“Do you know each other?” I asked.
Victor shut his eyes, his shoulders shuddering, and then he said, “I—hold on—”
While I blinked, he shook out of his skin and into a pale gray wolf with dark facial markings, faster than I’d ever seen any of us shift. It was not quite effortless, but it worked naturally, like a snake rubbing out of its skin or a cicada stepping out of the brittle shell of its former self. No gagging. No pain. None of the agony of every other shift I’d ever witnessed or experienced.
The wolf shook itself, fluffing its coat, staring balefully up at me with Victor’s brown eyes. I started to move away from the door, to give him an easy exit, but Cole said, voice strange, “Don’t bother.”
And then, as if on cue, the wolf sat down on its haunches hard, ears trembling. He yawned, whining as he did, and then his whole body shook violently.
Cole and I turned our faces away at the same time, just as Victor gasped audibly, shifting back into his human form. Just like that. In and out. My mind couldn’t quite grasp it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him tug up the blanket. More for the warmth than for the privacy, I was guessing.
Victor said, softly, “Goddammit.”
I looked at Cole, who had an utterly blank expression on his face, one that I was learning accompanied anything that mattered.
“Victor?” I said. “I’m Sam. Do you remember me?”
He was crouched on the floor now, rocking back and forth on his heels like he wasn’t sure if he should sit or kneel. That and the shape of his mouth told me that he was in pain. He said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe.” He shot a glance at Cole, and Cole winced slightly.
“Well, I’m Beck’s son,” I said. Close enough to the truth and faster to spit out. “I’ll help you, if I can.”
• COLE •
Sam was handling Victor a lot better than I had. I’d only stood and stared by the door, waiting to let him out if he managed to stay a wolf.
“That was…How do you shift that quickly?” Sam asked him.
Victor grimaced, glancing from Sam to me and back to Sam again. I could tell it was taking a big effort on his part to keep his voice steady. “It’s worse from wolf to me. From me to wolf is easy. Too easy, man. I keep shifting back even though it’s warm. That’s what does it, right?”
“This is the hottest day we’ve had so far,” Sam answered. “It’s not supposed to be this warm the rest of the week.”
“God,” Victor said, “I didn’t think it would be like this.”
Sam looked at me, as if I had anything to do with anything. He stepped around me to get a folding chair, then sat down across from Victor. Suddenly, he reminded me of Beck. Everything about him was saying interest and concern and sincerity, from the curve of his shoulders to the lowering of his eyebrows over his heavy-lidded eyes. I couldn’t remember if that was how Sam had first looked at me. I couldn’t remember the first thing I’d said to him.
“Is this the first time you’ve shifted back?” he asked Victor.
Victor nodded. “That I can remember, anyway.” He stared at me then, and I was very aware of my human body. At how I was just standing there, not in pain, not a wolf, just standing there.
Sam went on, like the whole thing was just a walk in the park, perfectly normal, “Are you hungry?”
“I—” Victor started. “Wait. I’m s—”
And he slid back to a wolf.
I could tell from the shock on Sam’s face and the way he pressed a finger to one of his eyebrows that this wasn’t normal, which made me feel a little better about finding the entire situation completely messed up. Victor the wolf stood there, eyeing the doorway and me and Sam, ears pricked and posture stiff.
I stared at Victor, remembering sitting in the hotel room after I’d met Beck, remembered saying, You ready for the next big thing, Vic?
“Cole,” Sam said, not looking away from him. “How many times? How long have you been here?”
I shrugged, trying to look casual about it. “A half hour. He’s been going back and forth the entire time. Is this normal?”
“No,” Sam said emphatically, still looking at the wolf, who had crouched down close to the floor, staring back at him. “No, this isn’t normal. If it’s warm enough for him to stay human, he should be able to stay human for longer. Not this—I mean…” He trailed off as the wolf stood back up again.
Sam moved his knees away from Victor, in case he wanted to bolt, but suddenly Victor’s ears flagged, and he began to tremble again. We both turned our faces away until he had changed into a human and had time to pull a blanket back over himself.
Victor groaned, lightly, and pressed his forehead into his hand.
Sam turned back around. “Does it hurt?”
“Ugh. Not a lot.” He paused, shrugged his shoulders up by his ears, and kept them there. “God, I’ve been doing this all day. I just want to know when it will stop.” He wouldn’t look at me; his truthfulness was for Sam.
Sam said, “I wish I had an answer for you, Victor. Something is keeping you from staying in one form, and I don’t know what it is.”
Victor asked, “Is this the best it gets? I mean, I’m caught, right? This is what I get for listening to you, Cole. I should’ve figured out a long time ago that this is always how it goes.”
But he still wasn’t looking at me.
I remembered that day back in the hotel. Victor was crashing badly from one of his highs. These new lows of his were so low that even I, in my studied disinterest, could see that one day he wouldn’t be able to climb back out of them. I’d been trying to help him when I convinced him to become a wolf with me. It wasn’t entirely selfish. It wasn’t just because I didn’t want to try it alone.
If Sam hadn’t been around, I would’ve told Victor that.
Sam knocked Victor’s shoulder with a fist. “Hey. It’s different when you’re new. Everybody starts out unstable, and then we even out. Yeah, it’s crap now, and you’re taking crap to a whole new level, but when it gets really warm, this’ll be behind you.”
Victor looked bleakly at Sam, a face I’d seen a million times before because I had created it. Finally, he looked at me. “This should be you, you bastard,” he said, and then he uncurled into a wolf again.
Sam threw up his hands, his palms open like an entreaty, and said, utterly frustrated, “How—how—how…” I realized how carefully he had been controlling his features and voice. It made my mind twist, almost as much as seeing Victor shift, to hear Sam go from oozing calm to being a hot mess. It meant that Sam had been perfectly capable of presenting a benevolent mask to me all along, but that he had chosen not to. Somehow it changed the entire way I thought of him.
Maybe that’s what made me speak up. “Something is over-riding the temperature,” I said. “That’s what I think. The heat is making him become human, but something else is telling his body to shift to wolf.”
Sam looked at me. Not disbelieving, but not believing, either. “What else could do that?” he asked.
I looked at Victor, despising him for making this complicated. How hard would it have been to follow me into the wolf and back out, like he was supposed to? I wished I’d never come to the damned shed.