The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

Servants arrived from Europe, including a solemn quiet French-speaking man who had been Margon,s valet, and a cheerful and uncomplaining old woman from England who cooked, cleaned, and baked bread. Thibault hinted that more would be coming.

Even before Thanksgiving, Reuben was hearing casual talk of a private airport above Fort Bragg that the others were using for short flights to distant hunting grounds. He was blazing with curiosity and so was Stuart. Stuart spent his days deep in study of werewolf lore, world history, evolution, civil and criminal law, human anatomy and endocrinology, archaeology, and foreign film.

Frequently the distinguished gentlemen disappeared into the Inner Sanctum, as they called it, to work with the ancient tablets which they were putting in some kind of order, and which they were not eager, for obvious reasons, to move again.

Felix spent much time trying to put his own galleries and libraries in reasonable order. And could often be found in the gabled attic over the master bedroom, reading in the very place where Reuben had found the little book of theology by Teilhard de Chardin.

Thanksgiving night, after the family left, Laura went south to spend a few days alone in her little house on the edge of Muir Woods. Reuben begged to go with her but she insisted that this was a trip she had to make alone. She wanted to visit the cemetery where her father and mother, her sister, and her daughter were buried. And when she came back, she said, she,d know what the future held for her. And so would Reuben.

He found this damned near unbearable. He was tempted more than once to drive south just to spy on Laura. But he knew that Laura needed this time. He did not so much as call her.

Finally, the distinguished gentlemen gathered up the cubs, and took them by plane for a hunt in the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

This was to be a hybrid hunt, according to Margon, and that meant clothing had to be worn - the predictable hooded sweatshirts and loose raincoats, baggy pants and loafers that would accommodate their transformed bodies.

Stuart and Reuben were both powerfully excited.

It was thrilling beyond their sharpest dreams - the hollow stripped-down cargo plane landing at the secret airstrip, the black SUVs tunneling through the jet-black night, and then the trip over the rooftops when the company spread out like cats in the dark, lured by the scent of the suffering girls and women held captive in a brothel-slave barracks from which they,d soon be smuggled into the United States under threat of torture and death.

They cut the power to the barracks before they invaded it, and quickly locked the women away for their own safety.

Reuben had never dreamed of such carnage, such abandon, such a massacre in the low concrete building, its escape routes latched from the outside, and its vicious male inmates scrambling like rats in the wet slippery corridors and dead-end rooms - to escape the remorseless sharp-toothed enemy that descended on them.

The building shook with the roars of the Morphenkinder, the shrieks and bellowing of dying men, and the screams of terrified women huddled in their filthy dormitory.

At last the stench of evil had died out; in remote corners of the compound, Morphenkinder still feasted, chomping on the remains. Stuart, the great shaggy Boy Wolf, in his long open coat, stood dazed staring at the bodies scattered around him. And the women had ceased their wailing.

Now it was time for them all to slip away - for the women to be freed in the blackness to stumble towards the light never knowing the identity of the hulking hooded giants who had avenged them. And the sure-footed hunters were gone, vaulting over the rooftops once more, their paws and garments stained with blood, their mouths smeared with it, their stomachs full.

They dozed like a litter, piled on one another in the hold of the plane. Somewhere over the Pacific they dropped their bloody garments into the sea, and emerged into the chill windy night of Mendocino County in the fresh rags they,d taken for their return - still bleary-eyed, glutted, and at peace, or so it seemed, silent on the short ride to Nideck Point as the rain, the familiar, relentless California rain, beat upon the windshield.

"Now that was hunting!" said Stuart, staggering in a half sleep towards the back door. And throwing back his head he let out a wolfen howl that echoed off the stone walls of the house, the others dissolving into soft laughter.

"Soon," said Margon, "we hunt the jungles of Colombia."

Reuben dreamed, as he dragged his exhausted limbs up the stairs, that Laura would be there waiting for him, but she was not. Only her fragrance was there in the soft down comforter and pillows. He took one of her flannel nightgowns from the closet, and held it in his arms, resolving to dream of her.

Hours later, he awoke to the miracle of the blue sky over the Pacific and the miracle of the dark blue water glittering and dancing under the sun.

Showering and dressing quickly, he went out to walk in the bright and glorious light, marveling at the common spectacle of snow-white clouds moving beyond the gables of the house which rose above him as severe and strong as battlements.

One had to live on this bleak and chilly coast to understand the full miracle of a clear day when the marine mists were simply gone as if their wintry reign had finally ended.

It seemed a lifetime ago that he had come to this very terrace with Marchent Nideck, and he had looked up at this house and asked of it that it give him the darkness, the depth, he so needed. Be the minor-key music in my life, he had said to it, and he had felt certain the house answered him, promising revelations of which he could not dream.

He walked across the windswept flags, straight into the brisk and fresh ocean wind, until he stood at the old broken balustrade that separated the terrace from the edge of the cliff, and that narrow perilous path that led down to the ribbon of beach below with its forlorn rocks and bleached driftwood.

The sound of the surf swallowed him whole. He felt weightless, and as if the wind would support him if he let himself go, with arms out towards the sky.

To the right of him rose the dark green tree-shrouded bluffs that sheltered the redwood forest. And to the south the twisted Monterey cypress and scrub oak that the wind had turned into tortured sculpture.

A tragic happiness took hold of him, a deep recognition that he loved what he was, loved it, loved the mad hunt in the filthy corridors of the brothel in Juarez, loved the mad sprinting through the clean forest north, loved the feel of the victim in his teeth, or the beast struggling so desperately and vainly to get away from him.

But there was a deep awareness in him that this was only the beginning. He felt young, powerful, and safe from a reckoning. He felt he had time to discover how and why he was wrong, and why he must change or give up the Wolf Gift that had extinguished so many other passions in him.