Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2) 5

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

• GRACE •

I didn’t even see Dad come into the room. The first moment I realized he was there was when I heard his voice, far away, like sound through water.

“What’s going on here?”

Sam’s voice was a murmured soundtrack to the pain that burned through me. I hugged my pillow and stared at the wall. I could see the diffuse shadow that Sam made and the sharper one of my father, closer to the hall lights. I watched them move back and forth, making one big shape and then two again.

“Grace. Grace Brisbane.” My father’s voice became louder again. “Don’t pretend I’m not here.”

“Mr. Brisbane—” Sam started.

“Do not—do not—‘Mr. Brisbane’ me,” Dad snapped. “I can’t believe you can look me in the face, when behind our backs—”

I didn’t want to move because every movement made the fire inside me burn faster, but I couldn’t let him say that. I rolled toward them, wincing at the thorns of pain that prickled through my stomach as I did. “Dad. No. Don’t say that to Sam. You don’t know.”

“Don’t think I’m not furious with you, too!” Dad said. “You have completely, utterly betrayed our trust in you.”

“Please,” Sam said, and now I saw that he was standing by the side of the bed in his sweatpants and T-shirt, fingers making white marks in his own arms. “I know you’re angry with me, and you can keep being angry with me and I don’t blame you, but there’s something wrong with Grace.”

“What’s going on here?” Now Mom’s voice. Then, in a strange, disappointed tone that I knew would kill Sam, “Sam? I can’t believe it.”

“Please, Mrs. Brisbane,” Sam said, although Mom had told him before to call her Amy, and he normally did, “Grace is really, really warm. She—”

“Just get away from the bed. Where’s your car?” Dad’s voice fell into the background again, and I stared at the shape of the ceiling fan above me, imagining it coming on and drying the sweat on my forehead.

Mom’s face appeared in front of me, and I felt her lay her hand on my forehead. “Sweetie, you do seem feverish. We heard you cry out.”

“My stomach,” I murmured, careful not to open my mouth too wide, in case what was inside me crawled out.

“I’m going to try to find the thermometer.” She vanished from my sight. I heard Dad’s and Sam’s voices going on and on and on. I didn’t know what they could possibly have to talk about. Mom reappeared. “Try to sit up, Grace.”

I cried out as I did, claws scraping the inside of my skin. Mom handed me a glass of water while she peered at the thermometer.

Sam, standing by the bedroom door, jerked around when the glass slid from my unprotesting hand and landed on the floor with a dull and distant sound. Mom stared at the glass, and then at me.

My fingers still in a circle, cupping an invisible glass, I whispered, “Mom, I think I’m really sick.”

“That’s it,” Dad said. “Sam, get your coat. I’m taking you to your car. Amy, take her temperature. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ll have my phone.”

I turned my eyes toward Sam, and his expression pierced me. He said, “Please don’t ask me to leave her like this.” My breath came a little faster.

“I’m not asking,” my father said. “I’m telling. If you ever want to be allowed to see my daughter again, you will get out of my house right now, because I am telling you to.”

Sam scrubbed his hands through his hair and then linked them behind his head, eyes closed. For a moment, it was like we all held our breaths, waiting to see what he would do. The tension in his body was written so clearly that an explosion seemed imminent.

He opened his eyes, and when he spoke, I almost didn’t recognize his voice. “Don’t—don’t even say that. Don’t threaten me with that. I’ll go. But don’t—” And he couldn’t even say anything else. I saw him swallow, and I think I said his name, but he was already down the hall with my father following him.

A moment later, I thought I heard the engine of Dad’s car rev to life outside, but it was Mom’s car, and I was in it, and I felt like my fever was eating me alive. Outside the car window, the stars swam in the cold night sky above me as we drove, and I felt small and alone and in pain. Sam Sam Sam Sam where are you?

“Sweetie,” Mom said from the driver’s seat. “Sam’s not here.”

I swallowed tears and watched the stars wheel out of sight.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

• SAM •

The night that Grace went to the hospital without me was the night I finally turned my eyes back to the wolves.

It was a night full of tiny coincidences that collided into something bigger. If Grace hadn’t gotten sick that night, if her parents had been out late as they usually were, if they hadn’t discovered us, if I hadn’t gone back to Beck’s house, if Isabel hadn’t heard Cole outside her back door, if she hadn’t delivered Cole to me, if Cole hadn’t been equal parts junkie and asshole and genius—how would life have unfolded?

Rilke says: “Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben”—“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”

My hand already missed the weight of Grace’s.

Nothing was the same after that night. Nothing.

After I got into the car with Grace’s father, he drove me to the cluttered alley behind the bookstore where my Volkswagen was parked, navigating carefully so that he didn’t rub his mirrors on the trash bins on either side. He pulled to a stop just behind my car, his silent face illuminated by the flickering streetlight that hung from the second story of the store. I was silent, too, my mouth sealed shut with a toxic paste of guilt and anger. We sat there together, and the windshield wiper scraped suddenly across the windshield, making us both flinch. He had accidentally turned it to intermittent when he signaled to enter the alley. He let it swipe the already-clear windshield once more before he seemed to remember to turn it off.

Finally, without looking at me, he said, “Grace has always been perfect. In seventeen years, she has never gotten into trouble at school. She’s never done drugs or alcohol. She’s a straight-A student. She has always been absolutely perfect.”

I didn’t say anything.

He went on. “Until now. We don’t need someone to come along and corrupt her. I don’t know you, Samuel, but I do know my daughter. And I know that this is all you. I am not trying to be threatening here, but I won’t have you ruining my daughter. I think you seriously need to reconsider your priorities before you see her again.”

For a brief moment, I tried out words in my head, but everything I thought of was too vitriolic or honest for me to imagine saying. So I just got out into the frigid night with everything still shut up inside me.

After he had gone, waiting just long enough to make sure that my car started before he backed out onto the empty street, I sat in the Volkswagen with my hands folded in my lap and stared at the back door of the bookstore. It seemed like days ago that Grace and I had walked through it, me still high with the memory of the studio invoice and her still high with my reaction and the pleasure of knowing just what to get me. I couldn’t picture her smug face now, though. The only image my mind could pull up was the one of her twisting in pain on top of the sheets, face flushed, reeking of wolf.

It’s only a fever.

That’s what I told myself as I drove toward Beck’s, my headlights the only illumination in the pitch-black night, bending and flickering against the black tree trunks on either side of the road. Again and again I said it, even as my gut whispered that it wasn’t and my hands ached to jerk the wheel and drive right back to the Brisbane house.

Halfway to Beck’s, I took out my cell phone and dialed Grace’s number. I knew it was a bad idea even as I did it, but I couldn’t help it.

There was a pause, and then I heard her father’s voice instead of hers.

“I’m only picking this up to tell you not to call,” he said. “Seriously, Samuel, if you know what’s good for you, you will just leave it for tonight. I do not want to talk to you tonight. I do not want Grace talking to you. Just—”

“I want to know how she is.” I thought about adding please, but couldn’t bring myself to.

There was a pause, like he was listening to someone else. Then he said, “It’s just a fever. Don’t call again. I’m trying really hard to not say something I’ll regret later.” This time I did hear someone’s voice in the background—Grace’s or her mother’s—and then the phone went dead.

I was a paper boat drifting in a massive night ocean.

I didn’t want to go to Beck’s, but I had nowhere else to go. I had no one else to go to. I was human, and without Grace, I had nothing but this car and a bookstore and a house full of countless empty rooms.

So I drove to Beck’s—I needed to stop thinking of it as Beck’s—and parked my car in the empty driveway. Once upon a time, I’d worked at the bookstore during the summers, when Beck was still human and I still lost my winters to being a wolf. I’d pull up in the summer evenings when it was still light, because during the summers, it was never night, and I would get out of Beck’s car to the sounds of people laughing and the smell of the grill from the backyard. It felt strange to be stepping out into the still night now, the cold prickling my skin, and knowing that all those voices from my past were trapped in the woods. Everyone but me.

Grace.

Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light, revealing the photographs stuck every which way all over the cabinets, and then switched on the hall light. In my head, I heard Beck say to my small nine-year-old self, “Why do we need every light in the house on? Are you signaling to aliens?”

And so I went through the house tonight and turned on every light, revealing a memory in every single room. The bathroom where I’d nearly turned into a wolf right after meeting Grace. The living room, where Paul and I had jammed with our guitars—his beat-up old Fender was still propped against the mantle. The downstairs guest room, where Derek had stayed with a girlfriend from town before Beck had chewed him out for it. I turned on the lights to the basement stairs and the lights in the library down there, and then came back up to get the lights in Beck’s office that I’d missed. In the living room, I stopped just long enough to crank up the expensive stereo system that Ulrik had bought when I was ten so that I could “hear Jethro Tull the way it was meant to be heard.”

Upstairs, I turned the knob on the floor lamp in Beck’s room, where he had almost never slept, preferring to store books and papers on his bed and instead fall asleep in a chair in the basement, some book facedown on his chest. Shelby’s room came to life under the dim yellow ceiling light, pristine and unlived in, no personal possessions except for her old computer. I was tempted for a brief moment to smash in the monitor, just because I wanted to hit something, and if anyone deserved it, Shelby did, but it didn’t seem like there’d be any satisfaction in breaking it without her here to see me finally do it. Ulrik’s room looked like it had been frozen in time. One of his jackets was still thrown across the bed next to a folded pair of jeans and an empty mug on the nightstand. Paul’s room was next, where he had a mason jar on the dresser with two teeth in it—one belonging to him, and one belonging to a dead white dog.