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She looked at Dad. His mouth worked, but he just shrugged. They both looked at me.
“Oh —” Mom said. “And you still talk to us after you turn eighteen. That’s part of it, too. ”
I pressed my fingers against my lips, my elbows leaned on the table. I didn’t want to give up my nights with Sam, but it was a fair compromise, especially when I hadn’t seen any way to a compromise. But what if I shifted? I couldn’t move back in until I was sure that I was stable. That had to be soon. Maybe now? I didn’t know. Cole’s cure would come too late to be useful.
“How do I know you’re not going to try to change the rules on me again?” I asked, stalling. “Sam is not negotiable, for instance. I’m keeping him. Forever and ever. I should put that out there right now. He’s the one. ”
Dad made another face but didn’t say anything. Mom, to my amazement, nodded a little. “Okay. I said we’d try. And not stop you from seeing him. ”
“And no more punching,” Rachel put in. I shot her a look. I felt it was a bit of cheating, waiting until the conflict had mostly subsided to fulfill her referee duties.
“Right,” Mom said. “Grace, what do you think?”
I glanced around the room: From here I could see the kitchen and the breakfast area, and it made me feel weird. I had thought this would be the last time I came here. That it would be a big fight and I would slam that book shut and never see it again. The idea of coming back to this house and climbing back into my old life was simultaneously relieving and exhausting. I thought of Sam’s dread of shifting again after he’d thought he was done and understood it infinitely.
“I … I have to think about it,” I said. “I want to sleep on it. ”
“Can’t you sleep on it here?” Mom asked.
Rachel shook her head. “No, because she has to take me back home, anyway. Referee says. ”
I stood up, making it not an option. I didn’t understand why my stomach still burned with nerves after the worst had gone by. “I’ll think about it and come back to talk about it. ”
Mom stood up then, too, so fast that the kitten started and hissed in Rachel’s arms, a tiny sound like a sneeze. Mom came around the table and hugged me again — a tight, weird-fitting hug that made me realize I couldn’t remember the last time, before this night, that she had attempted it. I wasn’t exactly sure where to hug her back, now that the time had come. She seemed all boobs and hair, so I just — squeezed in a general way.
“You will come back?” she said into my ear.
“Yes,” I said, and really meant it.
Dad stood up and gave me a draping shoulder-hug, as if possibly he knew he’d also find me all boobs and hair if he tried for a better one.
“Here’s your cat,” Rachel said, and handed my mother the kitten.
“Thank you for bringing her back,” Mom said. I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the cat or me.
Rachel shrugged and hooked arms with me. “It’s what I do. ” And with that, she towed me out of the house and back into the car. My parents stood at the doorway and watched the car, oddly forlorn looking, as we backed out and headed down the road. I felt giddy and ill.
The car was quiet for one minute.
Then Rachel said, “I can’t believe they replaced you with a cat. ”
I laughed, and it made my skin crawl. “I know, right? Thank you for coming. I mean, thank you. They were reasonable because you were there. ”
“They were reasonable because they thought you were dead. Do you — feel okay, Grace?”
I had missed a gear and the car gasped until I shifted to the right gear. I wasn’t the greatest with a stick shift, and suddenly it felt like too much effort to focus on. My stomach clenched again then, at the same time that a tremble worked its way up my arms, and I realized that what I’d put down as nerves was something worse.
“Oh, no,” I said, nausea rolling inside me. “I have to pull over. I’m sorry, I —”
The night road was deserted. I jerked the car to the shoulder and opened the door. I promptly threw up behind the car. Rachel’s face was white in the gloom; I hadn’t realized she’d gotten out.
She flapped her hands. “What do I do? I can’t drive a stick shift!”
I was starting to shiver now, hard, involuntary tremors that clicked my teeth together. “Rach, I’m so, so sorry. You need to —” I stopped to curl against the side of the car. Oh, God, I hated this part. My bones were breaking. No, no, no.
“Need to what? Grace, you’re freaking me out. Oh, no. Oh, no!” It was suddenly dawning on Rachel what was going on.
“Call Sam,” I managed. “Tell him I’ve shifted and to come get you. Cole can — ugh. Cole can drive the other car — oh — Rachel — go — wait in the car. Don’t —”
My knees didn’t want to hold me. They were loosening, getting ready to grow into something else. I was suddenly afraid of what she would think, watching me shift. She had to wait in the car. She couldn’t watch — it would ruin everything between us. My skin felt like someone else’s. I thought I must look terrible already.
But Rachel hugged me, a huge hug around my body and her cheek leaning against my tense one. I stank of wolf and I must have looked like a monster, and she was hugging me hard enough that I could feel it over the top of the pain. She was so brave that she made a tear escape.
“Does it hurt?” Rachel whispered, letting me go.
I shook my head fiercely. I balled my hands up against my body. “I just love you and it’s making me … making me …”
“Turn into a wolf,” said Rachel. “I know. ” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I have that effect on people. ”
I tried to say something else, but I lost my footing. The stars were brilliant above me, and I remembered yet another night: me and Sam under the stars, watching the northern lights. In my head the pink lights of the aurora borealis became the lights of the dash reflected in every broken piece of my Bronco’s smashed windshield, Sam and I behind it, saying good-bye, and then it was just me, broken into pieces, slivered like glass, made into something new.
CHAPTER SIXTY
SAM
It was oddly distressing to lose a night of sleep with Grace like this — out of the blue, with me far away from where she’d shifted. After dropping off Rachel, I wanted to go look for her, but Cole convinced me that it was useless; she wouldn’t come to me, and if she shifted back near her parents’ house, at least she’d know where she was. I didn’t think that I would fall asleep without her, but after Cole talked me out of driving back to where Rachel had left her, I lay in my bed and stared up at my paper birds and Christmas lights and pretended I was just waiting for Grace to come to bed. The long day stretched out behind me, and when I couldn’t hold all of the things that had happened in my mind at once, sleep found me.
I dreamed I was walking around the house, going from room to room. Each room was empty, but it was a full, breathing emptiness, like I might turn and see someone behind me at any moment. The house itself felt inhabited — not recently, but currently — as if the residents had merely gone outside to investigate the weather and would shortly return. The bedrooms, certainly, bore signs of life: On each bed was a suitcase or a backpack filled with clothing, shoes placed carefully beside it, personal effects laid out, waiting to go. Ulrik’s bed had his laptop and his electric razor. Paul’s had a pile of guitar picks and some burnt DVDs I had never heard of. Even the room with the bunk beds had supplies on their beds: Derek’s earbuds tangled on top of his camera, and Melissa’s sketchbook beside her shoes. Beck’s bed was empty.
I went from room to room, turning off lights in each room as I did. Good-bye to Beck’s room, never occupied. Good-bye to Ulrik’s room, where we’d watched horror movies on his laptop. I went downstairs without going to my room. Good-bye to the living room, where I had once sat with Grace on the sofa, nearly a wolf, where Isabel had helped stop Cole’s seizure. I turned the
light off. Good-bye to the yellow room that Cole lived in and Jack died in. Lights off in the bathroom I had avoided for a decade. Good-bye to the kitchen, with its photographs of us pinned and taped to every cabinet, one thousand smiles, every one of them genuine. I turned off the light and headed to the basement.
And here, in Beck’s library, surrounded by books, were Beck’s things that had been absent from his room, his suitcase and his shoes, sitting on the ottoman of his reading chair. His tie was folded neatly by them and beside them both was a CD with tangled branches on the cover. The title was scrawled in the only available white space: Still Waking Up.
All around me was Beck, living inside all of these books that he had read. He inhabited every page. He was every hero, every villain, every victim and every aggressor. He was the beginning and end of everything.
Die letzte aller Türen
Doch nie hat man
an alle schon geklopft
(The last of all doors
But one has never
knocked on all the others)
This was the last good-bye. I turned off the light.
There was only one place left. I slowly climbed the stairs to the ground floor and then to the second floor. Walked down the hall to my room. Inside, my paper birds trembled on their strings, caught in the premonition of an earthquake. I could see each memory that the birds contained, images playing across their wings like a television screen, all of them singing bright songs that I had sung before. They were beautiful and terrified, jerking to be free.
“Bad news, Ringo,” said Cole. “We’re all going to die. ”
I woke up to the sound of the telephone.
Adrenaline shot through my half-asleep body at the sudden noise, and the first clear thought I had, inexplicably, was Oh, no, not here. Half a moment later I realized the noise was just the telephone, and I couldn’t think why I had thought that. I picked up the receiver.
“Sam?” said Koenig.
He sounded very, very awake.
“I should have called earlier, but I was on midnights and I — it doesn’t matter. ” Koenig took an audible breath. “The hunt’s been moved up. ”
“It — what?” I thought perhaps I was still asleep, but my cranes hung perfectly still.
Koenig said, a little louder, “It’s tomorrow. Dawn. Five forty-seven A. M. The helicopter got freed up suddenly and they’ve moved it. Get up. ”
He didn’t have to tell me. I felt like I would never sleep again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
ISABEL
I wasn’t quite asleep when the phone rang.
It was a little after midnight, and I was trying to sleep mostly out of self-defense. Tensions were running high in the Culpeper household as the date of the hunt and the threat of California moved closer, and my parents were enjoying one of the screamathons that I’d been missing so sorely for the past few weeks. It sounded like my mother was winning — at least she’d roared more salient points than my father had in the last twenty minutes — but it also sounded like they had several more rounds to go.