CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
• GRACE •
I remember lying in the snow, a small spot of red going cold, surrounded by wolves.
“Are you sure this is the place?” I asked Sam. It was October, so the cold night air had pulled the green from the leaves and turned the underbrush red and brown. We stood in a small clearing. It was so small that I could stand in the middle and stretch my arms out to either side and touch a birch tree with one palm and brush the branches of a pine with the other, and I did.
Sam’s voice was certain. “Yes, this is it.”
“I remember it being larger.”
I’d been smaller then, of course, and it had been snowy — everything seemed more vast in the snow. The wolves had dragged me from the tire swing to here, pinned me down, made me one of them. I’d been so close to dying.
I turned slowly, waiting for recognition, for a flashback, for something to indicate that this really was the place. But the woods remained ordinary woods around me, and the clearing remained an ordinary clearing. If I’d been out walking by myself, I probably would have crossed it in a stride or two and not even considered it a clearing.
Sam scuffed his feet through the leaves and ferns. “So your parents think you’re going to … Switzerland?”
“Norway,” I corrected. “Rachel really is going, and I’m supposed to be going with her.”
“Do you think they believed you?”
“They don’t really have a reason not to. Rachel turned out to be very good at deception.”
“Troubling,” Sam said, though he didn’t sound troubled.
“Yes,” I agreed.
What I didn’t say, but we both knew, was that it wasn’t crucial that they believed me, anyway. I had turned eighteen and gotten my high school degree over the summer, as I’d promised, and they’d been decent to Sam and let me spend my days and evenings with him, as they’d promised, and now I was free to go to college or move out as I pleased. My bag was packed, actually, sitting in the trunk of Sam’s car in my parents’ driveway. Everything I needed to leave.
The only problem was this: winter. I could feel it stirring in my limbs, turning knots in my stomach, coaxing me to shift into a wolf. There could be no college, no moving out, no Norway even, until I was sure I could stay human.
I watched Sam crouch and sort through leaves on the forest floor. Something had caught his eye as he scuffled. “Do you remember that mosaic, at Isabel’s place?” I asked.
Sam found what he was looking for, a bright yellow leaf shaped like a heart. He straightened and twirled it by the long stem. “I wonder what will happen to it now that the house is empty.”
For a moment we were both quiet, standing close to each other in the small clearing, the familiar sensations of Boundary Wood around us. The trees here smelled like no other, mixed with wood smoke and the breeze over the lake. The leaves whispered against each other in a way that was subtly different from the leaves up on the peninsula. These branches had memories caught in them, red and dying in the cold nights, in a way that the other trees didn’t.
One day, I supposed, those woods would be home and these woods would be the stranger.
“Are you sure that you want to do this?” Sam asked softly.
He meant the syringe of meningitis-tainted blood, of course, that was waiting for me back at the lodge. The same almost-cure that had helped Sam and killed Jack. If Cole’s theories were correct and I fought the meningitis as a wolf, it would slowly fight the werewolf inside me and make me human for good. If Cole was wrong and Sam’s survival had been random, I faced overwhelming odds.
“I trust Cole,” I said. These days, he was a powerful force, a bigger person than when I first met him. Sam had said he was glad Cole was using his powers for good instead of evil. I was glad to see him turning the lodge into his castle. “Everything else he’s figured out has been right.”
Part of me felt a prickle of loss, because some days, I loved being a wolf. I loved this feeling of knowing the woods, of being a part of them. The utter freedom of it. But more of me hated the oblivion, the confusion, the ache of wanting to know more but being unable to. For all that I loved being a wolf, I loved being Grace more.
“What will you do while I’m gone?” I asked.
Without answering, Sam reached for my left hand, and I let him have it. He twisted the stem of the leaf around my ring finger so that it made a bright yellow band. We both admired it.
“I will miss you,” he said. Sam let go of the leaf and it drifted to the ground between us. He didn’t say that he was afraid that Cole was wrong, though I knew he was.
I turned so that I was facing my parents’ house. I couldn’t see it through the trees; maybe once it was winter, it would be visible, but for now, it was hidden behind the fall leaves. I closed my eyes and let myself breathe in the scent of these trees once more. This was good-bye.
“Grace?” Sam said, and I opened my eyes.
He reached out his hand to me.