had with Koenig. I was trying to see if it changed how I saw him, and it didn’t.
“Then why — I cannot believe I am asking this, but why are they staying wolves if the pack is about to be eliminated?”
“It’s involuntary. Temperature based. Wolf in winter, human in summer. Less time every year, and eventually we stay a wolf forever. We don’t keep our human thoughts when we shift.” I frowned. This explanation was getting less true every day that we spent with Cole. It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you’d relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays. “That’s grossly oversimplified. But it’s the basic rules of it.” I felt weird saying grossly oversimplified, too; a phrase like that was only because Koenig spoke so formally.
“So Grace —”
“Is missing because she’s still unstable in this weather. What is she supposed to tell her parents?”
Koenig considered. “Are you born a werewolf?”
“No, good old horror movie technique. Biting.”
“And Olivia?”
“Bitten last year.”
Koenig snorted softly. “Just incredible. I knew it. I kept finding things that led me back to that, and I could not believe it. And when Grace Brisbane disappeared out of the hospital and left just that bloody hospital gown behind … they said she was dying, that there was no way that she could have left under her own power.”
“She needed to shift,” I said softly.
“Everyone in the department blamed you. They have been looking for a way to crucify you. Tom Culpeper more than anyone. He has Heifort and everyone else lapping out of a bowl.” Now he sounded a little bitter, and it made me look at him in an entirely different way. I could see him out of uniform, at home, getting a beer out of the fridge, petting his dog, watching TV. A real person, something separate from the uniformed identity I’d assigned him. “They would very much like to hang you with this.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Because all I can do is tell them I didn’t do anything. Until Grace gets stable enough to reappear. And Olivia …”
Koenig paused. “Why did they kill her?”
My head was full of Shelby, her eyes on me through the kitchen window, the desperation and anger I thought I’d seen there. “I don’t think there was a ‘they.’ There’s one wolf that has been behind all of the problems. She attacked Grace before. She attacked Jack Culpeper, too. The others wouldn’t kill a girl. Not near summer. There are other ways to get food.” I had to try, very deliberately, to push away the memory of Olivia’s destroyed body.
We rode in silence for a minute or two.
“So, this is the situation,” Koenig said, and I was kind of charmed, now, to see that he sounded like a cop no matter what he said. “They have clearance to eliminate the pack. Fourteen days is not very long. You are telling me that some of them probably will be unable to shift before then, and some of them cannot shift at all. So we’re talking mass murder.”
Finally. It was relieving and terrifying to hear Culpeper’s plan defined as such.
“And there are not many options here. You could reveal the wolves for what they are, but —”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said hurriedly.
“—I was going to say that I do not think that is feasible. Telling Mercy Falls that they have a pack of wolves carrying an incurable infectious disease right after we discover that they have killed a girl …”
“Won’t end well,” I finished.
“And the other option is to try to motivate more animal rights groups to save the pack as wolves. It didn’t work in Idaho, and I think the time frame will be impossible, but …”
I said, “We thought of moving them.”
Koenig stilled. “Go on.”
I stumbled over the words. Koenig was so precise and logical that I felt, again, as if I needed to match it. “Someplace farther away from people. But then … it could just put us in a worse situation, unless we know what the people are like. And I don’t know what the pack will be like in a new place, without boundaries. I don’t know if I should try to sell Beck’s house to buy land, or what. There’s not enough money to buy a complete territory. Wolves range hugely, over miles and miles. So there’s always a chance of trouble.”