I didn’t want to go to Beck’s, but I had nowhere else to go. I had no one else to go to. I was human, and without Grace, I had nothing but this car and a bookstore and a house full of countless empty rooms.
So I drove to Beck’s—I needed to stop thinking of it as Beck’s—and parked my car in the empty driveway. Once upon a time, I’d worked at the bookstore during the summers, when Beck was still human and I still lost my winters to being a wolf. I’d pull up in the summer evenings when it was still light, because during the summers, it was never night, and I would get out of Beck’s car to the sounds of people laughing and the smell of the grill from the backyard. It felt strange to be stepping out into the still night now, the cold prickling my skin, and knowing that all those voices from my past were trapped in the woods. Everyone but me.
Grace.
Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light, revealing the photographs stuck every which way all over the cabinets, and then switched on the hall light. In my head, I heard Beck say to my small nine-year-old self, “Why do we need every light in the house on? Are you signaling to aliens?”
And so I went through the house tonight and turned on every light, revealing a memory in every single room. The bathroom where I’d nearly turned into a wolf right after meeting Grace. The living room, where Paul and I had jammed with our guitars—his beat-up old Fender was still propped against the mantle. The downstairs guest room, where Derek had stayed with a girlfriend from town before Beck had chewed him out for it. I turned on the lights to the basement stairs and the lights in the library down there, and then came back up to get the lights in Beck’s office that I’d missed. In the living room, I stopped just long enough to crank up the expensive stereo system that Ulrik had bought when I was ten so that I could “hear Jethro Tull the way it was meant to be heard.”
Upstairs, I turned the knob on the floor lamp in Beck’s room, where he had almost never slept, preferring to store books and papers on his bed and instead fall asleep in a chair in the basement, some book facedown on his chest. Shelby’s room came to life under the dim yellow ceiling light, pristine and unlived in, no personal possessions except for her old computer. I was tempted for a brief moment to smash in the monitor, just because I wanted to hit something, and if anyone deserved it, Shelby did, but it didn’t seem like there’d be any satisfaction in breaking it without her here to see me finally do it. Ulrik’s room looked like it had been frozen in time. One of his jackets was still thrown across the bed next to a folded pair of jeans and an empty mug on the nightstand. Paul’s room was next, where he had a mason jar on the dresser with two teeth in it—one belonging to him, and one belonging to a dead white dog.
I saved my own bedroom for last. Memories floated on strings from the ceiling. Books lined the walls, stacked and sloped against the desk. The room smelled stale and unused; the boy who had grown up in it hadn’t stayed here for a long time.
I’d be staying in it now. One person rattling around in this house, waiting and hoping for the reappearance of the rest of his family.
But just before I reached inside the dark room for the light switch on the wall, I heard the sound of an engine outside.
I was no longer alone.
“Are you trying to land airplanes?” Isabel asked me. She didn’t look real, standing in the middle of the living room in silky pajama bottoms and a padded white coat with a fur collar. I had never seen her without makeup, and she looked a lot younger. “I could see the house from a mile away. You must have every light turned on.”
I didn’t reply. I was still trying to work out how Isabel had ended up here at four o’clock in the morning with the boy I’d last seen changing into a wolf in the middle of the kitchen floor. He stood there in a battered sweatshirt and jeans that hung on him like they belonged to someone else, his bare feet an alarming mottled shade, and his fingers hooked in his pockets as if their terrible swelling and discoloration didn’t bother him. The way that he was looking at Isabel and the way she going out of her way not to look at him made it seem, impossibly, like they had some kind of history.
“You’re frostbitten,” I said to the guy, because it was something to say that didn’t require much thought. “You need to warm up those fingers or you’re going to be very unhappy later. Isabel, you had to know that.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Isabel said. “But if my parents caught him in my house, he’d be dead, and that would make him even more unhappy. I decided the outside chance of them noticing my car missing in the middle of the night was a happier option.” If Isabel noticed me swallowing, she didn’t pause. “By the way, this is Sam. The Sam.” It took me a moment to realize that she was now talking to the cocky frostbitten guy.
The Sam. I wondered what she’d told him about me. I looked at him. Again, the familiarity of his face pricked at me. It was not a real familiarity, like someone I had met in person, but more like the familiarity of meeting a person who looks like an actor whose name you can’t recall.
“So you’re the one in charge now?” he said, with a smile that struck me as sardonic. “I’m Cole.”
The one in charge now. That’s the way it was, wasn’t it?
“Have you seen any of the other wolves change yet?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I thought it was too cold for me to be changing.”
His grotesquely colored fingers were bothering me enough that I moved away from him and Isabel, toward the kitchen, where I found a bottle of ibuprofen. I tossed it toward Isabel, who surprised me by catching it. “It’s because you were just bitten. I mean, last year. Temperature doesn’t have so much to do with you shifting yet. It’s just going to be…unpredictable.”
“Unpredictable,” echoed Cole.
Sam, no, please, not again, stop—I blinked, and my mother’s voice was gone, back into the past where it belonged.
“What are these for? Him?” Isabel held up the bottle of pills and jerked her chin toward Cole. Again, I got that flash of history between them.
“Yeah. It’s going to hurt like hell when he warms up his fingers,” I said. “That’ll keep it bearable. Bathroom’s that way.”
• ISABEL •
Cole took the ibuprofen from me, but I could tell he wasn’t going to use it. Whether because he thought he was some macho tough guy or for religious reasons or what, I didn’t know. But when he went into the downstairs bathroom, I heard him hit the light switch and set down the pill bottle without opening it. Then I heard the water begin to run into the bath. Sam turned away with this strange, disgusted look on his face, and I knew that he didn’t like Cole.
“So, Romulus,” I said, and Sam turned around, his yellow eyes open wide. “Why are you here, all alone? I thought Grace would have to be surgically removed from your side.” After spending the last hour with Cole, whose face revealed only the emotions he wanted me to see, it was strange to see undisguised pain on Sam’s face. His thick dark eyebrows showed misery all by themselves. It occurred to me that he and Grace might have had a fight.
“Her parents kicked me out,” Sam said, and he smiled for just a second, like people do when something’s really not funny and they don’t want to be telling you but they don’t know what else to do. “Grace, uh, got sick and they, uh, found us together, and they kicked me out.”