I had thought I had come to Minnesota to die.
At two fifteen in the afternoon, Rick Vilkas had just finished his first commercial break. He was a music god who’d had us play live on his show and then asked me to sign a poster for his wife, who he said would only make love to our song “Sinking Ship (Going Down).” I’d written Rock the boat under my picture and signed my name. Rick Vilkas’s on-air persona was confidant, best friend over beer, passing along a secret in a low voice with an elbow in your side.
His voice now, coming through speakers in Beck’s living room, was intimate. “Everyone who listens to this show knows — hell, everyone who listens to the radio knows — Cole St. Clair, front man of NARKOTIKA and damned fine songwriter, has been missing for what — almost a year? ten months? somewhere in there. Oh, I know, I know — my producer, he’s rolling his eyes. Say what you like, Buddy, he might have been a number one screwup, but he could write a song.”
There it was, my name on the radio. I was sure it had been on the radio plenty of times in the past year, but this was the first time I’d been there for it. I waited to feel something — a sting of regret, guilt, agony — but there was nothing. NARKOTIKA was an ex-girlfriend whose photo no longer had the power to evoke emotion.
Vilkas continued, “Well, it looks like we have some news, and we’re the first to break it. Cole St. Clair’s not dead, folks. He’s not being held captive by a pack of fangirls or my wife, either. We’ve got a statement from his agent right now that says that St. Clair had a medical complication related to drug abuse — fancy that, did you people imagine that the lead singer of NARKOTIKA might have a substance abuse problem? — and that he went with his bandmate for some under-the-radar treatment and rehab out of the country. Says here he’s back in the States but is asking to be left alone while he ‘figures out what to do next.’ There you have it, folks. Cole St. Clair. He’s alive. No, no, don’t thank me now. Thank me later. Let’s hope for a reunion tour, right? Make my wife happy. Take all the time you need, Cole, if you’re listening. Rock’ll wait.”
Vilkas played one of our songs. I turned the radio off and rubbed my hand over my mouth. My legs were cramped from crouching in front of the stereo.
Six months ago, there would have been nothing worse in this world. There had been nothing I wanted more than to be thought missing or dead, unless it was to actually be missing or dead.
On the couch behind me, Isabel said, “So now you’re officially reborn.”
I turned the radio back on so I could catch the end of the song. One of my hands lay open on my knee and it felt like the whole world lay on my palm. The day felt like a prison break.
“Yes,” I said. “Looks that way.”
• SAM •
As soon as I saw the peninsula, I knew it was the solution.
It wasn’t that the entrance was exceedingly propitious. There was a rough-hewn log entranceway with the words KNIFE LAKE LODGE burned into it, and on either side of that was stockade fencing. Koenig swore softly over the combination lock on the gate until it yielded, and then he showed us how the stockade fence gave way to box wire fencing U-nailed to evergreen trees every few feet. He was polite and matter-of-fact, like a realtor showing potential clients an expensive piece of land.
“What happens when it gets to the water?” I asked. Beside me, Grace slapped a mosquito. There were a lot of them, despite the chill. I was glad that we’d come so early in the day, because the air had teeth up here.
Koenig gave the wire a tug; it remained snugly pinned to the ragged bark of the pine. “It goes a couple of yards into the lake, like I said. Did I say that before? Would you like to take a look?”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take a look. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Overhead, a thrush called continuously, sounding like a rusty swing set in motion. Slightly farther away, I could hear another bird singing like someone rolling their r’s, and beyond that one, another bird keening, and beyond that, another still — the kind of dense, endless layers of trees and birds that you got when there was not a human footprint in hundreds and hundreds of acres. Standing in this old conifer forest, long-since abandoned by people, I smelled a herd of deer and creeping beavers and small rodents turning over rocky soil, and as nervous excitement tapped through my veins, I felt more wolf than I had in a long time.
“I do,” Grace said. “If you don’t mind.”
“It’s why we’re here,” Koenig said, and set off through the trees, sure-footed as always. “Don’t forget to check yourself for ticks when we’re all through.”
I trailed after, content to let Grace look at the concrete details of life while I walked through the forest and tried to imagine the pack here. These woods were dense and difficult to walk through; the ground was covered with ferns that hid dips and rocks. The fence was enough to keep out large animals, so unlike Boundary Wood, there were no natural paths worn through the underbrush. The wolves would have no competition here. No danger. Koenig was right; if the wolves were to be moved, you couldn’t ask for a better place.
Grace squeezed my elbow, making so much noise on the way to me that I realized I had been left far behind. “Sam,” she said, and she was breathless, as if she might have been thinking the same thing I was. “Did you see the lodge?”
“I was looking at the ferns,” I said.
She grabbed hold of my arm and laughed, a clear, happy laugh that I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Ferns,” she repeated, and hugged my arm. “Crazy boy. Come over here.”
Holding hands felt strangely fanciful when done in the presence of Koenig, possibly because it was the first thing he looked at when we emerged in the clearing that held the lodge. He had put a baseball cap on his head to ward off deer flies in the open area — which somehow managed to make him look more formal, not less — and stood in front of a faded wooden cabin that seemed enormous to me. It was all windows and rough-hewn timber and looked like something tourists imagined Minnesota looked like.
“That’s the lodge?”
Koenig led the way, kicking debris off the concrete pad in front of the building. “Yeah. It used to be a lot nicer.”
I had been expecting — no, not even expecting, merely hoping for — a tiny cabin, some remnant of the resort’s former life that members of the pack could shelter in when they became human. Somehow, when Koenig had said resort, I hadn’t thought he’d really meant it. I’d thought it was a slightly aggrandized retelling of a failed family business. This must have been something to look at when it was first built.
Grace pulled her hand away from me so she could investigate better. She peered in a dusty window, cupping her hands against the glass. A vine rested on top of her head; the rest of it crawled up the side of the lodge. She stood in ankle-deep weeds that had sprung up in the crack between the concrete pad and the foundation. She looked very tidy in comparison, clean jeans, one of my windbreakers, her blond hair spread over her shoulders. “Seems pretty nice to me,” Grace said, forever endearing her to me.
It seemed to endear her to Koenig, too. Once he realized she wasn’t being sarcastic, he said, “I suppose so. There’s no power here, though, not anymore. I guess you could get it put back on, but you’d have to have meter guys come out here then, once a month.”