Sam had descended nearly silently and now he stood at the base of the stairs. His feet were bright red from a shower. Seeing him made me feel slightly less pessimistic, though his presence wouldn’t solve anything that wasn’t already solved.
“We were just talking about the cure,” Cole said.
Sam padded across the floor to me. “The band?” He sat down cross-legged next to me. I offered him coffee and, reliably, he shook his head.
“No, yours. And the one I’ve been working on. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how you make yourself shift.”
Sam made a face. “I don’t make myself shift.”
“Not often, Ringo,” Cole admitted, “but you do.”
I felt a little prickle of hope. If anybody could figure out how the Boundary Wood wolves worked, I thought it would be Cole. He’d saved me, hadn’t he?
“Like when you saved me from the wolves,” I said. “And what about in the clinic when we injected you?” That night seemed so long ago, in Isabel’s mom’s clinic, willing the wolf that was Sam to become human. Again, the memory of sadness pressed on me. “Have you figured anything out about it?”
Sam looked petulant as Cole started to talk about adrenaline and Cole St. Clairs in the system and how he was trying to use Sam’s unusual shifts as the basis of a cure.
“But if it was adrenaline, wouldn’t someone saying ‘boo’ make you shift?” I asked.
Cole shrugged. “I tried using an EpiPen — that’s pure adrenaline — and it worked, just barely.” Sam frowned at me, and I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking — that “barely” working sounded dangerous.
Cole said, “It’s just not making my brain react the right way; it’s not triggering the shift the same way that cold or the St. Clair buildup does. It’s hard to replicate when you have no idea what it’s actually doing. It’s like drawing a picture of an elephant from the sound it makes in the next cage over.”
“Well, I’m impressed you even figured out it was an elephant,” Sam said. “Apparently, Beck and the rest didn’t even have the species right.” He stood up and held his hand out for me. “Let’s go make breakfast.”
But Cole wasn’t done. “Oh, Beck just didn’t want to see it,” he said dismissively. “He didn’t really want to lose that time as a wolf. You know what, if my father were involved in all this, he’d whip out some CAT scans, some MRIs, about fourteen hundred electrodes, throw in a couple vials of poisonous meds and a car battery or two, and three or four dead werewolves later, he’d have his cure. Hot damn, he’s good at what he does.”
Sam lowered his hand. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about Beck like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like he’s —” Sam stopped. He frowned at me, as if the way to end the sentence was hidden in my expression. I knew what he had been about to say. Like you. Cole’s mouth wore the slightest of hard smiles.
“How about this?” Cole said. He gestured at the chair Beck had sat in before, making me think that he, too, had had a conversation with Beck in this basement. That was an odd thing to consider, for some reason: Cole having a history with Beck that we were unaware of. “How about you tell me who Beck was for you, and I’ll tell you who he was for me? And then, Grace, you can tell us whose version sounds like the real one.”
“I don’t think —” I started.
“I knew him for twelve years,” Sam interrupted. “You knew him for twelve seconds. My version wins.”
“Does it?” Cole asked. “Did he tell you about what he was like as a lawyer? Did he tell you about living in Wyoming? Did he tell you about his wife? Did he tell you about where he found Ulrik? Did he tell you what he was doing to himself when Paul got to him?”
Sam said, “He told me how he became a wolf.”
“Me, too,” I said, feeling like I should back Sam up. “He told me he was bitten in Canada and met up with Paul in Minnesota.”
“Not that he was in Canada with a death wish, and that Paul bit him there to keep Beck from killing himself?” Cole asked.
“He told you that because that was what you needed to hear,” Sam said.
“And he told you the story about hiking and about Paul being already here in Minnesota because it was what you needed to hear,” Cole said. “Tell me how Wyoming fits into this, because he didn’t tell either of us about that. He didn’t come from Canada to Mercy Falls when he discovered there were already wolves here, any more than he was bitten while he was out hiking. He simplified the story so he wouldn’t look bad to you. He simplified it for me because he didn’t think it was relevant for convincing me. Don’t tell me you haven’t doubted him, Sam, because it’s not possible. The man arranged for you to be infected and then adopted you. You had to have thought about it.”
My heart hurt for Sam, but he didn’t look down or away. His face was completely blank. “I’ve thought about it.”
“And what is it that you’re thinking?” Cole asked.
Sam said, “I don’t know.”
“You must be thinking something.”
“I don’t know.”
Cole stood up and took the step to stand right next to Sam, and the sheer force of the way he did was intimidating, somehow. “Don’t you want to ask him about it?”
Sam, to his credit, didn’t look intimidated. “That’s not really an option.”
Cole said, “What if it was? What if you could have him for fifteen minutes? I can find him. I can find him and I have something that should force him to shift. Not for long. But long enough to talk. I have to say I have some questions for him, too.”
Sam frowned. “Do what you want with your own body, but I’m not going to mess with someone who can’t give me his consent.”
Cole’s expression was deeply aggrieved. “It’s adrenaline, not prom sex.”
Sam’s voice was stiff. “I am not going to risk killing Beck just to ask him why he didn’t tell me he lived in Wyoming.”
It was the obvious answer, the one that Cole had to know that Sam would give. But Cole had that small, hard smile on his face again, barely there. “If we caught Beck and I made him human,” he said, “I might be able to start him back over, like Grace. Would you risk his life for that?”
Sam didn’t answer.
“Tell me yes,” Cole said. “Tell me to find him, and I will.”
And this, I thought, was why Sam and Cole could not get along. Because when it came down to it, Cole made bad decisions for good reasons, and Sam couldn’t justify that. Now, Cole dangled this tempting thing in front of Sam, this thing he wanted more than anything, along with the thing that he wanted the least. I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted him to give.
I saw Sam swallow. Turning to me, he said softly, “What do I say?”
I didn’t know what to tell him that he didn’t already know. I crossed my arms. I could think of a thousand reasons for and against, but all of them started and ended with the wanting I saw on Sam’s face now. “You have to be able to live with yourself,” I told him.