So my bedroom door was shut and I had my earbuds in, making white noise with offensive lyrics. My room was a rose-and-white cocoon made less stark by the lack of sunlight. Surrounded by my stuff, it could be any day of any year since we’d moved here. I could go downstairs, down the hall, and yell at Jack for not letting my dog out while I was gone. I could call my friends back in California who still remembered me and hatch plots to return and make plans to tour college campuses close to their houses. That the room was so unchanged and that night could play such tricks on me was endearing and horrifying at the same time.
Anyway, I almost missed it when my cell phone rang.
Caller ID: BECK’S HOUSE.
“Hi,” I said.
“Guess what your asshole father has done now?” Cole sounded a little out of breath.
I didn’t feel like answering. This wasn’t exactly how I’d hoped my next phone call with Cole would begin.
“Screwed us,” Cole said, not waiting for me to answer. “Over the hood of a foreign car. The hunt is happening at dawn. They’ve moved it.”
As if on cue, the landline rang from its base on my bed stand. I didn’t touch it, but even from here, I could see the caller ID: LANDY, MARSHALL. That meant that my dad and I were going to have the exact same conversation, basically, at the same time, with two different people.
The fighting downstairs had ceased. It was taking a long time for this to sink in.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Well, first I’m going to make Sam functional,” Cole said. “Grace shifted tonight and she’s in the woods, so he’s gone off the reservation.”
Now I was awake. I pulled out the single remaining earbud I still had in and sat up. “Grace is out there? That’s not acceptable.”
It was more than not acceptable. Grace versus Thomas Culpeper, Esquire, was not a battle that I wanted to ever see, because I knew how it would end.
“I know, princess,” Cole said tersely. “What I would like for you to do is to go to your father and tell him to get on the phone and make this stop.”
But I knew how that would end, too.
“That won’t work,” I replied. “This is bigger than him now.” “I. Don’t. Care,” Cole said, slowly and patiently, like I was a child. “You find that bastard and make him stop. I know you can.”
I could feel myself prickling at his tone. “Okay, first of all, you don’t tell me what to do. Secondly? All that will happen is I will go down there, make him completely pissed off at me for no reason, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, he’ll start to wonder why it is that I’m suddenly feeling so freaking friendly toward the wolves and maybe it will just open a can of worms that I will have to deal with for the rest of the year. And you know what he will say? It’s beyond him now. It’s time for you to do your thing.”
“My thing? My thing only worked if Grace was here to make it work. Without Grace, I have an emotionally unbalanced wolf and a Volkswagen.”
The house was stone quiet in comparison to the shouting before. I tried to imagine going down there and confronting my father about the hunt. It was too ludicrous to even contemplate.
“I’m not doing it, Cole.”
“You owe it to me to try.”
“Owe?” I laughed, harsh and short. For a moment, my mind skittered over every encounter we’d ever had, trying to think if there was any truth to what he’d said. I couldn’t think of anything. If anything, he owed me, big time. “Why do I owe you anything?”
Cole’s voice was completely level. “Your son of a bitch father killed Victor and threw him in front of my face.”
I felt my face getting hotter.
“I’m not him. I don’t owe you jack shit, Cole St. Clair. I might have considered going downstairs to talk to my dad before that, but now, screw you.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Grown-up way to handle your problems. Find a technicality, pitch a fit, and make it someone else’s problem. You really are daddy’s little girl.”
It stung, so I laughed at him. “You’re one to talk. The only thing that surprises me about all this is you sound remarkably sober. If it goes badly, you can always kill yourself, right?”
He hung up.
My pulse was racing, my skin searing, and suddenly I felt light-headed. I sat back and put hands over my mouth. My room looked exactly the same as it had before I’d picked up his call.
I threw my phone at the wall. Halfway through its flight, I realized that my father would kill me if I destroyed it, but it smacked the wall and slid to the ground without any pieces falling off it. It looked exactly the same as before.
Nothing had changed. Nothing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
SAM
Cole burst into the kitchen like a nail bomb. It was nearly one A.M., and in four and a half hours, the wolves were going to begin to die.
“No go, Ringo. Culpeper can’t call it off.” There was something chaotic in his eyes that wasn’t in his voice.
I hadn’t thought Culpeper would, but it seemed stupid to not at least try. “Is Isabel coming?” My voice sounded normal, to my surprise, a recording of me played back when the real me had lost my voice.
“No,” Cole said. Just like that. Barely a word. Just part of an exhalation. He pulled open the fridge with such ferocity that the condiments in the door cracked against each other. The cold air crept out of the fridge and around my ankles. “So it’s up to us. Your friend Koenig coming?”
It would’ve been nice: someone practical and on the positive side of the law with infinitely less emotional involvement than me sounded like a wonderful thing to have. “He found out the news because he was working. His shift ends at six A.M.”
“Perfect timing.” Cole grasped a handful of vials and syringes with one hand and dumped them on the island in front of me. They rolled and whirled in misshapen circles on the counter surface. “Here are our options.”
My ears rang. “We have more than one?”
“Three, precisely,” Cole said. He pointed to each in turn. “That one makes you a wolf. That one makes me a wolf. That one gives us both seizures.”
But there weren’t really three options. There was only one. There’d only ever been one. I said, “I have to go in and get her.”
“And the rest?”
“Her first.” It was the most horrible thing I’d ever had to say. But anything else had to be a lie. She was the one thing I’d remembered as a wolf, when there was nothing else. She was the one thing I knew I would hold on to. Had to hold on to. I would save the others if I could, but it had to be Grace first.
I didn’t think I’d been very persuasive, but Cole nodded. His nod made it real, and now that it was a plan, I felt sick. Not vaguely, but in a way that made my ears hum and my vision speckle in the corners. I had to become a wolf. Not in some distant future. Now.
“Okay, then here’s the plan, again. I’ll go to the lake,” Cole said. Now he was the general, sliding the syringe that would make him a wolf into one of the pockets of his cargo pants, pointing at some imaginary map in the air to demonstrate where we were going. “The parking area by Two Island Lake. That’s where I’m going to wait for you. You. Grace. Whoever you can bring with. Then we really need to be across that sparse area on that side of the woods well before dawn. It’d be like fish in a barrel, otherwise, with no cover. Are you ready?”
He had to repeat it. I thought about sitting in the bathtub with my guitar, singing “Still Waking Up.” I thought about pulling Grace’s dress over her head. I thought about Cole telling me that everyone listened to me, but I didn’t always say anything. I thought about everything that made me me and how afraid I was to lose it.
I would not lose it.
“I’m ready.”
There was no more time.
Outside, I carefully stripped out of my clothing and stood there while Cole tapped the syringe until the bubbles in it rose to the top. It was surprisingly light out here; the moon was nearly a week until full, but there were low clouds and mist that took what light there was and threw it everywhere. It made the woods behind the house look eerie and infinite.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Cole said. He took my arm and turned my palm toward the sky. My scars were puckered and ugly in the moonlight.
I was thinking: Grace’s hand in my hand, Beck shaking in the basement, burying Victor, becoming human. I was thinking, somewhere, maybe Grace is looking for me, too. I focused on the thoughts I wanted to bring with me. “I am Sam Roth. I am finding Grace. Finding the wolves. Bringing them to the lake.”
Cole nodded. “You damn well better be. Okay, this one has to go in a vein. Hold still. Say it again. Wait, tell me where your keys are, again, before I do.”
My heart thumped with nerves and fear and hope. “In my pocket.”
Cole looked down.
“I’m not wearing my pants anymore,” I said.
Cole looked at the step. “No, you aren’t. Okay. Now hold still.”
“Cole,” I said. “If I don’t —”
He heard the tone of my voice. “No. I’ll see you on the other side.”
Cole traced a vein from my scars to the inside of my elbow. I closed my eyes. He slid the needle in.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
SAM
For one second, one part of a second, one fraction of a breath, pain wiped all of my thoughts away from me. My veins were molten. My body was remapping itself, charting new courses, planning new bones while it crushed the others to dust. There was not a part of me that wasn’t negotiable.
I had forgotten the agony of it. There was no mercy to this. The first time I had shifted, I’d been seven. My mother had been the first to see. I couldn’t even remember her name right now.
My spine crackled.
Cole threw the syringe onto the step.
The woods were singing in the language I only knew as a wolf.
The last time I had done this, it had been Grace’s face in front of me. The last time I had done this, it had been good-bye.
No more. No more good-byes.
I am Sam Roth. I am finding Grace.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
ISABEL
It took me five minutes after Cole hung up on me to think that what he had said wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. It took me ten minutes to think that I should’ve called him back right away. It took me fifteen to find out he wasn’t answering the phone. Twenty to think I shouldn’t have said the bit about killing himself. Twenty-five to realize that it might end up being the last thing I ever said to him.
Why had I said it? Maybe Rachel was right with her bitch comment. I wished I knew how to set my weapons to stun instead of eviscerate.
It took what felt like half the night to realize that I couldn’t stand myself if I didn’t try to do something about the hunt.
I tried Cole’s number and then Sam’s one last time — nothing — and then I headed downstairs. In my head I rehearsed what I would say to my father. First the arguments, then the pleas, and finally, the justification for my concerns that wouldn’t lead it back to Sam and Beck, because I knew that would go nowhere with my father. This was going to go nowhere anyway.