“I’m not worried about that,” I assured him. “I’m just thinking we’d never know if there was anyone else here. The woods go on forever.”
Sam ran his fingers through my hair as if he were checking for more burrs, though I knew they were all gone, and he probably did, too. He paused, smiling at me, and then inhaled deeply. “Doesn’t smell like we’re alone.”
He looked at me, and I knew he was waiting for me to verify—to admit that if I tried, I could smell the scent of the pack’s hidden life all around us. Instead, I reached for his hand again. “Lead the way, bloodhound.”
Sam’s expression turned a bit wistful, but he led me through the underbrush, up a gradual hill. As he promised, it got better. The thorns thinned out and the trees grew taller and straighter, their branches not beginning until a few feet over our heads. The white, peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold. I turned to Sam, and his eyes reflected the same brilliant yellow back at me.
I stopped in my tracks. It was my woods. The golden woods I’d always imagined running away to. Sam, watching my face, dropped his hand out of mine and stepped back to look at me.
“Home,” he said. I think he was waiting for me to say something. Or maybe he wasn’t waiting for me to say something. Maybe he saw it on my face. I didn’t have anything to say—I just looked around at the shimmering light and the leaves hanging on the branches like feathers.
“Hey.” Sam caught my arm, looking at my face sideways, as if searching for tears. “You look sad.”
I turned in a slow circle; the air seemed dappled and vibrant around me. I said, “I used to always imagine coming here, when I was younger. I just can’t figure out how I would’ve seen it.” I probably wasn’t making any sense, but I kept talking, trying to reason it out. “The woods behind my house don’t look like this. No birches. No yellow leaves. I don’t know how I would recognize it.”
“Maybe someone told you about it.”
“I think I would remember someone telling me every little detail about this part of the woods, down to the color of the glittering air. I don’t even know how someone could’ve told me all that.”
Sam said, “I told you. Wolves have funny ways of communicating. Showing each other pictures when they’re close to one another.”
I turned back to where he was standing, a dark blot against the light, and gave him a look. “You aren’t going to stop, are you?”
Sam just gazed at me steadily, the silent lupine stare that I knew so well, sad and intent.
“Why do you keep bringing it back up?”
“You were bitten.” He walked in a slow circle around me, scuffing up leaves with his foot, glancing at me underneath his dark eyebrows.
“So?”
“So it’s about who you are. It’s about you being one of us. You couldn’t have recognized this place if you weren’t a wolf, too, Grace. Only one of us would’ve been able to see what I showed you.” His voice was so serious, his eyes so intense. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t even talk to you right now if you weren’t like us. We aren’t supposed to talk about who we are with regular people. It’s not as if we have a ton of rules to live by, but Beck told me that’s one rule we just don’t break.”
That didn’t make sense to me. “Why not?”
Sam didn’t say anything, but his fingers touched his neck where he’d been shot; as he did, I saw the pale, shiny scars on his wrist. It seemed wrong for someone as gentle as Sam to have to always wear evidence of human violence. I shivered in the growing chill of the afternoon. Sam’s voice was soft. “Beck’s told me stories. People kill us in all kinds of awful ways. We die in labs and we get shot and we get poisoned. It might be science that changes us, Grace, but all people see is magic. I believe Beck. We can’t tell people who aren’t like us.”
I said, “I don’t change, Sam. I’m not really like you.” Disappointment stuck a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.
He didn’t answer. We stood together in the wood for a long moment before he sighed and spoke again.
“After you were bitten, I knew what would happen. I waited for you to change, every night, so I could bring you back and keep you from getting hurt.” A chilly gust of wind lifted his hair and sent a shower of golden leaves glimmering down around him. He spread out his arms, letting them fall into his hands. He looked like a dark angel in an eternal autumn wood. “Did you know you get one happy day for every one you catch?”
I didn’t know what he meant, even after he opened his fist to show me the quivering leaves crumpled in his palm.
“One happy day for every falling leaf you catch.” Sam’s voice was low.
I watched the edges of the leaves slowly unfold, fluttering in the breeze. “How long did you wait?”
It would’ve been unbearably romantic if he’d had the courage to look into my face and say it, but instead, he dropped his eyes to the ground and scuffed his boot in the leaves—countless possibilities for happy days—on the ground. “I haven’t stopped.”
And I should’ve said something romantic, too, but I didn’t have the courage, either. So instead, I watched the shy way he was chewing his lip and studying the leaves, and said, “That must’ve been very boring.”
Sam laughed, a funny, self-deprecating laugh. “You did read a lot. And spent too much time just inside the kitchen window, where I couldn’t see you very well.”
“And not enough time mostly na**d in front of my bedroom window?” I teased.
Sam turned bright red. “That,” he said, “is so not the point of this conversation.”
I smiled sweetly at his embarrassment, beginning to walk again, kicking up golden leaves. I heard him scuffing leaves behind me. “And what was the point of it again?”
“Forget it!” Sam said. “Do you like this place or not?”
I stopped in my tracks, spinning to face him. “Hey.” I pointed at him; he raised his eyebrows and stopped in his tracks. “You didn’t think Jack would be here at all, did you?”
His thick dark eyebrows went up even farther.
“Did you really intend to look for him at all?”
He held his hands up as if in surrender. “What do you want me to say?”