The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

In a snarling frenzy, he hurled her through the broken window. He heard the body strike the paving of the street.

For a long second he stood there, waiting for the pain to return, but the pain didn,t return. There was nothing there but pulsing warmth.

He moved towards the wraithlike figure that was tied with tape and bandages to the brass headboard. Carefully he ripped loose her fetters.

She had her thin face turned to one side. "Hail Mary, full of grace," she prayed in a dry, whistling whisper, "the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus."

He bent down, removing the last of the bonds from her waist.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God," he said under his breath as he looked into her eyes. "Pray for us sinners - us sinners! - now and at the hour of our death."

The old woman moaned. She was too weak to move.

He left her, padding softly down the carpeted hallway of the house, and into another spacious room where he found a phone. It was so difficult to punch in the numbers. He was laughing to himself, thinking of the beast of Mendocino, tapping them out on the screen of an iPhone. When he heard the voice of the operator a wild exultant urge went through him, to say Murder, murder, but he did not. That would have been sheer madness. And he hated himself suddenly for thinking it so very funny. Besides, it wasn,t true. "Ambulance. Break-in. Old woman top floor. Held prisoner."

The operator was questioning him, and rattling off the address for verification.

"Hurry," he said. He left the phone off the hook.

He listened.

The house was empty except for the old woman - and one other silent person who slept.

It took him only a few moments to move down to the second floor and find that helpless invalid, an old man, bound as the woman had been bound, bruised and frail, and deep asleep.

Reuben explored, finding the light switch, and flooded the scene with light.

What more could he do to bring help to this creature and the other, to make certain no colossal blunder was made?

In the hallway, he saw the dim outline of himself in a high gold-framed mirror. He smashed it, the giant shards clattering to the floor.

He picked up the old-fashioned glass-shaded lamp from the hall table and heaved it over the railing so that it was smashed on the floor of the lower front hall.

The sirens were coming, winding together, just like those unraveling sounds he heard in Mendocino. Ribbons in the night.

He could go now.

He made his escape.

For a long time, he remained in the high dark cypress woods of Buena Vista Park. The hilltop trees were slender, but he had easily found one strong enough to support him, and he watched through a mesh of branches the ambulances and the police cars collected below on the hillside outside the mansion. He saw the old woman and the old man taken away. He saw the corpse of the vengeful tormentor collected from the pavement. He saw the sleepy disheveled spectators finally wander away.

A great exhaustion came over him. The pain in his shoulder was gone. In fact, he,d forgotten about it entirely. These paws of his could not feel like hands, he realized. They could not read the texture of the sticky fluid matted in his hair.

He was becoming ever more tired, positively weak.

Yet it was a simple matter to make the secretive and rapid journey home.

Back in his room, he again confronted himself in the mirror.

"Anything new to tell me?" he asked. "What a deep voice you have."

The transformation had begun.

He gripped the soft fur between his legs even as it was shrinking, vanishing, and then he felt his fingers emerging again to touch the wound in his shoulder.

There was no wound.

No wound at all.

He was so tired now he could scarcely remain standing, but he had to make sure of this. He moved towards the mirror. No wound. But was there a bullet locked inside him, a bullet that could infect him and kill him? How could he know?

He almost laughed out loud thinking of what Grace would say if he said, Mom, I think I got shot last night. Can you run an X-ray to see if there,s a bullet lodged in my shoulder? Don,t worry, I don,t feel a thing.

But no, that wasn,t going to happen.

He fell into his bed, loving the soft clean smell of the pillow, and as the pewter light of morning filled the room, he went fast asleep.

Chapter Eight

REUBEN AWOKE at ten, showered, shaved, and went immediately to Simon Oliver,s office to pick up the keys to Nideck Point. No, Marchent,s lawyers didn,t care if he visited the place; indeed the handyman needed to see him, and the sooner he could take over having some repairs made the better. And would he make his own inventory, please? They were worried about "all that stuff up there."

He was on the road before noon, speeding across the Golden Gate towards Mendocino, the rain a steady drizzle, the car filled with clothes, an extra computer, a couple of old Bose DVD players, and other things he would leave in his new refuge.

He needed this time alone desperately. He needed to be alone tonight with these powers - to study, to observe, to seek to control. Maybe he could stop the transformation at will or modulate it. Maybe he could bring it on.

Whatever the case, he had to get away from everything, including the voices that had drawn him into the slaughtering of four people. He had no choice but to head north.

And ... and, there was always the remote possibility that something lived up there in those northern woods that knew all about what he was and might just share with him the secrets of what he,d become. He didn,t really hope for that, but it was possible. He wanted to be visible to that thing. He wanted that thing to see him roaming the rooms of Nideck Point.

Grace had been at the hospital when he,d slipped out, and Phil had been nowhere around. He,d talked to Celeste briefly, listening numbly as she recounted the horrors of last night to him in boiling detail.

"And this THING just threw the woman out of the window, Reuben! And she landed smack-dab on the pavement! I mean the city is going crazy! It ripped apart two bums in Golden Gate Park, gutting one of them like a fish. And everybody loved your story, Reuben. The Man Wolf - that,s what they,re calling him. You could get a cut from the mugs and the T-shirts, you know. Maybe you should trademark ,Man Wolf., But who,s going to believe what that crazy woman in North Beach said? I mean, what is the thing going to do next: scrawl a poetic message on a wall in the victim,s blood?"

"That,s a thought, Celeste," Reuben had murmured.

When traffic stalled on the Waldo Grade, he called Billie.

"You scored again, Boy Wonder," said Billie. "I don,t know how you do it. It,s been picked up by the wire services and websites around the world. People are linking to it on Facebook and Twitter. You gave this monster, the Man Wolf, some metaphysical depth!"