books away from me. For it all to have been a waste — everything we’d done — it was just too much. The idea of a big library and a red coffeepot of my own seemed completely unreachable.
“Well,” Cole replied, “I don’t know about that. After all, he made himse — Oh, look, here’s miracle boy now. Good morning, Ringo.”
Sam had descended nearly silently and now he stood at the base of the stairs. His feet were bright red from a shower. Seeing him made me feel slightly less pessimistic, though his presence wouldn’t solve anything that wasn’t already solved.
“We were just talking about the cure,” Cole said.
Sam padded across the floor to me. “The band?” He sat down cross-legged next to me. I offered him coffee and, reliably, he shook his head.
“No, yours. And the one I’ve been working on. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how you make yourself shift.”
Sam made a face. “I don’t make myself shift.”
“Not often, Ringo,” Cole admitted, “but you do.”
I felt a little prickle of hope. If anybody could figure out how the Boundary Wood wolves worked, I thought it would be Cole. He’d saved me, hadn’t he?
“Like when you saved me from the wolves,” I said. “And what about in the clinic when we injected you?” That night seemed so long ago, in Isabel’s mom’s clinic, willing the wolf that was Sam to become human. Again, the memory of sadness pressed on me. “Have you figured anything out about it?”
Sam looked petulant as Cole started to talk about adrenaline and Cole St. Clairs in the system and how he was trying to use Sam’s unusual shifts as the basis of a cure.
“But if it was adrenaline, wouldn’t someone saying ‘boo’ make you shift?” I asked.
Cole shrugged. “I tried using an EpiPen — that’s pure adrenaline — and it worked, just barely.” Sam frowned at me, and I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking — that “barely” working sounded dangerous.
Cole said, “It’s just not making my brain react the right way; it’s not triggering the shift the same way that cold or the St. Clair buildup does. It’s hard to replicate when you have no idea what it’s actually doing. It’s like drawing a picture of an elephant from the sound it makes in the next cage over.”
“Well, I’m impressed you even figured out it was an elephant,” Sam said. “Apparently, Beck and the rest didn’t even have the species right.” He stood up and held his hand out for me. “Let’s go make breakfast.”
But Cole wasn’t done. “Oh, Beck just didn’t want to see it,” he said dismissively. “He didn’t really want to lose that time as a wolf. You know what, if my father were involved in all this, he’d whip out some CAT scans, some MRIs, about fourteen hundred electrodes, throw in a couple vials of poisonous meds and a car battery or two, and three or four dead werewolves later, he’d have his cure. Hot damn, he’s good at what he does.”
Sam lowered his hand. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about Beck like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like he’s —” Sam stopped. He frowned at me, as if the way to end the sentence was hidden in my expression. I knew what he had been about to say. Like you. Cole’s mouth wore the slightest of hard smiles.
“How about this?” Cole said. He gestured at the chair Beck had sat in before, making me think that he, too, had had a conversation with Beck in this basement. That was an odd thing to consider, for some reason: Cole having a history with Beck that we were unaware of. “How about you tell me who Beck was for you, and I’ll tell you who he was for me? And then, Grace, you can tell us whose version sounds like the real one.”
“I don’t think —” I started.
“I knew him for twelve years,” Sam interrupted. “You knew him for twelve seconds. My version wins.”
“Does it?” Cole asked. “Did he tell you about what he was like as a lawyer? Did he tell you about living in Wyoming? Did he tell you about his wife? Did he tell you about where he found Ulrik? Did he tell you what he was doing to himself when Paul got to him?”
Sam said, “He told me how he became a wolf.”
“Me, too,” I said, feeling like I should back Sam up. “He told me he was bitten in Canada and met up