The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

All was well around them.

He thought of the boy. He was in agony.

Unspeakable, all this.

He begged the forest to hold him close, to protect him from the merciless sharpness of his own conscience. A long time ago in his short life, the voice of conscience had been the voice of Grace, Phil, Jim, and Celeste. But that was no longer the way it was at all. And now his own conscience sank the knife into his soul.

Heal this, if you can with all your secret boiling power! Morphenkind, what have you done to that boy? Will he survive only to become what you are?

At last, he couldn,t stand these thoughts anymore. The sublime peace of these leafy heights was paling in the heat of his misery. He had to move, and he began to climb from tree to tree, with her arms and legs once more locked to him. They moved on in a great arc through the woods, and slowly back to the edge of the redwood forest. As always, she weighed nothing; she was fragrant and sweet as if he carried bundles of flowers close to him for their luscious scent. His tongue sought out her neck, her cheek, his growls turned to low moans serenading her.

She locked her arms and legs even tighter around him again, and he descended into the warmer closer air of the lower forest.

Her hands felt icy. Even he could feel this, feel the iciness as if it was smoke coming from her hands.

He walked slowly through the great generous gray-barked oaks, carrying her, stopping here and there so they could kiss, so he could move his left paw under her sweater and feel the hot silky naked flesh there, so moist, so bare, so redolent of citrus and blossoms he couldn,t name and the stark searing scent of her living flesh. He lifted her up and suckled her br**sts as she sighed.

Once inside the house, he laid her down on the great long dining room table. He held her icy hands between his paws, his warm paws, weren,t they warm? The room was dark. The house creaked and sighed against the pummeling of the ocean wind. Light fell languidly through the alcove from the great room.

For a long moment he looked at her, lying there waiting for him, her hair loose and snagged with bits of aromatic leaf or petal, her eyes large and drowsy yet fixed on him.

Then he gave the match to the oak wood that was built up in the fireplace. The kindling crackled, exploded, and the flames leapt. The eerie light danced on the coffered ceiling. It danced in the high lacquer of the tabletop.

She began to remove her clothes, but he begged her with a quiet gesture to stop. Then he took them off of her, rolling back the sweater and pulling it gently away, and pulling loose the pants and throwing them aside. She kicked off her shoes.

The sight of her naked on the bare table maddened him wondrously. He ran the soft side of his paws under her naked feet. He caressed her naked calves. "Don,t let me hurt you," he whispered in that low voice, so familiar to him now, now so much a part of him. "Tell me if I hurt you."

"You never hurt me," she whispered. "You can,t hurt me."

"Tender throat, tender belly," he growled, licking her with his long tongue, soft under-paws lifting her br**sts. Get thee behind me, tragedy. Kneeling over her, he lifted her and impaled her gently on his sex and the room went dim around him, the fire roaring and crackling in his ears, his mind filled with nothing but her, till it was no mind at all.

Afterwards, he picked her up and carried her up the stairs and down the hollow hallway - such a long walk in the secretive dark - to the warmer air of their bedroom. Perfume; candles. It was so very dim here, so very silent.

He laid her down on the bed, a shadow against the pale whiteness of the sheets, and sat beside her. Without fanfare he closed his eyes and brought the change. A little fire burst inside his chest; the air itself seemed to lift the wolf-coat, soften it, dissolve it. The orgasmic waves rocked him violently but quickly. Then the fur began to melt away, his skin drew breath, and he looked down again at his hands, his familiar hands.

"I did a terrible thing tonight," he said.

"What was it?" She clasped his arm and pressed it gently.

"I injured that boy, that boy I was trying to save. I think I passed the Chrism."

She said nothing. Her shadowy face was a picture of understanding and compassion, and what a marvel that was, because he expected neither from anyone. Hoping for something is not the same as expecting it.

"And what if he dies?" he asked with a sigh. "What if I,ve shed innocent blood? Or what if the best of all possible outcomes is that he becomes what I am?"

Chapter Thirty-One

THE STORY EXPLODED on the morning news, not because the Man Wolf had had the temerity to go to the northern city of Santa Rosa and shred four vicious killers, but because the surviving victim was already famous.

As the juvenile victim of a near-fatal attack, his identity was protected, but by 5:00 a.m. he had called the press from his hospital bed, and given his version of the story out to several reporters.

His name was Stuart McIntyre, a sixteen-year-old high school graduate who six months before had made international headlines by insisting on taking a male date to his senior prom at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Academy in Santa Rosa. The school had not only said no to Stuart,s request, but stripped him of the title of valedictorian, thereby denying him the right to make the key speech on graduation night, and Stuart had taken his case to the media, granting interviews by phone and e-mail to anybody and everybody who was interested.

This had not been the first g*y activist cause of which Stuart was a champion. But his greatest claim to fame before the prom crisis had been his success as a high school actor, persuading Blessed Sacrament to put on a full-scale production of Cyrano de Bergerac, just so that he could ably play the lead in it, which he had, to good reviews.

As soon as Reuben saw Stuart on the news he recognized him. Stuart had a square face, a sprinkling of freckles across his broad nose and cheeks, and a huge mop of unruly blond hair that suggested a halo. His eyes were blue and his habitual smile was a bit mischievous. It was actually a grin. His was a likable and at times pretty face. The camera loved him.

Reuben had just begun reporting for the Observer when Stuart became a local celebrity, and Reuben had never paid much attention to the story, except to be amused that this plucky kid thought he could convince a Catholic high school to let him take his boyfriend to the prom.

The "boyfriend," Antonio Lopez, had been the unfortunate kid murdered last night by the four g*y bashers, who had, by the way, expressed their intent, to the boys and to others, to mutilate both victims postmortem.

By noon, the story was huge, again, not only because the seeming "invincible" Man Wolf had intervened, saving Stuart,s life, but because the person behind the g*y bashing was rumored to be Stuart,s stepfather, a golf instructor named Herman Buckler. Two of the killers had been brothers-in-law of the dead boy, Antonio, and other members of their family spilled the story fingering the stepfather as the man who had masterminded the attack to get rid of his stepson. Stuart also told police that his stepfather had set up the attack, and that the young men who had tried to kill him had told him as much.