Linger

“Sam,” Cole repeated.

I didn’t understand, and then, I did.

It wasn’t when my mother wouldn’t look at me, just gazing at the edge of the bathtub and swallowing, over and over. Or when my father reached behind him and said my mother’s name to get her to look at him. Or even when she took one of the razor blades from his proffered hand, her fingers careful, as if she were selecting a fragile cracker from a plate of delicacies.

It was when she finally looked at me.

At my eyes. My wolf’s eyes.

I saw the decision in her face. The letting go.

And that was when they had to hold me down.

• COLE •

Sam was somewhere else. That was the only way to put it. His eyes were just—empty. I hauled him out to the living room and shook him. “Snap out of it. We’re out! Look around, Sam. We’re out.”

When I let go of his arms, Sam slumped to the floor, back against the wall, putting his head in his hands. He was suddenly all elbows and knees and joints folded up against one another, making him faceless.

I didn’t know how I felt, seeing him there. Knowing I’d done it, whatever it was. It was making me hate him. “Sam?” I said.

After a long moment, he said, not lifting his head, his voice strange and low and thin, “Just leave me alone. Leave me alone. What did I ever do to you?” His breaths were uneven; I heard them catching in his chest. Not like sobs. More like suffocation.

I looked down at him, and suddenly anger bubbled up through me. It shouldn’t have affected him this badly. It was just a damned bathroom. It was he who was making me this cruel—I hadn’t done anything to him except shown him a damned tub. I wasn’t that person he thought I was.

“Beck chose this, too,” I told him, because he wouldn’t say anything now to contradict me. “That’s what he told me. He said that he got everything he wanted in life after law school, and he was miserable. He told me he was going to kill himself, but a guy named Paul convinced him there was another way out.”

Sam was silent except for his ragged inhalations.

“That’s the same thing he offered me,” I said. “Only I can’t stay a wolf. Don’t tell me that you don’t want to hear it. You’re just as bad as I am. Look at you. Don’t talk to me about damage.”

He didn’t move, so I did. I went to the back door and threw it open. The night had become savage and cold while I was drinking, and I was rewarded with a wrenching twist in my gut.

I escaped.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

• SAM •

I went through the actions of punching down the dough and shaping the loaf and getting the bread in the oven. My head was humming with words that were too clipped and unrelated for me to form into lyrics. I was halfway here, halfway somewhere else, standing in Beck’s same old kitchen on a night that could’ve been now or ten years ago.

The faces on the cabinet photos smiled back at me, dozens of different permutations of me and Beck, Beck and Ulrik, Paul and Derek, Ulrik and me. Faces waiting to be reinhabited. The photos looked faded and old in the dull nighttime of the kitchen. I remembered Beck taping them up, when they were brand-new, concrete proof of our ties.

I thought about how my parents so easily decided not to love me, just because I couldn’t hold on to my skin. And about how I’d been so quick to shun Beck when I’d thought that he’d infected the three new wolves against their will. It was like I could feel my parents’ imperfect love running through my veins. So quick to judge.

When I finally noticed that Cole was gone, I opened the back door and retrieved his clothing from the yard. I stood there, holding the cold bundle in my hands, and let the night air cut down inside me, past the layers of everything that made me Sam and human, to the creeping wolf that I imagined still lurking inside me. I played back Cole’s dialogue in my head.

Was he really asking for my help?

I jumped when the phone rang. The phone was missing from the base in the kitchen, so I went into the living room and sat on the arm of the sofa while I picked up the receiver in there. Grace, I hoped fiercely. Grace.

“Hi?” It occurred to me, too late, that if Grace was calling this late, there was something wrong.

But it wasn’t Grace’s voice that answered, though it was female. “Who is this?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Someone called my cell from this number. Twice.”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Angie Baranova.”

“When did they call?”

“Yesterday. Earlyish. No message.”

Cole. Had to be. Sloppy bastard. “Must’ve been a wrong number,” I said.

“Must’ve been,” she echoed. “Because only, like, four people have this number.”

I amended my opinion of Cole. Stupid bastard.

“Like I said,” I insisted, “a wrong number.”

“Or Cole,” Angie said.

“Excuse me?”

She gave an unfunny, ugly little laugh. “Whoever you are, I know you wouldn’t say anything even if he was standing right beside you. Because Cole’s really good at that, isn’t he? Getting you to do what he wants? Well, if he is there and it was him calling my number, tell him I’ve got a new cell. It’s one 917-get-out-of-my-life. Thanks.”

And she hung up.

I clicked TALK again to hang up the phone and leaned to return it to the cradle. I looked at Beck’s stack of books on the end table. Beside them was a picture frame with a photo Ulrik had taken of Beck right after Paul had sprayed mustard on him while we barbecued burgers. Beck squinted at me, smears of unreal yellow caught in his eyebrows and globbed in his eyelashes.

“Sounds like you picked a real winner,” I told Beck’s photo.

• GRACE •

That night, I lay in my bed, trying to forget the way the wolves had looked at me and trying to pretend that Sam was with me. Blinking in the blackness, I tugged Sam’s pillow closer to me, but I’d used up all of his scent, and it was just a pillow again. I pushed it back to his side of the bed and lifted my hand to my nostrils instead, trying to tell if I still smelled like the wolves in the woods. I pictured Isabel’s face when she said, You know this has to do with the wolves, and tried to interpret what her expression had meant. Disgust? Like I was contagious? Or was it pity?

If Sam were here, I would’ve whispered, Do you think dying people know they’re dying?

I made a face at myself in the darkness. I knew I was being melodramatic.