Forever

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 43

 

  Beck. Beck was here.

  Cole made a hissing sound. “Are you inside yet? God bless America and all her sons. What is taking you so long?”

  The front door was locked. “Here, talk to Grace,” I said.

  “Mommy isn’t going to give me a different answer than Daddy,” Cole said, but I handed her the phone anyway.

  “Talk to him. I have to get my keys out. ” I dug in my pocket and unlocked the front door.

  “Hi,” said Grace. “We’re coming in. ” She hung up on him.

  I pushed open the front door and blinked to get used to the dimness. The first impression I got was of red striped over the furniture, the long afternoon light coming in the window and lying over the furniture. There was no sign of Cole or a wolf. He was not upstairs, despite his sarcastic response.

  My phone rang.

  “Sheesh,” Grace said, handing it to me.

  I held it to my ear.

  “Basement,” Cole said. “Follow the smell of burning flesh. ”

  I found the basement door open and heat emanating from the stairs. Even from here, I could smell wolf: nerves and damp forest floor and growing spring things. As I descended the stairs into the dim brown light of the basement, my stomach twisted with anxiety. At the bottom of the stairs, Cole stood with his arms crossed. He cracked every knuckle on his right hand with his thumb and started on his left. Behind him, I saw space heaters, the source of the choking heat.

  “Finally,” Cole said. “He was a lot groggier fifteen minutes ago. What took you so long? Did you go to Canada? Did you have to invent the internal combustion engine before you could leave?”

  “It was a couple of hours’ drive. ” I looked at the wolf. He lay in an unlikely, twisted position that no fully conscious animal would adopt. Half on his side, half pushed up onto his chest. Head weaving, eyes half closed, ears limp. My pulse was shallow and fast, a moth destroying itself on a light.

  “Speeding was an option,” Cole said. “Cops don’t get tickets. ”

  “Why the heaters?” I asked. “That won’t make him change. ”

  “Might keep a career werewolf human a little longer if this works,” Cole said. “If we don’t all get savaged first, which is a possibility if we dick around for much longer. ”

  “Shh,” Grace said. “Are we doing this or not, Sam?”

  She looked at me, not Cole. The decision was mine.

  I joined her in a crouch beside the wolf, and at my presence, his joints jerked as he became suddenly responsive. His ears were instantly more alert and his eyes flicked to meet mine. Beck’s eyes. Beck. Beck. My heart hurt. I waited for that moment of recognition from him, but it never came. Just that gaze, and then uncoordinated paws scrabbling, trying to move his drugged body.

  Suddenly the idea of sticking him with a needle full of epinephrine and God knew what else seemed ludicrous. This wolf was so firmly a wolf that Beck could never be pulled out of him. There was nothing here but Beck’s eyes with no Beck behind them. My mind grabbed at lyrics, something to get me out of this moment, something to save me.

  Empty houses don’t need windows

  ’cause no one’s looking in

  Why would a house need windows, anyway

  If no one’s looking out again

  The idea of seeing him again, just seeing him, as him, was such a powerful one. I hadn’t realized until this moment how much I had wanted it. Needed it.

  Cole crouched down next to us, the syringe in his hand. “Sam?” But really, he was looking at Grace, who was looking at me.

  Instantly, my brain replayed that second where the wolf’s eyes met mine. His gaze, without any understanding or reasoning behind it. We had no idea what we were working with here. No idea what effect the drugs would have on him. Cole had already guessed wrong on the dosage for the Benadryl. What if what he had in that syringe killed Beck? Could I live with that? I knew what choice I would make — had made — in the same situation. Given the choice between dying and having the chance to become human, I’d taken the risk. But I had been given the choice. I had been able to say yes or no.

  “Wait,” I said. The wolf was starting to stumble to his feet, his upper lip pulling back slowly from his teeth in a warning.

  But then there was this: me pushed into the snow, my life traded for this one, car doors slamming, Beck making the plan to bite me, taking everything away from me. I had never had a choice; it was simply forced upon me on one day that could’ve been no different from any other day in my life. He’d made the decision for me. So this was fair. No yes or no then. No yes or no now.

  I wanted this to work. I wanted it to make him human so I could demand an answer to every question I’d never asked. I wanted to force him into a human so that he could see my face one last time and tell me why he’d done this to me out of every human being on the planet, why me, why anyone, why. And, impossibly, I wanted to see him again so I could tell him I missed him so badly.

  I wanted it.

  But I didn’t know if he did.

  I looked at Cole. “No. No, I changed my mind. I can’t do it. I’m not that person. ”

  Cole’s green eyes, brilliant, held mine for a moment. He said, “But I am. ”

  And, fast as a snake, he stuck the needle into the wolf’s thigh.

  COLE

  “Cole,” Grace snapped. “I can’t believe you! I just can’t —”

  Then the wolf twitched, stumbling back from us, and Grace fell silent. It was convulsing with angular spasms that racked its body in time with a rapidly ascending pulse. It was impossible to tell if we were witnessing death or rebirth. A spasm rippled along the wolf’s coat, and it jerked its head upward in a violent, unnatural movement. A slow, ascending whine escaped from its nostrils.

  It was working.

  The wolf’s mouth cracked open in a gesture of silent agony.

  Sam turned his head away.

  It was working.

  I wanted, in that moment, to have my father standing there, watching, so I could say: Look at this. For every test of yours I couldn’t do, look at this. I was on fire with it.

  In a sudden, shivering movement, the wolf backed out of its skin and lay on the worn carpet at the base of the stairs. No longer a wolf. He was stretched out on his side, fingers clawed into the carpet, muscles hard and stringy over prominent bones. Colorless scars nicked his back, like it was a shell instead of skin. I was fascinated. It was not a man, it was a sculpture of a man-shaped animal, made for endurance and hunting.

  Sam’s hands were limp at his sides. Grace was looking at me, her face furious.

  But I was looking at Beck.

  Beck.

  I had pulled him out of that wolf.

  I walked my fingers across the wall until I found the light switch at the base of the stairs. As yellow light pooled in the basement, illuminating the bookshelves that lined the walls, he jerked to cover his eyes with his arm. His skin was still twitching and crawling, as if it wasn’t sure it wanted to remain in its current form. With all of the space heaters humming down here, the temperature was suffocating. The heat was pushing me so firmly into my human skin that I couldn’t imagine being anything else. If this inferno didn’t keep him human, nothing would.

  Sam silently climbed the stairs to shut the basement door to eliminate any drafts.

  “You are really lucky that didn’t turn out badly,” Grace said, her voice low, for me alone.

  I raised an eyebrow at her and then looked back to Beck. “Hey,” I said to him, “once you’re done with all that, I have clothing for you. You can thank me later. ”

  The man made a soft sound as he exhaled and shifted positions, the sort of sound someone makes without thinking when they’re in pain. He pushed his upper body off the ground in a move that seemed more wolf than man, and finally, he looked at me.

  It was months ago, and I was lying in the body I’d ruined.

  There is another
way out of all this, he had said. I can get you out of this world. I can make you disappear. I can fix you.

  After all this time — it felt like years since he had injected me with the werewolf toxin — here he was again. It was a pretty damn perfect piece of circularity: The man who’d made me a werewolf was the wolf that I’d made into a man.

  It was clear from his eyes, though, that his mind was still far, far away. He had pulled himself into an odd, animal position somewhere between sitting and crouching, and he regarded me warily. His hands were shaking. I didn’t know if that was from the change or from me sticking him.

  “Tell me when you recognize me,” I said to him. I got the sweatpants and sweatshirt from the chair I’d left them on, never quite turning my back to him.

  I balled the fabric and tossed it in Beck’s direction. The clothing swuffed gently to the ground in front of him, but he didn’t pay attention to it. His eyes glanced from me to the bookshelves behind me to the ceiling. I could actually see the expression in them transition, ever so slowly, from escape to recognition as he rebooted as Beck, the man, instead of Beck, the wolf.

  Finally, he jerkily pulled on the sweatpants and faced me. He left the sweatshirt lying on the floor. “How did you do this?” He looked away from me, as if he didn’t expect me to have the answer, and instead looked at his hands, his fingers spread wide. He studied both sides of them, backs and then palms, his eyebrows drawn together. It was such a strange, intimate gesture that I glanced away. It reminded me of our funeral for Victor for some reason.

  “Cole,” he said, and his voice was thick and gravelly. He cleared his throat, and his voice was a little better the second try. “How did you do this?”

  “Adrenaline. ” It was the simplest answer. “And some of adrenaline’s friends. ”

  “How did you know it would work?” Beck asked, and then, before I had a chance to reply, he answered himself. “You didn’t. I was the experiment. ”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Did you know it was me?”

  No point lying. I nodded.

  Beck looked up. “I’d rather that you had known. There are wolves that should stay wolves in those woods. ” He suddenly seemed to realize that Grace was standing opposite from me. “Grace,” he said. “Sam — did it work? Is he—?”

  “It worked,” Grace said softly. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her. “He’s human. He hasn’t shifted back since then. ”

  Beck closed his eyes and tipped his head back, his shoulders collapsing. I watched him swallow. It was naked relief, and it was sort of hard to watch. “Is he here?”

  Grace looked at me.

  I heard Sam’s voice from the stairs, sounding like nothing I’d ever heard from him.

  “I’m here. ”

  SAM

  Beck.

  I couldn’t keep my thoughts together. They scattered down the stairs, across the floor.

  he is a hand on my shoulder car tires hissing on wet pavement

  his voice narrates my childhood the smell of the forest on my suburban street

  my handwriting looks like his wolves

  he shouts across the house, sam, homework snow pressed against my skin