Forever (23 page)

• GRACE •

I had thought that the sheer fact of
me
would be enough for Rachel. The fact that I was living and breathing seemed like a pretty powerful recommendation for Sam's innocence, but when it came down to it, Rachel was still uncertain. It took several minutes to coax her into the car, even after she had seen me in it.

“Just because you have Grace doesn't mean that I'm sure about this,” Rachel said, peering at the open back door with a dubious expression. “For all I know, you've been giving her psychedelic mushrooms in your basement and you'd like to do the same thing to me.”

Sam glanced back at the school, his light eyes narrowed against the warm sun. He was probably thinking the same thing as me: Namely, that most everyone in Mercy Falls mistrusted him, and if someone noticed him standing at the back of a parking lot with an uncertain-looking girl, things could get unpleasant. He said, “I'm not exactly sure how to counteract that allegation.”

“Rachel, I am not drugged,” I said. “Just get in the car.”

Rachel frowned at me and then looked back to Sam. “Not until you tell me why you want to stay hidden.”

“It's sort of a long story.”

Rachel crossed her arms. “Summarize.”

“It really, really ought to be explained.”

Rachel didn't move.
“Summarize.”

I sighed. “Rachel, I keep turning into a wolf. Don't freak out.”

She waited for me to say something else, for it to make sense. But there wasn't any way to make it easy for her, not when I had to
summarize
.

“Why would I freak out?” Rachel asked. “Just because you're a crazy person saying crazy things? Of course you turn into a wolf. And I also turn into a zebra. Check out the stripes, they're a leftover.”

“Rachel,” Sam said gently, “I promise it makes a lot more sense when it's explained. If you give Grace a chance to — someplace
private
— it will still be weird, but not impossible.”

Rachel looked at him, aghast, and then back at me. “Sorry, Grace. But I just don't think it sounds like the greatest idea to let him drive me back to his lair.” She held out her hand to Sam, who looked at it as if it might be a weapon. Wiggling her fingers, she added, “Let me drive.”

“Drive … to my house?” Sam asked.

Rachel nodded.

Sam looked a little flustered, but to his credit, his voice didn't change. “How is that any different than if I drive us there?”

“I don't know! It will make me feel better.” Her hand was still out for the key. “In the movies, no one drives themselves to their own deaths.”

Sam looked at me. His face said,
Grace, help!

“Rachel,” I said firmly. “Do you even know how to drive a stick shift?”

“No,” Rachel said. “But I'm a fast learner.”

I gave her a look. “Rachel.”

“Grace, you have to admit this is pretty weird. Say it. You disappearing from the hospital and Olivia is — and Sam suddenly shows up with you and, well, the freaky hallucinogenic mushrooms are looking more and more realistic, especially when you start talking about wolves. Because next step is for Isabel Culpeper to show up saying that
everybody's going to be abducted by aliens and I have to tell you, I can't take that in my fragile emotional state. I think that —”

I sighed. “Rachel.”

“Fine,”
she said. She threw her bag in the backseat and climbed in after.

As we headed toward Beck's house, Sam in the driver's seat, me beside him, Rachel in the backseat, I felt suddenly and inexplicably homesick, somehow frantic with the thought of my lost life. I couldn't think what I was so desperately missing — surely not my parents, who hadn't been around enough to be missed — until I realized that the emotion was being triggered by the wildly sweet strawberry scent of Rachel's shampoo. And
that
I missed. Afternoons and evenings with Rachel, holed up in her room or taking over my parents' kitchen or following Olivia on one of her photography treks. I wasn't homesick, not really, because that required a home. I was personsick. Lifesick.

I turned to the backseat and stretched out my hand to Rachel, my fingers not quite long enough to reach her. She didn't say anything, just took my hand and clutched it tightly. We rode like that for the rest of the trip, me half-twisted and her leaning forward a little, our hands resting on the back of my seat. Sam didn't say anything, either, except for
Oh, sorry
when he shifted gears too soon and the car shuddered a bit.

Later, when we got back to the house, I told her everything, the whole story, from the moment the wolves dragged me from the swing to the day I'd almost died in my own blood. And everything in between. Sam looked more nervous than I'd ever seen him, but I wasn't worried. From the moment that I held Rachel's hand in the car, I'd known that in this strange new life, Rachel was one of the things I was going to get to keep.

• ISABEL •

I was against felonies when a misdemeanor would do. Using the school's lab would have constituted breaking and entering. Using one of the spare keys for my mother's office was merely unlawful entry. It was just common sense. I'd parked my SUV in the grocery store parking lot across the road so that anyone driving by the clinic would see nothing out of the ordinary. I would have made an excellent criminal. Maybe I still would. I was young yet and it was possible med school wouldn't work out.

“Do
not
break anything,” I told Cole as I gestured for him to go in before me. Possibly a futile plea, where Cole St. Clair was involved.

Cole stalked down the hallway, eyeing the posters on the walls. The low-income clinic was a part-time project for my mother, who also put in time with the local hospital. When my mother had first opened the clinic, the walls had been decorated with art that she didn't have room for in the house or had gotten tired of. She wanted the clinic to seem homelike, she had said when we first came to Mercy Falls. After Jack had died, she'd given away a lot of art from home, and once she got over that, she'd taken the pieces from the clinic walls to replace them. Now the clinic was generally decorated with a decor I liked to call
late pharmaceutical period
.

“All the way at the end, to the right,” I said. “Not that. That's the bathroom.”

The afternoon light was fading as I locked the door behind me,
but it didn't matter. When I turned on the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead, it became clinic time, where all times are the same. I'd always told Mom that if she really wanted the clinic to feel “homelike,” real lightbulbs would go a long way toward making it feel like a house instead of a Wal-Mart.

Cole had already disappeared into my mother's tiny lab room, and I slowly trailed after. I'd cut class to take the package to Cole, but I hadn't slept in — I'd been up and running. Then I'd helped Cole set up his incredibly industrial-looking pit trap, taking care not to fall into the sinkhole he said they'd pulled Grace out of. And now back here, waiting until the clinic was closed in order to come back in, telling my parents I was going to a student council meeting. I was ready to take a break. We hadn't had much food to speak of and I was feeling vaguely martyred for the whole werewolf cause. I paused in the reception area to open the tiny fridge under the counter. I grabbed two juices and carried them back with me. Juice was better than nothing.

In the lab room, Cole was already settled backward on a chair and leaning over the counter where the microscope was. He held one of his hands up in the air, pointing toward the ceiling. It only took me a moment to realize that he'd pricked his finger and was holding his hand up to slow the bleeding.

“Do you want, like, a Band-Aid, or are you fine doing the Statue of Liberty thing?” I asked. I put the juice next to him and then, on second thought, screwed off the lid and held the bottle to his mouth so he could get a drink. He waved his bloody finger in a sort of thank-you.

“I couldn't find the Band-Aids,” Cole said. “Which is to mean, I didn't look. Is this methanol? Oh, look, it is.”

I found him a Band-Aid and rolled another chair next to him. It didn't take much rolling. The lab room was really the storage room, drawers and shelves stuffed with prescription drug samples and trials, boxes of cotton balls and swabs and tongue depressors, bottles
of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. A urinalysis machine, microscope, blood tube rotaror. There wasn't much room for two chairs and two bodies in them.

Cole had smeared some of his blood on a glass slide and was peering at it through the microscope.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him.

He didn't answer; his eyebrows were pulled down close to his eyes in an expression of such deep thought that I suspected he hadn't even heard me. I sort of liked seeing him like that, not performing, just … being Cole, as hard as he could. He didn't resist as I took his hand and swabbed off the blood.

“For crying out loud,” I said, “what did you use to open yourself up, a butter knife?” I applied a Band-Aid and released his hand. He immediately used it to adjust the microscope.

The silence seemed to last forever, but it was probably only a minute. Cole sat back from the microscope, not looking at me. He laughed, a short, breathy laugh of disbelief, his hands tented in front of him, fingertips pressed together. He rested his fingers on his lips.

“Christ,” he said, and then he laughed again, that abbreviated laugh.

I was annoyed. “What?”

“Just — look.” Cole pushed his chair back and physically pulled mine over to take its place. “What do you see?”

I wasn't going to be able to see jack shit, since I didn't know what I was looking for, that's what. But I humored him. I put my eye against the microscope and peered in. And Cole was right — I could immediately see what he saw. There were dozens of red blood cells beneath the scope, colorless and normal. There were also two red dots.

I pulled back. “What is that?”

“It's the werewolf,” Cole said. He was jerking his spinning chair back and forth on its axis. “I knew it. I
knew
it.”

“Knew
what
?”

“Either I have malaria or that is what the wolf looks like. Hanging out there in my cells. I
knew
it was behaving like malaria. I knew it. Christ!”

He stood up, because sitting down wouldn't cut it anymore.

“Great, boy genius. What does that mean for the wolves? Can you cure it like malaria?”

Cole was looking at a chart on the wall. It depicted the growth stages of a fetus in vibrant colors that hadn't been seen since the sixties. He waved a hand at me. “Malaria can't be cured.”

“Don't be stupid,” I said. “They cure people of malaria.”

“No,” Cole said, and he traced the shape of one of the fetuses with his finger. “They just stop it from killing them.”

“So you're saying there's no cure,” I said. “But there's a way to stop them from … you've already stopped Grace from dying. I don't understand what the revelation is here.”

“Sam. Sam's the revelation. This is just confirmation. I need to do more work. I need paper,” Cole said, turning toward me. “I need …” He broke off, his temporary high slowly unwinding. It felt anti-climactic, coming out here for a scientific reveal that was only half-baked, one I couldn't understand. And being in the clinic after dark was reminding me of when Grace and I had brought Jack here. It was bringing back all that failure and loss and pretty much making me want to curl up on my bed back at home.

“Food,” I suggested. “Sleep. That's what I need. To get the hell out of here.”

Cole frowned at me, as if I'd suggested “ducks” and “yoga.”

I stood up and faced him. “Unlike those of you with raging wolf infections inside them, I have school in the morning, especially since I skipped today to be here.”

“Why are you pissed?”

“I'm not pissed,” I said. “I'm tired. I just want to go home, I guess.” The idea of going home didn't sound that great, either, though.

“You're pissed,” he said. “I'm almost there, Isabel. I've almost got something. I think I — I'm really close. I need to talk to Sam. If I can get him to talk to me.”

And then he was just a tired, good-looking guy, not a rock star with tens of thousands of fans who wondered where he was or a genius with a brain so big that it rebelled against being used and tried to invent ways to hurt itself instead.

Looking at him looking like that, I felt like I needed something from him, or somebody, and that probably meant that he also needed something from me, or somebody, but the revelation was like looking at spots on a slide. Knowing that it meant something to somebody wasn't the same as it meaning something to you.

And then I heard a familiar sound — the crack of the lock on the door at the end of the hall as the dead bolt unlocked. Someone else was here.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I hissed. I had two seconds to devise a plan. “Get your stuff and get under the counter!” Cole grabbed his slide and juice and Band-Aid wrapper and I checked to make sure he was pushed underneath the counter before I hit the light to the lab room and slid underneath with him.

The door at the end of the hall opened with a slow series of pops, then clunked heavily shut again. I heard my mother's irritated sigh, loud and dramatic enough to be heard all the way in the lab room. I hoped her irritation was because she thought someone had left the hall light on.

There was nothing of Cole but the glint of his eyes in the darkness, the light from the hall reflecting on them. There was not a lot of space under the counter, so we were knee to knee, foot crushed on top of foot, impossible to tell whose breath was whose. We were both
absolutely silent, listening to my mother's progress. I heard her heels click into one of the first rooms — probably the reception area. She was there for a several moments, shuffling around. Cole readjusted one of his feet so that my boot wasn't pressing into his ankle bone. I heard something in his shoulder pop as he moved. He braced one of his arms on the wall behind me. I somehow had a hand between his legs, so I withdrew it.

We waited.

My mother said, very clearly, “Dammit.” She crossed the hall into one of the exam rooms. I heard more paper shuffling. It was black as sleep in the cubby beneath the counter, too dark for my eyes to get used to, and it felt like we had more legs between the two of us than we really ought to. My mother dropped papers; I could hear the whoosh and ticking of them spreading over the floor and tapping into the exam table. She didn't swear this time, though.

Cole kissed me. I should have told him to stop, to keep still, but I wanted it. I didn't move from where I was curled up against the wall, just let him kiss me and kiss me again. It was the sort of kiss that would take a long time to recover from. You could take each of our kisses, from the very first moment we'd met, and put them on slides under a microscope, and I was pretty sure what you'd find. Even an expert would see nothing on the first one, and then on the next one, the start of something — mostly outnumbered, easily destroyed — and then more and more until finally this one, something that even the untrained eye could spot. Evidence that we'd probably never be cured of each other, but we might be able to keep it from killing us.

I heard the sound of my mother's footsteps a second before the light to the lab room went on. Then a heavy sigh.

“Isabel, why?”

Cole leaned away and so we were like two possums behind a Dumpster when she stood back to look at us. I saw her doing a quick
vitals check: We had all our clothing on, nothing was rumpled, we weren't injecting ourselves with anything. She looked at Cole; Cole smiled lazily back at her.

“You — you're from …” my mother started. She squinted at him. I waited for her to say NARKOTIKA, though I'd never imagined her a fan. But she said, “The boy from the stairs. From the house. The naked one. Isabel, when I said I didn't want you to do this in the house, I didn't mean to take it to the clinic. Why are you under this counter? Oh, I don't want to know. I just don't.”

I didn't really have anything to say.

My mother rubbed one of her eyebrows with a hand that was holding a closely printed form. “God, where is your car?”

“Across the road,” I said.

“Of course it is.” She shook her head. “I am not telling your father I saw you here, Isabel. Just, please, do not …” She didn't define what I was supposed to avoid doing. Instead, she threw my half-drunk bottle of juice in the trash can by the door, and turned the light out again. Her shoes receded down the hallway and then there was the popping of the outside door opening and closing. The clunk of the dead bolt.

In the darkness, Cole was invisible, but I could still feel him beside me. Sometimes you didn't have to see something to know it was there.

I felt a tickle on my skin; it took me a moment to realize that Cole was driving his die-cast Mustang up my arm. He was laughing to himself, hushed and infectious, as if there was still any reason to be quiet. He turned the car around at my shoulder and headed back down toward my hand, the wheels skidding on my skin a bit when he laughed.

I thought it was the truest thing I'd ever heard from Cole St. Clair.