I finally found a book on how to survive worst-case scenarios and settled on the stool behind the counter, resting my feet next to the cash register while I paged through. Being a werewolf was not listed. Neither was Recovering from addiction or Living with yourself.
The door dinged and I didn’t lift my gaze, thinking it was just Sam returning.
“Oh, what are you doing here?”
I could identify her by the disdain in her voice and the rosiness of her perfume even before I looked up. God, she was hot. Her lips looked like they’d taste like Twizzlers. Her mascara was thick as paint and her hair was longer than before — I could have wrapped its icy blondeness twice around my finger, not that I was imagining such things. As she let the door close slowly behind her, her edible lips parted.
“Welcome to the Crooked Shelf,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Can I help you find something? Our self-help section is extensive.”
“Oh, you should know,” Isabel said. She was holding two paper cups and she forcefully put them down on the counter, away from my feet. She regarded my face with something like contempt. Or maybe fear. Did Isabel Culpeper possess this emotion? “What the hell was Sam thinking? You know anyone can walk by on the street and see your face through those windows, right?”
“Nice view for them,” I said.
“Must be nice to be so carefree.”
“Must be nice to be so worried about other people’s problems.” Something slow and unfamiliar was moving through my veins. I was both surprised and impressed when I realized it was anger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been angry — I was sure it had been something between me and my father — and I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do about it.
“I’m not playing mind games with you,” she said.
I looked at the coffee cups she’d brought in. One for her, one for Sam. Such generosity seemed unlike the Isabel I knew. “Would you play mind games with Sam?” I asked.
Isabel stared at me for a long moment, and then she shook her head. “God, could you be any more insecure?”
The answer to that question was always yes, but I didn’t appreciate her bringing up my less public vices. I leaned forward to examine the two drinks, while Isabel gazed at me with slow death simmering in her eyes. Removing the lids, I looked at the contents. One of them was something that smelled suspiciously healthy. Green tea, maybe, or possibly horse pus. The other one was coffee. I took a drink of the coffee. It was bitter and complicated, just enough cream and sugar to make it drinkable.
“That,” she said, “was mine.”
I smiled broadly at her. I didn’t feel like smiling, but I hid that by smiling bigger. “And now it’s mine. Which means we’re almost even.”
“God, Cole, what? Even for what?”
I looked at her and waited for it to come to her. Fifty points if she got it in thirty seconds. Twenty points if she got it in a minute. Ten points if she got it in … Isabel just crossed her arms and looked out the window as if she were waiting for paparazzi to descend on us. Amazingly, she was so angry that I could smell it. My wolf senses were on fire with it; my skin prickled. Buried instincts were telling me to react. Fight. Flight. Neither seemed applicable. When she didn’t say anything, I shook my head and made a little phone gesture by my ear.
“Oh,” Isabel said, and she shook her head. “Are you serious? Still? The calls? Come on, Cole. I wasn’t going to do that with you. You’re toxic.”
“Toxic?” I echoed. Actually, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t flattered. There was a strength to that word that was tempting. Toxic. “Yes, toxicity. It’s one of my finer features. Is this because I didn’t sleep with you? Funny, normally girls yell at me because I did screw them.”
She gave her hard little laugh: Ha. Ha. Ha. Her heels clicked as she strode around the counter to stand right next to me. Her breath was hot on my face; her anger was louder than her voice. “This look on my face is because I was standing this close to you two nights ago, watching you twitch and drool because of whatever you’d stuck in your veins. I pulled you out of that hole once. I’m on the edge looking in anyway, Cole. I can’t be around someone else who is. You’re dragging me down with you. I’m trying to get out.”
And again, this is how Isabel always worked her magic on me. That little bit of honesty from her — and it wasn’t that much — took the wind out of my sails. The anger I’d felt before was strangely hard to sustain. I took my legs off the counter, slowly, one at a time, and then I turned on the stool so I was facing her. Instead of backing up to give me more room, she stayed right there, standing between my legs. A challenge. Or maybe a surrender.
“That,” I said, “is a lie. You only found me in the rabbit hole because you were already down there.”
She was so close to me that I could smell her lipstick. I was painfully aware that her hips were only an inch away from my thighs.
“I’m not going to watch you kill yourself,” Isabel said. A long minute passed where we heard nothing but the roar of a delivery truck as it drove down the street outside. She was looking at my mouth, and suddenly she looked away. “God, I can’t stay here. Just tell Sam I’ll call him.”
I reached out and put my hands on her hips as she tried to turn. “Isabel,” I said. One of my thumbs was on bare skin, right above the waist of her jeans. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
“Just chasing a high?” She attempted to turn again; I held on. I wasn’t holding tight enough to keep her, but she wasn’t pulling hard enough to get away, so we stayed as we were.
“I wasn’t trying to get high. I was trying to become a wolf.”
“Whatever. Semantics.” Isabel wouldn’t look at me now.
Letting go of her, I stood up so that we were face-to-face. I’d learned a long time ago that one of the finest weapons in my arsenal was my ability to invade personal space. She turned to look at me and it was her eyes and my eyes and I felt a surging sensation of rightness, of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person, that too-rare sensation of having the right thing to say and believing it, too:
“I’m only going to say this once, so you better believe me the first time. I’m looking for a cure.”
• SAM •
She — Amy, I tried to think of her as Amy instead of as Grace’s mother — wrangled the door open and led me through a shady ante-room in a more muted purple than the front, and then into a startlingly bright main room full of canvases. The light was pouring in through the back wall of windows, which looked out onto a shabby lot with old tractors parked in it. If you ignored the view, the space itself was professional and classy — light gray walls, like a museum, with picture wires hanging from white molding along the ceiling. Paintings hung on the walls and leaned against the corners; some of them looked like they were still wet.
“Water?” she asked.
I stood in the middle of the room and tried not to touch anything. It took me a moment to put the word water in context: to drink, not to drown in.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
Before, when I’d seen Amy’s work, it had been strange and whimsical — animals in urban areas, lovers painted in odd colors. But all the canvases I saw now had been drained of life. Even if they were paintings of places — alleys and barns — they felt like barren planets. There were no animals, no lovers. No focal point. The only canvas that had any subject was the one currently on her easel. It was a huge canvas, nearly as tall as I was, and it was all white except for a very small figure sitting in the lower left corner. The girl’s back was to the viewer, shoulders hunched up, dark blond hair down her back. Even facing away, it was unmistakably Grace.