to do it — no rednecks with rifles this time. We’re talking helicopters. They’re going to do it properly, like Idaho.”
I said, “It’s definitely happening?”
“Just a question of when they can schedule it,” my father said. “Collect the resources and manpower and all that.”
Somehow, that last sentence drove it home for me — “resources and manpower” was such a bullshit Marshall phrase that I could imagine my father repeating the words after hearing them on the phone only minutes before.
This was it.
Cole’s face had changed from the lazily handsome expression he’d worn before. Now, something in my voice or face must have tipped him off, because he was looking at me in a sharp, intense way that made me feel exposed. I turned my face away.
I asked my father, “Do you have any idea of when? I mean, at all?”
He was talking to someone else. They were laughing and he was laughing back. “What? Oh, Isabel, I can’t talk. A month, maybe, they said. We’re working on moving it up, though — it’s a question of the helo pilot and getting the area pinned down, I think. I’ll see you when I get home. Hey — why aren’t you in school?”
I said, “I’m in the bathroom.”
“Oh, well, you didn’t have to pick up in school,” my father said. I heard a man say his name in the background. “I have to go. Bye, pumpkin.”
I snapped the phone shut and stared at the books in front of me. There was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt face-out.
“Pumpkin,” Cole said.
“Don’t start.”
I turned and we just looked at each other. I wasn’t sure how much he’d heard. It didn’t take much to get the gist. There was still something about Cole’s face that was making me feel weird. Like before, life had always been a little joke that he found a little funny but mostly lame. But right now, in the face of this new information, this Cole was — uncertain. Just for two seconds, it was like I saw all the way down to the inside of him, and then the door dinged open and that Cole was gone.
Sam stood in the doorway of the store, the door slowly swinging shut behind him.
“Bad news, Ringo,” Cole said. “We’re going to die.”
Sam looked at me, a question in his eyes.
“My dad did it,” I said. “The hunt’s going through. They’re waiting on the helo pilot.”
Sam stood there by the front door for a long, long moment, his jaw working slightly. There was something odd and resolute about his expression. Behind him, the back of the open sign said CLOSED.
The silence stretched out so long that I was about to say something, and then Sam said, with strange formality, “I’m getting Grace out of those woods. The others, too, but she’s my priority.”
Cole looked up at that. “I think I can help you there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
• SAM •
The woods were slimy and still from days of rain. Cole led the way, the certainty in his steps proving how often he’d taken the paths. Isabel had reluctantly left for school, and when Karyn had arrived to replace me, Cole and I had headed back to Beck’s house as quickly as we could. While we were in the car, Cole had told me his brilliant idea for catching Grace: traps.
I couldn’t quite believe that all this time that I’d thought Cole was spending his days trashing the house, he’d also been trying to trap animals. Wolves. I supposed everything about Cole was so unpredictable that I couldn’t be legitimately surprised.
“How many of these things do you have?” I asked, as we picked through the woods. I could have been thinking about Isabel’s news, the impending hunt, but I focused on making my way through the trees. The world was so damp that it took quite a bit of concentration. Water from last night’s storm dripped on me as I used branches for handholds, and my feet slid sideways beneath me.
“Five,” Cole said, stopping to knock his shoe on a tree trunk; chunks of mud fell out the treads. “Ish.”
“‘Ish’?”
Cole kept walking. “I’m making one for Tom Culpeper next,” he said, without turning around.
I couldn’t say I disagreed.
“And what is it you’re planning on doing, if you catch one?”
Cole made an exaggerated noise of disgust as he stepped over a pile of old deer droppings. “Find out what makes us shift. And find out if you’re really cured.”
I was surprised that he hadn’t asked me for a blood sample