Forever (28 page)

I

my hands sweaty on the steering wheel of his car

never

endless evenings, all the same, standing by the grill

wanted

you're the best of us, Sam

this

• GRACE •

My first thought was that Sam needed to talk to Beck, to sort out all of the conflicted emotions in him, and my second thought was that Cole needed to talk to Beck about the various scientific concepts he'd tried out on himself, but my third thought was that I seemed to be the only one remembering exactly the reason why we absolutely needed to talk to Geoffrey Beck.

“Beck,” I said, feeling a little weird addressing him, but neither of the boys were, so what else was there for it, “I'm so sorry that we have to ask you questions when you feel like this.”

It was clear that he was suffering; Cole had made him human, but only barely. There was a scent and energy to the room that was wolfish still; if I'd closed my eyes and used my hidden senses to focus on Beck, I doubted I would've pictured him as human.

“Do it,” Beck said. His gaze jerked to Cole, to Sam, and then back to me.

“Tom Culpeper got an aerial hunt approved. In a week.” I waited for that to sink in, to see if I had to explain more what that meant.

Beck said softly, “Shit.”

I nodded. “We were thinking that we could move the pack. We need to know how.”

“My journal …” Beck, inexplicably, pressed one of his hands over his shoulder for a moment, holding it. He released it. It was harder, I thought, to watch someone in pain than to be in it yourself.

“I read it,” Cole replied. He stepped closer. He seemed less distressed than me by Beck's discomfort; maybe he was more used to seeing people hurting. “You said Hannah led them out. How? How did she keep the destination in her head?”

Beck glanced up to where Sam still stood silently on the stairs, then he answered, “Hannah was like Sam. She could hold some of her thoughts while she was a wolf. Better than the rest of us. Not as well as Sam, but better than me. She and Derrick were thick as thieves. Derrick was good at sending the images. She and Paul brought the wolves together, and Derrick stayed human. He kept that image of where we were going in his head and gave it to her. She led the wolves. He led her.”

“Could Sam do it?” Cole asked.

I didn't want to look at Sam. I knew that Cole already believed that he could.

Beck frowned at me. “If either of you is able to send him images while you're human.”

I glanced to Sam now, but his face betrayed no thoughts whatsoever. I didn't know if the brief, uncontrolled moments we had counted, when he'd showed me the golden woods when I was human, and when I'd showed him images of us together way back when we were in the clinic, injecting him with meningitis-infected blood. The latter, at least, had been close, intimate. I'd been right next to him. It wasn't like I was tossing the images from a car window while we ran from the woods. Losing Sam to his wolf form again for a plan as shaky as this … I hated the idea of it. We'd fought so hard for him to stay in that body. He despised losing himself so much.

“My turn,” Beck said. “My turn for questions. But a demand first. When I shift back here, put me back in the woods. Whatever happens to the wolves out there, I want to happen to me. They live, I live. They die, I die. Is that clear?”

I expected Sam to lodge a protest, but he said nothing.
Nothing.
I didn't know what I should do. Go to him? There was something faraway and terrifying about his expression.

Cole said, “Done.”

Beck didn't look disappointed. “First question. Tell me about the cure. You're asking about Sam leading the wolves out, but he's human. So the cure didn't work?”

“It worked,” Cole said. “The meningitis is battling the wolf. If I'm right, he'll still shift, every so often. But eventually he'll stop. Equilibrium.”

“Second question,” Beck said. He grimaced, pain written in the creases of his forehead, and then his face cleared. “Why is Grace a wolf now?” When he saw me looking at him sharply, he pointed to his nose with a wry expression. It was somehow gratifying that despite everything, he remembered my name and was concerned about me. It was hard to dislike him, even on Sam's behalf; the idea that he'd ever hurt Sam seemed so impossible when he was actually in front of you. If this was how conflicted
I
was after only meeting him a few times, I could only imagine how Sam was feeling.

“You don't have time to hear that whole answer,” Cole said. “Short answer: because she was bitten and chickens come home to roost eventually.”

“Okay, then, third question,” Beck said. “Can you cure her?”

“The cure killed Jack,” Sam said, the first words he'd spoken. He hadn't been there, like I had, to watch Jack die from the meningitis, his fingers turning blue as his heart gave up on them.

Cole's voice was dismissive, “He took on meningitis as a human. That's an unwinnable battle. You did it as a wolf.”

Sam's attention was on Cole and no one else. “How do we know you're right?”

Cole gestured broadly to Beck. “Because I have yet to be wrong.”

But Cole
had
been wrong before. It was just that he kept being right in the end. It seemed like an important difference.

Beck said, “Fourth question. Where are you moving them?”

“A peninsula north of here,” Cole said. “A cop owns it now. He found out about the wolves and wanted to help. Out of the kindness of his heart.”

Beck's face was uncertain.

“I know what you're thinking,” Cole said. “I've already decided; I'm going to buy it from him. Kindness is great. A deed in my name is better.”

Startled, I looked at Cole, and he looked back at me, his mouth set into a little line. Later, we had to talk to him about this.

“Last question,” Beck said. Something about his voice reminded me of the first time I'd ever spoken to him, on the phone, when I was being held hostage by Jack. There'd been something so sympathetic about his voice, something so kind, that it had almost broken me when nothing else had. And everything about his face now seemed to reinforce that: the honest squareness of his jaw; the lines by his mouth and eyes that seemed like they'd rather be smiling; the concerned, earnest set of his eyebrows. He rubbed a hand through his cropped auburn hair and then he looked up at Sam. He sounded absolutely miserable. “Are you ever going to speak to me?”

• SAM •

Here was Beck in front of me, and he was already on his way back to being a wolf, and every word that I'd ever said had left me.

“I'm trying to think of what I can say,” Beck said, his eyes on me. “I have maybe ten minutes to raise my son who I didn't think would live past eighteen. What do I say, Sam? What do I say?”

I held the banister in front of me, my knuckles white. I was the
one who asked the questions, not Beck. He was the one with the answers. What did he expect from me? I couldn't step without putting my feet into the prints that he'd left.

Beck crouched in front of one of the space heaters, not taking his gaze from me. “Maybe, after all this, there isn't anything to say. Ah, I …” He shook his head a little and looked at the floor. His feet were pale and scarred. Something about them looked like a kid's feet.

The room was silent. Everyone was watching me, as if the next move was up to me. But his question was mine: What did I say, in ten minutes? There were a thousand things that
needed
to be said. That I didn't know how to help Grace, now that she was a wolf. That Olivia had died, the police were watching me, Cole holds our fates in vials, what do we do, how do we save ourselves, how do I be Sam when winter means the same things as the summer?

My voice was rough and low when I spoke. “Were you driving?”

“Yeah,” Beck said softly. “Yeah, you would want to know that, wouldn't you?”

I had my hands in my pockets. Part of me wanted to take them out and cross them, but I didn't want to look anxious. Grace looked like she was moving even though she was standing still, like she wanted to move but her feet hadn't made up their mind yet. I wanted her here with me. I didn't want her to hear his answer. I was made of impossibilities.

Beck swallowed again. When he looked back up at me, his expression was a white flag. Surrendering the truth. Offering himself up for judgment. He said, “Ulrik was driving.”

I heard myself make a sound — barely audible — as I turned my face away. I wanted to get one of my boxes out of my head and climb into it, but Beck was the one who had told me about the boxes in the first place. So instead, I had this. Me lying in the snow with my skin gaping at the sky and there was a wolf, and it was Beck.

I couldn't think of it.

I couldn't stop thinking of it.

I closed my eyes, and it was still there.

A touch on my elbow made my eyes open. It was Grace, looking carefully at my face, holding my elbow as if it were made of glass.

“Ulrik was driving,” Beck said again, and his voice got a little louder. “Paul and I were the wolves. I — I didn't trust Ulrik to stay focused. Paul didn't want to do it. I bullied him. I know you don't have to forgive me. I haven't. No matter how much
right
I do after that, what I did to you will always have been wrong.” He stopped. Took a long, shaky breath.

I didn't know this Beck.

Grace whispered in my ear, “At least look at him, Sam. You don't know when you'll see him again.”

Because she asked, I looked at him.

“When I thought you didn't have another year, I —” Beck didn't finish. He shook his head, like clearing his thoughts. “I never thought that the woods would take you before me. And now I had to do it again — find someone to take care of us. But, listen to me, Sam. I tried to do it
right
this time.”

He was still watching me for a reaction. I didn't have one. I was apart from this. I was somewhere else. I could find, if I tried now, a collection of words to pull into lyrics. Something that would remove me from this moment and take me somewhere else.

Beck saw it. He
knew
me, like no one else knew me, not even Grace, yet. He said, “Don't — Sam. Don't go away. Listen: I have to tell you this. I had eleven years worth of memories to reenact, Sam, eleven years of the look on your face every time you realized you were about to shift. Eleven years of you asking me if you really had to do it this year. Eleven years of —”

He stopped then, and put his hand over his mouth, shaking fingers holding his jaw. He was so much
less
than the Beck I'd last seen.
This was not the Beck of summer. This was the Beck of a dying year. There was none of the power in his body now; it was all in his eyes.

Suddenly, Cole's voice punched through the room. “Sam, you know I was trying to kill myself when he found me. I was getting really good at it, too.” His eyes were on me, a challenge, unflinching. “I'd be dead now if it wasn't for him. He didn't force me. Victor, either. We both chose it. It wasn't like you.”

I knew this was true. I knew that there had been and probably always would be two Coles: the Cole who silenced the crowd with a smile and the Cole who whispered songs about finding his Alps. And I knew that Beck, somehow, in pulling Cole from the stage, had unearthed that second, quieter Cole, and given him a chance to live.

And me, too. Beck had bitten me, but it had been my parents, not him, who'd destroyed me. I had come to him as a crushed piece of paper that he had slowly smoothed. It wasn't just Cole that he'd rebuilt.

There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all the original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?

“Okay,” Beck said, voice taking a moment to solidify. “Okay. If I only have ten minutes, Sam, this is what I want to say. You're not the best of us. You're more than that. You're better than all of us. If I only have ten minutes, I would tell you to go out there and live. I'd say … please take your guitar and sing your songs to as many people as you can. Please fold a thousand more of those damn birds of yours. Please kiss that girl a million times.”

Beck suddenly broke off and ducked his head down to his knees; he clenched his hands on the back of his skull. I saw the muscles in his back twitching. Not lifting his head, he whispered, “And please forget all about me. I wish I had been better, but I wasn't. Please forget about me.”

His hands were still white-knuckled fists on the back of his head.

So many ways to say good-bye.

I said, “I don't want to.”

Beck lifted his head. His pulse was beating visibly in his neck, fast and hard.

Grace let go of me, and I knew that she meant to send me off, down the stairs. She was right. I went down the stairs, two at a time. Beck tried to stand, unsuccessfully, at the same time that I knelt swiftly down to meet him. Our foreheads were almost touching. Beck was shivering, hard.

So many days before this, it had been Beck crouching to meet me, me shivering on the floor.

I felt as unsteady as Beck, just then. It was like I'd unfolded all my paper crane memories and found something unfamiliar printed on them. Somehow along the way, hope had been folded into one of those birds. My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again:
Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved.
But really, the story was:
Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.

I was done being afraid. It had started that night, me and my guitar in the bathtub, and it would end with me disappearing into a wolf again. I wouldn't be afraid.

“Dammit,” Beck whispered, soft as a sigh. The heat was losing its grip on him. We were forehead to forehead again, father and son, Beck and Sam, the way it had always been. He was every devil and every angel.