Morbidly, I wanted to look at the other side again, the bloody one.
“Do you think there was something wrong with it?”
I asked.
“Ya think?” Isabel replied. Then she shrugged.
“Could just be a nosebleed. Do wolves get nosebleeds? They can make you yak if you look up when you have one.”
My stomach was tight with misgiving.
“Grace. Come on. Head trauma could do that, too.
Or animals picking at it after it died. Or any number of disgusting things to think about before lunch. Point is, it’s dead. The end.”
I looked at the lifeless gray eye. “Maybe we should bury it.”
“Maybe we can have coffee first,” Isabel said.
I stood up, brushing the dirt off my knees. I had the nagging feeling you get when you leave something undone, a prickling anxiety. Maybe Sam would know more. I kept my voice light and said, “Okay. Let’s go get warmed up and I’ll call Sam. He can come look at it afterward.”
“Wait,” Isabel said. She got out her cell phone, aimed it at the wolf, and clicked a photo. “Let’s try using our brains. Welcome to technology, Grace.”
I looked at the screen on her phone. The wolf’s face, glazed with blood in real life, looked ordinary and unharmed through the cell phone’s view. If I hadn’t seen the wolf in the flesh, I would’ve never known there was anything wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
• SAM • I had been sitting at Kenny’s for about fifteen minutes, watching the waitress attending to the customers in the other booths like a bee visiting and revisiting flowers, when Grace tapped on the other side of the streaked glass. She was a backlit silhouette against the bright blue sky, and I could just glimpse the slender white of her smile, and saw her kiss the air at me before she and Isabel headed around to the front of the diner.
A moment later, Grace, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, slid into the cracked red booth beside me, her jeans squelching on the perpetually greasy surface. She was about to touch my face before she kissed me, and I recoiled.
“What? Do I stink?” she asked, not sounding particularly bothered. She laid her cell phone and car keys on the table in front of her and reached across me for the menus by the wall.
Leaning away, I pointed to her gloves. “You do, actually. Your gloves smell like that wolf. Not in a good way.”
“Thanks for the backup, wolf-man,” Isabel said.
When Grace offered her a menu, she shook her head emphatically and added, “The whole car smelled like wet dog.”
I wasn’t sure about the wet-dog label; yes, I smelled the normal, musky wolf odor on Grace’s gloves, but there was something else to it—an unpleasant undercurrent that rankled my stillheightened sense of smell.
Grace said, “Sheesh. I’ll put them in the car. You don’t have to give me that about-to-hurl look. If the waitress comes, order me a coffee and something that involves bacon, okay?”
While she was gone, Isabel and I sat in a kind of uneasy silence filled by a Motown song playing overhead and the clattering of plates in the kitchen. I studied the shape of the saltshaker’s warped shadow across the container of sugar packets. Isabel examined the chunky cuff of her sweater and the way it rested on the table. Finally, she said, “You made another bird thing.”
I picked up the crane that I’d folded out of my napkin while I was waiting. It was lumpy and imperfect because the napkin hadn’t been quite square. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
I rubbed my nose, trying to rid it of the scent of the wolf. “I don’t know. There’s a Japanese legend that if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish.”
Isabel’s permanently arched right eyebrow made her smile look inadvertently cruel. “You have a wish?”
“No,” I said, as Grace sat back down beside me.
“All of my wishes have already been granted.”
“What were you wishing for?” Grace interrupted.
“To kiss you,” I said to her. She leaned toward me, offering her neck, and I kissed her just behind her ear, pretending I couldn’t still smell the almond scent of the wolf on her skin. Isabel’s eyes narrowed, though her lips stayed curved up, and I knew that, somehow, she had seen my reaction.
I looked away as the waitress came and took our order. Grace ordered coffee and a BLT. I got the soup of the day and tea. Isabel just ordered coffee, taking a bag of granola out of her small leather purse after the waitress had gone.
“Food allergy?” I asked.
“Hick allergy,” Isabel said. “Grease allergy. Where I used to live, we had real coffeehouses. When I say panini here, everyone says Bless you.”
Grace laughed and took my napkin crane; she made it flap its wings. “We’ll make a panini run to Duluth some day, Isabel. Until then, bacon will do you good.”
Isabel made a face like she didn’t much agree with Grace. “If by good, you mean cellulite and zits, sure. So, Sam, what’s the deal on this corpse, anyway? Grace said that you said something about wolves getting fifteen years after they stop shifting.”
“Nice, Isabel,” Grace muttered, casting a sideways glance at me to see what my expression was at the word corpse. But she’d already told me over the phone that the wolf wasn’t Beck, Paul, or Ulrik, so I didn’t react.
Isabel shrugged, unapologetic, and flipped open her phone. She pushed it across the table to me.
“Visual aid number one.”
The phone scraped across invisible crumbs on the table as I spun it right side up. My stomach gripped in a fist when I saw the wolf on the screen, clearly dead, but my grief lacked force. I had never known this wolf as a human.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Because I’ve only ever known this wolf as a wolf. It must’ve been from old age.
”
“I don’t think this was a natural death,” said Grace.
“Plus, there were no white hairs on the muzzle.”
“Plus, there were no white hairs on the muzzle.”
I lifted my shoulders. “I just know what Beck told me. That we get…got”—I struggled with tense, since I wasn’t one of them anymore—“ten or fifteen years after we stopped shifting. A wolf’s natural life span.”
“There was blood coming out of the wolf’s nose,” Grace said almost angrily, like it annoyed her to say it.
I slanted the screen back and forth, squinting at the muzzle. I didn’t see anything on the blurry screen to suggest a violent death.
“It wasn’t a lot,” Grace said, in response to my frown. “Did any of the other wolves that died ever have blood on their faces?”