He didn’t have to tell me. I felt like I would never sleep again.
• ISABEL •
I wasn’t quite asleep when the phone rang.
It was a little after midnight, and I was trying to sleep mostly out of self-defense. Tensions were running high in the Culpeper household as the date of the hunt and the threat of California moved closer, and my parents were enjoying one of the screamathons that I’d been missing so sorely for the past few weeks. It sounded like my mother was winning — at least she’d roared more salient points than my father had in the last twenty minutes — but it also sounded like they had several more rounds to go.
So my bedroom door was shut and I had my earbuds in, making white noise with offensive lyrics. My room was a rose-and-white cocoon made less stark by the lack of sunlight. Surrounded by my stuff, it could be any day of any year since we’d moved here. I could go downstairs, down the hall, and yell at Jack for not letting my dog out while I was gone. I could call my friends back in California who still remembered me and hatch plots to return and make plans to tour college campuses close to their houses. That the room was so unchanged and that night could play such tricks on me was endearing and horrifying at the same time.
Anyway, I almost missed it when my cell phone rang.
Caller ID: BECK’S HOUSE.
“Hi,” I said.
“Guess what your asshole father has done now?” Cole sounded a little out of breath.
I didn’t feel like answering. This wasn’t exactly how I’d hoped my next phone call with Cole would begin.
“Screwed us,” Cole said, not waiting for me to answer. “Over the hood of a foreign car. The hunt is happening at dawn. They’ve moved it.”
As if on cue, the landline rang from its base on my bed stand. I didn’t touch it, but even from here, I could see the caller ID: LANDY, MARSHALL. That meant that my dad and I were going to have the exact same conversation, basically, at the same time, with two different people.
The fighting downstairs had ceased. It was taking a long time for this to sink in.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Well, first I’m going to make Sam functional,” Cole said. “Grace shifted tonight and she’s in the woods, so he’s gone off the reservation.”
Now I was awake. I pulled out the single remaining earbud I still had in and sat up. “Grace is out there? That’s not acceptable.”
It was more than not acceptable. Grace versus Thomas Culpeper, Esquire, was not a battle that I wanted to ever see, because I knew how it would end.
“I know, princess,” Cole said tersely. “What I would like for you to do is to go to your father and tell him to get on the phone and make this stop.”
But I knew how that would end, too.
“That won’t work,” I replied. “This is bigger than him now.”
“I. Don’t. Care,” Cole said, slowly and patiently, like I was a child. “You find that bastard and make him stop. I know you can.”
I could feel myself prickling at his tone. “Okay, first of all, you don’t tell me what to do. Secondly? All that will happen is I will go down there, make him completely pissed off at me for no reason, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, he’ll start to wonder why it is that I’m suddenly feeling so freaking friendly toward the wolves and maybe it will just open a can of worms that I will have to deal with for the rest of the year. And you know what he will say? It’s beyond him now. It’s time for you to do your thing.”
“My thing? My thing only worked if Grace was here to make it work. Without Grace, I have an emotionally unbalanced wolf and a Volkswagen.”
The house was stone quiet in comparison to the shouting before. I tried to imagine going down there and confronting my father about the hunt. It was too ludicrous to even contemplate.
“I’m not doing it, Cole.”
“You owe it to me to try.”
“Owe?” I laughed, harsh and short. For a moment, my mind skittered over every encounter we’d ever had, trying to think if there was any truth to what he’d said. I couldn’t think of anything. If anything, he owed me, big time. “Why do I owe you anything?”
Cole’s voice was completely level. “Your son of a bitch father killed Victor and threw him in front of my face.”
I felt my face getting hotter.
“I’m not him. I don’t owe you jack shit, Cole St. Clair. I might have considered going downstairs to talk to my dad before that, but now, screw you.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Grown-up way to handle your problems. Find a technicality, pitch a fit, and make it someone else’s problem. You really are daddy’s little girl.”
It stung, so I laughed at him. “You’re one to talk. The only thing that surprises me about all this is you sound remarkably sober. If it goes badly, you can always kill yourself, right?”
He hung up.
My pulse was racing, my skin searing, and suddenly I felt light-headed. I sat back and put hands over my mouth. My room looked exactly the same as it had before I’d picked up his call.
I threw my phone at the wall. Halfway through its flight, I realized that my father would kill me if I destroyed it, but it smacked the wall and slid to the ground without any pieces falling off it. It looked exactly the same as before.
Nothing had changed. Nothing.
• SAM •
Cole burst into the kitchen like a nail bomb. It was nearly one A.M., and in four and a half hours, the wolves were going to begin to die.
“No go, Ringo. Culpeper can’t call it off.” There was something chaotic in his eyes that wasn’t in his voice.
I hadn’t thought Culpeper would, but it seemed stupid to not at least try. “Is Isabel coming?” My voice sounded normal, to my surprise, a recording of me played back when the real me had lost my voice.
“No,” Cole said. Just like that. Barely a word. Just part of an exhalation. He pulled open the fridge with such ferocity that the condiments in the door cracked against each other. The cold air crept out of the fridge and around my ankles. “So it’s up to us. Your friend Koenig coming?”
It would’ve been nice: someone practical and on the positive side of the law with infinitely less emotional involvement than me sounded like a wonderful thing to have. “He found out the news because he was working. His shift ends at six A.M.”
“Perfect timing.” Cole grasped a handful of vials and syringes with one hand and dumped them on the island in front of me. They rolled and whirled in misshapen circles on the counter surface. “Here are our options.”
My ears rang. “We have more than one?”
“Three, precisely,” Cole said. He pointed to each in turn. “That one makes you a wolf. That one makes me a wolf. That one gives us both seizures.”
But there weren’t really three options. There was only one. There’d only ever been one. I said, “I have to go in and get her.”
“And the rest?”
“Her first.” It was the most horrible thing I’d ever had to say. But anything else had to be a lie. She was the one thing I’d remembered as a wolf, when there was nothing else. She was the one thing I knew I would hold on to. Had to hold on to. I would save the others if I could, but it had to be Grace first.