Linger

I still didn’t know. I shrugged. “To help.”

“Then help,” Isabel said, and pushed the napkin closer to me. Louder, she said, “Sam.”

He lowered his hands but didn’t turn around. Frankly, I was surprised he’d moved at all.

“Sam,” she repeated, and this time, he did turn toward us. She pointed at the self-service bar and cashier at the other end of the room. “Get us some coffee.”

I didn’t know what was more amazing: that Isabel had just told him to get coffee, or that he did, albeit with no expression whatsoever. I turned my gaze back to Isabel. “Wow. Just when I think I’ve seen you at your coldest.”

“That was me being nice,” Isabel snapped. “What good is he doing, staring outside?”

“I don’t know, remembering all the great days he and his girlfriend had, before she dies.”

Isabel looked me right in the eye. “Do you think that will help you with Victor? Because it never really saves me when I think about Jack.” She pressed a finger into the napkin. “Talk to me. About this.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with Grace.”

Sam set two coffee cups down, one in front of me and one in front of Isabel. Nothing for himself.

“What’s wrong with Grace is the same thing that killed that wolf that you and Grace found,” Sam said, his voice sounding gritty, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “That smell is just too distinctive. It’s the same thing.”

He stood by the table, as if sitting down would mean that he was agreeing to something.

I looked at Isabel. “What makes you think that I can do something these doctors can’t?”

“Because you’re a genius,” Isabel said.

“These people are geniuses,” I replied.

Sam said, “Because you know.”

Isabel pushed the napkin at me again. And once again, it was my father and me at the dining room table, and he was presenting me with a problem. Or I was sitting in one of his college classes when I was sixteen, and he was looking at my written work beside my solutions, searching for signs that I would follow in his footsteps. Or it was me at one of his award presentations with the ironed shirts and old school ties surrounding me, and my father telling them, in a voice that stood for no argument, that I was going to be great.

I thought of just that simple gesture from earlier, when Sam had laid his hand on Grace’s collarbone.

I thought of Victor.

I took the napkin.

“I’m going to need more paper,” I said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

• SAM •

There was no longer night than this: Cole and I in the cafeteria, going over every detail of the wolves until Cole’s brain was full and he sent both Isabel and me away so that he could sit at a table with his head in his hands and a piece of paper in front of him. It seemed amazing to me that everything I wanted, everything I’d ever wanted, hung on the shoulders of Cole St. Clair, sitting at a plastic table with a scribbled-on napkin, but what else did I have?

I escaped from the cafeteria to sit outside her room, my back to the wall, my head in my hands. Against my will, I was memorizing everything about these walls, this place, this night.

I had no hope that they would let me in to see her.

So all I prayed for was that they would not come out to tell me that she was gone. I prayed for the door not to open. Just stay alive.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

• SAM •

Isabel came and got me and dragged me through the morningbusy halls to an empty stairwell where Cole waited for me. He was full of restless energy, his hands in two fists that he kept knocking lightly against each other, one on top of the other.

“Okay, I can’t promise anything,” Cole said. “I am just guessing here. But I have a—a theory. The thing is that, even if I’m right, I can’t be proved right. Just wrong, really.” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “What is the big thing in common between Grace and that wolf?” He waited. I guessed I was supposed to answer.

“The smell.”

Isabel said, “That’s what I thought, too. Though it’s pretty obvious, once Cole pointed it out.”

“The shifting,” Cole said. “Both the wolf and Grace haven’t shifted for—what—a decade or more? That’s the magic number for when wolves that don’t shift anymore die, right? I know you said that that was the natural life span of a wolf, but I don’t think that’s it. I think that every wolf that’s died without shifting has died like that wolf—of something. Not old age. And I think that’s what’s killing Grace.”

“The wolf she never was,” I said, suddenly remembering something she’d said the night before.

“Exactly,” Cole said. “I think that they die because they aren’t shifting anymore. I don’t think shifting is the curse. I think whatever it is that is telling our bodies to shift is the bad guy here.”

I blinked.

“It’s not the same thing,” Cole said. “If the shifting is the disease, it’s one thing. If you’re shifting because of the disease, it’s something else entirely. So here’s my theory, and this is such crap science, I don’t have to tell you. It’s science without microscopes, blood tests, or reality. Anyway. Grace was bitten. When she’s bitten, wolf toxin, for lack of a better term, is introduced. Whatever it is in this wolf spit is really bad for you. Let’s say that shifting is the good guy, and that something about this wolf spit initiates a defensive response in your body—shifting, to purge the toxin. Every time you shift, the toxin’s put at bay. And for some reason, these shifts are timed with the weather. Unless, of course—”

“You stop yourself from shifting,” Isabel said.

“Yeah.” Cole glanced up toward the bottom of the stairwell, toward Grace’s floor. “If you somehow destroy your body’s ability to use hot and cold as a trigger, you look cured, but you’re not. You’re…festering.”

I was tired, and I was not a science person. Cole could’ve told me that wolf toxin made you lay eggs and I would’ve thought it sounded reasonable at this point. “Okay. So it sounds fine, if vague. What’s the upshot? What are you suggesting?”

“I think she needs to shift,” Cole said.

It took me too long to realize what he was saying. “Become a wolf?”

Cole shrugged. “If I’m right.”