Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Should I be on the other side with something else?” Grace asked, her eyes on me just a second longer before she turned back.

  “A knife is a bit excessive,” I suggested, stepping away from the garage door. “There’s a push broom over there.”

  She looked at the knife before setting it down on a birdbath — another failed grounds beautification attempt by Beck.

  “I hate raccoons,” observed Cole. “This is why your idea of moving the wolves is somewhat problematic, Grace.”

  Grace, armed with a push broom, inserted the bristly end under the car with grim efficiency. “I hardly find this to be an apt comparison.”

  I could see the masked nose of the raccoon poking out from under the BMW. In a sudden rush, it bolted away from Cole’s broomstick and ran directly by the open garage door to hide behind a watering can on the other side of the car.

  “Why, you dumb bastard,” Cole said wonderingly.

  Grace walked over and pushed on the watering can, gently. There was a moment’s hesitation, and the raccoon bolted directly back under the car. Again, completely bypassing the open door. Grace, an ardent disciple of logic, threw up her free hand. “The door is right there. It’s the entire wall.”

  Cole, looking a bit more enthusiastic than the job called for, rummaged around beneath the car with the broomstick again. Duly terrified by this onslaught, the raccoon bolted back to the watering can. The smell of its fear was strong as the rank scent of its coat, and vaguely contagious.

  “This,” Cole said, the broomstick braced on the ground beside him, looking like Moses in sweatpants, “is the reason raccoons don’t take over the planet.”

  “This,” I said, “is the reason we keep getting shot at.”

  Grace looked down at the raccoon where it was huddled in the corner. Her expression was pitying. “No complicated logic.”

  “No spatial sense,” I said. “Wolves have plenty of complicated logic. Just no human logic. No spatial sense. No sense of time. No sense of boundaries. Boundary Wood is too small for us.”

  “So we move the wolves someplace better,” Grace said. “Someplace with a better human-to-acre ratio. Someplace with fewer Tom Culpepers.”

  “There are always Tom Culpepers,” I said at the same time that Cole said it, and Grace smiled ruefully at both of us.

  “It would have to be pretty remote,” I said. “And it couldn’t be private property, unless it was ours, and I don’t think we’re that rich. And it couldn’t have existing wolves already, or there’s a good chance they’d kill a lot of us in the beginning. And there would have to be prey there, or we’d just die of starvation anyway. Plus, I’m not sure how you’d catch twenty-odd wolves. Cole’s been trying and he’s not had much luck even getting one.”

  Grace had her stubborn face on, which meant she was losing her sense of humor as well. “Better idea?”

  I shrugged.

  Cole scratched his bare chest with the end of the broomstick and said, “Well, you know, they’ve been moved before.”

  He had both Grace’s and my undivided attention.

  Cole said, tone lazy, infinitely used to slowly doling out things other people wanted to hear, “Beck’s journal starts when he’s a wolf. But the journal doesn’t start in Minnesota.”

  “Okay,” Grace said, “I’ll bite. Where?”

  Cole pointed the broomstick at the license plate above the door, BECK 89. “Then the real wolf population started to come back and, like Ringo here said, started killing the part-time wolves, and he decided their only option was to move.”

  I felt an odd sense of betrayal. It wasn’t that Beck had ever lied to me about where he’d come from — I was sure I’d never asked him directly if he’d always been here in Minnesota. And it wasn’t like that license plate wasn’t in plain sight. It was just — Wyoming. Cole, benevolent interloper that he was, knew things about Beck that I didn’t. Part of me said it was because Cole had the balls to read Beck’s journal. But another part of me said that I shouldn’t have had to.

  “So does it say how he did it?” I asked.

  Cole gave me an odd look. “A little.”

  “A little how?”

  “Only said that Hannah helped them a lot.”

  “I’ve never heard of Hannah,” I said. I was aware that I sounded wary.

  “You wouldn’t have,” Cole said. Again he had that funny expression. “Beck said that she hadn’t been a wolf very long, but she couldn’t seem to stay human as long as the others. She stopped shifting that year after they moved. He said she seemed more capable of holding human thoughts when she was a wolf than the others. Not much. But remembered faces and returned to places she’d been as a human, but as a wolf.”

  Now I knew why he was looking at me. Grace was looking at me, too. I looked away. “Let’s get this raccoon out of here.”

  We stood there in silence for a few moments, a little trippy with sleep loss, until I realized that I heard movement from closer to me. I hesitated for a moment, my head cocked, listening to identify the source.

  “Oh, hey,” I noted. Crouched behind a plastic garbage can, right beside me, was a second, larger raccoon, looking up at me with leery eyes. Far better at hiding than the first one, obviously, as I had been completely unaware of its presence. Grace craned her neck, trying to see over the car what I was looking at.

  I didn’t have anything in my hands but my hands, so that’s what I used. I reached down and took the handle of the garbage can. And very slowly, I pushed it toward the wall, forcing the raccoon out the other side.

  Instantly, the raccoon tore along the wall and straight out the door into the night. No pause. Just straight out the garage door.

  “Two of them?” Grace asked. “Th —” She stopped as the first raccoon, inspired by the success of the escaping raccoon, bolted out after it, no detours to watering cans along the way.

  “Pf,” she said. “As long as there’s not a third. Now it figures out the concept of the door.”

  I headed to the garage door to close it, but as I did, I caught a glimpse of Cole. He was staring out after the raccoons, his eyebrows pulled together in a face that, for once, wasn’t arranged to best affect the viewer.

  Grace started to speak and then followed my gaze to Cole. She fell quiet.

  For a full minute, we were silent. In the distance, the wolves had begun to howl, and the hair on my neck was crawling.

  “There’s our answer,” Cole said. “That’s what Hannah did. That’s how we get the wolves out of the woods.” He turned to look at me. “One of us has to lead them out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  • GRACE •

  It felt like camp when I woke up in the morning.

  When I was thirteen, my grandmother had paid for me to go to summer camp for two weeks. Camp Blue Sky for Girls. I’d loved it — two weeks with every moment planned out, every day accounted for, ready-made purpose printed out on colored 8.5” × 11” fliers poked in our cubby holes each morning. It was the opposite of life with my parents, who laughed at the idea of schedules. It was fantastic and the first time I realized that there might be other right ways to happiness than the one prescribed by my parents. But the thing about camp was that it wasn’t home. My toothbrush was grubby from being poked into the small pocket of my backpack by a mother who forgot to buy plastic baggies before I left. The bunk bed crushed my shoulder uncomfortably when I tried to sleep. Dinner was good but salty and just a little too far away from lunch, and unlike at home, I couldn’t just go to the kitchen and get some pretzels. It was fun and different and just that tiny bit wrong that made it disconcerting.

  So here I was at Beck’s house, in Sam’s bedroom. It wasn’t properly home — home still conjured up the memory of pillows that smelled like my shampoo, and my beat-up old copies of John Buchan novels that I’d gotten from a library sale so they were doubly dear, and the running-water-shaving-sound of my father getting ready for work, and the radio speaking to itself in low, earnest
tones in the study, and the endlessly comfortable logic of my own routine. Did that home even exist for me anymore?

  Sitting up in Sam’s bed, I was sleep-stupid and surprised to find him lying beside me, rolled up to the wall with his fingers splayed against it. I couldn’t remember a morning I’d ever woken up before him, and feeling a bit neurotic, I watched him until I saw his chest rise and fall under his ratty T-shirt.

  I climbed out of the bed, expecting him to wake up at any moment, half hoping he would, half hoping he wouldn’t, but he remained in his crooked little sleeping pose, looking like he’d been tossed onto the bed.

  I had that toxic combination of not enough sleep and too much wakefulness pumping through me, so it took me longer than I would’ve thought to make it out to the hallway and then another moment to remember where the bathroom was, and when I got there, I had no hairbrush and no toothbrush and the only thing I could find to wear was one of Sam’s T-shirts with a logo on it from a band I didn’t recognize. So I used his toothbrush, telling myself with every stroke across my teeth that this was no grosser than kissing him, and almost believing it. I found his hairbrush next to a disreputable-looking razor and used one but not the other.

  I looked in the mirror. It felt like I was living life on the wrong side of it. Time passing didn’t mean anything here. I said, “I want to tell Rachel I’m alive.”

  It didn’t sound unreasonable, until I started thinking about how it could go wrong.

  I checked back in the bedroom — Sam was still sleeping — and headed downstairs. Part of me wanted him to be awake, but the other part of me liked this quiet feeling of being both alone and not lonely. It reminded me of all the times I’d sat reading or doing homework with Sam in the same room. Together but silent, two moons in companionable orbit.

  Downstairs, I found Cole sprawled on the couch, sleeping with one arm stretched above his head. Remembering that there was a coffeepot in the basement, I tiptoed down the hall and crept down the stairs.

  The basement was a cozy but somewhat disorienting place — draftless and windowless, all the light coming from lamps, making it impossible to tell the time. It was strange to be back in the basement, and I felt a weird, misplaced sense of sadness. The last time I’d been down here had been after the car crash, talking with Beck after Sam had shifted into a wolf. I’d thought he was gone forever. Now it was Beck who was lost.

  I started the coffeepot and sat in the chair I’d sat in when I spoke to Beck. Behind his empty chair stretched the bookshelves with the hundreds of books he’d never read again. Every wall was covered with them; the coffeepot was nestled on the few inches of shelf not occupied by books. I wondered how many there were. Were there ten in a foot of shelf space? Maybe one thousand books. Maybe more than that. Even from here, I could see that they were tidily organized, non-fiction by subject, battered novels by author.

  I wanted a library like this by the time I was Beck’s age. Not this library. A cave of words that I’d made myself. I didn’t know if that would be possible now.

  Sighing, I stood and browsed the shelves until I found that Beck had a few education books, and then I sat on the floor with them, carefully setting my coffee mug beside me. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been reading when I heard the stairs creak softly. Glancing up, I saw a set of bare feet descending: Cole, looking musty and sleep-tussled, a line in the side of his face where the couch pillow had pressed into it.

  “Hi, Brisbane,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. “St. Clair.”

  Cole unplugged the coffeepot and brought the entire thing over to the floor where I was. He topped my coffee up and poured a cup for himself, silent and solemn during the entire process. Then he turned his head to read the titles of the books I’d pulled out.

  “Distance learning, eh? Heady stuff first thing in the morning.”

  I ducked my head. “This is all Beck had.”

  Cole read further. “Acing the CLEP test. Legitimate online degrees. How to be an educated werewolf without leaving the comfort of your own basement. Bothers you, doesn’t it? School, I mean.”

  I glanced up at him. I hadn’t thought I sounded upset. I hadn’t thought I was that upset. “No. Okay, yeah. It does. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to finish high school. I like studying.” I realized after I’d said it that Cole had chosen NARKOTIKA over college. I wasn’t sure how to explain the thrill I used to get when I considered college. I wasn’t sure how to describe the anticipation when I looked at course catalogs — all those possibilities — or just the sheer pleasure of opening up a new notebook and a new textbook next to it. The appeal of being someplace with a bunch of other people who also liked studying. Of having a tiny apartment that I could rule like a queen, my way, all the time. Feeling a little silly, I added, “I guess that sounds corny, doesn’t it.”

  But Cole looked thoughtfully into his coffee cup and said, “Mmm, studying. I’m a fan, myself.” He pulled one of the books to him and opened it to a random page. The chapter heading read Studying the World From Your Armchair and there was a graphic of a stick figure doing just that. “Do you remember everything that happened in the hospital?”

  He was asking in that ask me more way, so I did. He detailed the events of the night, from when I’d started throwing up blood, to Sam and him taking me to the hospital, to Cole puzzling out science to save me. And then he told me about my father punching Sam.

  I thought I must’ve misunderstood him. “He didn’t really hit him, though, right? I mean, you just mean that he …”

  “No, he whaled him,” Cole remarked.

  I took a sip of my coffee. I wasn’t sure what was weirder, to consider my dad punching Sam, or to realize how much I had missed while lying in a hospital bed or shifting. Suddenly the time I spent as a wolf felt even more like lost time, hours I’d never get back. Like my effective lifespan had been abruptly halved.

  I stopped thinking about that, and started thinking about my father hitting Sam instead.

  “I think,” I said, “that makes me angry. Sam didn’t hit him back, did he?”

  Cole laughed and poured himself some more coffee.

  “And so I was never really cured,” I said.

  “No. You just didn’t shift, which isn’t the same thing. The St. Clairs — I hope you don’t mind, I’m naming the werewolf toxins after myself, for purposes of the Nobel Peace Prize or Pulitzer or whatever — were all built up inside you.”

  “So Sam’s not cured, either,” I said. I put my coffee cup down and shoved the books away from me. For it all to have been a waste — everything we’d done — it was just too much. The idea of a big library and a red coffeepot of my own seemed completely unreachable.

  “Well,” Cole replied, “I don’t know about that. After all, he made himse — Oh, look, here’s miracle boy now. Good morning, Ringo.”

  Sam had descended nearly silently and now he stood at the base of the stairs. His feet were bright red from a shower. Seeing him made me feel slightly less pessimistic, though his presence wouldn’t solve anything that wasn’t already solved.

  “We were just talking about the cure,” Cole said.

  Sam padded across the floor to me. “The band?” He sat down cross-legged next to me. I offered him coffee and, reliably, he shook his head.

  “No, yours. And the one I’ve been working on. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how you make yourself shift.”

  Sam made a face. “I don’t make myself shift.”

  “Not often, Ringo,” Cole admitted, “but you do.”

  I felt a little prickle of hope. If anybody could figure out how the Boundary Wood wolves worked, I thought it would be Cole. He’d saved me, hadn’t he?

  “Like when you saved me from the wolves,” I said. “And what about in the clinic when we injected you?” That night seemed so long ago, in Isabel’s mom’s clinic, willing the wolf that was Sam to become human. Again, the memory of sadness pressed on me. “Have you figured anything out about it?�
��

  Sam looked petulant as Cole started to talk about adrenaline and Cole St. Clairs in the system and how he was trying to use Sam’s unusual shifts as the basis of a cure.

  “But if it was adrenaline, wouldn’t someone saying ‘boo’ make you shift?” I asked.

  Cole shrugged. “I tried using an EpiPen — that’s pure adrenaline — and it worked, just barely.” Sam frowned at me, and I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking — that “barely” working sounded dangerous.

  Cole said, “It’s just not making my brain react the right way; it’s not triggering the shift the same way that cold or the St. Clair buildup does. It’s hard to replicate when you have no idea what it’s actually doing. It’s like drawing a picture of an elephant from the sound it makes in the next cage over.”

  “Well, I’m impressed you even figured out it was an elephant,” Sam said. “Apparently, Beck and the rest didn’t even have the species right.” He stood up and held his hand out for me. “Let’s go make breakfast.”

  But Cole wasn’t done. “Oh, Beck just didn’t want to see it,” he said dismissively. “He didn’t really want to lose that time as a wolf. You know what, if my father were involved in all this, he’d whip out some CAT scans, some MRIs, about fourteen hundred electrodes, throw in a couple vials of poisonous meds and a car battery or two, and three or four dead werewolves later, he’d have his cure. Hot damn, he’s good at what he does.”

  Sam lowered his hand. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about Beck like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he’s —” Sam stopped. He frowned at me, as if the way to end the sentence was hidden in my expression. I knew what he had been about to say. Like you. Cole’s mouth wore the slightest of hard smiles.

  “How about this?” Cole said. He gestured at the chair Beck had sat in before, making me think that he, too, had had a conversation with Beck in this basement. That was an odd thing to consider, for some reason: Cole having a history with Beck that we were unaware of. “How about you tell me who Beck was for you, and I’ll tell you who he was for me? And then, Grace, you can tell us whose version sounds like the real one.”