Sinner

By the time I got to .blush., my skin was clammy. I could feel my heart tripping. My mind said: anxiety attack. My body just screamed. Every piece of my skin was sending a thousand messages a second to my brain. Run. Fight. Get the hell out of here.

There was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be anxious over. But then I would turn over the image of that tattoo like a shovel turning over grave dirt. And my stomach would churn. It felt as if the temperature were plummeting.

It’s not cold out here, I told myself. Even overcast, it wasn’t cold. I looked out at the street and imagined blistering sun brilliant on the car mirrors, white light searing the sides of the buildings. But my brain howled the cold at me. My arms were goose bumps with the fake cold.

I had known all along that the more times I forced the shift, the more likely I was to shift accidentally. I had been playing this game for weeks now.

No.

I called Isabel. My fingers were already shaking enough to make hitting the buttons difficult.

Her voice was another cool thing in the whitewashed day.

“Culpep —”

“Is the store empty?”

“Cole, this isn’t —”

“Is it empty?” She had to say yes, because I was already there, my face reflected in the black-ice mirror of the door, my hand on the door handle. I needed to put my head between my legs, to breathe into a damn paper bag, to shut myself in a room far away from the clouds and the world. I needed to get off the street.

“Yeah. Hey, what is —”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I hung up. I threw my phone, wallet, and keys into the potted plant by the front door.

This isn’t happening.

But it was.

The second I pushed open the door to .blush., the second the airconditioning hit my already cool skin, it was over.

Isabel stood in between tables of clothing, staring at me.

Her face looked bizarre somehow, like I couldn’t understand the angles of it.

My stomach seized. My skin was ragged. My breath was in pieces. I couldn’t tell her what was happening. But she didn’t need to be told.

She shut her eyes, just for a second. She opened them. She said, “No. Cole, I can’t —”

But I was already a wolf.

Chapter Forty-Nine

· isabel ·

Just like that, it had happened.

This was how to deal with disaster: Isolate the worst part of the problem. Identify a solution. Tune out every bit of noise.

Here was the disaster: Cole St. Clair was a wolf in the middle of Santa Monica, trapped in my place of work, a business I had just been setting up for a private showing Sierra had this evening. It would have been bad any other time, but now, it meant that a wolf stood in the front of a store currently lit by one hundred candles.

Isolate the worst part of the problem.

Cole St. Clair.

Identify a solution.

It was enough to make me want to give up.

There he was, in the flesh, everything I’d been afraid of. It was not a monster. It just wasn’t Cole.

It was every wolf I’d left behind in Minnesota. It was every hurtling, grief-saturated memory that galloped into my mind. It was every tear I hadn’t cried since I’d moved.

The wolf didn’t move. Its ears swiveled slowly toward me and away, back toward the street noise. The hackles of its lovely coat were scuffed up into feral suspicion. As before, just as I remembered, the eyes were still Cole’s: brilliant green and intense. But everything that made him Cole was stripped from them, replaced with instinct and image.

He was poised for flight, but there was nowhere to go.

I should have never let him back into my life.

The wonder of Sierra’s creations was that he didn’t look out of place here, as long as he didn’t move. He looked stuffed and intentional. I had seen plenty of stuffed animals in my time.

Thanks, Dad.

That spurred my brain into movement.

Think, Isabel.

I took in the scene: wolf, pile of clothing, candles.

Isolate the worst part of the problem.

The candles weren’t a problem yet. Discovery wasn’t a problem yet. Those were only possibilities.

The problem was the wolf. And if I thought about it, I knew the answer to this. I knew enough about the science to know that his body defaulted to human in this weather. The wolves back in Minnesota shifted into wolves in the winter, but this store was only a temporary winter. I didn’t know why the airconditioning had made him shift now of all times, but I had

seen its effect on him right in front of me.

Identify a solution.

I glanced toward the wall opposite, where the thermostat was.

Heat.

I glanced up at the clock on the wall. Fifteen minutes until Sierra was supposed to get here to start setting up the champagne.

My heart was thumping.

Damn you, Cole, damn you —

I took a step, just to see what would happen.

The wolf’s head jerked to follow the motion. There was nothing overtly aggressive about the move, but still, everything in the wolf’s posture suddenly looked dangerous. I saw the knot of shoulder muscles beneath the fur. I heard the thin, barely there scrape of nails on concrete as his paws tensed. I saw the deadwhite canine as he silently lifted his lip and then dropped it again.

A warning.

As a wolf, Cole didn’t know me. He wouldn’t go out of his way to rip my throat out. But if I threatened him, nothing would stop him, either.

I cut my eyes away from him. Staring would only be seen as a challenge. I took another step. Then another. I wasn’t getting any closer to him. No threat.

The wolf turned, swift and sinuous, and left a noseprint on the inside of the glass door before turning back. Low to the ground, wary, he moved farther into the store.

As long as he didn’t come over here — I had made it to the thermostat. I flicked on the heat and turned it all the way up.

On the other side of the store, the wolf caught a sudden glimpse of himself in one of the decorative mirrors that leaned against the walls. He jerked back, surprised.

His haunch hit one of the tables. Three tall candles sat on the topmost part of it, above a display of taupe tops with seagrass woven sleeves.

In the mirror, I saw the reflection of the lit candles wobble.

I held my breath.

The candles tumbled.

For one brief moment, as one of the candles fell and went out, I thought it would be okay. And then the other two hit. One of them rolled off to the side and sputtered. The third landed on a top, and it caught. The fire bit into the sea grass.

Damn you, Sierra —

The reflection of the growing flame caught the wolf’s attention.