Always (A Wolves of Mercy Falls Fanfic)

Chapter 1

Sam's POV:

I shot up, out of bed. I was so tense and rigid my back was as strait as a pole. My heart crashed in my chest making a drum bang in my ears.

The dream rushed backed to me. It was the same one I had been having for nights now. The wolf with the brown eyes stalked through the forest, that much was consistent. What changed every night was the way she died. Sometimes from hunger, or a storm, or the cold.

Oh, Grace.

Without her I was broken into a million pieces, scattered in all of our memories. Without her I was pure longing, longing for the endless summer we would never have.

Without Grace, I wasn't me, I was nothing.

As I threw back the covers and made my way down the creaking stairs of our shack to find Cole, I realised I now knew how Grace felt last year, when she thought me to be dead.

"Ahh, Ringo, you're up. Good! I need you for a moment,"

"Look Cole I'm really sorry, but I'm just not in the mood to give you my DNA, or be your experiment, or watch you burn our house down, or whatever it is you need me for," As an afterthought I added "It would be nice to still have a house if Grace comes back." I said quietly.

"I think you mean when. When she comes back, not if," he replied "She will be back, Sam. I know she will. And yes, you will still have a house when she returns seeing as I'm not planing on lighting anything on fire at the moment. I just wanted to talk to you about how you've been moping around the house for the last week. There's stuff to do. We've just moved a pack if wolves we need to make sure this environment is safe for them, that they are not eating anything that's killing them and that they're not being killed by other things. I mean, I know how you feel. I'm feeling the same. But they are both gone, for now at least, but that doesn't mean we get the right to slack off and do nothing. Come on! What would Grace say if she was here at the moment, she'd be telling us to get to work and she's gonna be wiping your ass when she's back if you haven't done anything,"

I just stared at him in shock for several seconds seeing as those were the last words I would have expected to hear come out of Cole's mouth. He was right though. I needed to do something. Even if it was only to keep my mind from wandering back to Grace, although I was beginning to think that was impossible. I would never stop thinking of her. Her in my memories, her in my dreams, her in my thoughts.

"Yeah. You're right. What do we do though? It's almost getting too cold for you to go outside again and we don't have much, if any warm weather still to come," I stated sadly.

"I don't really even care anymore. This needs to be done and I need to do something to keep my mind away from Isabel," Cole replied.

At that I gasped. Cole wasn't one for big heart to heart conversations or they expressing of feelings through anything but music. It took him ages to admit he had feelings for Isabel, but it would seem that now he'd realised he'd told her too late and he'd lost her, he was happy to admit to me that he missed her. It was the first time he had brought her up since she had left for California, around the time Grace had been injected with the virus that could either kill her or give us the life we've always dreamed of, but I think we both miss a little Isabel round here. Thoughts of missing Isabel brought me to thoughts of missing Grace and I knew Cole was right, we had work to do.

***

I trudged back up the stairs and into the room that had been allocated to me. Mine but not really mine. My room is either at Grace's house or Beck's house, they're the houses with memories. Memories of Grace, my pack, my childhood, Beck, Paul, Ulrick, even Shelby.

As I wrestled my shirt over my head and brought it down across my shoulders I thought of the candy shop and the rest of that night. As I pulled on my jeans and stuffed my feet into my boots I thought of The Crooked Shelf and the sofa in the upstairs room, reserved always for Grace and me.

I walked back down the stairs, my feet encased by the boots, making them feel like they weighed several kilos each. The effort needed to lift them was immense.

I made my way to the front door, not bothering with breakfast, and walked down the steps and straight into the forest. Longing to lose myself overtook me for a first time in what felt like forever. I needed to know Grace was safe, and while she was a wolf, I wanted to be one too. I didn't care if it meant bringing those awful memories to the surface and making them hurt again, like scurvy opens a man's semi-healed wounds to make them bleed. I thought that I could live happily if I could forget my parents and what they tried to do to me but I realized quite a while ago, that a life without Grace would mean no life at all, and I'd rather be with Grace and be bleeding than pretend to be healed and live a lie.