Forever. Part 10

"This is what we do to them, when we eat them," Shelby had said. I remember just standing there, trying to hear any trace of emotion in her voice. She pointed to the bird's mangled chest cavity with another pencil she held in her other hand. I remembered that it was one of my pencils, from my room. Batman. Freshly sharpened. The idea of her in my room felt more real and horrifying than the tortured animal kicking up dust on the edge of the concrete drive.

"Did you do that?" I asked. I knew she had.

As if I hadn't spoken, Shelby said, "This is where its brain is. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain."

She pointed to the starling's eye. I could see the tip of the pencil resting directly on the s.h.i.+ning black surface and something inside me clenched, bracing itself. The starling lay perfectly still. Its pulse was visible in its exposed innards.

"No -" I said.

Shelby stuck my Batman pencil through the starling's eye. She smiled at it, a faraway smile that had nothing to do with joy. Her gaze s.h.i.+fted in my direction though she didn't turn her head.

I stood there, my heart racing as if I was the one who'd been attacked. My breath came in uneven, sick jerks. Looking at Shelby and the starling, black and white and red, it was hard to remember what happiness felt like.

I had never told Beck.

Shame made me a prisoner. I hadn't stopped her. It had been my pencil. And in penance, I never forgot that image. I carried it with me, and it was a thousand times heavier than the weight of that little bird's body.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

I wished Shelby was dead. I wished that this scent, the one that both Cole and I were following, was just a phantom of her, a relic instead of a promise. Once upon a time, it would have been good enough for her to just leave the woods in search of another pack, but I was not that Sam anymore. Now, I hoped she was someplace she could never return from.

But the scent of her, lingering in the damp underbrush, was too strong. She was alive. She'd been here. Recently.

I stopped then, listening.

"Cole," I said.

He stopped immediately, something in my voice warning him. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the grumbling, alive smell of the woods waking up as they warmed. Birds shouting from tree to tree. Far away, outside the woods, a dog barking, sounding like a yodel. And then - a distant, faint, anxious sound. If we hadn't stopped, the noise of our feet would've obliterated it. But now, clearly, I heard the whistling, whimpering sound of a wolf in distress.

"One of your traps?" I asked Cole softly.

He shook his head.

The sound came again. Something like misgiving tugged in my stomach. I didn't think it was Shelby.

I held my finger to my lips and he jerked his chin to show he understood. If there was an injured animal, I didn't want to drive it away before we could help.

We were suddenly wolves ourselves, in human skins - soundless and watchful. As when I had hunted, my strides were long and low, my feet barely clearing the forest floor. My stealth wasn't something I had to consciously recollect. I just pulled away my humanness, and there it was, just underneath, waiting for me to recall it back to the surface.

Beneath my feet, the ground was slick and slimy with the wet clay and sand. As I descended into a shallow ravine, arms outstretched for balance, my shoes slid, leaving behind misshapen prints. I stopped. Listened. I heard Cole hiss as he struggled to keep his balance behind me. The sound of the wolf's whimper came again. The distress in it plucked something deep inside me. I crept closer.

My heart was loud in my ears.

The closer I got, the more wrong it felt. I could hear the whistling of the wolf, but I also heard the sound of water, which didn't make sense. No river ran through the bottom of this ravine, and we were nowhere near the lake. Still: splas.h.i.+ng.

A bird sang over us, loud, and a breeze lifted the leaves around me, showing their pale undersides. Cole was looking at me but not quite at me, listening. His hair was longer than when we'd first met, his color better. He looked, strangely, like he belonged here, aware and tense in these woods. The breeze was sending petals around us, though there was no flowering tree in sight. It was an ordinary, beautiful spring day in these woods, but my breath was coming unevenly and all I could think was I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.

Suddenly, I had a clear, perfect sensation of drowning. Of water, cold and slimy, closing over the hair on the top of my head, of water burning my nostrils, of my lungs held tight in its grip.

It was a fragmented memory, entirely out of place. How wolves communicated.

And then I knew where the wolf was. I abandoned my stealth and scrambled the last few yards.

"Sam!" snapped Cole.

I barely stopped in time. Beneath my right foot, the ground sloughed away, falling with a splash. I pulled back to a safer distance and peered down.

Below me, the clay was shockingly yellow, a scratch of unreal color below the dark leaves. It was a sinkhole, freshly made, judging from the newly exposed tree roots, witches' fingers that poked crookedly out of the slick sides. The edge of the pit was jagged where it had collapsed; the rain must've been too much for the roof of an underground cavern. The resulting hole was eight or ten or fifteen feet deep, it was hard to tell. The bottom was filled with something like yellow-orange water or mud, thick enough to cling to the sides, thin enough to drown in.

Floating in the water was a wolf, its fur clogged and tufted with mud. It wasn't whimpering now, just drifting in the water. Not even kicking its legs. Its coat was too filthy for me to identify.

"Are you alive?" I whispered.

At my voice, the wolf kicked convulsively and lifted its head to look at me.

Grace.

I was a radio tuned to all stations at the same time, so many thoughts inside me that none of them counted.

Now I could see the evidence of her struggles: claw marks in the soft clay at the water line, chunks of dirt pried from the side of the pit, a track worn smooth by a body sliding back down into the water. She had been here a while, and when she looked at me, I could see that she was tired of fighting. I saw, too, that her eyes were knowing, pensive, full of understanding. If not for the cold water around her, holding her body in wolf form, she'd probably be human.

That made it so much worse.

Beside me, Cole sucked in a breath before saying anything. "Something for it to climb on? Something to at least -"

He didn't finish, because I was already scouting around the mouth of the sinkhole, looking for something that would be of help. But with Grace in wolf form, what could I do? The water was at least six feet below me, and even if I managed to find something long enough to lower into the pit - maybe there was something in the shed - it would have to be something she could walk on, since she couldn't climb. Could I even convince her to walk on something? If she had her hands, her fingers, this still wouldn't be easy, but at least it wouldn't be impossible.

"This is all useless," Cole said, nudging a branch with his foot. The only wood near the pit was a couple of crumbling, rotten pine trees downed by storms and age, nothing useful. "Is there anything back at the house?"

"A ladder," I said. But it would take me at least thirty minutes to get there and back. I didn't think she had thirty more minutes. It was cold up here in the shade of the trees, and I thought that it must be colder down in the water. How cold did it have to be for hypothermia? I crouched back at the edge of the pit, feeling helpless. That same dread I'd felt when I saw Cole seizing was slowly poisoning me.

Grace had made her way to the side of the pit nearest me, and I watched her attempt a foothold, her legs trembling with fatigue. She didn't even manage to leverage herself an inch out of the water before her paws smeared back down the wall. Her head was only just above water, her trembling ears tipped at half-mast. Everything about her was exhausted, cold, beaten.

"It won't last until we get the ladder," Cole said. "It hasn't got that much stamina left."

I felt sick with the plausibility of her death. I said miserably, "Cole, it's Grace."

He looked at me then, instead of at her, his expression complicated.

Below us, the wolf flicked her eyes up toward me, holding my gaze for a moment, her brown eyes on my yellow ones.

"Grace," I said. "Don't give up."

It seemed to steel her: She began to swim again, this time toward another part of the wall. It was painful to recognize Grace in this grim determination. Again she tried to climb, one shoulder forced into the muck, the other paw scrabbling above the water at the steep wall. Her hind paws were braced on something below the surface of the water. Straining upward, muscles twitching, she pressed against the clay wall, shutting one eye to keep the mud out. s.h.i.+vering, she looked at me with her one open eye. It was so easy to look past the mud, past the wolf, past everything else, and into that eye, right into Grace.

And then the wall gave way. In a cascade of mud and grit, she splashed into the water. Her head vanished beneath the sludge.

There was an infinite moment where the brown water was perfectly still.

In those seconds that it took for her to fight her way back to the surface, I made up my mind.

I stripped off my jacket, stood at the edge of the sinkhole, and, before I could think of the countless horrific consequences, I went in.

I heard Cole say my name, too late.

I half slid, half fell into the water. My foot touched something slick, and before I had a chance to determine whether it was the bottom of the pit or merely a submerged root, I was swallowed.

The grit of the water stung my eyes for a second before I closed them. In the moment of that blackness, time disappeared, became an arbitrary concept, and then I found my footing and lifted my head above the surface.

"Sam Roth, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Cole said. There was admiration in his voice, which probably meant I'd made a poor decision.

The water came just to my collarbone. It was slimy as mucus and bitterly, bitterly cold. I felt like I had no skin, standing in this pit. It was just my bones and this frigid water pa.s.sing around them.

Grace pressed against the opposite wall, her head against the mud, her expression torn between wariness and something her lupine face couldn't convey. Now that I knew the depth of the sinkhole, I realized that she must be on her back legs, leaning against the wall to save her strength.

"Grace," I said, and, at the sound of my voice, her eyes hardened into fear. I tried not to take it personally; wolf instincts took precedence, no matter what humanity I thought I'd seen in them earlier. Still, I had to rethink my plan of trying to lift her toward the edge of the hole. It was hard to concentrate; I was so cold that my goose b.u.mps hurt. Every old instinct I had was telling me to get out of the cold before I s.h.i.+fted.

It was so cold.

Above me, Cole was crouched at the edge of the pit. I could feel his restlessness, hear the unasked question, but I didn't know how to answer him.

I moved toward her, just to see how she reacted. She jerked back, defensively, and lost her footing. She vanished into the water, and this time, she was gone for the s.p.a.ce of several breaths. When she emerged, she tried unsuccessfully to find her previous resting place, but the wall wouldn't hold her. She paddled feebly, nostrils huffing above the water. We didn't have much time.

"Should I come down there?" Cole asked.

I shook my head. I was so cold that my words were more breath than voice. "Too - cold. You'll - s.h.i.+ft."

Near me, the wolf whistled, very quietly, anxious.

Grace, I thought, closing my eyes. Please remember who I am. I opened my eyes.

She was gone. There was just a slow, thick ripple moving toward me from where she'd sank.

I lunged forward, my shoes sinking into the soft floor of the pit, and scooped my arms through the water. Agonizing seconds went by where all I felt was silt on arms, roots on my fingertips. The pool that had seemed small from above now felt vast and depthless.

All I could think was: She's going to die before I can find her. She's going to die inches from my fingertips, sucking water into her nose and breathing mud. I will live this moment again and again every day of my life.

Then, finally, my fingers touched something more substantial. I felt the solidness of her wet fur. I wrapped my arms underneath to lift her up and get her head above water.

I needn't have worried about her snapping. In my arms, she was a limp thing, lightweight with the water buoying her up, pathetic and broken. She was a golem of twigs and mud, cold as a corpse already from her hours in the water. Brown water bubbled from her nostrils.

My arms wouldn't stop shaking. I leaned my forehead against her muddy cheek; she didn't flinch. I felt her ribs pressing against my skin. She breathed another sticky, dirty-water breath.

"Grace," I whispered. "This isn't how it ends."

Each of her exhalations was wet and raspy. My mind was a jostle of ideas and plans - if I could get her farther out of the water, if I could keep her warmer, if I could keep her above water until she got some strength back, if Cole could get the ladder - but I couldn't focus on any one of them. Keeping her face above the liquid mud, I moved around slowly, feeling with my feet for whatever she'd stood on earlier.

I looked up to the edge of the hole. Cole was gone.

I didn't know what to feel.

Moving slowly, I found a slick, fat root that supported my weight, and I braced myself against the wall, Grace's wolf body in my arms. I hugged her to me until I felt her strange fast heartbeat against my chest. She was s.h.i.+vering now, whether from fear or exhaustion, I didn't know. I didn't know, either, how I was going to get us out of here.

I knew this, though: I wasn't letting go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

* COLE *

Running as a wolf was effortless. Every muscle was built for it. Every part of a wolf body worked together for seamless, constant motion, and the wolf mind just wouldn't hold on to the concept of tiring at some point in the future. So there was only running like you would never stop, and then: stopping.

As a human, I felt clumsy and slow. My feet were useless in this mud, collecting so much c.r.a.p on the bottom that I had to knock it off to continue. By the time I reached my destination, the shed, I was out of breath and my knees ached from running uphill. No time to stop, though. I already had half an idea of what to retrieve from the shed, unless a better idea presented itself. I pushed open the door and peered inside. Stuff that had seemed infinitely practical when I'd seen it before now seemed useless and fanciful. Bins of clothing. Boxes of food. Bottled water. A television. Blankets.

I tore the lids off the bins marked SUPPLIES, looking for what I really wanted: some kind of cable, bungee cord, rope, ball python. Anything I could fasten around the mouth of a bin to turn it into a sort of dumbwaiter for wolves. But there was nothing. This was like kindergarten for werewolves. Snack time and nap supplies.

I swore into the empty room.

Maybe I should have risked the extra time to go back to the house for the ladder.

I thought about Sam, s.h.i.+vering down in that hole with Grace in his arms.

I had a sudden flash of memory: Victor's cold body at the bottom of a hole, dirt flung over him. It was only a trick of my thoughts, and an untrue one at that - Victor had been wrapped up when we buried him - but it was enough. I wasn't burying another wolf with Sam. Especially not Grace.

The thing I was beginning to figure out about Sam and Grace, the thing about Sam not being able to function without her, was that that sort of love only worked when you were sure both people would always be around for each other. If one half of the equation left, or died, or was slightly less perfect in their love, it became the most tragic, pathetic story invented, laughable in its absurdity. Without Grace, Sam was a joke without a punch line.

Think, Cole. What is the logical answer?

My father's voice.

I closed my eyes, imagined the sides of the pit, Grace, Sam, myself at the top. Simple. Sometimes the simplest solution was the best.

Opening my eyes, I grabbed two of the bins and upended them, dumping their contents onto the floor of the shed, abandoning everything in them but a towel. I nested the bins inside each other, along with the towel, and tucked the lids under my arm. It seemed like the best weapons in my life had always been the most innocuous: empty plastic bins, a blank CD, an unmarked syringe, my smile in a dark room.

I slammed the shed door behind me.