Werewolves aren't immortal, just immune to age. But time is their enemy anyway. After just so long, one wolf told me, nothing matters anymore and death looks better than living another day. Samuel was very old.
The Marrok, Samuel's father, had taken to calling me once a month to "check on things," he said. For the first time it occurred to me that he hadn't been checking on me, but on his son.
"How long have you felt this way?" I asked, inching my way up onto his bed, slowly so I didn't startle him. "Did you leave Montana because you couldn't hide this from Bran?"
"No. I want you," he said starkly moving his arm so I could see that his eyes had changed back to human grey-blue.
"Do you?" I asked, knowing that it wasn't completely true. "Your wolf might still want me, but I don't think you do. Why did you leave the Marrok to come here?"
He rolled away, giving his back to me. I didn't move, careful not to crowd him. I didn't back away either, just waited for his answer.
Eventually it came. "It was bad. After Texas. But when you came back to us, it went away. I was fine. Until the baby."
"Did you talk to Bran about it?" Whatever it was. I put my face against the small of his back, warming him with my breath. Samuel would see suicide as cowardice, I tried to reassure myself, and Samuel hated cowards. I might not want to love Samuel-not after the way we'd once hurt each other-but I didn't want to lose him either.
"The Marrok knows," he whispered. "He always does. Everyone else believed I was the same, just like always. My father knew something was wrong, that I wasn't right. I was going to leave-but then you came."
If Bran couldn't fix him, what was I supposed to do?
"You left the pack for a long time," I said, feeling my way. He'd left the pack shortly after I had, over fifteen years ago. He'd stayed away for most of those fifteen years. "Bran told me you went lone-wolf in Texas." Wolves need their pack, or else they start to get a little strange. Lone wolves were, in general, an odd bunch, dangerous to themselves and others.
"Yes." Every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for the blow to fall. I decided that meant I was on the right track.
"It's not easy being alone, not for years." I scooted up a little until I could wrap myself around him, tucking my legs behind his. I slipped the arm I wasn't lying on around his side and pressed my hand over his stomach, showing him that he wasn't alone, not while he lived at my house.
He started to shake, vibrating the whole bed. I tightened my arm, but I didn't say anything! I'd gone as far as I was willing to go. Some wounds need to be pricked so they can drain, others just need to be left alone-I wasn't qualified to know the difference.
He wrapped both of his arms over the top of mine. "I hid myself from the wolves. I hid among the humans." He paused. "Hid from myself. What I did to you was wrong, Mercedes. I told myself I couldn't wait, I couldn't take the chance that another would take you from me. I had to make you mine so my children would live, but I knew I was taking advantage of you. You weren't old enough to defend yourself from me."
I rubbed my nose against his back in reassurance, but I didn't speak. He was right, and I respected him too much to lie.
"I violated your trust, and my father's, too. I couldn't live with it: I had to leave. I traveled to the far corner of the country and became someone else: Samuel Cornick, college freshman, fresh off the farm with a newly minted high school diploma. Only on the night of the full moon did I allow myself to remember what I was."
The muscles under my hands convulsed twice. "In med school, I met a girl. She reminded me of you: quiet with a sneaky sense of humor. She looked a little like you, too. It felt like a second chance to me-a chance to do it right. Or maybe I just forgot. We were friends at first, in the same program at school. Then it became something more. We moved in together."
I knew what was coming, because it was the worst thing I could think of that could have happened to Samuel. I could smell his tears, though his voice was carefully even.
"We took precautions, but we weren't careful enough. She got pregnant." His voice was stark. "We were doing our internships. We were so busy we hardly had time to say 'hello' to each other. She didn't notice until she was nearly three months pregnant because she assumed that the symptoms were from stress. I was so happy."
Samuel loved children. Somewhere I had a picture of him wearing a baseball cap with Elise Smithers, age five, riding him as if he had been a pony. He'd thrown away everything he believed in because he thought I, unlike a human or werewolf, could give him children who would live.
I tried not to let him know I was crying, too.
"We were doing internships." He was speaking quietly now. "It's time consuming and stressful. Long irregular hours. I was working with an orthopedic surgeon, nearly a two hour drive from our apartment. I came home one night and found a note."
I hugged him harder, as if I could have stopped what happened.
"A baby would have interfered with her schooling," he said. "We could try again, later. After... after she was established. After there was money. After..." He kept talking but he'd dropped into a foreign tongue, its liquid tone conveying his anguish better than the English words had.
The curse of a long life is that everyone around you dies. You have to be strong to survive, and stronger to want to do so. Bran had told me once that Samuel had seen too many of his children die.
"That infant tonight..."
"He'll live," I said. "Because of you. He'll grow up strong and healthy."