Forever

Cole, looking a bit more enthusiastic than the job called for, rummaged around beneath the car with the broomstick again. Duly terrified by this onslaught, the raccoon bolted back to the watering can. The smell of its fear was strong as the rank scent of its coat, and vaguely contagious.

“This,” Cole said, the broomstick braced on the ground beside him, looking like Moses in sweatpants, “is the reason raccoons don’t take over the planet.”

“This,” I said, “is the reason we keep getting shot at.”

Grace looked down at the raccoon where it was huddled in the corner. Her expression was pitying. “No complicated logic.”

“No spatial sense,” I said. “Wolves have plenty of complicated logic. Just no human logic. No spatial sense. No sense of time. No sense of boundaries. Boundary Wood is too small for us.”

“So we move the wolves someplace better,” Grace said. “Someplace with a better human-to-acre ratio. Someplace with fewer Tom Culpepers.”

“There are always Tom Culpepers,” I said at the same time that Cole said it, and Grace smiled ruefully at both of us.

“It would have to be pretty remote,” I said. “And it couldn’t be private property, unless it was ours, and I don’t think we’re that rich. And it couldn’t have existing wolves already, or there’s a good chance they’d kill a lot of us in the beginning. And there would have to be prey there, or we’d just die of starvation anyway. Plus, I’m not sure how you’d catch twenty-odd wolves. Cole’s been trying and he’s not had much luck even getting one.”

Grace had her stubborn face on, which meant she was losing her sense of humor as well. “Better idea?”

I shrugged.

Cole scratched his bare chest with the end of the broomstick and said, “Well, you know, they’ve been moved before.”

He had both Grace’s and my undivided attention.

Cole said, tone lazy, infinitely used to slowly doling out things other people wanted to hear, “Beck’s journal starts when he’s a wolf. But the journal doesn’t start in Minnesota.”

“Okay,” Grace said, “I’ll bite. Where?”

Cole pointed the broomstick at the license plate above the door, BECK 89. “Then the real wolf population started to come back and, like Ringo here said, started killing the part-time wolves, and he decided their only option was to move.”

I felt an odd sense of betrayal. It wasn’t that Beck had ever lied to me about where he’d come from — I was sure I’d never asked him directly if he’d always been here in Minnesota. And it wasn’t like that license plate wasn’t in plain sight. It was just — Wyoming. Cole, benevolent interloper that he was, knew things about Beck that I didn’t. Part of me said it was because Cole had the balls to read Beck’s journal. But another part of me said that I shouldn’t have had to.

“So does it say how he did it?” I asked.

Cole gave me an odd look. “A little.”

“A little how?”

“Only said that Hannah helped them a lot.”

“I’ve never heard of Hannah,” I said. I was aware that I sounded wary.

“You wouldn’t have,” Cole said. Again he had that funny expression. “Beck said that she hadn’t been a wolf very long, but she couldn’t seem to stay human as long as the others. She stopped shifting that year after they moved. He said she seemed more capable of holding human thoughts when she was a wolf than the others. Not much. But remembered faces and returned to places she’d been as a human, but as a wolf.”

Now I knew why he was looking at me. Grace was looking at me, too. I looked away. “Let’s get this raccoon out of here.”

We stood there in silence for a few moments, a little trippy with sleep loss, until I realized that I heard movement from closer to me. I hesitated for a moment, my head cocked, listening to identify the source.

“Oh, hey,” I noted. Crouched behind a plastic garbage can, right beside me, was a second, larger raccoon, looking up at me with leery eyes. Far better at hiding than the first one, obviously, as I had been completely unaware of its presence. Grace craned her neck, trying to see over the car what I was looking at.

I didn’t have anything in my hands but my hands, so that’s what I used. I reached down and took the handle of the garbage can. And very slowly, I pushed it toward the wall, forcing the raccoon out the other side.

Instantly, the raccoon tore along the wall and straight out the door into the night. No pause. Just straight out the garage door.

“Two of them?” Grace asked. “Th —” She stopped as the first raccoon, inspired by the success of the escaping raccoon, bolted out after it, no detours to watering cans along the way.

“Pf,” she said. “As long as there’s not a third. Now it figures out the concept of the door.”

I headed to the garage door to close it, but as I did, I caught a glimpse of Cole. He was staring out after the raccoons, his eyebrows pulled together in a face that, for once, wasn’t arranged to best affect the viewer.

Grace started to speak and then followed my gaze to Cole. She fell quiet.

For a full minute, we were silent. In the distance, the wolves had begun to howl, and the hair on my neck was crawling.

“There’s our answer,” Cole said. “That’s what Hannah did. That’s how we get the wolves out of the woods.” He turned to look at me. “One of us has to lead them out.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

GRACE

It felt like camp when I woke up in the morning.

When I was thirteen, my grandmother had paid for me to go to summer camp for two weeks. Camp Blue Sky for Girls. I’d loved it — two weeks with every moment planned out, every day accounted for, ready-made purpose printed out on colored 8.5” × 11” fliers poked in our cubby holes each morning. It was the opposite of life with my parents, who laughed at the idea of schedules. It was fantastic and the first time I realized that there might be other right ways to happiness than the one prescribed by my parents. But the thing about camp was that it wasn’t home. My toothbrush was grubby from being poked into the small pocket of my backpack by a mother who forgot to buy plastic baggies before I left. The bunk bed crushed my shoulder uncomfortably when I tried to sleep. Dinner was good but salty and just a little too far away from lunch, and unlike at home, I couldn’t just go to the kitchen and get some pretzels. It was fun and different and just that tiny bit wrong that made it disconcerting.