Now it was ten years later and a different girl was dead and the coverage was never-ending.
The word now was extermination.
• GRACE •
This was the nightmare.
Everything around me was solid black. Not the shape-filled black of my room at night, but the absolute depthless dark of a place with no light. Water splattered onto my bare skin, the driving sting of rain and then the heavier splash of water dripping from somewhere overhead.
All around me, I could hear the sound of the rain falling in a forest.
I was human.
I had no idea where I was.
Suddenly, light burst around me. Crouched and shaking, I had just enough time to see a forked snake of lightning strike beyond the black branches above me, my wet and dirty fingers outstretched before me, and the purple ghosts of tree trunks around me.
Then black.
I waited. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn’t prepared when —
The crack of thunder sounded like it came from somewhere inside me. It was so loud that I clapped my hands over my ears and ducked my head to my chest before the logical part of me took over. It was thunder. Thunder couldn’t hurt me.
But my heart was loud in my ears.
I stood there in the blackness — it was so dark that it hurt — and wrapped my arms around my body. Every instinct in me was telling me to find shelter, to make myself safe.
And then, again: lightning.
A flash of purple sky, a gnarled hand of branches, and eyes.
I didn’t breathe.
It was dark again.
Black.
I closed my eyes, and I could still see the figure in negative: a large animal, a few yards away. Eyes on me, unblinking.
Now the hairs on my arms were slowly prickling, a slow, silent warning. Suddenly, all I could think about was that time when I was eleven. Sitting on the tire swing, reading. Glancing up and seeing eyes — and then being dragged from the swing.
Thunder, deafening.
I strained to hear the sound of an approach.
Lightning illuminated the world again. Two seconds of light, and there they were. Eyes, colorless as they reflected the lightning. A wolf. Three yards away.
It was Shelby.
The world went dark.
I started to run.
• SAM •
I woke up.
I blinked, my eyes momentarily mystified by the brightness of my bedroom light in the middle of the night. Slowly, my thoughts assembled themselves, and I remembered leaving the light on, thinking I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.
But here I was, my eyes uncertain from sleep, my desk lamp casting lopsided shadows from one side of the room. My notebook had slid partially off my chest, all the words inside it off-kilter. Above me, the paper cranes spun on their strings in frantic, lumpy circles, animated by the air vent in the ceiling. They looked desperate to escape their individual worlds.
When it became obvious that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I stretched my leg out and used my bare foot to turn on the CD player on the table at the end of my bed. Finger-picked guitar sounded through the speakers, each note in time with my heart. Lying sleepless in this bed reminded me of nights before Grace, when I’d lived in the house with Beck and the others. Back then, the population of paper cranes above me, scrawled with memories, had been in no danger of outgrowing their habitat as I slowly counted down toward my expiration date, the day when I’d lose myself to the woods. I’d stay awake long into the night, lost with wanting.
The longing then was abstract, though. I’d wanted something I knew I couldn’t have: a life after September, a life after twenty, a life with more time spent Sam than wolf.
But now what I longed for wasn’t an imagined future. It was a concrete memory of me slouched in the leather chair in the Brisbanes’ study, a novel — The Children of Men — in my hand while Grace sat at the desk, biting the end of a pencil while doing homework. Saying nothing, because we didn’t have to, just pleasantly intoxicated with the leather-scent of the chair around me and the vague smell of a roasted chicken hanging in the air and the sound of Grace sighing and turning her chair back and forth. Beside her, the radio hummed pop songs, top-40 hits that faded into the background until Grace tunelessly sang a refrain.
After a while, she lost interest in her homework and crawled into the chair with me. Make room, she said, though there was no way to make room. I protested when she pinched my thigh, trying to make herself fit into the seat beside me. Sorry for hurting you, she said right in my ear, but it wasn’t really an apology, because you don’t bite someone’s earlobe to tell them you’re sorry. I pinched her and she laughed as she pressed her face into my collarbone. One of her hands tunneled between the chair and my back to touch my shoulder blades. I pretended to read on and she pretended to rest against me, but she kept pinching my shoulder blade and I kept tickling her with my free hand, until she was laughing even as we kissed and kissed again.
There is no better taste than this: someone else’s laughter in your mouth.
After a while, Grace fell asleep for real on my chest, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to follow her. Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths. The weight of her pinned my fleeting thoughts to the ground, and in that moment, I was more in the world than I’d ever been.
So now, looking at the paper cranes tugging urgently on their strings, I knew exactly what I wanted, because I’d had it.
I couldn’t fall back asleep.
• GRACE •
I couldn’t outrun a wolf.
Neither of us could see very well in the dark, but Shelby had a wolf’s sense of smell and a wolf’s sense of hearing. I had bare feet tangled in thorns and blunt nails too short for attack and lungs that couldn’t seem to get enough air. I felt powerless in this stormy wood. All I could think about was my memories of teeth in my collarbone, hot breath on my face, snow leaching my blood away from me.
Thunder cracked again, leaving behind the painfully fast crashing of my heart.
Panic wouldn’t help.
Calm down, Grace.
I stumbled between lightning flashes, reaching out in front of me. Partially to spare myself from running into something, and partially in hopes of finding a tree with low enough branches to climb. That was the only advantage I had over Shelby — my fingers. But every tree here was either a skinny pine or a massive oak — no branches for twenty or fifty feet.
And behind me, somewhere: Shelby.
Shelby knew I’d seen her and so now she didn’t take care to be quiet. Though she couldn’t see any better than me in the darkness, I could hear her still tracking toward me in between lightning flashes, guided by her sense of smell and hearing.
I was more scared when I didn’t hear her than when I did.
Lightning flickered. I thought I saw —
I froze, silent, waiting. I held my breath. My hair was plastered to my face and shoulders; a single wet strand was stuck to the corner of my mouth. It was easier to hold my breath than to resist the temptation to brush away that little bit of hair. Standing still, all I could think of were the small miseries: My feet hurt. The rain stung on my mud-smeared legs. I must have cut myself on unseen thorns. My stomach felt utterly empty.
I tried not to think about Shelby. I tried to concentrate on keeping my eyes locked on where I thought I’d seen my key to safety, so that when the lightning came again, I’d be able to map out a path.