“H-hold it steady,” Sam said. “L-let me get her and …”
He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. He shifted her in his arms and stepped onto the first bin. I reached out with my free hand to steady him. His arm was the exact temperature of the mud. Grace looked like a dead dog in his arms as he climbed onto the next. The bins teetered precariously; I was the only thing keeping them from tumbling under his weight.
“Fast,” I hissed. God, the water was cold; I couldn’t get used to it. I was going to turn into a wolf, and no I was not going to, not right now — I gripped the edge of the bins. Sam was on the bin with Grace and his shoulder was at the edge of the pit. He closed his eyes for a bare second. He whispered sorry, and then tossed the wolf’s body up and out of the pit, onto dry ground. It was only a few feet, but I saw that it pained him. He turned to me. He was still shaking with the cold.
I was so close to wolf that I could taste it in my mouth.
“You come out first,” Sam said, his teeth gritted to keep his voice steadier. “I don’t want you to change.”
It wasn’t really me who mattered, wasn’t me who absolutely had to climb out of this hole, but Sam didn’t leave room for argument. He clambered off the bins and splashed heavily into the water beside me. There was a knot the size of my head in my guts, clenching and unclenching. I felt like my fingers were inside my diaphragm, tiptoeing their way up my throat.
“Climb,” Sam said.
My scalp crept and crawled. Sam reached out and grabbed my jaw, hard enough that his fingertips were painful against my jawbone. He stared into my eyes, and I could feel the wolf in me responding to that challenge, this unspoken instinct that lent force to his command. I didn’t know this Sam.
“Climb,” he ordered. “Get out!”
And said like that, I had to. I crawled up the bins, my body twitching, my fingers finding the edge of the sinkhole. Every second that I was out of the water I felt more human and less wolf, though I could smell the stink of myself, of the near-shift. It washed over me every time I turned my head. Pausing a bit to gather my senses, I slithered out of the sinkhole on my stomach. It was not the sexiest move I’d ever performed, but I was impressed nonetheless. A few feet away, Grace lay on her side, motionless but breathing.
Below me, Sam climbed unsteadily onto the first bin and waited a long moment to find his balance.
“I … I’m only going to have a second before this thing falls,” Sam said. “Can you —”
“Got it,” I replied.
He was wrong; he had less than a second. He had only barely made it onto the second bin, crouching, when they began to tip below him. He reached up and, almost in the same moment, I grabbed his arm. The bins fell back into the water below, the splash more muffled than I would’ve expected, as Sam swung his other arm up for me to grab. I braced myself against the soggy edge of the sinkhole and backed up. It was a good thing that Sam was a gangly guy with limbs made of twigs, because otherwise we would’ve both ended up back in the pit.
Then it was over. I was leaning back on my arms, out of breath. Not a single part of me untouched by the slimy mud of the sinkhole. Sam sat beside Grace, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking at the small balls of clay that formed when he did. The wolf lay quietly next to him, breaths fast and jerky.
Sam said, “You didn’t have to come down there.”
“Yes, I did,” I said.
I looked up and found him already looking back at me. In the dark of the woods, his eyes looked very pale. So strikingly wolf’s eyes. I remembered him grabbing my jaw and telling me to climb, appealing to my wolf instincts if nothing else. The last time someone had stared me in the face like that, ordered me to listen and to focus through the change, it had been the first time I’d shifted. The voice had been Geoffrey Beck’s.
Sam reached out and touched Grace’s side; I saw his fingers move as they traced the ribs hidden beneath the fur. “There’s a poem that goes like this,” he said. “Wie lange braucht man jeden Tag, bis man sich kennt.”
He kept touching the wolf’s ribs, his eyebrows furrowed, until the wolf lifted its head slightly, uneasy. Sam put his hands in his lap. “It means ‘how long it takes us, each day, to know each other.’ I haven’t really been fair to you.”
Sam saying it didn’t matter, but it kind of did, too. “Save your kraut poetry for Grace,” I said, after a pause. “You’re getting your weird all over me.”
“I’m serious,” Sam said.
I said, not looking at him, “I’m serious, too. Even cured, you’re really incredibly abnormal.”
Sam wasn’t laughing. “Take the apology, Cole, and I won’t say anything about it again.”
“Fine,” I said, standing up and tossing him the towel. “Apology accepted. In your defense, I didn’t really deserve ‘fair.’”
Sam carefully tucked the towel around the wolf’s body. She jerked away at his touch, but she was too tired to really react. “It’s not the way I was brought up,” he said finally. “People shouldn’t have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty.”
I thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would have gone down differently with Isabel here. She would’ve disagreed. But that was because, with Isabel, cruelty and kindness were sometimes the same thing.
“Anyway,” Sam said. But he didn’t say anything else. He scooped up Grace’s body, all wrapped tightly in the towel so that she couldn’t move even if she found the strength. He started toward the house.
Instead of following him, I walked back to the edge of the sinkhole and looked in. The bins still floated in the thin mud below, so covered in the dirty paste that it was impossible to see their original color. There was no motion on the surface of the water, nothing to betray its depth.
I spit into the hole. The mud was so thick it didn’t even ripple outward where my spit landed. It would’ve been hell to die in. It occurred to me that every single way I’d tried to die had been an easy way. It hadn’t seemed like it at the time, when I lay on the floor and said enoughenoughenoughenoughjustgetmeout to no one. I had never really considered that it was a privilege to die as Cole and not as something else.
• ISABEL •
There was this thing that my parents used to do to me and Jack, before Jack died. They’d pick a time when we were most likely to be doing something that we wanted to be doing, sometimes homework but more often plans with friends — opening night of a movie you were dying to see was always a likely time — and then they would kidnap us.
They would take us to Il Pomodoro. That is “The Tomato” for those of you who, like me, do not speak cornball. Il Pomodoro was an hour and a half away from Mercy Falls in the middle of nowhere, which was saying a lot, because Mercy Falls was also the middle of nowhere. Why travel from one non-destination to another? Because while most people knew my father as a hard-assed trial lawyer who eviscerated his opponents with the ease of a velociraptor on speed, I knew the truth, which was that my father turned into a melting kitten in the hands of Italian men who served him garlic breadsticks while a tenor warbled sweetly in the background.