The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

He started writing. Oh, forgot to wash my hand.

He went into the bathroom and began to scrub. Something didn,t feel right about his hand. He stretched out his fingers. Well now, this can,t be. He examined his other hand as well. Bigger. His hands were bigger. No doubt about it. He didn,t wear a ring. If he had, he,d have known before now.

He went to his dresser, and pulled out a pair of his leather driving gloves. He couldn,t get them on.

He stood there taking stock. His feet were aching. They,d been aching all day. It hadn,t mattered much. He,d been enjoying himself and it had been a minor annoyance, but now he realized what it meant. His feet were bigger, not a whole lot bigger, just slightly bigger. He took off his shoes and that felt good.

He walked into his mother,s room. She was standing against the window, with her arms folded, merely looking at him. That,s much the way I,ve been looking at people, he thought. She,s staring, studying, taking stock. Only she isn,t looking at everybody that way, just at me.

"Human growth hormone," he said. "They found that in my blood."

She nodded slowly.

"You,re still technically an adolescent. You,re still growing. You probably will be until you,re maybe thirty. So your body puts out human growth hormone still when you sleep."

"So I could have a growth spurt still."

"A small one, perhaps." She was concealing something. She was not herself at all.

"What,s wrong, Mom?"

"I don,t know, baby, I,m just worried about you," she said. "I want you to be all right."

"I,m fine, Mamma. Never better."

He went to his room, fell across his bed, and slept.

After dinner the next night, his brother sought him out and asked if they could talk alone together.

They went up to the roof deck, but it was just too cold. After a few minutes, they settled in the living room before the fireplace. The room was small, like all the rooms in the Russian Hill house, but beautifully appointed and cozy. Reuben was in his father,s leather chair, and Jim was sitting on the couch. Jim wore his "clerics," as he called them, meaning his black shirtfront and white Roman collar with the usual black coat and pants. He was never one for going around in regular clothes.

His ran his fingers back through his brown hair and then he looked at his brother. Reuben felt that same odd detachment he,d been feeling for days. He studied his brother,s blue eyes, his pale skin, his thin lips. His brother simply wasn,t as flashy as Reuben was, Reuben thought, but he was a good-looking man.

"I,m worried about you," Jim said.

"Of course, why wouldn,t you be?" said Reuben.

"See, that,s just it. That,s the way you,ve been talking. Kind of soft and direct and strange."

"It,s not strange," said Reuben. Why add anything to that? Didn,t Jim know what this had been like? Or didn,t Jim know enough to know he couldn,t know what this had been like? Marchent dead, that house his now, Reuben nearly dying. All that.

"I want you to know we,re all with you," Jim said.

"That,s an understatement," said Reuben.

Jim smiled grimly and shot him a sharp flashing glance.

"Tell me something," Reuben said. "You meet a lot of people down there in the Tenderloin, I mean very unusual people, and you hear confessions. You,ve been hearing them for years."

"Right."

"Do you believe in evil, a disembodied principle of evil?"

Jim was speechless.

Then he ran his tongue over his lips and replied. "These killers," he said. "They were addicts. It,s all much more mundane...."

"No, Jim, I,m not talking about them. Yeah, I know their story. I mean ... do you ever think you can feel evil? Feel it coming out of someone? Feel a person about to do something evil?"

Jim appeared to be reflecting.

"It,s situational and psychological," he said. "People do destructive things."

"Maybe that,s it," said Reuben.

"What?"

He didn,t want to recount the story of the man in the bar. After all, it really wasn,t a story. Hardly anything had happened. He sat there thinking, thinking about what he had felt about that man. Maybe he had a heightened sense of the man,s destructive power or tendencies. "Much more mundane ...," he murmured.

"You know," said Jim, "I,ve always teased you about living a charmed life, about being the sunshine boy, the happy one."

"Yes," said Reuben drawing out the word sarcastically. "Well, I always was."

"Well, nothing like this has ever happened to you before and ... I,m worried."

Reuben didn,t answer. He was thinking again. He was thinking about the man in the bar. And then he thought about his brother. His brother was gentle. His brother had a remarkable calm. It occurred to him suddenly that his brother had a kind of simplicity that others never achieve.

When Jim spoke up again, his voice startled Reuben.

"I would give anything in this world to make you better," said Jim, "to have the expression on your face come back to what it was before, to have you again look like my brother, Reuben."

What a remarkable statement. Reuben didn,t answer. What was the point of saying anything? He had to think about that. He was drifting. For a moment, he was with Marchent, walking up the slope to Nideck Point.

Jim cleared his throat.

"I understand," Jim offered. "She screamed and you tried to reach her, but you couldn,t reach her in time. That,s going to make a difference, even though you know you did your very best to get to her. That,s bound to make any man feel a lot of things."

Reuben thought, Yes, that,s true. But he felt no necessity to say anything about it. He thought of how easy it had been to punch that man in North Beach right in the face. And easy enough to do that and nothing else, to let the guy stagger and decide to move on.

"Reuben?"

"Yeah, Jim, I,m listening," he said. "But I wish you wouldn,t worry. Look, we,ll talk when it,s time for us to talk."

Jim,s phone was ringing in his pocket. He jerked it out angrily, studied the small screen, rose to his feet, kissed Reuben on the top of his head, and left.

Thank God, Reuben thought.

He sat there looking into the fire. It was a gas-log fire but a good one. He thought of that roaring untidy oak blaze in Marchent,s living room fireplace. He smelled the burning oak again, and her perfume.

You are alone when something like this happens. Doesn,t matter how many people love you and want to help you. You are alone.

When Marchent died, she was alone.