Shiver

Grace’s voice was pragmatic, as if she didn’t know the effect she was having on me. “I want to know what makes you a wolf.”

That one was easy. “When the temperature drops, I become a wolf. When it’s cold at night and warm during the day, I can feel it coming on, and then, finally, it’s cold enough that I shift into a wolf until spring.”

“The others, too?”

I nodded. “The longer you’re a wolf, the warmer it has to be for you to become human.” I paused for a moment, wondering if now was the time to tell her. “Nobody knows how many years you get of switching back and forth. It’s different for every wolf.”

Grace just looked at me—the same long look she’d given me when she was younger, lying in the snow, looking up at me. I couldn’t read it any better now than I could then. I felt my throat tighten in anticipation of her reply, but, mercifully, she changed her line of questioning. “How many of you are there?”

I wasn’t sure, just because so many of us didn’t become humans anymore. “About twenty.”

“What do you eat?”

“Baby bunnies.” She narrowed her eyes, so I grinned and said, “Adult bunnies, too. I’m an equal-opportunity bunny-eater.”

She didn’t skip a beat. “What was on your face the night you let me touch you?” Her voice stayed the same for this question, but something around her eyes tightened, as though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.

I had to struggle to remember that night—her fingers in my ruff, her breath moving the fine hairs on the side of my face, the guilty pleasure of being so close to her. The boy. The one who was bitten. That was what she was really asking. “Do you mean there was blood on my face?”

Grace nodded.

Part of me felt a little sad that she had to ask, but of course she did. She had every reason not to trust me. “It wasn’t his—that boy’s.”

“Jack,” she said.

“Jack,” I repeated. “I knew the attack happened, but I wasn’t there for it.” I had to dig deeper into my memory to trace the source of the blood on my muzzle. My human brain supplied logical answers—rabbit, deer, roadkill—all of them instantly stronger than my actual wolf memories. Finally, I snatched the real answer from my thoughts, though I wasn’t proud of it. “It was a cat. The blood. I’d caught a cat.”

Grace let out a breath.

“You aren’t upset that it was a cat?” I asked.

“You have to eat. If it wasn’t Jack, I don’t care if it was a wal- laby,” she said. But it was obvious her mind was still on Jack. I tried to remember what little I knew of the attack, hating for her to think badly of my pack.

“He provoked them, you know,” I said.

“He what? You weren’t there, were you?”

I shook my head and struggled to explain. “We can’t—the wolves—when we communicate, it’s with images. Nothing complicated. And not across great distances. But if we’re right by each other, we can share an image with another wolf. And so the wolves that attacked Jack, they showed me images.”

“You can read each other’s minds?” Grace asked, incredulous.

I shook my head vigorously. “No. I—it’s hard to explain as a hu—as me. It’s just a way of talking, but our brains are different as wolves. There’s no abstract concepts, really. Things like time, and names, and complicated emotions are all out of the question. Really, it’s for things like hunting or warning each other of danger.”

“And what did you see about Jack?”

I lowered my eyes. It felt strange, recalling a wolf memory from a human mind. I flipped through the blurry images in my head, recognizing now that the red blotches on the wolves’ coats were bullet wounds, and that the stains on their lips were Jack’s blood. “Some of the wolves showed me something about being hit by him. A—gun? He must have had a BB gun. He was wearing a red shirt.” Wolves saw color poorly, but red we could see.

“Why would he do that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. That’s not the sort of thing we told each other.”

Grace was quiet, still thinking about Jack, I suppose. We sat in the close silence until I started to wonder whether she was upset. Then she spoke. “So you never get to open Christmas presents.”

I looked at her, not knowing how to respond. Christmas was something that happened in another life, one before the wolves.

Grace looked down at the steering wheel. “I was just thinking that you were never around in the summer, and I always loved Christmas, because I knew you’d always be there. In the woods. As a wolf. I guess it’s because it’s cold, right? But that must mean that you never get to open Christmas presents.”

I shook my head. I changed too early now to even see Christmas decorations in stores.

Grace frowned at the steering wheel. “Do you think of me when you’re a wolf?”

When I was a wolf, I was a memory of a boy, struggling to hold on to meaningless words. I didn’t want to tell her the truth: that I couldn’t remember her name.

“I think of the way you smell,” I said, truthfully. I reached over and lifted a few strands of her hair to my nose. The scent of her shampoo reminded me of the scent of her skin. I swallowed and let her hair fall back down to her shoulder.

Grace’s eyes followed my hand from her shoulder to my lap, and I saw her swallow, too. The obvious question—when I would change back again—hung between us, but neither of us put words to it. I wasn’t ready to tell her yet. My chest ached at the thought of leaving all this behind.

“So,” she said again, and put her hand on the steering wheel. “Do you know how to drive?”

I pulled my wallet from my jeans pocket and proffered it. “The State of Minnesota seems to think so.”

She extracted my driver’s license, held it up against the steering wheel, and read out loud: “Samuel K. Roth.” She added, with some surprise, “This is an actual license. You must really be real.”

I laughed. “You still doubt it?”

Instead of answering, Grace handed my wallet back and asked, “Is that your real name? Aren’t you supposedly dead, like Jack?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this, but I answered anyway. “It wasn’t the same. I wasn’t bitten as badly, and some strangers saved me from being dragged off. Nobody pronounced me dead, like they did with Jack. So, yes, that’s my real name.”