My parents. Oh, God. My parents. I remembered standing in their kitchen, feeling the wolf climbing out of me, fighting with them about Sam. I remembered stuffing my backpack full of clothing and running away to Beck’s house. I remembered choking on my own blood….
Grace Brisbane.
I’d forgotten all of it as a wolf. And I was going to forget it all again.
I knelt, because standing seemed suddenly difficult, and clutched my arms around my bare legs. A brown spider crawled across my toes before I had a chance to react. Birds kept singing overhead. Dappled sunlight, hot where it came through full strength, played across the forest floor. A warm spring breeze hummed through the new green leaves of the branches. The forest sighed again and again around me. While I was gone, nature moved on, normal as always, but here I was, a small, impossible reality, and I didn’t know where I belonged or what I was supposed to do anymore.
Then, a warm breeze, smelling almost unbearably of cheese biscuits, lifted my hair and presented me with an option. Someone had clearly been feeling optimistic about this fair weather and had hung out a line of clothing to dry at the brick rambler next door. My eye was caught by the garments as the wind fluffed them. A line of neatly pinned-up possibilities. Whoever lived in the rambler was clearly a few sizes larger than me, but one of the dresses looked like it had a tie around the waist. Which meant it could work. Except, of course, it meant stealing someone’s clothing.
I had done a lot of things that a lot of people might not consider strictly right, but stealing wasn’t one of them. Not like this. Someone’s nice dress that they probably had to wash by hand and hang up to dry. And they had underwear and socks and pillowcases up on the line, too, which meant they were probably too poor to have a dryer. Was I really willing to take someone’s Sunday dress so I would have a chance at getting back to Mercy Falls? Was that really the person I was now?
I’d give it back. When I was done.
I crept along the woodline, feeling exposed and pale, trying to get a better look at my prey. The smell of cheese biscuits — probably what had drawn me as a wolf in the first place — suggested to me that someone must be home. No one could abandon that smell. Now that I’d caught the scent, it was hard for me to think of anything else. I forced myself to focus on the problem at hand. Were the makers of the cheese biscuits watching? Or the neighbors? I could stay mostly out of sight, if I was clever.
My unlucky victim’s backyard was a typical one for the houses near Boundary Wood, littered with the usual suspects: tomato cages, a hand-dug barbecue pit, television antennae with wires leading to nowhere. Push mower half covered with a tarp. A cracked plastic kiddie pool filled with funky-looking sand, and a family of lawn furniture with plasticky sunflower-printed covers. A lot of stuff, but nothing really useful as cover.
Then again, they’d been oblivious enough for a wolf to steal trash off their back step. Hopefully they were oblivious enough for a na**d high school girl to nick a dress from their clothesline.
I took a deep breath, wished for a single, powerful moment that I could be doing something easy like taking a pop quiz in Calculus or ripping a Band-Aid off an unshaved leg, and then darted into the yard. Somewhere, a small dog began to bark furiously. I grabbed a handful of dress.
It was over before I knew it. Somehow I was back in the woods, stolen garment balled in my hands, my breath coming fast, my body hidden in a patch of what may or may not have been poison sumac.
Back at the house, someone shouted at the dog to Shut up before I put you out with the trash!
I let my heart settle down. Then, guiltily and triumphantly, I slid the dress over my head. It was a pretty blue flowered thing, too light for the season, really, and still a little damp. I had to cinch the back up quite a bit to make it fit me. I was almost presentable.
Fifteen minutes later, I had taken a pair of clogs off another neighbor’s back steps (one of the clogs had dog crap stuck to one heel, which was probably why they’d been put outside to begin with) and I was strolling along the road casually, like I lived there. Using my wolf senses, giving in like Sam had showed me so long ago, I could create a far more detailed picture of the surrounding area in my head than I could with my eyes. Even with all this information, I had no real idea where I was, but I knew this: I was nowhere near Mercy Falls.
But I had a plan, sort of. Get out of this neighborhood before someone recognized their dress and clogs walking away. Find a business or some kind of landmark to get my bearings, hopefully before the clogs gave me a blister. Then: somehow get back to Sam.
It wasn’t the greatest of plans, but it was all I had.
CHAPTER TWO
ISABEL
I measured time by counting Tuesdays.
Three Tuesdays until school was out for the summer.
Seven Tuesdays since Grace had disappeared from the hospital.
Fifty-five Tuesdays until I graduated and got the hell out of Mercy Falls, Minnesota.
Six Tuesdays since I’d last seen Cole St. Clair.
Tuesdays were the worst day of the week in the Culpeper household. Fight day. Well, every day could be a fight day in our house, but Tuesday was the surefire bet. It was coming up on a year since my brother, Jack, had died, and after a family screamathon that had spanned three floors, two hours, and one threat of divorce from my mother, my father had actually started going to group counseling with us again. Which meant every Wednesday was the same: my mother wearing perfume, my father actually hanging up the phone for once, and me sitting in my father’s giant blue SUV, trying to pretend the back didn’t still smell like dead wolf.
Wednesdays, everyone was on their best behavior. The few hours following counseling — dinner out in St. Paul, some mindless shopping or a family movie — were things of beauty and perfection. And then everyone started to drift away from that ideal, hour by hour, until, by Tuesday, there were explosions and fist-fights on set.
I usually tried to be absent on Tuesdays.
On this particular one, I was a victim of my own indecision. After getting home from school, I couldn’t quite bring myself to call Taylor or Madison to go out. Last week I’d gone down to Duluth with both of them and some boys they knew and spent two hundred dollars on shoes for my mother, one hundred dollars on a shirt for myself, and let the boys spend a third of that on ice cream we didn’t eat. I hadn’t really seen the point then, other than to shock Madison with my cavalier credit card wielding. And I didn’t see the point now, with the shoes languishing at the end of Mom’s bed, the shirt fitting weirdly now that I had it at home, and me unable to remember the boys’ names other than the vague memory that one of them started with J.