Shiver

“Don’t sulk,” he said, and pushed the door farther open with his shoulder to leave. “It’s not becoming.”

Her voice was ice-cold. “I have to take care of everything myself.”

He smiled at her fondly, somehow reducing the value of her anger. “We’d be lost without you, obviously. Don’t stay up too late.”

The door softly clicked shut behind him, and Grace stared at the bookshelves, the desk, the closed door. Anything but my face.

I closed my novel without noting the page. “She’s not dead.”

“Mom might’ve called animal control,” Grace said to the desk.

“Your mom didn’t call animal control. Shelby’s alive.”

“Sam. Shut up. Please. We don’t know. One of the other wolves could’ve dragged her body off the deck. Don’t jump to conclusions.” She looked at me, finally, and I saw that Grace, despite her complete inability to read people, had puzzled out what Shelby was to me. My past clawing out at me, trying to steal me even before winter did.

I felt like things were getting away from me. I’d found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.

CHAPTER FORTY • SAM

58°F

And so I looked for them.

Every day that Grace was at school, I searched for them, the two wolves I didn’t trust, the ones who were supposed to be dead. MercyFalls was small. Boundary Wood was—not as small, but more familiar, and maybe more willing to give up its secrets to me.

I would find Shelby and Jack and I’d confront them on my own terms.

But Shelby had left no trail off the deck, so maybe she really was gone. And Jack, too, was nowhere—a dead, cold trail. A ghost that left no corpse behind. I felt like I had combed the entire county for signs of him.

I thought—vaguely hoped—that he’d died, too, and ceased to be a problem. Been hit by some Department of Transportation vehicle and scooped into a dump somewhere. But there were no tracks leading to roads, no trees marked, no scent of a new-made wolf lingering at the school parking lot. He had disappeared as completely as snow in summer.

I should’ve been glad. Disappearing meant discreet. Disappearing meant he wasn’t my problem anymore.

But I just couldn’t accept it. We wolves did many things: change, hide, sing underneath a pale, lonely moon—but we never disappeared entirely. Humans disappeared. Humans made monsters out of us.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE • GRACE

54°F

Sam and I were like horses on a merry-go-round. We followed the same track again and again—home, school, home, school, bookstore, home, school, home, etc.—but really, we were circling the big issue without ever getting any closer to it. The real heart of it: Winter. Cold. Loss.

We didn’t talk about the looming possibility, but I felt I could always sense the chill of the shadow it cast over us. I’d read a story once, in a really dire collection of Greek myths, about a man called Damocles who had a sword dangling over his throne, hung by a single hair. That was us—Sam’s humanity dangling by a tight thread.

On Monday, as per the merry-go-round, it was back to school as usual. Although it had only been two days since Shelby attacked me, even the bruising had disappeared. It seemed I had a little bit of the werewolf healing in me after all.

I was surprised to find Olivia absent. Last year, she’d never missed a single day.

I kept waiting and waiting for her to walk into one of the two classes we shared before lunch, but she didn’t. I kept looking at her empty desk in class. She could’ve been just sick, but a part of me that I was trying to ignore said it was more. In fourth period, I slid into my usual seat behind Rachel. “Rachel, hey, have you seen Olivia?”

Rachel turned to face me. “Huh?”

“Olivia. Doesn’t she have Science with you?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t heard from her since Friday. I tried calling her and her mom said she was sick. But what about you, buttercup? Where were you this weekend? You never call, you never write.”

“I got bitten by a raccoon,” I said. “I had to get rabies shots and I took Sunday to sleep it off. To make sure I didn’t start foaming at the mouth and savaging people.”

“Gross. Where did it bite you?”

I gestured toward my jeans. “Ankle. It doesn’t look like much. I’m worried about Olive, though. I haven’t been able to get her on the phone.”

Rachel frowned and crossed her legs; she was, as ever, wearing stripes, this time, striped tights. She said, “Me, neither. Do you think she’s avoiding us? Is she still mad at you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

Rachel made a face. “We’re okay, though, right? I mean, we haven’t really been talking. About stuff, I mean. Stuff’s been happening. But we haven’t been, you know, talking. Or over at each other’s houses. Or whatever.”

“We’re okay,” I said firmly.

She scratched her rainbow tights and bit her lip before saying, “Do you think we should, you know, go over to her house and see if we can catch her?”

I didn’t answer right away, and she didn’t push it. This was unfamiliar territory for both of us: We’d never had to really work to make our trio stick together. I didn’t know if tracking Olivia down was the right thing or not. It seemed kind of drastic, but how long had it been since we’d seen her or talked to her, really? I said, slowly, “How about we wait until the end of the week? If we haven’t heard from her by then, then we…?”

Rachel nodded, looking relieved. “Coolio.”

She turned back around in her seat as Mr. Rink, at the front of the classroom, cleared his throat to get our attention. He said, “Okay, you guys will probably hear this several times today from the teachers, but don’t go around licking the water fountains or kissing perfect strangers, okay? Because the Health Department has reported a couple of cases of meningitis in this part of the state. And you get that from—anyone? Snot! Mucus! Kissing and licking! Don’t do it!”

There was appreciative hooting in the back of the classroom.

“Since you can’t do any of that, we’ll do something almost as good. Social studies! Open up your books to page one hundred and twelve.”

I glanced at the doorway again for the thousandth time, hoping to see Olivia come through it, and opened my book.