Linger

I wanted to believe I was just being melodramatic.

Laying a hand flat on my belly, I thought about the gnawing ache that lived a few inches below my fingers. Right now, the pain seemed dull, slumbering.

I pressed my fingers into my skin.

I know you’re there.

It seemed pitiful to be sitting awake in bed, contemplating my mortality alone, while Sam was within easy driving distance. I shot a futile glance up toward my parents’ room, irritated that they’d deprived me of his company when I most needed it.

If I died now, I’d never go to college. I’d never live on my own. I’d never buy my own coffeepot (I wanted a red one). I’d never marry Sam. I’d never get to be Grace the way Grace was meant to be.

I had been so careful, my entire life.

I considered my own funeral. No way would Mom have enough common sense to plan it. Dad would do it between calls to investors and HOA board members. Or Grandma. She might step up to the plate once she knew what a crappy job her son was doing of raising her granddaughter. Rachel would come, and probably a few of my teachers. Definitely Mrs. Erskine, who wanted me to be an architect. Isabel, too, though she probably wouldn’t cry. I remembered Isabel’s brother’s funeral—the whole town had turned out, because of his age. So maybe I would get a good crowd, even if I hadn’t been a legend in Mercy Falls, just by virtue of having died too young to have actually lived. Did people bring gifts to funerals like they did to weddings and baby showers?

I heard a creak outside my door. A sudden pop, a foot on a floorboard, and then the door creeping softly open.

For a single, tiny moment, I thought it might be Sam, somehow, miraculously sneaking in. But then from my nest in my blankets, I saw the shape of my father’s shoulders and head as he leaned into my room. I did my best to look asleep while still keeping my eyes slitted open. My father came in a few, hesitant steps, and I thought, with surprise, He’s checking to see if I’m all right.

But then he lifted his chin just a little bit, to look at a place just beyond me, and I realized that he wasn’t here to make sure I was all right. He was just here to make sure Sam wasn’t with me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

• COLE •

Crouched on the cold forest floor, pine needles pressing into my palms, blood smeared over my bare knees, I couldn’t remember how long I’d been human.

I was suspended in a pale blue morning, fog tinting everything pastel as it moved slowly around me. The air reeked of blood, feces, and brackish water. It only took a glance at my hands to see where the smells came from. The lake was a few yards away from me, and between me and the water lay a dead deer, flat on her side. A flap of skin folded back from her ribs, presenting her innards like a gruesome gift. It was her blood that was smeared across my knees and, I saw now, my hands as well. In the overhead branches, invisible in the mist, crows called back and forth to one another, eager for me to lose interest in my kill.

I cast a glance around me, looking for the other wolves that must’ve helped me to take down the doe, but they had left me alone. Or, more truthfully, I’d left them, by shifting into a reluctant human.

Slight movement caught my eye; I darted a glance toward it. It took me a moment to realize what had moved—the doe. Her eye. She blinked, and as she did, I saw that she was looking right at me. Not dead—dying. Funny how two things could be so similar and yet so far apart. Something about the expression in her liquid black eye made my chest hurt. It was like—patience. Or forgiveness. She had resigned herself to the fate of being eaten alive.

“Jesus,” I whispered, getting slowly to my feet, trying not to alarm her further. She didn’t even flinch. Just this: blink. I wanted to back away, give her space, let her escape, but the exposed bones and spilled guts told me flight was impossible for her. I’d already ruined her body.

I felt a bitter smile twist my lips. Here it was, my brilliant plan to stop being Cole and slip into oblivion. Here it was. Standing na**d and painted with death, my empty stomach twisting with hunger while I faced a meal for something I wasn’t anymore.

The doe blinked again, face extraordinarily gentle, and my stomach lurched.

I couldn’t leave her like this. That was the thing. I knew I couldn’t. I confirmed my location with a quick glance around—a twenty-minute walk to the shed, maybe. Another ten to the house, if there was nothing to kill her with in the shed. Forty minutes to an hour of lying here with her guts exposed.

I could just walk away. She was dying, after all. It was inevitable, and how much did the suffering of a deer count for?

Her eye blinked again, silent and tolerant. A lot—that was how much it counted for.

I cast around for anything that might serve as a weapon. None of the stones by the lake were large enough to be useful, and I couldn’t imagine myself bludgeoning her to death, anyway. I ran through everything I knew of anatomy and instantly deadly car crashes and catastrophes. And then I looked back to her exposed ribs.

I swallowed.

It only took me a moment to find a branch with a sharp enough end.

Her eye rolled up toward me, black and bottomless, and one of her front legs twitched, a memory of running. There was something awful about terror trapped behind silence. About latent emotions that couldn’t be acted out.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t mean to be cruel.”

I stabbed the stick through her ribs.

Once.

Twice.

She screamed, this high scream that was neither human nor animal but something terrible in between, the sort of sound that you never forget no matter how many beautiful things you hear afterward. Then she was silent, because her punctured lungs were empty.

She was dead, and I wanted to be. I was going to find out how to keep myself a wolf. Or I just couldn’t do this anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

• GRACE •

I didn’t think I’d slept, but a knock on my bedroom door woke me, so I must’ve. I opened my eyes; it was still dark in my room. The clock said it was morning, but only barely. The numbers glowed 5:30.

“Grace,” my mother’s voice said, too loud for 5:30. “We need to talk to you before we go.”

“Go where?” My voice was a croak, still half asleep.

“St. Paul,” Mom said, and now she sounded impatient, like I should know. “Are you decent?”

“How can I be decent at five?” I muttered, but I waved a hand at her, since I was sleeping in a camisole and pj bottoms. Mom turned on the light switch, and I winced at the sudden brightness. I barely had time to see that Mom was in her billowy fair shirt before Dad appeared behind her. Both of them shuffled into my room. Mom’s lips were pressed into a tight, businesslike smile, and Dad’s face looked as if he had been sculpted from wax. I couldn’t remember a time I’d seen them both looking so uncomfortable.