Linger

I’d been there.

“Cole,” I said, and both Sam’s head and Cole’s jerked toward me. They had to look down, because I had long before gotten too tired to stand. From my place in the cold, dry leaves, I gestured toward Victor. “Why don’t you say something? I mean, to Victor.”

Sam blinked at me, surprised. I think maybe he’d forgotten that I’d already had to say good-bye to him once. I knew how it felt.

Cole didn’t look at either of us. He pressed his knuckles to his forehead and swallowed. “I can’t, um…” He stopped, because his voice was unsteady. I saw his throat move as he swallowed again.

We were making it harder for him. We were making him fight both grief and tears.

Sam picked up on this, and said, “We can go if you want some privacy.”

“Please don’t,” Cole whispered.

His face was still dry, but a tear, cold against my hot cheek, streaked off my chin.

Sam waited a long moment for Cole to speak, and when he didn’t, Sam recited a poem, his voice low and formal, “Death arrives among all that sound, like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it…” I watched Cole go completely still as Sam spoke. Still like not moving. Not breathing. A sort of still so deep you know it went all the way through him.

Sam took a step toward Cole and then, carefully, he put a hand on Cole’s shoulder.

“This isn’t Victor. This is something Victor wore, for a little while. Not anymore.”

They both looked at the body of the wolf, stiff and small and defeated-looking in death.

Cole sank to the ground.

• COLE •

I had to look at his eyes.

I uncovered the body so there was nothing between me and Victor’s brown eyes. They were empty and faraway, ghosts of his real eyes.

The cold shook my shoulders, a soft threat of what was to come, but I pushed it away, out of my head. I looked into his eyes and tried to pretend that there was no wolf around them.

I remembered the day I’d asked Victor if he wanted to start a band with me. We were in his room, which was one part bed and three parts drum kit, and he was slamming out a solo. The echo was so loud in the small room that it sounded like there were three drummers. His poster frames jittered on the walls and his alarm clock was slowly jerking toward the edge of his bedside table. Victor’s eyes were shining with manic fervor, and he made a crazy face at me every time he kicked the bass drum.

I could barely hear Angie’s shout from the next room. “Vic, you’re making my ears bleed! Cole, shut that stupid door!”

I shut Victor’s bedroom door behind me.

“Sounds hot,” I told him.

Victor tossed me one of his drumsticks. It arced past my head, and I had to jerk to catch it. I took a whack at his cymbals.

“Victor!” howled Angie.

He called, “These are magic hands!”

“One day, people will pay for the privilege of listening!” I shouted back.

Victor grinned at me and did a fast run with just one stick and the bass drum.

I smashed the cymbal again to piss Angie off and turned to Victor.

“What’s up?” Victor asked. He pounded at the drums again, smacking his stick off the one I held in my hand in the middle of the run.

“So you ready to do this thing?” I asked him.

Victor lowered his drumstick. His eyes were steady on me. “What?”

“NARKOTIKA,” I said.

Now, in this freezing cold wind, the sun disappearing, I reached out and touched the fur on Victor’s shoulder. I said, my voice gravelly and uneven, “I came here to get away. I came here to forget everything. I thought…I thought I didn’t have anything to lose.”

The wolf lay there, small and gray and dark in the failing light. Dead. I had to keep looking at his eyes. I wouldn’t let myself forget that this was not a wolf. This was Victor.

“And it really worked, Victor.” I shook my head. “You know it, don’t you? It’s all gone when you’re a wolf. It’s just what I wanted. It is so, so good. It’s absolute nothing. I could be a wolf right now, and I wouldn’t remember this. It would be like it never happened. I wouldn’t care if you were dead, because I wouldn’t even remember who you were.”

Out of the corner of my field of vision, I saw Sam turn his face away from me. I was profoundly aware of him not looking at me, not looking at Grace.

I closed my eyes.

“All…this…pain. This…” My voice was failing me again, suddenly dangerously unsteady. But I wouldn’t let myself stop. I opened my eyes. “Guilt. Because of what I’ve done to you. Because of what I’ve always done to you. It would—it would be gone.” I stopped, rubbed my hand across my face. My voice was nearly inaudible. “But that’s what I always do, isn’t it, Vic? Screw things up and then make myself disappear?”

I reached out and touched one of the wolf’s front paws; the fur was coarse and cold beneath my fingertips. “Ah, Vic,” I said, and my voice caught in my throat. “You were so good. Magic hands.” He’d never have hands again.

I didn’t say the next part out loud. Never again, Victor. I’m done running. I’m sorry this is what it took for me to see.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something, the darkness shifting.

Wolves.

As a human, I had never seen so many of them, but now, the dark spaces between the trees seethed with them. Ten? A dozen? They were far enough away that I could almost believe I was imagining the dim shapes.

Grace’s eyes were on them, too. “Sam,” she whispered. “Beck.”

“I know,” he said.

We were all frozen, waiting to see how long the wolves would stay, and if they would come any closer. Crouched there beside Victor, I was aware that the glinting eyes meant something different to each of us. Sam’s past. My present. Grace’s future.

“Are they here for Victor?” Sam asked, voice soft.

Nobody answered him.

I realized: I was the only one mourning Victor for who he really was.

The wolves remained where they were, specters in the oncoming night. Finally, Sam turned to me and asked, “Are you ready?”

I didn’t think it was something you could be ready for, but I covered Victor’s face with the sheet. Together, Sam and I hefted his weight—it felt like nothing between us—and gently lowered him into the grave, with Grace and the pack as our audience.

The woods were utterly silent.