“That’s awesome,” I told him. “Always great to meet a fan.”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, it’s not just that. When you disappeared, Cole . . .”

My ears felt a little ring-y.

“When you disappeared, I was having a rough time, too,” he said. He pulled up his sleeves. In the crooked blue shadows of the stairwell, his arms were a mess of scars. Track marks and cutting. But old. Old scars. “But when I heard on the radio that you were in rehab, I thought, I can do it, too.

And I did. I totally did, because of you. Because if you could come back from that, back from the dead, I could do it, too.

You changed my life. That song you guys had, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me, I know it’s about, about rebirth. . . .”

“Coffinbone” wasn’t about rebirth. It was about wanting to die. All of the songs back then were about wanting to die. My chest felt small.

“When I heard you were in town recording, I knew the time was right for this. And when I saw you drive in here, I knew this was my, this was my chance to tell you thanks. And show you — sorry, it’s still a little raw.” The guy half turned, jacking up his shirt. The skin of his back was red and angry with the irritation of a brandnew tattoo.

In cursive it said, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me. And then a date. The date he got out of rehab or went in or something. Probably he wanted me to ask. But I didn’t.

There was nothing wrong with any of it except that he’d taken a quote about wanting to die every second of every day and tattooed it on his body because he didn’t understand. There was nothing really wrong with that, either, because it meant what he wanted it to mean.

But I knew what it had meant in the beginning, and the permanence of it, of marking his body forever with my desire to die, made my stomach churn sickly. The feeling didn’t go away when he pulled down his shirt.

“That’s amazing, man,” I told him. “Good for you. Give me a — give me a fist bump.”

He shivered and wiped his left eye and then gave me the most timid fist bump known to man. He looked like he might fall down.

“I just wanted to tell you,” he said again, “what an inspiration you are. I don’t want to stop you from your, whatever. Oh, gosh, this is the best day of my life.”

I summoned a little wave for him as I turned away. As I headed down the stairs, the metal echoed and rattled beneath me. My legs felt wobbly, and my pulse had suddenly begun to race.

He’d done everything right. He hadn’t detained me. Hadn’t asked me to sign his face or his dick. Just said his piece and then gone on his way. Cleaned himself up and unfairly credited me with the burden of his recovery.

But my recovery was such a fragile thing. What happened if you hung your cure on someone else’s, and they turned out to be still sick? I wished for the sailing optimism of my first days here. My bulletproof confidence.

By the time I got to .blush., my skin was clammy. I could feel my heart tripping. My mind said: anxiety attack. My body just screamed. Every piece of my skin was sending a thousand messages a second to my brain. Run. Fight. Get the hell out of here.

There was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be anxious over. But then I would turn over the image of that tattoo like a shovel turning over grave dirt. And my stomach would churn. It felt as if the temperature were plummeting.

It’s not cold out here, I told myself. Even overcast, it wasn’t cold. I looked out at the street and imagined blistering sun brilliant on the car mirrors, white light searing the sides of the buildings. But my brain howled the cold at me. My arms were goose bumps with the fake cold.

I had known all along that the more times I forced the shift, the more likely I was to shift accidentally. I had been playing this game for weeks now.

No.

I called Isabel. My fingers were already shaking enough to make hitting the buttons difficult.

Her voice was another cool thing in the whitewashed day.

“Culpep —”

“Is the store empty?”

“Cole, this isn’t —”

“Is it empty?” She had to say yes, because I was already there, my face reflected in the black-ice mirror of the door, my hand on the door handle. I needed to put my head between my legs, to breathe into a damn paper bag, to shut myself in a room far away from the clouds and the world. I needed to get off the street.

“Yeah. Hey, what is —”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I hung up. I threw my phone, wallet, and keys into the potted plant by the front door.

This isn’t happening.

But it was.

The second I pushed open the door to .blush., the second the airconditioning hit my already cool skin, it was over.

Isabel stood in between tables of clothing, staring at me.

Her face looked bizarre somehow, like I couldn’t understand the angles of it.

My stomach seized. My skin was ragged. My breath was in pieces. I couldn’t tell her what was happening. But she didn’t need to be told.

She shut her eyes, just for a second. She opened them. She said, “No. Cole, I can’t —”

But I was already a wolf.

Chapter Forty-Nine

· isabel ·

Just like that, it had happened.

This was how to deal with disaster: Isolate the worst part of the problem. Identify a solution. Tune out every bit of noise.

Here was the disaster: Cole St. Clair was a wolf in the middle of Santa Monica, trapped in my place of work, a business I had just been setting up for a private showing Sierra had this evening. It would have been bad any other time, but now, it meant that a wolf stood in the front of a store currently lit by one hundred candles.

Isolate the worst part of the problem.

Cole St. Clair.

Identify a solution.

It was enough to make me want to give up.

There he was, in the flesh, everything I’d been afraid of. It was not a monster. It just wasn’t Cole.

It was every wolf I’d left behind in Minnesota. It was every hurtling, grief-saturated memory that galloped into my mind. It was every tear I hadn’t cried since I’d moved.

The wolf didn’t move. Its ears swiveled slowly toward me and away, back toward the street noise. The hackles of its lovely coat were scuffed up into feral suspicion. As before, just as I remembered, the eyes were still Cole’s: brilliant green and intense. But everything that made him Cole was stripped from them, replaced with instinct and image.