down but Sam caught my arm and knelt down himself to look.
“For crying out loud,” he said. “It’s a raccoon.”
“Poor thing,” I said.
“It could be a rabid baby-killer,” Cole told me primly.
“Shut up,” Sam said pleasantly, still peering under the vehicle. “I’m wondering how to get it out.”
Cole stepped past me, holding the broom like a staff. “I’m more interested in how it got in.”
He walked around the back of the car to the side door of the garage, which was slightly open. He tapped on the open door. “Sherlock found a clue.”
• SAM •
I said, “Sherlock should figure out how to get this guy out.”
“Or girl,” Cole said, and Grace regarded him approvingly. Holding the knife from the kitchen, she looked stark and sexy and like someone I didn’t associate with her body. Her repartee with Cole maybe should’ve made me jealous, but instead it made me glad — evidence, more than anything else, that I was starting to think of Cole as a friend. Everyone harbored the secret fantasy that everyone who was friends with them would also be friends with each other.
I padded to the front of the garage, grit pressing uncomfortably into the bottom of my bare feet, and tugged the garage door open. It rolled up into the ceiling with a terrific crash and the dark driveway with my Volkswagen spread out before me. It was an eerie and lonesome landscape. The cool night air, scented with new leaves and buds, bit at my arms and toes, and some potent combination of the cool breeze and the wide, wide night quickened my blood and called to me. I was momentarily lost with the force of my wanting.
With some effort, I turned back to Cole and Grace. Cole was already poking experimentally around the bottom of the car with the broomstick, but Grace was looking out into the night with an expression that I felt mirrored mine. Something like contemplation and yearning. She caught me looking at her and her face didn’t change. I felt like — I felt like she knew how I felt. For the first time in a very long time, I remembered waiting in the woods for her to shift, waiting for us both to be wolves at the same time.
“Come on, you bastard,” Cole said to the animal under the car. “I was having an excellent dream.”
“Should I be on the other side with something else?” Grace asked, her eyes on me just a second longer before she turned back.
“A knife is a bit excessive,” I suggested, stepping away from the garage door. “There’s a push broom over there.”
She looked at the knife before setting it down on a birdbath — another failed grounds beautification attempt by Beck.
“I hate raccoons,” observed Cole. “This is why your idea of moving the wolves is somewhat problematic, Grace.”
Grace, armed with a push broom, inserted the bristly end under the car with grim efficiency. “I hardly find this to be an apt comparison.”
I could see the masked nose of the raccoon poking out from under the BMW. In a sudden rush, it bolted away from Cole’s broomstick and ran directly by the open garage door to hide behind a watering can on the other side of the car.
“Why, you dumb bastard,” Cole said wonderingly.
Grace walked over and pushed on the watering can, gently. There was a moment’s hesitation, and the raccoon bolted directly back under the car. Again, completely bypassing the open door. Grace, an ardent disciple of logic, threw up her free hand. “The door is right there. It’s the entire wall.”
Cole, looking a bit more enthusiastic than the job called for, rummaged around beneath the car with the broomstick again. Duly terrified by this onslaught, the raccoon bolted back to the watering can. The smell of its fear was strong as the rank scent of its coat, and vaguely contagious.
“This,” Cole said, the broomstick braced on the ground beside him, looking like Moses in sweatpants, “is the reason raccoons don’t take over the planet.”
“This,” I said, “is the reason we keep getting shot at.”
Grace looked down at the raccoon where it was huddled in the corner. Her expression was pitying. “No complicated logic.”
“No spatial sense,” I said. “Wolves have plenty of complicated logic. Just no human logic. No spatial sense. No sense of time. No sense of boundaries. Boundary Wood is too small for us.”
“So we move the wolves someplace better,” Grace said. “Someplace with a better human-to-acre ratio. Someplace with fewer Tom