Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) (12 page)

Grace’s parents were home.

“They’re never home,” Grace said, her voice clearly spelling out her annoyance. But there they were, or at least their cars: her father’s Taurus, looking either silver or blue in the moonlight, and her mother’s little VW Rabbit tucked in front of it.

“Don’t even think of saying ‘I told you so,’” Grace said. “I’m going to go inside and see where they are, and then I’ll come back out to debrief.”

“You mean, for me to debrief you,” I corrected, tensing my muscles to keep from shivering. Whether from nerves or the memory of cold, I didn’t know.

“Yes,” Grace replied, turning off the headlights. “That. Right back.”

I watched her run in the house and slunk down into my seat. I couldn’t quite believe that I was hiding in a car in the middle of a freezing cold night, waiting for a girl to come running back out and tell me the coast was clear to come sleep in her room. Not just any girl.
The
girl. Grace.

She appeared at the front door and made an elaborate gesture. It took me a moment to realize she meant for me to turn off the Bronco and come in. I did so, sliding out of the car as quickly as possible and hurrying quietly up into the front hallway; cold tugged and bit at my exposed skin. Without even letting me pause, Grace gave me a shove, launching me down the hall while she shut the front door and headed in toward the kitchen.

“I forgot my backpack,” she announced loudly in the other room.

I used the cover of their conversation to creep into Grace’s bedroom and softly shut the door. Inside the house, it was easily thirty degrees warmer, a fact for which I was very grateful. I could still feel the trembling in my muscles from being outside; the sensation of
in between
that I hated.

The cold exhausted me and I didn’t know how long Grace would be up with her parents, so I climbed into bed without turning on the light. Sitting there in the dim moonlight, leaning against the pillows, I rubbed life back into my frozen toes and listened to Grace’s distant voice down the hall. She and her mother were having some amiable conversation about the romantic comedy that had just been on TV. I’d already noticed that Grace and her parents had no problem talking about unimportant things. They seemed to have an endless capacity for laughing pleasantly together about inane topics, but I’d never once heard them talk about anything meaningful.

It was so strange to me, coming from the environment of the pack. Ever since Beck had taken me under his wing, I’d
been surrounded by family, sometimes suffocatingly so, and Beck had never failed to give me his undivided attention when I wanted it. I’d taken it for granted, but now I felt spoiled.

I was still sitting up in bed when the doorknob turned quietly. I froze, absolutely still, and then exhaled when I recognized the sound of Grace’s breathing. She shut the door behind her and turned toward the window.

I saw her teeth in the low light. “You in here?” she whispered.

“Where are your parents? Are they going to come in here and shoot me?”

Grace went silent. In the shadows, without her voice, she was invisible to me.

I was about to say something to dispel the strangely awkward moment when she said, “No, they’re upstairs. Mom’s making Dad sit for her to paint him. So you’re clear to go brush your teeth and stuff. If you do it fast. Just sing in a high-pitched voice, so they think it’s me.” Her voice hardened when she said
Dad
, though I couldn’t imagine why.

“A tone-deaf voice,” I corrected.

Grace passed by me on the way to the dresser, swatting at my butt. “Just go.”

Leaving my shoes in her room, I padded quietly down the hall to the downstairs bathroom. It only had a stand-up shower, for which I was intensely grateful, and Grace had made sure to pull the curtain shut so that I wouldn’t have to look into it, anyway.

I brushed my teeth with her toothbrush. Then I stood there, a lanky teenager in a big green T-shirt she had borrowed from
her father, looking at my floppy hair and yellow eyes in the mirror.
What are you doing, Sam?

I closed my eyes as if hiding my pupils, so wolflike even when I was a human, would change what I was. The fan for the central heating hummed, sending subtle vibrations through my bare feet, reminding me that it was the only thing keeping me in this human form. The new October nights were already cold enough to rip my skin from me, and by next month, the days would be, too. What was I going to do, hide in Grace’s house all winter, fearing every creeping draft?

I opened my eyes again, staring at them in the mirror until their shape and color didn’t mean anything. I wondered what Grace saw in me, why I fascinated her. What was I without my wolf skin? A boy stuffed so full of words that they spilled out of me.

Right now, every phrase, every lyric, that I had in my head ended with the same word:
love
.

I had to tell Grace that this was my last year.

I peered into the hallway for signs of her parents and crept back into the bedroom, where Grace was already in bed, a long, soft lump under the covers. For a moment, I let my imagination run wild as to what she was wearing. I had a dim wolf memory of her climbing out of bed one spring morning, wearing just an oversized T-shirt, her long legs exposed as she slid them out from under the covers. So sexy it hurt.

Immediately, I felt embarrassed for fantasizing. I sort of paced around at the end of the bed for a few minutes, thinking
about cold showers and barre chords and other things that weren’t Grace.

“Hey,” she whispered, voice muzzy as if she had been asleep already. “What’re you doing?”

“Shhh,” I said, my cheeks flushing. “Sorry I woke you up. I was just thinking.”

Her reply was broken by a yawn. “Stop thinking then.”

I climbed into bed, keeping to the edge of the mattress. Something about this evening had changed me — something about Grace seeing me at my worst, immobile in the bathtub, ready to give up. Tonight, the bed seemed too small to escape her scent, the sleepy sound of her voice, the warmth of her body. I discreetly stuffed a bunch of blankets between us and rested my head on the pillow, willing my doubts to fly away and let me sleep.

Grace reached over and began stroking her fingers through my hair. I closed my eyes and let her drive me crazy.
She draws patterns on my face / These lines make shapes that can’t replace / the version of me that I hold inside / when lying with you, lying with you, lying with you.
“I like your hair,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about a melody to go with the lyrics in my head.

“Sorry about tonight,” she whispered. “I don’t mean to push your boundaries.”

I sighed as her fingers curled around my ears and neck. “It’s just so fast. I want you to” — I stopped short of saying
love me
, because it seemed presumptive — “want to be with me. I’ve wanted it forever. I just never thought it would actually
happen.” It felt too serious, so I added, “I am just a mythological creature, after all. I technically shouldn’t exist.”

Grace laughed, low, just for me. “Silly boy. You feel very real to me.”

“You do, too,” I whispered.

There was a long pause in the darkness.

“I wish I changed,” she said finally, barely audible. I opened my eyes, needing to see the way her face looked when she said that. It was more descriptive than any expression I’d ever seen her wear: immeasurably sad, lips set crookedly with longing.

I reached out for her, cupped the side of her face with my hand. “Oh, no, you don’t, Grace. No, you don’t.”

She shook her head against the pillow. “I feel so miserable when I hear the howling. I felt so awful when you disappeared for the summer.”

“Oh, angel, I would take you with me if I could,” I said, and I was simultaneously surprised that the word
angel
came out of my mouth and that it felt right to call her that. I ran a hand over her hair, fingers catching in the strands. “But you don’t want this. I lose more of myself every year.”

Grace’s voice was strange. “Tell me what happens, at the end.”

It took me a moment to figure out what she meant. “Oh, the end.” There were one thousand ways to tell her, a thousand ways to color it. Grace wouldn’t fall for the rose-colored version that Beck had told me at first, so I just told it straight. “I become me — become human — later in the spring every year. And one year — I guess I just won’t change. I’ve seen it happen to
the older wolves. One year, they don’t become human again, and they’re just … a wolf. And they live a little longer than natural wolves. But still — fifteen years, maybe.”

“How can you talk about your own death like that?”

I looked at her, eyes glistening in the dim light. “How else could I talk about it?”

“Like you regret it.”

“I regret it every day.”

Grace was silent, but I
felt
her processing what I’d said, pragmatically putting everything into its proper place in her head. “You were a wolf when you got shot.”

I wanted to press my fingers to her lips, push the words she was forming back into her mouth. It was too soon. I didn’t want her to say it yet.

But Grace went on, her voice low. “You missed the hottest months this year. It wasn’t that cold when you got shot. It was cold, but not winter cold. But you were a wolf. When were you a human this year?”

I whispered, “I don’t remember.”

“What if you hadn’t been shot? When would you have become you again?”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t know, Grace.” It was the perfect moment to tell her.
This is my last year.
But I couldn’t say it. Not yet. I wanted another minute, another hour, another night of pretending this wasn’t the end.

Grace inhaled a slow, shaky breath, and something in the way she did it made me realize that somehow, on some level, she knew. She’d known all along.

She wasn’t crying, but I thought I might.

Grace put her fingers back into my hair, and mine were in hers. Our bare arms pressed against each other in a cool tangle of skin. Every little movement against her arm rubbed off a tiny spark of her scent, a tantalizing mix of flowery soap, faint sweat, and desire for me.

I wondered if she knew how transparent her scent made her, how it told me what she was feeling when she didn’t say it out loud.

Of course, I’d seen her smelling the air just as often as I did. She had to know that she was driving me crazy right now, that every touch of her skin on mine tingled, electric.

Every touch pushed the reality of the oncoming winter further away.

As if to prove me right, Grace moved closer, kicking away the blankets between us, pressing her mouth to mine. I let her part my lips and sighed, tasting her breath. I listened to her almost inaudible gasp as I wrapped my arms around her. Every one of my senses was whispering to me over and over to get closer to her, closer to her, as close as I could. She twined her bare legs in mine and we kissed until we had no more breath and got closer until distant howls outside the window brought me back to my senses.

Grace made a soft noise of disappointment as I disentangled my legs from hers, aching with wanting more. I shifted to lie next to her, my fingers still caught in her hair. We listened to the wolves howling outside the window, the ones who hadn’t changed. Or who would never change again. And we buried our heads against each other so we couldn’t hear anything but the racing of our hearts.

School felt like an alien planet on Monday. It took me a long moment of sitting behind the wheel of the Bronco, watching the students milling on the sidewalks and the cars circling the lot and the buses filing neatly into place, to realize that school hadn’t changed. I had.

“You have to go to school,” Sam said, and if I hadn’t known him, I wouldn’t have heard the hopeful questioning note. I wondered where he would go while I was sitting in class.

“I know,” I replied, frowning at the multicolored sweaters and scarves trailing into the school, evidence of winter’s approach. “It just seems so …” What it seemed was irrelevant, disconnected from my life. It was hard to remember what was important about sitting in a classroom with a stack of notes that would be meaningless by next year.

Beside me, Sam jumped in surprise as the driver’s-side door came open. Rachel climbed into the Bronco with her backpack, shoving me across the bench seat to make room for herself.

She slammed the door shut and let out a big sigh. The car seemed very full with her in it. “Nice truck.” She leaned forward
and looked over at Sam. “Ooh, a boy. Hi, Boy! Grace, I’m so
hyper
. Coffee! Are you mad at me?”

I leaned back in surprise, blinking. “No?”

“Good! Because when you didn’t call me in for
ever
, I figured you’d either died or were mad at me. And you’re obviously not dead, so I thought it was the mad thing.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “But you
are
pissed at Olivia, right?”

“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if it was still true. I remembered why we fought, but I couldn’t really remember why it had been meaningful. “No. I don’t think so. It was stupid.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” Rachel said. She leaned forward and rested her chin on the steering wheel so that she could look at Sam. “So, Boy, why are you in Grace’s car?”

Despite myself, I smiled. I knew what Sam
was
needed to be a secret, but Sam himself didn’t have to be, did he? I was suddenly filled with the need for Rachel to approve of him. “Yeah, Boy,” I said, craning my neck to see Sam right beside me. He wore an expression caught somewhere between amusement and doubt. “Why are you in my car?”

“I’m here for visual interest,” Sam said.

“Wow,” Rachel replied. “Like, long-term, or short-term?”

“For as long as I’m interesting.” He turned his face into my shoulder for a moment in a wordless gesture of affection. I tried not to smile like an idiot.

“Oh, it’s that way, is it? Well, then, I’m Rachel, and I’m hyper, and I’m Grace’s best friend,” she said, and stuck her hand
out to him. She was wearing rainbow-colored fingerless gloves that stretched up to her elbows. Sam shook her hand.

“Sam.”

“Nice to meet you, Sam. Do you go here?” When he shook his head, Rachel took my hand and said, “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Well, then, I’m going to steal this nice person from you and take her to class because we’re going to be late and I have lots of stuff to talk to her about and she’s missed out on so much freaky wolf stuff because she’s not talking to her other best friend. So you can see we have to go. I would say I’m not normally this hyper, but I kinda am. Let’s go, Grace!”

Sam and I exchanged looks, his eyes fleetingly worried, and then Rachel opened the door and pulled me out. Sam slid behind the wheel. For a second I thought he might kiss me good-bye, but instead he glanced at Rachel before resting his fingers on my hand for a moment. His cheeks were pink.

Rachel didn’t say anything, but she smiled crookedly before pulling me toward the school. She wiggled my arm. “So that’s why you haven’t been calling, huh? The Boy is supercute. What’s he, homeschooled?”

As we pushed through the school doors, I looked over my shoulder at the Bronco. I saw Sam lift a hand in a wave before he started to back out of the parking space.

“Yeah, he is, on both counts,” I said. “More on that later. What is going on with the wolves?”

Rachel dramatically clutched her arms around my shoulders.

“Olivia saw one. It was up on their front porch and there were
claw marks
, Grace. On the door. Creep. Factor.”

I halted in the middle of the hallway; students behind us made irritated noises and pushed around us. I said, “Wait. At Olivia’s house?”

“No, at your mom’s.” Rachel shook her head and peeled off her rainbow gloves. “Yes, at Olivia’s house. If you guys would stop fighting, she could tell you herself. What are you fighting about, anyway? It pains me to see my peeps not playing nice with each other.”

“I told you, it’s just stupid stuff,” I said. I kind of wanted her to stop talking so I could try and think about the wolf at Olivia’s house. Was it Jack again? Why at Olivia’s?

“Well, you guys need to start getting along because I want you both to go with me over Christmas break. And that’s not that far off, you know. I mean, not really, once you start planning stuff. Come
on
, Grace, just say yes!” Rachel wailed.

“Maybe.” It wasn’t really the wolf at Olivia’s that bothered me. It was the claw marks bit. I needed to talk to Olivia and find out how much of this was real and how much of it was Rachel’s love of a good story.

“Is this about The Boy? He can come! I don’t care!” Rachel said.

The hall was slowly emptying; the bell rang overhead. “We’ll talk about it later!” I said, and hurried with Rachel into first period. I found my usual seat and began sorting through my homework.

“We need to talk.”

I jerked to attention at the sound of an entirely different voice: Isabel Culpeper’s. She slid her giant cork heels the rest of the way under the other desk and leaned toward me, highlighted hair framing her face in perfect, shiny ringlets.

“We’re sort of in class right now, Isabel,” I said, gesturing toward the taped morning announcements playing on the TV at the front of the classroom. The teacher was already at the front of the class, bent over her desk. She wasn’t paying attention, but I still wasn’t thrilled with the idea of a conversation with Isabel. Best-case scenario was that she needed help with her homework or something; I had a reputation for being good at math, so it was sort of possible.

Worst case was that she wanted to talk about Jack.

Sam had said that the only rule the pack had was that they didn’t talk about werewolves to outsiders. I wasn’t about to break that rule.

Isabel’s face was still wearing a pretty pout, but I saw storms destroying small villages in her eyes. She glanced toward the front of the room and leaned closer to me. I smelled perfume — roses and summer in this Minnesota cold. “It will only take a second.”

I looked over at Rachel, who was frowning at Isabel. I really didn’t want to talk to Isabel. I didn’t really know much about her, but I knew she was a dangerous gossip who could quickly reduce my standing in the school to cafeteria target practice. I wasn’t really one who tried to be popular, but I remembered what had happened to the last girl who had gotten on Isabel’s bad side. She was still trying to get out from under a
convoluted rumor that involved lap dancing and the football team. “Why?”

“Privately,”
hissed Isabel. “Across the hall.”

I rolled my eyes as I pushed out of my desk and tiptoed out the back of the room. Rachel gave me a brief, pained look. I was sure I wore a matching one. “Two seconds. That’s it,” I told Isabel as she shuffled me across the hall into an empty classroom. The corkboard on the opposite wall was covered with anatomical drawings; someone had pinned a thong over one of the figures.

“Yeah. Whatever.” She shut the door behind us and eyed me as if I would spontaneously break into song or something. I didn’t know what she was waiting for.

I crossed my arms. “Okay. What do you want?”

I’d thought I was prepared for it, but when she said, “My brother. Jack,” my heart still raced.

I didn’t say anything.

“I saw him while I was running this morning.”

I swallowed. “Your brother.”

Isabel pointed at me with a perfect nail, glossier than the hood of the Bronco. Her ringlets bounced. “Oh, don’t give me that. I
talked
to him. He’s not dead.”

I briefly wrestled with the image of Isabel jogging. I couldn’t see it. Maybe she meant running from her Chihuahua. “Um.”

Isabel pressed on. “There was something screwed up with him. And don’t say ‘That’s because he’s dead.’ He’s not.”

Something about Isabel’s charming personality — and maybe the fact that I knew Jack was actually alive — made it
very difficult to empathize with her. I said, “Isabel, it seems to me like you don’t need me to have this conversation. You’re doing a great job all by yourself.”

“Shut up,” Isabel said, which only supported my theory. I was about to tell her so, but her next words stopped me cold. “When I saw Jack, he said he hadn’t really died. Then he started — twitching — and said he had to go
right then
. When I tried to ask him what was wrong with him, he said that you knew.”

My voice came out a little strangled sounding. “Me?” But I remembered his eyes imploring me as he lay pinned beneath the she-wolf.
Help me.
He had recognized me.

“Well, it’s not exactly a shock, is it? Everyone knows that you and Olivia Marx are freaks for those wolves, and clearly this has something to do with them. So what’s going on, Grace?”

I didn’t like the way she asked the question — like maybe she already knew the answer. Blood was rushing in my ears; I was in way over my head. “Look. You’re upset, I get that. But seriously, get help. Leave me and Olivia out of this. I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t Jack.”

The lie left a bad taste in my mouth. I could see the reasoning behind the pack’s secrecy, but Jack was Isabel’s brother. Didn’t she have a right to know?

“I wasn’t seeing things,” Isabel snapped as I opened the door. “I’m going to find him again. And I’m going to find out what your part is in all this.”

“I don’t have a part,” I said. “I just like the wolves. Now I need to get to class.”

Isabel stood in the doorway, watching me go, and I wondered what, at the beginning of all this, she had thought I was going to say.

She looked almost forlorn, or maybe it was just an act.

In any case, I said, “Isabel, just get help.”

She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s what I was doing.”