“Then why — I cannot believe I am asking this, but why are they staying wolves if the pack is about to be eliminated?”
“It’s involuntary. Temperature based. Wolf in winter, human in summer. Less time every year, and eventually we stay a wolf forever. We don’t keep our human thoughts when we shift.” I frowned. This explanation was getting less true every day that we spent with Cole. It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you’d relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays. “That’s grossly oversimplified. But it’s the basic rules of it.” I felt weird saying grossly oversimplified, too; a phrase like that was only because Koenig spoke so formally.
“So Grace —”
“Is missing because she’s still unstable in this weather. What is she supposed to tell her parents?”
Koenig considered. “Are you born a werewolf?”
“No, good old horror movie technique. Biting.”
“And Olivia?”
“Bitten last year.”
Koenig snorted softly. “Just incredible. I knew it. I kept finding things that led me back to that, and I could not believe it. And when Grace Brisbane disappeared out of the hospital and left just that bloody hospital gown behind … they said she was dying, that there was no way that she could have left under her own power.”
“She needed to shift,” I said softly.
“Everyone in the department blamed you. They have been looking for a way to crucify you. Tom Culpeper more than anyone. He has Heifort and everyone else lapping out of a bowl.” Now he sounded a little bitter, and it made me look at him in an entirely different way. I could see him out of uniform, at home, getting a beer out of the fridge, petting his dog, watching TV. A real person, something separate from the uniformed identity I’d assigned him. “They would very much like to hang you with this.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Because all I can do is tell them I didn’t do anything. Until Grace gets stable enough to reappear. And Olivia …”
Koenig paused. “Why did they kill her?”
My head was full of Shelby, her eyes on me through the kitchen window, the desperation and anger I thought I’d seen there. “I don’t think there was a ‘they.’ There’s one wolf that has been behind all of the problems. She attacked Grace before. She attacked Jack Culpeper, too. The others wouldn’t kill a girl. Not near summer. There are other ways to get food.” I had to try, very deliberately, to push away the memory of Olivia’s destroyed body.
We rode in silence for a minute or two.
“So, this is the situation,” Koenig said, and I was kind of charmed, now, to see that he sounded like a cop no matter what he said. “They have clearance to eliminate the pack. Fourteen days is not very long. You are telling me that some of them probably will be unable to shift before then, and some of them cannot shift at all. So we’re talking mass murder.”
Finally. It was relieving and terrifying to hear Culpeper’s plan defined as such.
“And there are not many options here. You could reveal the wolves for what they are, but —”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said hurriedly.
“— I was going to say that I do not think that is feasible. Telling Mercy Falls that they have a pack of wolves carrying an incurable infectious disease right after we discover that they have killed a girl …”
“Won’t end well,” I finished.
“And the other option is to try to motivate more animal rights groups to save the pack as wolves. It didn’t work in Idaho, and I think the time frame will be impossible, but …”
I said, “We thought of moving them.”
Koenig stilled. “Go on.”
I stumbled over the words. Koenig was so precise and logical that I felt, again, as if I needed to match it. “Someplace farther away from people. But then … it could just put us in a worse situation, unless we know what the people are like. And I don’t know what the pack will be like in a new place, without boundaries. I don’t know if I should try to sell Beck’s house to buy land, or what. There’s not enough money to buy a complete territory. Wolves range hugely, over miles and miles. So there’s always a chance of trouble.”
Koenig drummed his fingers on the wheel, eyes narrowed. A long moment of silence went by. I was glad of it. I needed it. The ramifications of my confession to Koenig felt unpredictable.
“I am just talking as I’m thinking,” Koenig said finally, “but I have property, a few hours farther up in the Boundary Waters. It was my father’s, but I just inherited it.”
I started, “I … don’t …”
“It’s a peninsula,” Koenig interrupted me. “Pretty big one. Used to be an old resort, but that’s all shut down because of old family politics. The end of it is fenced off. Not the best of fence, just box wire between trees in some places, but it could be reinforced.”
He glanced over at me at the same time that I looked at him, and I knew we were both thinking: This might be it.
“I don’t think a peninsula, even a big one, would be big enough to support the pack. We’d have to feed them,” I said.
“So you feed them,” Koenig said.
“And are there campers?” I asked.
“It faces mining land,” Koenig replied. “Mining company hasn’t been active since sixty-seven, but they hold on to the land. There’s a reason why the resort didn’t make it.”
I chewed my lip. It was hard to believe in hope. “We’d still have to get them there, somehow.”
“Quietly,” Koenig advised. “Tom Culpeper won’t consider relocation an alternative to their deaths.”
“And quickly,” I said. I was thinking about how long Cole had been unsuccessfully trying to trap wolves, however, and how long it would take to catch twenty-odd wolves and how we would transport them hours north.
Koenig was silent. Finally, he said, “Maybe it’s not a good idea. But you can consider it an option.”
An option. Option meant a plausible course of action, and I wasn’t sure it was even that. But what else did we have?
• GRACE •
The interminable day finally ended when Sam came home with a pizza and an uncertain smile. Over the pizza, Sam told me everything that Koenig had said. We sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, his desk lamp and Christmas lights turned on, the pizza box between us. The desk lamp was next to the one sloping wall by the roof, and the way the wall diverted the light made the room seem warm and cave-like. The CD player by Sam’s bed was turned on, low, some smoky voice singing to a piano.
Sam described everything that had happened, making a little sweeping motion with his fingers across the floor with each one, as if unconsciously moving the last thing out of the way before he told me the next. Everything was a sort of a wreck, and I felt completely adrift, but I couldn’t help but think how much I liked to look at him in this low yellow light. He was not as soft as when I’d first met him, not as young, but the angles of his face, his quick gestures, the way he sucked in his lower lip to think before going on — I was in love with all of it.