Forever

I thought about Grace’s genuine smile. About Sam’s trust in my theory. About knowing that Grace had lived because of me. There was something vaguely glorious about having a purpose again.

I put my bloody palm to my mouth and sucked on the cut. Then I leaned over and picked all the pieces back up again.

Voicemail #20: “I wish you’d answer.”

CHAPTER FIVE

GRACE

I watched him.

I lay in the damp underbrush, my tail tucked close to me, sore and wary, but I couldn’t seem to leave him behind. The light crept lower, gilding the bottom of the leaves around me, but still, he remained. His shouts and the ferocity of my fascination made me shiver. I clamped my chin onto my front paws, laid my ears back against my head. The breeze carried his scent to me. I knew it. Everything in me knew it.

I wanted to be found.

I needed to bolt.

His voice moved far away and then closer and then far again. At times the boy was so far I almost couldn’t hear him. I half rose, thinking of following. Then the birds would grow quieter as he approached again and I would hurriedly crouch back into the leaves that hid me. Each pass was wider and wider, the space between his coming and going longer. And I only grew more anxious.

Could I follow him?

He came back again, after a long period of almost quiet. This time, the boy was so close that I could see him from where I lay, hidden and motionless. I thought, for a moment, that he saw me, but his expression stayed focused on some point beyond me. The shape of his eyes made my stomach turn uncertainly. Something inside me tugged and pulled, aching once again. He cupped his hands around his mouth, called into the woods.

If I stood, he would see me for certain. The force of wanting to be seen, of wanting to approach him, made me whine under my breath. I almost knew what he wanted. I almost knew —

“Grace?”

The word pierced me.

The boy still didn’t see me. He’d just tossed his voice out into the emptiness, waiting for a reply.

I was too afraid. Instincts pinned me to the ground. Grace. The word echoed inside me, losing meaning with each repetition.

He turned, head bowed, and picked his way slowly away from me, toward the slanted light that marked the edge of the woods. Something like panic rose up inside me. Grace. I was losing the shape of the word. I was losing something. I was lost. I —

I stood up. If he turned, I was unmistakable now, a dark gray wolf against the black trees. I needed him to stay. If he stayed, maybe it would ease this terrible feeling inside me. The force of standing there, in plain sight, so close to him, made my legs quiver beneath me.

All he had to do was turn around.

But he didn’t. He just kept walking, carrying the something that I’d lost with him, carrying the meaning of that word — Grace — never knowing how close he’d been.

And I remained, silently watching him leave me behind.

CHAPTER SIX

SAM

I lived in a war zone.

When I pulled into the driveway, the music slapped its hands against the car windows. The air outside the house thumped with a booming bass line; the entire building was a speaker. The closest neighbors were acres away, so they were spared the symptoms of the disease that was Cole St. Clair. Cole’s very being was so big that it couldn’t be contained by four walls. It bled out the windows, crashed out of the stereo, shouted out suddenly in the middle of the night. When you took away the stage, you still had the rock star.

Since he’d come to live in Beck’s house — no, my house — Cole had terraformed it into an alien landscape. It was as if he couldn’t help destroying things; chaos was a side effect to his very presence. He spread every single CD case in the house over the living room floor, left the television turned to infomercials, burned something sticky into the bottom of a skillet and then abandoned it on the stove top. The floorboards in the downstairs hallway were lined with deep dimples and claw marks that led from Cole’s room to the bathroom and back again, a lupine alphabet. He’d inexplicably take every glass out of the cupboard and organize them by size on the counter, leaving all the cabinet doors hanging open, or watch a dozen old ’80s movies halfway through and leave the cassettes unrewound on the floor in front of the VCR he’d excavated from somewhere in the basement.

I made the mistake of taking it personally, the first time I came home to the mess. It took me weeks to realize that it wasn’t about me. It was about him. For Cole, it was always about him.

I got out of the Volkswagen and headed toward the house. I wasn’t planning on being here long enough to worry about Cole’s music. I had a very specific list of items to retrieve before I went back out again. Flashlight. Benadryl. The wire crate from the garage. I’d stop by the store to get some ground beef to put the drugs in.

I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the basement. It was just — there were so many ways to effortlessly die as a wolf, just one moment too long on a highway, a few days without a successful hunt, one paw too far into the backyard of a drunk redneck with a rifle.

I could feel that I was going to lose her.

I couldn’t go another night with that in my head.

When I opened the back door, the bass line resolved itself into music. The singer, voice distorted by volume, shouted to me: “Suffocate suffocate suffocate.” The timbre of the voice seemed familiar, and all at once I realized that this was NARKOTIKA, played loud enough for me to mistake the throbbing electronic backbeat for my heartbeat. My breastbone hummed with it.

I didn’t bother to call out for him; he wouldn’t be able to hear me. The lights he’d left on laid down a history of his comings and goings: through the kitchen, down the hall to his room, the downstairs bathroom, and into the living room where the sound system was. I momentarily considered tracking him down, but I didn’t have time to hunt for him as well as Grace. I found a flashlight in the cabinet by the fridge and a banana from the island, and headed toward the hall. I promptly tripped over Cole’s shoes, caked in mud, lying haphazardly in the doorway from the kitchen to the hall. I saw now that the kitchen floor was covered with dirt, the dull yellow lights illuminating where Cole’s pacing had painted an ouroboros of filthy footprints in front of the cabinets.

I rubbed a hand through my hair. I thought of a swearword but didn’t say it. What would Beck have done with Cole?

I was reminded, suddenly, of the dog that Ulrik had brought home from work once, a mostly grown Rottweiler inexplicably named Chauffeur. It weighed as much as I did, was a bit mangy around the hips, and sported a very friendly disposition. Ulrik was all smiles, talking about guard dogs and Schutzhund and how I would grow to love Chauffeur like a brother. Within an hour of its arrival, Chauffeur ate four pounds of ground beef, chewed the cover off a biography of Margaret Thatcher — I think it ate most of the first chapter as well — and left a steaming pile of crap on the couch. Beck said, “Get that damn langolier out of here.”