Forever

It took me a moment to pull myself together enough to look around and then another moment to process what I was seeing. A bathroom. A framed postcard of some mountains next to the sink. A glass-walled shower, no tub. A closed door. Recognition dawned all at once — this was the upstairs bathroom at Beck’s house. Oh. What that meant hit me all at once: I’d made it back to Mercy Falls. I’d made it back to Sam.



Too stunned to be properly appreciative, I climbed to my feet. Beneath my toes, the tile of the floor was spread with mud and dirt. The color of it — a sick yellow — made me cough, choking on water that wasn’t there.



Movement caught my eye, and I froze, my hand over my mouth. But it was just me: In the mirror, a naked version of Grace with a lot of ribs and wide eyes looked out, her mouth covered by fingers. I lowered my hand to touch my lowest rib and, as if on cue, my stomach growled.



“You look a little feral,” I whispered to myself, just to watch my mouth move. I still sounded like me. That was good.



On the corner of the sink sat a pile of clothing, folded with the extreme tidiness of someone who generally either folded a lot of clothing or none at all. I recognized it from my backpack, the one I’d brought when I came to Beck’s house however many months ago. I pulled on my favorite long-sleeved white T and a blue T-shirt over the top of it; they were like old friends. Then jeans and socks. No bra or shoes — they were both back at the hospital, or wherever things left behind at hospitals by bleeding girls went.



What it came down to was this: I was a girl who turned into a wolf, and I had almost died, and the thing that was going to bother me the most all day was that I was going to have to go around without a bra.



Underneath the clothing was a note. I felt a weird little tickle in my stomach when I saw Sam’s familiar handwriting, all run together and barely legible.



GRACE — THIS IS POSSIBLY THE WORST THING I’VE EVER DONE, SHUT MY GIRLFRIEND IN MY BATHROOM. BUT WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO WITH YOU UNTIL YOU SHIFTED. I PUT YOUR CLOTHING IN HERE. DOOR’S NOT LOCKED SO YOU CAN JUST OPEN IT SOON AS YOU HAVE FINGERS. I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU. — S



Happiness. That’s what the feeling was. I held the note in my hands and tried to remember the events he’d written about. I tried to remember being shut in here, being retrieved from the woods. It was like trying to remember an actor’s name after being shown his vaguely familiar face. My thoughts danced maddeningly out of my reach. Nothing, nothing, and then — I was choking on the memory of darkness and mud. Shelby. I remembered Shelby. I had to swallow, hard, and I looked up at myself in the mirror again. My face was afraid, my hand pressed to my throat.



I didn’t like what my face looked like afraid; it looked like some other girl I didn’t recognize. I stood there and composed it carefully until the Grace in the mirror was the one I knew, and then I tried the doorknob. As Sam had said, it was unlocked, and I stepped into the hall.



I was surprised to find that it was night. I could hear the hum of appliances downstairs, the whisper of air through heating vents, the sounds an occupied house made when it thought no one was listening. I remembered that Sam’s room was to my left, but its open doorway was dark. To my right, another door at the end of the hall stood open, and light spilled out into the hallway. I chose that option, padding past photographs of Beck and others smiling and, weirdly enough, a collection of socks nailed to the wall in an artistic pattern.



I peered into the bright doorway and found Beck’s room. After half a second, I realized that I had no true reason to believe it to be Beck’s room. It was all rich greens and blues, dark wood and simple patterns. A reading lamp on the bedside table illuminated a stack of biographies and a pair of reading glasses. There was nothing particularly identifying about it. It was just a very comfortable and simple room, in the same way that Beck seemed comfortable and simple.



But it wasn’t Beck who lay on the mattress; it was Cole, sprawled crosswise, his feet dangling off the edge, toes pointing at the floor. A little leather book lay on its face beside him. On his other side was a mess of loose papers and photographs.



Cole looked asleep among the mess. I started to back out, but when my foot hit a creaky section of floor, he made a noise into the blue comforter.



“Are you awake?” I asked.



“Da.”



He turned his face as I came around to the end of the bed. I felt like I was in a hotel room then, this nice, tidy, unfamiliar room with its sparse color-coordination, glowing desk lamp, and its sense of abandonment.



Cole looked up at me. His face was always a shock: so good looking. I had to make a conscious effort to put that aside in order to be able to talk to him like a real person. He couldn’t help what his face looked like. I was going to ask him where Sam was, but on second thought, that seemed pretty rude, to just use Cole as a signpost.



“Is this Beck’s room?” I asked.



Cole stretched his arm out across the comforter toward me and made a thumbs-up.



“Why are you sleeping here?”



“I wasn’t sleeping,” Cole said. He rolled onto his back. “Sam never sleeps. I’m trying to learn his secrets.”



I rested my butt on the end of the bed, not quite sitting, not quite standing. The idea of Sam not sleeping made me a little sad. “Are his secrets in these papers?”



Cole laughed. His laugh was a short, percussive thing that seemed like it belonged on an album. I thought it was a lonely sort of sound. “No, these are Beck’s secrets.” He groped out until his fingers reached the leather journal. “Beck’s journal.” He rested his other hand on some of the loose papers. I saw now that he was lying on even more of them. “Mortgage and wills and trust paperwork and dental records and prescriptions for drugs that Beck tried to cure the pack with.”



I was surprised, a little, to hear that such things existed, but I shouldn’t have been. Those weren’t things that Sam generally would have sought out — facts were not the most interesting thing to him — and quite possibly it had been information he’d grown up knowing and already found not useful. “Do you think Beck would be very pleased that you were going through his stuff?” I softened the question with a smile.



Cole said, “He’s not here.” But then he seemed to think better of his short answer, because he said, voice earnest, “Beck said he wanted me to take over for him. Then he left. This is the only way I know how to learn anything. It beats the hell out of reinventing the wheel.”



“I thought Beck wanted Sam to take over for him?” Then I answered my own question. “Oh — I guess he thought that Sam wasn’t changing back. That’s why he recruited you.”



Well, that was why he recruited someone. Why he had chosen Cole in specific was less certain. At some point he must have seen this guy in front of me and thought that he would make a good pack leader. At some point he must’ve seen something of himself in Cole. I thought I could see it, maybe. Sam had Beck’s gestures, but Cole had … the strength of Beck’s personality? The confidence? There was something like the force of Beck’s character in Cole; where Sam was kind, Cole was driven.



Again Cole laughed that same cynical laugh. And again, I heard the bravado in it, but, it was like Isabel, where I had learned that you took away the cynical bit and heard the truth: the weariness and the loneliness. I still missed a lot of the nuances that Sam picked up on, but it wasn’t hard to hear when you were listening for it.



“Recruiting is such a noble-sounding verb,” Cole said, sitting up, pulling his legs toward him to sit cross-legged. “It makes me think about men in uniforms and great causes and signing up to protect the American way. Beck didn’t want me to die. That’s why he chose me. He thought I was going to kill myself, and he thought he would save me.”



I wasn’t going to let him get away with that.



“People kill themselves every day,” I said. “It’s, like, thirty thousand Americans a year or something like that. Do you really think that’s why he chose you? I don’t. It’s just not logical. Out of everyone in the world, obviously he picked you for a very specific reason, especially considering that you’re famous and otherwise a risk. I mean, logic. Logic.”



Cole smiled at me then, this sudden, broad thing that was pleasing in its realness. “I like you,” he said. “You can stay.”



“Where’s Sam?”



“Downstairs.”



“Thanks,” I said. “Hey — has Olivia shown up here yet?”



His expression didn’t change, signaling his ignorance as much as anything he could say. My heart sank, just a little. “Who?” he asked.



“One of the other wolves,” I said. “One of my friends who was bitten last year. My age.”



It pained me to think of her out in the woods going through the same thing I was.



Something strange flitted across Cole’s face then, too fast for me to interpret it. I just wasn’t that good at reading faces. He looked away from me, gathering up some of the papers, stacking them against his foot and then putting them down in such a way that they immediately became disorderly again. “Haven’t seen her.”



“Okay,” I said. “I’d better go find Sam.” I moved toward the door, feeling a strange little bubble of nerves in my rib cage. Sam was here, I was here, I was very firmly in my skin. I would be with him again. I was suddenly and irrationally afraid that I would see him and things would be different, somehow. That what I felt wouldn’t match up with what I saw, or that he would’ve changed how he felt about me. What if we had to start all over again, from scratch? I was filled at the same time with the knowledge that my fears were completely unfounded and with the realization that they just weren’t going to move until I saw Sam again.



“Grace,” Cole said as I started to leave.



I stopped in the doorway.



He shrugged. “Never mind.”



By the time I got out into the hall, Cole was already laid back on the bed, papers spread under him and over him and around him, surrounded by everything that Beck had left behind. He could have so easily looked lost, surrounded by all those memories and words, but instead, he looked buoyed, buffered by the pain that had come before him.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX



ISABEL



There was something about driving with my parents that always made me a worse driver. No matter how much time I’d spent with my hands gripped on a steering wheel, put a parental unit in the passenger seat and instantly I started braking too hard and turning too soon and hitting the wipers when I reached for the radio knob. And though I’d never been one to talk to people who couldn’t hear me (Sam Roth was turning out to be the notable exception to that), with a parent in the car, suddenly I found myself snarling at other drivers’ poor vanity plate choices or grousing about their slowness or commenting on their signal light coming on a full two miles before they planned to turn off.



Which was why, when my headlights illuminated the truck-thing half-pulled off the road, its nose pointing into the ditch, I said, “Oh, stellar parking job there.”