Forever

“How many of these things do you have?” I asked, as we picked through the woods. I could have been thinking about Isabel’s news, the impending hunt, but I focused on making my way through the trees. The world was so damp that it took quite a bit of concentration. Water from last night’s storm dripped on me as I used branches for handholds, and my feet slid sideways beneath me.

“Five,” Cole said, stopping to knock his shoe on a tree trunk; chunks of mud fell out the treads. “Ish.”

“‘Ish’?”

Cole kept walking. “I’m making one for Tom Culpeper next,” he said, without turning around.

I couldn’t say I disagreed.

“And what is it you’re planning on doing, if you catch one?”

Cole made an exaggerated noise of disgust as he stepped over a pile of old deer droppings. “Find out what makes us shift. And find out if you’re really cured.”

I was surprised that he hadn’t asked me for a blood sample yet.

“Maybe,” Cole said thoughtfully, “I’ll enlist you for a bit of benign experimentation next.”

Apparently I was getting to know him better than I thought. “Maybe not,” I said.

As we walked, I suddenly caught a whiff of something that reminded me of Shelby. I stopped, turned in a slow circle, stepped carefully over a whiplike, bright green branch of thorns at my feet.

“What are you doing, Ringo?” Cole asked, stopping to wait.

“I thought I smelled …” I broke off. I didn’t know how to explain.

“The white wolf? The pissy one?”

I looked at him, and his expression was canny.

“Yes. Shelby,” I said. I couldn’t find whatever scent it was that I’d caught before. “She’s bad news. Have you seen her recently?”

Cole nodded, terse. I felt a knot of disappointment settle, cold and undigested, in my stomach. I hadn’t seen Shelby in months now, and I had hoped, optimistically, that she’d abandoned the woods. It wasn’t unheard of for wolves to leave their packs. Most packs had a scapegoat, picked on and driven away from food, pushed outside of the pack hierarchy, and they’d often travel hundreds of miles to start another pack, somewhere far away from their tormentors.

Once upon a time, Salem, an older wolf I’d never known as a human, had been the omega of the Boundary Wood pack. But I had seen enough of Shelby when I was clawing my way through the meningitis to know that she had fallen low in Paul’s eyes and thus low in the pack. It was as if he knew, somehow, what she had done to me and Grace.

“Bad news how?” Cole asked.

I didn’t want to tell him. To talk about Shelby was to take the memories of her out of the boxes I’d carefully put them away in, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that. I said warily, “Shelby prefers being a wolf. She … had a bad childhood, somewhere, and she isn’t quite right.” As soon as I said the words, I hated them, because it was the same thing that Grace’s mom had just said about me.

Cole grunted. “Just the way Beck likes them.” He turned away and began to walk, vaguely following the trail Shelby had left behind, and after a moment, I did, too, though I was lost in my thoughts.

I remembered Beck bringing Shelby home. Telling us all to give her time, give her space, give her something that she needed but we couldn’t offer. Months had gone by, then, a warm day, like this. Beck had said, Could you go see what Shelby’s gotten up to? He didn’t really think she was up to something, or he would’ve gone himself.

I’d found her outside, crouched by the driveway. She started when she heard me approach, but when she saw it was me, she turned back around, unconcerned. I was like air to her: neither good nor bad. Just there. So she didn’t react when I walked directly up to where she crouched, her white-blond hair hiding her face.

She had a pencil in her hand, and she was using it to scry in bits of innards, stretching loops of intestines straight with the tip of the pencil. They looked like worms. There was some metallic green and oily-looking organ nestled among them. At the other end of the guts, a few inches away, a starling jerked and bicycled its legs, upright on its chest and then its side, held fast to Shelby’s pencil by the grip of its own intestines.

“This is what we do to them, when we eat them,” Shelby had said. I remember just standing there, trying to hear any trace of emotion in her voice. She pointed to the bird’s mangled chest cavity with another pencil she held in her other hand. I remembered that it was one of my pencils, from my room. Batman. Freshly sharpened. The idea of her in my room felt more real and horrifying than the tortured animal kicking up dust on the edge of the concrete drive.

“Did you do that?” I asked. I knew she had.

As if I hadn’t spoken, Shelby said, “This is where its brain is. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.”

She pointed to the starling’s eye. I could see the tip of the pencil resting directly on the shining black surface and something inside me clenched, bracing itself. The starling lay perfectly still. Its pulse was visible in its exposed innards.

“No —” I said.

Shelby stuck my Batman pencil through the starling’s eye. She smiled at it, a faraway smile that had nothing to do with joy. Her gaze shifted in my direction though she didn’t turn her head.

I stood there, my heart racing as if I was the one who’d been attacked. My breath came in uneven, sick jerks. Looking at Shelby and the starling, black and white and red, it was hard to remember what happiness felt like.

I had never told Beck.

Shame made me a prisoner. I hadn’t stopped her. It had been my pencil. And in penance, I never forgot that image. I carried it with me, and it was a thousand times heavier than the weight of that little bird’s body.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

I wished Shelby was dead. I wished that this scent, the one that both Cole and I were following, was just a phantom of her, a relic instead of a promise. Once upon a time, it would have been good enough for her to just leave the woods in search of another pack, but I was not that Sam anymore. Now, I hoped she was someplace she could never return from.

But the scent of her, lingering in the damp underbrush, was too strong. She was alive. She’d been here. Recently.

I stopped then, listening.

“Cole,” I said.

He stopped immediately, something in my voice warning him. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the grumbling, alive smell of the woods waking up as they warmed. Birds shouting from tree to tree. Far away, outside the woods, a dog barking, sounding like a yodel. And then — a distant, faint, anxious sound. If we hadn’t stopped, the noise of our feet would’ve obliterated it. But now, clearly, I heard the whistling, whimpering sound of a wolf in distress.