I just kept smiling, because I’d known that all along.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
• ISABEL •
At three in the afternoon, we had Kenny’s to ourselves. It still smelled like the morning’s greasy breakfast offerings: cheap bacon, soggy hash browns, and a vague cigarette odor, despite the lack of a smoking section.
Across the booth from me, Cole slouched, his legs long enough that I kept accidentally hitting them with my feet. I didn’t think he looked like he belonged in this hick diner any more than I did. He looked like he’d been put together by a swank designer who knew what he was doing—his distinctive features were brutal and purposeful, sharp enough to hurt yourself on. The booth seemed soft and faded around him, almost comically old-fashioned and country in comparison, like someone had dropped him here for a tongue-in-cheek photo shoot. I was sort of fascinated by his hands—hard-looking hands, all steep angles and prominent veins running across the back of them. I watched the deft way that his fingers moved while he did mundane things like putting sugar in his coffee.
“You a musician?” I asked.
Cole looked at me from under his eyebrows; something about the question bothered him, but he was too good to reveal much. “Yeah,” he said.
“What kind?”
He made the kind of face real musicians make when they’re asked about their music. His voice was self-deprecating when he said, “Just a bit of everything. Keyboards, I guess.”
“We have a piano at my house,” I said.
Cole looked at his hands. “Don’t really do it anymore.” And then he fell silent again, and it was that silence, heavy and growing and poisonous, that rested on the table between us.
I made a face that he didn’t see because he didn’t bother lifting his eyes. I wasn’t big on making small talk. I considered calling Grace to ask her what I should say to a reticent suicidal werewolf, but I’d left my phone somewhere. Car, maybe.
“What are you looking at?” I demanded finally, not expecting an answer.
To my surprise, Cole stretched one hand out toward me, extending his fingers so that his thumb was closest, and he regarded it with an expression of wonder and revulsion. His voice echoed his expression. “This morning, when I became me again, there was a dead deer in front of me. Not really dead. She was looking at me”—and now he met my eye, to see my reaction—“but she couldn’t get up, because before I’d shifted, I’d ripped her open. And I guess, well, I guess I was eating her alive. And I guess I kept doing it after, because my hands…they were covered with her guts.”
He looked down at his thumb, and now I saw that there was a small ridge of brown beneath the nail. The end of his thumb trembled, so slightly that I almost didn’t see it. He said, “I can’t get it off.”
I rested my hand on the table, palm up, and when he didn’t understand what I wanted, I stretched my arm a few inches farther and took his fingers in mine. With my other hand, I got my nail clipper out of my purse. I flicked out the hook and slid it under his nail, scraping the bit of brown out.
I blew the grit off the table, put the clippers back in my purse, and let him have his hand back.
He left it where it was, between us, palm down, fingers spread out and pressed against the tabletop as if it were an animal poised for flight.
Cole said, “I don’t think your brother was your fault.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, Grace.”
“Huh?”
“Grace. Sam’s girlfriend. She says that, too. But she wasn’t there. Anyway, the guy she tried to save that way lived. She can afford to be generous. Why are we talking about this?”
“Because you made me walk three miles for a cup of old coffee. Tell me why meningitis.”
“Because meningitis gives you a fever.” His blank look told me that I was starting in the wrong place. “Grace was bitten as a kid. But she never shifted, because her idiot father locked her in the car on a hot day and nearly fried her. We decided that maybe you could replicate that effect with a high fever, and we couldn’t think of anything better than meningitis.”
“With a thirty-five percent survival rate,” Cole said.
“Ten to thirty percent,” I corrected. “And I already told you—it cured Sam. It killed Jack.”
“Jack is your brother?”
“Was, yeah.”
“And you injected him?”
“No, Grace did. But I got the infected blood to give to him.”
Cole looked impatient. “I don’t even have to bother to tell you why your guilt is self-indulgent, then.”
One of my eyebrows shot up. “I don’t—”
“Shhh,” he said. He drew his outstretched hand back toward his coffee mug and stared at the salt and pepper shakers. “I’m thinking. So Sam never shifts at all?”
“No. The fever cooked the wolf out of him, or something.”
Cole shook his head without looking up. “That doesn’t make sense. That shouldn’t have worked. That’s like saying you shiver when you’re cold and you sweat when you’re hot, and so to stop you from shivering for the rest of your life, we’re going to put you in a pizza oven for a couple minutes.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. This was supposed to be Sam’s last year, and he should’ve been a wolf right now. The fever worked.”
He frowned up at me. “I wouldn’t say the fever worked. I would say that something about meningitis made him stop shifting. And I’d say something about getting shut in a car made Grace stop shifting. Those are maybe true. But saying that the fever did it? You can’t prove that.”
“Listen to you, Mr. Science Guy.”
“My father—”
“The mad scientist,” I interjected.
“Yes, the mad scientist. He used to tell a joke in his classes. It’s about a frog. I think it’s a frog. It might be a grasshopper. Let’s go with frog. A scientist has a frog and he says, ‘Jump, frog.’ The frog jumps ten feet. The scientist writes down Frog jumps ten feet. Then the scientist chops off one of the frog’s legs and says, ‘Jump, frog,’ and the frog jumps five feet. The scientist writes Cut off one leg, frog jumps five feet. Then he chops off another leg, and says, ‘Jump,’ and the frog jumps two feet. The scientist writes down Cut off two legs, frog jumps two feet. Then he cuts off all the frog’s legs and says, ‘Jump,’ and the frog just lies there. The scientist writes down the conclusions of the test: Cutting off all a frog’s legs makes the subject go deaf.” Cole looked at me. “Do you get it?”
I was indignant. “I’m not a total idiot. You think we jumped to the wrong conclusion. But it worked. What does it matter?”
“Nothing, I guess, for Sam, if it’s working,” Cole said. “But I just don’t think that Beck had it right. He told me that cold made us wolves and hot made us humans. But if that was true, the new wolves like me wouldn’t be unstable. You can’t make rules and then say that they don’t really count just because your body doesn’t know them yet. Science doesn’t work that way.”
I considered. “So you think that’s more frog logic?”