The room stank of wolf. For a dizzying moment, it was me and Sam, my face buried in his ruff, one thousand miles from here.
Sam squeezed his eyes shut for a second, and when he opened them, he said, “Sorry. Grace—I know this is an awful thing to ask. But could we go to Beck’s? I have to see him again, if this is—” He stopped.
But I knew what he’d been about to say. The end.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO • GRACE
33°F
Driving on cloudy nights had always unsettled me. It was as if the low cloud cover not only hid the moonlight but also robbed the headlights of any power, siphoning away their light the second it hit the air. Now, with Sam, I felt like I was driving down a black tunnel that kept getting ever narrower. The sleet tapped the windshield; both my hands gripped the wheel as the car tires bucked on the slick road.
The heat was on absolute high, and I wanted to believe that Sam looked a little better. Isabel had poured his coffee into a travel mug, and I’d forced him to drink it as we drove, despite his nausea. It seemed to be helping, more than the external heat sources had, anyway. I took this as a possible reinforcement of our new theory of internal heat.
“I’m thinking more about your theory,” Sam said, as if reading my mind. “It makes a lot of sense. But you’d have to get your hands on something to induce the fever—maybe meningitis, like Isabel said—and I’m thinking that’s going to be unpleasant.”
“Aside from the fever itself, you mean?”
“Yeah. Aside from that. Like dangerously unpleasant. Especially considering you can’t exactly do animal testing first to find out if it’s going to work.” Sam glanced at me quickly to see if I had gotten the joke.
“Hardly funny.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Granted.”
Sam reached over and touched my cheek. “But I’d be willing to try it. For you. To stay with you.”
He said it so simply, so unaffectedly, that it took me a moment to get the statement’s full impact. I wanted to say something, but I felt like I had no breath at all.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Grace. It’s not good enough anymore to watch you from the woods, not now that I’ve been with you—the real thing. I can’t just watch anymore. I’d rather risk whatever could happen—”
“Death—”
“Yeah, death—than watch all this slip away. I can’t do that, Grace. I want to try. Only—I think I’d have to be human for it to have a chance. It doesn’t seem like you could kill the wolf while you were the wolf.”
I was trembling. Not because it was cold, but because it sounded possible. Horrible, deadly, awful—possible. And I wanted it. I wanted to never have to give up this feeling of his fingers on my cheek or the sad sound of his voice. I should’ve told him, No, it’s not worth it, but that would’ve been a lie of such epic proportions that I couldn’t do it.
“Grace,” Sam said, abruptly. “If you want me.”
“What?” I said, and then realized what he had said. It seemed impossible that he had to ask. I couldn’t be that hard to read. Then I realized—stupid, slow me—that he wanted to hear it. He told me all the time how he felt, and I was just…stoic. I don’t think I’d ever told him. “Of course I do. Sam, I love you, you know I do. I’ve loved you for years. You know that.”
Sam curled his arms around himself. “I do. But I wanted to hear you say it.” He reached toward my hand before realizing I couldn’t take it off the wheel; instead he made a knot of my hair around his fingers and rested his fingertips against my neck. I imagined I could feel his pulse and my pulse syncing up through that tiny bit of contact. This could be mine forever.
He slouched back in his seat, looking tired, and leaned his face on his shoulder to look at me while he played with my hair. He started to hum a song, and then, after a few bars, he sang it. Quietly, sort of half-sung, half-spoken, incredibly gentle. I didn’t catch all the words, but it was about his summer girl. Me. Maybe his forever girl. His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an icecovered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me.
The Bronco lurched violently, and a heartbeat later, I saw the deer roll up over the hood. A crack raced across the windshield, exploding a second later into a thousand spiderwebbed fractures. I hit the brake, but nothing happened. Not even a whisper of a response.
Turn, Sam said, or maybe I imagined him saying it, but when I turned the wheel, the Bronco kept going straight, sliding, sliding, sliding. I remembered, in the back of my head, my dad saying, Steer into the skid, and I did, but it was too late.
There was a sound like a bone breaking, and there was a dead deer on the car and in the car and glass was everywhere and God, a tree shoved through my hood, and there was blood on my knuckles from the glass, and I was shaking and Sam was looking at me with this look on his face like oh, no, and then I realized that the car wasn’t running and there was frigid air trickling in the jagged hole in the windshield.
I wasted a moment staring at him. Then I tried the engine, which wouldn’t even respond when I turned the key. I said: “We call 911. They’ll come get us.”
Sam’s mouth made a sad little line, and he nodded, as if that really would work. I punched in the number and reported the accident, talking fast, trying to guess where we might be, and then I took off my coat, careful not to drag the sleeves over my bloody knuckles, and I threw it on top of Sam. He sat quietly, unmoving, as I grabbed a blanket from the backseat and threw it on top of him, too, and then I slid across the seat and leaned against him, hoping to lend my body heat to him.
“Call Beck, please,” Sam said, and I did. I put it on speakerphone and set it on the dash.
“Grace?” Beck’s voice.
“Beck,” Sam said. “It’s me.”
There was a pause, and then, “Sam. I—”
“There’s no time,” Sam said. “We’ve hit a deer. We’re wrecked.”
“God. Where are you? Is the car running?”
“Too far. We called 911. The engine’s dead.” Sam gave Beck a moment to realize what that meant. “Beck, I’m sorry I didn’t come by. There are things I need to say—”
“No, listen to me first, Sam. Those kids. I need you to know I recruited them. They knew. They knew all along. I didn’t do it against their will. Not like you. I’m so sorry, Sam. I’ve never stopped being sorry.”