“It was near our property line, Isabel,” Mom snapped.
Then my father said what I’d somehow known he was going to say. “She was killed by wolves.”
I was filled with incredible anger, all of a sudden, at Sam and Cole and Grace, for doing nothing when I’d told them to do something.
There was more noise coming from the piano room. I spoke over the top of it. “Well, I’ve been at school or here all day. Hard to get killed at school.” Then, because I realized I needed to ask or look guilty: “When will they know who she is?”
“I don’t know,” my father said. “They said she was in bad shape.”
Mom said abruptly, “I’m going to go change out of these clothes.” For a moment, I couldn’t puzzle out the reason for her speedy exit. Then I realized she must’ve been thinking about my brother’s death, imagining Jack torn apart by wolves. I was impervious; I knew how Jack had really died.
Just then, there was a thump from the piano room, clear enough that my father’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the phone,” I said loudly. “I didn’t mean to upset Mom. Hey. Something hit the bottom of my car on the way home. Would you look at it?”
I waited for him to refuse me, to charge into the other room and find Grace shifting into a wolf. But instead he sighed and nodded, already heading back toward the other door.
Of course there was nothing under my car for him to find. But he spent so long investigating that I had time to hurry back to the piano room to see if Grace had destroyed the Steinway. All I found was an open window and one of the screens pushed out into the yard. I leaned out and caught a glimpse of yellow — my Santa Maria Academy shirt, snagged on one of the bushes.
There had never been a worse time for Grace to be a wolf.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
• SAM •
So I had missed her again.
After the phone call, I lost hours to — nothing. Caught completely by the sound of Grace’s voice, my thoughts chased each other, the same questions over and over. Wondering if I would have been able to see Grace if I’d gotten her message earlier, if I hadn’t gone out to check the shed for signs of life, if I hadn’t walked farther into the woods and shouted up through birch leaves to the sky, frustrated by Cole’s seizure and Grace’s absence and by just the weight of being me.
I drowned in the questions until the light failed. Hours gone, like I’d shifted, but I’d never left my own skin. It had been years since I’d lost time like this.
Once upon a time, that was my life. I used to look out the window for hours at a time, until my legs fell asleep beneath me. It was when I first came to Beck — I must’ve been eight or so, not long after my parents had left me with my scars. Ulrik sometimes picked me up under my armpits and pulled me back toward the kitchen and a life occupied by other people, but I was a silent, quivering participant. Hours, days, months gone, lost to another place that admitted neither Sam nor wolf. It was Beck who finally broke the spell.
He had offered me a tissue; it was a strange enough gift that it brought me to the present. Beck waved it at me again. “Sam. Your face.”
I touched my cheeks; they weren’t so much damp as sticky with the memory of continuous tears. “I wasn’t crying,” I told him.
“I know you weren’t,” Beck replied.
While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”
I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.
“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.
My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”
“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”
“No,” I said.
Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”