I was at the lodge, and Koenig was waiting. Not remarking on my nakedness, he gave me a T-shirt and sweatpants from his car.
“There’s a pump out back if you want to get cleaned up,” he said, though I couldn’t be dirty. This skin I wore right now was freshly minted.
But I went around the back of the lodge, wondering at my stride, my hands, my slow human heartbeat. When the water started to spurt from the old metal pump, I realized my palms and knees were grubby from when I’d changed back.
I scrubbed my skin and put on the clothing and took a drink from the pump. By then, my thoughts were swirling back to me, and they were wild and swelling and uncertain. I had done it — I had led the pack here, I had shifted back to me, I had been a wolf and kept myself true, or if not all of myself, at least my heart.
It was impossible, but here I was, standing at the lodge, wearing my skin.
And then I saw Beck’s death, and my breath was a ship pitching at sea, uneven and perilous.
I thought of Grace in the woods, both of us wolves. The feeling of running beside her, having what I’d dreamed of all of those years before I’d known her properly as a girl. Those hours spent as wolves together were exactly what I’d imagined they’d be, no words to get in the way. I’d wanted winters of that, but I knew now that we were destined, again, to spend those cold months apart. Happiness was a shard rammed in between my ribs.
And then there was Cole.
This impossible thing had only been made possible because of him. I closed my eyes.
Koenig found me beside the pump. “Are you all right?”
I opened my eyes, slowly. “Where are the others?”
“In the woods.”
I nodded. They were probably finding someplace they felt safe enough to rest.
Koenig crossed his arms. “Good job.”
I looked into the woods. “Thanks.”
“Sam, I know you don’t want to think about this right now, but they’ll come back for the bodies,” he told me. “If you want to get th —”
“Grace will shift soon,” I said. “I want to wait for her.”
The truth was, I needed Grace. I couldn’t go back there without her. And more than that, I needed to see her. I couldn’t trust my wolf memories to know she was all right until I saw her.
Koenig didn’t press me. We went into the lodge, and then he retrieved another set of clothing from his car and laid it outside of the lodge door like an offering. He returned with a styrofoam cup of convenience store coffee while drinking one of his own. It tasted awful, but I drank it, too grateful for the kindness to refuse.
Then I sat on one of the dusty chairs in our new home, my head in my hands, looking at the floor, sifting through my wolf memories. Remembering the last thing Cole had said to me: I’ll see you on the other side.
And then there was a soft knock on the door, and it was Grace, dressed in a slightly too-large T-shirt and sweats. Everything I’d meant to say to her — We lost Cole. Beck’s dead. You’re alive — dissolved on my tongue.
“Thank you,” Grace said to Koenig.
“Saving people’s lives,” Koenig said, “is my job.”
Then she crossed to me and hugged me, hard, while I buried my face in her shoulder. Finally, she pulled away and sighed. “Let’s go get them.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
SAM
In comparison to our journey that morning, it took no time at all to get back to the field where the helicopter had found us.
And there Beck was, his body a wreck. There were all kinds of internal parts lying outside of him that I’d never considered him having.
“Sam,” Grace said to me.
His body was so flat and thin looking now, like it had nothing left in it. And maybe it didn’t. Maybe it had all been annihilated from the blast. Those pieces, though. That he had dragged with him before he died. I remembered the bird that Shelby had killed in our driveway.
Sam.
The mouth was parted open, the tongue laying over teeth. Not like a dog would pant, but in a strange, unnatural way. The angle of the tongue made me think that the body must be stiff. Just like a dog hit by a car, really, just another dead body.
sam
say
his eyes, though
something
it had his eyes
sam
and I had so much left to say to him
you’re scaring me
I would be fine. I was fine. It was like I had known all along that he would die. Be dead. That we would find his body like this, ruined and undone, that he would be gone from me and we would never fix what had been broken. I would not cry, because this was just the way it would be. He would be gone, but he had been gone before, and this wouldn’t feel any different, this absolute gone, this forever gone, this gone without hope of spring and warm weather bringing him back to me.
I would feel nothing, because there was nothing to feel. I felt I’d lived this moment a thousand times, so many times that I had no energy or emotion left to bring to the scene. I tried out the idea in my head, Beck is dead, Beck is dead, Beck is dead, waiting for tears, for feeling, for anything.
The air smelled like spring around us, but it felt like winter.
GRACE
Sam just stood there, shaking, hands beside him, silent and staring down at the body at our feet. Something terrible in his face made tear after noiseless tear slide down my cheek.
“Sam,” I begged. “Please.”
Sam said, “I’m fine.”
And then he just crumpled gently to the ground. He was a curled form, hands up behind his head, pulling his face down to his knees, so far beyond crying that I didn’t know what to do.
I crouched beside him and wrapped my arms around him. He shook and shook, but no tears came.
“Grace,” he whispered, and in that one word, I heard agony. He was running a hand through his hair again and again, knotting and releasing fistfuls of it in his palm, ceaseless. “Grace, help me. Help me.”
But I didn’t know what to do.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
GRACE
I used Koenig’s phone to call Isabel.
Sam, Koenig, and I had spent an hour picking our way over the scrub, performing the morbid job of counting the wolf bodies and seeing if Sam recognized them. Seven wolves dead, including Beck. We hadn’t gotten to Shelby’s or Cole’s bodies yet.
Sam stood a few feet away, looking out into the woods, his hands linked behind his head. As always, it was a gesture that was at once intensely Sam but also Beck. I didn’t remember if I’d ever told Sam that. I didn’t know if it would help or hurt to tell him now.