mouth.
“You come out first,” Sam said, his teeth gritted to keep his voice steadier. “I don’t want you to change.”
It wasn’t really me who mattered, wasn’t me who absolutely had to climb out of this hole, but Sam didn’t leave room for argument. He clambered off the bins and splashed heavily into the water beside me. There was a knot the size of my head in my guts, clenching and unclenching. I felt like my fingers were inside my diaphragm, tiptoeing their way up my throat.
“Climb,” Sam said.
My scalp crept and crawled. Sam reached out and grabbed my jaw, hard enough that his fingertips were painful against my jawbone. He stared into my eyes, and I could feel the wolf in me responding to that challenge, this unspoken instinct that lent force to his command. I didn’t know this Sam.
“Climb,” he ordered. “Get out!”
And said like that, I had to. I crawled up the bins, my body twitching, my fingers finding the edge of the sinkhole. Every second that I was out of the water I felt more human and less wolf, though I could smell the stink of myself, of the near-shift. It washed over me every time I turned my head. Pausing a bit to gather my senses, I slithered out of the sinkhole on my stomach. It was not the sexiest move I’d ever performed, but I was impressed nonetheless. A few feet away, Grace lay on her side, motionless but breathing.
Below me, Sam climbed unsteadily onto the first bin and waited a long moment to find his balance.
“I … I’m only going to have a second before this thing falls,” Sam said. “Can you —”
“Got it,” I replied.
He was wrong; he had less than a second. He had only barely made it onto the second bin, crouching, when they began to tip below him. He reached up and, almost in the same moment, I grabbed his arm. The bins fell back into the water below, the splash more muffled than I would’ve expected, as Sam swung his other arm up for me to grab. I braced myself against the soggy edge of the sinkhole and backed up. It was a good thing that Sam was a gangly guy with limbs made of twigs, because otherwise we would’ve both ended up back in the pit.
Then it was over. I was leaning back on my arms, out of breath. Not a single part of me untouched by the slimy mud of the sinkhole. Sam sat beside Grace, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking at the small balls of clay that formed when he did. The wolf lay quietly next to him, breaths fast and jerky.
Sam said, “You didn’t have to come down there.”
“Yes, I did,” I said.
I looked up and found him already looking back at me. In the dark of the woods, his eyes looked very pale. So strikingly wolf’s eyes. I remembered him grabbing my jaw and telling me to climb, appealing to my wolf instincts if nothing else. The last time someone had stared me in the face like that, ordered me to listen and to focus through the change, it had been the first time I’d shifted. The voice had been Geoffrey Beck’s.
Sam reached out and touched Grace’s side; I saw his fingers move as they traced the ribs hidden beneath the fur. “There’s a poem that goes like this,” he said. “Wie lange braucht man jeden Tag, bis man sich kennt.”
He kept touching the wolf’s ribs, his eyebrows furrowed, until the wolf lifted its head slightly, uneasy. Sam put his hands in his lap. “It means ‘how long it takes us, each day, to know each other.’ I haven’t really been fair to you.”
Sam was saying it didn’t matter, but it kind of did, too. “Save your kraut poetry for Grace,” I said, after a pause. “You’re getting your weird all over me.”
“I’m serious,” Sam said.
I said, not looking at him, “I’m serious, too. Even cured, you’re really incredibly abnormal.”
Sam wasn’t laughing. “Take the apology, Cole, and I won’t say anything about it again.”
“Fine,” I said, standing up and tossing him the towel. “Apology accepted. In your defense, I didn’t really deserve ‘fair.’”
Sam carefully tucked the towel around the wolf’s body. She jerked away at his touch, but she was too tired to really react. “It’s not the way I was brought up,” he said finally. “People shouldn’t have to earn kindness. They should have to earn cruelty.”
I thought, suddenly, of how this