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I knew this was true. I knew that there had been and probably always would be two Coles: the Cole who silenced the crowd with a smile and the Cole who whispered songs about finding his Alps. And I knew that Beck, somehow, in pulling Cole from the stage, had unearthed that second, quieter Cole, and given him a chance to live.
And me, too. Beck had bitten me, but it had been my parents, not him, who’d destroyed me. I had come to him as a crushed piece of paper that he had slowly smoothed. It wasn’t just Cole that he’d rebuilt.
There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all the original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?
“Okay,” Beck said, voice taking a moment to solidify. “Okay. If I only have ten minutes, Sam, this is what I want to say. You’re not the best of us. You’re more than that. You’re better than all of us. If I only have ten minutes, I would tell you to go out there and live. I’d say … please take your guitar and sing your songs to as many people as you can. Please fold a thousand more of those damn birds of yours. Please kiss that girl a million times. ”
Beck suddenly broke off and ducked his head down to his knees; he clenched his hands on the back of his skull. I saw the muscles in his back twitching. Not lifting his head, he whispered, “And please forget all about me. I wish I had been better, but I wasn’t. Please forget about me. ”
His hands were still white-knuckled fists on the back of his head.
So many ways to say good-bye.
I said, “I don’t want to. ”
Beck lifted his head. His pulse was beating visibly in his neck, fast and hard.
Grace let go of me, and I knew that she meant to send me off, down the stairs. She was right. I went down the stairs, two at a time. Beck tried to stand, unsuccessfully, at the same time that I knelt swiftly down to meet him. Our foreheads were almost touching. Beck was shivering, hard.
So many days before this, it had been Beck crouching to meet me, me shivering on the floor.
I felt as unsteady as Beck, just then. It was like I’d unfolded all my paper crane memories and found something unfamiliar printed on them. Somehow along the way, hope had been folded into one of those birds. My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.
I was done being afraid. It had started that night, me and my guitar in the bathtub, and it would end with me disappearing into a wolf again. I wouldn’t be afraid.
“Dammit,” Beck whispered, soft as a sigh. The heat was losing its grip on him. We were forehead to forehead again, father and son, Beck and Sam, the way it had always been. He was every devil and every angel.
I said, “Tell me you want us to cure you. ”
Beck’s fingertips were white and then red, pushed against the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly, and I knew he was saying it for me, just me. “Do what it takes. ” He looked up at Cole. “Cole, you are —”
And then his skin tore, violently, and I leaped to push the heater out of his way before Beck crashed to the floor, jerking.
Cole stepped forward and pushed a second needle into the crook of Beck’s arm.
And in that split second, as Beck’s face turned toward the ceiling, his eyes unchanging, I saw my own face.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
COLE
EPINEPHRINE/PSEUDOEPHEDRINE MIX 7
METHOD: INTRAVENOUS INJECTION
RESULT: SUCCESSFUL
(SIDE EFFECTS: NONE)
(NOTE: ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS STILL DICTATE SHIFT BACK TO WOLF)
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
SAM
I felt dirty after Beck shifted back, like I’d been complicit in a crime. I was reminded so acutely of my life before, when I’d hidden from the winter and when I’d had my family, that I could feel my thoughts slipping away to protect me. I wasn’t the only one, apparently: Cole announced that he was “going for a drive” and left in Ulrik’s old BMW. After he’d gone, Grace trailed after me as I made bread as if my life depended on it, and then I left her watching the oven as I went to shower. To scrub the memories off me. To remind myself that, for now, I had my hands and my human skin and my face.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in there when I heard the bathroom door open and close.
“This is good,” Grace said. The closed toilet lid creaked as she tried to find a way to make it a comfortable seat. “Good job, Sam. ”
I couldn’t see her, but I could smell the bread. I was oddly discomfited by the knowledge that she was in the room while I was standing there under the running water. Somehow taking a shower with her in the room was more intimate than sex. I felt about one thousand times more naked, even behind the dark shower curtain.
I looked at the bar of soap in my hand. I applied it to my ribs. “Thanks. ”
Grace was quiet, inches away on the other side of the curtain. I couldn’t see her, so she couldn’t see me.
“Are you all clean in there?” Grace asked.
“Oh my God, Grace,” I replied, and she laughed.
There was another pause. I washed between my fingers. One of my fingernails was battered from rubbing against a guitar string. I studied it to see if I needed to do something about it; it was hard to properly diagnose it in the orange half-light provided by the shower curtain.
“Rachel said she would go with me, tomorrow, to see my parents,” Grace said. “Tomorrow night. That’s when she’s free. ”
“Are you nervous?” I was nervous, and I wasn’t even going, by Grace’s request.
“I dunno. It just has to happen. It’ll get you off the hook. Plus, I need to be officially alive for Olivia’s funeral. Rachel said they cremated her. ” She stopped. There was a long space full of nothing but the water hitting me and the tile. She said, “This bread is excellent. ”
I got it. Subject change. “Ulrik taught me how to make it. ”
“What a talented guy. Speaks with a German accent and makes bread. ” On the other side, she poked the shower curtain; when it touched my bare hip, I shied away in an undignified fashion. “You know, this could be us, in five years. ”
I had no body parts left to clean. I was a prisoner in the shower unless I could reach my towel from behind the curtain or persuade Grace to hand it to me. I didn’t think she would hand it to me. “Making bread with a German accent?” I suggested.
“That’s exactly what I meant,” she said. I heard the withering tone in her voice. I was glad to hear it. I could use levity at the moment.
“Will you give me my towel?”
“You have to come and get it. ”
“Vixen,” I muttered. There was hot water left. I stood in it and looked at the uneven grout on the tiles under the showerhead. My fingers were getting pruney and the hair on my legs had stuck together to form soaked, matted arrows toward my feet.
“Sam?” Grace said. “Do you think Cole’s right about the cure? About the meningitis working if you have it while you’re a wolf? Do you think I should try it?”
This was too hard of a question to answer after the evening with Beck. Yes, I wanted her cured. I wanted more proof than me, though, that it would work. I wanted something to make the fate Jack had suffered a lower percentage of the possible outcomes. I had risked everything for this, but now that it came to it for Grace, I didn’t want her to do the same. But how could she have a normal life without it?
“I don’t know. I want more information. ” It sounded formal, like something I’d say to Koenig. I am collecting more data.
“I mean, we don’t have to worry about it until winter, anyway,” she said. “I was just wondering if you felt cured. ”
I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t feel cured. I felt like what Cole said — alm
ost cured. A war survivor with a phantom limb. I still felt that wolf that I’d been: living in my cells, sleeping uneasily, waiting to be coaxed out by weather or a rush of adrenaline or a needle in my veins. I didn’t know if that was real or suggested. I didn’t know if one day I would feel secure in my skin, taking my human body for granted.
“You look cured,” Grace said.
Just her face was visible at the end of the shower curtain, looking in at me. She grinned and I yelled. Grace reached in just far enough to shut off the tap.
“I’m afraid,” she said, whipping the shower curtain open all the way and presenting me with my towel, “this is the sort of thing you’ll have to put up with in your old age. ”
I stood there, dripping, feeling utterly ridiculous, Grace standing opposite, smiling with her challenge. There was nothing for it but to get over the awkwardness. Instead of taking the towel, I took her chin with my wet fingers and kissed her. Water from my hair ran down my cheeks and onto our lips. I was getting her shirt all wet, but she didn’t seem to mind. A lifetime of this seemed rather appealing. I said gallantly, “That better be a promise. ”
Grace stepped into the shower in her sock feet and wrapped her arms around my damp chest. “It’s a guarantee. ”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
ISABEL
I heard a soft knock on the mudroom door. Stepping over boots and a trowel and a bag of bird seed, I opened it.
Cole St. Clair stood in the black rectangle of the doorway, his hands in his pockets.
“Ask me in,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
GRACE
It was properly dark by the time Rachel and I got to my parents’ house on Sunday night. Rachel, due to fascinating driving habits frowned upon by the Minnesota State Police, didn’t have a driver’s license, so I had had to pick her up. She’d showed me a beaded purse with a smiley face on the side by means of a hello and smiled a thin white smile in the dark. It was the dark, I thought, that made it so surreal to be pulling up in my parents’ driveway. Because with only the porch light to illuminate the front of the rambler and a corner of the drive, everything about the house looked precisely the same as the night that I left.
I pulled up the parking brake beside the car I’d gotten with the insurance money from my last one — I remembered, all of a sudden, yet another night, the one when a deer had smashed through my Bronco’s windshield and I’d thought that I was losing Sam to the wolves for good. That seemed like a million nights ago and hours ago at the same time. Tonight felt like a beginning and an ending.
Next to me, Rachel opened her beaded smiley face purse and removed some strawberry lip gloss. She applied two coats of fruity armor with fierce determination, and ferociously zipped it back into the purse. Then we marched to the front door, sisters in battle, the sounds of our shoes on the concrete sidewalk our only war cry. I didn’t have a key, so I had to knock.
Now that I was here, I really didn’t want to go through with it.
Rachel looked at me. She said, “You’re like my favorite older sister, which doesn’t make sense, because you’re the same age as me. ”
I was flattered, but I said, “Rachel, you say weird things. ”