Linger

I ignored his expression and said, “I watched Ulrik’s seeds every day for weeks, waiting for any little bit of green in the dirt, anything to tell me that there was life waiting to happen. And that’s it. That’s the difficult part,” I told Cole. “I am standing here in the shed, and I’m waiting to see if my seeds are going to poke out of the dirt. I don’t know if it’s too early to look for signs of life or if, this time, winter has claimed my family for good.”

Cole stared at me. The contempt was gone from his expression, but he didn’t say anything. His face held something empty, something I didn’t know how to react to, so I didn’t say anything, either.

There was no point in staying any longer. I did the last step while Cole hung back, checking the food bins to make sure no insects had gotten into them. I left my fingers hooked on the edge of the plastic bin for a moment as I listened. I didn’t know what I was listening for; there was only silence and more silence and more silence again. Even the cardinal outside the still-open door had fallen quiet.

Pretending Cole wasn’t there, I strained my ears like I had when I was a wolf, attempting to create a map of all the creatures in the nearby woods and the sounds that they made. But I heard nothing.

Somewhere, there were wolves in these woods, but they were invisible to me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

• COLE •

I was losing my grip on my human body, and I was glad.

Sam made me uncomfortable. I had a couple of different personas that pretty much worked across the board for everyone I had ever met, but none of them seemed right for him. He was painfully, annoyingly earnest, and how was I supposed to respond to that?

So I was relieved when we got back from the shed and he announced that he was going on a drive.

“I’d ask if you wanted to come,” Sam said, “but you’re going to change soon.”

He didn’t say how he came to this conclusion, but his nostrils pinched a bit, like he could smell me. A few moments later, the diesel engine of his Volkswagen thrummed noisily as it pulled out of the driveway, leaving me alone in a house that changed moods with the time of day. The afternoon got cloudy and cold, and suddenly, the house was no longer a comforting den but a foreboding maze of graying rooms, something out of a fever dream. Likewise, my body wasn’t firmly human—but it wasn’t wolf, either. Instead it was a strange, middle territory—human body, wolf brain. Human memories seen through wolf eyes. At first I paced the halls, the walls pressing in, not really believing Sam’s diagnosis. When I finally felt a hint of the shift in the creep of my nerves, I stood at the open back door and waited for the cold to take me. But I wasn’t there yet. So I shut the door and lay on my borrowed bed, feeling the gnaw of nausea and the crawl of my skin.

Through the discomfort, I was intensely relieved.

I had begun to think that I wasn’t going to change back into a wolf.

But this miserable in-between—I got up, went to the back door again, stood in the frigid wind. I gave up after about ten minutes and retreated back to the couch, curling around the turmoil of my stomach. My mind darted through the gray halls, though my body stayed still. In my head, I walked down the hall, through unfamiliar rooms in shades of black and white. I felt Isabel’s collarbone under my hand, saw my skin losing its color as I became a wolf, felt the microphone in my fist, heard my father’s voice, saw him facing me across the dining room table.

No. Anywhere but home. I would let my memories take me anywhere but there.

Now I was at the photo studio with the rest of NARKOTIKA. It was our first big magazine spread. Well, really it was mine. The theme was “Under-18 Success Stories,” and I was the poster child. The rest of NARKOTIKA was just there as supporting cast.

They weren’t shooting us in the studio proper; instead the photographer and his assistant had taken us into the stairwell of the old building and were trying to capture the mood of the band’s music by draping us over the railings and standing us on different stairs. The stairwell smelled like someone else’s lunch—fake bacon bits and salad dressing you’d never order and some mysterious spice that might have been old foot.

I was coming off a high. It wasn’t my first one, but it was pretty damn close. These brand-new highs pushed me into a humming flight of euphoria that still left me feeling a little guilty afterward. I had just written one of my best songs ever—“Break My Face (and Sell the Pieces),” destined to be my best-selling single—and I was in a great mood. I would’ve been in an even better mood if I hadn’t been there, because I wanted to be smelling the outside air, thick with exhaust fumes and restaurant smells and every thrilling city scent that told me I was somebody.

“Cole. Cole. Hey, slick. Could you stand still for me? Stand next to Jeremy for a second and look down over here. Jeremy, you look at him,” the photographer said. He was a paunchy, middle-aged guy, with an unevenly cut goatee that was going to bother me all day. His assistant was a twenty-something redheaded girl who had already confessed her love for me and thus became uninteresting. At seventeen, I hadn’t yet discovered that a sardonic smile could make girls take their shirts off.

“I haven’t stopped,” Jeremy said. He sounded half-asleep. He always sounded half-asleep. Victor, on the other side of Jeremy, was smiling down at the ground just like the photographer had told him to.

I wasn’t feeling the shot. How was shooting us looking over a balcony like some freaking Beatles album cover going to fit NARKOTIKA’s sound? So I shook my head and spit off the balcony and the photographer’s flash went off and he and his assistant stared at the viewfinder and looked annoyed. Another flash. Another annoyed look. The photographer came to the landing and stood six stairs down from us. His voice was cajoling. “Okay, Cole, how about something with some life in it? You know, give me a smile. Imagine your best memory. Give me a smile you’d give your mom.”

I raised an eyebrow and wondered if he was for real.

The photographer seemed to have a flash of insight, because his voice raised as he said, “Imagine you’re onstage—”

“You want life?” I asked. “ ‘Cause this isn’t it. Life is unexpected. Life is about risk. That’s what NARKOTIKA is, not some damn Boy Scout family picture. It’s—”

And I leaped at him. I flew off the stairs, my arms spread out on either side, and I saw panic cross his face just as his assistant jerked her camera up and the flash blinded me.