Linger (10 page)

He nodded, and just as he turned to go upstairs, I caught a glimpse of some private emotion on his face that made me think he wasn't as much of an open book as I'd thought. It made me want to stop him and ask him to fill in the blanks of our conversation — how Grace was sick, why the bathroom light wasn't on, what he was going to do now — but it was way too late, and, anyway, I wasn't that girl yet.

• COLE •

The worst of the pain was already over, and I was just lying in the water, floating my hands on top of the bathwater and imagining falling asleep in it, when I heard a knock on the bathroom door.

Isabel's voice followed the knock, the force of which opened the unlatched door an inch. “Have you drowned?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mind if I come in?” But she didn't wait for my answer; she just let herself in, sitting on the toilet beside the tub. The fluffy, fur-lined hood of her jacket made her look like she had a hunchback. Her hair was jagged on her cheek. She looked like an ad for something. For toilets. For jackets. For antidepressants. Whatever it was for, I'd buy it. She looked down at me.

“I'm naked,” I said.

“So am I,” Isabel replied. “Under my clothing.”

I cracked a grin. Had to give credit where credit was due.

“Are your feet going to fall off?” she asked.

Because of the size of the bathtub, I had to lift and straighten my leg to look at my toes. They were a little red, but I could wiggle them and feel all of them except for my pinkie toe, which was still mostly numb. “Not today, I don't think.”

“Are you going to stay in there forever?”

“Probably.” I sank my shoulders farther into the water to show my commitment to the plan. I glanced up at her. “Care to join me?”

She raised a knowing eyebrow. “Looks a little small in there.”

I closed my eyes with another smile.
“Zing.”
With my eyes shut, I felt warm and floaty and invisible. They should invent a drug that made you feel like this. “I miss my Mustang,” I said, mostly because it was the sort of statement that would make her react.

“Lying naked in a bathtub made you think of your car?”

“It had a rockin' heater. You could really cook the hell out of yourself in there,” I said. It was a lot easier to talk to her with my eyes closed, too. Not so much of a pissing contest. “I wish I'd had it earlier tonight.”

“Where is it?”

“Home.”

I heard her take her coat off; it
shushed
on the bathroom counter. The toilet creaked as she sat back down. “Where's home?”

“New York.”

“City?”

“State.” I thought about the Mustang. Black, shiny, souped-up, sitting in my parents' garage because I was never home to drive it. It had been the first thing that I'd bought when my first big check came in, and, in the irony of the century, I'd been on tour too much to ever drive it.

“I thought you came from Canada.”

“I was on” — I stopped just short of saying
tour
. I was liking my anonymity too much — “vacation.” I opened my eyes and saw in her hard expression that she'd heard the lie. I was beginning to realize that she didn't miss much.

“Some vacation,” she replied. “Must've sucked for you to choose this.” She was looking now at the track-mark scars on my arms, but not in the way that I expected her to. Not like judging. More like hungry. Between that and the fact that she was wearing only a camisole beneath her coat, I was having a hard time focusing.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “How about you? How do you know about the wolves?”

Isabel's eyes betrayed something for just a second, so fast that I couldn't tell what it was. In between that and her makeupless face, young and soft-looking, I felt bad for asking.

Then I wondered why I bothered to feel bad for this girl I hardly knew.

“I'm friends with Sam's girlfriend,” Isabel said. I'd done enough lying, or at least telling of partial truths, to know what it sounded like. But since she hadn't called me out on my own partial truth, I returned the favor.

“Right. Sam,” I echoed. “Tell me more about him.”

“I already told you that he's like Beck's son and he's basically taking over for him. What more do you want to know? It's not like I'm his girlfriend.” But her voice was admiring; she liked him. I didn't know what I thought of him yet.

I said the thing that had been bugging me since I'd met him. “It's cold. He's human.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, Beck led me to believe that was a pretty hard thing to accomplish, if not impossible.”

Isabel seemed to be contemplating something — I saw a tiny, silent battle waging in her eyes — and finally she shrugged and said, “He's cured. He gave himself a high fever and it cured him.” This was a clue of some kind. To Isabel. Something in her voice wasn't quite right when she said it, but I wasn't sure how it fit into the overall picture.

“I thought Beck wanted us — the new ones — to take care of the pack because there aren't many left who turn human for long enough,” I said. Truthfully, I was relieved. I didn't want responsibility; I wanted to slide into the darkness of a wolf's skin for as much time as possible. “Why didn't he just cure everybody?

“He didn't know Sam was cured. If he'd known, he would've never made more wolves. And the cure doesn't work for everybody.” Now Isabel's voice was out-and-out hard, and I felt like I was somehow no longer a part of the conversation I'd started.

“Good thing I don't want to be cured, then,” I said lightly.

She looked at me, and her voice was contemptuous. “Good thing.”

Suddenly I felt sort of done. Like in the end, she was going to see the truth about me no matter what I said, because that was what she did. She was going to see that when you took away NARKOTIKA, I was just Cole St. Clair, and inside me was absolutely nothing.

I felt the familiar hollow hunger inside, like my soul was rotting.

I wanted a fix. I needed to find a needle to slide under my skin or a pill to dissolve under my tongue.

No. What I needed was to be a wolf again.

“Aren't you afraid?” Isabel asked, suddenly, and I opened my eyes. I hadn't realized I'd shut them. Her gaze was intense.

“Of what?”

“Of losing yourself?”

I told her the truth: “That's what I'm hoping for.”

• ISABEL •

I didn't have anything to say to that. I didn't expect him to be honest with me. I wasn't sure where we could go from here, because I wasn't prepared to return the favor.

He lifted a dripping hand from the water, his fingertips a little wrinkled.

“You want to see if my fingers are done?” he asked.

Something in my stomach turned over as I took his wet hand and ran my fingers from his palm to his fingertips. His eyes were half-closed, and when I was through, he took his hand back and sat up, making the water slosh and crest around him. He leaned his hands on the edge of the bathtub, putting his face
at my eye level. I knew we were going to kiss again and I knew that we shouldn't, because he was already at rock bottom and I was getting there, too, but I couldn't help myself. I was starving for him.

His mouth tasted like wolf and salt, and when he put his hand at the base of my neck to pull me closer, lukewarm water trailed down my collarbone into my shirt and between my breasts.

“Ow,”
he said into my mouth, and I pulled back. But he didn't appear particularly concerned as he looked down at his shoulder, where my nails had broken the skin. I was still aching from kissing him, and this time, at least, he seemed to feel it, too, because when he dragged his still slightly damp hand flat down my neck to my breastbone, stopping just short of broaching the line of my camisole, I felt the
wanting
in the pressure of his fingertips.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Find a bed,” he said.

“I'm not sleeping with you.” The high of the kiss was starting to wear off, and it was like the first time I'd met him all over again. Why did I let him get to me? What was wrong with me? I stood up, got my coat off the counter, and put it back on. Suddenly, I was horribly afraid that Sam would know that we'd kissed.

“And again I'm left feeling like I must be a bad kisser,” Cole said.

“I need to go home,” I told him. “I have school tomorrow — today. I have to be home before my dad leaves for work.”

“A really bad kisser.”

“Just say thanks for your fingers and toes.” I had my hand on the doorknob. “And let's leave it at that.”

Cole should've been looking at me like I was crazy, but he was just looking at me. Like he didn't seem to get that this was a rejection.

“Thanks for my fingers and toes,” he said.

I shut the bathroom door behind me and left the house without finding Sam. It wasn't until I was halfway home that I remembered how Cole had told me that he was hoping to lose himself. It made me feel better to think that he was broken.

• COLE •

I woke up human, though the sheets were twisted and smelled of wolf.

After Isabel left the night before, Sam had led me past a pile of linens that had clearly just been torn from a bed, and set me up in a downstairs bedroom. The entire room was so yellow that it looked like the sun had thrown up on the walls and wiped its mouth afterward on the dresser and curtains. But it had a freshly made bed in the middle of the room, and that was all that mattered.

“Good night,” Sam said, voice cool but not hostile.

I didn't reply. I was already under the covers, dead to the world, dreaming of nothing.

Now, blinking in the late morning sunshine, I left the bed unmade and padded into the living room, which looked entirely different in the daylight. All reds and tartans made brilliant by the sun pouring in the wall of windows behind me. It looked comfortable. Not at all like the stiff gothic perfection of Isabel's house.

In the kitchen, photos were stuck every which way on the cabinets, a mess of tape and pushpins and smiling faces. I immediately found Beck in dozens of them, and Sam, too, looking like a stop-motion video as he aged in each one. No Isabel.

The faces, for the most part, were all happy and grinning and comfortable, like they were making the best of a strange life. There were photos of grilling and canoeing and playing guitars together, but it was pretty obvious that they all took place either in this house or in the immediate vicinity of Mercy Falls. It was like there were two messages being given out by the cabinets of photos:
We are a family
, and
You are a prisoner
.

You chose this
, I reminded myself. The truth was, I hadn't given much thought to the times in between being a wolf. I hadn't really given much thought to anything.

“How are your fingers?”

My muscles tensed for a second before I recognized the voice as Sam's. I turned toward it and found him standing in the wide doorway to the kitchen, a cup of tea in his hand, the light from behind haloing his shoulders. His eyes had a shadowed look that was equal parts sleep deprivation and uncertainty about me.

It was a weird and surprisingly freeing feeling, to have someone not take you at face value.

To answer his question, I lifted my hands beside my head and wiggled my fingers, a gesture with cavalier overtones that I hadn't initially intended.

Sam's unnervingly yellow eyes — I never got used to them — kept looking, looking at me, waging a battle with himself. Finally he said in a flat voice, “There's cereal and eggs and milk.”

I raised an eyebrow.

Sam's shoulders had already ducked as he started to retreat back into the hall, but my raised eyebrow stopped him. He closed his eyes for a moment, then reopened them. “Okay, this.” He set his mug on the island between us and crossed his arms. “This: Why are you here?”

The pugilistic tone made me like him slightly better. It offset his stupid floppy hair and sad, fake-looking eyes. Evidence of a spine was a good thing.

“To be a wolf,” I said, flippant. “Which, coincidentally,
isn't
the reason you're here, if rumors are true.”

Sam's eyes flicked to the photos behind me, so many of them containing him, and then back to my face. “It doesn't matter why I'm here. This is my home.”

“I see that,” I replied. I could've helped him out, but I didn't see the point.

Sam considered for a moment. I could actually see him mentally reviewing how much effort he wanted to put into the conversation. “Look. I'm not normally a jerk. But I'm having a really hard time understanding why someone would choose this life. If you could explain that to me, we'd be a lot closer to getting along.”

I held out my hands as if I were presenting something. When I did that at shows, the audience went wild, because it meant I was about to sing something new. Victor would've
gotten the reference and laughed. Sam didn't have the context, so he just looked at my hands until I said, “To make a fresh start, Ringo. The same reason your man Beck did it.”

Sam's expression went totally flat. “But you
chose
this. On purpose.”

Clearly Beck had given Sam a different story of his genesis than the one he'd given me; I wondered which one was real. I wasn't about to get into a lengthy discussion with Sam, however, who was looking at me like he expected me to debunk Santa Claus next. “Yeah, I did. Make of that what you will. Now can I get some breakfast, or what?”

Sam shook his head — not like he was angry, but like he was shaking gnats away from his thoughts. He glanced at his watch. “Yeah. Whatever. I've got to get to work.” He stepped past me, not meeting my eyes, and then checked himself. He went back into the kitchen and jotted something on a Post-it note, which he then smacked onto the door of the fridge. “That's my cell and my work. Call me if you need me.”

It was clearly killing him to be nice to me, but still, he was. An ingrained sense of politeness? Duty? What was it? I wasn't really a fan of nice people.

Sam started again to head out, but he stopped again, in the doorway, his car keys jingling. “You'll probably change back soon. When the sun goes down, anyway, or if you're outside too long. So try to stick around here, okay? So no one will see you shift?”

I smiled thinly at him. “Sure thing.”

Sam looked like he was going to say something else, but then he just pressed two fingers to his temple and grimaced.
The gesture said all the things that Sam hadn't: He had plenty of problems, and I was just another one of them.

I was enjoying being not-famous more than I'd expected.

• ISABEL •

When Grace wasn't in school on Monday, I ducked into the girls' bathroom and called her during lunch. And got her mom. At least, I was pretty sure it was her mother.

“Hello?” The voice that answered was obviously not Grace's.

“Uh, hello?” I tried not to sound too snarky, in case it really was her mom. “I
was
calling for Grace.” Okay, so I couldn't keep all the attitude out of my voice. But seriously.

The other voice was friendly. “Who is this?”

“Who is
this
?”

I heard Grace's voice, finally. “Mom! Give me that!” There was a shuffling sound and then Grace said, “Sorry about that. I'm grounded, and apparently that means that people can screen my calls without asking me.”

Color me impressed. Saint Grace got grounded? “What did you do?”

I heard a door shut on her side of the phone. Not quite a slam, but more defiant than I would've expected from Grace. She said, “Got caught sleeping with Sam.”

My face in the bathroom mirror opposite me looked surprised, eyebrows hiked up toward my hairline, the black liner around my eyes making them look even bigger and rounder than they really were. “This is the good stuff! You guys were having
sex
?”

“No, no. He was just sleeping in my bed. They're completely overreacting.”

“Oh, of course they are,” I said. “Everyone's parents are cool with their daughters sharing bed space with their boyfriends. I know my parents would love it. So, what, they kept you from going to school? That seems …”

“No, that's because I was in the hospital,” Grace said. “I got a fever, and again they overreacted and took me to the hospital instead of giving me Tylenol. I think they just wanted a good reason to take me in the opposite direction from Sam. Anyway, it took forever, of course, like it always does in a hospital, and I didn't get home until late. So I just woke up, basically.”

For some reason my thoughts immediately ran to Grace looking up at Mr. Grant and asking to be excused for her headache. “What's wrong with you? What did the doctors say?”

“Virus, or something. It was just a fever,” Grace said, so fast that I barely had time to get out my questions. It didn't sound like she believed herself.

The bathroom door came open slightly behind me and I heard, “Isabel, I know you're in there.” Ms. McKay, my English teacher. “If you keep skipping lunch, I'm going to have to tell your parents. Just saying. Class is in ten minutes.”

The door swung shut once more.

Grace said, “Are you not eating again?”

I said, “Shouldn't you be more worried about your problems at the moment?”

• COLE •

After Sam had disappeared to “work,” whatever that was, I poured myself a glass of milk and wandered back into the living room to look through some drawers. In my experience, drawers and backpacks were great ways to get to know a person. The end tables in the living room only offered up remote controls and PlayStation controls, so I headed into the office I'd passed on the way from my bedroom.

It was a way better jackpot. The desk was stuffed with papers, and the computer wasn't password protected. The room was practically made for ransacking, situated on the corner of the house with windows on two walls, one pair of them facing the street, so I would have plenty of warning if Sam returned. I set my glass of milk down next to the mouse pad (someone had drawn doodles all over the pad with a Sharpie, including a sketch of a very large-breasted girl in a schoolgirl outfit) and made myself comfortable in the chair. The office was like the rest of the house — homey and masculine and comfortable.

On top of the desk, there were some bills, all addressed to Beck and all marked
PAID BY AUTOMATIC WITHDRAWAL
. Bills were not interesting. A brown leather day planner sat next to the keyboard. Day planners were not interesting, either. I opened a drawer instead. A bunch of software programs, mostly utilitarian stuff, but a handful of games as well. Also not interesting. I went for the bottom drawer and was rewarded by a swirl of dust, which is what people use to cover their best secrets. Then, a brown envelope labeled
SAM
. Now we were getting somewhere. I pulled out the first sheet. Adoption paperwork.

Here we go.

I shook the contents of the envelope on the desk, reaching in to pull out some of the smaller sheets that stayed inside. Birth certificate: Samuel Kerr Roth, showing that he was about a year younger than me. A photograph of Sam, knobby and small but still bearing the same flop of dark hair and heavy-lidded eyes I'd noticed the night before. His expression was complicated. Last night, the freakish wolf-yellow of his eyes had caught my attention; when I pulled the photo closer, I saw that baby Sam had the same yellow irises. So they weren't colored contacts. Somehow that made me feel slightly friendlier toward him. I put down the photo. Beneath it was a sheaf of browning newspaper clippings. My eyes scanned the stories.

I felt a thick, disgusted glob in the back of my throat that wouldn't go away when I swallowed. I was having a hard time
not thinking of Victor's little brother, who was eight now. I flipped back to the photo of Sam holding Beck's hand and looked once more at Sam, his half-closed eyes staring at some point past the camera, vacant. The position of his small hand in Beck's turned his wrist toward the camera, clearly showing the recent red-brown slash across it.

A little voice in my head said
And you feel sorry for yourself.

I shoved the newspaper clippings and the photograph back into the envelope so that I didn't have to look at them, and looked at the sheaf of paperwork underneath instead. It was trust paperwork, naming Sam as the beneficiary of the trust — which included the house — and the contents of a checking account and a savings account, both bearing Beck's and Sam's names.

Pretty heavy stuff. I wondered if Sam knew that he basically owned the place. Underneath the paperwork was another black day planner. Flipping through it, I saw journal entries with the efficient, backward-slanting writing of a left-hander. I turned to the first page:
“If you're reading this, I'm either a wolf for good, or you're Ulrik and you should get the hell out of my stuff.”

I jerked when the phone rang.

I watched it ring twice, and then I picked it up. I answered, “Da.”

“Is this Cole?”

My spirits inexplicably rose. “Depends. Is this my mother?”

Isabel's voice was sharp over the phone. “I wasn't aware you had one. Does Sam know that you're picking up the phone now?”

“Were you calling for him?”

A pause.

“And is that your number on the caller ID?”

“Yeah,” said Isabel. “Don't call it, though. What are you doing? You're still you?”

“For the moment. I'm looking through Beck's stuff,” I said, shoving the
SAM
envelope and its contents back in the drawer.

“Are you kidding me?” Isabel asked. She answered her own question. “No, you're not.” Another pause. “What did you find?”

“Come and look.”

“I'm at school.”

“Talking on the phone?”

Isabel considered. “I'm in the bathroom trying to work up enthusiasm for my next class. Tell me what you found. Some ill-gotten knowledge will cheer me up.”

“Sam's adoption papers. And some newspaper clippings about how his parents tried to kill him. Also, I found a really bad sketch of a woman wearing a schoolgirl outfit. It's definitely worth seeing.”

“Why are you talking to me?”