Think, Cole. What is the logical answer?
My father’s voice.
I closed my eyes, imagined the sides of the pit, Grace, Sam, myself at the top. Simple. Sometimes the simplest solution was the best.
Opening my eyes, I grabbed two of the bins and upended them, dumping their contents onto the floor of the shed, abandoning everything in them but a towel. I nested the bins inside each other, along with the towel, and tucked the lids under my arm. It seemed like the best weapons in my life had always been the most innocuous: empty plastic bins, a blank CD, an unmarked syringe, my smile in a dark room.
I slammed the shed door behind me.
GRACE
I was dead, floating in water deeper than me and wider than me.
I was
bubbling breath
clay in my mouth
black-star vision
a moment
then a moment
then I was
Grace.
I was floating, dead in water colder than me and stronger than me.
Stay awake.
The warmth of his body tugged at my skin
ripped
Please, if you can understand me
I was inside out
everything was yellow, gold, smeared over my skin
Stay awake
I
was
awake
I
was
COLE
The pit was eerily silent when I got to it, and I half expected, for some reason, to find both Sam and Grace dead. Once upon a time, I would’ve stolen that feeling and written a song, but that time was long gone.
And they weren’t dead. Sam looked up at me when I crept to the edge of the hole. His hair was plastered to his head in the sort of unstudied disarray that hands normally lifted to fix without thinking, but of course Sam had no hands free. His shoulders shook with the cold and he ducked his chin to his chest as he shuddered. If I hadn’t known what he held in his arms, I would have never guessed that small, dark form was a live animal.
“Heads up,” I said.
Sam looked up just as I dropped the two bins down. He winced as water exploded upward, splattering my skin with cold drops. I felt the wolf inside me jerk at the sensation, dissipating almost instantly. It was a weird reminder that eventually, I’d turn back into a wolf, and not because I’d stuck myself with a needle or otherwise experimented on myself. Eventually I’d shift because I couldn’t help it.
“C-cole?” Sam asked. He sounded bewildered.
“Stand on the bins. One might be enough. How heavy is she?”
“N-not.”
“Then you can hand her up to me.” I waited while he moved stiffly through the water to the closest bin. It was bobbing on the surface; he was going to have to push it under the surface and turn it upside down in order for it to be a step. He tried to lean to grab the edge of it while still holding Grace; her head flopped away from his chest, limp and unresponsive. It was clear that he couldn’t manipulate the bin without putting Grace down, and to put Grace down was to drown her.
Sam stood there, just staring at the floating bin, his arms tremoring under Grace. He was absolutely motionless. His head was tilted slightly to the side, regarding the water or something just past it. Both of his shoulders were slanted steeply to point at the ground. Victor had trained me to recognize what that meant. Giving up was the same in every language.
There are times that you sat back and let others play their solo and there are times you got up and took control of the music. And the truth is, I’ve never looked as good sitting still.
I said, “Watch — !” and not really giving Sam a chance to react, I slid down into the hole. There was a brief moment of utter vertigo, where my body wasn’t sure how much farther I was falling and when I needed to brace myself, and then I caught my arm on the side just before pitching under the surface of the liquid mud. “Hot damn,” I breathed, because the water was cold, cold, cold.
Behind a layer of grit, Sam’s face was uncertain, but he saw what I meant to do. “B-better hurry.”
“You think?” I said. Sam was right, though — the cold water was jerking and twisting and poking fingers at me, prodding for the wolf inside me. I tipped the first bin and water poured into it, the weight tugging it down beneath the surface. Working by feel, trying to hold my twisting stomach still inside me, I turned the bin and pushed it into the sludge at the bottom. I reached for the other, let it fill with water, stacked it sideways on top. Grabbed the floating lid and pressed it on top.
“H-hold it steady,” Sam said. “L-let me get her and …”
He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. He shifted her in his arms and stepped onto the first bin. I reached out with my free hand to steady him. His arm was the exact temperature of the mud. Grace looked like a dead dog in his arms as he climbed onto the next. The bins teetered precariously; I was the only thing keeping them from tumbling under his weight.
“Fast,” I hissed. God, the water was cold; I couldn’t get used to it. I was going to turn into a wolf, and no I was not going to, not right now — I gripped the edge of the bins. Sam was on the bin with Grace and his shoulder was at the edge of the pit. He closed his eyes for a bare second. He whispered sorry, and then tossed the wolf’s body up and out of the pit, onto dry ground. It was only a few feet, but I saw that it pained him. He turned to me. He was still shaking with the cold.
I was so close to wolf that I could taste it in my mouth.
“You come out first,” Sam said, his teeth gritted to keep his voice steadier. “I don’t want you to change.”
It wasn’t really me who mattered, wasn’t me who absolutely had to climb out of this hole, but Sam didn’t leave room for argument. He clambered off the bins and splashed heavily into the water beside me. There was a knot the size of my head in my guts, clenching and unclenching. I felt like my fingers were inside my diaphragm, tiptoeing their way up my throat.
“Climb,” Sam said.
My scalp crept and crawled. Sam reached out and grabbed my jaw, hard enough that his fingertips were painful against my jawbone. He stared into my eyes, and I could feel the wolf in me responding to that challenge, this unspoken instinct that lent force to his command. I didn’t know this Sam.
“Climb,” he ordered. “Get out!”
And said like that, I had to. I crawled up the bins, my body twitching, my fingers finding the edge of the sinkhole. Every second that I was out of the water I felt more human and less wolf, though I could smell the stink of myself, of the near-shift. It washed over me every time I turned my head. Pausing a bit to gather my senses, I slithered out of the sinkhole on my stomach. It was not the sexiest move I’d ever performed, but I was impressed nonetheless. A few feet away, Grace lay on her side, motionless but breathing.