chapter SIX
• SAM •
I lived in a war zone.
When I pulled into the driveway, the music slapped its hands against the car windows. The air outside the house thumped with a booming bass line; the entire building was a speaker. The closest neighbors were acres away, so they were spared the symptoms of the disease that was Cole St. Clair. Cole’s very being was so big that it couldn’t be contained by four walls. It bled out the windows, crashed out of the stereo, shouted out suddenly in the middle of the night. When you took away the stage, you still had the rock star.
Since he’d come to live in Beck’s house — no, my house — Cole had terraformed it into an alien landscape. It was as if he couldn’t help destroying things; chaos was a side effect to his very presence. He spread every single CD case in the house over the living room floor, left the television turned to infomercials, burned something sticky into the bottom of a skillet and then abandoned it on the stove top. The floorboards in the downstairs hallway were lined with deep dimples and claw marks that led from Cole’s room to the bathroom and back again, a lupine alphabet. He’d inexplicably take every glass out of the cupboard and organize them by size on the counter, leaving all the cabinet doors hanging open, or watch a dozen old ’80s movies halfway through and leave the cassettes unrewound on the floor in front of the VCR he’d excavated from somewhere in the basement.
I made the mistake of taking it personally, the first time I came home to the mess. It took me weeks to realize that it wasn’t about me. It was about him. For Cole, it was always about him.
I got out of the Volkswagen and headed toward the house. I wasn’t planning on being here long enough to worry about Cole’s music. I had a very specific list of items to retrieve before I went back out again. Flashlight. Benadryl. The wire crate from the garage. I’d stop by the store to get some ground beef to put the drugs in.
I was trying to decide if you still had free will as a wolf. If I was a terrible person for planning to drug my girlfriend and drag her back to my house to keep in the basement. It was just — there were so many ways to effortlessly die as a wolf, just one moment too long on a highway, a few days without a successful hunt, one paw too far into the backyard of a drunk redneck with a rifle.
I could feel that I was going to lose her.
I couldn’t go another night with that in my head.
When I opened the back door, the bass line resolved itself into music. The singer, voice distorted by volume, shouted to me: “Suffocate suffocate suffocate.” The timbre of the voice seemed familiar, and all at once I realized that this was NARKOTIKA, played loud enough for me to mistake the throbbing electronic backbeat for my heartbeat. My breastbone hummed with it.
I didn’t bother to call out for him; he wouldn’t be able to hear me. The lights he’d left on laid down a history of his comings and goings: through the kitchen, down the hall to his room, the downstairs bathroom, and into the living room where the sound system was. I momentarily considered tracking him down, but I didn’t have time to hunt for him as well as Grace. I found a flashlight in the cabinet by the fridge and a banana from the island, and headed toward the hall. I promptly tripped over Cole’s shoes, caked in mud, lying haphazardly in the doorway from the kitchen to the hall. I saw now that the kitchen floor was covered with dirt, the dull yellow lights illuminating where Cole’s pacing had painted an ouroboros of filthy footprints in front of the cabinets.
I rubbed a hand through my hair. I thought of a swearword but didn’t say it. What would Beck have done with Cole?
I was reminded, suddenly, of the dog that Ulrik had brought home from work once, a mostly grown Rottweiler inexplicably named Chauffeur. It weighed as much as I did, was a bit mangy around the hips, and sported a very friendly disposition. Ulrik was all smiles, talking about guard dogs and Schutzhund and how I would grow to love Chauffeur like a brother. Within an hour of its arrival, Chauffeur ate four pounds of ground beef, chewed the cover off a biography of Margaret Thatcher — I think it ate most of the first chapter as well — and left a steaming pile of crap on the couch. Beck said, “Get that damn langolier out of here.”
Ulrik called Beck a Wichser and left with the dog. Beck told me not to say Wichser because it was what ignorant German men said when they knew they were wrong, and a few hours later, Ulrik returned, sans Chauffeur. I never did sit on that side of the couch again.
But I couldn’t kick Cole out. He had nowhere to go but down from here. Anyway, it wasn’t so much that Cole was intolerable. It was that Cole, undiluted, taken neat with nothing to cut through the loudness of him, was intolerable.
This house had been so different when it had been filled with people.
The living room went silent for two seconds as the song ended and then the speakers busted out another NARKOTIKA song. Cole’s voice exploded through the hall, louder and brasher than real life:
Break me into pieces
small enough to fit
in the palm of your hand, baby
I never thought that you would save me
break a piece
for your friends
break a piece
just for luck
break a piece
sell it sell it
break me break me
My hearing wasn’t as sensitive as it was when I was a wolf, but it was still better than most people’s. The music was like an assault, something physical to push past.
The living room was empty — I’d turn the music off when I got back downstairs — and I jogged through it to get to the stairs. I knew there was an assortment of medicines in the downstairs bathroom’s cabinet, but I couldn’t get to them. The downstairs bathroom with its tub held too many memories for me to get through. Luckily, Beck, sensitive to my past, kept another store of medicines in the upstairs bathroom where there was no tub.
Even up here, I could feel the bass vibrating under my feet. I shut the door behind me and allowed myself the small comfort of rinsing the dried car-washing suds from my arms before I opened the mirror-fronted cabinet. The cabinet was full of the vaguely distasteful evidence of other people, as most shared bathroom cabinets were. Ointments and other people’s toothpaste and pills for terms and conditions that no longer applied and hairbrushes with hair not my color in the bristles and mouthwash that had probably expired two years before. I should clean it out. I would get around to it.
I gingerly removed the Benadryl, and as I closed the cabinet, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My hair was longer than I’d ever let it get before, my yellow eyes lighter than ever against the dark circles beneath them. But it wasn’t my hair or the color of my eyes that had caught my attention. There was something in my expression that I didn’t recognize, something at once helpless and failing; whoever this Sam was, I didn’t know him.
I snatched the flashlight and the banana off the corner of the sink. Every minute I spent here, Grace could be getting farther away.
I trotted down the stairs, two at a time, into the seething music. The living room was still empty so I crossed the floor to turn the stereo off. It was a strange place, the lamps by the tartan sofas casting shadows in every direction, no one here to listen to the fury exploding from the speakers. It was the lamps, more than the emptiness, that made me uncomfortable. They were slightly mismatched, with dark wood bases and cream shades; Beck had brought them back one day and Paul had declared that the house now officially looked like his grandmother’s. Maybe because of that, the lamps never got used; we always used the brighter ceiling light instead, which made the faded reds in the couch less sad and kept the night outside. But now, the twin pools of lamplight reminded me of spotlights on a stage.
I stopped next to the couch.
The living room wasn’t empty after all.
Out of the reach of the light, a wolf lay next to the couch, twitching and jerking, mouth parted, revealing its teeth. I recognized the color of the coat, the staring green eyes: Cole.
Shifting. I knew, logically, that he must be shifting — whether from wolf into human or human into wolf, I didn’t know — but still, I felt uneasy. I watched for a minute, waiting to see if I would have to open the door to release him outside.
The pounding music fell into silence as the song ended; I still heard ghostly echoes of the beat whispering in my ears. I dropped my supplies softly onto the couch beside me, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling to wary attention. By the other couch, the wolf was still spasming, head jerking to the side again and again, senselessly violent and mechanical. His legs were ramrod straight away from him. Saliva dripped from his open jaws.
This wasn’t shifting. This was a seizure.
I started with surprise as a slow piano chord rang out beside my ear, but it was only the next track on the CD.
I crept around the couch to kneel by Cole’s body. A pair of pants lay on the carpet beside him, and a few inches away from them, a half-depressed syringe.
“Cole,” I breathed, “what have you done to yourself?”
The wolf’s head jerked back toward its shoulders, again and again.
Cole sang from the speakers, his voice slow and uncertain against a sparse backing of just piano, a different Cole than I’d ever heard:
If I am Hannibal
where are my Alps?
I had no one to call. I couldn’t call 911. Beck was far out of reach. It would take too long to try to explain to Karyn, my boss at the bookstore, even if I could trust her to keep our secret. Grace might know what to do, but even she was in the woods, hidden from me. The feeling of impending loss sharpened inside me, like my lungs rubbed sandpaper with each inhalation.
Cole’s body ripped through one spasm after another, head snapping back again and again. There was something deeply disturbing about the silence of it, the fact that the only sound accompanying all this abrupt motion was the hiss of his head rubbing the carpet while a voice he no longer possessed sang from the speakers.
I fumbled in my back pocket and pulled out my phone. There was only one person to call. I stabbed in the number.
“Romulus,” Isabel said, after only two rings. I heard road noise. “I was thinking of calling you.”
“Isabel,” I said. I couldn’t make my voice sound serious enough for some reason. It just sounded as if I were talking about the weather. “I think Cole’s having a seizure. I don’t know what to do.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Roll him on his side so he doesn’t drown in his own spit.”
“He’s a wolf.”
In front of me, Cole was still seizing, at war with himself. Flecks of blood had appeared in his saliva. I thought he’d bitten his tongue.
“Of course he is,” she said. She sounded pissed, which I was beginning to realize meant that she actually cared. “Where are you?”
“In the house.”
“Well then, I’ll see you in a second.”
“You —?”
“I told you,” Isabel said. “I was thinking of calling you.”
It only took two minutes for her SUV to pull into the driveway.
Twenty seconds later, I realized Cole wasn’t breathing.