wanted
you’re the best of us, Sam
this
• GRACE •
My first thought was that Sam needed to talk to Beck, to sort out all of the conflicted emotions in him, and my second thought was that Cole needed to talk to Beck about the various scientific concepts he’d tried out on himself, but my third thought was that I seemed to be the only one remembering exactly the reason why we absolutely needed to talk to Geoffrey Beck.
“Beck,” I said, feeling a little weird addressing him, but neither of the boys were, so what else was there for it, “I’m so sorry that we have to ask you questions when you feel like this.”
It was clear that he was suffering; Cole had made him human, but only barely. There was a scent and energy to the room that was wolfish still; if I’d closed my eyes and used my hidden senses to focus on Beck, I doubted I would’ve pictured him as human.
“Do it,” Beck said. His gaze jerked to Cole, to Sam, and then back to me.
“Tom Culpeper got an aerial hunt approved. In a week.” I waited for that to sink in, to see if I had to explain more what that meant.
Beck said softly, “Shit.”
I nodded. “We were thinking that we could move the pack. We need to know how.”
“My journal …” Beck, inexplicably, pressed one of his hands over his shoulder for a moment, holding it. He released it. It was harder, I thought, to watch someone in pain than to be in it yourself.
“I read it,” Cole replied. He stepped closer. He seemed less distressed than me by Beck’s discomfort; maybe he was more used to seeing people hurting. “You said Hannah led them out. How? How did she keep the destination in her head?”
Beck glanced up to where Sam still stood silently on the stairs, then he answered, “Hannah was like Sam. She could hold some of her thoughts while she was a wolf. Better than the rest of us. Not as well as Sam, but better than me. She and Derrick were thick as thieves. Derrick was good at sending the images. She and Paul brought the wolves together, and Derrick stayed human. He kept that image of where we were going in his head and gave it to her. She led the wolves. He led her.”
“Could Sam do it?” Cole asked.
I didn’t want to look at Sam. I knew that Cole already believed that he could.
Beck frowned at me. “If either of you is able to send him images while you’re human.”
I glanced to Sam now, but his face betrayed no thoughts whatsoever. I didn’t know if the brief, uncontrolled moments we had counted, when he’d showed me the golden woods when I was human, and when I’d showed him images of us together way back when we were in the clinic, injecting him with meningitis-infected blood. The latter, at least, had been close, intimate. I’d been right next to him. It wasn’t like I was tossing the images from a car window while we ran from the woods. Losing Sam to his wolf form again for a plan as shaky as this … I hated the idea of it. We’d fought so hard for him to stay in that body. He despised losing himself so much.
“My turn,” Beck said. “My turn for questions. But a demand first. When I shift back here, put me back in the woods. Whatever happens to the wolves out there, I want to happen to me. They live, I live. They die, I die. Is that clear?”
I expected Sam to lodge a protest, but he said nothing. Nothing. I didn’t know what I should do. Go to him? There was something faraway and terrifying about his expression.
Cole said, “Done.”
Beck didn’t look disappointed. “First question. Tell me about the cure. You’re asking about Sam leading the wolves out, but he’s human. So the cure didn’t work?”
“It worked,” Cole said. “The meningitis is battling the wolf. If I’m right, he’ll still shift, every so often. But eventually he’ll stop. Equilibrium.”
“Second question,” Beck said. He grimaced, pain written in the creases of his forehead, and then his face cleared. “Why is Grace a wolf now?” When he saw me looking at him sharply, he pointed to his nose with a wry expression. It was somehow gratifying that despite everything, he remembered my name and was concerned about me. It was hard to dislike him, even on Sam’s behalf; the idea that he’d ever hurt Sam seemed so impossible when he was actually in front of you. If this was how conflicted I was after only meeting him a few times, I could only imagine how Sam was feeling.
“You don’t have time to hear that whole answer,” Cole said. “Short answer: because she was bitten and chickens come home to roost eventually.”
“Okay, then, third question,” Beck said. “Can you cure her?”
“The cure killed Jack,” Sam said, the first words he’d spoken. He hadn’t been there, like I had, to watch Jack die from the meningitis, his fingers turning blue as his heart gave up on them.
Cole’s voice was dismissive, “He took on meningitis as a human. That’s an unwinnable battle. You did it as a wolf.”
Sam’s attention was on Cole and no one else. “How do we know you’re right?”
Cole gestured broadly to Beck. “Because I have yet to be wrong.”
But Cole had been wrong before. It was just that he kept being right in the end. It seemed like an important difference.
Beck said, “Fourth question. Where are you moving them?”
“A peninsula north of here,” Cole said. “A cop owns it now. He found out about the wolves and wanted to help. Out of the kindness of his heart.”
Beck’s face was uncertain.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Cole said. “I’ve already decided; I’m going to buy it from him. Kindness is great. A deed in my name is better.”
Startled, I looked at Cole, and he looked back at me, his mouth set into a little line. Later, we had to talk to him about this.
“Last question,” Beck said. Something about his voice reminded me of the first time I’d ever spoken to him, on the phone, when I was being held hostage by Jack. There’d been something so sympathetic about his voice, something so kind, that it had almost broken me when nothing else had. And everything about his face now seemed to reinforce that: the honest squareness of his jaw; the lines by his mouth and eyes that seemed like they’d rather be smiling; the concerned, earnest set of his eyebrows. He rubbed a hand through his cropped auburn hair and then he looked up at Sam. He sounded absolutely miserable. “Are you ever going to speak to me?”
• SAM •
Here was Beck in front of me, and he was already on his way back to being a wolf, and every word that I’d ever said had left me.
“I’m trying to think of what I can say,” Beck said, his eyes on me. “I have maybe ten minutes to raise my son who I didn’t think would live past eighteen. What do I say, Sam? What do I say?”
I held the banister in front of me, my knuckles white. I was the one who asked the questions, not Beck. He was the one with the answers. What did he expect from me? I couldn’t step without putting my feet into the prints that he’d left.
Beck crouched in front of one of the space heaters, not taking his gaze from me. “Maybe, after all this, there isn’t anything to say. Ah, I …” He shook his head a little and looked at the floor. His feet were pale and scarred. Something about them looked like a kid’s feet.