Linger

“Beck wanted me to go to law school,” Sam said, fingering the edge of my favorite robin’s-egg-blue mug. “He never told me, but I heard him tell Ulrik.”

“It’s hard to imagine you as a lawyer,” I said.

Sam smiled a self-deprecating smile and shook his head. “I can’t imagine myself as a lawyer, either. I can’t imagine myself as anything yet, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds…terrible. Like I have no ambition.” Again, his eyebrows drew together, pensive. “But this idea of a future is really new to me. Until this month, I never thought I could go to college. I don’t want to rush into it.”

I must have been just staring at him, because he added, hurriedly, “But I don’t want you to have to wait, Grace. I don’t want to keep you from going ahead because I can’t make up my mind.”

Feeling childish, I said, “We could go someplace together.”

The kettle whistled. Sam pulled it from the heat as he said, “I somehow doubt that the same college will be ideal for a budding math genius and a boy in love with moody poetry. I suppose it’s possible.” He stared out the kitchen window at the frozen gray woods. “I don’t know if I can really leave, though. At all. Who will take care of the pack?”

“I thought that was why the new wolves were made,” I said. The words sounded strange in my mouth. Callous. As if the pack dynamic were an artificial, engineered thing, which of course it wasn’t. Nobody knew what the newcomers were like. Nobody but Beck, of course, but he wasn’t talking.

Sam rubbed his forehead, pressing his palm over his eyes; he did it a lot since he’d come back. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I know that’s what they’re for.”

“He would’ve wanted you to go,” I said. “And I still think we could find a school together.”

Sam looked at me, his fingers still pressed into his temple as if he’d forgotten they were there. “I’d like that.” He paused. “I’d really like—I’d like to meet the new wolves and see what kind of people they are, though. It’ll make me feel better. Maybe I’ll go after that. After I’m sure everything’s taken care of here.”

I put a jagged line through Pick a college. “I’ll wait for you,” I said.

“Not forever,” Sam said.

“No, if you turn out to be useless, I’ll go without you.” I tapped my pencil on my teeth. “I think we should look around for the new wolves tomorrow. And Olivia. I’ll call Isabel and ask her about the wolves she saw in her woods.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sam said. He returned to his list at the table and added something to it. Then he smiled at me and spun the index card so that I could read it right side up.

Listen to Grace.

• SAM •

Later, I thought of the things I could have added to the list of resolutions, things I’d wanted back before I realized what being a wolf meant for my future. Things like Write a novel and Find a band and Get a degree in obscure poetry in translation and Travel the world. It felt indulgent and fanciful to be considering those things now after reminding myself for so long that they were impossible.

I tried to imagine myself filling out a college application. Writing a synopsis. Tacking a sign saying drummers wanted on the corkboard opposite Beck’s post office box. The words danced in my head, dazzling in their sudden nearness. I wanted to add them to my index card of resolutions, but I just…couldn’t.

That night, while Grace showered, I got out the card and looked at it again. And I wrote:

Believe in my cure.

CHAPTER FIVE

• COLE •

I was human.

I was bleary, exhausted, confused. I didn’t know where I was. I knew I’d lost more time since I’d last been awake; I must’ve shifted back to a wolf again. Groaning, I rolled onto my back and clenched and unclenched my fists, trying out my strength.

The early morning forest was absolutely freezing, mist hanging in the air, turning everything light gold. Close to me, the damp trunks of pine trees jutted from the haze, black and severe. Within a few feet, they turned to pastel blue and then disappeared entirely in the white fog.

I was lying in the damn mud; I could feel my shoulders coated and crackling with it. When I lifted my hand to brush off my skin, my fingers were coated as well—a thin, anemic clay that looked like baby poop. My hands stank like the lake, and sure enough, I could hear water slowly lapping very close to my left side. I reached out a hand and felt more mud, then water on my fingertips.

How did I get here? I remembered running with the pack, then shifting, but I couldn’t remember making it to the shore. I must’ve shifted back again. To wolf, and then to human. The logic of it—or rather, the lack of logic—was maddening. Beck had told me the shifts would get more controlled, eventually. So where was the control?

I lay there, my muscles starting to tremble, the cold pinching my skin, and knew that I was going to shift back to a wolf soon. God, I was tired. Stretching my shaking hands above my head, I marveled at the smooth, unmarked skin of my arms, most of the scarring of my former life gone. I was being reborn in five-minute intervals.

I heard movement in the woods near me, and I turned my face, my cheek against the ground, to see if it belonged to a threat. Close by, a white wolf watched me, halfway behind a tree, her coat tinted gold and pink in the rising morning sun. Her green eyes, strangely pensive, met mine for a long moment. There was something about the way she was looking at me that felt unfamiliar. Human eyes without judgment or jealousy or pity or anger; just silent consideration.

I didn’t know how it made me feel.

“What are you looking at?” I snarled.

Without a sound, she slid into the mist.

My body jerked on its own accord, and my skin twisted into another form.

I didn’t know how much time I’d spent as a wolf this go-round. Was it minutes? Hours? Days? It was late morning. I didn’t feel human, but I wasn’t wolf, either. I hovered somewhere in between, my mind skating from memory to present and back to memory again, past and present equally lucid.

Somehow my brain darted from my seventeenth birthday to the night my heart stopped beating at Club Josephine. And that’s where it stayed. Not a night I would’ve chosen to relive.

This was who I was, before I was a wolf: I was Cole St. Clair, and I was NARKOTIKA.

Outside, the Toronto night was cold enough to ice over puddles and choke you with your own frigid breath, but inside the warehouse that was Club Josephine, it was hot as Hades, and it would be even hotter upstairs with the crowd.