Forever

And here, in Beck’s library, surrounded by books, were Beck’s things that had been absent from his room, his suitcase and his shoes, sitting on the ottoman of his reading chair. His tie was folded neatly by them and beside them both was a CD with tangled branches on the cover. The title was scrawled in the only available white space: Still Waking Up.

All around me was Beck, living inside all of these books that he had read. He inhabited every page. He was every hero, every villain, every victim and every aggressor. He was the beginning and end of everything.

Die letzte aller Türen

Doch nie hat man

an alle schon geklopft

(The last of all doors

But one has never

knocked on all the others)

This was the last good-bye. I turned off the light.

There was only one place left. I slowly climbed the stairs to the ground floor and then to the second floor. Walked down the hall to my room. Inside, my paper birds trembled on their strings, caught in the premonition of an earthquake. I could see each memory that the birds contained, images playing across their wings like a television screen, all of them singing bright songs that I had sung before. They were beautiful and terrified, jerking to be free.

“Bad news, Ringo,” said Cole. “We’re all going to die.”

I woke up to the sound of the telephone.

Adrenaline shot through my half-asleep body at the sudden noise, and the first clear thought I had, inexplicably, was Oh, no, not here. Half a moment later I realized the noise was just the telephone, and I couldn’t think why I had thought that. I picked up the receiver.

“Sam?” said Koenig.

He sounded very, very awake.

“I should have called earlier, but I was on midnights and I — it doesn’t matter.” Koenig took an audible breath. “The hunt’s been moved up.”

“It — what?” I thought perhaps I was still asleep, but my cranes hung perfectly still.

Koenig said, a little louder, “It’s tomorrow. Dawn. Five forty-seven A.M. The helicopter got freed up suddenly and they’ve moved it. Get up.”

He didn’t have to tell me. I felt like I would never sleep again.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

ISABEL

I wasn’t quite asleep when the phone rang.

It was a little after midnight, and I was trying to sleep mostly out of self-defense. Tensions were running high in the Culpeper household as the date of the hunt and the threat of California moved closer, and my parents were enjoying one of the screamathons that I’d been missing so sorely for the past few weeks. It sounded like my mother was winning — at least she’d roared more salient points than my father had in the last twenty minutes — but it also sounded like they had several more rounds to go.

So my bedroom door was shut and I had my earbuds in, making white noise with offensive lyrics. My room was a rose-and-white cocoon made less stark by the lack of sunlight. Surrounded by my stuff, it could be any day of any year since we’d moved here. I could go downstairs, down the hall, and yell at Jack for not letting my dog out while I was gone. I could call my friends back in California who still remembered me and hatch plots to return and make plans to tour college campuses close to their houses. That the room was so unchanged and that night could play such tricks on me was endearing and horrifying at the same time.

Anyway, I almost missed it when my cell phone rang.

Caller ID: BECK’S HOUSE.

“Hi,” I said.

“Guess what your ass**le father has done now?” Cole sounded a little out of breath.

I didn’t feel like answering. This wasn’t exactly how I’d hoped my next phone call with Cole would begin.

“Screwed us,” Cole said, not waiting for me to answer. “Over the hood of a foreign car. The hunt is happening at dawn. They’ve moved it.”

As if on cue, the landline rang from its base on my bed stand. I didn’t touch it, but even from here, I could see the caller ID: LANDY, MARSHALL. That meant that my dad and I were going to have the exact same conversation, basically, at the same time, with two different people.

The fighting downstairs had ceased. It was taking a long time for this to sink in.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Well, first I’m going to make Sam functional,” Cole said. “Grace shifted tonight and she’s in the woods, so he’s gone off the reservation.”

Now I was awake. I pulled out the single remaining earbud I still had in and sat up. “Grace is out there? That’s not acceptable.”

It was more than not acceptable. Grace versus Thomas Culpeper, Esquire, was not a battle that I wanted to ever see, because I knew how it would end.

“I know, princess,” Cole said tersely. “What I would like for you to do is to go to your father and tell him to get on the phone and make this stop.”

But I knew how that would end, too.

“That won’t work,” I replied. “This is bigger than him now.” “I. Don’t. Care,” Cole said, slowly and patiently, like I was a child. “You find that bastard and make him stop. I know you can.”

I could feel myself prickling at his tone. “Okay, first of all, you don’t tell me what to do. Secondly? All that will happen is I will go down there, make him completely pissed off at me for no reason, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, he’ll start to wonder why it is that I’m suddenly feeling so freaking friendly toward the wolves and maybe it will just open a can of worms that I will have to deal with for the rest of the year. And you know what he will say? It’s beyond him now. It’s time for you to do your thing.”

“My thing? My thing only worked if Grace was here to make it work. Without Grace, I have an emotionally unbalanced wolf and a Volkswagen.”

The house was stone quiet in comparison to the shouting before. I tried to imagine going down there and confronting my father about the hunt. It was too ludicrous to even contemplate.

“I’m not doing it, Cole.”

“You owe it to me to try.”

“Owe?” I laughed, harsh and short. For a moment, my mind skittered over every encounter we’d ever had, trying to think if there was any truth to what he’d said. I couldn’t think of anything. If anything, he owed me, big time. “Why do I owe you anything?”

Cole’s voice was completely level. “Your son of a bitch father killed Victor and threw him in front of my face.”

I felt my face getting hotter.

“I’m not him. I don’t owe you jack shit, Cole St. Clair. I might have considered going downstairs to talk to my dad before that, but now, screw you.”