Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) (9 page)

That night, Sam stayed in my bed again, chastely perched on the farthest edge of the mattress, but somehow, during the night, our bodies migrated together. I half woke early in the morning, long before dawn, the room washed clean by pale moonlight, and found that I was pressed up against Sam’s back, my hands balled up to my chest like a mummy. I could just barely see the dark curve of his shoulder, and something about the shape it made, the gesture it suggested, filled me with a sort of fierce, awful affection. His body was warm and he smelled so good — like wolf, and trees, and home — that I buried my face in his shoulder and closed my eyes again. He made a soft noise and rolled his shoulders back against me, pressing closer.

Right before I drifted back to sleep again, my breathing slowing to match his, I had a brief, burning thought:
I can’t live without this
.

There had to be a cure.

The next day was unseasonably fair, too beautiful to be going to school, but I couldn’t skip a second day without coming up with a really good excuse. It wasn’t that I’d get too far behind; it just seemed that when you never miss school for a certain length of time, people tend to notice when you do. Rachel had already called twice and left an ominous voicemail saying I’d picked the
wrong day to cut class, Grace Brisbane
! Olivia hadn’t called since our argument in the hall, so I guessed that meant we weren’t on speaking terms.

Sam drove me to school in the Bronco while I hastily caught up on some of my English homework I hadn’t done the day before. Once he’d parked, I opened the door, letting in a gust of unseasonably warm air. Sam turned his face toward the open door, his eyes half-closed.

“I love this weather. I feel so me.”

Watching him bask in the sun, winter seemed a million miles away, and I couldn’t imagine him leaving me. I wanted to memorize the crooked line of his nose for later daydreaming.
For a moment, I felt an irrational stab of guilt that my feelings for Sam were replacing those that I’d had for my wolf — until I remembered that he
was
my wolf. All over again, I had the weird sensation of the ground shifting beneath me at the fact of his existence, immediately followed by relief. My obsession was so — easy now. The only thing I had to explain to my friends was where my new boyfriend had come from.

“I guess I have to go,” I said. “I don’t want to.”

Sam’s eyes opened the rest of the way and focused on me. “I’ll be here when you come back, promise.” He added, very formal, “May I use your car? I’d like to see if Beck’s still human, and if not, whether his house has the power turned on.”

I nodded, but part of me hoped the power would be off at Beck’s house. I kind of wanted Sam back in my bed, where I could keep him from disappearing like the dream that he was. I climbed out of the Bronco with my backpack. “Don’t get any tickets, speed racer.”

As I came around the front of the vehicle, Sam rolled down his window. “Hey!”

“What?”

Shyly, he said, “Come here, Grace.” I smiled at the way he said my name and returned to the window, smiling wider when I realized what he wanted. His careful kiss didn’t fool me; as soon as I parted my lips slightly, he sighed and pulled back. “I’ll make you late for school.”

I grinned. I was on top of the world. “You’ll be back at three?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

I watched him pull out of the lot, already feeling the length of the school day stretching before me.

A notebook smacked my arm. “Who was that?!”

I turned to Rachel and tried to think of something that was easier than the truth. “My ride?”

Rachel didn’t push the issue, mostly because her brain was already on to something else. She grabbed my elbow and began steering me toward the school. Surely, surely, there had to be some kind of eternal reward waiting for me for going to school on a gorgeous day like this with Sam in my car. Rachel wiggled my arm to get my attention. “Grace. Focus. There was a wolf outside of the school yesterday. In the parking lot. Like, everyone saw it when school got out.”

“What?” I turned and looked over my shoulder at the lot, trying to imagine a wolf amongst the cars. The sparse pine trees that bordered the lot didn’t connect with Boundary Wood; the wolf would’ve had to cross several streets and yards to get to the parking lot. “What did it look like?”

Rachel gave me a weird look. “The wolf?”

I nodded.

“Like a wolf. Gray.” Rachel saw my withering look and shrugged. “I don’t know, Grace. Bluish-gray? With mucky gross scratches on its shoulder. It looked scruffy.”

So it was Jack. It had to be. “It must have been total chaos,” I said.

“Yeah, you should’ve been here, wolf-girl. Seriously. Nobody got hurt, thank God, but Olivia completely freaked out. The whole school was freaked out. Isabel was totally hysterical and
made a huge scene.” Rachel squeezed my arm. “So why didn’t you pick up your phone, anyway?”

We walked into the school; the doors were propped open to let in the balmy air. “Battery died.”

Rachel made a face and spoke louder to be heard over the crush of students in the halls. “So, are you sick? I never thought I’d live to see the day that you didn’t make it to class. Between you not being in class and wild animals roaming the parking lot, I thought the world was coming to an end. I was waiting for the rains of blood.”

“I think I got some sort of twenty-four-hour bug,” I replied.

“Ew, should I not touch you?” But instead of moving away, Rachel slammed her shoulder into mine with a grin. I laughed and shoved her off, and as I did, I saw Isabel Culpeper. My smile faded. She was leaning against the wall by one of the drinking fountains, her shoulders hunched forward. At first I thought she was looking at her cell phone, but then I realized her hands were empty and she was just staring at the ground. If she hadn’t been such an ice princess, I would’ve thought she was crying. I wondered if I should talk to her.

As if reading my thoughts, Isabel looked up then, and her eyes, so similar to Jack’s, met mine. I could read the challenge in them:
So what are you looking at, huh?

I looked away quickly and kept walking with Rachel, but I had the uncomfortable sense of things left unsaid.

As I lay in Grace’s bed that night, jarred by the news of Jack’s appearance at the school, I stared, sleepless, out into a blackness interrupted only by the dim halo of her hair on her pillow. And I thought about wolves who didn’t act like wolves. And I thought about Christa Bohlmann.

It had been years since the memory of Christa had crossed my mind, but Grace’s frowning account of Jack lurking where he didn’t belong had brought it all back.

I remembered the last day I saw her, when Christa and Beck were fighting in the kitchen, the living room, the hall, the kitchen again, growling and shouting at each other like circling wolves. I’d been young, about eight, so Beck had seemed like a giant then — a narrow, furious god barely containing his anger. Round and round the house he went with Christa, a heavyset young woman with a face made blotchy by rage.

“You killed two people, Christa. When are you going to face up to that?”

“Killed? Killed?” Her voice was shrill to my ears, claws on glass. “What about me? Look at me. My life is over.”

“It’s not over,” Beck snapped. “You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Your heart’s still beating? I can’t say the same for your two victims.”

I remember shrinking back at Christa’s voice — a throaty, barely understandable scream. “This is not a life!”

Beck raged at her about selfishness and responsibility, and she shot back with a string of profanity that I was shocked by; I’d never heard the words before.

“How about that guy in the basement?” Beck snapped. I could just see Beck’s back from my vantage point in the hall. “You bit him, Christa. You’ve ruined
his
life now. And you killed two people. Just because they called you some nasty words. I keep waiting to see some remorse. Hell, I’ll just take a guarantee that this won’t happen again.”

“Why would I guarantee you anything? What have you ever given me?” Christa snarled. Her shoulders hunched and twitched. “You call yourselves a pack? You’re a coven. You’re an abomination. You’re a cult. I’ll do what I want. I’ll get through this life how I want.”

Beck’s voice was terribly, terribly even. I remember being suddenly sorry for Christa then, because Beck stopped sounding angry when he was at his worst. “Promise me this won’t happen again.”

She looked straight at me then — no, not at me. Through me. Her mind was someplace far away, escaping the reality of her changing body. I could see a vein standing out right down the middle of her forehead, and I noticed that her fingernails were claws. “I don’t owe you anything. Go to hell.”

Beck said, very quietly, “Get out of my house.”

She did. She slammed the glass door so hard that the dishes in the kitchen cabinets rattled. A few moments later, I heard the door open and shut again, much quieter, as Beck went after her.

I remembered that it had been cold enough out that I was worried Beck would change for the winter and leave me alone in the house. That fear was enough to make me slide out of the hallway into the living room, just as I heard a massive
crack
.

Beck quietly let himself back into the house, shivering with the cold and the threat of the change, and he carefully laid a gun on the counter as though it was made of glass. Then he noticed me, standing in the living room, arms across my chest, my fingers clutching my biceps.

I still remembered the way his voice sounded when he said, “Don’t touch that, Sam.” Hollow. Ragged. He’d gone into his office and laid his head down on his arms for the rest of the day. At dusk, he and Ulrik had gone outside, voices low and hushed; through the window, I’d seen Ulrik get a shovel from the garage.

And now, here I was, lying in Grace’s bed, and somewhere out there was Jack. Angry people didn’t make good werewolves.

While Grace was in school, I had driven by Beck’s house. The driveway was empty and the windows were dark; I hadn’t the heart to go inside and see how long it had been unoccupied. Without Beck to enforce the pack’s safety, who was supposed to keep Jack in line?

An unwelcome sense of responsibility was starting to pinch at the back of my throat. Beck had a cell phone, but I couldn’t
remember the number, no matter how long I riffled through my memories. I pressed my face against the pillow and prayed that Jack wouldn’t bite anyone, because if he became a problem, I didn’t think I was strong enough to do what would have to be done.

When Grace’s alarm went off the next morning at 6:45 for school, screaming electronic obscenities into my ear, I instantly shot straight up into the air, heart pounding, just as I had the day before. My head was stuffed full of dreams: wolves and humans and blood smeared on lips.

“Ummmm,” Grace mumbled, unconcerned, and pulled up the sheets around her neck. “Turn that off, would you? I’m getting up. I’ll … be up in a second.” She rolled over, her blonde head barely visible above the edge of the blanket, and sank into the bed as if she had grown into the mattress.

And that was it. She was asleep and I was not.

I leaned back against her headboard and let her lie by my side, warm and dreaming, for a few minutes more. I stroked her hair with careful fingers, tracing a line from her forehead around her ear and down to just the top of her long neck, where her hair stopped being hair proper and was instead little baby fluffs that went every which way. They were fascinating, these soft feathers that would grow up to be her hair. I was incredibly tempted to bend down and bite them, ever so softly, to wake her up and kiss
her and make her late for school, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Jack and Christa and people who made bad werewolves. If I went to the school, would I still be able to follow Jack’s trail with my weaker sense of smell?

“Grace,” I whispered. “Wake up.”

She made a soft noise that, roughly translated, meant
piss off
in sleep language.

“Time to wake up,” I said, and stuck my finger in her ear.

Grace squealed and smacked at me. She was up.

Our mornings together were beginning to have the comfort of routine. While Grace, still dogged by sleep, stumbled toward the shower, I put a bagel in the toaster for each of us and convinced the coffeemaker to do something that sounded like making coffee. Back in her bedroom, I listened to Grace sing tunelessly in the shower while I pulled on my jeans and checked her drawers for socks that didn’t look too girly for me to borrow.

I heard my breathing stop without feeling it. Photographs, nestled amongst her neatly folded socks. Pictures of the wolves. Of us. Carefully, I lifted the stack out of the drawer and retreated to the bed. Turning my back to the door as if I were doing something illicit, I paged through the pictures with slow fingers. There was something fascinating about seeing these images with my human eyes. Some of the wolves I could attach human names to; the older ones who had always changed before me. Beck, big, bulky, blue-gray. Paul, black and clean-looking. Ulrik, brownish-gray. Salem, with his notched ear and running eye. I sighed, though I didn’t know why.

The door behind me opened, letting in a gust of steam that smelled like Grace’s soap. Grace stepped behind me and rested her head on my shoulder; I breathed in the scent of her.

“Looking at yourself?” she asked.

My fingers, flicking between the photos, froze. “I’m in here?”

Grace came round the side of the bed and sat down facing me. “Of course. Most of them are of you — you don’t recognize yourself? Oh. Of course you wouldn’t. Tell me who’s who.”

Slower, I paged through the images again as she shifted to sit next to me, the bed groaning with her movements. “That’s Beck. He’s always taken care of the new wolves.” Though there’d only been two newly made wolves since me: Christa and the wolf that she’d created, Derek. The fact was, I wasn’t used to younger newcomers — our pack usually grew by other, older wolves finding us, not by the addition of savagely born newbies like Jack. “Beck’s like a father to me.” It sounded weird to say it like that, even if it was true. I’d never had to explain it to anyone before. He had been the one to take me under his wing after I’d escaped from my house, and the one who carefully glued the fragments of my sanity back together.

“I could tell how you felt about him,” Grace said, and she sounded surprised at her own intuition. “Your voice is different whenever you talk about him.”

“It is?” Now it was my turn to be surprised. “Different how?”

She shrugged, looking a little shy. “I dunno. Proud, I guess. I think it’s sweet. Who’s that?”

“Shelby,” I said, and there was no pride in my voice for her. “I told you about her before.”

Grace watched my face.

The memory of the last time Shelby and I had seen each other made my gut twist uncomfortably. “She and I don’t see things the same way. She thinks being a wolf is a gift.”

Beside me, Grace nodded, and I was grateful to leave it at that.

I flipped through the next few photographs, more of Shelby and Beck, until I paused at Paul’s black form. “That’s Paul. He’s our pack leader when we’re wolves. That’s Ulrik next to him.” I pointed to the brown-gray wolf beside Paul. “Ulrik’s like a crazy uncle, sort of. A German one. He swears a lot.”

“Sounds great.”

“He’s a lot of fun.” Actually, I should’ve said
was
a lot of fun. I didn’t know if this had been his last year, or if he might still have another summer in him. I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off, and the way he held on to his German accent, like he couldn’t be Ulrik without it.

“Are you okay?” Grace asked, frowning at me.

I shook my head, staring at the wolves in the photographs, so clearly animals when seen through my human eyes. My family. Me. My future. Somehow, the photographs blurred a line I wasn’t ready to cross yet.

I realized Grace had her arm around my shoulder, her cheek leaning against me, comforting me even though she couldn’t possibly understand what was bothering me.

“I wish you could’ve met them,” I said, “when every body was human.” I didn’t know how to explain to her what an
enormous part of me they were, their voices and faces as humans, and their scents and forms as wolves. How lost I felt now, the only one wearing human skin.

“Tell me something about them,” Grace said, her voice muffled against my T-shirt.

I let my mind flit over memories. “Beck taught me how to hunt when I was eight. I hated it.” I remembered standing in Beck’s living room, staring out at the first ice-covered tree branches of the winter, brilliant and winking in the morning sun. The backyard seemed like a dangerous and alien planet.

“Why did you hate it?” Grace asked.

“I didn’t like the sight of blood. I didn’t like hurting things. I was eight.” In my memories, I seemed small, ribby, innocent. I had spent all of the previous summer letting myself believe that this winter, with Beck, would be different, that I wouldn’t change and that I’d go on eating the eggs Beck cooked for me forever. But as the nights grew colder and even short trips outside made my muscles shake, I knew the time was coming soon when I wouldn’t be able to avoid the change, and that Beck wouldn’t be around to cook much longer. But that didn’t mean I would go willingly.

“Why hunt, then?” Grace asked, ever logical. “Why not just leave food out for yourselves?”

“Ha. I asked Beck that same question, and Ulrik said, ‘
Ja
, and the raccoons and possums, too?’”

Grace laughed, unduly delighted by my lousy impression of Ulrik’s accent.

I felt a rush of warmth in my cheeks; it felt good to talk to her about the pack. I loved the glow in her eyes, the curious
quirk in her mouth — she knew what I was and she wanted to know more. But that didn’t mean it was right to tell her, someone outside the pack. Beck had always said,
The only people we have to protect us is us
. But Beck didn’t know Grace. And Grace wasn’t only human. She may not have changed, but she had been bitten. She was wolf on the inside. She had to be.

“So what happened?” Grace asked. “What did you hunt?”

“Bunnies, of course,” I replied. “Beck took me out while Paul waited in a van to collect me afterward in case I was unstable enough to change back.” I couldn’t forget how Beck had stopped me by the door before we went out, bending double so he could look into my face. I was motionless, trying not to think about changing bodies and snapping a rabbit’s neck between my teeth. About saying good-bye to Beck for the winter. He had taken my thin shoulder in his hand and said, “Sam, I’m sorry. Don’t be scared.”

I hadn’t said anything, because I was thinking it was cold, and Beck wouldn’t change back after the hunt, and then I’d have no one who knew how to cook my eggs right. Beck made perfect eggs. More than that. Beck kept me Sam. Back then, with the scars on my wrists still so fresh, I’d been so dangerously close to fracturing into something that was neither human nor wolf.

“What are you thinking about?” Grace asked. “You stopped talking.”

I looked up; I hadn’t realized I’d looked away from her. “Changing.”

Grace’s chin pressed into my shoulder as she looked into my face; her voice was hesitant. She asked me a question she’d asked me before. “Does it hurt?”

I thought of the slow, agonizing process of the change, the bending of muscles, the bulging of skin, the grinding of bones. The adults had always tried to hide their shifts from me, wanting to protect me. But it wasn’t seeing them change that scared me — the sight only made me pity them, since even Beck groaned with the pain of it. It was changing myself that terrified me, even now. Forgetting Sam.

I was a bad liar, so I didn’t bother to try. “Yes.”

“It kind of makes me sad to think of you having to do that as a little kid,” Grace said. She was frowning at me, blinking too-shiny eyes. “Actually, it bothers me a lot. Poor little Sam.” She touched my chin with a finger; I leaned into her hand.

I remembered being so proud that I hadn’t cried while I changed that time, unlike when I was younger and my parents had watched me, eyes round with horror. I remembered Beck the wolf, bounding away and leading me into the woods, and I remembered the warm, bitter sensation of my first kill on my muzzle. I had changed back again after Paul, bundled up in a coat and hat, had retrieved me. It was in the van on the way home that loneliness hit me. I was alone; Beck wouldn’t be human again that year.

Now, it was like I was eight years old all over again, alone and newly scarred. My chest ached, my breath squeezed out of me.

“Show me what I look like,” I asked Grace, tilting the photos toward her. “Please.”

I let her take the stack from my hand and watched her face light up as she flipped through the pictures, looking for one in particular. “There. That one’s my favorite of you.”

I looked at the photo she had handed me. A wolf looked back at me, wearing my eyes, a still wolf watching from the woods, sunlight touching the edges of its fur. I looked and looked, waiting for it to mean something. Waiting for a prickling of recognition. It seemed unfair that the other wolves’ identities were so clear to me in their photographs, but that mine was hidden. What was it in this photo, in that wolf, that made Grace’s eyes light up?

What if it wasn’t me? What if she was in love with some other wolf and she only thought it was me? How would I ever know?

Grace was oblivious to my doubts and misread my silence for fascination. She unfolded her legs and stood up, facing me, then ran a hand through my hair. She lifted her palm to her nose, inhaling deeply. “You know, you still smell like you do when you’re a wolf.”

And just like that, she’d said maybe the one thing that could’ve made me feel better. I handed her the photo on her way out.

Grace stopped in the door, dimly silhouetted by the dull gray morning light, and looked back at me, at my eyes, my mouth, my hands, in a way that made something inside me knot and unknot unbearably.

I didn’t think I belonged here in her world, a boy stuck between two lives, dragging the dangers of the wolves with me, but when she said my name, waiting for me to follow, I knew I’d do anything to stay with her.