“Are you sleeping?” Sam’s voice was barely a whisper, but in the dark room where he didn’t belong, it was like a shout.
I rolled in my bed toward where he lay on the floor, a dark bundle curled in a nest of blankets and pillows. His presence, so strange and wonderful, seemed to fill the room and press against me. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep
again. “No.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You already have.”
He paused, considering. “Can I ask you two questions, then?”
“You already have.”
Sam groaned and threw one of the small sofa pillows in my direction. It arced through the moonlit room, a blackened projectile, and thumped harmlessly by my head. “So you’re a smart-ass, then.”
I grinned in the darkness. “Okay, I’ll play. What do you want to know?”
“You were bitten.” But it wasn’t a question. I could hear the interest in his voice, sense the tension in his body, even across the room. I slid down into my blankets, hiding from what he’d said.
“I don’t know.”
Sam’s voice rose above a whisper. “How can you not know?”
I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “I was young.”
“I was young, too. I knew what was happening.” When I didn’t answer, he asked, “Is that why you just lay there? You didn’t know they were going to kill you?”
I stared at the dark square of night through the window, lost in the memory of Sam as a wolf. The pack circled around me, tongues and teeth, growls and jerks. One wolf stood back, ice-decked ruff bristling all along his neck, quivering as he watched me in the snow. Lying in the cold, under a white sky going dark, I kept my eyes on him. He was beautiful: wild and dark, yellow eyes filled with a complexity I couldn’t begin to fathom. And he gave off a scent the same as the other wolves around me — rich, feral,
musky. Even now, as he lay in my room, I could smell the wolf on him, though he was wearing scrubs and a new skin.
Outside, I heard a low, keening howl, and then another. The night chorus rose, missing Sam’s plaintive voice but gorgeous nonetheless. My heart quickened, sick with abstract longing, and on the floor, I heard Sam give a low whimper. The miserable sound, caught halfway between human and
wolf, distracted me.
“Do you miss them?” I whispered.
Sam climbed from his makeshift bed and stood by the window, an unfamiliar silhouette against the night, his arms clutched around his lanky body. “No. Yeah. I don’t know. It makes me feel — sick. Like I don’t belong here.”
Sounds familiar. I tried to think of something to say to comfort him, but couldn’t settle on anything that would sound genuine.
“But this is me,” he insisted, his chin jerking to refer to his body. I didn’t know if he meant to convince me or himself. He remained by the window as the wolves’ howls reached a crescendo, pricking my eyes to tears.
“Come up here and talk to me,” I said, to distract both of us. Sam half turned, but I couldn’t see his expression. “It’s cold down there on the floor and you’ll get a crick in your neck. Just come up here.”
“What about your parents?” he said, the same question he’d asked in the hospital. I was about to ask him why he worried about them so much, when I remembered Sam’s story about his own parents and the shiny, puckered scars
on his wrists.
“You don’t know my parents.”
“Where are they?” Sam asked.
“Gallery opening, I think. My mom’s an artist.”
His voice was dubious. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
My voice was louder than I’d meant for it to be. “Just get in. I trust you to behave. And to not hog the sheets.” When he still hesitated, I said, “Hurry up, before there’s no more night left.”
Obediently, he retrieved one of the pillows from the floor, but hesitated again on the opposite side of the bed. In the dim light, I could just make out his mournful expression as he regarded the forbidden territory of the bed. I wasn’t sure if I was charmed by his reluctance to share a bed with a girl or insulted that, apparently, I wasn’t hot enough for him to charge the mattress like a bull.
Finally, he climbed in. The bed creaked under his weight, and he winced before settling on the very far edge of it, not even under the blanket. I could smell the faint wolf scent better now, and I sighed with a strange contentedness. He sighed, too.
“Thank you,” he said. Formal, considering he was lying in my bed.
“You’re welcome.”
The truth of it struck me then. Here I was with a shape-shifting boy in my bed. Not just any shape-shifting boy, but my wolf. I kept reliving the memory of the deck light clicking to life, revealing him for the first time. A weird combination of excitement and nervous ness tingled through me.
Sam turned his head to look at me, as though my thrill of nerves had sent up a flare. I could see his eyes glinting in the dim light, a few feet away.
“They bit you. You should’ve changed, too, you know.”
In my head, the wolves circled a body in the snow, their lips bloody, teeth bared, growling over the kill. A wolf, Sam, dragged the body from the circle of wolves. He carried it through the trees on two legs that left human footprints in the snow. I knew I was falling asleep, so I shook myself awake; I couldn’t remember whether I’d answered Sam.
“Sometimes I wish I had,” I told him.
He closed his eyes, miles away on the other side of the bed. “Sometimes I do, too.”
