chapter TWENTY-ONE
• ISABEL •
The problem with Cole St. Clair is that you could believe everything he said, and, also, you couldn’t believe anything he said. Because he was just so grandiose that it was easy to believe he could accomplish the impossible. But he was also such an incredible dirtbag that you couldn’t really trust a single thing he said, either.
The problem was that I wanted to believe him.
Cole hooked his fingers in his back pockets, as if proving that he wasn’t going to touch me unless I made the first move. With all the books behind him, he looked like one of those posters you see in libraries, the ones with celebrities advocating literacy. COLE ST. CLAIR SAYS NEVER STOP READING! He looked like he was enjoying himself up there on the moral high ground.
And he looked damn good.
I was reminded suddenly of a case that my dad had worked on. I didn’t really remember the details properly — it was probably several different cases run together, actually — just some loser who’d been convicted of something in the past and was now being accused of something else. And my mom had said something like Give him the benefit of the doubt. I’d never forgotten my father’s reply, because it was the first and only clever thing I thought he’d ever said: People don’t change who they are. They only change what they do with it.
So if my father was right, it meant that behind those earnest green eyes staring into mine, it was the same old Cole, perfectly capable of being that person he was before, lying on the floor drunk out of his mind and working up the nerve to kill himself. I didn’t know if I could take that.
I said finally, “And your cure for werewolfism was … epilepsy?” Cole made a disinterested noise. “Oh, that was just a side effect. I’ll fix it.”
“You could have died.”
He smiled, the wide, gorgeous smile that he knew very well was wide and gorgeous. “But I didn’t.”
“I don’t think that counts,” I said, “as not being suicidal.”
Cole’s tone was dismissive. “Taking risks is not being suicidal. Otherwise, skydivers need serious help.”
“Skydivers have parachutes or whatever the hell it is skydivers have!”
Cole shrugged. “And I had you and Sam.”
“We didn’t even know that you —” I broke off, because my phone was ringing. I stepped away from Cole to look at it. My dad. If there had ever been a time to let it go through to voicemail, this was it, but after my parents’ tirade yesterday, I had to pick it up.
I was aware of Cole’s eyes on me as I flipped the phone open. “Yeah, what?”
“Isabel?” My father’s voice was both surprised and … buoyant.
“Unless you have another daughter,” I replied. “Which would explain a lot.”
My father acted like I hadn’t spoken. He still sounded suspiciously good-tempered. “I dialed your number by accident. I meant to call your mother.”
“Well, no, you got me. What were you calling her for? You sound high,” I said. Cole’s eyebrows jerked up.
“Language,” my father replied automatically. “Marshall just called me. The girl was the last straw. He’s got word that our wolf pack is coming off the protected list and they’re setting up an aerial hunt. The state’s going to do it — no rednecks with rifles this time. We’re talking helicopters. They’re going to do it properly, like Idaho.”
I said, “It’s definitely happening?”
“Just a question of when they can schedule it,” my father said. “Collect the resources and manpower and all that.”
Somehow, that last sentence drove it home for me — “resources and manpower” was such a bullshit Marshall phrase that I could imagine my father repeating the words after hearing them on the phone only minutes before.
This was it.
Cole’s face had changed from the lazily handsome expression he’d worn before. Now, something in my voice or face must have tipped him off, because he was looking at me in a sharp, intense way that made me feel exposed. I turned my face away.
I asked my father, “Do you have any idea of when? I mean, at all?”
He was talking to someone else. They were laughing and he was laughing back. “What? Oh, Isabel, I can’t talk. A month, maybe, they said. We’re working on moving it up, though — it’s a question of the helo pilot and getting the area pinned down, I think. I’ll see you when I get home. Hey — why aren’t you in school?”
I said, “I’m in the bathroom.”
“Oh, well, you didn’t have to pick up in school,” my father said. I heard a man say his name in the background. “I have to go. Bye, pumpkin.”
I snapped the phone shut and stared at the books in front of me. There was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt face-out.
“Pumpkin,” Cole said.
“Don’t start.”
I turned and we just looked at each other. I wasn’t sure how much he’d heard. It didn’t take much to get the gist. There was still something about Cole’s face that was making me feel weird. Like before, life had always been a little joke that he found a little funny but mostly lame. But right now, in the face of this new information, this Cole was — uncertain. Just for two seconds, it was like I saw all the way down to the inside of him, and then the door dinged open and that Cole was gone.
Sam stood in the doorway of the store, the door slowly swinging shut behind him.
“Bad news, Ringo,” Cole said. “We’re going to die.”
Sam looked at me, a question in his eyes.
“My dad did it,” I said. “The hunt’s going through. They’re waiting on the helo pilot.”
Sam stood there by the front door for a long, long moment, his jaw working slightly. There was something odd and resolute about his expression. Behind him, the back of the open sign said CLOSED.
The silence stretched out so long that I was about to say something, and then Sam said, with strange formality, “I’m getting Grace out of those woods. The others, too, but she’s my priority.”
Cole looked up at that. “I think I can help you there.”