He closed his eyes, miles away on the other side of the bed. “Sometimes I do, too.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN • SAM
42°F
I woke up all in a rush. For a moment, I lay still, blinking, trying to determine what had woken me. The events of the previous night rushed back to me as I realized it wasn’t a sound that had woken me, but a sensation: a hand resting on my arm. Grace had rolled over in her sleep, and I couldn’t stop staring at her fingers resting on my skin.
Here, lying next to the girl who had rescued me, my simple humanity felt like a triumph.
I rolled onto my side and for a while, I just watched her sleep, long, even breaths that moved the flyaway hairs by her face. In slumber, she seemed utterly certain of her safety, utterly unconcerned by my presence beside her. That felt like a subtle victory, too.
When I heard her father get up, I lay perfectly still, heart beating fast and silent, ready to leap from the edge of the mattress in case he came to wake her for school. But he left for work in a cloud of juniper-scented aftershave that billowed toward me from under the door. Her mother left soon after, noisily dropping something in the kitchen and swearing in a pleasant voice as she shut the door behind her. I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t glance into Grace’s room to make sure she was still alive, especially considering they hadn’t seen her when they came home in the dead of the night. But the door stayed shut.
Anyway, I felt foolish in the scrubs, and they were useless to me in this awful in-between weather, so I slipped out while Grace slept; she didn’t even stir as I left. I hesitated on the back deck, looking at the frost-tipped blades of grass. Even though I’d borrowed a pair of her father’s boots, the early morning air still bit at the skin of my bare ankles beneath the rubber. I could almost feel the nausea of the change rolling over in my stomach.
Sam, I told myself, willing my body to believe. You’re Sam. I needed to be warmer; I retreated inside to find a coat. Damn this weather. What had happened to summer? In an overstuffed closet that smelled of stale memories and mothballs, I found a puffy, bright blue jacket that made me look like a blimp and ventured out into the backyard with more confidence. Grace’s father had feet the size of a yeti, so I tramped into the woods with all the grace of a polar bear in a dollhouse.
Despite the chilly air that made ghosts of my breath, the woods were beautiful this time of year, all bold primary colors: crisp leaves in startling yellow and red, bright cerulean sky. Details I never noticed as a wolf. But as I made my way toward my stash of clothing, I missed all the things I didn’t notice as a human. Though I still had heightened senses, I couldn’t smell the many subtle tracks of animals in the underbrush or the damp promise of warmer weather later in the day. Normally, I could hear the industrial symphony of cars and trucks on the distant highway and detect the size and speed of each vehicle. But now all I could smell was the smokiness of autumn, its burning leaves and half-dead trees, and all I could hear was the low, barely audible hum of traffic far in the distance.
As a wolf, I would have smelled Shelby’s approach long before she’d come into sight. But not now. She was nearly on top of me when I got the feeling that something was close. The tiny hairs on my neck stood at attention, and I had the uneasy sense that I was sharing my breath with someone else. I turned and saw her, big for a female, white coat ordinary and yellowish in this full daylight. She seemed to have survived the hunt without so much as a scratch. Ears slightly back, she observed my ridiculous apparel with a cocked head.
“Shhh,” I said, and held my hand out, palm up, letting what was left of my scent waft toward her. “It’s me.”
Her muzzle curled in distaste as she backed slowly away, and I guessed she recognized Grace’s scent layered on top of mine. I knew I did; even now, her spare, soapy aroma clung to my hair where I’d lain on her bed and to my hand where she’d held it.
Wariness flashed in Shelby’s eyes, mirroring her human expression. This was how it was with Shelby and me—I couldn’t remember a time we hadn’t been subtly at odds. I clung to my humanity—and to my obsession with Grace—like a drowning man, but Shelby welcomed the forgetting that came with her lupine skin. Of course, she had plenty of reasons to forget.
Now, in these September woods, we regarded each other. Her ears tipped toward me and away, collecting dozens of sounds that escaped my human ears, and her nostrils worked, discovering where I’d been. I found myself remembering the sensation of dried leaves beneath my paws and the sharp, rich, slumber-heavy scent of these autumn woods when I was a wolf.
Shelby stared into my eyes—a very human gesture, considering my rank in the pack was too high for wolves other than Paul or Beck to challenge me like that—and I imagined her human voice saying to me, as it had so many times before, Don’t you miss it?
I closed my eyes, shutting out the vividness of her gaze and the memory of my wolf body, and instead thought of Grace, back at the house. There was nothing in my wolf experience that could ever compare to the feeling of Grace’s hand in mine. I immediately turned this thought over in my head, creating lyrics. You’re my change of skin / my summer-winter-fall / I spring to follow you / this loss is beautiful. In the second it took me to compose the lyric and imagine the guitar riff that would go with it, Shelby had vanished into the woods, soft as a whisper.
That she could disappear with the same silent stealth as she had arrived reminded me of my vulnerable state, and I clumped hurriedly to the shed where my clothing was stashed. Years ago, Beck and I had dragged the old shed, piece by piece, from his backyard to a small clearing deep in the woods.
Inside were a space heater, a boat battery, and several plastic bins with names written on the sides. I opened the bin marked with my name and pulled out the stuffed backpack inside. The other bins were loaded with food and blankets and spare batteries—equipment for holing up in this shack, waiting for other pack members to change—but mine contained supplies for escape. Everything I kept here was designed to get me back to humanity as quickly as possible, and for that, Shelby couldn’t forgive me.