Forever

I could cry for help, but no one would hear me.

But what else could I do? The fact was this: If I turned into a wolf, I’d die. I could only swim for so long. All of a sudden, it seemed like a horrifying way to die, all alone, in a body that no one would ever recognize.

The cold pulled at me, flowed into my veins, unlocking the disease inside me. No, no, no. But I couldn’t resist it anymore; I could feel the pulse in my fingers pounding as the skin bubbled into another shape.

The water sloshed around me as my body began to tear itself apart.

I screamed Sam’s name into the darkness until I couldn’t remember how to speak.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SAM

“This is where the magic happens,” Cole said. “Are you going to put on your leotard now?”

We were by the back entrance to the Crooked Shelf, the bookstore where I sometimes lived. I’d slept badly with the thunderstorm, and after last night’s news, I hadn’t wanted to come in to work, but there had been no way to get off my shift on such short notice. So in I went. I had to admit that the normalcy of it was assuaging my anxiety a little. Well, except for Cole. Every other day, I had left Cole behind when I went to work, and hadn’t thought much of it. But this morning, I’d looked over while I was packing up and had seen him silently watching me getting ready to go, and I’d asked him if he wanted to come along. I didn’t yet regret letting him come with me, but the morning was still young.

Cole squinted up at me from the base of the short stairs, arms braced on either stair rail, his hair a concerted mess. The uncomplicated morning light made him look disarming and at ease. Camouflage.

I echoed, “My leotard?”

“Yeah, your superhero shit,” Cole said. “Sam Roth, werewolf by night, book retail specialist by day. Don’t you need a cape for that?”

“Yes,” I replied, unlocking the door. “Literacy rate in this country’s appalling; you need a cape to even sell a cookbook. You’re going to stay in the back if someone comes in, right?”

“No one’s going to recognize me in a bookstore,” Cole said. “Is the front of the store as crappy looking as the back?”

All of the stores on Main shared the same back alley, cluttered with spray-painted Dumpsters, weeds that looked like half-grown saplings, and plastic bags that had escaped death to tangle around the bases of staircases. Nobody came this way but owners and staff; I liked the disrepair because it was so far gone I didn’t feel I had to try to clean it up.

“Nobody ever sees this part,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s pretty.”

“So it’s like track six on an album,” Cole said. He smirked at some private joke. “So what’s the plan, Stan?”

I pushed open the back door. “Plan? I have to work until noon. Isabel is supposed to come by sometime before then to tell me what she’s found out since last night. Then, maybe, I’ll put a bag on your head and we’ll get lunch.”

The back room was a mess of papers and boxes waiting to be put out for the trash. I had no taste for tidiness, and Karyn, the owner, had an arcane system of filing that made sense to no one but her. The first time Grace had seen the disorder, she’d been visibly horrified. Cole, on the other hand, just thoughtfully examined a box cutter and a stack of rubber-banded bookmarks while I turned the lights on.

“Put those back where you found them,” I said.

As I did the business of opening up the store, Cole stalked around after me, his hands folded behind his back like a boy who’d been told not to break anything. He looked profoundly out of place here, a polished, aggressive predator moving amongst sunlit shelves that seemed folksy in comparison. I wondered if it was a conscious decision, his projected attitude, or if it was a by-product of the person within. And I wondered how someone like him, a furious sun, was going to survive in someplace like Mercy Falls.

With Cole’s intent eyes on me, I felt self-conscious as I unlocked the front door, set up the register, turned on the music overhead. I doubted that he really appreciated the aesthetics of the store, but I felt a small, fierce bit of pride as he looked around. There was so much of me here.

Cole’s attention was on the carpeted stairs near the back of the store. He asked, “What’s upstairs?”

“Poetry and some special editions.” Also, memories of me and Grace that were too piercing to relive at the moment.

Cole pulled a chick lit novel from an endcap, studied it vaguely, and put it back. He’d been here five minutes and he was already restless. I glanced at my watch, looking to see how long I had until Karyn arrived to relieve me. Four hours suddenly seemed like a very long time. I tried to remember the philanthropic impulse that had driven me to bring Cole.

Just then, as I turned toward the checkout counter, I caught an image out of the corner of my eye. It was one of those brief glances where you’re amazed, afterward, at how much you’ve managed to see during the brief second of eye contact. One of those glances that should’ve been just a forgotten blur but was instead a snapshot. And the snapshot was this: Amy Brisbane, Grace’s mother, walking past the big glass picture window of the bookstore toward her art studio. She held one arm across her chest, gripping the strap of her purse as if each jerky stride might pull it free from her shoulder. She wore a gauzy, pale scarf and that blank expression people put on when they want to become invisible. And I knew, right then, from that face, that she had heard about the dead girl in the woods, and she was wondering if it was Grace.

I should tell her it wasn’t.

Oh, but there were a multitude of small crimes the Brisbanes had committed. I could easily bring back the memory of Lewis Brisbane’s fist connecting with my face in a hospital room. Of being thrown out of their house in the middle of the night. Of going precious days without seeing Grace because they’d suddenly discovered parenting principles. I’d had so little, and they’d taken it from me.

But that face Amy Brisbane wore — I could still see it in my mind, even though her marionette strides had taken her past the storefront.

They had told Grace I was just a fling.

I bumped a fist into my palm again and again, torn. I was aware that Cole was watching me.

That blank face — I knew it was the same one I was wearing these days.

They’d made her last days as a human, as Grace, miserable. Because of me.

I hated this. I hated knowing what I wanted and knowing what was right and knowing that they weren’t the same thing.