When he was with Rachel he felt like the future would be a good one after all.
They still sat across from each other on the bench during lunch, and they didn’t hold hands while walking between classes. But somehow, at least for the time being, it didn’t feel like they needed to. Simply being in each others’ company was such a deep and fulfilling experience, and just the idea of future concepts such as hand-holding made it all the more exciting. It was enough to sneak sideways peeks at Rachel during class and catch her doing the same back. It was enough to critique each others’ lunches with the memory of last night still fresh in their minds. It was enough to simply live in the present, knowing that the horizon only got brighter.
Every other human being at school that day seemed like a soulless hologram, programmed to go about their daily business in a distant, robotic fashion. Patrick and Rachel were the only ones who seemed real—the only two actors in the spotlight, in front of a backdrop covered with hundreds of painted faces. And that was the way Patrick wished it could stay forever.
The dream didn’t waver until the very end of the school day. Patrick hoped that Rachel would want to go for a walk again, or at least hang out at one of their houses.
“I really really want to hang out,” she said as they put their unneeded books in their lockers for the day, “but I told my chemistry study group that I would hang back and help work on our project for a few hours after school.”
Leaving Rachel for the remainder of the day was a sad thought, but Patrick told himself that this was actually perfect. Despite the new drunkenness he was experiencing, he had things he needed to do.
“Okay, that’s fine,” he said. I’ll just see you tomorrow, I guess.
Rachel gave him a warm smile.
“Okay.”
She walked toward him and before he could tell what was happening she was giving him a hug. Their bodies were suddenly so close, and Patrick could smell the shampoo in her hair and the fabric softener on her clothes with great intensity. For a second he wasn’t sure what to do with his arms, but with some mental effort he wrapped them around her back.
The whole thing only lasted a few seconds, and when Rachel quietly said, “See ya,” and walked down the hall, Patrick was left standing in a daze, holding his backpack limply at his side. It took him several moments to shake off his shock and the explosion of butterflies in his stomach, but finally he managed to finish putting his books away and head outside, all the while a huge, stupid grin on his face.
It was hard to force his mind to return to business, but realizing how little time he had was certainly sobering. Patrick walked down the street and considered everything once more.
He was continuing in the face of danger, but the fact of the matter was that he wasn’t much use to Hillward in the ICU. Dean made for a much bigger wolf, and he simply wouldn’t let Patrick search the woods if he could help it. He wasn’t sure when the guy slept, but it seemed that night was entirely under Dean’s rule. In a confrontation, Patrick had practically no chance of defending himself.
Patrick’s only choice then, was to search during the day. This idea didn’t sound like a pleasant one, as the thought of people and cars in all directions made him feel very vulnerable. This was his only option however, and he decided with great effort that he would just have to be extra careful. He would need to be fast, too. Today he would search for a few hours and report to his parents to prevent them from worrying. He would then claim he was going for a walk and continue his search until the sun just started to go down.
Patrick walked to that infamous crooked post on the side of the road and peered down the path into the woods. He gave a quick turn to make sure that no one was watching and stepped into the trees. After a moment he slid his backpack off his shoulders and dropped it onto the ground, changing a few steps later.
The daytime smells were essentially the same as those at night, only the smell of squirrel was more fresh and the pungent scent of car exhaust clung sickly to the air. Completely gone were the sounds of the bats (he had grown used to them, but this was certainly much more comfortable), replaced by the hum of many motors and the shouting of children.
Being able to see the world through both his nose and his eyes was very pleasing to Patrick. He didn’t need the light, but it certainly made it much more comfortable to navigate without thought. He saw everything in muted grey colors, but the colors that he could see in his mind—practically taste—were more than enough for him.
After a few moments of adjusting to the bright world of day, Patrick began his frenzied search. There were very few hours of daylight when one considered the fact that Wolf Watch pretty much began the second the sun hit the trees. When the first shadows began to peek out from under the people of the town and start to grow long, everyone ran for their houses. And who could blame them? It certainly seemed like taking the garbage to the trash can after nightfall had become a life-threatening ordeal. And Patrick was pretty sure that if your children were the ones whose safety was in question, nightfall would begin to creep into the world roughly around noon. For that reason, Patrick had to hurry.
He searched around the trail for a while, then took off in a random direction when staying in one place proved to be too nerve-wracking. He soon found himself at the edge of the creek, and in the daylight he thought he could see the imprint his body had left in the drying mud. He searched up and down the top of the embankment, his nose to the ground, snuffling rapidly around rocks and through the grass and weeds. At one point he jerked his head up to find a squirrel eating a nut on the ground in front of him, its black eyes bugging out at the world, its line of sight a mystery behind its lack of any discernable pupil. When it stuck the nut in its mouth and ran nimbly up the tree Patrick stopped himself with great effort from running after it and barking. (He had never wanted to do such a thing as a human, so why was it so appealing now?) All throughout his searching his ears were pricked up and he devoted a section of his attention solely to listening for approaching people (or animals). With so much surrounding noise pollution and so many scampering squirrels and fluttering birds it was difficult to listen for the sounds of footsteps, so he readied himself to bolt at the first sign of an intruder in case he wasn’t quite quick enough to pick up on it as it approached.
*****
When Patrick found it, it was sheer chance that brought him over that square inch of ground and luck that the tiniest sliver of intuition told him to stay there. He had only barely noticed it in the first place, instantly regarding it as nothing but a lapse in his thinking, but something told him to wait and give it another sniff anyway.
He had stopped in a small clearing a few dozen yards from his back yard. The trail that led to the road was off to his right. He sniffed at the spot for several long moments, trying to put his finger on exactly what was irregular about it. His body was still, every muscle tense as his mind reached out to the smell, probed it. He couldn’t tell if it was even a smell at all, because he couldn’t quite place it into any sort of category. Its color was simply… different. When he ran his nose over it he got a sense of out of place. These feelings were hard to articulate even to himself, and seemed to be mostly based on some weird gut instinct.
Unsure as to what it might be but almost certain that it was certainly something, he sniffed at it for a minute longer, wondering what he should do.
What could a wolf do for a crow? he thought to himself.
The answer seemed pretty obvious.
Patrick scraped at the ground with his paw. He raked over the spot again and again, and when he had loosened an adequate amount of dirt he braced his hind legs and began to dig.
After what must have been about ten minutes Patrick had dug a foot into the ground. It took a while to get down the correct motions and muscle movements for the task, but soon it became very natural.
I wonder how many tries before I can catch a Frisbee, a sillier part of him asked a
s he scooped the dirt out from under him and flung it between his legs. Thankfully the soil was far enough from the trail that it was relatively soft; it took some work, but it certainly wasn’t like digging through solid rock. As he dug deeper he even began to feel (and smell, more than anything) moisture left behind from the last rain.
Patrick thought he could hear a slow change in the sound of his paws digging through the earth, but decided that it was most likely a trick of his mind—a product of the grating repetition of the sound. But when he dragged his claws across a surface that sounded curiously like the hollow scraping of wood, he stopped.
For a moment he didn’t believe it. He stood staring at the bottom of his little hole, thinking that it had to have been his ears playing a trick on him. But then there it was, not just a ringing memory in his ears but a smell—the smell of wood. But not any normal wood, no; this wood smelled nothing like the trees around him. It was musty, it was old, it was out of place.
Patrick’s heart began to race madly and he resumed digging, this time in a frenzied hurry. He scooped away enough dirt to reveal a six inch circle of a flat wooden surface, and he didn’t need to venture far into his imagination to produce a theory as to what he was now standing on.
Despite the bolt of pure energy that had been gifted to him, digging in this fashion was taking far too long. After another ten minutes he had barely increased the size of the hole at all, and he decided that it was time for a different approach. He stopped digging and ran as quickly as he could toward his house. He changed back before he reached the yard and jogged up to the back door. When he reached it he saw that no one was in the living room to see his approach, so he decided to tiptoe around suspicion altogether and sneak to the front of the house where he let himself in by way of the front door. He held the door open and shouted down the hall.
“Hey, Mom!” His voice echoed across the hardwood floor and through the house.
“Yeah?” his mother answered back, probably from inside her office.
“I’m out taking a walk…” he shouted, and just in time added, “with some friends!”
“Alright, be home before nighttime.”
“I will!” He shut the door and ran back around the house. Like the old rusty bathroom fittings, a few tools had been left outside during the renovations. His father had meant to cart it all into the garage a long time ago, but Patrick thanked him silently for putting it off for so long. Leaning up against the house along with a hoe and a few lengths of PVC piping was a shovel. It was still dirty from digging up the planters around the front porch.
Patrick grabbed it and swiftly ran back to the woods before anyone could see where he was going. He found his way back to the hole and began to dig with the shovel. He was thankful to find that his took much less effort, as the blade slid into the ground easily with a stomp or two, and each scoop felt like the equivalent of at least a minute’s worth of soil dug with his paws.
Patrick dug for what must have been at least an hour. He worked at uncovering as much of the wooden surface as he could, stopping whenever it ended and he was only digging into straight earth. His heart began to hammer anew when the shape that was left in the ground slowly revealed itself to be a rectangle, five or six feet long. The smell of the wood was heavy now, though he was thankful that his human nose couldn’t truly grasp what was undoubtedly an unnerving scent.
When the entire top was uncovered he flipped the shovel over and used it to scrape the last bits of dirt from the surface, revealing much of the light brown wood. Now he could see that along the edge were what appeared to be nails. Patrick marveled at the large box that lay before him, his head swimming. He began to ask himself what to do next, but before the words were even finished scrolling across his mind he jammed the blade of the shovel under the large plank that he supposed was the lid. The nails had rusted away to almost nothing, and Patrick pried the top off with only two cranks of the handle. He dropped the shovel and lifted the lid off with held breath.
Inside the box was something long, something wrapped in a black cloth bag. Patrick’s heart felt like it might jump out of his chest. It was a body. There was a body in this box. There was a body in a box buried in the woods behind his house. This was why he was turning into a wolf. To find this box. He stared at the figure for several moments with wide eyes and short breath. There was something placed on top of the body, slightly concealed in the folds of the fabric. He leaned closer and saw that it was a necklace—some sort of red stone on a metal chain.
Amidst the thumping of his heart in his ears he barely heard the growling.
Patrick whirled around and saw Dean standing hunched on all fours, his fur bristling, his teeth bared. Without conscious thought Patrick’s body changed and the very next second Dean was lunging at him. The enormous wolf snarled and leapt at him with his whole body, but Patrick jumped deftly to his right. Too shocked to be scared, Patrick wheeled around and tried to bite Dean on the back of the neck, but the huge jaws were coming at him again and he was forced shirk out of the way. They bit at each others’ faces and were soon on their hind legs, scrabbling and trying to get a good hold. Dean nipped at his face and Patrick turned to avoid it, falling over in the process. He flipped back over as quickly as he could and saw Dean advancing on him, preparing to pounce.
Just as Patrick was about to throw his weight at the wolf in a savage last effort, there was a loud CAW. Dean turned his head to the coffin, as did Patrick.
The crow was sitting on the body, holding the stone in its beak. It flew across the clearing to the edge of the trail.
Patrick’s heart sank as he saw with utter horror that Rachel was standing there, holding his backpack and staring at them with wide eyes.
The crow flapped over to her and dropped the stone at her feet, then flew off cawing madly. Rachel stared down at the necklace for a second, then closed her eyes, dropping the backpack. There was a sudden change in her posture that was so subtle Patrick almost missed it, and she opened her eyes once more with a look on her face that was nothing short of terrifying. Eyes that were not her own stared down at the stone and an eerie and unnatural smile crept over her face. She bent down and picked it up, slipping it around her neck with apparent glee. She looked up at Patrick, who could only stare unbelievingly.
“Thank you, child,” Rachel said, only her voice seemed… wrong—somehow not her voice at all.
Patrick’s wits shot back to him like a lightning bolt and he suddenly knew with overwhelming certainty that her life was in danger. He leapt forward, shouting “NO!” in a mental cry, but before he could cross the clearing she lifted her hand and thousands of leaves fell from the tree above, dousing her like water. The leaves cascaded onto her and swirled about her body in a brief flurry, and when they finally fell to the ground she was gone.
Patrick jumped to the spot where she had stood, turning his head from side to side, trying to spot her. He dropped his nose to the ground and sniffed, but the smell of her fabric softener and her shampoo and that underlying scent that was her own personal fingerprint on the world did not trail from the line on which she had entered the woods. Patrick stopped and looked up into the trees, complete dread spreading through his mind and his stomach and his heart like a noxious flame. Behind him he could hear Dean running off through the woods.
Patrick stood staring, his breathing heavy, wanting to run but knowing that there was nowhere to go.
Chapter 19
The students didn’t laugh much at school the next day.
When Mrs. Spotts walked into the room she was close to tears. She informed the class that Rachel hadn’t come home the night before. She told them how the students in her study group had said that she left the school alone a little after five o’clock the day before. Mrs. Spotts asked the class if any of them had seen her after that, or known where she might have gone. No one made a sound, lest the scooting of a chair or the shuffling of papers be mistaken fo
r a raised hand or a confession.
Patrick could feel the eyes on him. He and Rachel had hung out exclusively for weeks, and he was clearly having the hardest time with the news. The spotlight was on him the entire day, and all of his classes were stricken with an unnerving hush. People spoke in unnaturally quiet tones, keeping laughter to a minimum out of either respect or fear. If this were an abduction it would be bad enough—kids and teenagers often returned from them unharmed—but Patrick didn’t have to poll the school to know if they thought Rachel was coming back. Before the attacks had been harmless—just another fairy tale news item, another “brush your teeth before bed, drive with your seatbelt on, don’t pick up hitchhikers”. Now it seemed that they were wrong; and this, for a teenager, was a very scary thought.
The whole day Patrick tried his best to ignore the pitiful stares, the little whispers. His mind was numb with grief, and he only stared at the front of each class, ignoring the teachers entirely. He didn’t bother taking down homework assignments. He didn’t plan on doing them. He only sat in his chair, fulfilling at least that obligation, his head hurting too much to even think. Thinking, he found, did nothing. There were no ideas. No theories. No plans. Just a maddening emptiness. Emptiness that he couldn’t escape no matter how hard he tried to shut off his brain.
Besides, the thoughts had already come. He had spent the majority of the previous night lying in bed, running it through his mind until it exhausted him, though the sleep was still reluctant to come even then. He realized with bitterness how the main reason he had continued to pry into this mystery despite Dean’s warnings had been to protect Rachel, and it ended up being the only reason she had been affected at all. If he had simply listened to that horrible little voice inside his head that told him to give up, Rachel would be fine. He did what he thought he had to do, and now the most important person in the world to him was gone. Venturing into the woods that first night had been such a scary thought, but despite all his apprehension he did it anyway, being truly brave for perhaps the first time in his life. And it was this action that had set the entire thing in motion… If he hadn’t done this, he would have simply attended school like a normal sixteen-year-old and struck up a safe and happy relationship with Rachel. They might even be further along by now without all of the odd distractions…