I tried to remember I was no longer alone. I tried not to flinch when I felt the cold rush in through a suddenly open door. I’d traded my inherited SUV, full of the scent of Beck and my life with the wolves, for a Volkswagen Golf just big enough for me and Grace and my guitar. I’d gotten my old job back at The Crooked Shelf, surrounded by new words and the sound of pages turning. In the months since I’d lost my lupine skin, I’d tried to learn how to be a boy again. Now, as the spring branches shared seldom-seen frills of tender pink-it was where I belonged. Before, it had been a place that existed only in the heat of summer, concrete sidewalks and leaves curved up toward the sun, everything smelling of warm asphalt and dissipating truck exhaust. Mercy Falls, Minnesota, looked different when you knew you’d be human for the rest of your life. I never knew there were so many different ways to say good-bye. I never knew there were so many kinds of love or that love could make people do so many different things. I want this, my hand in Sam’s hand and his cheek resting against my neck.īut my body betrays me. An unknown human past hides behind each pair of eyes Sam is the only one I ever truly knew, and I have him beside me now.

Beautiful, alluring-but strangers nonetheless. The wolves in the woods are strangers now that I know the secret of the pack. The weight of things known, things unsaid. It used to be only Sam’s yellow eyes that watched me from between the rain-soaked birches, but now, I feel the weight of the entire pack’s gaze. Their eyes, human eyes in wolf skulls, remind me of water: the clear blue of water reflecting the spring sky, the brown of a brook churning with rainfall, the green of the lake in summer as the algae begins to bloom, the gray of a snow-choked river.

But now, instead of me watching the wolves, waiting for one of them to come to me, they are the ones watching me, waiting for me to come to them. I had a lot of reasons to long to be part of the wolf pack that lives in the woods behind my house.

Sam stays Sam, and Cole stays Cole, and it’s only me who’s not firmly in my own skin. With the heat, the remaining wolves will soon be falling out of their wolf pelts and back into their human bodies. He had the body that was a mystery, too strange and wonderful and terrifying to comprehend.īut now it is spring. His was the good-bye that meant the most. Just a few months ago, it was Sam who was the mythical creature. This is the story of a boy who used to be a wolf and a girl who was becoming one.

Linger maggie