Forever

I’d found her outside, crouched by the driveway. She started when she heard me approach, but when she saw it was me, she turned back around, unconcerned. I was like air to her: neither good nor bad. Just there. So she didn’t react when I walked directly up to where she crouched, her white-blond hair hiding her face.



She had a pencil in her hand, and she was using it to scry in bits of innards, stretching loops of intestines straight with the tip of the pencil. They looked like worms. There was some metallic green and oily-looking organ nestled among them. At the other end of the guts, a few inches away, a starling jerked and bicycled its legs, upright on its chest and then its side, held fast to Shelby’s pencil by the grip of its own intestines.



“This is what we do to them, when we eat them,” Shelby had said. I remember just standing there, trying to hear any trace of emotion in her voice. She pointed to the bird’s mangled chest cavity with another pencil she held in her other hand. I remembered that it was one of my pencils, from my room. Batman. Freshly sharpened. The idea of her in my room felt more real and horrifying than the tortured animal kicking up dust on the edge of the concrete drive.



“Did you do that?” I asked. I knew she had.



As if I hadn’t spoken, Shelby said, “This is where its brain is. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.”



She pointed to the starling’s eye. I could see the tip of the pencil resting directly on the shining black surface and something inside me clenched, bracing itself. The starling lay perfectly still. Its pulse was visible in its exposed innards.



“No —” I said.



Shelby stuck my Batman pencil through the starling’s eye. She smiled at it, a faraway smile that had nothing to do with joy. Her gaze shifted in my direction though she didn’t turn her head.



I stood there, my heart racing as if I was the one who’d been attacked. My breath came in uneven, sick jerks. Looking at Shelby and the starling, black and white and red, it was hard to remember what happiness felt like.



I had never told Beck.



Shame made me a prisoner. I hadn’t stopped her. It had been my pencil. And in penance, I never forgot that image. I carried it with me, and it was a thousand times heavier than the weight of that little bird’s body.



And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,



Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?



I wished Shelby was dead. I wished that this scent, the one that both Cole and I were following, was just a phantom of her, a relic instead of a promise. Once upon a time, it would have been good enough for her to just leave the woods in search of another pack, but I was not that Sam anymore. Now, I hoped she was someplace she could never return from.



But the scent of her, lingering in the damp underbrush, was too strong. She was alive. She’d been here. Recently.



I stopped then, listening.



“Cole,” I said.



He stopped immediately, something in my voice warning him. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the grumbling, alive smell of the woods waking up as they warmed. Birds shouting from tree to tree. Far away, outside the woods, a dog barking, sounding like a yodel. And then — a distant, faint, anxious sound. If we hadn’t stopped, the noise of our feet would’ve obliterated it. But now, clearly, I heard the whistling, whimpering sound of a wolf in distress.



“One of your traps?” I asked Cole softly.



He shook his head.



The sound came again. Something like misgiving tugged in my stomach. I didn’t think it was Shelby.



I held my finger to my lips and he jerked his chin to show he understood. If there was an injured animal, I didn’t want to drive it away before we could help.



We were suddenly wolves ourselves, in human skins — soundless and watchful. As when I had hunted, my strides were long and low, my feet barely clearing the forest floor. My stealth wasn’t something I had to consciously recollect. I just pulled away my humanness, and there it was, just underneath, waiting for me to recall it back to the surface.



Beneath my feet, the ground was slick and slimy with the wet clay and sand. As I descended into a shallow ravine, arms outstretched for balance, my shoes slid, leaving behind misshapen prints. I stopped. Listened. I heard Cole hiss as he struggled to keep his balance behind me. The sound of the wolf’s whimper came again. The distress in it plucked something deep inside me. I crept closer.



My heart was loud in my ears.



The closer I got, the more wrong it felt. I could hear the whistling of the wolf, but I also heard the sound of water, which didn’t make sense. No river ran through the bottom of this ravine, and we were nowhere near the lake. Still: splashing.



A bird sang over us, loud, and a breeze lifted the leaves around me, showing their pale undersides. Cole was looking at me but not quite at me, listening. His hair was longer than when we’d first met, his color better. He looked, strangely, like he belonged here, aware and tense in these woods. The breeze was sending petals around us, though there was no flowering tree in sight. It was an ordinary, beautiful spring day in these woods, but my breath was coming unevenly and all I could think was I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.



Suddenly, I had a clear, perfect sensation of drowning. Of water, cold and slimy, closing over the hair on the top of my head, of water burning my nostrils, of my lungs held tight in its grip.



It was a fragmented memory, entirely out of place. How wolves communicated.



And then I knew where the wolf was. I abandoned my stealth and scrambled the last few yards.



“Sam!” snapped Cole.



I barely stopped in time. Beneath my right foot, the ground sloughed away, falling with a splash. I pulled back to a safer distance and peered down.



Below me, the clay was shockingly yellow, a scratch of unreal color below the dark leaves. It was a sinkhole, freshly made, judging from the newly exposed tree roots, witches’ fingers that poked crookedly out of the slick sides. The edge of the pit was jagged where it had collapsed; the rain must’ve been too much for the roof of an underground cavern. The resulting hole was eight or ten or fifteen feet deep, it was hard to tell. The bottom was filled with something like yellow-orange water or mud, thick enough to cling to the sides, thin enough to drown in.



Floating in the water was a wolf, its fur clogged and tufted with mud. It wasn’t whimpering now, just drifting in the water. Not even kicking its legs. Its coat was too filthy for me to identify.



“Are you alive?” I whispered.



At my voice, the wolf kicked convulsively and lifted its head to look at me.



Grace.



I was a radio tuned to all stations at the same time, so many thoughts inside me that none of them counted.



Now I could see the evidence of her struggles: claw marks in the soft clay at the water line, chunks of dirt pried from the side of the pit, a track worn smooth by a body sliding back down into the water. She had been here a while, and when she looked at me, I could see that she was tired of fighting. I saw, too, that her eyes were knowing, pensive, full of understanding. If not for the cold water around her, holding her body in wolf form, she’d probably be human.



That made it so much worse.



Beside me, Cole sucked in a breath before saying anything. “Something for it to climb on? Something to at least —”



He didn’t finish, because I was already scouting around the mouth of the sinkhole, looking for something that would be of help. But with Grace in wolf form, what could I do? The water was at least six feet below me, and even if I managed to find something long enough to lower into the pit — maybe there was something in the shed — it would have to be something she could walk on, since she couldn’t climb. Could I even convince her to walk on something? If she had her hands, her fingers, this still wouldn’t be easy, but at least it wouldn’t be impossible.



“This is all useless,” Cole said, nudging a branch with his foot. The only wood near the pit was a couple of crumbling, rotten pine trees downed by storms and age, nothing useful. “Is there anything back at the house?”



“A ladder,” I said. But it would take me at least thirty minutes to get there and back. I didn’t think she had thirty more minutes. It was cold up here in the shade of the trees, and I thought that it must be colder down in the water. How cold did it have to be for hypothermia? I crouched back at the edge of the pit, feeling helpless. That same dread I’d felt when I saw Cole seizing was slowly poisoning me.



Grace had made her way to the side of the pit nearest me, and I watched her attempt a foothold, her legs trembling with fatigue. She didn’t even manage to leverage herself an inch out of the water before her paws smeared back down the wall. Her head was only just above water, her trembling ears tipped at half-mast. Everything about her was exhausted, cold, beaten.



“It won’t last until we get the ladder,” Cole said. “It hasn’t got that much stamina left.”



I felt sick with the plausibility of her death. I said miserably, “Cole, it’s Grace.”



He looked at me then, instead of at her, his expression complicated.



Below us, the wolf flicked her eyes up toward me, holding my gaze for a moment, her brown eyes on my yellow ones.



“Grace,” I said. “Don’t give up.”



It seemed to steel her: She began to swim again, this time toward another part of the wall. It was painful to recognize Grace in this grim determination. Again she tried to climb, one shoulder forced into the muck, the other paw scrabbling above the water at the steep wall. Her hind paws were braced on something below the surface of the water. Straining upward, muscles twitching, she pressed against the clay wall, shutting one eye to keep the mud out. Shivering, she looked at me with her one open eye. It was so easy to look past the mud, past the wolf, past everything else, and into that eye, right into Grace.



And then the wall gave way. In a cascade of mud and grit, she splashed into the water. Her head vanished beneath the sludge.



There was an infinite moment where the brown water was perfectly still.



In those seconds that it took for her to fight her way back to the surface, I made up my mind.



I stripped off my jacket, stood at the edge of the sinkhole, and, before I could think of the countless horrific consequences, I went in.



I heard Cole say my name, too late.



I half slid, half fell into the water. My foot touched something slick, and before I had a chance to determine whether it was the bottom of the pit or merely a submerged root, I was swallowed.



The grit of the water stung my eyes for a second before I closed them. In the moment of that blackness, time disappeared, became an arbitrary concept, and then I found my footing and lifted my head above the surface.



“Sam Roth, you bastard,” Cole said. There was admiration in his voice, which probably meant I’d made a poor decision.



The water came just to my collarbone. It was slimy as mucus and bitterly, bitterly cold. I felt like I had no skin, standing in this pit. It was just my bones and this frigid water passing around them.



Grace pressed against the opposite wall, her head against the mud, her expression torn between wariness and something her lupine face couldn’t convey. Now that I knew the depth of the sinkhole, I realized that she must be on her back legs, leaning against the wall to save her strength.