The words were meaningless to me, but obviously not to Sam. His eyes were too bright, and he blinked. “I don’t regret it. I love you, Beck.”
“I love you, too, Sam. You’re the best of us, and nothing can change that.”
Sam shuddered, the first sign I’d seen of the cold acting on him. “I have to go,” he said. “There’s no more time.”
“Good-bye, Sam.”
“Bye, Beck.”
Sam nodded to me and I hit the END button.
For a second he was still, blinking. Then he shook off all the blankets and coats so that his arms were free and he wrapped them around me as tightly as he could. I felt him shuddering, shuddering against me as he buried his face in my hair.
I said, uselessly, “Sam, don’t go.”
Sam cupped my face in his hands and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were yellow, sad, wolf, mine. “These stay the same. Remember that when you look at me. Remember it’s me. Please.”
Please don’t go.
Sam let go of me and spread out his arms, gripping the dash with one hand and the back of his seat with the other. He bowed his head and I watched his shoulders ripple and shake, watched the silent agony of the change until that one soft, awful cry, just when he lost himself.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE • SAM
33°F
crashing into the trembling void
stretching my hand to you
losing myself to frigid regret
is this fragile love
a way
to say
good-bye
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR • GRACE
32°F
When the paramedics arrived, I was curled on the passenger seat in a pile of coats, my hands pressed against my face.
“Miss, are you all right?”
I didn’t answer, just put my hands on my lap and looked at my fingers, covered with bloody tears.
“Miss, are you alone?”
I nodded.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE • SAM
32°F
I watched her, like I’d always watched her.
Thoughts were slippery and transient, faint scents on a frigid wind, too far away to catch.
She sat just outside the wood near the swing, curled small, until the cold shook her, and still she didn’t move. For a long time, I didn’t know what she was doing.
I watched her. Part of me wanted to go to her, though instinct sang against it. The desire sparked a thought which sparked a memory of golden woods, days floating around me and falling around me, days lying still and crumpled on the ground.
But I realized then what she was doing, folded there, trembling with the vicious cold. She was waiting, waiting for the cold to shake her into another form. Maybe that unfamiliar scent I caught from her was hope.
She waited to change, and I waited to change, and we both wanted what we couldn’t have.
Finally, night crept across the yard, lengthening the shadows, pulling them out of the woods until they covered the whole world.
I watched her.
The door opened. I shrank farther into the dark. A man came out, pulled the girl from the ground. The light from the house glistened off the frozen tracks on her face.
I watched her. Thoughts, distant, fled with her absence. After she disappeared into the house, there was only this: longing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX • GRACE
34°F
Their howls were the hardest thing to bear.
As terrible as the days were, the nights were worse; days were just listless preparations to somehow make it through another night populated by their voices. I lay in bed and hugged his pillow until there was no more of his scent caught in it. I slept in his chair in Dad’s study until it had my shape instead of his. I walked barefoot through the house in a private grief I couldn’t share with anyone.
The only person I could share with, Olivia, couldn’t be reached by phone, and my car—the car I couldn’t even bear to think of—was useless and broken.
And so it was just me in the house and the hours stretched out before me and the unchanging, leafless trees of Boundary Wood outside my window.
The night I heard him howl was the worst. The others began first, like they had for the last three nights. I sank down into the leather chair in Dad’s study, buried my face in the last Samscented T-shirt of his that I had, and pretended that it was just a recording of wolves, not real wolves. Not real people. And then, for the first time since the crash, I heard his howl join in with them.
It tore my heart out, because I heard his voice. The wolves sang slowly behind him, bittersweet harmony, but all I heard was Sam. His howl trembled, rose, fell in anguish.
I listened for a long time. I prayed for them to stop, to leave me alone, but at the same time I was desperately afraid that they would. Long after the other voices had dropped away, Sam kept howling, very soft and slow.
When he finally fell silent, the night felt dead.
Sitting still was intolerable. I stood up, paced, clenched and unclenched my hands into fists. Finally I took the guitar that Sam had played and I screamed and smashed it into pieces on Dad’s desk.
When Dad came down from his room, he found me sitting in the middle of a sea of splintered wood and snapped strings, like a boat carrying music had crashed on a rocky shore.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN • GRACE
35°F
The first time I picked up my phone after the crash, it was snowing. Light, delicate flakes drifted by the black square of my window, like flower petals. I wouldn’t have picked it up, but it was the one person I had been trying to contact since the crash. “Olivia?”
“G-gr-r-ace?” Olivia, barely recognizable. She was sobbing.
“Olivia, shh—what’s wrong?” That was a stupid question. I knew what was wrong with her.
“Re-remember I told you I knew about the wolves?” She was taking big gasps of air between the words. “I didn’t tell you about the hospital. Jack—”
“Bit you,” I said.
“Yes,” Olivia sobbed out the word. “I didn’t think anything would happen, because days went by and I felt the same!”
My limbs fell slack. “You changed?”
“I—I can’t—I—”
I closed my eyes, imagining the scene. God. “Where are you now?”
“At the b-bus stop.” She paused, sniffing. “It’s c-cold.”
“Oh, Olivia. Olivia, come over here. Stay with me. We’ll figure this out. I’d come, but I don’t have a car yet.”
Olivia began to sob again.
I stood up and shut my bedroom door. Not that Mom would hear me; she was upstairs, anyway. “Olivia, it’s okay. I’m not going to freak out. I saw Sam change and I didn’t freak out. I know what it’s like. Calm down, okay? I can’t come get you. I don’t have a car. You’re going to have to drive over here.”