Shelby fell out of my grip, deadweight, and I fell back into the cabinets behind me.
She was dead. Or at least close, because she was jerking. But all I could seem to think about was how I’d made a mess of the kitchen floor. I just stared at the white squares of linoleum, my eyes following the streaky lines my shoes had made through the blood and finding the one red pawprint in the center of the kitchen that had somehow been perfectly preserved.
I couldn’t figure how I could smell the blood so strongly, and then I looked down at my shaking arms and saw the red smeared on my hands and over my wrists. I had to struggle to remember that it was Shelby’s blood. She was dead. This was her blood. Not mine.
Hers.
My parents counted backward, slowly, and blood welled up from my veins.
I was going to throw up.
I was ice.
I
“We have to move him!” The girl’s voice was piercingly loud in the silence. “Get him someplace warm. I’m all right. I’m all right. I just—help me move him!”
Their voices tore into my head, too loud and too many. I sensed movement all around me, their bodies and my skin whirling and spinning, but deep inside me, there was a part that held completely still.
Grace. I held on to that one name. If I kept that in my head, I would be okay.
Grace.
I was shaking, shaking; my skin was peeling away.
Grace.
My bones squeezed, pinched, pressed against my muscles.
Grace.
Her eyes held me even after I stopped feeling her fingers gripping my arms.
“Sam,” she said. “Don’t go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT GRACE
38°F
“Who could do that to a child?” Mom made a face. I wasn’t sure if the face was because of what I’d just told her or because of the pee and antiseptic smell of the hospital.
I shrugged and wriggled uncomfortably on the hospital bed. I didn’t really need to be here.
The gash on my arm hadn’t even needed stitches. I just wanted to see Sam.
“So he’s really messed up then.” Mom frowned at the television above the hospital bed, though it was turned off. She didn’t wait for me to respond. “Well, of course. Of course he is. He would have to be. You don’t live through that without being messed up. Poor kid. He looked like he was really in pain.”
I hoped Mom would quit babbling about this by the time Sam was done talking to the nurse. I didn’t want to think about the curve of his shoulders, the unnatural shape that his body had formed in response to the cold. And I hoped Sam would understand why I’d told Mom about his parents—her knowing about them had to be better than her knowing about the wolves. “I told you, Mom. It really bothers him to remember. Of course he freaked out when he saw the blood on his arms. It’s classical conditioning, or whatever they call it.
Google it.”
Mom squeezed her arms around herself. “If he hadn’t been there, though…”
“Yes, I would’ve died, blah blah blah. But he was there. Why is everyone more worked up about this than I am?” Many of Shelby’s teeth marks had already become ugly bruises instead—though I didn’t heal nearly as quickly as Sam had when he was shot.
“Because you have no survival instinct, Grace. You’re like a tank, you just chug along, thinking nothing can stop you, until you meet up with a bigger tank. Are you sure you want to go out with someone with that kind of history?” Mom seemed to warm to her theory. “He could have a psychotic break. I read that people get those when they’re twenty-eight. He could be almost normal and then suddenly go slasher. I mean, you know I’ve never told you what to do with your life before now. But what if—what if I asked you to not see him?”
I hadn’t expected that. My voice was brittle. “I would say that by virtue of your not acting parental up to this point, you’ve relinquished your ability to wield any power now. Sam and I are together. It’s not an option.”
Mom threw her hands up as if trying to stop the Grace-tank from running over her. “Okay.
Fine. Just be careful, okay? Whatever. I’m going to go get a drink.”
And just like that, her parental energies were expended. She had played Mom by driving us to the hospital, watching the nurse tend to my wounds, and warning me off my psychotic boyfriend, and now she was done. It was obvious I was going to live, so she was off duty.
A few minutes after she’d left, the door clicked open, and Sam came to the side of my bed, looking pale and tired under the greenish lights. Tired, but human.
“What did they do to you?” I asked.
His mouth quirked into a smile completely without humor. “Gave me a bandage for a cut that has healed since they put it on. What did you tell her?” He glanced around for Mom.
“I told her about your parents and said that’s what was wrong with you. She believed me.
It’s cool. Are you all right? Are you—” I wasn’t sure what I was asking. Finally, I said, “Dad said she was dead. Shelby. I guess she couldn’t heal like you did. It was too fast.”
Sam laid his palms on either side of my neck and kissed me. He pressed his forehead against mine so that we were staring at each other and it looked like he had only one eye.
“I’m going to hell.”
“What?”
His one eye blinked. “Because I should be feeling bad about her being dead.”
I pulled back so I could see his expression; it was strangely empty. I wasn’t sure what to say in light of that information, but Sam saved me by taking my hands and squeezing them tightly. “I know I should be upset right now. But I just feel like I’ve dodged this huge missile. I didn’t change, you’re all right, and for the moment, she’s just one less thing for me to worry about. I just feel—I feel drunk.”
“Mom thinks you’re damaged goods,” I told him.
Sam kissed me again, closed his eyes for a moment, and then kissed me a third time, lightly. “I am. Do you want to run away?”
I didn’t know if he meant from the hospital, or from him.
“Mr. Roth?” a nurse appeared in the door. “You can stay in here, but you should sit down for this.”
Like me, Sam had to get a series of rabies shots—standard hospital procedure for unprovoked animal attacks. It wasn’t like we could tell the staff that Sam knew the animal personally and that said animal had been homicidal, not rabid. I shuffled over to make room for Sam, who sat beside me with an uneasy glance toward the syringe in the nurse’s hands.
“Don’t look at the needle,” the nurse advised as she pushed up his bloody sleeve with rubber-gloved hands. Sam looked away, to my face, but his eyes were distant and unfocused, his mind somewhere else as the nurse stuck the needle into his skin. As I watched her depress the syringe, I fantasized that it was a cure for Sam—liquid summer injected right into his veins.