The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

He was stunned. This had to be a coincidence, and certainly it was a coincidence that no one had noticed and which no one might ever notice.

But there was something else in those first few lines. He brought up the story again. Sperver. He,d seen that name before too, somewhere, and it had something to do with Marchent and Nideck Point. But what? He couldn,t remember. Sperver. He could almost see the name written in ink, but where? Then it hit him. It was the last name of Felix Nideck,s very dear friend and mentor, Margon, the man Felix had called Margon the Godless. Hadn,t his name been written on the mat inside the framing of the big photograph over the fireplace? Oh, why hadn,t he written down those names? But he was certain of it. He remembered Marchent saying the name Margon Sperver.

No, this simply could not be a coincidence. One name, yes, but two names? No. Impossible. But what in the world could this possibly mean?

He experienced a deep frisson.

Nideck.

What had Simon Oliver, his lawyer, told him? He,d talked on and on about this in phone call after phone call, as if reassuring himself of this rather than Reuben.

"The family,s hardly what you would call ancient. It comes out of nowhere in the 1880s. There was an exhaustive search for relatives after Felix disappeared, for anyone who might have information on the man. They found nothing. Of course the nineteenth century is filled with new men, self-made men. A timber baron who comes out of nowhere and builds a huge house. Par for the course. The point is, you aren,t likely to be challenged on all this by any long-lost heirs. They don,t exist anywhere."

He sat staring at the computer screen.

Could that family name have been contrived for a reason? No. That,s absurd. What would have been the reason? What, these people read an obscure werewolf story and they took the name Nideck from it? And then over a century later - . No, this was nonsense. Sperver or no Sperver. It just couldn,t be. Marchent never knew of any such family secret.

He saw Marchent,s radiant face, her smile, heard her laughter. So wholesome, so possessed of an inner ... an inner what? An inner happiness?

But what if that dark house contained the proverbial dark secret?

He spent the next quarter hour skimming the short story "The Man-Wolf."

It was predictably entertaining, and typically nineteenth century. Hugh Lupus was the werewolf, of Nideck Castle, under a family curse, and the story involved tantalizing but for Reuben,s purposes meaningless elements like a dwarf who answered the gates of the castle and a powerful witch called the Black Plague. Sperver was the huntsman of the Black Forest.

What could all this have to do with the reality of what Reuben had endured? Surely he didn,t believe the obvious cliche that a werewolf curse hung over Nideck Point.

How could he know?

He couldn,t dismiss it, that was certain.

He thought of that big photograph over Marchent,s library fireplace, of those men deep in the tropical forest - Felix Nideck and his mentor, Margon Sperver. Marchent had mentioned others, names, but he couldn,t clearly remember them - except that they didn,t appear in the story.

Ah, he had to make an exhaustive search of all werewolf literature. And at once he set about ordering books specifically on werewolf fiction, legends, and poetry, including anthologies and studies, to be delivered overnight.

But he felt he was grasping at straws. He was imagining things.

Felix was long dead. Margon was probably dead. Marchent had searched and searched. What absurd nonsense. And the beast thing came into that house from the forest, certainly, through the shattered dining room windows. It heard the screams just as you hear screams; he smelled the evil as you smell evil.

Romantic nonsense.

A sadness came over him suddenly that Felix was dead and gone. But still: names from a man wolf story. And what if there is, what, some degenerate beast cousin roaming the forest ... keeping guard over the house?

He felt tired.

Suddenly a warm feeling came over him. He heard the low roar of the gas fire; he heard the rain singing in the gutters. He felt warm all over, and light. The voices of the city throbbed and rumbled, and gave him the oddest feeling that he was connected to the whole world. Hmmm. It was just the opposite of the alienation he,d felt earlier when talking to real identifiable people at the Observer.

"You belong to them now, maybe," he whispered. The voices were too homogenized. Words, cries, pleas, hovered just below the surface.

God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?

He looked at his watch.

It was just past ten o,clock. What if he took off now in the Porsche for Nideck Point? Why, the drive would be nothing. Just several hours in pouring rain. Very likely he could get in the house. He,d break a little windowpane if he had to. Why would there be a problem? The house would be legally his within a few weeks. He,d already signed all the documents the title company required of him. He,d already taken over the utility bills, hadn,t he? Well, hell, why not go there?

And the beast man out there, in the forest. Would he know that Reuben was there? Would he pick up the scent of the one he,d bitten and left alive?

He was burning to go up there.

Something startled him. It wasn,t a sound exactly, no, but something ... a vibration - as if a car with a pounding sound system was passing in the street.

He saw a dark woods, but it wasn,t the woods of Mendocino. No, another woods, a misty tangled woods that he knew. Alarm.

He got up and opened the doors to the deck.

The air was gusty and bitter cold. The rain struck his face and his hands. It was divinely bracing.

The city shimmered beneath its veil of rain, thicket upon thicket of lighted towers crowding in on him so beautifully. He heard a voice whispering as if in his ear: "Burn him, burn them." This was an ugly, acid voice.

His heart was thudding, and his body tensed. All over his skin came the ecstatic rippling sensation. A fount inside him let loose with a gushing power that straightened his back.

It was happening, all right, the wolf-hair was covering his body, the mane descending to his shoulders, and the waves of ecstatic pleasure were coursing over him, obliterating all caution. The wolf-hair grew from his face as though invisible fingers coaxed it, and the keening pleasure made him gasp.

His hands were already claws; as before, he tore off his clothes, and kicked off his shoes. He ran his claws over his thick hairy arms and chest.

All the sounds of the night were sharpened, the chorus rising around him, mingled with bells, fleeting streaks of music, and desperate prayers. He felt the urge to escape the confines of the room, to spring off into the darkness, utterly indifferent to where he might land.