Almost two months and not a breath from her, despite a number of extremely entertaining voicemails on my part.
Voicemail #1: “Hi, Isabel Culpeper. I am lying in my bed, looking at the ceiling. I am mostly naked. I am thinking of … your mother. Call me.”
And now she called?
No way.
I couldn’t stay in the house with the phone looking at me like that, so I got my shoes and headed out into the afternoon. Since I’d taken Grace away from the hospital, I’d started digging further into discovering what made us wolves. Here in the bush, there was no way to look at us under the microscope and get real answers. But I’d planned out a few experiments that didn’t require a lab — just luck, my body, and some balls. And one of said experiments would really run better if I could get my hands on one of the other wolves. So I’d been making forays into the forest. Actually, reccies. That was what Victor used to call our late-night convenience store runs to buy hasty meals constructed of plastic and dried cheese flavoring. I was performing reccies into Boundary Wood, in the name of science. I felt compelled to finish what I’d started.
Voicemail #2: The first minute and thirty seconds of “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” by the Bee Gees.
Today, the weather was warm and I could smell absolutely everything that had ever peed in the woods. I struck off on my usual path.
Cole, it’s me.
God, I was going crazy. If it wasn’t Isabel’s voice, it was Victor’s, and it was getting a little crowded inside my head. If I wasn’t imagining removing Isabel’s bra, I was willing the phone to ring, and if I wasn’t doing that, I was remembering Isabel’s father chucking Victor’s dead body onto the driveway. In between them and Sam, I was living with three ghosts.
Voicemail #3: “I’m bored. I need to be entertained. Sam is moping. I may kill him with his own guitar. It would give me something to do and also make him say something. Two birds with one stone! I find all these old expressions unnecessarily violent. Like, ring around the rosy. That’s about the plague, did you know? Of course you did. The plague is, like, your older cousin. Hey, does Sam talk to you? He says jack shit to me. God, I’m bored. Call me.”
Snares. I was going to think about my experiments instead. Catching a wolf was turning out to be incredibly complicated. Using objects found in the basement of Beck’s house, I’d rigged up a huge number of snares, traps, crates, and lures, and had caught an equally huge number of animals. Not a single member of Canis lupus. It was hard to say which was more aggravating — catching yet another useless animal or figuring out a way to get it out of the trap or snare without losing a hand or an eye.
I was getting very fast.
Cole, it’s me.
I couldn’t believe that after all this time, she had called back, and her first words hadn’t been some form of apology. Maybe that part was coming next, and I’d missed it by hanging up.
Voicemail #4: “Hotel California” by the Eagles, in its entirety, with every instance of the word California replaced with Minnesota.
I kicked a rotten log and watched it explode into a dozen black shards on the rain-soaked forest floor. So I’d refused to sleep with Isabel. My first decent act in several years. No good deed goes unpunished, my mother used to say. It was her motto. Probably she felt that way about changing my diapers now.
I hoped Isabel was still staring at her phone. I hoped she’d called back one hundred times since I’d gone outside. I hoped she felt infected like I did.
Voicemail #5: “Hi, this is Cole St. Clair. Want to know two true things? One, you’re never picking up this phone. Two, I’m never going to stop leaving long messages. It’s like therapy. Gotta talk to someone. Hey, you know what I figured out today? Victor’s dead. I figured it out yesterday, too. Every day I figure it out again. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel like there’s no one I can —”
I checked my traps. Everything was coated in mud from the rain that had kept me in the house for the past several days. The ground was slop under my feet and my traps were useless. Nothing in the one on the ridge. A raccoon in the one near the road. Nothing in the one in the ravine. And the trap near the shed, a new sort of snare, was completely demolished, the pegs ripped from the ground, trip wires everywhere, small trees snapped, and all the food eaten. It looked like I’d tried to trap Cthulhu.
What I needed was to think like a wolf, which was remarkably hard to do when I wasn’t one.
I gathered up the ruined bits of snare and headed back to the shed to see if I could find what I needed to rebuild it. There was nothing wrong with life that some wire cutters couldn’t fix.
Cole, it’s me.
I wasn’t going to call her back.
I smelled something dead. Not yet rotting, but soon.
I hadn’t done anything wrong. Isabel could call me the twenty times that I’d called her.
Voicemail #6: “So, yeah, I’m sorry. That last message went a little pear-shaped. You like that expression? Sam said it the other day. Hey, try this theory on for size: I think he’s a dead British housewife reincarnated into a Beatle’s body. You know, I used to know this band that put on fake British accents for their shows. Boy, did they suck, aside from being assholes. I can’t remember their name now. I’m either getting senile or I’ve done enough to my brain that stuff’s falling out. Not so fair of me to make this one-sided, is it? I’m always talking about myself in these things. So, how are you, Isabel Rosemary Culpeper? Smile lately? Hot Toddies. That was the name of the band. The Hot Toddies.”
I swore as a bit of wire from the snare in my hand cut my palm. It took me several moments to get my hands free of the mess of metal and wood. I dropped it onto the ground in front of me and stared at it. That piece of crap wasn’t catching anything anytime soon. I could just walk away. Nobody had asked me to play Science Guy.
There was nothing saying that I couldn’t just take off. I wouldn’t be a wolf again until winter, and I could be hundreds of miles away by then. I could even go back home. Except that home was just the place where my black Mustang was parked. I belonged there just about as much as I belonged here with Beck’s wolves.
I thought about Grace’s genuine smile. About Sam’s trust in my theory. About knowing that Grace had lived because of me. There was something vaguely glorious about having a purpose again.
I put my bloody palm to my mouth and sucked on the cut. Then I leaned over and picked all the pieces back up again.
Voicemail #20: “I wish you’d answer.”
CHAPTER FIVE
GRACE
I watched him.
I lay in the damp underbrush, my tail tucked close to me, sore and wary, but I couldn’t seem to leave him behind. The light crept lower, gilding the bottom of the leaves around me, but still, he remained. His shouts and the ferocity of my fascination made me shiver. I clamped my chin onto my front paws, laid my ears back against my head. The breeze carried his scent to me. I knew it. Everything in me knew it.
I wanted to be found.
I needed to bolt.
His voice moved far away and then closer and then far again. At times the boy was so far I almost couldn’t hear him. I half rose, thinking of following. Then the birds would grow quieter as he approached again and I would hurriedly crouch back into the leaves that hid me. Each pass was wider and wider, the space between his coming and going longer. And I only grew more anxious.
Could I follow him?
He came back again, after a long period of almost quiet. This time, the boy was so close that I could see him from where I lay, hidden and motionless. I thought, for a moment, that he saw me, but his expression stayed focused on some point beyond me. The shape of his eyes made my stomach turn uncertainly. Something inside me tugged and pulled, aching once again. He cupped his hands around his mouth, called into the woods.
If I stood, he would see me for certain. The force of wanting to be seen, of wanting to approach him, made me whine under my breath. I almost knew what he wanted. I almost knew —
“Grace?”
The word pierced me.
The boy still didn’t see me. He’d just tossed his voice out into the emptiness, waiting for a reply.
I was too afraid. Instincts pinned me to the ground. Grace. The word echoed inside me, losing meaning with each repetition.
He turned, head bowed, and picked his way slowly away from me, toward the slanted light that marked the edge of the woods. Something like panic rose up inside me. Grace. I was losing the shape of the word. I was losing something. I was lost. I —
I stood up. If he turned, I was unmistakable now, a dark gray wolf against the black trees. I needed him to stay. If he stayed, maybe it would ease this terrible feeling inside me. The force of standing there, in plain sight, so close to him, made my legs quiver beneath me.
All he had to do was turn around.
But he didn’t. He just kept walking, carrying the something that I’d lost with him, carrying the meaning of that word — Grace — never knowing how close he’d been.
And I remained, silently watching him leave me behind.
CHAPTER SIX
SAM
I lived in a war zone.
When I pulled into the driveway, the music slapped its hands against the car windows. The air outside the house thumped with a booming bass line; the entire building was a speaker. The closest neighbors were acres away, so they were spared the symptoms of the disease that was Cole St. Clair. Cole’s very being was so big that it couldn’t be contained by four walls. It bled out the windows, crashed out of the stereo, shouted out suddenly in the middle of the night. When you took away the stage, you still had the rock star.
Since he’d come to live in Beck’s house — no, my house — Cole had terraformed it into an alien landscape. It was as if he couldn’t help destroying things; chaos was a side effect to his very presence. He spread every single CD case in the house over the living room floor, left the television turned to infomercials, burned something sticky into the bottom of a skillet and then abandoned it on the stove top. The floorboards in the downstairs hallway were lined with deep dimples and claw marks that led from Cole’s room to the bathroom and back again, a lupine alphabet. He’d inexplicably take every glass out of the cupboard and organize them by size on the counter, leaving all the cabinet doors hanging open, or watch a dozen old ’80s movies halfway through and leave the cassettes unrewound on the floor in front of the VCR he’d excavated from somewhere in the basement.
I made the mistake of taking it personally, the first time I came home to the mess. It took me weeks to realize that it wasn’t about me. It was about him. For Cole, it was always about him.
I got out of the Volkswagen and headed toward the house. I wasn’t planning on being here long enough to worry about Cole’s music. I had a very specific list of items to retrieve before I went back out again. Flashlight. Benadryl. The wire crate from the garage. I’d stop by the store to get some ground beef to put the drugs in.
I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the basement. It was just — there were so many ways to effortlessly die as a wolf, just one moment too long on a highway, a few days without a successful hunt, one paw too far into the backyard of a drunk redneck with a rifle.
