Shiver

Isabel closed her eyes for a second. “Okay. So let me get this straight. My brother wasn’t really killed by wolves. He was just mauled by them and then turned into a werewolf? Sorry, I’m missing the whole undead thing. And isn’t there supposed to be something about moons and silver bullets and a bunch of crap like that?”

“He healed himself, but it took a while,” I told her. “He wasn’t ever really dead. I don’t know how he escaped from the morgue. The moon and silver stuff is all just myth. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s—it’s a disease that’s worse when it’s cold. I think the moon myth is because it gets cold overnight, so when we’re new, we change into wolves overnight a lot. So people thought it was the moon that caused it.”

Isabel seemed to be taking this pretty well. She wasn’t fainting, and she didn’t smell afraid. She sipped her coffee. “Grace, this is disgusting.”

“It’s instant,” Grace apologized.

Isabel asked, “So does my brother recognize me when he’s a wolf?”

Grace looked at my face; I couldn’t look back at her when I answered. “Probably a little. Some of us don’t remember anything about our lives when we’re wolves. Some of us remember a little.”

Grace looked away, sipped her coffee, pretended she didn’t care.

“So there’s a pack?”

Isabel asked good questions. I nodded. “But Jack hasn’t found them yet. Or they haven’t found him.”

Isabel ran a finger around the rim of her coffee mug for a long moment. Finally she looked from me to Grace and back again. “Okay, so what’s the catch here?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re sitting here just talking, and Grace is here trying to pretend like everything’s just fine, but everything isn’t just fine, is it?”

I guess I couldn’t be surprised by her intuition. You didn’t claw your way to the top of the high school food chain without being able to read people. I looked into my still-full coffee cup. I didn’t like coffee—too strong and bitter a flavor. I’d been a wolf too long; I’d lost my taste for it. “We’ve got expiration dates. The longer it’s been since we’ve been bitten, the less cold we need to turn us into wolves. And the more heat we need to turn us into humans. Eventually, we just don’t turn, become human again.”

“How long?”

I didn’t look at Grace. “It varies from wolf to wolf. Years and years for most wolves.”

“But not for you.”

Shut up, Isabel. I didn’t want to test Grace’s even expression any further. I just shook my head, very slightly, hoping that Grace really was looking out the window and not at me.

“So what if you lived in Florida, or someplace really warm?”

I was relieved to get the topic off me. “A couple of us tried it. It doesn’t work. It just makes you supersensitive to the slightest temperature change.” Ulrik and Melissa and a wolf named Bauer had gone down to Texas one year in hopes of outrunning the winter. I still remembered the excited phone call from Ulrik after weeks of not changing—and then his dejected return, minus Bauer, after they’d walked past the slightly ajar door of an air-conditioned shop and Bauer had instantly changed forms. Apparently, Texas Animal Control didn’t believe in tranquilizer guns.

“What about the equator? Where the temperature never changes?”

“I don’t know.” I tried not to sound exasperated. “None of us ever decided to go to the rain forest, but I’ll keep that in mind for when I win the lotto.”

“No need to be a jerk,” Isabel said, setting her coffee mug down on a stack of magazines. “I was just asking. So anybody who gets bitten changes, then?”

Everyone except the one I wish I could take with me. “Pretty much.” I heard my voice, how tired it sounded, and didn’t care.

Isabel pursed her lips and I thought she’d press it further, but she didn’t. “So that’s really it. My brother’s a werewolf, a real werewolf, and there’s no cure.”

Grace’s eyes narrowed, and I wished I knew what she was thinking. “Yeah. You got it. But you already knew all this. So why did you ask us?”

Isabel shrugged. “I guess I was waiting for someone to jump out of the curtain and say, ‘Whoopdie-friggin-doo, fooled you! No such thing as werewolves. What were you thinking?’”

I wanted to tell her that there really wasn’t such thing as werewolves. That there were humans, and there were wolves, and there were those of us that were on the way from one to another. But I was just tired, so I didn’t say anything.

“Tell me you won’t tell anyone.” Grace spoke abruptly. “I don’t think you have yet, but you can’t tell anyone now.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? My dad fricking shot one of the wolves because he was angry about it. Do you think I’m going to try and tell him Jack’s one of them? And my mother’s already medicated out the wazoo. Yeah, big help she would be. I’m just going to have to deal with this on my own.”

Grace exchanged a look with me that said, Good guess, Sam.

“And with us,” Grace added. “We’ll help you when we can. Jack doesn’t have to be alone, but we have to find him first.”

Isabel flicked an invisible piece of dust off one of her boots, as if she didn’t know what to do with the kindness. Finally, she said, still looking at her boot, “I don’t know. He wasn’t a very nice person last time I saw him. I don’t know if I want to find him.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

For not being able to tell you that his nasty temper was from the bite and would go away. I shrugged. It felt like I was doing a lot of that. “For not having happier news.”

There was a low, irritating buzz from the kitchen.

“The quiche is done,” Isabel said. “At least I get a consolation prize.” She looked at me and then at Grace. “So soon he’ll stop switching back and forth, right? Because winter’s almost here?”

I nodded.

“Good,” Isabel said, looking out the window at the na**d branches of the trees. Looking out to the woods that were Jack’s home now, and soon, mine. “Can’t get here soon enough.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE • GRACE

45°F