Forever.

(NOTE: ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS STILL DICTATE SHIFT BACK TO WOLF).

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN.

* SAM *

I felt dirty after Beck shifted back, like I"d been complicit in a crime. I was reminded so acutely of my life before, when I"d hidden from the winter and when I"d had my family, that I could feel my thoughts slipping away to protect me. I wasn"t the only one, apparently: Cole announced that he was "going for a drive" and left in Ulrik"s old BMW. After he"d gone, Grace trailed after me as I made bread as if my life depended on it, and then I left her watching the oven as I went to shower. To scrub the memories off me. To remind myself that, for now, I had my hands and my human skin and my face.

I wasn"t sure how long I"d been in there when I heard the bathroom door open and close.

"This is good," Grace said. The closed toilet lid creaked as she tried to find a way to make it a comfortable seat. "Good job, Sam."

I couldn"t see her, but I could smell the bread. I was oddly discomfited by the knowledge that she was in the room while I was standing there under the running water. Somehow taking a shower with her in the room was more intimate than s.e.x. I felt about one thousand times more naked, even behind the dark shower curtain.

I looked at the bar of soap in my hand. I applied it to my ribs. "Thanks."

Grace was quiet, inches away on the other side of the curtain. I couldn"t see her, so she couldn"t see me.

"Are you all clean in there?" Grace asked.

"Oh my G.o.d, Grace," I replied, and she laughed.

There was another pause. I washed between my fingers. One of my fingernails was battered from rubbing against a guitar string. I studied it to see if I needed to do something about it; it was hard to properly diagnose it in the orange half-light provided by the shower curtain.

"Rachel said she would go with me, tomorrow, to see my parents," Grace said. "Tomorrow night. That"s when she"s free."

"Are you nervous?" I was nervous, and I wasn"t even going, by Grace"s request.

"I dunno. It just has to happen. It"ll get you off the hook. Plus, I need to be officially alive for Olivia"s funeral. Rachel said they cremated her." She stopped. There was a long s.p.a.ce full of nothing but the water hitting me and the tile. She said, "This bread is excellent."

I got it. Subject change. "Ulrik taught me how to make it."

"What a talented guy. Speaks with a German accent and makes bread." On the other side, she poked the shower curtain; when it touched my bare hip, I shied away in an undignified fashion. "You know, this could be us, in five years."

I had no body parts left to clean. I was a prisoner in the shower unless I could reach my towel from behind the curtain or persuade Grace to hand it to me. I didn"t think she would hand it to me. "Making bread with a German accent?" I suggested.

"That"s exactly what I meant," she said. I heard the withering tone in her voice. I was glad to hear it. I could use levity at the moment.

"Will you give me my towel?"

"You have to come and get it."

"Vixen," I muttered. There was hot water left. I stood in it and looked at the uneven grout on the tiles under the showerhead. My fingers were getting pruney and the hair on my legs had stuck together to form soaked, matted arrows toward my feet.

"Sam?" Grace said. "Do you think Cole"s right about the cure? About the meningitis working if you have it while you"re a wolf? Do you think I should try it?"

This was too hard of a question to answer after the evening with Beck. Yes, I wanted her cured. I wanted more proof than me, though, that it would work. I wanted something to make the fate Jack had suffered a lower percentage of the possible outcomes. I had risked everything for this, but now that it came to it for Grace, I didn"t want her to do the same. But how could she have a normal life without it?

"I don"t know. I want more information." It sounded formal, like something I"d say to Koenig. I am collecting more data.

"I mean, we don"t have to worry about it until winter, anyway," she said. "I was just wondering if you felt cured."

I didn"t know what to tell her. I didn"t feel cured. I felt like what Cole said - almost cured. A war survivor with a phantom limb. I still felt that wolf that I"d been: living in my cells, sleeping uneasily, waiting to be coaxed out by weather or a rush of adrenaline or a needle in my veins. I didn"t know if that was real or suggested. I didn"t know if one day I would feel secure in my skin, taking my human body for granted.

"You look cured," Grace said.

Just her face was visible at the end of the shower curtain, looking in at me. She grinned and I yelled. Grace reached in just far enough to shut off the tap.

"I"m afraid," she said, whipping the shower curtain open all the way and presenting me with my towel, "this is the sort of thing you"ll have to put up with in your old age."

I stood there, dripping, feeling utterly ridiculous, Grace standing opposite, smiling with her challenge. There was nothing for it but to get over the awkwardness. Instead of taking the towel, I took her chin with my wet fingers and kissed her. Water from my hair ran down my cheeks and onto our lips. I was getting her shirt all wet, but she didn"t seem to mind. A lifetime of this seemed rather appealing. I said gallantly, "That better be a promise."

Grace stepped into the shower in her sock feet and wrapped her arms around my damp chest. "It"s a guarantee."

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT.

* ISABEL *

I heard a soft knock on the mudroom door. Stepping over boots and a trowel and a bag of bird seed, I opened it.

Cole St. Clair stood in the black rectangle of the doorway, his hands in his pockets.

"Ask me in," he said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE.

* GRACE *

It was properly dark by the time Rachel and I got to my parents" house on Sunday night. Rachel, due to fascinating driving habits frowned upon by the Minnesota State Police, didn"t have a driver"s license, so I had had to pick her up. She"d showed me a beaded purse with a smiley face on the side by means of a h.e.l.lo and smiled a thin white smile in the dark. It was the dark, I thought, that made it so surreal to be pulling up in my parents" driveway. Because with only the porch light to illuminate the front of the rambler and a corner of the drive, everything about the house looked precisely the same as the night that I left.

I pulled up the parking brake beside the car I"d gotten with the insurance money from my last one - I remembered, all of a sudden, yet another night, the one when a deer had smashed through my Bronco"s windshield and I"d thought that I was losing Sam to the wolves for good. That seemed like a million nights ago and hours ago at the same time. Tonight felt like a beginning and an ending.

Next to me, Rachel opened her beaded smiley face purse and removed some strawberry lip gloss. She applied two coats of fruity armor with fierce determination, and ferociously zipped it back into the purse. Then we marched to the front door, sisters in battle, the sounds of our shoes on the concrete sidewalk our only war cry. I didn"t have a key, so I had to knock.

Now that I was here, I really didn"t want to go through with it.

Rachel looked at me. She said, "You"re like my favorite older sister, which doesn"t make sense, because you"re the same age as me."

I was flattered, but I said, "Rachel, you say weird things."

We both laughed, and our laughs were uncertain creations with almost no sound.

Rachel dabbed her lips on her sleeve; in the yellow glow offered by the moth-filled porch light, I saw evidence of where she"d done it earlier, a small collection of kisses on her cuff.

I tried to think of what to say. I tried to think of which of them would open the door. It was almost nine. Maybe neither of them would open it. Maybe - It was Dad who opened the door. Before he had a chance to react to the fact that it was me, my mother shouted from the living room, "Don"t let the kitten out!"

Dad stared at Rachel and then at me, and in the meantime, a brown tabby cat the size of a rabbit crept around the doorjamb and shot into the yard beyond us. I felt ridiculously betrayed by the presence of the cat. Their only daughter had disappeared and they"d gotten a kitten to replace me?

And it was the first thing I said. "You got a cat?"

My father was shocked enough by my presence that he answered honestly. "Your mother was lonely."

"Cats are very low maintenance." It was not the warmest of replies, but he hadn"t exactly delivered the warmest of opening lines, either. I had expected, somehow, to find evidence of my absence on his face, but he looked as he always did. My father sold expensive real estate and he looked like he sold expensive real estate. He had well-groomed hair from the "80s and a smile that encouraged sizable down payments. I didn"t know what I was expecting. Bloodshot eyes or pouches beneath his eyes or ten years added to him or weight gain or weight loss - just some concrete evidence of time pa.s.sing without me, and it not being easy for him. That was all I wanted. Concrete proof of their anguish. Anything to prove that I was making the wrong decision confronting them tonight. But there was nothing. I sort of wanted to just go then. They"d seen me. They knew I was alive. I"d done my job.

But then my mother came around the corner of the hall. "Who is that?" She froze. "Grace?" And her voice broke on that one syllable, so I knew I was coming in after all.

Before I had time to decide if I was ready for a hug, I was in one, my mother"s arms so tightly around my neck and my face pressed into the fuzz of her sweater. I heard her say, G.o.d thank you Grace thank you. She was either laughing or crying, but when I pulled back I couldn"t see either a smile or tears. Her lower lip trembled. I hugged my arms to keep them still.

I hadn"t thought coming back would be so hard.

I ended up sitting at the breakfast table with my parents across from me. There were a lot of memories living at this table, usually me sitting by myself, but fond nonetheless. Nostalgic, anyway. The kitchen smelled weird, though, like too much take-out food, odors from eating it, storing it, throwing it away. Never quite the same as the smell you got from actually using a kitchen to cook. The unfamiliar scent made the experience seem dreamlike, foreign and familiar all at once.

I thought Rachel had abandoned me for the car, but after the first couple moments of silence, she came down the hall from the front door, holding the tabby kitten under her arm. She wordlessly put it down on the couch and came to stand behind me. She looked as if she would rather be anywhere but here. It was rather valiant, and my heart sort of swelled to see it. Everybody ought to have friends like Rachel.

"This is very shocking, Grace," my father said, across from me. "You"ve put us through a lot."

My mother began to cry.

I changed my mind, right then. I no longer wanted to see evidence of their anguish anymore. I didn"t want to watch my mother cry. I had spent so long hoping that they had missed me, wishing that they loved me enough that it would hurt that I was gone, but now that I saw my mother"s face, guilt and sympathy were making a solid lump in my throat. I just wanted to have had the conversation already and be back on the way home. This was too hard.

I started, "I wasn"t trying to put you -"

"We thought you were dead," my father said. "And all this time, you were with him. Just letting us -"

"No," I said. "I was not with him all this time!"

"We"re just relieved that you"re all right," Mom said.

But Dad wasn"t there yet. "You could have called, Grace," he said. "You could have just called so we knew you were alive. That was all we needed."

I believed him. He didn"t really need me. He needed proof of me. "Last time I tried to talk to you, you told me I couldn"t see Sam until I was eighteen, and completely talked over the top of m -"

"I"m calling the police to tell them you"re here," Dad said. He was halfway out of his seat.

"Dad," I snapped. "First of all, they know. Second of all, you"re doing it. You"re not even listening to half of what I say."

"I am not doing anything," he said. He looked at Rachel. "Why did you bring Rachel?"

Rachel twitched a bit at the sound of her name. She said, "I"m the referee."

Dad put his hands up in the air like he gave up, which is what people do when they"re not really giving up, and then he pressed them against the table like we were having a seance and the table was trying to move.

"We don"t need a referee," Mom said. "There"s not going to be anything unpleasant."

"Yes, there is," Dad said. "Our daughter ran away from home. That"s a crime, Amy. An actual crime in the eyes of Minnesota law. I"m not going to pretend it didn"t happen. I"m not going to pretend that she didn"t run away to live with her boyfriend."

I wasn"t sure what it was about that statement that made me suddenly see everything with perfect clarity. Dad was going perfectly through the motions of parenting: an autopilot setting that was completely reactionary and probably learned from television shows and weekend movies. I studied them: Mom huddled with her new kitten, which had wandered from the couch to jump on her lap, and Dad staring at me as if he didn"t recognize me. Yes, they were grown-ups, but I was, too. It was like Rachel had said about me being her older sister. My parents had raised me to be an adult as fast as they could and they couldn"t be offended when I turned into one.

I pressed my hands onto the table, too, an echo of Dad"s posture. And then I said what I"d wanted to say for a long time. "And I"m not going to pretend that I didn"t almost die in your car, Dad."

"Oh, come on, now," he said.

My stomach hurt with my indignation. "No, I won"t come on, now. It"s just a symptom. You forgot you had a kid in your car. And before that, I was dragged off the swing by wolves while Mom was upstairs painting. And yeah, I had my boyfriend sleeping in my bed here, but it took you weeks to realize it. Did you even notice I was sleeping here? You gave me thirty miles of free leash. Did you think I wouldn"t use it?"

Rachel frantically applied lip gloss again.

"Okay," Mom said. The cat was crawling around her neck. She pulled it off and handed it to Rachel, which I thought was probably against referee rules. Rachel did look happier with the kitten, though. "Okay. So where does that leave us? I"m not going to fight anymore. G.o.d, Lewis. I don"t want to fight with her. I thought she was dead."

Dad"s lips made a thin line, but he sealed his mouth shut.

I took a deep breath and steeled myself. I had to get this out right. "I"m moving out."