I closed my eyes.
“All…this…pain. This…” My voice was failing me again, suddenly dangerously unsteady. But I wouldn’t let myself stop. I opened my eyes. “Guilt. Because of what I’ve done to you. Because of what I’ve always done to you. It would—it would be gone.” I stopped, rubbed my hand across my face. My voice was nearly inaudible. “But that’s what I always do, isn’t it, Vic?
Screw things up and then make myself disappear?”
I reached out and touched one of the wolf’s front paws; the fur was coarse and cold beneath my fingertips. “Ah, Vic,” I said, and my voice caught in my throat. “You were so good. Magic hands.” He’d never have hands again.
I didn’t say the next part out loud. Never again, Victor. I’m done running. I’m sorry this is what it took for me to see.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something, the darkness shifting.
Wolves.
As a human, I had never seen so many of them, but now, the dark spaces between the trees seethed with them. Ten? A dozen? They were far enough away that I could almost believe I was imagining the dim shapes.
Grace’s eyes were on them, too. “Sam,” she whispered. “Beck.”
“I know,” he said.
We were all frozen, waiting to see how long the wolves would stay, and if they would come any closer.
Crouched there beside Victor, I was aware that the glinting eyes meant something different to each of us.
Sam’s past. My present. Grace’s future.
“Are they here for Victor?” Sam asked, voice soft.
Nobody answered him.
I realized: I was the only one mourning Victor for who he really was.
The wolves remained where they were, specters in the oncoming night. Finally, Sam turned to me and asked, “Are you ready?”
I didn’t think it was something you could be ready for, but I covered Victor’s face with the sheet. Together, Sam and I hefted his weight—it felt like nothing between us—and gently lowered him into the grave, with Grace and the pack as our audience.
The woods were utterly silent.
Then Grace stood up, finally, unsteady on her feet, one of her hands pressed to her stomach.
Sam startled as one of the wolves began to croon.
It was a low, sad sound, far more like a human voice than I thought possible.
One by one, the other wolves added their voices; as the evening grew darker, the song swelled, filling every crevice and gully in the forest. It prickled some wolf memory, buried deep in my mind, of me tipping my head back to the sky, calling the spring.
The lonely song drove home the fact of Victor’s cold body in the grave like nothing else, and I realized that my cheeks were wet as I lowered my face to my palms.
Lowering my hands, I saw Sam cross the few steps to Grace and hold her swaying form.
Holding tight, denying the fact that eventually we all had to let go.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
• SAM • When we got back inside, it was hard to tell who looked worse—Cole, so racked with grief, or Grace, her eyes looking huge in her pale, pale face. It hurt to look at both of them.
Cole sank down into one of the chairs at the dining room table. I led Grace to the couch and sat next to her, meaning to turn on the radio, to talk to her, to do something, but I was all used up. So we all sat in silence, lost in our thoughts.
An hour later, when we heard the back door come open, all of us jerked, relaxing only a little when we saw that it was Isabel, bundled in her white, fur-lined jacket and her usual boots. Her eyes slid from Cole sitting at the table, his head on his crossed arms, to me, and then finally to Grace, who lay against my chest.
“Your father was here,” I said, stupidly, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
“I know. I saw, after it was too late. I didn’t know he was going to bring it here.” Isabel’s arms were held tightly to her sides. “You should’ve heard him crowing when he got back. I couldn’t get away until after dinner; I told him I was going to the library, because if there’s one thing that man doesn’t know, it’s the hours the library is open.” She paused, half turning her head back toward Cole’s still-motionless form and then back to me. “Who was it? The wolf, I mean.”
I glanced toward the dining room table, just visible from where we were on the couch. I knew he could hear us. “It was Victor. Cole’s friend.”
Isabel jerked her attention back to Cole. “I didn’t realize he had any…” She seemed to realize how awful that sounded, because she added, “Here.”
“Yes,” I said emphatically.
She looked uncertain, glancing back at Cole and then back at us. Finally, she said, “I came to see what the plan was.”
“Plan?” I asked. “For what?”
Isabel looked at Cole again, and then at Grace a little longer, and then she pointed a finger at me. With a gritted smile, she said, “Can I have a moment with you? In the kitchen?”
Grace lifted her head dully and frowned at Isabel, but she moved off me so that I could follow Isabel to the kitchen.
I had barely crossed over the threshold when Isabel said, voice biting, “I told you that the wolves were around our house and that my father was not a fan. What were you waiting for?”
My eyebrows raised at the accusation. “What?
What your father did today? I was supposed to prevent that?”
“You’re in charge. They’re your wolves now. You can’t just sit there.”
“I didn’t really think your father was going to go out—” Isabel interrupted me. “Everyone knows my dad will shoot at anything that can’t shoot back. I expected you to do something!”
“I don’t know what I would do to keep the wolves from the property. They go around the lake because the hunting’s good there. I really didn’t think your trigger-happy father would blatantly flout hunting and firearms laws to prove his point.” My voice came out accusing, which I knew wasn’t fair.
Isabel laughed; it sounded like a bark, short and humorless. “You, of all people, ought to know what he is capable of, for God’s sake. In the meantime, how long are you going to pretend there’s nothing wrong with Grace?”
I blinked at her.
“Don’t give me those lamb eyes. You’re sitting there with her, and she looks like a cancer patient or something. I mean, she looks awful. And she smells just like that dead wolf. So what’s going on?”
I winced. “I don’t know, Isabel,” I said. My voice sounded tired, even to me. “We went to the clinic today. Nothing.”