Wolves of Mercy Falls 03 - Forever

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “I’m not coming,” Cole replied. “I have man’s work.”

  Sam shot Cole a warning look. It was a look I thought probably had something to do with the kitchen finally looking like a kitchen again and Sam wanting it to stay that way.

  Cole’s reply was enigmatic. Well, sort of. Whenever Cole wasn’t being completely flamboyant, he always seemed mysterious by comparison. “Bring your phone with you. In case I need to get ahold of you.”

  Sam rubbed his fingers over his mouth as if he were checking his shaving job. “Don’t burn down the house.”

  “Okay, Mother,” Cole replied.

  “Oh, let’s go,” I said.

  It was a strange trip. We didn’t know Koenig at all, and he knew nothing about us except for what nobody else knew. It was made more difficult because he was being kind in a very amorphous way that we weren’t certain we were glad for yet. It was hard to be both grateful and talkative.

  So we sat three across on the bench seat: Koenig, Sam, me. The truck smelled vaguely like Dr Pepper. Koenig drove eight miles above the speed limit. The road took us northeast, and it wasn’t long before civilization began to fall away. The sky overhead was a friendly, cloudless blue, and all the colors seemed supersaturated. If winter had ever been here, this place didn’t remember it.

  Koenig didn’t say anything, just rubbed his hand over his close-cropped hair. He didn’t look quite like the Koenig I remembered, this young guy driving us into the middle of nowhere in a civilian truck, wearing a shirt in department-store maroon. This was not who I’d expected to be putting my trust in at this stage. Beside me, Sam practiced a guitar chord on my thigh.

  Appearances weren’t everything, I supposed.

  The truck was silent. After a bit, Sam brought up the weather. He thought it was pretty smooth sailing from here on out. Koenig said he thought that was probably true, but you never knew what Minnesota had in store for you. She could surprise you, he said. I found myself pleased by him referring to Minnesota as a “she.” It seemed to render Koenig more benevolent, somehow. Koenig asked Sam what he was thinking of doing for college, and Sam mentioned that Karyn had offered him a full-time position at the bookstore, and he was considering it. No shame in that, commented Koenig. I thought about two-hundred-level classes and majors and minors and success quantified by a piece of paper and kind of wished they would change the subject.

  Koenig did. “What about St. Clair?”

  “Cole? Beck found him,” Sam said. “It was a charity case.”

  Koenig glanced over. “For St. Clair or for Beck?”

  “That’s something I ask myself a lot these days,” Sam replied. He and Koenig exchanged a look at this, and I was surprised to see that Koenig was regarding Sam as an equal, or, if not an equal, at least as an adult. I spent so much time alone with Sam that other people’s reactions to him and us together always seemed to come as a shock. It was hard to imagine how one guy could elicit so many different responses from other people. It was like there were forty different versions of Sam. I’d always assumed that everyone took me at face value, but now I wondered — were there forty different versions of Grace out there, too?

  We all jumped when Sam’s phone rang from my bag — a bag packed with a change of clothing in case I shifted and a novel in case I needed to look busy — and Sam said, “Would you get that, Grace?”

  I paused when I saw that the number on the phone wasn’t one that I recognized. I showed the screen to Sam as the phone rang again. He shook his head, puzzled.

  “Should I?” I asked, tipping it in my hand as if to open it.

  “New York,” Koenig said. He looked back to the road. “It’s a New York exchange.”

  This information didn’t enlighten Sam. He shrugged.

  I opened the phone and put it to my ear. “Hello?”

  The voice on the other side was light and male. “Oh — right. Hello. Is Cole around?”

  Sam blinked at me, and I could tell that he could hear the voice as well.

  “I think you have a wrong number,” I said. Immediately, my brain processed what this meant — Cole had used Sam’s phone to call somewhere. Home? Would Cole have done that?

  The voice was not perturbed. His voice was lazy and slippery, like a melting pat of butter. “No, I don’t. But I understand. This is Jeremy. We were in a band together.”

  “With this person I don’t know,” I replied.

  “Yes,” Jeremy said. “I have something I would like you to tell Cole St. Clair, if you would. I’d like you to tell him I have given him the best present in the world, and it took quite a lot of effort on my part, so I’d appreciate if he didn’t just tear the wrapping off and then throw it away.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “In eighteen minutes, the present is going to air on Vilkas’s radio spot. Cole’s parents will be listening, too, I’ve made sure of that. Do you have that?”

  “Vilkas? What station is that on?” I asked. “Not that I’m saying anything.”

  “I know what it is,” Koenig said, not looking up from the road. “Rick Vilkas.”

  “That’s the one,” Jeremy said, overhearing him. “Someone has excellent taste. You sure that Cole isn’t around?”

  “He really isn’t,” I said.

  “Will you tell me something? When I last saw our intrepid hero Cole St. Clair, he was not in the best of places. In fact, I might say he was in the worst of them. All I want to know is, is he happy?”

  I thought about what I knew of Cole. I thought about what it meant that he had a friend who cared that much about him. Cole could not have ever been terrible through and through, if someone cared this much about him from his past life. Or maybe he was just so great before he got terrible that he had a friend that rode that through to the other side. It sort of changed the way I thought about Cole, and sort of didn’t. “Getting there.”

  There was a pause, and then Jeremy said, “And Victor?”

  I didn’t say anything at all. Neither did Jeremy. Koenig turned the radio on, the volume down, and began to tune it.

  Jeremy said, “They both died a long time ago. I was there to see it. You ever watched a friend die in his own skin? Ahh. Well, you can only raise so many of the dead. Getting there.” It took me a second to realize that he was repeating my answer from before. “I’ll take that. Tell him to listen to Vilkas, if you would. He changed my life. I won’t forget that.”

  “I never said I knew where he was,” I said.

  “I know it,” Jeremy replied. “I won’t forget that, either.”

  The phone went quiet in my hand. I met Sam’s eyes. The almost-summer sun was bright on his face and turned his eyes shockingly, eerily yellow. For half a second, I wondered if his parents would have tried to kill a brown-eyed boy, a blue-eyed boy. Any son that didn’t have wolf’s eyes already.

  “Call Cole,” Sam said.

  I dialed Beck’s house. The phone rang and rang, and just as I was about to give up, the phone clicked, and a second later, “Da?”

  “Cole,” I said, “turn on the radio.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  • COLE •

  When I started everything, and by everything, I mean life, suicide was a joke. If I have to ride in that car with you, I’ll slash my wrists with a butter knife. It was as real as a unicorn. No, less real than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it’s funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV.

  Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole, and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you’d been exposed, you didn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t want to put other people off their feed.

  It wasn’t until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possib
ility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.

  Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.

  I looked good when I sang the end.

  It took NARKOTIKA to make suicide a goal. A reward for services rendered. By the time they knew how to say NARKOTIKA in Russia, Japan, and Iowa, everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I’d scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

  I had thought I had come to Minnesota to die.

  At two fifteen in the afternoon, Rick Vilkas had just finished his first commercial break. He was a music god who’d had us play live on his show and then asked me to sign a poster for his wife, who he said would only make love to our song “Sinking Ship (Going Down).” I’d written Rock the boat under my picture and signed my name. Rick Vilkas’s on-air persona was confidant, best friend over beer, passing along a secret in a low voice with an elbow in your side.

  His voice now, coming through speakers in Beck’s living room, was intimate. “Everyone who listens to this show knows — hell, everyone who listens to the radio knows — Cole St. Clair, front man of NARKOTIKA and damned fine songwriter, has been missing for what — almost a year? ten months? somewhere in there. Oh, I know, I know — my producer, he’s rolling his eyes. Say what you like, Buddy, he might have been a number one screwup, but he could write a song.”

  There it was, my name on the radio. I was sure it had been on the radio plenty of times in the past year, but this was the first time I’d been there for it. I waited to feel something — a sting of regret, guilt, agony — but there was nothing. NARKOTIKA was an ex-girlfriend whose photo no longer had the power to evoke emotion.

  Vilkas continued, “Well, it looks like we have some news, and we’re the first to break it. Cole St. Clair’s not dead, folks. He’s not being held captive by a pack of fangirls or my wife, either. We’ve got a statement from his agent right now that says that St. Clair had a medical complication related to drug abuse — fancy that, did you people imagine that the lead singer of NARKOTIKA might have a substance abuse problem? — and that he went with his bandmate for some under-the-radar treatment and rehab out of the country. Says here he’s back in the States but is asking to be left alone while he ‘figures out what to do next.’ There you have it, folks. Cole St. Clair. He’s alive. No, no, don’t thank me now. Thank me later. Let’s hope for a reunion tour, right? Make my wife happy. Take all the time you need, Cole, if you’re listening. Rock’ll wait.”

  Vilkas played one of our songs. I turned the radio off and rubbed my hand over my mouth. My legs were cramped from crouching in front of the stereo.

  Six months ago, there would have been nothing worse in this world. There had been nothing I wanted more than to be thought missing or dead, unless it was to actually be missing or dead.

  On the couch behind me, Isabel said, “So now you’re officially reborn.”

  I turned the radio back on so I could catch the end of the song. One of my hands lay open on my knee and it felt like the whole world lay on my palm. The day felt like a prison break.

  “Yes,” I said. “Looks that way.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  • SAM •

  As soon as I saw the peninsula, I knew it was the solution.

  It wasn’t that the entrance was exceedingly propitious. There was a rough-hewn log entranceway with the words KNIFE LAKE LODGE burned into it, and on either side of that was stockade fencing. Koenig swore softly over the combination lock on the gate until it yielded, and then he showed us how the stockade fence gave way to box wire fencing U-nailed to evergreen trees every few feet. He was polite and matter-of-fact, like a realtor showing potential clients an expensive piece of land.

  “What happens when it gets to the water?” I asked. Beside me, Grace slapped a mosquito. There were a lot of them, despite the chill. I was glad that we’d come so early in the day, because the air had teeth up here.

  Koenig gave the wire a tug; it remained snugly pinned to the ragged bark of the pine. “It goes a couple of yards into the lake, like I said. Did I say that before? Would you like to take a look?”

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take a look. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Overhead, a thrush called continuously, sounding like a rusty swing set in motion. Slightly farther away, I could hear another bird singing like someone rolling their r’s, and beyond that one, another bird keening, and beyond that, another still — the kind of dense, endless layers of trees and birds that you got when there was not a human footprint in hundreds and hundreds of acres. Standing in this old conifer forest, long-since abandoned by people, I smelled a herd of deer and creeping beavers and small rodents turning over rocky soil, and as nervous excitement tapped through my veins, I felt more wolf than I had in a long time.

  “I do,” Grace said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “It’s why we’re here,” Koenig said, and set off through the trees, sure-footed as always. “Don’t forget to check yourself for ticks when we’re all through.”

  I trailed after, content to let Grace look at the concrete details of life while I walked through the forest and tried to imagine the pack here. These woods were dense and difficult to walk through; the ground was covered with ferns that hid dips and rocks. The fence was enough to keep out large animals, so unlike Boundary Wood, there were no natural paths worn through the underbrush. The wolves would have no competition here. No danger. Koenig was right; if the wolves were to be moved, you couldn’t ask for a better place.

  Grace squeezed my elbow, making so much noise on the way to me that I realized I had been left far behind. “Sam,” she said, and she was breathless, as if she might have been thinking the same thing I was. “Did you see the lodge?”

  “I was looking at the ferns,” I said.

  She grabbed hold of my arm and laughed, a clear, happy laugh that I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Ferns,” she repeated, and hugged my arm. “Crazy boy. Come over here.”

  Holding hands felt strangely fanciful when done in the presence of Koenig, possibly because it was the first thing he looked at when we emerged in the clearing that held the lodge. He had put a baseball cap on his head to ward off deer flies in the open area — which somehow managed to make him look more formal, not less — and stood in front of a faded wooden cabin that seemed enormous to me. It was all windows and rough-hewn timber and looked like something tourists imagined Minnesota looked like.

  “That’s the lodge?”

  Koenig led the way, kicking debris off the concrete pad in front of the building. “Yeah. It used to be a lot nicer.”

  I had been expecting — no, not even expecting, merely hoping for — a tiny cabin, some remnant of the resort’s former life that members of the pack could shelter in when they became human. Somehow, when Koenig had said resort, I hadn’t thought he’d really meant it. I’d thought it was a slightly aggrandized retelling of a failed family business. This must have been something to look at when it was first built.

  Grace pulled her hand away from me so she could investigate better. She peered in a dusty window, cupping her hands against the glass. A vine rested on top of her head; the rest of it crawled up the side of the lodge. She stood in ankle-deep weeds that had sprung up in the crack between the concrete pad and the foundation. She looked very tidy in comparison, clean jeans, one of my windbreakers, her blond hair spread over her shoulders. “Seems pretty nice to me,” Grace said, forever endearing her to
me.

  It seemed to endear her to Koenig, too. Once he realized she wasn’t being sarcastic, he said, “I suppose so. There’s no power here, though, not anymore. I guess you could get it put back on, but you’d have to have meter guys come out here then, once a month.”

  Grace, her face still smushed against the glass, said, “Oh, that sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. That’s a big fireplace in there, though, isn’t it? You could make it livable without power, if you were clever.” I stood next to her and pressed my face against the window. Inside, I saw a dim great room dominated by a massive fireplace. Everything looked gray and abandoned: rugs made colorless by dust, a dead potted plant, a mounted animal head rendered unidentifiable by age. It was an abandoned hotel lobby, a snapshot of the Titanic under the ocean. A small cabin seemed more manageable all of a sudden.

  “Can I go look at the rest of the land?” I asked, drawing back from the glass. I pulled Grace gently away from the climbing vine; it was poison ivy.

  “Be my guest,” Koenig said. Then, after a pause, he said, “Sam?” There was a cautious note to the way he said it that made me think I wasn’t going to like what he said next.

  “Yes, sir?” I asked. The sir slipped out before I even thought about it, and Grace didn’t even glance over in my direction at it, just looked at Koenig herself. It was that sort of way that he’d said, Sam?

  “Geoffrey Beck is your legal adoptive father, correct?”

  “Yes,” I said. My heart jerked in my chest at the question, not because my answer was a lie, but because I didn’t understand why he was asking it. Maybe he was going to change his mind about helping us. I tried to sound nonchalant. “Why do you ask?”

  “I am trying to decide if I regard what he did to you as a crime,” Koenig said.