chapter TWENTY-TWO
• SAM •
The woods were slimy and still from days of rain. Cole led the way, the certainty in his steps proving how often he’d taken the paths. Isabel had reluctantly left for school, and when Karyn had arrived to replace me, Cole and I had headed back to Beck’s house as quickly as we could. While we were in the car, Cole had told me his brilliant idea for catching Grace: traps.
I couldn’t quite believe that all this time that I’d thought Cole was spending his days trashing the house, he’d also been trying to trap animals. Wolves. I supposed everything about Cole was so unpredictable that I couldn’t be legitimately surprised.
“How many of these things do you have?” I asked, as we picked through the woods. I could have been thinking about Isabel’s news, the impending hunt, but I focused on making my way through the trees. The world was so damp that it took quite a bit of concentration. Water from last night’s storm dripped on me as I used branches for handholds, and my feet slid sideways beneath me.
“Five,” Cole said, stopping to knock his shoe on a tree trunk; chunks of mud fell out the treads. “Ish.”
“‘Ish’?”
Cole kept walking. “I’m making one for Tom Culpeper next,” he said, without turning around.
I couldn’t say I disagreed.
“And what is it you’re planning on doing, if you catch one?”
Cole made an exaggerated noise of disgust as he stepped over a pile of old deer droppings. “Find out what makes us shift. And find out if you’re really cured.”
I was surprised that he hadn’t asked me for a blood sample yet.
“Maybe,” Cole said thoughtfully, “I’ll enlist you for a bit of benign experimentation next.”
Apparently I was getting to know him better than I thought. “Maybe not,” I said.
As we walked, I suddenly caught a whiff of something that reminded me of Shelby. I stopped, turned in a slow circle, stepped carefully over a whiplike, bright green branch of thorns at my feet.
“What are you doing, Ringo?” Cole asked, stopping to wait.
“I thought I smelled …” I broke off. I didn’t know how to explain.
“The white wolf? The pissy one?”
I looked at him, and his expression was canny.
“Yes. Shelby,” I said. I couldn’t find whatever scent it was that I’d caught before. “She’s bad news. Have you seen her recently?”
Cole nodded, terse. I felt a knot of disappointment settle, cold and undigested, in my stomach. I hadn’t seen Shelby in months now, and I had hoped, optimistically, that she’d abandoned the woods. It wasn’t unheard of for wolves to leave their packs. Most packs had a scapegoat, picked on and driven away from food, pushed outside of the pack hierarchy, and they’d often travel hundreds of miles to start another pack, somewhere far away from their tormentors.
Once upon a time, Salem, an older wolf I’d never known as a human, had been the omega of the Boundary Wood pack. But I had seen enough of Shelby when I was clawing my way through the meningitis to know that she had fallen low in Paul’s eyes and thus low in the pack. It was as if he knew, somehow, what she had done to me and Grace.
“Bad news how?” Cole asked.
I didn’t want to tell him. To talk about Shelby was to take the memories of her out of the boxes I’d carefully put them away in, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that. I said warily, “Shelby prefers being a wolf. She … had a bad childhood, somewhere, and she isn’t quite right.” As soon as I said the words, I hated them, because it was the same thing that Grace’s mom had just said about me.
Cole grunted. “Just the way Beck likes them.” He turned away and began to walk, vaguely following the trail Shelby had left behind, and after a moment, I did, too, though I was lost in my thoughts.
I remembered Beck bringing Shelby home. Telling us all to give her time, give her space, give her something that she needed but we couldn’t offer. Months had gone by, then, a warm day, like this. Beck had said, Could you go see what Shelby’s gotten up to? He didn’t really think she was up to something, or he would’ve gone himself.
I’d found her outside, crouched by the driveway. She started when she heard me approach, but when she saw it was me, she turned back around, unconcerned. I was like air to her: neither good nor bad. Just there. So she didn’t react when I walked directly up to where she crouched, her white-blond hair hiding her face.
She had a pencil in her hand, and she was using it to scry in bits of innards, stretching loops of intestines straight with the tip of the pencil. They looked like worms. There was some metallic green and oily-looking organ nestled among them. At the other end of the guts, a few inches away, a starling jerked and bicycled its legs, upright on its chest and then its side, held fast to Shelby’s pencil by the grip of its own intestines.
“This is what we do to them, when we eat them,” Shelby had said. I remember just standing there, trying to hear any trace of emotion in her voice. She pointed to the bird’s mangled chest cavity with another pencil she held in her other hand. I remembered that it was one of my pencils, from my room. Batman. Freshly sharpened. The idea of her in my room felt more real and horrifying than the tortured animal kicking up dust on the edge of the concrete drive.
“Did you do that?” I asked. I knew she had.
As if I hadn’t spoken, Shelby said, “This is where its brain is. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.”
She pointed to the starling’s eye. I could see the tip of the pencil resting directly on the shining black surface and something inside me clenched, bracing itself. The starling lay perfectly still. Its pulse was visible in its exposed innards.
“No —” I said.
Shelby stuck my Batman pencil through the starling’s eye. She smiled at it, a faraway smile that had nothing to do with joy. Her gaze shifted in my direction though she didn’t turn her head.
I stood there, my heart racing as if I was the one who’d been attacked. My breath came in uneven, sick jerks. Looking at Shelby and the starling, black and white and red, it was hard to remember what happiness felt like.
I had never told Beck.
Shame made me a prisoner. I hadn’t stopped her. It had been my pencil. And in penance, I never forgot that image. I carried it with me, and it was a thousand times heavier than the weight of that little bird’s body.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
I wished Shelby was dead. I wished that this scent, the one that both Cole and I were following, was just a phantom of her, a relic instead of a promise. Once upon a time, it would have been good enough for her to just leave the woods in search of another pack, but I was not that Sam anymore. Now, I hoped she was someplace she could never return from.
But the scent of her, lingering in the damp underbrush, was too strong. She was alive. She’d been here. Recently.
I stopped then, listening.
“Cole,” I said.
He stopped immediately, something in my voice warning him. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the grumbling, alive smell of the woods waking up as they warmed. Birds shouting from tree to tree. Far away, outside the woods, a dog barking, sounding like a yodel. And then — a distant, faint, anxious sound. If we hadn’t stopped, the noise of our feet would’ve obliterated it. But now, clearly, I heard the whistling, whimpering sound of a wolf in distress.
“One of your traps?” I asked Cole softly.
He shook his head.
The sound came again. Something like misgiving tugged in my stomach. I didn’t think it was Shelby.
I held my finger to my lips and he jerked his chin to show he understood. If there was an injured animal, I didn’t want to drive it away before we could help.
We were suddenly wolves ourselves, in human skins — soundless and watchful. As when I had hunted, my strides were long and low, my feet barely clearing the forest floor. My stealth wasn’t something I had to consciously recollect. I just pulled away my humanness, and there it was, just underneath, waiting for me to recall it back to the surface.
Beneath my feet, the ground was slick and slimy with the wet clay and sand. As I descended into a shallow ravine, arms outstretched for balance, my shoes slid, leaving behind misshapen prints. I stopped. Listened. I heard Cole hiss as he struggled to keep his balance behind me. The sound of the wolf’s whimper came again. The distress in it plucked something deep inside me. I crept closer.
My heart was loud in my ears.
The closer I got, the more wrong it felt. I could hear the whistling of the wolf, but I also heard the sound of water, which didn’t make sense. No river ran through the bottom of this ravine, and we were nowhere near the lake. Still: splashing.
A bird sang over us, loud, and a breeze lifted the leaves around me, showing their pale undersides. Cole was looking at me but not quite at me, listening. His hair was longer than when we’d first met, his color better. He looked, strangely, like he belonged here, aware and tense in these woods. The breeze was sending petals around us, though there was no flowering tree in sight. It was an ordinary, beautiful spring day in these woods, but my breath was coming unevenly and all I could think was I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.
Suddenly, I had a clear, perfect sensation of drowning. Of water, cold and slimy, closing over the hair on the top of my head, of water burning my nostrils, of my lungs held tight in its grip.
It was a fragmented memory, entirely out of place. How wolves communicated.
And then I knew where the wolf was. I abandoned my stealth and scrambled the last few yards.
“Sam!” snapped Cole.
I barely stopped in time. Beneath my right foot, the ground sloughed away, falling with a splash. I pulled back to a safer distance and peered down.
Below me, the clay was shockingly yellow, a scratch of unreal color below the dark leaves. It was a sinkhole, freshly made, judging from the newly exposed tree roots, witches’ fingers that poked crookedly out of the slick sides. The edge of the pit was jagged where it had collapsed; the rain must’ve been too much for the roof of an underground cavern. The resulting hole was eight or ten or fifteen feet deep, it was hard to tell. The bottom was filled with something like yellow-orange water or mud, thick enough to cling to the sides, thin enough to drown in.
Floating in the water was a wolf, its fur clogged and tufted with mud. It wasn’t whimpering now, just drifting in the water. Not even kicking its legs. Its coat was too filthy for me to identify.
“Are you alive?” I whispered.
At my voice, the wolf kicked convulsively and lifted its head to look at me.
Grace.
I was a radio tuned to all stations at the same time, so many thoughts inside me that none of them counted.
Now I could see the evidence of her struggles: claw marks in the soft clay at the water line, chunks of dirt pried from the side of the pit, a track worn smooth by a body sliding back down into the water. She had been here a while, and when she looked at me, I could see that she was tired of fighting. I saw, too, that her eyes were knowing, pensive, full of understanding. If not for the cold water around her, holding her body in wolf form, she’d probably be human.
That made it so much worse.
Beside me, Cole sucked in a breath before saying anything. “Something for it to climb on? Something to at least —”
He didn’t finish, because I was already scouting around the mouth of the sinkhole, looking for something that would be of help. But with Grace in wolf form, what could I do? The water was at least six feet below me, and even if I managed to find something long enough to lower into the pit — maybe there was something in the shed — it would have to be something she could walk on, since she couldn’t climb. Could I even convince her to walk on something? If she had her hands, her fingers, this still wouldn’t be easy, but at least it wouldn’t be impossible.
“This is all useless,” Cole said, nudging a branch with his foot. The only wood near the pit was a couple of crumbling, rotten pine trees downed by storms and age, nothing useful. “Is there anything back at the house?”
“A ladder,” I said. But it would take me at least thirty minutes to get there and back. I didn’t think she had thirty more minutes. It was cold up here in the shade of the trees, and I thought that it must be colder down in the water. How cold did it have to be for hypothermia? I crouched back at the edge of the pit, feeling helpless. That same dread I’d felt when I saw Cole seizing was slowly poisoning me.
Grace had made her way to the side of the pit nearest me, and I watched her attempt a foothold, her legs trembling with fatigue. She didn’t even manage to leverage herself an inch out of the water before her paws smeared back down the wall. Her head was only just above water, her trembling ears tipped at half-mast. Everything about her was exhausted, cold, beaten.
“It won’t last until we get the ladder,” Cole said. “It hasn’t got that much stamina left.”
I felt sick with the plausibility of her death. I said miserably, “Cole, it’s Grace.”
He looked at me then, instead of at her, his expression complicated.
Below us, the wolf flicked her eyes up toward me, holding my gaze for a moment, her brown eyes on my yellow ones.
“Grace,” I said. “Don’t give up.”
It seemed to steel her: She began to swim again, this time toward another part of the wall. It was painful to recognize Grace in this grim determination. Again she tried to climb, one shoulder forced into the muck, the other paw scrabbling above the water at the steep wall. Her hind paws were braced on something below the surface of the water. Straining upward, muscles twitching, she pressed against the clay wall, shutting one eye to keep the mud out. Shivering, she looked at me with her one open eye. It was so easy to look past the mud, past the wolf, past everything else, and into that eye, right into Grace.
And then the wall gave way. In a cascade of mud and grit, she splashed into the water. Her head vanished beneath the sludge.
There was an infinite moment where the brown water was perfectly still.
In those seconds that it took for her to fight her way back to the surface, I made up my mind.
I stripped off my jacket, stood at the edge of the sinkhole, and, before I could think of the countless horrific consequences, I went in.
I heard Cole say my name, too late.
I half slid, half fell into the water. My foot touched something slick, and before I had a chance to determine whether it was the bottom of the pit or merely a submerged root, I was swallowed.
The grit of the water stung my eyes for a second before I closed them. In the moment of that blackness, time disappeared, became an arbitrary concept, and then I found my footing and lifted my head above the surface.
“Sam Roth, you bastard,” Cole said. There was admiration in his voice, which probably meant I’d made a poor decision.
The water came just to my collarbone. It was slimy as mucus and bitterly, bitterly cold. I felt like I had no skin, standing in this pit. It was just my bones and this frigid water passing around them.
Grace pressed against the opposite wall, her head against the mud, her expression torn between wariness and something her lupine face couldn’t convey. Now that I knew the depth of the sinkhole, I realized that she must be on her back legs, leaning against the wall to save her strength.
“Grace,” I said, and, at the sound of my voice, her eyes hardened into fear. I tried not to take it personally; wolf instincts took precedence, no matter what humanity I thought I’d seen in them earlier. Still, I had to rethink my plan of trying to lift her toward the edge of the hole. It was hard to concentrate; I was so cold that my goose bumps hurt. Every old instinct I had was telling me to get out of the cold before I shifted.
It was so cold.
Above me, Cole was crouched at the edge of the pit. I could feel his restlessness, hear the unasked question, but I didn’t know how to answer him.
I moved toward her, just to see how she reacted. She jerked back, defensively, and lost her footing. She vanished into the water, and this time, she was gone for the space of several breaths. When she emerged, she tried unsuccessfully to find her previous resting place, but the wall wouldn’t hold her. She paddled feebly, nostrils huffing above the water. We didn’t have much time.
“Should I come down there?” Cole asked.
I shook my head. I was so cold that my words were more breath than voice. “Too — cold. You’ll — shift.”
Near me, the wolf whistled, very quietly, anxious.
Grace, I thought, closing my eyes. Please remember who I am. I opened my eyes.
She was gone. There was just a slow, thick ripple moving toward me from where she’d sank.
I lunged forward, my shoes sinking into the soft floor of the pit, and scooped my arms through the water. Agonizing seconds went by where all I felt was silt on arms, roots on my fingertips. The pool that had seemed small from above now felt vast and depthless.
All I could think was: She’s going to die before I can find her. She’s going to die inches from my fingertips, sucking water into her nose and breathing mud. I will live this moment again and again every day of my life.
Then, finally, my fingers touched something more substantial. I felt the solidness of her wet fur. I wrapped my arms underneath to lift her up and get her head above water.
I needn’t have worried about her snapping. In my arms, she was a limp thing, lightweight with the water buoying her up, pathetic and broken. She was a golem of twigs and mud, cold as a corpse already from her hours in the water. Brown water bubbled from her nostrils.
My arms wouldn’t stop shaking. I leaned my forehead against her muddy cheek; she didn’t flinch. I felt her ribs pressing against my skin. She breathed another sticky, dirty-water breath.
“Grace,” I whispered. “This isn’t how it ends.”
Each of her exhalations was wet and raspy. My mind was a jostle of ideas and plans — if I could get her farther out of the water, if I could keep her warmer, if I could keep her above water until she got some strength back, if Cole could get the ladder — but I couldn’t focus on any one of them. Keeping her face above the liquid mud, I moved around slowly, feeling with my feet for whatever she’d stood on earlier.
I looked up to the edge of the hole. Cole was gone.
I didn’t know what to feel.
Moving slowly, I found a slick, fat root that supported my weight, and I braced myself against the wall, Grace’s wolf body in my arms. I hugged her to me until I felt her strange fast heartbeat against my chest. She was shivering now, whether from fear or exhaustion, I didn’t know. I didn’t know, either, how I was going to get us out of here.
I knew this, though: I wasn’t letting go.