Linger

“Let’s go home,” I said.

“This is your home,” Grace said, with a playful smile. “You can’t fool me.”

But I stood up, tugging both her hands to pull her after me.

“I want to get home before your parents do,” I said. “They’ve been getting home really early.”

“Let’s elope,” Grace said lightly, bending to collect our leftover sandwiches and drinks. I held out the bag so that she could toss everything inside, and watched as she retrieved the sandwich-paper crane before we headed down the stairs.

Hand in hand, we retreated through the now-dark store and out back, where Grace’s white Mazda was parked. When she got into the driver’s seat, I lifted my palm to my nose, trying to catch a whiff of the scent from before. I couldn’t smell it, but the wolf in me couldn’t ignore the memory of it in that kiss.

It was like a low voice whispering in a foreign language, breathing a secret that I couldn’t understand.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

• SAM •

Something woke me.

Surrounded by the dull, familiar darkness of Grace’s bedroom, I wasn’t sure what it was. There was no sound outside, and the rest of the house lay in the half-aware silence of night. Grace, too, was quiet, rolled away from me. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose against the back of her soapscented neck. The tiny blond hairs at her nape tickled my nostrils. I jerked my face away from them and Grace sighed in her sleep, curling her back tighter against the shape of my body as she did. I should’ve slept, too—I had inventory work at the store early the next day—but something in my subconscious hummed with an uneasy watchfulness. So I lay against her, close as two spoons in a drawer, until her skin was too hot to be comfortable.

I slid a few inches away, keeping a hand on her side. Normally, the soft up-and-down of her ribs under my palm lulled me to sleep when nothing else would. But not tonight.

Tonight, I couldn’t stop remembering what it had felt like when I’d been just about to shift. The way the cold had crawled along my skin, trailing goose bumps behind it. The turn, turn, turn of my stomach, aching nausea unfurling. The slow sunburst of pain up my spine as it stretched according to memories of another shape. My thoughts slipping away from me, crushed and reformed to fit my winter skull.

Sleep evaded me, just out of my grasp. My instincts prickled relentlessly, urging me to alertness. The darkness pressed against my eyes while the wolf inside me sang something is not right.

Outside, the wolves began to howl.

• GRACE •

I was too hot. The sheets stuck to my damp calves; I tasted sweat at the corner of my lips. As the wolves howled, my skin tingled with the heat, a hundred tiny needle pricks all over my face and hands. Everything felt painful: the blanket’s uncomfortable weight on me, Sam’s cold hand on my hip, the wailing, high cries of the wolves outside, the memory of Sam’s fingers pressed into his temples, the shape of my skin on my body.

I was asleep; I was dreaming. Or I was awake, coming out of a dream. I couldn’t decide.

In my mind, I saw all the people I’d ever seen shift into wolves: Sam, mournful and agonized, Beck, strong and controlled, Jack, savage and painful, Olivia, swift and easy. They all observed me from the woods, dozens of eyes watching me: the outsider, the one who didn’t change.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my sandpaper mouth. I wanted to lift my face from my damp pillow, but it felt like too much trouble. I waited restlessly for sleep, but my eyes hurt too much to close.

If I hadn’t been cured, I wondered, what would my shift have been like? What sort of wolf would I have been? Looking at my hands, I imagined them dark gray, banded with white and black. I felt the weight of a ruff hanging on my shoulders, felt the nausea kick in my gut.

For a single, brilliant moment, I felt nothing but the cold air of my room on my skin and heard nothing but Sam breathing beside me. But then the wolves began to howl again, and my body shuddered with a sensation that was both new and somehow familiar.

I was going to shift.

I choked on the wolf rising up inside me, pressing against the lining of my stomach, clawing inside my skin, trying to peel me inside out.

I wanted it, and my muscles burned and groaned.

Pain split me

I had no voice

I was on fire.

I sprang from the bed, shaking off my skin.

• SAM •

I jerked awake, stung by Grace’s scream. She was one hundred million degrees, close enough to burn me but too far away for me to reach.

“Grace!” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

The sheets swept off my body as she rolled away from me, crying out again. In the dim light, I could only see her shoulder, and I reached out for it, cupping her arm with my hand. She was drenched with sweat, and her skin trembled beneath my palm, an unstable, unfamiliar flutter.

“Grace, wake up! Are you okay?” My heart was pounding so loud that it felt like I wouldn’t hear her even if she did answer.

She thrashed beneath my touch and then bolted upright, eyes wild, body volatile and quivering. I didn’t know her.

“Grace, talk to me,” I whispered, though whispering seemed pointless in light of her earlier scream.

Grace stared at her hands with a kind of wonder. I laid the back of my hand on her forehead; she was appallingly hot, hotter than I thought anyone could be. I laid my palms on both sides of her neck, and she shuddered as if they were ice.

“I think you’re sick,” I said, my own stomach turning over. “You have a fever.”

She spread her fingers wide and studied her shaking hands. “I dreamed—I dreamed I shifted. I thought I—”

She suddenly let out a terrible wail and curled away from me, clutching her arms around her stomach.

I didn’t know what to do.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. “I’m getting you some Tylenol or something. In the bathroom?”

She just whimpered. It was terrifying.

I leaned forward to see her face, and that’s when I smelled it.

She stank of wolf.

Wolf, wolf, wolf.

From Grace.

The scent of wolf.

It wasn’t possible. It had to be me. I prayed it was me.

I turned my face into my own shoulder, inhaled. Lifted my hand to my nose, the one that had just touched her forehead.

Wolf.

My heart stopped.

And then the door came open and light flooded in from the hall.

“Grace?” Her father’s voice. The bedroom light came on, and his eyes found me sitting next to her. “Sam?”