thirty-six

The wind cut into my skin as soon as I stepped out the back door of the station and into the night. I tucked my hair into the collar of my shirt to block out the chill creeping down my neck. Snow littered the tiny parking lot. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. At least not anything I could see.

Dad had given me the gift of time. How much, I didn’t know, and I had no idea where to start.

For a split second, I thought about just running, about climbing on the next bus to Michigan, to the Upper Peninsula, and escaping before they even had a chance to catch me. But everything about that felt wrong.

I had to see Grant. That’s what I had to do first.

The one good thing about Amble is that you can see just about anything you might need from wherever you’re standing. I could see the roof of the hospital—if you could even call it a hospital—poking up over the town like a cement-colored stalk peeking out from the snow. I started running.

The cold gnawed at the raw skin on my wrists, and my lungs ached. But my legs kept moving forward, one boot print after another. I wanted to stop, to lean over and grab at the stitch in my side until it quit hurting. But I felt the weight of the invisible time bomb strapped to my chest, tick tick ticking away the last slivers of any future I had a chance at.

Grant.

Ella.

I said their names over and over in my head, watched in my mind flashes of their dimples and eyes and tutus and half-grins. And I kept running.

Sometimes I caught a flash of something shifting through the cornfields. I knew it was them, waiting for me, growling at me.

I kept running.

There was nothing the wolves could do to pull me back into their universe. There was no message they could send me that would make me want to cut through the field and tear them apart. There was only this:

Grant.

Ella.

A howl pierced through the night, and then another and another. Ice dripped down my spine, and it wasn’t from the cold. I whipped around the corner and was blinded by the lights lining the hospital parking lot. I stopped just long enough to clutch my stomach and forced the air back into my lungs. And then I stepped inside.

“Can I help you?” asked a chubby woman behind the front desk.

I stepped up to the desk. “I’m here to see Grant Buchanan.”

She tipped her head forward and stared at me over her thick glasses. I bit my lip and looked away. Did she know who I was? It wouldn’t surprise me, since gossip hung in the air around Amble like smog in Manhattan. My only shot was if enough time had ticked away and she didn’t recognize me as Mike Graham’s pariah daughter.

My head snapped up. “I’m Rae Buchanan, Grant’s sister. Can I see him?” It was a long shot, for sure, but it was all I had.

The woman looked at me for a long time before scribbling something down on a sticky note. “Visiting hours end in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be done in fifteen.”

She kept writing for a second, then nodded. “Better hurry then,” she said without looking up. “Second floor, room sixteen.”

I headed for the elevator. Everything ticked around me: the buttons on the wall, the blood in my veins. It was all moving too slow, but way too fast at the same time. My time was running out, but I wasn’t moving fast enough to catch up to it.

The doors creaked open and I bolted.

14.

15.

16.

Room 16. My stomach lurched when I saw his name scrawled on the whiteboard outside the door. Under it, someone had written Cranial contusion, multiple facial wounds, abdominal injury.

If only they knew.

I opened the door so that a sliver of the room came into focus. There was a machine that churned in the corner, whirring and beeping on repeat. There was just the tip of Grant’s ear, poking out of his pillow. I stared through the crack in the door, waiting for that ear to move, his head to shift, his voice to croak out an awkward sound. He didn’t move.

If I stared at his perfect, pink ear long enough, then maybe it would be okay. Maybe his face would be the same, and there would be no angry claw marks striping his lips. Maybe he’d still have his soft voice and sweet words still stuck in his throat and maybe they wouldn’t have been taken away like Ella’s.

His head twitched and the tiniest corner of a bandage slid into the sliver of the room I could see.

“Hello?” he said, just above a whisper.

The sound of his voice punctured my lungs, and all the breath I’d been bottling up seeped out. His words; he still had them. He could still use them.

I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me with a quiet click.

Grant blinked at me from behind a cluster of bandages. They looped around his head and shadowed his face like tufts of gauzy clouds. Another set completely smothered his nose.

But his mouth, his lips, they were still there.

The way he stared at me, his eyes glassy and empty, punctured my lungs and my heart and everything else inside all over again.

“Grant,” I whispered as I sank into the chair next to his bed. “It’s Claire. You remember me, right?”

He blinked at me slowly and then closed his eyes. His head tipped back on the pillow and I thought for a second he’d fallen asleep. My heart clawed its way into my throat as I watched him lie there, his mouth open and the reflection of the florescent lights pooled into the creases of his lips. My brain grabbed at an image that I’d just seen, one that looked something like this. When had I seen this? I pressed my hands over my eyes.

Grant’s picture skidded across the desk at the station, his eyes closed and his head surrounded in a halo of blood-speckled snow. His mouth was open then too, and the Big Dipper on his nose was soaked in congealed blood.

I watched him. He could have been dead, if it weren’t for beeping machines telling us both he wasn’t. I got up and sat at the edge of his bed.

“Can I see?” I asked, even though I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t answer me. Or if it mattered if he did. I touched the edge of the bandage on his nose.

Grant’s eyes snapped open, but he didn’t say anything. He just watched me, and as much as I wanted him to look at me like he had just a day ago, there was nothing. But he didn’t stop me, either.

Gently, I pulled at the edge of the bandage until it slid off. A line of angry stitches zigzagged through Grant’s star-freckles and sliced off the handle of the Big Dipper. I felt the tears climb up my throat before I felt them on my cheeks. Something in Grant’s eyes flickered, but he still just watched.

I touched the tip of his nose. “Did you know I used to think your freckles looked like the Big Dipper?” My finger trailed down to the bandage at his throat that was held in place by a spot of blood. “And that the handle pointed to your eyebrows? That’s one of my favorite things about you.” A smile crept onto my face as I thought about how much I’d wanted to touch the tip of that handle on Grant’s nose two years ago, when he gave me my birthday cupcake in the cornfield. How I’d finally gotten to, that night in Alpena.

Grant’s eyebrows knitted together as he watched me. He swallowed and said, “You have one too.”

My heart thumped so hard in my chest that I almost didn’t hear his words. I dropped my fingers from his bandages and forced his voice back into my head. I didn’t want to lose his words; I couldn’t lose them. “What do you mean?” I asked.

He propped himself up in bed and flinched as the IV tube wiggled in his hand. He slowly, carefully, reached for my wrist and flipped it over, like I was the one cut up and fragile. His finger traced over a rectangle of tiny freckles that spilled onto my palm from my wrist. “Here’s the dipper part of the Big Dipper,” he said as he touched each freckle. Then he slid his finger across the pink scar left behind from my blood oath with Rae. “And this is the handle.”

I touched the scar. “A long time ago, Rae made me promise her that I would never tell anyone where she was going. We made a blood oath.” I watched him carefully as I said it. “I still don’t know why she did it with a knife and not a needle or something less … violent.”

“Rae always did have a flare for the dramatic.” Grant sighed as he touched the scar again. He glanced up at me. “Did you keep your promise?”

I thought about the days after, the way Dad used to scare me just by looking at me. How he probably knew I could have told him where Rae was, but I wouldn’t. How I finally told that Ryan guy, when I was being interrogated about Ella, because I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“No,” I said. “Only for a few days.” All of a sudden, I felt the weight of the time bomb ticking on my chest. The second hand was ticking louder, echoing in the space between us, warning me. I had to go if I wanted a future outside of Havenwood, outside of Amble. With Grant.

But did Grant want a future with me?

I sucked in a breath. “Grant, I have to go. And I don’t think I’m coming back.” I forced the next part out of my mouth: “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again.”

Something behind Grant’s eyes flickered, a tiny spark of recognition. Or maybe it was fear. Whatever it was, it was quickly dimmed by the pain medication dripping through his IV. He blinked for so long that I wasn’t sure whether he’d fallen asleep.

“Grant?” I touched the tips of his fingers.

He started back to life and shook his head. And then he wove his fingers through mine. “Can you keep a promise to me?”

I bit my lip as I watched the way his fingers bent around mine. It seemed like it would be such a weird mix: my toothpick fingers all tied up in his long, rough ones. But somehow they looked okay together, like his hands were meant to be big enough to swallow mine up and cover them from the cold. And I thought about the one other promise I’d ever made, the most important one: to keep Ella safe.

I hadn’t kept that one.

“Can you at least try, Claire?” Grant asked as he squeezed my fingers. “Sometimes promises don’t work out the way you want them to. But the most important thing is that you at least gave it your best shot.”

The fact that he was even talking to me right now, even though his words were kind of slurred from whatever was dripping through his IV, was a miracle to me. The fact that he even wanted to talk to me was another miracle.

“I can try,” I told him.

Grant swallowed and tipped his head toward the ceiling. He took a deep breath. “How did I even get here?”

His torn-up face in the photographs flashed through my brain again. I closed my eyes. “I found you in the cornfield,” I whispered. It was the truth, as much of it as I could keep from slipping between my fingers anyway. I’d found Grant in the cornfield, injured before I got there. And then the wolf.

And then the knife.

His voice cut through the images in my head. “Can you promise me that if I leave with you right now, we’ll make it out of Amble before anything … happens to us?”

I looked at him—all of him—for the first time since I’d stepped in this room. Dozens of stitches screamed at me from under his bandages, every last one of them possibly my fault.

“I don’t know.” I pulled myself from the edge of his bed. “I don’t remember how everything happened. I just found you in the field and your head was bleeding and I don’t even know—”

“Claire, are you capable of hurting me right now?”

I looked at him and what used to be left of his Big Dipper nose, and everything in me melted. “No,” I whispered.

He nodded once. And then he tugged the IV needle out of his hand without flinching.

I tried to breath. “Are you sure you want to leave with me? What about your job, your mom, your friends. Your future?”

Grant shook his head as if he were trying to shake out the remnants of the pain medication from his brain. “I don’t have a future here anymore. You know how Amble is. They never forget when you betray them.” He touched my cheek. “And there’s not really a future without you in it, anyway.”

My chest exploded with something like happiness, or maybe just utter fear. Everything about Grant looked unstable, from the slur between his lips to the cloudiness behind his eyes. I wasn’t sure if he meant what he said or if he just wanted out of that hospital bed, but there had to be some part of him that still trusted me under all those narcotics if he was willing to go with me.

Right?

I didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. “We’ve gotta hurry,” I said as I grabbed his arm.

Grant ripped the heart monitor off his finger and pulled himself up. As soon as he stood, his knees buckled and I almost tumbled down with him. “Sorry,” he murmured, and he sounded way more messed up than I’d thought. “They put something strong in that IV.”

I pulled him up and opened the door. My heart sank when I saw the cluster of hospital employees puttering around the nurses’ station. “How are we going to get out of here?” I whispered.

“Ella,” Grant said, like it was the most obvious thing in the word.

Warmth flooded over me like an exploding sun and I gasped. Ella. Of course. Her diary entries. The secret escape route in the hospital when she came here for speech therapy.

I nodded. “Come on, I know where to go.”