could look at me. “Really?” Now she looked more like herself in the dim light, her hair mussed from lying on my chest and her eyes more alive, and my hand that rested on her waist wanted desperately to slide inside her shirt to map a course up the dip of her spine, to touch her shoulder blades and make her think only of me.
But it wasn’t a bridge I would start across by myself. I didn’t know where we stood. I was good at waiting.
“Yes,” I said, instead of kissing her. “Yes, it was Tom Culpeper.”
Grace lay back down on my chest. “That’s crazy.”
“You’re Geoffrey Beck’s kid,” Tom Culpeper had observed. Even in the dim light, I had seen that his SUV was crusted with ice and sand and salt — snirt, Ulrik always called it, a combination of snow and dirt — and that the headlights cast a crooked path of light across me and the Escort. He had added, after some thought, “Sam, right? Looks like you need a hand.”
I remembered thinking at the time how relieving it was to hear my name said in such an ordinary voice, to wipe out the memory of how Beck had said it as he’d shifted.
“He helped me out,” I said. “He seemed different then, I guess. That must’ve been soon after they moved here.”
“Did he have Isabel with him?” Grace asked.
“I don’t remember Isabel.” I considered. “I try really hard not to think of him as evil, Grace. Because of Isabel. I don’t know what I would have thought of him, if not for the wolves.”
“If not for the wolves,” Grace said, “neither of us would’ve given him any thought at all.”
“This story was supposed to have bacon in it,” I admitted. “It was supposed to make you laugh.”
She sighed heavily, like the weight of the world had crushed the breath out of her, and I knew how she felt.
“That’s okay. Turn off the lights,” she replied, reaching down to tug the comforter over both of us where we lay. She smelled faintly like wolf, and I didn’t think she’d make it all the way through the night without shifting. “I’m ready for today to be over.”
Feeling far less sleepy than before, I dropped my arm off the side of the bed to pull the plug out of the wall. The room went dark and, after a moment, Grace whispered that she loved me, sounding a little sad. I wrapped my arms tightly around her shoulders, sorry that loving me was such a complicated thing.
Her breaths were already slowing as I whispered it back to her. But I didn’t sleep. I stayed awake, thinking of Tom Culpeper and Beck, how the truth of them seemed so buried inside. I kept seeing Culpeper walking across the snow toward me, his nose already red from the cold, perfectly willing to help a boy he didn’t know change a tire in the freezing evening. And between repeated flashes of that image, I kept seeing the wolves plunging out of the morning to shove my small body to the ground, to change my life forever.
Beck had done that. Beck had decided to take me. Long before my parents decided they didn’t want me, he had planned to take me. They had just made it easy for him.
I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had.
I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?
In the middle of the night, Grace woke up, her eyes wide, her body shuddering. She said my name, just like Beck had said it all those years ago by the side of the road, and then, like Beck, she left me with nothing but an empty suit of clothing and one thousand unanswered questions.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
• ISABEL •
Sam’s cell phone called me at seven A.M. the next morning. Normally I would’ve been getting ready for school at seven A.M., but it was a weekend, which meant that instead I was lying on my bed, pulling on my running shoes. I ran because I was vain and it gave me great legs.
I flipped open the phone. “Hello?” I