Linger

“Is this the first time you’ve shifted back?” he asked Victor.

Victor nodded. “That I can remember, anyway.” He stared at me then, and I was very aware of my human body. At how I was just standing there, not in pain, not a wolf, just standing there.

Sam went on, like the whole thing was just a walk in the park, perfectly normal, “Are you hungry?”

“I—” Victor started. “Wait. I’m s—”

And he slid back to a wolf.

I could tell from the shock on Sam’s face and the way he pressed a finger to one of his eyebrows that this wasn’t normal, which made me feel a little better about finding the entire situation completely messed up. Victor the wolf stood there, eyeing the doorway and me and Sam, ears pricked and posture stiff.

I stared at Victor, remembering sitting in the hotel room after I’d met Beck, remembered saying, You ready for the next big thing, Vic?

“Cole,” Sam said, not looking away from him. “How many times? How long have you been here?”

I shrugged, trying to look casual about it. “A half hour. He’s been going back and forth the entire time. Is this normal?”

“No,” Sam said emphatically, still looking at the wolf, who had crouched down close to the floor, staring back at him. “No, this isn’t normal. If it’s warm enough for him to stay human, he should be able to stay human for longer. Not this—I mean…” He trailed off as the wolf stood back up again.

Sam moved his knees away from Victor, in case he wanted to bolt, but suddenly Victor’s ears flagged, and he began to tremble again. We both turned our faces away until he had changed into a human and had time to pull a blanket back over himself.

Victor groaned, lightly, and pressed his forehead into his hand.

Sam turned back around. “Does it hurt?”

“Ugh. Not a lot.” He paused, shrugged his shoulders up by his ears, and kept them there. “God, I’ve been doing this all day. I just want to know when it will stop.” He wouldn’t look at me; his truthfulness was for Sam.

Sam said, “I wish I had an answer for you, Victor. Something is keeping you from staying in one form, and I don’t know what it is.”

Victor asked, “Is this the best it gets? I mean, I’m caught, right? This is what I get for listening to you, Cole. I should’ve figured out a long time ago that this is always how it goes.”

But he still wasn’t looking at me.

I remembered that day back in the hotel. Victor was crashing badly from one of his highs. These new lows of his were so low that even I, in my studied disinterest, could see that one day he wouldn’t be able to climb back out of them. I’d been trying to help him when I convinced him to become a wolf with me. It wasn’t entirely selfish. It wasn’t just because I didn’t want to try it alone.

If Sam hadn’t been around, I would’ve told Victor that.

Sam knocked Victor’s shoulder with a fist. “Hey. It’s different when you’re new. Everybody starts out unstable, and then we even out. Yeah, it’s crap now, and you’re taking crap to a whole new level, but when it gets really warm, this’ll be behind you.”

Victor looked bleakly at Sam, a face I’d seen a million times before because I had created it. Finally, he looked at me. “This should be you, you bastard,” he said, and then he uncurled into a wolf again.

Sam threw up his hands, his palms open like an entreaty, and said, utterly frustrated, “How—how—how…” I realized how carefully he had been controlling his features and voice. It made my mind twist, almost as much as seeing Victor shift, to hear Sam go from oozing calm to being a hot mess. It meant that Sam had been perfectly capable of presenting a benevolent mask to me all along, but that he had chosen not to. Somehow it changed the entire way I thought of him.

Maybe that’s what made me speak up. “Something is over-riding the temperature,” I said. “That’s what I think. The heat is making him become human, but something else is telling his body to shift to wolf.”

Sam looked at me. Not disbelieving, but not believing, either. “What else could do that?” he asked.

I looked at Victor, despising him for making this complicated. How hard would it have been to follow me into the wolf and back out, like he was supposed to? I wished I’d never come to the damned shed.

“Something in his brain chemistry?” I said. “Victor has a pituitary problem. Maybe the way it imbalances his levels is interfering with how he shifts.”

Sam gave me a weird look then, but before he could say anything, the pale wolf’s legs began to quiver. I looked away and then Victor was human again. Just like that.

• SAM •

I felt like I was watching the transformation of two people: Victor to wolf, and Cole to someone else. I was the only one standing here, staying the same.

I couldn’t bring myself to leave Victor by himself like this, and so I stayed, and Cole stayed, too, minutes turning into hours while we waited for him to stabilize.

“There’s no way to reverse it,” Victor said flatly as the day began to ebb, not really a question.

I tried not to stiffen as my mind flashed back through the winter before I had rejoined Grace. Lying on the forest floor, fingers dug into the ground, head splitting open. Standing ankle deep in the snow, throwing up until I couldn’t stand. Convulsed with fever, eyes shut against the agony of the light, praying for death.

“No,” I said.

Cole’s eyes were sharp on me, hearing my lie. I wanted to ask him, If this is your friend, why am I the one sitting here next to him instead of you?

As we sat there, waiting for Victor’s next transformation, cooler air and dimming light stole in through the open door, evidence of the temperature dropping as the sun went down.

“Victor, I don’t know how to make you stay human right now,” I said. “But I think it’s probably cold enough that if I got you outside, you’d probably stay a wolf. Do you want that? Do you want a break from shifting, even if it’s not as you?”

Victor said, “Oh my God, yes,” with such feeling that it stung.

“And who knows,” I added. “Maybe once you get more stable, you’ll—”

But there was no point finishing the sentence because Victor was already a wolf again, scrambling back from his proximity to me. “Cole!” I said hurriedly, jumping up. Cole jerked to life, pulling open the door. I was rewarded with a gush of cold air that made me wince, and the wolf shot out into the woods, tail low and ears flattened against his head.