Forever (5 page)

• COLE •

Back on the planet called New York, my father, Dr. George St. Clair, MD, PhD, Mensa, Inc., was a fan of the scientific process. He was a good mad scientist. He cared about the why. He cared about the how. Even when he didn't care about what it was doing to the subject, he cared about how you could state the formula to replicate the experiment.

Me, I cared about results.

I also cared, very deeply, about not being like my father in any way. In fact, most of my life decisions were based around the philosophy of not being Dr. George St. Clair.

So it was painful to have to agree with him on something so important to him, even if he'd never know about it. But when I opened my eyes, feeling like my insides had been pounded flat, the first thing I did was feel for the journal on the nightstand beside me. I had woken earlier, found myself alive on the living room floor — that was a surprise — and crawled to my bedroom to sleep or finish the process of dying. Now, my limbs felt like they'd been assembled by a factory with lousy quality control. Squinting in gray light that could've been any time of day or night, I opened the journal up with fingers that felt like inanimate objects. I had to turn past pages of Beck's handwriting to get to my own, and then I wrote the date and copied the format I'd used on the days before. My handwriting on the facing page was a bit sturdier than the letters I scratched down now.

I closed the book and rested it on my chest. I'd pop the champagne over my discovery just as soon as I could stay awake. When progress stopped feeling so much like a disease.

I closed my eyes again.

• GRACE •

When I first became a wolf, I didn't know the first thing about how to survive.

When I'd first come to the pack, the things I didn't know wildly outnumbered the things that I did: how to hunt, how to find the other wolves when I got lost, where to sleep. I couldn't speak to the others. I didn't understand the riot of gestures and images that they used.

I knew this, though: If I gave into fear, I'd die.

I started by learning how to find the pack. It was by accident. Alone and hungry and feeling a hollow that food wouldn't fill regardless, I'd tipped my head back in despair and keened into the cold darkness. It was a wail more than a howl, pure and lonely. It echoed against the rocks near me.

And then, a few moments later, I heard a reply. A yipping howl that didn't last long. Then another. It took me a few moments to realize that it was waiting for me to respond. I howled again, and then, immediately, the other wolf replied. It had not finished howling when another wolf began, and another. If their howls echoed, I couldn't hear it; they were far away.

But far away was nothing. This body never got tired.

So I learned how to find the other wolves. It took me days to learn the mechanics of the pack. There was the large black wolf that was clearly in charge. His greatest weapon was his gaze: A sharp look would effectively send one of the other pack members to their belly. Anyone
but the large gray wolf who was nearly as respected: He would merely flatten his ears back and lower his tail, only slightly deferential.

From them, I learned the language of dominance. Teeth over muzzle. Lips pulled back. Hair raised along spine.

And from the bottommost members of the pack, I learned about submission. The belly presented to the sky, the eyes directed downward, the lowering of one's whole body to look small.

Every day, the lowest wolf, a sickly thing with a running eye, was reminded of his place. He was snapped at, pinned to the ground, forced to eat last. I thought that being the lowest would be bad, but there was something worse: being ignored.

There was a white wolf who hovered on the edge of the pack. She was invisible. She wasn't invited into games, even by the gray-brown joker of the pack. He would even play with birds and he wouldn't play with her. She was a non-presence during hunts, untrusted, ignored. But the pack's treatment of her wasn't entirely unjustified: Like me, she didn't seem to know how to speak the language of the pack. Or perhaps I was being too kind. Really, it seemed like she didn't care to use what she knew.

She had secrets in her eyes.

The only time I saw her interact with another wolf was when she snarled at the gray wolf and he attacked her.

I thought he would kill her.

But she was strong; a scuffle through ferns ensued, and in the end the joker intervened, putting his body between the fighting wolves. He liked peace. But when the gray wolf shook himself and trotted away, the gray-brown joker turned back to the white wolf and showed his teeth, reminding her that though he'd stopped the fight, he didn't want her near.

After that, I decided not to be like her. Even the omega wolf was treated better. There was no place for an outsider in this world. So I
crept up to the black alpha wolf. I tried to remember everything I'd seen; instinct whispered the parts that I couldn't quite remember. Ears flattened, head turned, shrunk down smaller. I licked his chin and begged for admittance to the pack. The joker was watching the exchange; I glanced at him and cracked a wolfish grin, just fast enough for him to see. I focused my thoughts and managed to send an image: me running with the pack, joining in the play, helping with the hunt.

The welcome was so boisterous and immediate that it was as if they'd been waiting for me to approach. I knew then that the white wolf was only rejected because she chose it.

My lessons began. As spring burst out around us, unfurling blossoms so sweet they smelled of rot, turning the ground soft and damp, I became the project of the pack. The gray wolf taught me how to creep up on prey, to run around and clamp down on a deer's nose as the others swept up its flanks. The black alpha taught me to follow scent trails at the edge of our territory. The joker taught me how to bury food and mark an empty stash. They seemed to take a peculiar joy in my ignorance. Long after I'd learned the cues for play, they would prompt me with exaggerated play bows, their elbows down to the ground, tails high and waving. When, hungry to the point of distraction, I managed to catch a mouse on my own, they pranced around me and celebrated as if I'd caught a moose. When they outstripped me on hunts, they'd return with a bit of the kill, like they would for a cub; for a long time, I stayed alive because of their kindness.

When I curled on the forest floor, crying softly, my body shaking and my insides ripped to shreds by the girl that lived inside me, the wolves stood watch, protecting me, though I wasn't sure what I needed to be protected from. We were the largest things in these woods, barring the deer, and even for them we had to run for hours.

And run we did. Our territory was vast; at first it seemed endless. But no matter how far we pursued our quarry, we circled and returned
to the same stretch of woods, a long sloping stretch of ground broken by pale-barked trees.
Home. Do you like it?

I would howl, at night, when we slept there. Hunger that could never be filled would well up inside me as my mind snatched at thoughts that didn't seem to fit inside my head. My howling would set off the others, and together we'd sing and warn others of our presence and cry for any members of the pack that weren't there.

I kept waiting for him.

I knew he wouldn't come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images to me of what he'd looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf by the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn't know how to begin to look.

And it was more than his eyes that haunted me. They were a doorway to other almost-memories, almost-images, almost-versions of myself that I couldn't catch, more elusive prey than the fastest deer. I thought I would starve for want of whatever that was.

I was learning to survive as a wolf, but I hadn't yet learned how to live as one.

• GRACE •

I shifted early one afternoon. “One” afternoon because I had absolutely no concept of time. I had no idea how long it had been since the last time I could fully remember being me, at Ben's Fish and Tackle. All I knew was that when I came to, I was in the little overgrown patio area near Isabel's house. My face was pressed against the damp dirt that covered the colorful mosaic I'd first seen several months ago. I'd been lying there long enough that the tiles had left a lined pattern in the side of my face. Down below me, ducks on the pond held terse conversations with each other. I stood up, testing my legs, and brushed most of the dirt and sticky wet leaf bits off me.

I said, “Grace.” The ducks stopped quacking.

I was incredibly pleased by my ability to recall my own name. Being a wolf had drastically lowered my standards for miracles. Also, saying it out loud proved that I was sturdily human and could risk going up to the Culpeper house. The sun found me through the branches and warmed my back as I crept up through the trees. Checking to make sure that the driveway was empty — I was naked, after all — I made the run across the yard for the back door.

The last time Isabel had brought me here, the back door had been unlocked; I remembered commenting on it. Isabel had said,
I never remember to lock it.

She'd forgotten again today.

I cautiously let myself in and found the phone in the spotless stainless-steel kitchen. The smell of food was so tantalizing that, for a moment, I just stood there, the phone in my hand, before I thought to dial.

Isabel picked up at once.

“Hi,” I said. “It's me. I'm at your house. No one else is here.”

My stomach growled. I eyed a bread box; a bagel wrapper poked out the bottom.

“Don't move,” Isabel said. “I'm coming.”

 

A half hour later, Isabel found me in her dad's hall of animals, eating a bagel, dressed in her old clothes. The room was actually fascinating, in a horrifying way. First of all, it was huge: two stories high, dim as a museum, and about as long as my parents' house was wide. It was also full of dozens of stuffed animals. I assumed Tom Culpeper had shot them all. Was it legal to shoot moose? Did they even have moose in Minnesota? It seemed like if anyone would have seen them, it would have been me. Perhaps he'd bought them instead. I imagined men in jumpsuits unloading animals with styrofoam taped to their antlers.

The door shut behind Isabel, loud and echoey like a church, and her heels tapped across the floor. The resonance of her footsteps in the hush only increased the church sensation.

“You look awfully happy,” Isabel said, since I was still smiling at the moose. She stood beside me. “I came as fast as I could. I see you found my closet.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Thanks for that.”

She picked at the sleeve of the T-shirt I wore, an old yellow T-shirt that read
SANTA MARIA ACADEMY
. “This shirt brings back horrible memories. I was Isabel C. back then, because my best friend was Isabel, too. Isabel D. Wow, was she ever a bitch.”

“In case I shift, I didn't want to ruin anything nice.” I glanced over at her; I was terribly glad to see her. Any other of my friends might have hugged me after I'd been gone for so long. But I didn't think Isabel hugged anyone, under any circumstances. My stomach twisted, warning me that I might not stay Grace for as long as I'd hoped. I asked, “Did your dad shoot all these?”

Isabel made a face. “Not all. Some of them he probably lectured to death.”

We walked a few feet and I stopped in front of a glass-eyed wolf. I waited for the horror to hit, but it never came. Small round windows let in narrow shafts of light, casting circles of light at the stuffed wolf's paws. The wolf was shrunken and dusty and dull-haired and didn't look like it had ever been alive. Its eyes had been made in a factory somewhere and they didn't tell me anything about who the wolf might have been, animal or human.

“Canada,” Isabel said. “I asked him. Not one of the Mercy Falls wolves. You don't have to keep staring at it.”

I wasn't sure if I believed him.

“Do you miss California?” I asked. “And Isabel D.?”

“Yes,” Isabel answered, then didn't elaborate. “Did you call Sam?”

“No answer.” His phone had gone straight to voicemail; he'd probably let the battery run down again. And no one had answered at the house. I tried not to let my face show my disappointment. Isabel wouldn't understand, and I didn't feel like sharing my sorrow any more than Isabel did at the moment.

“For me, either,” Isabel said. “I left a message at his work.”

“Thanks,” I said. But the truth was, I didn't feel very firmly Grace. Lately I had been staying human longer, awkwardly finding myself stranded in the middle of unfamiliar stretches of woods, but I still couldn't seem to stay human for longer than an hour. Sometimes I wasn't even human long enough to really register my change of bodies
in my recently wolf brain. I had no idea of how much time had passed. All those days, silently marching by me …

I stroked the wolf's nose. It felt dusty and hard, like I was petting a shelf. I wished I was at Beck's house, sleeping in Sam's bed. Or even at my own house, getting ready to finish up my last month of school. But the threat of changing into a wolf dwarfed every other concern in my life.

“Grace,” Isabel said. “My father is trying to get his congressman friend to help him get the wolves off the protected list. He wants to do an aerial hunt.”

My stomach twisted again. I walked across the gorgeous hardwood floor to the next animal, a fantastically huge hare forever frozen in midjump. It had a spiderweb between its back legs. Tom Culpeper — did he have to keep pursuing the wolves? Couldn't he stop? But I knew he couldn't. In his mind, it wasn't revenge, it was prevention. Righteous sword swinging. Keeping other people from suffering the same fate as his son. If I really, really tried, I could see it from his point of view and then I could stop thinking of him as a monster for two seconds, for Isabel's sake.

“You and Sam both!” Isabel snapped. “You don't even look bothered. Don't you believe me?”

“I believe you,” I replied. I looked at our reflections in the shiny wood. It was remarkably satisfying to see the dim, wavy shape of my human form. I felt a wave of nostalgia for my favorite jeans. I sighed. “I'm just a little tired of it all. It's a lot to deal with at the same time.”

“But it has to be dealt with anyway. It doesn't matter if you like it or not. And Sam has the practical sense of a …” Isabel trailed off. Apparently she couldn't think of anything more fanciful than Sam.

“I know it has to be dealt with,” I said wearily. My stomach lurched again. “What we need to do is move them, but I can't think about how to do that right now.”

“Move them?”

I walked slowly to the next animal. Some kind of goose, running with its wings outstretched. Possibly it was supposed to be landing. The slanting afternoon light from above played with my sight and made the goose's black eye look like it was winking at me. “Obviously we have to get them away from your dad. He's not going to stop. There has to be someplace safer.”

Isabel laughed, a short laugh that was more hiss than mirth. “I love that you came up with an idea in two seconds when Sam and Cole haven't come up with one in two months.”

I looked at her. She was giving me a smirking sort of look, one eyebrow raised. It was probably meant to be admiring. “Well, it might not work. I mean, moving a pack of wild animals …”

“Yeah, but at least it's an idea. It's nice to see someone using their brain.”

I made a face. We looked at the goose. It didn't wink again.

“Does it hurt?” Isabel asked.

I realized she was looking at my left hand, which had made its way to press on my side, all by itself. “Only a little,” I lied. She didn't call me out on my untruthfulness.

We both jumped when Isabel's phone rang.

“That's for you,” Isabel said, before she even dug it out. She looked at the screen and handed it to me.

My stomach jolted; I couldn't tell if it was from the wolf inside me or from sudden, inexplicable nerves.

Isabel smacked my arm; my skin crawled underneath her touch. “Say something.”

“Hi,” I said. More of a croak.

“Hi,” Sam said, voice barely loud enough for me to hear. “How are you doing?”

I was very aware of Isabel standing beside me. I turned toward the
goose. It winked at me again. My skin didn't feel like it was mine. “Better now.”

I didn't know what I was supposed to say in two minutes after two months apart. I didn't want to talk. I wanted to curl up against him and fall asleep. More than anything, I wanted to be able to see him again, to see in his eyes that what we had had been real and that he wasn't a stranger. I didn't want a big gesture, an elaborate conversation — I just wanted to know that something was still the same when everything else had changed. I felt a surge of anger at the inadequate phone, at my uncertain body, at the wolves who'd made me and ruined me.

“I'm coming,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

Eight minutes too late. My bones ached. “I would really” — I paused to clench my teeth against the shivering. This was the worst part — when it was really starting to hurt but I knew that it was going to get more painful later — “like to get some cocoa when I'm back. I miss chocolate.”

Sam made a soft noise. He could tell, and it hurt me, more than the shift, that he could. He said, “I know it's hard. Think of summer, Grace. Remember it will stop.”

My eyes burned. I hunched my shoulders against the presence of Isabel.

“I want it to stop now,” I whispered, and felt terrible for admitting it.

Sam said, “You —”

“Grace!” hissed Isabel, snatching the phone away from me. “You have to get out of here. My parents are home!”

She snapped the phone shut just as I heard voices from the other room.

“Isabel!” Tom Culpeper's voice rang out, distantly. My body was stretching and ripping inside. I wanted to fold in on myself.

Isabel propelled me toward a door; I stumbled into another room. She said, “Get in there. Be quiet! I'll take care of it.”

“Isabel,” I gasped, “I can't —”

The massive old lock at the other side of the hall cracked out like a shot, at the same moment that Isabel slammed the door shut in my face.