Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) (29 page)

The evening was steel gray, the sky an endless expanse of frozen clouds waiting for snow and for night. Outside the SUV, the tires crunched along salted roads, and sleet tapped on the windshield. Inside, behind the wheel, Isabel kept complaining about the “wet mutt smell,” but to me it was pine and earth, rain and musk. And behind it, the sharp, contagious edge of anxiety. In the passenger seat, Jack kept whining softly, halfway between animal and human. Olivia sat beside me in the backseat, her fingers knotted so tightly in mine that it hurt.

Sam was behind us. When we had lifted him into the SUV, his body was heavy with drug-induced sleep. Now, his breaths were deep and uneven, and I strained to listen to them over the sound of slush spraying from the tires, to maintain some kind of connection with him when I couldn’t touch him. With him drugged, I could’ve sat with him and run my fingers through his fur, but it would’ve been torment for him.

He was an animal now. Back in his world, far away from me.

Isabel pulled up in front of the little clinic. At this hour, the parking lot was dark and unlit; the clinic itself was a little gray square. It didn’t look like a place to work miracles. It looked like a place you came when you were sick and had no money. I pushed the thought out of my head.

“I stole the keys from Mom,” Isabel said. To her credit, she didn’t sound nervous. “Come on. Jack, can you try the hell not to savage someone before we get inside?”

Jack muttered something unrepeatable. I looked in the back; Sam was on his feet, swaying. “Isabel, hurry up. The Benadryl’s wearing off.”

Isabel wrenched up the parking brake. “If we get arrested, I’m telling them you all abducted me.”

“Come on!” I snapped. I opened my door; Olivia and Jack both winced at the cold. “Hurry up — you two need to run.”

“I’ll come back to help you with him,” Isabel told me, and leaped out of the SUV. I turned back around to Sam, who rolled his eyes up toward me. He seemed disoriented, groggy.

I was momentarily frozen by his gaze, remembering Sam lying in bed, nose to nose with me, eyes looking into mine.

He made a soft noise of anxiety.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

Isabel returned, and I came around back to help her. She pulled off her belt and expertly twisted it around Sam’s muzzle. I winced, but I couldn’t tell her not to. She hadn’t been bitten and there was no guarantee of how Sam would react to this process.

Between the two of us, we lifted him and crab-walked to the clinic. Isabel kicked open the door, which was already
slightly ajar. “The exam rooms are that way. Lock him in one of those and we’ll do Olivia and Jack first. Maybe he’ll turn back again, if he’s in the heat long enough.”

Isabel’s lie was extraordinarily kind; we both knew he wasn’t changing without some kind of miracle. The best I could hope for was that Sam had been wrong — that this cure wouldn’t kill him when he was a wolf. I followed Isabel to a little supply room, cluttered and stinking with a sort of medicinal, rubber scent. Olivia and Jack were already waiting there, heads ducked together as if they were talking, which surprised me. Jack lifted his head when we came in.

“I can’t stand this waiting,” he said. “Can we just get this the hell over with?”

I looked at a bin of alcohol wipes. “Do I need to prep his arm?”

Isabel gave me a look. “We’re intentionally infecting him with meningitis. It seems pointless to be worried about infection at the injection site.”

I swabbed his arm, anyway, while Isabel retrieved a blood-filled syringe from the fridge.

“Oh, God,” Olivia whispered, her eyes frozen on the syringe.

We didn’t have time to comfort her. I took Jack’s cold hand and turned it so that it was palm up, like I remembered seeing the nurse do before our rabies shots.

Isabel looked at Jack. “You’re sure you want this.”

He lifted his teeth in a snarl. He stank of fear. “Just do it.”

Isabel hesitated; it took me a moment to realize why. “Let me do it,” I told her. “He can’t hurt me.”

Isabel handed me the syringe and ducked aside. I took her place. “Look the other way,” I ordered Jack. He turned his head away. I stuck the needle in, then smacked his face with my free hand as he jerked back around toward me. “Control yourself!” I snapped. “You’re not an animal.”

He whispered, “Sorry.”

I depressed the syringe fully, trying not to think too hard about the bloody contents of it, and pulled out the needle. There was a dot of red at the injection site; I didn’t know if it was Jack’s blood or infected blood from the syringe. Isabel was just staring at it, so I turned around, grabbed a Band-Aid, and stuck it over the site. Olivia let out a low moan.

“Thank you,” Jack said. He hugged his arms around himself. Isabel looked sick.

“Just give me the other one,” I said to Isabel. Isabel handed it to me and we turned to Olivia, who was so pale that I could see the vein running over her temple; nerves shook her hands. Isabel took over my duty of swabbing the arm. It was like an unspoken rule that we both had to feel useful to make the hateful task possible.

“I changed my mind!” Olivia cried. “I don’t want to do it! I’ll take my chances!”

I took her hand. “Olivia. Olive. Calm down.”

“I can’t.” Olivia’s eyes were on the dark red of the syringe. “I can’t say that I’d rather die than be this way.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to convince her to do something that could kill her, but I didn’t want her to not do it, out of fear. “But your whole life — Olivia.”

Olivia shook her head. “No. No, it’s not worth it. Let Jack try it. I’ll take my chances. If it works on him, then I’ll try it. But I … can’t.”

“You do know it’s nearly November, right?” Isabel demanded. “It’s freezing cold! You’re going to change soon for the winter, and we won’t get another chance until spring.”

“Just let her wait,” Jack snapped. “There’s no harm. Better her parents think she’s missing for a few months than find out she’s a werewolf.”

“Please.” Olivia’s eyes were full of tears.

I shrugged helplessly and put down the syringe. I didn’t know any more than she did. And in my heart, I knew that, in her position, I’d make the same choice — better to live with her beloved wolves than die of meningitis.

“Fine,” Isabel said. “Jack, take Olivia out to the car. Wait there and keep an eye out. Okay, Grace. Let’s go see what Sam’s done to the exam room while we were gone.”

Jack and Olivia headed down the hallway, pressed against each other for warmth, trying not to shift, and Isabel and I turned to go to the wolf who already had.

Standing just outside the exam room where Sam was, Isabel put her hand on my arm, stopping me before I turned the door handle. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked. “It could kill him. Probably will kill him.”

Instead of answering, I pushed open the door.

In the ugly fluorescent lighting of the room, Sam looked ordinary, doglike, small, crouched beside the exam table. I knelt
in front of him, wishing that we’d thought of this possible cure before it was probably too late for him. “Sam.”
I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive.
… I had known that the heat wouldn’t change him back to human. It was nothing but selfishness that had made me bring him to the clinic. Selfishness, and a fallible cure that couldn’t possibly work for him in this form. “Sam, do you still want to do this?”

I touched his ruff, imagining it as his dark hair. I swallowed unhappily.

Sam whistled through his nose. I had no idea how much he understood of what I said; only that, in his semi-drugged state, he didn’t flinch under my touch.

I tried again. “It could kill you. Do you still want to try?”

Behind me, Isabel coughed meaningfully.

Sam whined at the noise, eyes jerking to Isabel and the door. I stroked his head and looked into his eyes. God, they were the same. It killed me to look at them now.

This has to work.

A tear slid down my face. I didn’t bother to swipe it away as I looked up at Isabel. I wanted this like I’d never wanted anything. “We have to do it.”

Isabel didn’t move. “Grace, I don’t think he stands a chance unless he’s human. I just don’t think it will work.”

I ran a finger over the short, smooth hair on the side of his face. If he hadn’t been sedated, he wouldn’t have tolerated it, but the Benadryl had dulled his instincts. He closed his eyes. It was unwolflike enough to give me hope.

“Grace. Are we doing this or not? Seriously.”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m trying something.”

I settled on the floor and whispered to Sam, “I want you to listen to me, if you can.” I leaned the side of my face against his ruff and remembered the golden wood he had shown me so long ago. I remembered the way the yellow leaves, the color of Sam’s eyes, fluttered and twisted, crashing butterflies, on their way to the ground. The slender white trunks of the birches, creamy and smooth as human skin. I remembered Sam standing in the middle of the wood, his arms stretched out, a dark, solid form in the dream of the trees. His coming to me, me punching his chest, the soft kiss. I remembered every kiss we’d ever had, and I remembered every time I’d curled in his human arms. I remembered the soft warmth of his breath on the back of my neck while we slept.

I remembered Sam.

I remembered him forcing himself out of wolf form for me. To save me.

Sam jerked away from me. His head was lowered, tail between his legs, and he was shaking.

“What’s happening?” Isabel’s hand was on the doorknob.

Sam backed away farther, crashing into the cabinet behind him, curling into a ball, uncurling. He was peeling free. He was shaking out of his fur. He was wolf and he was Sam, and then

“Hurry,” Sam whispered. He was jerking, hard, against the cabinet. His fingers were claws on the tile. “Hurry. Do it now.”

Isabel was frozen by the door.

“Isabel! Come
on
!”

She snapped out of her spell and came over to us. She crouched beside Sam, next to the bare expanse of his back. He was biting his lip so hard that it was bleeding. I knelt, took his hand.

His voice was strained. “Grace —
hurry
. I’m almost gone.”

Isabel didn’t ask any more questions. She just grabbed his arm, turned it, and jabbed the needle in. She depressed the syringe halfway, but it jerked out of his arm as he seized violently. Sam backed away from me, tugging his hand from mine, and threw up.

“Sam —”

But he was gone. In half the time it had taken him to become human, he was a wolf. Shaking, staggering, nails scratching on the tiles, falling to the floor.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” Isabel said. That was all she said. She laid the syringe on the counter. “Crap. I hear Jack. I’ll be right back.”

The door opened and closed. I knelt next to Sam’s body and buried my face in his fur. His breaths were ragged and exhausted. And all I could think was —
I killed him. This is going to kill him.

Jack was the one who opened the exam room door. “Grace, come on. We have to go — Olivia’s not doing so good.”

I stood, embarrassed to be found with tear-stained cheeks. I turned to tip the used syringe into the hazardous waste container by the counter. “I need help carrying him.”

He scowled at me. “That’s why Isabel sent me in here.”

I looked down, and my heart stopped. Empty floor. I spun, ducking my head to look under the table. “Sam?”

Jack had left the door open. The room was empty.

“Help me find him!” I shouted at Jack, pushing past him into the hallway. There was no sign of Sam. As I pelted down the hall, I could see the door wide-open at the end of it, black night staring in. It was the first place a wolf would’ve run to, once his drugs wore off. Escape. The night. The cold.

I spun in the parking lot, looking for any sign of Sam in the slender finger of Boundary Wood that stretched behind the clinic. But it was darker than dark. No lights. No sound. No Sam.

“Sam!”

I knew he wouldn’t come, even if he heard me. Sam was strong, but instincts were stronger.

It was intolerable to imagine him out there somewhere, half a vial of infected blood mixing slowly with his.

“Sam!”
My voice was a wail, a howl, a cry in the night. He was gone.

Headlights blinded me: Isabel’s SUV, tearing up beside me and shuddering to a stop. Isabel leaned over from the driver’s side and shoved open the passenger-side door, her face a ghost in the lights of the dashboard.

“Get in, Grace. Hurry the hell up! Olivia is changing and we’ve been here way too long already.”

I couldn’t leave him.

“Grace!”

Jack climbed into the backseat, shuddering; his eyes pleaded with me. They were the same eyes I’d seen at the very beginning, back when he’d first been turned. Back before I’d known anything at all.

I got in and slammed the door shut, looking out the window just in time to see a white wolf standing by the edge of the parking lot. Shelby. Alive, just like Sam had thought. I stared in the rearview mirror at her; the wolf stood in the parking lot and gazed after us. I thought I saw triumph in her eyes as she turned and disappeared into the darkness.

“Which wolf is that?” Isabel demanded.

But I couldn’t answer. All I could think was
Sam, Sam, Sam
.