Maggie Stiefvater - [Wolves of Mercy Falls 02]

by Maggie Stiefvater

I planned in my head what I would say—something like, Don’t expect anything else—but when I opened the door, he was already gone.

  I flicked on the back light. Dim yel ow light splashed across the frozen yard, odd reflections thrown by the thin layer of crusted sleet. About ten feet from the door, I saw the jeans and tattered sweatshirt lying in a haphazard pile.

  My ears and nose burning in the cold, I crunched slowly out to the clothing, stopping to study the shape of it. One of the sleeves of the sweatshirt was flung out, as if pointing to the distant pine woods. I lifted my eyes and, sure enough, there he was. A gray-brown wolf standing just a few yards beyond me, staring at me with Cole’s green eyes.

  “My brother died,” I told him.

  The wolf didn’t flick an ear; sleet and snow drifted down and clung to his fur.

  “I’m not a nice person,” I said.

  Stil motionless. My mind bent, just a little, trying to reconcile Cole’s eyes and that wolf’s face.

  I unwrapped the bread and held the bag so that the slices tumbled onto the ground next to my feet. He didn’t flinch—just stared, unblinking, human eyes in an animal’s face. “But I shouldn’t have told you your kiss sucked,” I added, trembling a little with the cold. Then I wasn’t sure what else to say about the kiss, so I shut up.

  I turned back to the door. Before I went in, I folded the clothing and flipped the empty planter by the door over it to protect it from the weather. Then I left him out in the night.

  I could stil remember his human eyes in that wolf face; they’d looked as empty as I felt.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  • SAM •

  I missed my mother.

  I couldn’t explain this to Grace, because I knew al she could see when she thought of my mother were the savage scars that my parents had left on my wrists. And it was true, the memories of them trying to kil the tiny monster I had become were stuffed into my head so tightly that sometimes they seemed like they would split my skul ; the old wounds dug so deep that I felt the razor blades again whenever I was near a bathtub. But I had other memories of my mother, too, that snuck in between the cracks when I least expected them. Like now, when I was curled over the counter in The Crooked Shelf, my books lying inches from my empty hands, my eyes looking out the windows at the creeping brown evening. The last words I had read rested on my lips—Mandelstam, who wrote about me without having any way to know me:

  But by blood no wolf am I

  Outside, the last bit of sun glazed the corners of the parked cars with blinding amber and fil ed the puddles in the street with liquid gold. Inside, the store was already out of the reach of the dying day, dim and empty and half-asleep.

  It was twenty minutes to closing.

  It was my birthday.

  I remembered my mother making me cupcakes on my birthdays. Never a cake, since it was just my parents and me, and I had the appetite of a bird, picking and choosing my culinary battles careful y. A cake would’ve gone stale before it was eaten.

  So my mother made cupcakes. I remembered the

  vanil a scent of the frosting, hastily swirled onto the cake with a butter knife. By itself, it would’ve been ordinary, but this particular cupcake had a candle poked through the frosting. A tiny flame stretched from the wick, a bead of melted wax trembling just beneath it, and the cupcake was transformed to something bright and beautiful and special.

  I could stil smel the church scent of the blown-out match, see the reflection of the flame in my mother’s eyes, feel the soft cushion of the kitchen chairs under my skinny, folded-up legs. I heard my mother tel me to put my hands in my lap and saw her set the cupcake in front of me—she wouldn’t let me hold the plate, in case I knocked the candle onto my lap.

  My parents had always been so careful with me, until the day they decided I needed to die.

  In the store, I put my forehead in my hands and stared down at the curled corner of the book cover lying between my elbows. I could see how the cover was not real y a single piece of paper, how it was real y a printed piece of stock with a protective layer over the top, and how the topmost layer had peeled back to let a corner of the true cover get stained and yel ow and tattered.

  I wondered if I was real y remembering my mother making me cupcakes, or if it was something my brain had stolen from one of the thousands of books I had read. Someone else’s mother, pasted onto my own, slinking in to fil the void.

  Without raising my head, I lifted my gaze, putting the matching scars on my wrists directly at eye level. In the dul evening light, my veins were visible below the translucent skin of my arms, but the light blue forks disappeared beneath the uneven scar tissue. In my head, I reached to take the cupcake from the plate with arms smooth and unmarked, stil pristine with my parents’ love. My mother smiled at me.

  Happy birthday.

  I closed my eyes.

  I didn’t know how long they’d been closed when the ding of the shop door made me jerk up. I was about to tel the newcomer that we were no longer open, but then Grace turned around, shoving the door shut behind her with her shoulder. She clutched a drink tray in one hand and a Subway bag in the other. It was like another light had been turned on in the store; the entire place seemed brighter.

  I was too stunned to jump up to help her, and by the time it occurred to me, she’d already deposited her loot on the counter. Coming around the back of the counter, Grace threw her arms around my shoulders and whispered in my ear, “Happy birthday.”

  I wriggled my arms free of her embrace to wrap them around her waist. I held her tightly to me and pressed my face to her neck, hiding my surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Beck told me before he changed,” Grace said.

  “You should’ve mentioned it.” She pul ed back to look at my face. “What were you thinking about? When I came in?”

  “Being Sam,” I said.

  “What a nice thing to be,” Grace said. And then

  “What a nice thing to be,” Grace said. And then she smiled, bigger and bigger, until I felt my expression mirror hers, our noses touching. Grace final y stepped away to gesture to her offering on the counter, wrapped around my stack of books in a rather intimate way. “I’m sorry this is not more swank. There’s not real y a place to do romantic in Mercy Fal s, and even if there were, I’m somewhat poor at this moment, anyway. Can you eat now?”

  I slid around her and went to the front door, locking it and turning the open sign around. “Wel , it’s closing time. Do you want to go home with it? Or upstairs?”

  Grace glanced toward the burgundy-carpeted

  stairs that led to the loft, and I knew she’d made up her mind. “You carry the drinks with your big muscles,” she said, with considerable irony. “And I’l take the sandwiches, since they’re not breakable.”

  Switching off the lights for the first floor, I fol owed her up the stairs, cardboard drink tray in hand. Our feet went swoof swoof in the thick carpet as we climbed to the dim loft with its slanted ceilings. With every step we took, I felt like I was ascending further and further above that remembered birthday to something infinitely more real.

  “What did you get me?” I asked.

  “Birthday sandwich,” Grace replied. “Duh.”

  I flicked on the lily lamp that sat on the low bookshelves; eight smal bulbs cast an erratic pattern of rose-colored light over us both as I joined Grace on the battered love seat.

  My birthday sandwich turned out to be roast beef with mayonnaise, the same as Grace’s. We spread out the papers between us so that the edges overlapped and Grace hummed “Happy Birthday” in a terribly offkey way.

  “And many more,” she added in an entirely new key.

  “Why, thanks,” I said. I touched her chin, and she smiled at me.

  After we’d finished our sandwiches—wel , I had nearly finished mine, Grace had eaten the bread off hers—she gestured to the sandwich wrappers and said, “You should crumple up those papers. And I’l get your present out.”


  I looked at her, eyebrows raised, as she pul ed her backpack from the floor onto her lap. “You shouldn’t have gotten me anything,” I said. “I feel sil y getting a present.”

  “I wanted to,” Grace said. “Don’t ruin it by going al bashful. I said get rid of those papers!”

  I bent my head and started to fold.

  “You and those cranes!” She laughed as she saw

  that I was folding the tidier of the two sandwich papers into a big, floppy bird printed with the Subway logo.

  “What is it with you and them?”

  “I used to make them for good times. To remember the moment.” I waved the Subway crane at her; it flapped its loose, wrinkled wings. “You know you’l never forget where this crane came from.”

  Grace studied it. “I think that’s a pretty safe assumption.”

  “Mission accomplished,” I said softly, and rested the crane on the floor beside the love seat. I knew I was stal ing the moment before she presented her gift. It gave me a weird knot in my stomach to think she’d gotten me something. But Grace wouldn’t be put off.

  “Now, close your eyes,” she said. Her voice had a little catch in it—anticipation. Hope. I silently said a prayer: Please let me like whatever it is she got. In my head, I tried to imagine the face that went with perfect delight, so that I could have it ready to pul out no matter what she had given me.

  I heard her rezipping her backpack and felt the cushions rocking as she rearranged herself on the couch.

  “Do you remember the first time we came up here?” she asked as I sat there, half-alone in the darkness of my closed eyes.

  It wasn’t a question meant to be answered, so I just smiled.

  “Do you remember how you made me close my eyes, and you read me that poem from Rilke?” Grace’s voice was closer; I felt her knee touch mine. “I loved you so much right then, Sam Roth.”

  My skin tightened in a shiver, and I swal owed. I knew she loved me, but she almost never said it. That alone could’ve been her birthday gift for me. My hands lay open in my lap; I felt her press something into them. She closed one of my hands over the top of the other. Paper.

  “I didn’t think I could ever be as romantic as you,”

  she said. “You know I’m not good at that. But—wel .”

  And she did a funny little laugh at herself, so endearing that I nearly forgot myself and opened my eyes to see her face when she did it. “Wel , I can’t wait anymore. Open your eyes.”

  I opened them. There was a folded piece of computer paper in my hands. I could see the ghost of the printing that was on the inside, but not what it was. Grace could barely sit stil . Her expectation was hard to bear, because I didn’t know if I could live up to it. “Open it.”

  I tried to remember the happy face. The upward tilt of my eyebrows, the open grin, the squinty eyes. I opened the paper.

  And I completely forgot about what my face was supposed to look like. I just sat there, staring at the words on the paper, not real y believing them. It wasn’t the hugest of presents, though for Grace, it must’ve been difficult to manage. What was amazing was that it was me, a resolution I hadn’t been brave enough to write down. It was something that said she knew me. Something that made the I love you s real. It was an invoice. For five hours of studio time. I looked up at Grace and saw that her anticipation had melted away into something entirely different. Smugness. Complete and total smugness, so

  whatever my face had done on its own accord must’ve given me away.

  “Grace,” I said, and my voice was lower than I’d planned.

  Her smug little smile threatened to break into a bigger one. She asked, unnecessarily, “You like it?”

  “I…”

  She saved me from having to compose the rest of a sentence. “It’s in Duluth. I scheduled it for one of our mutual days off. I figured you could play some of your songs and…I don’t know. Do whatever you hope you’l do with them.”

  “A demo,” I said softly. The gift was more than she knew—or maybe she realized everything that it meant. It was more than just a nod to me doing more with my music. It was an acknowledgment that I could move forward. That there was going to be a next week and a next month and a next year for me. Studio time was about making plans for a brand-new future. Studio time said that if I gave someone my demo and they said, “I’l get back to you in a month,” I’d stil be human by the time they did.

  “God, I love you, Grace,” I said. Stil holding the invoice, I hugged her, tight, around her neck. I pressed my lips against the side of her head and hugged her hard again. I put down the paper beside the Subway crane.

  “Are you going to make it into a crane, too?” she asked, then closed her eyes so I could kiss her again. But I didn’t. I just stroked the hair away from her face so I could look at her with her eyes closed. She made me think of those angels that were on top of graves, eyes closed, faces lifted up, hands folded.

  “You’re hot again,” I said. “Do you feel al right?”

  Grace didn’t open her eyes, just let me continue tracing around the edge of her face as if I were stil pushing her hair away from her skin. My fingers felt cold against her warm skin. She said, “Mmm hmm.”

  So I kept teasing her skin with my fingers. I thought a b o ut tel ing her what I was thinking, like You’re beautiful and You’re my angel, but the thing about Grace was that words like that meant more to me than to her. They were throwaway phrases to her, things that made her smile for a second but were just…gone after that, too corny to be real. To Grace, these were the things that mattered: my hands on her cheeks, my lips on her mouth. The fleeting touches that meant I loved her.

  When I leaned in to kiss her, I caught just the tiniest trace of that sweet, nutty smel from the wolf she’d found, so faint that I could have been imagining it. But just the thought of it was enough to throw me from the moment.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  “This is your home,” Grace said, with a playful smile. “You can’t fool me.”

  But I stood up, tugging both her hands to pul her after me.

  “I want to get home before your parents do,” I said.

  “They’ve been getting home real y early.”

  “Let’s elope,” Grace said lightly, bending to col ect our leftover sandwiches and drinks. I held out the bag so that she could toss everything inside, and watched as she retrieved the sandwich-paper crane before we headed down the stairs.

  Hand in hand, we retreated through the now-dark store and out back, where Grace’s white Mazda was parked. When she got into the driver’s seat, I lifted my palm to my nose, trying to catch a whiff of the scent from before. I couldn’t smel it, but the wolf in me couldn’t ignore the memory of it in that kiss.

  It was like a low voice whispering in a foreign language, breathing a secret that I couldn’t understand.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  • SAM •

  Something woke me.

  Surrounded by the dul , familiar darkness of Grace’s bedroom, I wasn’t sure what it was. There was no sound outside, and the rest of the house lay in the half-aware silence of night. Grace, too, was quiet, rol ed away from me. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose against the back of her soapscented neck. The tiny blond hairs at her nape tickled my nostrils. I jerked my face away from them and Grace sighed in her sleep, curling her back tighter against the shape of my body as she did. I should’ve slept, too—I had inventory work at the store early the next day—but something in my subconscious hummed with an uneasy watchfulness. So I lay against her, close as two spoons in a drawer, until her skin was too hot to be comfortable.

  I slid a few inches away, keeping a hand on her side. Normal y, the soft up-and-down of her ribs under my palm lul ed me to sleep when nothing else would. But not tonight.

  Tonight, I couldn’t stop remembering what it had felt like when I’d been just about to shift. The way the cold had crawled along my skin, trailing goose bumps behind it. The turn, turn,
turn of my stomach, aching nausea unfurling. The slow sunburst of pain up my spine as it stretched according to memories of another shape. My thoughts slipping away from me, crushed and reformed to fit my winter skul .

  Sleep evaded me, just out of my grasp. My instincts prickled relentlessly, urging me to alertness. The darkness pressed against my eyes while the wolf inside me sang something is not right.

  Outside, the wolves began to howl.

  • GRACE •

  I was too hot. The sheets stuck to my damp calves; I tasted sweat at the corner of my lips. As the wolves howled, my skin tingled with the heat, a hundred tiny needle pricks al over my face and hands. Everything felt painful: the blanket’s uncomfortable weight on me, Sam’s cold hand on my hip, the wailing, high cries of the wolves outside, the memory of Sam’s fingers pressed into his temples, the shape of my skin on my body.

  I was asleep; I was dreaming. Or I was awake, coming out of a dream. I couldn’t decide.

  In my mind, I saw al the people I’d ever seen shift into wolves: Sam, mournful and agonized, Beck, strong and control ed, Jack, savage and painful, Olivia, swift and easy. They al observed me from the woods, dozens of eyes watching me: the outsider, the one who didn’t change.

  My tongue stuck to the roof of my sandpaper mouth. I wanted to lift my face from my damp pil ow, but it felt like too much trouble. I waited restlessly for sleep, but my eyes hurt too much to close.

  If I hadn’t been cured, I wondered, what would my shift have been like? What sort of wolf would I have been? Looking at my hands, I imagined them dark gray, banded with white and black. I felt the weight of a ruff hanging on my shoulders, felt the nausea kick in my gut.

  For a single, bril iant moment, I felt nothing but the cold air of my room on my skin and heard nothing but Sam breathing beside me. But then the wolves began to howl again, and my body shuddered with a sensation that was both new and somehow familiar. I was going to shift.

  I choked on the wolf rising up inside me, pressing against the lining of my stomach, clawing inside my skin, trying to peel me inside out.