I knew of one, one that until now I’d just been too cowardly to attempt, that worked permanently.
I’d told Angie once. It was back before she hated me, I think. I’d been playing the keyboard, home from my first tour, when the whole world lay out before me like I was both king and conqueror, full of possibilities.
Angie didn’t know yet that I’d cheated on her during the tour. Or maybe she did. When I’d stopped playing, my fingers still hovering over the keys, I said to her, “I’ve been thinking about killing myself.”
Angie hadn’t looked up from her position in the old La-Z-Boy we kept in the garage. “Yeah, I guessed that.
How’s that working out for you?”
“It’s got its definite pros,” I replied. “I can only think of one con.”
She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then she said, “Why would you say something like that, anyway? You want me to talk you out of it? The only person who can talk you out of or into that is yourself.
You’re the genius. You know that. So that means you’re just saying it for effect.”
“Bull,” I said. “I really wanted your advice. But whatever.”