The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

“Is this the easiest time, Felix?” he asked.

“No. Not always. Not everyone has the remarkable family you have.” He paused. “You’ve confided in your brother, Jim, haven’t you? I mean he knows what you are and what we are.”

“In Confession, Felix,” said Reuben. “Yes, I thought I’d told you. Perhaps I didn’t. But it was in Confession and my brother is the kind of Catholic priest who will die before he breaks the seal of the Confessional. But yes, he knows.”

“I sensed as much from the very start,” Felix said. “The others sensed it, of course. We know when people know. You will find this out in time. I think it’s rather marvelous that you had such an opportunity.” He was musing. “My life was so very different. But this is not the time for that tale.”

“You must trust, all of you,” said Reuben, “that Jim would never—.”

“Dear boy, do you think any of us would ever harm your brother?”

When they reached the stairs, he put his arm around Reuben again, and paused, his head down.

“What is it, Felix?” Reuben asked. He wanted somehow to tell Felix how much he cared for him, reciprocate the warm words Felix had spoken to him.

“You mustn’t fear what’s to come with Laura,” Felix said. “Nothing is forever with us; it only seems so. And when it stops seeming so, well, that is when we begin to die.” He frowned. “I didn’t mean to say that. I meant to say …”

“I know,” said Reuben. “You meant one thing and something else came out.”

Felix nodded.

Reuben looked into his eyes. “I think I know what you’re saying. You’re saying ‘treasure the pain.’ ”

“Yes, why maybe that is what I’m saying,” said Felix. “Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don’t live this life, if we don’t live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die.”

Reuben nodded.

“That’s why the statues are still there, in the cellar, after all these years. That’s why I brought them here from my homeland. That’s why I built this house. That’s why I am back under this roof, and you and Laura are an essential flame! You and Laura and the promise of what you are. Hmmm. I don’t have your gift for words, Reuben. I make it sound as if I need you to love one another. That’s not right. That’s not what I meant to say at all. I come to warm my hands at a blaze and to marvel at it. That’s all.”

Reuben smiled. “I love you, Felix,” he said. There was not a lot of emotion in his voice or in his eyes, only a deep and comfortable conviction, and the conviction that he was understood, and that no more words really were necessary.

Their eyes met, and neither needed to say a word.

They went on up the stairs.

In the dining room, Margon and Stuart were still at work. Stuart was going on about the stupidity and vapidity of rituals, and Margon was protesting softly that Stuart was being an incorrigible nuisance on purpose, as if he were arguing with his mother or his old teachers at school. Stuart was laughing impishly and Margon was smiling in spite of himself.

Sergei wandered in, the great blond-haired giant with the blazing blue eyes. His clothes were streaked with rain and dirt, his hair full of dust and bits of broken leaf. He looked ruddy and dazed. A curious silent exchange passed between Sergei and Felix, and a strange prickling feeling came over Reuben. Sergei had been out hunting; Sergei had been the Man Wolf tonight; the blood was pounding in him. And Reuben’s blood knew it and Felix knew it. Stuart too sensed it, eyeing him with fascination and resentment, it seemed, and then glancing at Margon.

But Margon and Felix simply went back to work.

Sergei drifted off to the kitchen.

And Reuben went up to get snug with his laptop by the fire and research Christmas customs and the pagan customs of Midwinter, and maybe begin an essay for the Observer. Billie, his editor, was calling just about every second day. She wanted more material from him. So did the readers, she said. And he liked the idea of penetrating the different attitudes, positive and negative, towards Christmas, of probing why we were so ambivalent about it, why the ancient traditions often disturbed us as much as the spending and shopping, and how we might start thinking about Christmas in a fresh and committed way. It felt good to think of something other than the old cynical cliches.

Something occurred to him. He realized he was trying to figure a way to express what he was learning now without revealing the secret of how he was learning it, and how learning itself for him had so totally changed. “This is the way it will be,” he whispered. “I’ll pour out what I know, yes, but there will always be a holding back.” Even so, he wanted to get busy. Christmas customs, Christmas spirit, echoes of Midwinter, yes.

4

TWO A.M.

The house slept.

Reuben came down the stairs in his slippers and heavy wool robe.

Jean Pierre, who often took the night shift, was sleeping on his folded arms at the kitchen counter.

The fire in the library was not quite out.

Reuben stirred it, brought it back to life, and took a book from the shelves and did something he had always wanted to do. He curled up in the window seat against the cold window, comfortable enough on the velvet cushions, with a throw pillow between him and the damp chill panes.

The rain was flooding down the glass only inches from his eyes.

The lamp on the desk was sufficient for him to read a little. And a little, in this dim uncommitted light, was all he wanted to read.

It was a book on the ancient Near East. It seemed to Reuben he cared passionately about it, about the whole question of where some momentous anthropological development had occurred, but he lost the thread almost at once. He put his head back against the wood paneling and he stared through narrow eyes at the small dancing flames on the hearth.

Some errant wind blasted the panes. The rain hit the glass like so many tiny pellets. And then there came that sighing of the house that Reuben heard so often when he was alone like this and perfectly still.

He felt safe and happy, and eager to see Laura, eager to do his best. His family would love the open house on the sixteenth, simply love it. Grace and Phil had never been more than casual entertainers of their closest friends. Jim would think it wonderful, and they would talk. Yes, Jim and Reuben had to talk. It wasn’t merely that Jim was the only one of them who knew Reuben, knew his secrets, knew everything. It was that he was worried about Jim, worried about what the burden of the secrets was doing to him. What in God’s name was Jim suffering, a priest bound by the oath of the Confessional, knowing such secrets which he could not mention to another living being? He missed Jim terribly. He wished he could call Jim now.