like my insides had been pounded flat, the first thing I did was feel for the journal on the nightstand beside me. I had woken earlier, found myself alive on the living room floor — that was a surprise — and crawled to my bedroom to sleep or finish the process of dying. Now, my limbs felt like they’d been assembled by a factory with lousy quality control. Squinting in gray light that could’ve been any time of day or night, I opened the journal up with fingers that felt like inanimate objects. I had to turn past pages of Beck’s handwriting to get to my own, and then I wrote the date and copied the format I’d used on the days before. My handwriting on the facing page was a bit sturdier than the letters I scratched down now.
EPINEPHRINE/PSEUDOEPHEDRINE MIX 4
METHOD: INTRAVENOUS INJECTION
RESULT: SUCCESSFUL
(SIDE EFFECTS SEIZURE)
I closed the book and rested it on my chest. I’d pop the champagne over my discovery just as soon as I could stay awake. When progress stopped feeling so much like a disease.
I closed my eyes again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
• GRACE •
When I first became a wolf, I didn’t know the first thing about how to survive.
When I’d first come to the pack, the things I didn’t know wildly outnumbered the things that I did: how to hunt, how to find the other wolves when I got lost, where to sleep. I couldn’t speak to the others. I didn’t understand the riot of gestures and images that they used.
I knew this, though: If I gave into fear, I’d die.
I started by learning how to find the pack. It was by accident. Alone and hungry and feeling a hollow that food wouldn’t fill regardless, I’d tipped my head back in despair and keened into the cold darkness. It was a wail more than a howl, pure and lonely. It echoed against the rocks near me.
And then, a few moments later, I heard a reply. A yipping howl that didn’t last long. Then another. It took me a few moments to realize that it was waiting for me to respond. I howled again, and then, immediately, the other wolf replied. It had not finished howling when another wolf began, and another. If their howls echoed, I couldn’t hear it; they were far away.
But far away was nothing. This body never got tired.
So I learned how to find the other wolves. It took me days to learn the mechanics of the pack. There was the large black wolf that was clearly in charge. His greatest weapon was his gaze: A sharp look would effectively send one of the other pack members to their belly. Anyone but the large gray wolf who was nearly as respected: He would merely flatten his ears back and lower his tail, only slightly deferential.
From them, I learned the language of dominance. Teeth over muzzle. Lips pulled back. Hair raised along spine.
And from the bottommost members of the pack, I learned about submission. The belly presented to the sky, the eyes directed downward, the lowering of one’s whole body to look small.
Every day, the lowest wolf, a sickly thing with a running eye, was reminded of his place. He was snapped at, pinned to the ground, forced to eat last. I thought that being the lowest would be bad, but there was something worse: being ignored.
There was a white wolf who hovered on the edge of the pack. She was invisible. She wasn’t invited into games, even by the gray-brown joker of the pack. He would even play with birds and he wouldn’t play with her. She was a non-presence during hunts, untrusted, ignored. But the pack’s treatment of her wasn’t entirely unjustified: Like me, she didn’t seem to know how to speak the language of the pack. Or perhaps I was being too kind. Really, it seemed like she didn’t care to use what she knew.
She had secrets in her eyes.
The only time I saw her interact with another wolf was when she snarled at the gray wolf and he attacked her. I thought he would kill her.
But she was strong; a scuffle through ferns ensued, and in the end the joker intervened, putting his body between the fighting wolves. He liked peace. But when the gray wolf shook himself and trotted away, the gray-brown joker turned back to the white wolf and showed his teeth, reminding her that though he’d stopped the fight, he didn’t want her near.