Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) (27 page)

When the paramedics arrived, I was curled on the passenger seat in a pile of coats, my hands pressed against my face.

“Miss, are you all right?”

I didn’t answer, just put my hands on my lap and looked at my fingers, covered with bloody tears.

“Miss, are you alone?”

I nodded.

I watched her, like I’d always watched her.

Thoughts were slippery and transient, faint scents on a frigid wind, too far away to catch.

She sat just outside the wood near the swing, curled small, until the cold shook her, and still she didn’t move. For a long time, I didn’t know what she was doing.

I watched her. Part of me wanted to go to her, though instinct sang against it. The desire sparked a thought which sparked a memory of golden woods, days floating around me and falling around me, days lying still and crumpled on the ground.

But I realized then what she was doing, folded there, trembling with the vicious cold. She was waiting, waiting for the cold to shake her into another form. Maybe that unfamiliar scent I caught from her was hope.

She waited to change, and I waited to change, and we both wanted what we couldn’t have.

Finally, night crept across the yard, lengthening the shadows, pulling them out of the woods until they covered the whole world.

I watched her.

The door opened. I shrank farther into the dark. A man came out, pulled the girl from the ground. The light from the house glistened off the frozen tracks on her face.

I watched her. Thoughts, distant, fled with her absence. After she disappeared into the house, there was only this: longing.

Their howls were the hardest thing to bear.

As terrible as the days were, the nights were worse; days were just listless preparations to somehow make it through another night populated by their voices. I lay in bed and hugged his pillow until there was no more of his scent caught in it. I slept in his chair in Dad’s study until it had my shape instead of his. I walked barefoot through the house in a private grief I couldn’t share with anyone.

The only person I could share with, Olivia, couldn’t be reached by phone, and my car — the car I couldn’t even bear to think of — was useless and broken.

And so it was just me in the house and the hours stretched out before me and the unchanging, leafless trees of Boundary Wood outside my window.

The night I heard him howl was the worst. The others began first, like they had for the last three nights. I sank down into the leather chair in Dad’s study, buried my face in the last Sam-scented T-shirt of his that I had, and pretended that it was just a recording of wolves, not real wolves. Not real people. And
then, for the first time since the crash, I heard his howl join in with them.

It tore my heart out, because I heard his voice. The wolves sang slowly behind him, bittersweet harmony, but all I heard was Sam. His howl trembled, rose, fell in anguish.

I listened for a long time. I prayed for them to stop, to leave me alone, but at the same time I was desperately afraid that they would. Long after the other voices had dropped away, Sam kept howling, very soft and slow.

When he finally fell silent, the night felt dead.

Sitting still was intolerable. I stood up, paced, clenched and unclenched my hands into fists. Finally I took the guitar that Sam had played and I screamed and smashed it into pieces on Dad’s desk.

When Dad came down from his room, he found me sitting in the middle of a sea of splintered wood and snapped strings, like a boat carrying music had crashed on a rocky shore.

The first time I picked up my phone after the crash, it was snowing. Light, delicate flakes drifted by the black square of my window, like flower petals. I wouldn’t have picked it up, but it was the one person I had been trying to contact since the crash. “Olivia?”

“G-gr-r-ace?” Olivia, barely recognizable. She was sobbing.

“Olivia, shh — what’s wrong?” That was a stupid question. I
knew
what was wrong with her.

“Re-remember I told you I knew about the wolves?” She was taking big gasps of air between the words. “I didn’t tell you about the hospital. Jack —”

“Bit you,” I said.

“Yes,” Olivia sobbed out the word. “I didn’t think anything would happen, because days went by and I felt the same!”

My limbs fell slack. “You changed?”

“I — I can’t — I —”

I closed my eyes, imagining the scene. God. “Where are you now?”

“At the b-bus stop.” She paused, sniffing. “It’s c-cold.”

“Oh, Olivia. Olivia, come over here. Stay with me. We’ll figure this out. I’d come, but I don’t have a car yet.”

Olivia began to sob again.

I stood up and shut my bedroom door. Not that Mom would hear me; she was upstairs, anyway. “Olivia, it’s okay. I’m not going to freak out. I saw Sam change and I didn’t freak out. I know what it’s like. Calm down, okay? I can’t come get you. I don’t have a car. You’re going to have to drive over here.”

I calmed her down for another few minutes and told her I’d have the front door unlocked when she got there. For the first time since the crash, I felt closer to me again.

When she arrived, looking red-eyed and disheveled, I pushed her toward the bathroom for a shower and got her a change of clothes. I sat on the closed toilet lid while she stood in the hot water.

“I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours,” I told her. “I want to know when Jack bit you.”

“I told you how I met him, taking pictures of the wolves, and how I fed him. It was so stupid that I didn’t tell you — I was just so guilty about fighting with you that I didn’t tell you right away, and then I started cutting classes to help him out, and then I felt like I couldn’t tell you without … I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry.”

“It’s water under the bridge now,” I said. “What was he like? Did he force you to help him?”

“No,” Olivia said, “He was pretty nice, actually, when things went his way. He got pretty angry when he changed, but it looked painful. And he kept asking about the wolves, wanting
to see photos, and we talked, and after he found out that you’d been bitten —”

“Found out?” I echoed.

“Okay, I told him! I didn’t know it was going to make him crazy! He went on and on about a cure after that, and he tried to get me to tell him how to fix him. And then he, um, he …” She wiped her eyes. “Bit me.”

“Wait. He bit you when he was human?”

“Yeah.”

I shuddered. “God. How awful. Sick bastard. So you’ve been dealing with this all the time, by yourself?”

“Who would I tell?” Olivia said. “I thought Sam was one, because of his eyes — because I thought I recognized them from my wolf photos — but he told me he was wearing contacts when I met him. So I knew I either had it wrong or he just wasn’t going to help me, anyway.”

“You should’ve told me. I already told you about the werewolves, anyway.”

“I know. I was just — guilty. I was just” — she shut off the water — “stupid. I don’t know. What can I do, anyway? How was Sam human so much? I saw him. He waited in the Bronco for you all the time, and he never changed.”

I handed her a towel over the top of the curtain. “Come into my room. I’ll tell you.”

Olivia stayed with me overnight, shaking and kicking so much that she eventually made a nest of blankets and my sleeping bag next to the bed so that we could both sleep. After a late breakfast, we went to get Olivia some toothpaste and other
toiletries — Mom had ridden to work with Dad so that I could use her car. On the way back from the store, my cell phone rang. Olivia picked up the phone without answering the call and read the number off to me.

Beck. Did I really want to do this? I sighed and held out my hand for the phone. “Hello?”

“Grace.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to call you,” Beck said. His voice sounded flat. “I know the last couple days must’ve been hard for you.”

Was I supposed to say something? I hoped not, because I couldn’t think of anything. My brain felt cloudy.

“Grace?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m calling about Jack. He’s doing better now, he’s more stable, and it won’t be too long before he changes for the winter. But he’s still got a couple weeks of swapping back and forth, I think.”

My brain wasn’t too cloudy to realize how much Beck was trusting me at this point. I felt vaguely honored. “So he’s not still locked in the bathroom?”

Beck laughed, not a funny laugh, but nice to hear, anyway. “No, he’s graduated from the bathroom to the basement. But I’m afraid, um, I’m going to change soon — I almost did this morning. And that would leave Jack in a very bad place for the next few weeks. I hate to ask you this, because it puts you in danger of getting bitten — but maybe you could keep an eye on him until he changes?”

I paused. “Beck, I’ve been bitten already.”

“God!”

“No, no,” I added hurriedly. “Not recently. Many years ago.”

Beck’s voice was strange. “You’re the girl that Sam saved, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“And you never changed.”

“No.”

“How long have you known Sam?”

“We only met in person this year. But I’ve watched him ever since he saved me.” I pulled into the driveway but didn’t turn the engine off. Olivia leaned over, cranked up the heat, and lay back in her seat with closed eyes. “I’d like to come over before you change. To just talk, if that’s okay.”

“That would be more than okay. But it’ll have to be soon, I’m afraid. I’m just getting to the point where I can’t turn back now.”

Crap. My phone was beeping another call through. “This afternoon?” I asked. When he agreed, I said, “I have to go — I’m sorry — someone is calling me.”

We said good-bye and I clicked over to the other call.

“Holy crap, Grace, how many times were you going to let it ring? Eighteen? Twenty? One hundred?” It was Isabel; I hadn’t heard from her since the day after the crash, when I’d filled her in on where Jack was.

I replied, “For all you know, I was in class, and I was being murdered for my phone ringing during it.”

“You weren’t in class. Anyway. I need your help. My mom saw another case of meningitis — the worse sort of
meningitis — at the clinic where she works. While I was there, I drew the guy’s blood. Three vials.”

I blinked several times before I figured out what she was saying. “You what?! Why?”

“Grace, I thought you were at the top of the class. Clearly the sliding scale has done wonders for you. Try to focus. While Mom was on the phone, I pretended to be a nurse and I drew his blood. His nasty, infected blood.”

“You know how to draw blood?”

“Yes, I know how to draw blood! Doesn’t everyone? Are you not getting what I’m saying? Three vials. One for Jack. One for Sam. One for Olivia. I need you to help me get Jack over to the clinic. The blood’s in the fridge there. I’m afraid to take it out in case the bacteria die or whatever it is that bacteria do. Anyway, I don’t know where this guy’s house is, where Jack is.”

“You want to inject them. To give them meningitis.”

“No, I want to give them malaria. Yes, stupid. I want to give them meningitis. The main symptom is — ta
da
— a fever. And if we’re being honest, I don’t give a crap if you do it to Sam and Olivia. It probably won’t work on Sam, anyway, because he’s a wolf already. But I figured I had to get enough blood for all of them if I wanted to get you to help me.”

“Isabel, I would’ve helped you, anyway.” I sighed. “I’m going to give you an address. Meet me there in an hour.”