I suddenly felt incredibly lucky to be waiting. Because no matter how it gnawed at me, demanded my wakefulness, stole my thoughts, at the end of this endless waiting was Grace. What was Cole waiting for?
“Now?” Cole asked.
I stopped playing the guitar. “Now what?”
Cole shoved himself up and leaned back on his hands, still looking up. He sang, completely unself-conscious — but of course, why would he be? I was an audience two thousand bodies smaller than he was used to.
“One thousand ways to say good-bye, one thousand ways to cry …”
I strummed the A minor chord that started the song and Cole smiled a self-deprecating smile as he realized he’d started in the wrong key. I played the chord again, and this time I sang it, and I wasn’t self-conscious, either, because Cole had already heard me through my car speakers and thus couldn’t be disappointed:
One thousand ways to say good-bye
One thousand ways to cry
One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside
I say good-bye good-bye good-bye
I shout it out so loud
’Cause the next time that I find my voice
I might not remember how
As I sang good-bye good-bye good-bye, Cole began to sing the harmonies that I’d recorded on my demo. The guitar was a little out of tune — just the B string, it was always the B string — and we were a little out of tune, but there was something comfortable and companionable about it.
It was one frayed rope thrown across the chasm between us. Not enough to get across, but maybe just enough to tell that it wasn’t as wide as I’d originally thought.
At the end, Cole made the hissed haaaa haaaaa haaaa of fake audience noise. Then, abruptly, he stopped and looked at me, his head cocked. His eyes were narrowed, listening.
And then I heard them.
The wolves were howling. Their distant voices cadenced and melodic, discordant for a moment before falling back into harmonies. Tonight they sounded restless but beautiful — waiting, like the rest of us, for something we couldn’t quite name.
Cole was looking at me still, so I said, “That’s their version of the song.”
“Needs some work,” Cole replied. He looked at my guitar. “But not bad.”
We sat in silence then, listening to the wolves howling between bursts of thunder. I tried unsuccessfully to pick out Grace’s voice among them, but heard only the voices I’d grown up with. I tried to remind myself that I’d just heard her real voice on the phone earlier that afternoon. It didn’t mean anything that her voice was absent now.
“We don’t need the rain,” Cole said.
I frowned at him.
“Back into the compound, I suppose.” Cole slapped his arm and flicked an invisible insect off his skin with deft fingers. He stood up, tucked his thumbs into his back pockets, and faced the woods. “Back in New York, Victor —”
He stopped. Inside the house, I heard the phone ring. I made a mental note to ask him What about New York? but when I got inside, it was Isabel on the phone, and she told me that the wolves had killed a girl and that it wasn’t Grace but I needed to turn on the damn television.
I turned it on and Cole and I stood in front of the couch. He crossed his arms while I thumbed through the channels.
The wolves were indeed on the news again. Once upon a time, a girl had been attacked by the wolves of Mercy Falls. The coverage then had been brief and speculative. The word then was accident.
Now it was ten years later and a different girl was dead and the coverage was never-ending.
The word now was extermination.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GRACE
This was the nightmare.
Everything around me was solid black. Not the shape-filled black of my room at night, but the absolute depthless dark of a place with no light. Water splattered onto my bare skin, the driving sting of rain and then the heavier splash of water dripping from somewhere overhead.
All around me, I could hear the sound of the rain falling in a forest.
I was human.
I had no idea where I was.
Suddenly, light burst around me. Crouched and shaking, I had just enough time to see a forked snake of lightning strike beyond the black branches above me, my wet and dirty fingers outstretched before me, and the purple ghosts of tree trunks around me.
Then black.
I waited. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn’t prepared when —
The crack of thunder sounded like it came from somewhere inside me. It was so loud that I clapped my hands over my ears and ducked my head to my chest before the logical part of me took over. It was thunder. Thunder couldn’t hurt me.
But my heart was loud in my ears.
I stood there in the blackness — it was so dark that it hurt — and wrapped my arms around my body. Every instinct in me was telling me to find shelter, to make myself safe.
And then, again: lightning.
A flash of purple sky, a gnarled hand of branches, and
eyes.
I didn’t breathe.
It was dark again.
Black.
I closed my eyes, and I could still see the figure in negative: a large animal, a few yards away. Eyes on me, unblinking.
Now the hairs on my arms were slowly prickling, a slow, silent warning. Suddenly, all I could think about was that time when I was eleven. Sitting on the tire swing, reading. Glancing up and seeing eyes — and then being dragged from the swing.
Thunder, deafening.
I strained to hear the sound of an approach.
Lightning illuminated the world again. Two seconds of light, and there they were. Eyes, colorless as they reflected the lightning. A wolf. Three yards away.
It was Shelby.
The world went dark.
I started to run.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SAM
I woke up.
I blinked, my eyes momentarily mystified by the brightness of my bedroom light in the middle of the night. Slowly, my thoughts assembled themselves, and I remembered leaving the light on, thinking I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.
But here I was, my eyes uncertain from sleep, my desk lamp casting lopsided shadows from one side of the room. My notebook had slid partially off my chest, all the words inside it off-kilter. Above me, the paper cranes spun on their strings in frantic, lumpy circles, animated by the air vent in the ceiling. They looked desperate to escape their individual worlds.
When it became obvious that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I stretched my leg out and used my bare foot to turn on the CD player on the table at the end of my bed. Finger-picked guitar sounded through the speakers, each note in time with my heart. Lying sleepless in this bed reminded me of nights before Grace, when I’d lived in the house with Beck and the others. Back then, the population of paper cranes above me, scrawled with memories, had been in no danger of outgrowing their habitat as I slowly counted down toward my expiration date, the day when I’d lose myself to the woods. I’d stay awake long into the night, lost with wanting.