Lightning flickered again, and this time I saw for certain what I thought I’d glimpsed earlier. Just barely, but it was there: the black outline of the shed where the pack kept supplies. It was several dozen yards to my right, above me, as if on a ridge. If I could make it there, I could slam that door in Shelby’s face.
The forest went black and then thunder split the quiet. It was so loud that all other sound seemed to be sucked out of the world for a few seconds afterward.
In that noiseless dark, I bolted, hands in front of me, trying to stay true to the path to the shed. I heard Shelby behind me, close, snapping a branch as she jumped toward me. I felt more than heard her closeness. Her fur brushed my hand. I scrambled away and then
I
was
falling
my hands grasped air
endless black
falling
I didn’t realize that I was crying out until all my breath was stolen and the sound was cut off. I hit something frigid and solid and my lungs emptied all at once. I only had a moment to realize that what I’d hit was water before I got a mouthful of it.
There was no up or down, just blackness. Just water coating my mouth and skin. It was so cold. So cold. Color exploded in front of my eyes, just a symptom in this blackness. My brain crying for air.
I clawed my way to the surface and gasped. My mouth was full of gritty, liquid mud. I felt it oozing down my cheeks from my hair.
Thunder grumbled above me, the sound seeming to come from far away; I felt like I was in the middle of the earth. Shivering almost too much to stand, I stretched my legs out and felt for the bottom. There — when I stood, the water came to the tip of my chin. It was freezing cold and filthy, but at least I could keep my head above water without tiring. My shoulders shook with involuntary tremors. I was so cold.
Then, standing in that frigid water, I felt it. A slow, slow path of nausea that started in my stomach and crawled up my throat. The cold. It was pulling at me, telling my body to shift.
But I couldn’t shift. As a wolf, I’d have to swim to keep my head above water. And I couldn’t swim forever.
Maybe I could climb out. I half swam, half stumbled through the icy water, reaching out. There must be a way out of this. My hands jammed into a craggy dirt wall that was perfectly vertical, stretching up higher than I could reach. My stomach twisted inside me.
No, I told myself. No, you’re not shifting, not now.
I made my way around the wall, feeling for a possible escape. The sides stretched up and away from me, endless. I tried to get purchase in them, but my fingers wouldn’t dig into the packed dirt, and the roots gave way under my weight, sending me back into the mud. My skin trembled, both from cold and the impending shift. I sucked in my frozen lower lip to try to steady it.
I could cry for help, but no one would hear me.
But what else could I do? The fact was this: If I turned into a wolf, I’d die. I could only swim for so long. All of a sudden, it seemed like a horrifying way to die, all alone, in a body that no one would ever recognize.
The cold pulled at me, flowed into my veins, unlocking the disease inside me. No, no, no. But I couldn’t resist it anymore; I could feel the pulse in my fingers pounding as the skin bubbled into another shape.
The water sloshed around me as my body began to tear itself apart.
I screamed Sam’s name into the darkness until I couldn’t remember how to speak.
• SAM •
“This is where the magic happens,” Cole said. “Are you going to put on your leotard now?”
We were by the back entrance to the Crooked Shelf, the bookstore where I sometimes lived. I’d slept badly with the thunderstorm, and after last night’s news, I hadn’t wanted to come in to work, but there had been no way to get off my shift on such short notice. So in I went. I had to admit that the normalcy of it was assuaging my anxiety a little. Well, except for Cole. Every other day, I had left Cole behind when I went to work, and hadn’t thought much of it. But this morning, I’d looked over while I was packing up and had seen him silently watching me getting ready to go, and I’d asked him if he wanted to come along. I didn’t yet regret letting him come with me, but the morning was still young.
Cole squinted up at me from the base of the short stairs, arms braced on either stair rail, his hair a concerted mess. The uncomplicated morning light made him look disarming and at ease. Camouflage.
I echoed, “My leotard?”
“Yeah, your superhero shit,” Cole said. “Sam Roth, werewolf by night, book retail specialist by day. Don’t you need a cape for that?”
“Yes,” I replied, unlocking the door. “Literacy rate in this country’s appalling; you need a cape to even sell a cookbook. You’re going to stay in the back if someone comes in, right?”
“No one’s going to recognize me in a bookstore,” Cole said. “Is the front of the store as crappy looking as the back?”
All of the stores on Main shared the same back alley, cluttered with spray-painted Dumpsters, weeds that looked like half-grown saplings, and plastic bags that had escaped death to tangle around the bases of staircases. Nobody came this way but owners and staff; I liked the disrepair because it was so far gone I didn’t feel I had to try to clean it up.
“Nobody ever sees this part,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s pretty.”
“So it’s like track six on an album,” Cole said. He smirked at some private joke. “So what’s the plan, Stan?”
I pushed open the back door. “Plan? I have to work until noon. Isabel is supposed to come by sometime before then to tell me what she’s found out since last night. Then, maybe, I’ll put a bag on your head and we’ll get lunch.”
The back room was a mess of papers and boxes waiting to be put out for the trash. I had no taste for tidiness, and Karyn, the owner, had an arcane system of filing that made sense to no one but her. The first time Grace had seen the disorder, she’d been visibly horrified. Cole, on the other hand, just thoughtfully examined a box cutter and a stack of rubber-banded bookmarks while I turned the lights on.
“Put those back where you found them,” I said.
As I did the business of opening up the store, Cole stalked around after me, his hands folded behind his back like a boy who’d been told not to break anything. He looked profoundly out of place here, a polished, aggressive predator moving amongst sunlit shelves that seemed folksy in comparison. I wondered if it was a conscious decision, his projected attitude, or if it was a by-product of the person within. And I wondered how someone like him, a furious sun, was going to survive in someplace like Mercy Falls.
With Cole’s intent eyes on me, I felt self-conscious as I unlocked the front door, set up the register, turned on the music overhead. I doubted that he really appreciated the aesthetics of the store, but I felt a small, fierce bit of pride as he looked around. There was so much of me here.
Cole’s attention was on the carpeted stairs near the back of the store. He asked, “What’s upstairs?”
“Poetry and some special editions.” Also, memories of me and Grace that were too piercing to relive at the moment.
Cole pulled a chick lit novel from an endcap, studied it vaguely, and put it back. He’d been here five minutes and he was already restless. I glanced at my watch, looking to see how long I had until Karyn arrived to relieve me. Four hours suddenly seemed like a very long time. I tried to remember the philanthropic impulse that had driven me to bring Cole.