That’s one reason I don’t want the weekend to come to a close. The other one is that I can hardly face what I must do on Monday.
Sunday evening, we stand at our window and watch the sun go down over Forest Park. We can see the Planetarium, and of course the great maze of the zoo, and we think we can spot the art museum and the history museum and the Muny Opera, but maybe those are just breaks in the tree line. It’s November now, and the landscape is a dense brown marked with spots of intransigent green and gold. All up and down the major artery of Kingshighway Boulevard, buildings and cars are turning on lamps and headlights in defiance of the oncoming night. Brody is standing behind me, his arms around my waist and his chin against my hair. I have crossed my arms over his, and I am standing as close to him as I possibly can, just to feel his heat and weight against my body.
I feel as safe and protected as I ever will, and so I say at last, in a low voice, “I lied to my sister.”
His voice is low and lazy, free of shock or accusation. “Really? You don’t love me?”
“Not about that.”
“Then what?”
“I told her that I’d always be around. Or words to that effect.”
I feel him lift his head. “And you won’t? Where are you going?”
I turn to face him, still staying within his embrace. We haven’t turned on any lights in the room, and the daylight outside is fading fast. We’re half in shadow, but we can still see each other’s faces with utter clarity. His expression is confused but open; I wonder what he can read in mine.
“I don’t trust her,” I say. “I don’t believe she can come back to the house, and see me, and keep her animal shape. I think she’ll shift, and I think she’ll die.”
Brody keeps one arm around my waist but lifts a hand to brush hair from my face. “I think so, too,” he says, “but I wasn’t going to say so.”
“I have to stop her.”
“Do you really think you can? How?”
It’s surprisingly difficult to say the words out loud. But ever since Dr. Kassebaum pronounced her dreadful sentence, I’ve known what I have to do. I lean my cheek against his chest, so when I speak, my voice is muffled. “I have to invoke my superpower.”
* * *
Kurt Markham’s office is pretty much exactly what I would have expected. The wood paneling, enormous black desk, and trophy case full of athletic awards and framed certificates all scream successful ex-jock with lots of money and no class. Or maybe I would have interpreted any of his décor schemes the same way.
“Well, darlin’, this is a pleasant surprise,” he says when his secretary ushers me inside. At a nod from him, she shuts the door behind her. A huge picture window behind his desk admits the gray light of a stormy November afternoon and shows me his face mostly in silhouette. I prefer that, actually, to seeing his smug smile. It doesn’t bother me that the harsh light falls squarely on my face and exposes every line and fleeting expression. I am beyond caring what Kurt Markham thinks.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I reply.
“I understand I should congratulate you. You got married to that reporter fellow. Kind of sudden, wasn’t it?”
“Sudden but wonderful,” I say.
He laughs. “Well, good for you. You and your husband planning to live in that little bitty house you got out here, or is he a city man? You thinking about selling the property and moving? ’Cause I’m sure willing to make you another offer if that’s why you’re here.”
“That’s exactly why I’m here,” I say coolly. I can get through this without crying. I know I can. “I want half a million dollars. I want it today. And I want the house torn down before the end of the week.”
Kurt had been leaning back in his big leather seat, but at that he sits up so fast that he slams his knee into the top of his desk. “Half a million—and what? Slow down, darlin’, business doesn’t happen quite that fast.”
“Well, it does, or we’re not doing business. Those are my terms. Yes or no?”
“Even if the property was worth five hundred thousand—which, honestly, Mel, it isn’t—it’s not like I have that kind of money just lying around—”
I come to my feet. “Fine. I’ll look for another buyer.”
He leaps up, too, and the chair makes a faint crashing sound as it hits the wall. “Wait, wait, wait. I’m just trying to get a handle on your terms.”
I’ve made it as far as the door, but I turn back to face him. Now I’m actually glad for the weak sunlight on my face; I hope it shows him that I’m dead serious. “Those are my terms. Five hundred thousand. Today. And I want it written into the contract that if the house is not razed to the ground by the end of the week, you owe me another half million.”
He studies me for a long moment, letting the easy smile fade from his face while he makes cold calculations in his head. Oh, he’s not doing the math on the price of the property versus the profit he can make; he’s long ago performed a cost/benefit analysis and knows exactly what he can afford to pay. He’s sizing me up as an opponent, trying to guess where I might be vulnerable, how he might outmaneuver me. Most successful quarterback Dagmar High School had ever fielded, and a college standout at Mizzou. Would have gone pro if he hadn’t blown out his knee. Still a poker player who wins local tournaments and has made it to Vegas once or twice on the national circuit. Charles once called him a smiling shark, but he’s not smiling now.
“I think we’ve got a little room for negotiating here,” he says softly.
I lay my hand on the doorknob. “No we don’t.”
“Well, can I have an hour to think about it? I need to call a few folks, see how much money I can rustle up on such short notice.”
“No you don’t.”
“Now, Melanie. Be reasonable.”
“That’s the offer, Kurt. Take it or leave it. When I walk out, it’s off the table.”
“And you have someone else you’re gonna make the same offer to? Some other developer who happens to want the same land?”
I just smile. Kurt’s the local boy with all the connections and the biggest land-development operation in this part of the county, but there are a couple of other housing contractors who’ve started building in our area, and they’re eager to do business. Sure, the economy has been bad for a couple of years, but everyone expects the housing market to rebound—and here in the St. Louis area, most of the activity is in the small towns in the semirural areas, where there’s lots of room for growth.
Kurt shakes his head admiringly, and his bad-boy grin slowly reappears. “You always were a ballbuster, Mel. I never should have let you break up with me.”
“That’s the mistake you made, Kurt. Thinking you could let me or not let me do anything. Do we have a deal? Or do I go?”
Even though he’s standing all the way across the room, he holds his hand out, ready to shake mine. “We have a deal.”
* * *
One week later, the house has been reduced to splinter and brick. Ann will never be able to come home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JANET
By the time he was thirty-five, Cooper had the body of a sixty-year-old. A well-kept, well-fed, energetic sixty-year-old, it’s true, but a man in decline nonetheless. It didn’t take much basic math to figure out that he would be lucky to have another ten years of quality life.
For a while, I thought I had found a way to slow the aging process, though it was counterintuitive and cost me dearly. If I injected Cooper with a serum made of his own blood, he would stay in wolf shape three weeks instead of two. Although I would have expected him to deteriorate more rapidly as he spent extended time in animal form, the reverse appeared to be true. In fact, the deterioration seemed to halt altogether if I gave him enough injections to keep him in animal shape for more than a month at a time. If he was a wolf for six weeks and human for two, his systems seemed to stabilize. No doubt he still aged, but at a more reasonable rate. From this I concluded that it was the transformation p
rocess itself—not just the effort required to live as a wolf—that took such a toll on his body.
But, oh God, six weeks without Cooper beside me—Cooper, the man, the artist, the lover, the gentle soul—I had such a difficult time enduring those lengthy separations. It was not as if I could not see him every day, of course. Even as a wolf, he stayed on the property. Winter or summer, we would spend evenings quietly together outside on the back porch, as we had done so many times on the deck at my parents’ house so long ago. I could talk to his dark, intelligent face; I could know that he understood me; I could be convinced, literally be without a wisp of doubt, that he loved me. But it was not the same. I missed him. I craved him. I wanted him, and I could see him slipping away.
And then everything got worse.
* * *
For the past three years, I had been assisted in my lab work by Evan’s daughter, a shy, brilliant girl named Karadel. When she first joined me, she was an awkward and uncertain seventeen, a homeschooled girl who would have been instantly admitted into any med school in the country except for the fact that she shape-shifted on a random basis into a truly astonishing variety of creatures. She had been an eagle, a fox, a brown mouse, a doe, a butterfly, an elephant. I sometimes thought that finding a refuge for Karadel had been Evan’s primary purpose in buying property for me and setting me up with my own practice. He had kept her for a long time on his estate in Barrington, a far western suburb of Chicago with lots of open land, but the transformation to the pachyderm had alarmed him. And so she came to stay with me.
As far as I was concerned, she was a gift straight from heaven. I had hoped she might become my assistant—fill a sort of vet-tech role—but it was quickly clear that with intensive training, she could be a full-fledged veterinarian every bit as good as I was. So I approached her education as if I would one day send her out into the world to open her own clinic. I taught her everything. By the time she was twenty, she could treat and diagnose any creature who came to my office, whether true animal or shape-shifter. She had also had a little success in learning how to control her own bewildering transformations, and she worked alongside me in the lab, trying to unlock the mysteries of her personal chemistry.
Cooper adored her, and she treated him like a favorite uncle. Sometimes, when he was a wolf and she was in some compatible form, they would romp through the grassland of the property like adolescent cubs learning to play and fight. I would watch them from the windows and blink back tears, reminding myself that it was foolish to be jealous. Oh, I didn’t think they harbored romantic feelings for each other, but Karadel could share with Cooper something I never could. Half of his life had always been mine—less than half now; perhaps one-quarter. And I had always wanted all of him to belong to me.
It was Karadel who first realized that the wolf serum was no longer halting Cooper’s deterioration. She had spent four days as a lively little Yorkie, and she and Cooper had chased each other through the snow-covered meadow that comprised the biggest section of my land. It was mid-January, not too early to think about spring, the time the world would redeem all the promises it made every fall. This is not the end. This is only a time for rest and renewal.
“I’m worried about Cooper,” Karadel said. They were almost the first words she spoke aloud once she was back in human shape.
“What? Why?” I asked sharply. My heart, always braced for tragedy, seized up for a moment; I felt a spasm of pain pulse through my chest.
“He seemed so much slower today. He couldn’t run very far or very fast, and a couple of times he just stopped and sort of panted for breath.”
“Maybe he’s picked up a lung infection,” I said. “I’ll bring him in and do an X-ray.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” she said gently. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but his muzzle. It’s gone almost completely white. I think—I think it’s caught up with him. All the extra time you bought him with the serum—it’s all kind of evaporated. I think he’s old.”
I stared at her—a dark, slim girl with her mother’s build and her father’s uncanny eyes—and felt the edges of my world begin to disintegrate. It was as if I were standing on a sandbar in the middle of a low, sluggish river, and upstream about a mile or so I could hear floodwaters rumbling. The level of the river was already beginning to rise, nibbling away at the crumbling boundaries of my safe island. It wouldn’t be long before the toxic, tumbling water would come roaring through, obliterating my life and drowning me in despair.
“How old?” I whispered.
“I’m only guessing,” she said. “I’d have to examine him. But I’d say—in wolf years—eighteen. Maybe nineteen.” Wolves in the wild rarely lived past ten; those in captivity might live to be twenty. Karadel’s voice became even softer. “And once he’s human—”
“He’ll be about ninety or more,” I breathed. “Close to the end.”
“He’s probably got a year, at least,” she said.
“In wolf form,” I answered.
She just looked at me and didn’t answer.
“I think whenever he changes to human shape, he loses time,” I added. “If he has a year, but he changes shape three times—maybe he has six months.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” she said.
“It’s not long enough.”
“I don’t think we ever get enough time with the people we care about,” she said sadly, and I knew she spoke from experience. Her mother had died when Karadel was a child, and her father, who was now in his late forties, was growing weaker by the day. And, of course, she had lost any number of shape-shifter friends to disease, accident, and those too-early deaths. “My father says grief is the price of love,” she added.
I shook my head. “I can’t pay that price. I can’t live without him,” I said.
“You’d be amazed at what you can do,” she replied.
That I knew to be true; my whole life had been a series of surprises. But even if I discovered I could live without Cooper, I knew I wouldn’t want to.
“I want that year,” I said. “I want every minute of it.”
“You want to keep him in wolf shape that whole time?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem fair to him. He misses you, too, when you’re human and he’s animal. If he doesn’t have much time left, he deserves to share it with you.”
“He does,” I said. “And he will. But you’re going to have to help me.”
Her eyes went wide with shock. She had worked beside me in the lab; she knew at once what I intended.
“You don’t even know if it will work,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “It might kill you—it really might.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Without Cooper, I’d rather be dead.”
* * *
In the end, and only because Karadel insisted, I put off the injections; I allowed Cooper to become human one more time. She had been right, of course. He was a very old man now, decidedly frail, but still marked by that eternal sweetness and that hard-won peace. He knew at once that he could no longer cheat his implacable internal clock. He understood right away that his choice was to go back to wolf form and stay there for a year or more, or bounce between states of existence and be dead in a few months.
“I choose human,” he said. Despite the cold, we were outside, sitting side by side on the back porch, watching sunset sigh and release its golden grip on the ice-covered trees, the shorn grasses, the yawning acres of land. “I choose you.”
I had my arms around his waist and my head against his shoulder, but now I snuggled closer, inhaling him like the fresh scent of a summer day. “I choose you, too,” I whispered into his chest. “But I choose wolf. And I will be a wolf alongside you.”
I felt him lean back, angle his head down, try to see my face. “You want to test your serum on yourself?” he demanded. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“I think it will.”
Now he did pull back far enough that he could put one hand under my chin and tilt my hea
d up. “And if it doesn’t?”
I met his eyes squarely. “Then you will get a chance to mourn me the way I have always expected to mourn you.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“No,” I said, “neither do I.”
He leaned in to give me a gentle kiss. “I would love to be a wolf alongside you,” he whispered. “We would have a year?”
“I think so. Close enough.”
“And we could stay here?”
“Of course.”
“What about your practice? All the shape-shifters who have come to rely on you?”
“Karadel is as good as I am. She can take care of them.” I kissed him. “You can’t possibly have any more objections.”
“Only the big one. The only one that matters. That I am afraid for you. That I don’t want you to give up your life for mine.”
“My life has always been yours,” I said. “And I’m not giving anything up. I am simply joining our lives together at the end.”
He leaned his cheek against the top of my head. “Then I say yes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MELANIE
The year that follows is one of my best and one of my worst.
Brody and I rent a house in south St. Louis and settle in to married life. For the most part, I love it, and the easy companionship we enjoyed during our courtship just becomes easier and more companionable. Of course, there are adjustments. He’s still something of a slob, he doesn’t always remember that two people sharing one bathroom have to display a great deal of sensitivity to both individuals’ schedules, and his sense of time rarely synchs up with that of the general population. He’s as likely to want a serious in-depth conversation at 3 a.m. as high noon, and it rarely occurs to him that there might be an hour when it’s too late to call. But those are minor irritations, and the benefits outweigh them a hundred times over. In many ways, I am happier than I have ever been.