Read Online Forever by Maggie Stiefvater - Free Book Online Page B

called me and told me the police had just found a body in the woods. A girl, and they haven’t identified her yet.”
    This was not good. I was glad that I knew that Grace was here, in the piano room making weird scratching noises. I realized Mom was still staring at me meaningfully; I was supposed to react.
    I said, “And you just assumed that some random dead person was me?”
    â€œIt was near our property line, Isabel,” Mom snapped.
    Then my father said what I’d somehow known he was going to say. “She was killed by wolves.”
    I was filled with incredible anger, all of a sudden, at Sam and Cole and Grace, for doing nothing when I’d told them to do something .
    There was more noise coming from the piano room. I spoke overthe top of it. “Well, I’ve been at school or here all day. Hard to get killed at school.” Then, because I realized I needed to ask or look guilty: “When will they know who she is?”
    â€œI don’t know,” my father said. “They said she was in bad shape.”
    Mom said abruptly, “I’m going to go change out of these clothes.” For a moment, I couldn’t puzzle out the reason for her speedy exit. Then I realized she must’ve been thinking about my brother’s death, imagining Jack torn apart by wolves. I was impervious; I knew how Jack had really died.
    Just then, there was a thump from the piano room, clear enough that my father’s eyes narrowed.
    â€œI’m sorry I didn’t pick up the phone,” I said loudly. “I didn’t mean to upset Mom. Hey. Something hit the bottom of my car on the way home. Would you look at it?”
    I waited for him to refuse me, to charge into the other room and find Grace shifting into a wolf. But instead he sighed and nodded, already heading back toward the other door.
    Of course there was nothing under my car for him to find. But he spent so long investigating that I had time to hurry back to the piano room to see if Grace had destroyed the Steinway. All I found was an open window and one of the screens pushed out into the yard. I leaned out and caught a glimpse of yellow — my Santa Maria Academy shirt, snagged on one of the bushes.
    There had never been a worse time for Grace to be a wolf.

• SAM •
    So I had missed her again.
    After the phone call, I lost hours to — nothing. Caught completely by the sound of Grace’s voice, my thoughts chased each other, the same questions over and over. Wondering if I would have been able to see Grace if I’d gotten her message earlier, if I hadn’t gone out to check the shed for signs of life, if I hadn’t walked farther into the woods and shouted up through birch leaves to the sky, frustrated by Cole’s seizure and Grace’s absence and by just the weight of being me.
    I drowned in the questions until the light failed. Hours gone, like I’d shifted, but I’d never left my own skin. It had been years since I’d lost time like this.
    Once upon a time, that was my life. I used to look out the window for hours at a time, until my legs fell asleep beneath me. It was when I first came to Beck — I must’ve been eight or so, not long after my parents had left me with my scars. Ulrik sometimes picked me up under my armpits and pulled me back toward the kitchen and a life occupied by other people, but I was a silent, quivering participant. Hours, days, months gone, lost to another place that admitted neither Sam nor wolf. It was Beck who finally broke the spell.
    He had offered me a tissue; it was a strange enough gift that it brought me to the present. Beck waved it at me again. “Sam. Your face.”
    I touched my cheeks; they weren’t so much damp as sticky with the memory of continuous tears. “I wasn’t crying,” I told him.
    â€œI know you weren’t,” Beck replied.
    While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell