Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #2) 5

“I haven’t stopped,” Jeremy said. He sounded half-asleep. He always sounded half-asleep. Victor, on the other side of Jeremy, was smiling down at the ground just like the photographer had told him to.

I wasn’t feeling the shot. How was shooting us looking over a balcony like some freaking Beatles album cover going to fit NARKOTIKA’s sound? So I shook my head and spit off the balcony and the photographer’s flash went off and he and his assistant stared at the viewfinder and looked annoyed. Another flash. Another annoyed look. The photographer came to the landing and stood six stairs down from us. His voice was cajoling. “Okay, Cole, how about something with some life in it? You know, give me a smile. Imagine your best memory. Give me a smile you’d give your mom.”

I raised an eyebrow and wondered if he was for real.

The photographer seemed to have a flash of insight, because his voice raised as he said, “Imagine you’re onstage—”

“You want life?” I asked. “ ‘Cause this isn’t it. Life is unexpected. Life is about risk. That’s what NARKOTIKA is, not some damn Boy Scout family picture. It’s—”

And I leaped at him. I flew off the stairs, my arms spread out on either side, and I saw panic cross his face just as his assistant jerked her camera up and the flash blinded me.

I crashed down on one foot and rolled up against the brick wall of the stairwell, laughing my ass off. Nobody asked if I was okay. Jeremy was yawning, Victor was giving me the finger, and the photographer and the assistant were exclaiming over their viewfinder.

“Have some inspiration,” I told them, and stood up. “You’re welcome.” I wasn’t even feeling any pain.

After that, they let me do what I wanted for the shoot. Humming and singing my new song, I led them up and down the stairs, pressing my fingers against the wall like I was about to push it over; down to the lobby, where I stood in a potted plant; and finally into the alley behind the studio, where I jumped on top of the car that had brought us from the hotel, leaving dents in the roof so the car would remember me.

When the photographer called it a day, his assistant came over to me and asked for my hand. I offered my palm, and she pulled it around so that it faced the sky. Then she wrote her name and number on it while Victor watched from just behind her.

Victor grabbed my shoulder as soon as she’d gone back inside. “What about Angie?” he demanded, with a half smile on his face like he knew I was going to give him an answer he liked.

“What about her?” I asked.

The smile disappeared, and he gripped the hand with the number on it. “I don’t think she’d be really happy about this.”

“Vic. Dude. None of your business.”

“She’s my sister. It’s my business.”

The conversation was definitely ruining my good mood. “Well, then, here it is: Angie and I are over. We’ve been over so long, they’re teaching it in history classes. And it’s still none of your business.”

“You bastard,” Victor said. “You’re going to leave her like that? You ruin her life and just walk away?”

It was really ruining my good mood. It was starting to feel like time for a needle or a beer or a razor. “Hey, I asked her. She said she’d rather go it alone.”

“And you believed her? You know, you think you’re so good. You and your goddamn genius. You think you’re going to live forever like this? No one’s going to remember your face when you’re twenty. No one’s going to remember you.”

He was deflating, though. He was almost done. If I said sorry or even just stayed quiet, he’d probably turn away and go back to the hotel.

I waited a beat, and then I said, “At least the girls call me by my name, dude.” I watched his face, a smirk on mine. “At least I’m not always ‘NARKOTIKA’s drummer.’”

Victor punched me. It was a good punch, but not everything he had. In any case, I was still standing, though I thought he’d probably split my lip. I could still feel my face and I could still remember what we were talking about. I looked at him.

Jeremy appeared by Victor’s elbow, probably clued in by the sound of Victor’s fist smacking my face that this wasn’t one of our usual arguments.

“Don’t just stand there!” Victor shouted, and he hit me again, right in the jaw, and this time I had to stagger to stay up. “Hit me, you piece of crap. Hit me.”

“Boys,” Jeremy said, but didn’t move.

Victor slammed his shoulder into my chest, one hundred and eighty pounds of repressed anger, and this time I crashed to the ground, a piece of asphalt grinding into my back. “You’re such a waste of space. Life is one big ego trip for you, you privileged son of a bitch.” He was kicking me now, and Jeremy was watching, arms crossed.

“That’s enough,” Jeremy said.

“I—want—to—smash—that—smile—off—your—face,” Victor said between kicks. He was out of breath now, and finally, one of his kicks threw him off balance and he fell heavily to the ground next to me.

I stared up at the rectangle of gray-white sky above us, framed in by the dark buildings, and felt blood trickle from my nose. I thought about Angie back at home and the way she’d looked when she told me she’d rather go it alone, and I wished she could’ve watched Victor kick the crap out of me.

Above me, Jeremy held out his camera phone and took a picture of the two of us lying on the asphalt in some city I couldn’t even remember the name of.

Three weeks later, that photo of me flying off the stairs, Jeremy and Victor watching me, hit magazine stands and made the front page of the mag. My face was everywhere. No one was forgetting me anytime soon. I was everywhere.

Later in the afternoon, lying on the floor of Beck’s house, the shift became urgent inside me, so insistent that I realized that my nausea earlier had only been pretend, nothing like the real thing, which bit and tore and ripped at my guts. I made my way again to the back door and opened it, standing and looking out at the grass. It was surprisingly warm outside, the overcast sky gone, but an occasional stiff breeze reminded me it was still March. This time, when a cold gust of wind blew, it cut right through my human body to the wolf inside. Goose bumps raced across my skin. I stepped onto the concrete stoop and hesitated, wondering if I should go to the shed and leave my clothing there to make it easier to retrieve later. But the next gust sent me double with shudders. I wasn’t going to make it to the shed.

My stomach groaned and pinched; I crouched and waited.

But the shift didn’t come right away, like it had before. Having been human for almost a day now, my body was more sure of its form, and it didn’t seem like it wanted to give it up easily.

C’mon, shift, I thought, as the wind pulled another rack of shuddering from me. My stomach churned. I tried to remember that it was just a reaction to the shifting process; I didn’t really need to throw up. If I just resisted the impulse, I’d be fine.

I braced my fingers against the cold concrete, willing the wind to push me into a wolf. Out of the blue, I remembered Angie’s number, and I felt an irrational desire to go back inside and dial it, just to hear her say hello before I hung up. I wondered what Victor was thinking right now, after all this.

My chest ached.

Get me out of this body. Get me out of Cole, I thought.

But that was just one more thing out of my control.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

• GRACE •

That night, there was nothing different about my bed without Sam there. There was nothing unfamiliar about the shape of the mattress. The sheets were no larger without him. I was no less tired without the steady sound of his breathing, and in the dark, I could not see the absence of his square shoulder beside me. The pillow still smelled like him, like he’d gotten up to get his book and had forgotten to come back.

But it made all the difference in the world.

My stomach aching, an echo of the pain of last night, I pressed my face into his pillow and tried not to remember those nights when I had thought he was gone for good. Imagining him over in Beck’s house now, I rolled over and got my cell phone. But I didn’t dial his number, because, stupidly, all I could think of was when we were lying together and Sam was shivering and he said, Maybe we should rethink our lifestyle. Then I thought of him telling me to stay over here, not to come over and stay with him.

Maybe he was glad to be over there, to have the excuse to be alone. Maybe he wasn’t. I didn’t know. I felt sick, sick, sick, in some new and terrible way that I couldn’t describe. I wanted to cry and felt foolish for it.

I put my phone back on the nightstand and rolled back into his pillow and finally went to sleep.

• SAM •

I was an open wound.

Restless, I roamed the halls of the house, wanting to call her again, afraid to get her in trouble, afraid of something nameless and huge. I paced until I was too tired to stand, and then I headed upstairs to my room. Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn’t underneath it.

My thoughts festered inside me. I could not sleep. My mind slid away from the reality of the empty bed beside me and curved my thoughts into lyrics, my fingers imagining the frets they would press to find the tune.

I’m an equation that only she solves / these Xs and Ys by other names called / My way of dividing is desperately flawed / as I multiply days without her.

As the endless night crawled slowly by, innumerable minutes piling one upon another without getting anywhere, the wolves began to howl and my head began to pound. One of the dull, slow aches that the meningitis had left as its legacy. I lay in the empty house and listened to the pack’s slow cries rise and fall with the pressure inside my skull.

I had risked everything, and I had nothing to show for it but my open hand, lying empty and palm up toward the ceiling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

• GRACE •

“I’m going for a walk,” I told Mom.

No day had ever passed as slowly as this Saturday. Once upon a time, when I was younger, I would’ve been thrilled to have an entire day with my mother in the house; now, I felt restless, like I had a houseguest. She wasn’t really keeping me from doing anything, but I didn’t feel like starting anything while she was around, either.

Currently, Mom was delicately folded on the end of the couch, reading one of the books that Sam had left behind. When she heard my voice, her head whipped around and her entire body stiffened. “You’re what?”

“I’m going for a walk,” I said, tempted to take Sam’s book out of her hands. “I’m bored out of my mind and I want to talk with Sam, but you guys won’t let me and I have to do something or I will start throwing stuff around my room like an angry chimp.”

The truth was that without school or Sam, I needed to be outside. That’s what I had always done in the summers before Sam—fled to the tire swing in the backyard, book in hand, needing the sound of the woods to fill the empty, restless space inside me.