The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

He made himself look up. And he made himself remain standing, though it became harder and harder to do so. The hair was retracting, disappearing, though some of it fell to the tile floor. The black tip of his nose was paling, dissolving. His nose was shrinking, becoming shorter. The fangs were shrinking. His mouth tingled. His hands and feet tingled. Every part of him was electrified with sensation.

Finally, the acute physical pleasure overwhelmed him. He couldn,t watch, couldn,t be attentive. He was near to fainting.

He staggered into the bedroom and fell across the bed. Deep orgasmic spasms ran through the muscles of his thighs and calves, through his back, his arms. The bed felt wondrously soft, and the voices outside had become a low vibrant hum.

The darkness came, as it had during those despairing moments in Marchent,s house, when he,d thought he was dying. But he didn,t fight it now as he had then.

He was asleep before the transformation was finished.

It was broad daylight when the ringing of his phone awakened him. Where was it coming from?

It stopped.

He turned and got up. He was cold and naked, and the raw light of the overcast sky hurt his eyes. A sharp pain in his head scared him, but then it left as suddenly as it had come.

He looked around for the iPhone. He found it on the bathroom floor and at once clicked back to the pictures.

He was certain, certain, he would find nothing there but a photograph of good old Reuben Golding. Just that, and nothing more, and incontrovertible proof that Reuben Golding was going flat-out crazy.

But there it was: the man wolf, staring back at him.

His heart stopped.

The head was immense, the brown mane falling well beyond the shoulders, the long black-tipped nose more than evident, and the fangs cutting below the black-rimmed edge of the mouth of the thing. Blue eyes, your blue eyes.

He covered his mouth with his hand. He was shaking all over. He felt of his own, natural lips, well formed, faintly pink, as he studied himself in the mirror. And then he looked at that mouth again, rimmed in black. This could not be; and this was. This was a lupine man - a monster. He clicked through one picture after another.

Dear God ...

The creature,s ears were long, pointed, cleaving to its head, half hidden by the luxuriant hair. Its forehead protruded, but did not really conceal the large eyes. Only they retained their human proportion. The beast looked like nothing he,d ever seen before - certainly not the teddy bear monster of old werewolf movies. It looked like a tall satyr.

"Man wolf," he whispered.

And is this what almost killed me in Marchent,s house? Is this what lifted me in its mouth and almost tore open my throat as it had done to Marchent,s brothers?

He synced the images one by one to his computer.

Then, sitting down before the thirty-inch monitor, he brought them up one by one. He gasped. In one picture, he,d been holding up his paw - and it was him, wasn,t it? No point to calling it "it." And now he studied the paw, the big hairy webbed fingers and the claws.

He went back into the bathroom and looked at the floor. Last night he,d seen hairs dropping off him as they would off a shedding dog. They weren,t there now. There was something there, something wispy - tiny tendrils, almost too thin to see that seemed to disintegrate when he tried to catch them up in his fingers.

So it dries up, it dissolves, it flies away. All the evidence is inside me or gone, burnt up.

So that,s why they,d never found any fur or hair in Mendocino County!

He remembered that spasm in his gut, and the waves of pleasure washing over him, pervading every limb the way music reverberates through the wood of a violin or the wood of a building.

On the bed, he found the same fine, vanishing hairs, dissolving at his touch, or simply scattering far and wide.

He began to laugh. "I can,t help it," he whispered. "I can,t help it." But this was an exhausted, desperate laughter. Sinking down on the side of the bed, his head in his hands, he gave in to it, laughing under his breath until he was too exhausted to laugh anymore.

An hour later, he was still lying there, with his head on the pillow. He was remembering things - the scent of the alleyway, garbage, urine; the scent of the woman, a tender perfume suffused with an acid smell, almost citruslike - the smell of fear? He didn,t know. The whole world had been alive with scents and sounds, but he,d been focused only on the reek of the man, the pumping smell of his fury.

The phone rang. He ignored it. It rang again. It didn,t matter.

"You killed somebody," he said. "Are you going to think about that? Stop thinking about scents, and sensations, and leaping over rooftops, and jumping some twelve feet in the air. Stop it. You killed somebody."

He couldn,t be sorry. No, not at all. The man was going to kill the woman. He had already done irreparable damage to her, terrifying her, strangling her, forcing his fury upon her. The man had harmed others. The man lived and breathed to hurt and harm. He knew this, knew this from what he saw, and oddly enough from that powerful reek. The man was a killer.

Dogs know the scent of fear, don,t they? Well, he knew the scent of helplessness, and the scent of rage.

No, he wasn,t sorry. The woman was alive. He saw her running down that alley, falling, rising again, running not only towards the busy street, the lights, the traffic, but towards her life, her life yet to be lived, a life of things to learn, and things to know and things to do.

He saw Marchent, in his mind,s eye, rushing out of the office with the gun in her hand. He saw the dark figures close in on her. She fell hard on the kitchen floor. She died. And there was no more life.

Life died around her. The great redwood forest outside her house died, and all the rooms of her house died. The shadows of the kitchen shrank; the boards beneath her shrank. Until there was nothing, and the nothing closed her in and shut her up. And that was the end of it for Marchent.

If there was a great blossoming on the other side, if her soul had expanded in the light of an infinite and embracing love, well, how are we to know it, until we go there too? He tried for a moment to imagine God, a God as immense as the universe with all its millions of stars and planets, its unchartable distances, its inevitable sounds and its silence. Such a God could know all things, all things, the minds and attitudes and fears and regrets of every single living thing, from the scampering rat to every person. This God could gather a soul, whole and complete and magnificent, from a dying woman on a kitchen floor. He could catch it up in His powerful hands, and carry it heavenward beyond this world to be forever united with Him.

But how could Reuben really know that? How could he know what lay on the other side of the silence in the hallway when he,d been struggling there to breathe and live, and those two dead bodies had been tangled with his body?