At the end of the hall was the room Jack had died in. I reached in and turned on the bedroom light. Instantly the room turned the same abusive shade of yellow I remembered from before. It was clear that this was Cole’s room now. A pair of sweatpants walked across the floor unattended. Glasses and bowls and pens and papers covered every available horizontal surface. The bed was unmade, and riding on the crest of rumpled bedspread was a bound leather book, like a journal or diary.
I climbed into the bed — it smelled like Cole that day he’d come over and had been trying to smell nice — and lay on my back, thinking of Jack dying right here. It was a hard memory to conjure, and it wasn’t strong enough to bring emotion with it. That made me feel simultaneously relieved and sad; I was losing him.
After a few moments, I reached over and picked up the journal. A pen was put in it to hold the page. The idea that Cole might have his private thoughts written down was strange to me; I didn’t think he could really be honest, even on paper.
I opened it up and scanned the pages. It was at the same time nothing that I expected and everything. Honesty, but no emotions. A bland chronology of Cole’s life for the past month. Words jumped out at me.
Seizure. Chills. Moderate success. Uncontrollable shaking of hands, approx. two hours. Shifted for twenty-seven minutes. Vomiting extensive; suggest fasting?
It was what was unwritten that I wanted from this journal. Not what I needed, but what I wanted. I paged through, looking to see if his entries became wordier, but they didn’t. I did find what I needed, however, on the last page: Meet at Two Island parking area, then up 169 then north on Knife Lake.
It would take me awhile to find where they meant on Two Island Lake; it was massive. But now I knew where to start.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
GRACE
And now, finally, here he was, as I remembered him, after all this time.
I was standing in a woods made out of white-barked trees when he found me. My howls to him had gathered two other pack members by the time that we got within sight of each other. The closer we got, the more anxious I became; it was difficult to howl instead of whimper. The others tried to console me, but I kept showing them images of his eyes, trying to convey — something. I couldn’t believe it was really his voice. Not until I saw his eyes.
And then, there he was, panting, uncertain. He trotted into the clearing and hesitated when he saw the other two wolves flanking me. But his scent apparently identified him to them, and a flurry of images passed between us, him playing, him hunting, him among the pack.
I bounded to him, my tail up, ears pricked, ecstatic and quivering. He threw me an image so strong that it brought me up short. It was the trees around us, the white tree trunks with the black weals up the side, the leaves falling, humans standing among them.
I threw one back, me galloping here to find him, using his voice to guide me ever closer.
But again, he threw me the image.
I didn’t understand. Was this a warning — were these humans coming? Was it a memory? Had he seen them?
The image shifted, twisted: a boy and a girl, leaves in hands, the image soaked in wanting, longing. The boy had my wolf’s eyes. Something inside me hurt.
Grace.
I whined softly.
I didn’t understand, and now I felt that familiar pang of loss and hollowness inside me.
Grace.
It was a sound that meant nothing and everything. My wolf stepped carefully toward me, waiting for my ears to prick before he licked my chin and nosed my ears and muzzle. I felt like I had been waiting for a lifetime for him to be here; I was trembling with it. I couldn’t stop pressing against him, pushing my nose against his cheek, but it was okay, because he was just as insistent. Affection required touching and jostling.
Now, finally, he sent me an image that I could comprehend: us, our heads thrown back, singing together, calling the other wolves from all over the woods. It was toned with urgency, with danger. Those were both things that I was familiar with.
He tipped his head back and howled. It was a long, keening wail, sad and clear, and it went further toward making me understand that word Grace than his images had. After a moment, I opened my mouth and howled as well.
Together, our voices were louder. The other wolves pressed in against us, nosing, whimpering, and, finally, howling.
There wasn’t a place in the woods you wouldn’t hear us.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
COLE
It was five fifteen A.M.
I was so tired that I couldn’t imagine sleeping. I was that tired that made your hands shake and your eyes see lights at the corners of your vision, movement where there was none.
Sam was not here.
What a strange world this was, that I could come here to lose everything about myself, and instead lose everything but me. It was possible that I’d thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God’s fence. It would be, after all, a divinely ironic punishment to watch me learn to care and then destroy the things I cared about.
I didn’t know what I would do if this didn’t work. I realized, then, that somewhere along the way, I’d started to think that Sam could really do it. There hadn’t been a part of me, even a small part, that had believed otherwise, and so now this feeling I felt rumbling in my chest was disappointment and betrayal.
I couldn’t go back to that empty house. It was nothing without the people in it. And I couldn’t go back home to New York. It hadn’t been home for a long time. I was a man without a country. Somewhere along the way, I’d become the pack.
I blinked, rubbed my eyes. There was movement at the edge of my vision again, miscellaneous floaters, consolation prizes for actual sight in this dim light. I rubbed again, rested my head against the steering wheel.
But the movement was real.
It was Sam, his yellow eyes regarding the car warily.
And behind him were the wolves.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
SAM
Everything about this was wrong. We were in the open, we were bunched together, we were too near the vehicle. Instincts made my hackles rise. The light of the moon glowed inside the mist, making the world artificially bright. A few of the wolves started to retreat back into the darkness of the trees, but I broke into a run, herding them back snugly by the lake. Images flashed briefly into my mind: us, by the lake, all together. Me and her.
Grace. Grace. finding the wolves. the lake.
I’d done those things. What now? There was no what now.
Grace could smell my anxiety. She nosed my muzzle, leaned into me, but I wasn’t comforted.
The pack was restless. I had to break off again to drive a few stragglers back to the lake. The white she-wolf — Shelby — snarled at me but didn’t attack. The wolves kept looking up to the vehicle; there was a person in it.