Forever

But it wasn’t a bridge I would start across by myself. I didn’t know where we stood. I was good at waiting.

“Yes,” I said, instead of kissing her. “Yes, it was Tom Culpeper.”

Grace lay back down on my chest. “That’s crazy.”

“You’re Geoffrey Beck’s kid,” Tom Culpeper had observed. Even in the dim light, I had seen that his SUV was crusted with ice and sand and salt — snirt, Ulrik always called it, a combination of snow and dirt — and that the headlights cast a crooked path of light across me and the Escort. He had added, after some thought, “Sam, right? Looks like you need a hand.”

I remembered thinking at the time how relieving it was to hear my name said in such an ordinary voice, to wipe out the memory of how Beck had said it as he’d shifted.

“He helped me out,” I said. “He seemed different then, I guess. That must’ve been soon after they moved here.”

“Did he have Isabel with him?” Grace asked.

“I don’t remember Isabel.” I considered. “I try really hard not to think of him as evil, Grace. Because of Isabel. I don’t know what I would have thought of him, if not for the wolves.”

“If not for the wolves,” Grace said, “neither of us would’ve given him any thought at all.”

“This story was supposed to have bacon in it,” I admitted. “It was supposed to make you laugh.”

She sighed heavily, like the weight of the world had crushed the breath out of her, and I knew how she felt.

“That’s okay. Turn off the lights,” she replied, reaching down to tug the comforter over both of us where we lay. She smelled faintly like wolf, and I didn’t think she’d make it all the way through the night without shifting. “I’m ready for today to be over.”

Feeling far less sleepy than before, I dropped my arm off the side of the bed to pull the plug out of the wall. The room went dark and, after a moment, Grace whispered that she loved me, sounding a little sad. I wrapped my arms tightly around her shoulders, sorry that loving me was such a complicated thing.

Her breaths were already slowing as I whispered it back to her. But I didn’t sleep. I stayed awake, thinking of Tom Culpeper and Beck, how the truth of them seemed so buried inside. I kept seeing Culpeper walking across the snow toward me, his nose already red from the cold, perfectly willing to help a boy he didn’t know change a tire in the freezing evening. And between repeated flashes of that image, I kept seeing the wolves plunging out of the morning to shove my small body to the ground, to change my life forever.

Beck had done that. Beck had decided to take me. Long before my parents decided they didn’t want me, he had planned to take me. They had just made it easy for him.

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.

I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

In the middle of the night, Grace woke up, her eyes wide, her body shuddering. She said my name, just like Beck had said it all those years ago by the side of the road, and then, like Beck, she left me with nothing but an empty suit of clothing and one thousand unanswered questions.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ISABEL

Sam’s cell phone called me at seven A.M. the next morning. Normally I would’ve been getting ready for school at seven A.M., but it was a weekend, which meant that instead I was lying on my bed, pulling on my running shoes. I ran because I was vain and it gave me great legs.

I flipped open the phone. “Hello?” I wasn’t sure what I expected.

“I knew it,” Cole said. “I knew you’d pick up the phone if you thought it was Sam.”

“Oh my God. Are you for real?”

“I am for very real. Can I come inside?”

I jumped off my bed and went to the window, peering around. I could just see the edge of a rather ugly station wagon at the end of the driveway.

“Is that you in that perv-mobile?”

“It smells,” Cole said. “I would invite you to come out here and talk to me in the privacy of the car, but it’s pretty powerful stuff, whatever is making it smell.”

“What do you want, Cole?”

“Your credit card. I need to order a fishing net, some hardware, and a couple of tranquilizers that I swear are totally over-the-counter. Also, I need them overnighted.”

“Tell me you’re just trying to be funny.”

“I told Sam I could catch Beck. I’m going to build a pit trap using the pit Grace helpfully found by falling into it and bait it with Beck’s favorite food, which he helpfully recorded in his journal while telling an anecdote about a kitchen fire.”

“You are trying to be funny. Because otherwise, this sounds like an insane person on the telephone.”

“Scent is the strongest tie to memory.”

I sighed and lay back down on my bed, phone still at my ear. “What does this have to do with keeping you all from being killed by my father?”

There was a pause. “Beck moved the wolves once before. I want to ask him about it.”

“And a fishing net, some hardware, and drugs will help you to do that?”

“If not, it’s all the makings of a very good time.”

I stared at the ceiling. Long ago, Jack had thrown Silly Putty at the place where the ceiling tipped to meet the roof-slanted wall, and it still stuck there.

I sighed. “Fine, Cole, fine. I’ll meet you at the side door, by the little stairs you went up before. Park that thing someplace my parents won’t see when they wake up. And don’t be loud.”

“I’m never loud,” Cole said, and the phone went silent in my hand at the same time my bedroom door opened.

Still lying on my back, I looked upside down to the door and was unsurprised to see Cole letting himself in. He shut the door carefully behind him. He was wearing cargo pants and a plain black T-shirt. He looked famous, but I was beginning to realize that was a function of the way he stood, not of what he wore. In my room, which was all floating, light fabrics and pillows that shone and mirrors that smiled back at you, Cole looked out of place, but I was beginning to figure out that that, too, was a function of how he was, not where he was.