Forever

“No,” Rachel said. “But I’m a fast learner.”

I gave her a look. “Rachel.”

“Grace, you have to admit this is pretty weird. Say it. You disappearing from the hospital and Olivia is — and Sam suddenly shows up with you and, well, the freaky hallucinogenic mushrooms are looking more and more realistic, especially when you start talking about wolves. Because next step is for Isabel Culpeper to show up saying that everybody’s going to be abducted by aliens and I have to tell you, I can’t take that in my fragile emotional state. I think that —”

I sighed. “Rachel.”

“Fine,” she said. She threw her bag in the backseat and climbed in after.

As we headed toward Beck’s house, Sam in the driver’s seat, me beside him, Rachel in the backseat, I felt suddenly and inexplicably homesick, somehow frantic with the thought of my lost life. I couldn’t think what I was so desperately missing — surely not my parents, who hadn’t been around enough to be missed — until I realized that the emotion was being triggered by the wildly sweet strawberry scent of Rachel’s shampoo. And that I missed. Afternoons and evenings with Rachel, holed up in her room or taking over my parents’ kitchen or following Olivia on one of her photography treks. I wasn’t homesick, not really, because that required a home. I was personsick. Lifesick.

I turned to the backseat and stretched out my hand to Rachel, my fingers not quite long enough to reach her. She didn’t say anything, just took my hand and clutched it tightly. We rode like that for the rest of the trip, me half-twisted and her leaning forward a little, our hands resting on the back of my seat. Sam didn’t say anything, either, except for Oh, sorry when he shifted gears too soon and the car shuddered a bit.

Later, when we got back to the house, I told her everything, the whole story, from the moment the wolves dragged me from the swing to the day I’d almost died in my own blood. And everything in between. Sam looked more nervous than I’d ever seen him, but I wasn’t worried. From the moment that I held Rachel’s hand in the car, I’d known that in this strange new life, Rachel was one of the things I was going to get to keep.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

ISABEL

I was against felonies when a misdemeanor would do. Using the school’s lab would have constituted breaking and entering. Using one of the spare keys for my mother’s office was merely unlawful entry. It was just common sense. I’d parked my SUV in the grocery store parking lot across the road so that anyone driving by the clinic would see nothing out of the ordinary. I would have made an excellent criminal. Maybe I still would. I was young yet and it was possible med school wouldn’t work out.

“Do not break anything,” I told Cole as I gestured for him to go in before me. Possibly a futile plea, where Cole St. Clair was involved.

Cole stalked down the hallway, eyeing the posters on the walls. The low-income clinic was a part-time project for my mother, who also put in time with the local hospital. When my mother had first opened the clinic, the walls had been decorated with art that she didn’t have room for in the house or had gotten tired of. She wanted the clinic to seem homelike, she had said when we first came to Mercy Falls. After Jack had died, she’d given away a lot of art from home, and once she got over that, she’d taken the pieces from the clinic walls to replace them. Now the clinic was generally decorated with a decor I liked to call late pharmaceutical period.

“All the way at the end, to the right,” I said. “Not that. That’s the bathroom.”

The afternoon light was fading as I locked the door behind me, but it didn’t matter. When I turned on the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead, it became clinic time, where all times are the same. I’d always told Mom that if she really wanted the clinic to feel “homelike,” real lightbulbs would go a long way toward making it feel like a house instead of a Wal-Mart.

Cole had already disappeared into my mother’s tiny lab room, and I slowly trailed after. I’d cut class to take the package to Cole, but I hadn’t slept in — I’d been up and running. Then I’d helped Cole set up his incredibly industrial-looking pit trap, taking care not to fall into the sinkhole he said they’d pulled Grace out of. And now back here, waiting until the clinic was closed in order to come back in, telling my parents I was going to a student council meeting. I was ready to take a break. We hadn’t had much food to speak of and I was feeling vaguely martyred for the whole werewolf cause. I paused in the reception area to open the tiny fridge under the counter. I grabbed two juices and carried them back with me. Juice was better than nothing.

In the lab room, Cole was already settled backward on a chair and leaning over the counter where the microscope was. He held one of his hands up in the air, pointing toward the ceiling. It only took me a moment to realize that he’d pricked his finger and was holding his hand up to slow the bleeding.

“Do you want, like, a Band-Aid, or are you fine doing the Statue of Liberty thing?” I asked. I put the juice next to him and then, on second thought, screwed off the lid and held the bottle to his mouth so he could get a drink. He waved his bloody finger in a sort of thank-you.

“I couldn’t find the Band-Aids,” Cole said. “Which is to mean, I didn’t look. Is this methanol? Oh, look, it is.”

I found him a Band-Aid and rolled another chair next to him. It didn’t take much rolling. The lab room was really the storage room, drawers and shelves stuffed with prescription drug samples and trials, boxes of cotton balls and swabs and tongue depressors, bottles of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. A urinalysis machine, microscope, blood tube rotaror. There wasn’t much room for two chairs and two bodies in them.

Cole had smeared some of his blood on a glass slide and was peering at it through the microscope.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer; his eyebrows were pulled down close to his eyes in an expression of such deep thought that I suspected he hadn’t even heard me. I sort of liked seeing him like that, not performing, just … being Cole, as hard as he could. He didn’t resist as I took his hand and swabbed off the blood.

“For crying out loud,” I said, “what did you use to open yourself up, a butter knife?” I applied a Band-Aid and released his hand. He immediately used it to adjust the microscope.

The silence seemed to last forever, but it was probably only a minute. Cole sat back from the microscope, not looking at me. He laughed, a short, breathy laugh of disbelief, his hands tented in front of him, fingertips pressed together. He rested his fingers on his lips.