just more; I suppose I had an idea I wanted to see the lake. A wooden plank path led us one hundred feet away from the lodge and back into the trees before giving way to ferns and thorns. I listened to the birds and the sounds of our feet through the underbrush. The afternoon sun was painting everything shades of gold and green. I felt very quiet and small and still inside.
Grace said, “Sam, this could work.”
I didn’t look at her. I was thinking about the miles of road between us and home. Beck’s house already felt like a wistful memory. “That lodge is scary.”
“It could be cleaned up,” Grace said. “It could work.”
“I know,” I said. “I know it could.”
There was a massive outcropping before us, the slender rocks longer than the Volkswagen, flat as shingles. Grace only paused for a moment before climbing up the side. I scrambled up after her and together we stood, higher than we had been before, but still not high enough to see the tops of the tallest trees. There was only the humming feeling one gets up high, that feeling that the ground was moving slightly, to say that we were any closer to the sky than we were on the ground. I had never seen pines this tall in Mercy Falls. One pine slanted close to the top of the outcropping and Grace dragged her fingers along its trunk, her face wondering. “It’s so beautiful.” She had to pause, her hand rested on the bark, to tip her head all the way back to see the top. There was something lovely in the way her mouth looked, lips parted with amazement, something lovely about just the line of her back and legs altogether, at home on top of this massive pile of rock in the middle of nowhere.
I said, “You make it easy to love you.”
Grace dropped her fingers from the tree and turned to me. She turned her head sideways as if I’d told a riddle and she had to work to puzzle it out. “Why do you look so sad?”
I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the ground beyond the rock. There were a dozen different shades of green down there, if you were really looking. As a wolf, there wouldn’t be a single one. “This is the place. But it’s going to have to be me, Grace. That’s what Cole wants. We can’t trap all of the wolves and we don’t have enough people to drive them out. The only chance we have is to lead them out, and it has to be a wolf with some sense of human direction. I wanted Cole to do it. I thought about this: If everything were fair and logical, it would be him. He likes being a wolf; it’s his science, his toys. If the world were a fair place, he would be the one to lead them out. But no. He told me he couldn’t hold anything in his head when he was a wolf. He said he wanted to, but he couldn’t.”
I heard Grace breathing, slow and cautious, but she didn’t say anything.
“You don’t even shift anymore,” Grace said.
I knew the answer to that. With utmost certainty. “Cole could make it happen.”
Grace pulled one of my hands out of a pocket and rested my curled fingers in her palm. I felt her pulse, light and steady, against my thumb.
“I was beginning to take these for granted,” I said, moving my fingers against her skin. “I was beginning to think I’d never have to do it again. I was beginning to like the person I was.” I wanted to tell her how badly I didn’t want to shift again, how badly I didn’t even want to think about shifting. How I was starting to finally think of myself in present tense, life in motion instead of life, preserved. But I didn’t trust my voice to take me there. And admitting it out loud wouldn’t make what had to be done any easier. So again I was silent.
“Oh, Sam,” she said. She put her arms around my neck and let me rest my face against her skin. Her fingers moved through my hair. I heard her swallow. “When we —”
But she didn’t finish. She just squeezed my neck hard enough that my breath had to ease by her body to escape. I kissed her collarbone, her hair tickling my face. She sighed.