Overhead, the sky was huge and blue and filled with white clouds painted with thin ice crystals too far above the earth for me to feel, here on the warm ground. I was ten minutes down the road before I realized I had forgotten to roll up the windows; the air had dried the soap on my arms to white streaks. I met another car on the highway and passed it in a no passing zone.
In ten minutes, I would have Grace in my passenger seat. Everything would be all right. I could already feel her fingers laced in mine, her cheek pressed against my neck. It felt like years since I’d had my arms wrapped around her body, my hands pressed up against her rib cage. Ages since I’d kissed her. Lifetimes since I’d heard her laugh.
I ached with the weight of my hope. I fixated on the incredibly inconsequential fact that for two months, Cole and I had been living on dinners of jelly sandwiches and canned tuna and frozen burritos. Once Grace was back, we would do better. I thought we had a jar of spaghetti sauce and some dried pasta. It seemed incredibly important to have a proper dinner for her return.
Every minute closer to her. In the back of my head, nagging concerns pressed, and the biggest ones involved Grace’s parents. They were certain that I’d had something to do with her disappearance, since she’d fought with them about me right before she shifted. In the two months that she’d been gone, the police had been out to search my car and question me. Grace’s mother found excuses to walk by the bookstore when I was working, staring in the window while I pretended not to see. Articles about Grace’s and Olivia’s disappearances ran in the local paper, and they said everything about me but my name.
Deep down, I knew that this — Grace as a wolf, her parents as enemies, me in Mercy Falls in this newly minted body — was a Gordian knot, impossible to untangle and lay straight. But surely if I had Grace, it would work out.
I nearly drove by Ben’s Fish and Tackle, a nondescript building mostly hidden by scrubby pines. The Volkswagen lurched as I pulled into the parking lot; the potholes in the gravel were deep and filled with muddy water that I heard splashing up on the undercarriage. Scanning the lot as I pulled in, I slowed. There were a few U-Hauls parked behind the building. And there, beside them, near the trees —
I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and climbed out, leaving it running. I stepped over a wooden railroad tie and stopped. At my feet, in the wet grass, lay a flowered dress. A few feet away from me, I saw an abandoned clog, and another yard beyond it, lying on its side, its mate. I took a deep breath, then knelt to pick up the dress. Balled in my hand, the fabric was scented softly with the memory of Grace. I straightened and swallowed.
From here, I could see the side of the Volkswagen, covered in filth from the parking lot. It was as if I had never washed it.
I climbed back behind the wheel, laying the dress in the backseat, and then I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth, breathing the same breaths over and over again, my elbows braced against the wheel. I sat there for several long moments, looking out over the dash at the left-behind set of shoes.
It had been so much easier when I was the wolf.
• COLE •
This was who I was, now that I was a werewolf: I was Cole St. Clair, and I used to be NARKOTIKA.
I had thought there’d be nothing left of me, once you took away the pounding bass of NARKOTIKA and the screams of a few hundred thousand fans and a calendar black with tour dates. But here it was, months later, and it turned out that there was fresh skin underneath the scab I’d picked off. Now, I was a fan of the simple pleasures in life: grilled cheese sandwiches without black flecks on the crust, jeans that didn’t pinch the better parts of me, an inch of vodka, ten to twelve hours of sleep.
I wasn’t sure how Isabel fit into this.
The thing was, I could go most of my week without thinking about grilled cheese and vodka. But I couldn’t seem to say the same thing about Isabel. It wasn’t like fantastic daydreams, either, the good sort of tease. It was more like jock itch. If you were really busy, you could almost forget about it, but then when you stopped moving, it was murder.
Almost two months and not a breath from her, despite a number of extremely entertaining voicemails on my part.
Voicemail #1: “Hi, Isabel Culpeper. I am lying in my bed, looking at the ceiling. I am mostly naked. I am thinking of … your mother. Call me.”
And now she called?
No way.
I couldn’t stay in the house with the phone looking at me like that, so I got my shoes and headed out into the afternoon. Since I’d taken Grace away from the hospital, I’d started digging further into discovering what made us wolves. Here in the bush, there was no way to look at us under the microscope and get real answers. But I’d planned out a few experiments that didn’t require a lab — just luck, my body, and some balls. And one of said experiments would really run better if I could get my hands on one of the other wolves. So I’d been making forays into the forest. Actually, reccies. That was what Victor used to call our late-night convenience store runs to buy hasty meals constructed of plastic and dried cheese flavoring. I was performing reccies into Boundary Wood, in the name of science. I felt compelled to finish what I’d started.
Voicemail #2: The first minute and thirty seconds of “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” by the Bee Gees.
Today, the weather was warm and I could smell absolutely everything that had ever peed in the woods. I struck off on my usual path.
Cole, it’s me.
God, I was going crazy. If it wasn’t Isabel’s voice, it was Victor’s, and it was getting a little crowded inside my head. If I wasn’t imagining removing Isabel’s bra, I was willing the phone to ring, and if I wasn’t doing that, I was remembering Isabel’s father chucking Victor’s dead body onto the driveway. In between them and Sam, I was living with three ghosts.
Voicemail #3: “I’m bored. I need to be entertained. Sam is moping. I may kill him with his own guitar. It would give me something to do and also make him say something. Two birds with one stone! I find all these old expressions unnecessarily violent. Like, ring around the rosy. That’s about the plague, did you know? Of course you did. The plague is, like, your older cousin. Hey, does Sam talk to you? He says jack shit to me. God, I’m bored. Call me.”
Snares. I was going to think about my experiments instead. Catching a wolf was turning out to be incredibly complicated. Using objects found in the basement of Beck’s house, I’d rigged up a huge number of snares, traps, crates, and lures, and had caught an equally huge number of animals. Not a single member of Canis lupus. It was hard to say which was more aggravating — catching yet another useless animal or figuring out a way to get it out of the trap or snare without losing a hand or an eye.
I was getting very fast.
Cole, it’s me.
I couldn’t believe that after all this time, she had called back, and her first words hadn’t been some form of apology. Maybe that part was coming next, and I’d missed it by hanging up.
Voicemail #4: “Hotel California” by the Eagles, in its entirety, with every instance of the word California replaced with Minnesota.
I kicked a rotten log and watched it explode into a dozen black shards on the rain-soaked forest floor. So I’d refused to sleep with Isabel. My first decent act in several years. No good deed goes unpunished, my mother used to say. It was her motto. Probably she felt that way about changing my diapers now.