I was curled in the corner of the shed, staring at my bloody fingers, my brain slowly drifting out of my wolf thoughts and into fragmented human ones. Bins and their lids were scattered across the shed, and the boom box lay in the middle of the floor, the cord jerked from the wall. There was dried blood smeared on the floor, with prints both wolf and human through it. Chips and peelings from the door made a violent confetti, surrounded by torn bags of chips and pretzels, their ruined contents abandoned, uneaten.
Ulrik crossed the floor, his boots crunching softly across the fine sand of potato chips, and he stopped halfway to me as I shrank back. My vision danced, showing me by turns the trashed shed and my old bedroom, strewn with bed linens and shredded books.
He reached a hand toward me. “Come on, get up. Let’s get you inside.”
But I didn’t move. I looked again at my blunted nails, bloody splinters shoved beneath them. I was lost in the small world of my fingertips, the shallow ridges of whorls outlined delicately with red, a single banded wolf hair caught in my blood. My gaze slid to the lumpy new scars on my wrists, spotted with crimson.
“Sam,” Ulrik said.
I didn’t lift my eyes to him. I had used all my words and all my strength trying to get out, and now I couldn’t bring myself to want to stand.
“I’m not Beck,” he said, voice helpless. “I don’t know what he does to make you snap out of this, okay? I don’t know how to speak your language, Junge. What are you thinking? Just look at me.”
He was right. Beck had a way of pulling me back to reality, but Beck was not there. Ulrik finally picked me up, my body limp as a corpse in his arms, and carried me all the way back to the house. I didn’t speak or eat or move until Beck shifted and came into the house—even now, I still didn’t know if it had been hours or days.
Beck didn’t come straight to me. Instead he went into the kitchen and clanged some pots. When he came back out to the living room, where I hid in the corner of the sofa, he had a plate of eggs.
“I made you food,” he said.
The eggs were exactly the way I liked them. I looked at them instead of Beck’s face and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Beck said. “You didn’t know any better. And Ulrik was the only one who liked those damn Doritos. You did us all a favor.”
He set the plate down on the sofa beside me and went down the hall into his study. After a minute, I took the eggs and slid silently down the hall after him. Sitting down outside the open study door, I listened to the erratic patter of Beck’s fingers on his keyboard as I ate.
That was back when I was still broken. It was back when I thought I’d have Beck forever.
“Hi, Ringo.”
Cole’s voice brought me back to the here and now, years later, no longer a nine-year-old guided by benevolent guardians. He stood at my elbow as I faced the shed door.
“I see you’re still human,” I said, more surprised than my voice let on. “What are you doing out here?”
“Trying to become a wolf.”
A nasty chill ran down my skin at that, remembering fighting the wolf inside. Remembering the turn in my stomach before the shift. The sick feeling just when I lost myself. I didn’t reply. Instead, I pushed open the door to the shed, fumbling for the light. The space smelled musty, unused; memories and dust motes suspended in the stale air. Behind me, a cardinal made its squeaking-sneaker noise again and again, but otherwise, there was no sound.
“Now’s a good a time as any to get familiar with this place, then,” I told him. I stepped into the shed, my shoes making dusty shuffling noises on the worn wood floor. Everything was in place as far as I could see—blankets folded neatly beside the dormant television, watercooler filled to the top, and jugs lined up obediently behind it, waiting their turn. Everything was waiting for wolves to fall into humans.
Cole stepped in after me, looking around at the bins and supplies with vague interest. Everything about him radiated disdain and restless energy. I wanted to ask him What did Beck see in you? Instead, I asked, “Is it what you expected?”
Cole had one of the bins opened a few inches and was looking inside; he didn’t look away as he replied, “What?”
“Being a wolf.”
“I expected it to be worse,” he said, and now he looked at me, a sly smile on his face like he knew what I’d gone through to not be one. “Beck told me the pain was unbearable.”
I picked up a dried leaf that we’d tracked into the shed. “Yeah, well, the pain’s not the difficult part.”
“Oh yeah?” Cole’s voice was knowing. It was like he wanted me to hate him. “What’s the difficult part, then?”
I turned away from him. I really didn’t want to answer. Because I didn’t think he’d care about the difficult part.
Beck had picked him. I would not hate him. I would not. There had to have been something in there that Beck saw. Finally, I said, “One year, one of the wolves—Ulrik—he decided it would be a great idea to start growing Italian herbs from seeds in pots. Ulrik was always doing crazy crap like that.” I remembered him poking holes in the potting soil and dropping seeds in, tiny, dead-looking things disappearing into the deep black earth. “This had better work, dammit,” he had said amiably to me. I’d been standing by his elbow the entire time, getting in his way while I watched, moving only when his elbow accidentally prodded my chest. “Think you can stand any closer, Sam?” he’d asked. Now, to Cole, I added, “Beck thought Ulrik was crazy. He told him that basil was only two bucks a bunch at the store.”
Cole raised one of his eyebrows at me, his expression clearly indicating that he was indulging me.
I ignored his expression and said, “I watched Ulrik’s seeds every day for weeks, waiting for any little bit of green in the dirt, anything to tell me that there was life waiting to happen. And that’s it. That’s the difficult part,” I told Cole. “I am standing here in the shed, and I’m waiting to see if my seeds are going to poke out of the dirt. I don’t know if it’s too early to look for signs of life or if, this time, winter has claimed my family for good.”
Cole stared at me. The contempt was gone from his expression, but he didn’t say anything. His face held something empty, something I didn’t know how to react to, so I didn’t say anything, either.
There was no point in staying any longer. I did the last step while Cole hung back, checking the food bins to make sure no insects had gotten into them. I left my fingers hooked on the edge of the plastic bin for a moment as I listened. I didn’t know what I was listening for; there was only silence and more silence and more silence again. Even the cardinal outside the still-open door had fallen quiet.
Pretending Cole wasn’t there, I strained my ears like I had when I was a wolf, attempting to create a map of all the creatures in the nearby woods and the sounds that they made. But I heard nothing.
Somewhere, there were wolves in these woods, but they were invisible to me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
• COLE •
I was losing my grip on my human body, and I was glad.
Sam made me uncomfortable. I had a couple of different personas that pretty much worked across the board for everyone I had ever met, but none of them seemed right for him. He was painfully, annoyingly earnest, and how was I supposed to respond to that?