Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) (8 page)

I kissed her. Just the barest brush of my lips against hers, nothing animal. Even in that moment, I deconstructed the kiss: her possible reactions to, her possible interpretations of, the way it made a shudder tighten my skin, the seconds between when I touched her lips and when she opened her eyes.

Grace smiled at me. Her words were taunting, but her voice was gentle. “Is that all you’ve got?” I touched my lips to hers again, and this time, it was a very different sort of kiss. It was six years’ worth of kissing, her lips coming to life under mine, tasting of orange and of desire. Her fingers ran through my sideburns and into my hair before linking around my neck, alive and cool on my warm skin. I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once. For once in my human life, my mind didn’t wander to compose a song lyric or store the moment for later reflection.

For once in my life,

I was here

and nowhere else.

And then I opened my eyes and it was just Grace and me — nothing anywhere but Grace and me — she pressing her lips together as though she were keeping my kiss inside her, and me, holding this moment that was as fragile as a bird in my hands.

Some days seem to fit together like a stained glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture. The last twenty-four hours had been like that. The night at the hospital was one pane, sickly green and flickering. The dark hours of the early morning in Grace’s bed were another, cloudy and purple. Then the cold blue reminder of my other life this morning, and finally the brilliant, clear pane that was our kiss.

In the current pane, we sat on the worn bench seat of an old Bronco at the edge of a run-down, overgrown car lot on the outskirts of town. It seemed like the complete picture was starting to come into focus, a shimmering portrait of something I thought I couldn’t have.

Grace ran her fingers over the Bronco’s steering wheel with a thoughtful, fond touch, and then turned to me. “Let’s play twenty questions.”

I was lying back in the passenger seat, eyes closed, and letting the afternoon sun cook me through the windshield. It felt
good. “Shouldn’t you be looking at other cars? You know, car shopping usually involves … shopping.”

“I don’t shop very well,” Grace said. “I just see what I need and I get it.”

I laughed at that. I was beginning to see how very
Grace
such a statement was.

She narrowed her eyes at me in mock irritation and crossed her arms over her chest. “So, questions. These aren’t optional.”

I glanced out across the car lot to make sure that the owner hadn’t returned from towing her car yet — here in Mercy Falls, the towing company and the used car company were one and the same. “Okay. Better not be anything embarrassing.”

Grace slid over a little closer to me on the bench seat and slouched down in a mirror image of my posture. I felt like this was the first question: her leg pressed against my leg, her shoulder pressed against my shoulder, her tightly laced shoe resting on top of my scuffed leather one. My pulse raced, a wordless answer.

Grace’s voice was pragmatic, as if she didn’t know the effect she was having on me. “I want to know what makes you a wolf.”

That one was easy. “When the temperature drops, I become a wolf. When it’s cold at night and warm during the day, I can feel it coming on, and then, finally, it’s cold enough that I shift into a wolf until spring.”

“The others, too?”

I nodded. “The longer you’re a wolf, the warmer it has to be for you to become human.” I paused for a moment, wondering if now was the time to tell her. “Nobody knows how
many years you get of switching back and forth. It’s different for every wolf.”

Grace just looked at me — the same long look she’d given me when she was younger, lying in the snow, looking up at me. I couldn’t read it any better now than I could then. I felt my throat tighten in anticipation of her reply, but, mercifully, she changed her line of questioning. “How many of you are there?”

I wasn’t sure, just because so many of us didn’t become humans anymore. “About twenty.”

“What do you eat?”

“Baby bunnies.” She narrowed her eyes, so I grinned and said, “Adult bunnies, too. I’m an equal-opportunity bunny-eater.”

She didn’t skip a beat. “What was on your face the night you let me touch you?” Her voice stayed the same for this question, but something around her eyes tightened, as though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.

I had to struggle to remember that night — her fingers in my ruff, her breath moving the fine hairs on the side of my face, the guilty pleasure of being so close to her. The boy. The one who was bitten. That was what she was really asking. “Do you mean there was blood on my face?”

Grace nodded.

Part of me felt a little sad that she had to ask, but of course she did. She had every reason not to trust me. “It wasn’t his — that boy’s.”

“Jack,” she said.

“Jack,” I repeated. “I knew the attack happened, but I wasn’t there for it.” I had to dig deeper into my memory to trace the
source of the blood on my muzzle. My human brain supplied logical answers — rabbit, deer, roadkill — all of them instantly stronger than my actual wolf memories. Finally, I snatched the real answer from my thoughts, though I wasn’t proud of it. “It was a cat. The blood. I’d caught a cat.”

Grace let out a breath.

“You aren’t upset that it was a cat?” I asked.

“You have to eat. If it wasn’t Jack, I don’t care if it was a wallaby,” she said. But it was obvious her mind was still on Jack. I tried to remember what little I knew of the attack, hating for her to think badly of my pack.

“He provoked them, you know,” I said.

“He what? You weren’t there, were you?”

I shook my head and struggled to explain. “We can’t — the wolves — when we communicate, it’s with images. Nothing complicated. And not across great distances. But if we’re right by each other, we can share an image with another wolf. And so the wolves that attacked Jack, they showed me images.”

“You can read each other’s minds?” Grace asked, incredulous.

I shook my head vigorously. “No. I — it’s hard to explain as a hu — as me. It’s just a way of talking, but our brains are different as wolves. There’s no abstract concepts, really. Things like time, and names, and complicated emotions are all out of the question. Really, it’s for things like hunting or warning each other of danger.”

“And what did you see about Jack?”

I lowered my eyes. It felt strange, recalling a wolf memory from a human mind. I flipped through the blurry images in my
head, recognizing now that the red blotches on the wolves’ coats were bullet wounds, and that the stains on their lips were Jack’s blood. “Some of the wolves showed me something about being hit by him. A — gun? He must have had a BB gun. He was wearing a red shirt.” Wolves saw color poorly, but red we could see.

“Why would he do that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. That’s not the sort of thing we told each other.”

Grace was quiet, still thinking about Jack, I suppose. We sat in the close silence until I started to wonder whether she was upset. Then she spoke. “So you never get to open Christmas presents.”

I looked at her, not knowing how to respond. Christmas was something that happened in another life, one before the wolves.

Grace looked down at the steering wheel. “I was just thinking that you were never around in the summer, and I always loved Christmas, because I knew you’d always be there. In the woods. As a wolf. I guess it’s because it’s cold, right? But that must mean that you never get to open Christmas presents.”

I shook my head. I changed too early now to even see Christmas decorations in stores.

Grace frowned at the steering wheel. “Do you think of me when you’re a wolf?”

When I was a wolf, I was a memory of a boy, struggling to hold on to meaningless words. I didn’t want to tell her the truth: that I couldn’t remember her name.

“I think of the way you smell,” I said, truthfully. I reached over and lifted a few strands of her hair to my nose. The scent of her shampoo reminded me of the scent of her skin. I swallowed and let her hair fall back down to her shoulder.

Grace’s eyes followed my hand from her shoulder to my lap, and I saw her swallow, too. The obvious question — when I would change back again — hung between us, but neither of us put words to it. I wasn’t ready to tell her yet. My chest ached at the thought of leaving all this behind.

“So,” she said again, and put her hand on the steering wheel. “Do you know how to drive?”

I pulled my wallet from my jeans pocket and proffered it. “The State of Minnesota seems to think so.”

She extracted my driver’s license, held it up against the steering wheel, and read out loud: “Samuel K. Roth.” She added, with some surprise, “This is an actual license. You must really be real.”

I laughed. “You still doubt it?”

Instead of answering, Grace handed my wallet back and asked, “Is that your real name? Aren’t you supposedly dead, like Jack?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this, but I answered anyway. “It wasn’t the same. I wasn’t bitten as badly, and some strangers saved me from being dragged off. Nobody pronounced me dead, like they did with Jack. So, yes, that’s my real name.”

Grace looked thoughtful, and I wondered what she was thinking. Then, abruptly, she looked at me, expression dark. “So your parents know what you are, right? That’s why they —”
She stopped and sort of half closed her eyes. I could see her swallowing again.

“It makes you sick for weeks afterward,” I said, rescuing her from finishing the sentence. “The wolf toxin, I guess. While it’s changing you. I couldn’t stop shifting back and forth, no matter how warm or cold I was.” I paused, the memories flickering through my head like photos from someone else’s camera. “They thought I was possessed. Then it got warm and I improved — became stable, I mean, and they thought I was cured. Saved, I suppose. Until winter. For a while they tried to get the church to do something about me. Finally they decided to do something themselves. They’re both serving life sentences now. They didn’t realize that we’re harder to kill than most people.”

Grace’s face was nearing a pale shade of green and the knuckles on her hand clutching the steering wheel had turned white. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I really was. “Let’s talk about cars. Is this one your betrothed? I mean, assuming it runs okay? I don’t know anything about cars, but I can at least pretend. ‘Runs okay’ sounds like something someone would say if they knew what they were talking about, right?”

She seized the subject, petting the steering wheel. “I do like it.”

“It’s very ugly,” I said generously. “But it looks as though it would laugh at snow. And, if you hit a deer, it would just hiccup and keep going.”

Grace added, “Plus, it’s got a pretty appealing front seat. I mean, I can just —” Grace leaned across the bench seat toward
me, lightly resting one of her hands on my leg. Now she was an inch away from me, close enough that I felt the heat of her breath on my lips. Close enough that I could feel her waiting for me to lean into her, too.

In my head, an image flashed of Grace in her backyard, her hand outstretched, imploring me to come to her. But I couldn’t, then. I was in another world, one that demanded I keep my distance. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I still lived in that world, bound by its rules. My human skin was only mocking me, taunting me with riches that would vanish at the first freeze.

I sat back from her, and looked away before I could see her disappointment. The silence was thick around us. “Tell me about after you were bitten,” I said, just to say something. “Did you get sick?”

Grace leaned back in her seat and sighed. I wondered how many times I’d disappointed her before. “I don’t know. It seems like such a long time ago. I guess — maybe. I remember having the flu right afterward.”

After I was bitten, it had felt like the flu, too. Exhaustion, hot and cold shakes, nausea burning the back of my throat, bones aching to change form.

Grace shrugged. “That was the year I got locked in the car, too. It was a month or two after the attack. It was spring, but it was really hot. My dad took me along with him to run some errands, because I guess I was too young to leave behind.” She glanced at me to see if I was listening. I was.

“Anyway, I had the flu, I guess, and I was just stupid with sleep. So on the way home I fell asleep in the backseat … and
the next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital. I guess Dad had gotten home and gotten the groceries out and forgotten about me. Just left me locked in the car, I guess. They said I tried to get out, but I don’t remember that, really. I don’t remember anything until the hospital, where the nurse was saying that it was the hottest May day on record for Mercy Falls. The doctor told my dad the heat in the car should’ve killed me, so I’m a miracle girl. How’s that for responsible parenting?”

I shook my head in disbelief. There was a brief silence that gave me enough time to notice the consternation in her expression and remind me that I sincerely regretted not kissing her a moment ago. I thought about saying
Show me what you meant earlier, when you said that you liked this front seat
. But I couldn’t imagine my mouth forming those words, so instead I just took her hand and ran my finger along her palm and between her fingers, tracing the lines in her hand and letting my skin memorize her fingerprints.

Grace made a small sound of appreciation and closed her eyes as my fingers whispered circles on her skin. Somehow this was almost better than kissing.

Both of us jerked when someone tapped on the glass on my side of the car. The tow-truck driver and car-lot owner stood there, peering in at us. His voice came through, muffled by the glass. “You find what you were looking for?”

Grace reached across and rolled down the window. She was talking to him but looking at me, gaze intense, when she said, “Absolutely.”