“You were trying to see if I would recognize it, weren’t you?” I took another step, closing the distance between us. I could feel the heat of his body, even without touching him, in the increasing cold of the day. “You told me about this wood somehow. How did you show it to me?”
“I keep trying to tell you. You won’t listen. Because you’re stubborn. It’s how we speak—it’s the only words we have. Just pictures. Just simple little pictures. You have changed, Grace. Just not your skin. I want you to believe me.” His hands were still raised, but he was starting to grin at me in the failing light.
“So you only brought me here to see this.” I stepped forward again, and he stepped back.
“Do you like it?”
“Under false pretenses.” Another step forward; another back. The grin widened.
“So do you like it?”
“When you knew we wouldn’t come across anybody else.”
His teeth flashed in his grin. “Do you like it?”
I punched my hands into his chest. “You know I love it. You knew I would.” I went to punch him again, and he grabbed my wrists. For a moment we stood there like that, him looking down at me with the grin half-caught on his face, and me looking up at him: Still Life with Boy and Girl. It would’ve been the perfect moment to kiss me, but he didn’t. He just looked at me and looked at me, and by the time I realized I could just as easily kiss him, I noticed that his grin was slipping away.
Sam slowly lowered my wrists and released them. “I’m glad,” he said, very quietly.
My arms still hung by my sides, right where Sam had put them. I frowned at him. “You were supposed to kiss me.”
“I thought about it.”
I just kept looking at the soft, sad shape of his lips, looking just like his voice sounded. I was probably staring, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted him to kiss me and how stupid it was to want it so badly. “Why don’t you?”
He leaned over and gave me the lightest of kisses. His lips, cool and dry, ever so polite and incredibly maddening. “I have to get inside soon,” he whispered. “It’s getting cold.”
For the first time I paid attention to the icy wind that cut through my long sleeves. One of the frigid gusts hurled thousands of fallen leaves back into the air, and for a single second, I thought I smelled wolf.
Sam shuddered.
Squinting at his face in the dim light, I realized suddenly that his eyes were afraid.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE • SAM
37°F
We didn’t run back to the house. Running would’ve meant acknowledging something that I wasn’t ready to face in front of her—something that I was. Instead, we walked with a giant’s strides, dried leaves and branches snapping under our feet, our breaths drowning out the other sounds of the evening. Cold snaked under my collar, tightening my skin into goose bumps.
If I didn’t let go of her hand, I’d be all right.
A wrong turn would lead us away from the house, but I couldn’t concentrate on the trees around me. My vision flashed with jerky memories of humans shifting into wolves, hundreds of shifts over my years with the pack. The memory of the first time I’d seen Beck shift was vivid in my mind—more real than the screaming red sunset through the trees in front of Grace and me. I remembered the frigid white light streaming in the living room windows of Beck’s house, and I remembered the shaking line of his shoulders as he braced his arms against the back of the sofa.
I stood beside him, looking up, no words in my mouth.
“Take him out!” Beck shouted, his face toward the hallway but his eyes half-closed. “Ulrik, take Sam out of here!”
Ulrik’s fingers around my arm then were as tight as Grace’s fingers around my hand were now, pulling me through the woods, leading us back over the trail we’d left earlier. Night crouched in the trees, waiting to overtake us, cold and black. But Grace didn’t look away from the sun glowing through the trees as she headed toward it.
The brilliant nimbus of the sun half blinded me, making stark silhouettes of the trees, and suddenly I was seven again. I saw the star pattern of my old bedspread so clearly that I stumbled. My fingers clutched the fabric, balling and tearing it under my grip.
“Mama!” My voice broke on the second syllable. “Mama, I’m going to be sick!”
I was tangled on the floor in blankets and noise and puke, shaking and clawing at the floor, trying to hold on to something, when my mother came to the bedroom door, a familiar silhouette. I looked at her, my cheek resting against the floor, and I started to say her name, but no sound came out.
She dropped to her knees and she watched me change for the first time.
“Finally,” Grace said, tearing my brain back to the woods around us. She sounded out of breath, as if we’d been running. “There it is.”
I couldn’t let Grace see me change. I couldn’t change now.
I followed Grace’s gaze to the back of Beck’s house, a flash of warm red-brown in this chilly blue evening.
And now I ran.
Two steps from the car, all my hopes of getting warm in the Bronco were crushed in the moment it took for Grace to uselessly tug the locked door handle. Inside, the keys swung from the ignition with her effort. Grace’s face twisted with frustration.
“We’ll have to try the house,” she said.
We didn’t have to break into Beck’s house. He always left a spare key stuck in the weather lining of the back door. I tried not to think of the car keys hanging in the Bronco’s ignition; if we had them, I would’ve been warm again already. My hands shook as I pulled the spare key from the lining and tried to slide it into the dead bolt. I was hurting already. Hurry up, you idiot. Hurry up.
I just couldn’t stop shaking.
Grace carefully took the key from me, with not even a hint of fear, though she had to know what was happening. She closed one of her warm hands over my cold, shuddering ones, and with the other she shoved the key into the knob and unlocked it.
God, please let the power be on. Please let the heat be on.
Her hand on my elbow pushed me inside the dark kitchen. I couldn’t shed the cold; it clung to every bit of me. My muscles began to cramp and I put my fingers over my face, shoulders hunched.
“No,” Grace said, her voice even and firm, just like she was answering a simple question. “No, come on.”
She pulled me away from the door and shut it behind me. Her hand slid along the wall by the door, finding the light switches, and miraculously, the lights flickered on, coming to ugly, fluorescent life above us. Grace pulled on me again, dragging me farther away from the door, but I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to curl in on myself and give in. “I can’t, Grace. I can’t.”