The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

Dust on the shelves above. Dust on the hardwood floor. Nothing to be found, nothing to which a vagrant spirit might have sadly attached itself—if that’s what vagrant spirits did.

“Marchent,” he whispered. He put his hand to his forehead, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from it. “Marchent, please,” he whispered again. He couldn’t remember from the lore he’d heard all his life whether a ghost could read your mind. “Marchent, help me,” he offered, but his whisper sounded huge in the empty room, and as unnerving to him suddenly as everything else.

The bathroom was empty and immaculate, with empty cabinets. No radio to be seen. Smell of bleach.

How pretty the wallpaper was, an old toile pattern with pastoral figures, in blue and white. This was like the pattern on the padded hangers.

He imagined her bathing in the long oval claw-foot tub, and a wave of her intimate presence caught him off guard, fragments of their moments in each other’s arms on that ghastly night, fragments of her warm face against his, and her soft soothing voice.

He turned and inspected the scene before him, and then slowly he made his way to the bed. It wasn’t a high bed at all, and he sat down on the side of it, facing the windows, and he closed his eyes.

“Marchent, help me,” he said under his breath. “Help me. What is it, Marchent?” If he’d ever known sorrow like this before, he couldn’t remember it. His soul was shaken. And suddenly he began to cry. The whole world seemed empty to him, devoid of any hope, of any possibility of dreams. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” he said thickly. “Marchent, I came as soon as I heard you scream. I swear to God, I did, but they were too much for me, the two of them, and besides, I was just too late.”

He bowed his head. “Tell me what it is you want of me, please,” he said. He was crying just like a child now. He thought of Felix downstairs in the library last night, asking himself why he had never come home during all those years, feeling such awful regret. He thought of Felix in the hallway last night saying so dejectedly, “Why should she want me to have anything … after the way I abandoned her?”

He took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose and mouth.

“I can’t answer for Felix,” he said. “I don’t know why he did what he did. Or if I do, I can’t say. But I can tell you that I love you. I would have given my life to stop them from hurting you. I would have done that without a thought.”

A kind of relief coursed through him, but he felt it was cheap and undeserved. The finality of her death deserved better. The finality of her death left him crushed. Yet he had, in a rush, said so many things that he’d been longing to say and that felt good, though perhaps it didn’t matter to her at all. He had no idea whether or not Marchent really existed in any realm where she might see him or hear him, or what the apparition at the door had been.

“But all this is true, Marchent,” he said. “And you left me the gift of this house, and I did nothing to deserve it, nothing, and I’m alive here, and I don’t know what’s happened to you, to you, Marchent—I don’t understand.”

He didn’t have any more words to speak out loud. In his heart, he said, I loved you so much.

He thought of how unhappy he’d been when he met her. He thought of how desperately he’d wanted to be free not only of his loving family but of his miserable connection with Celeste. Celeste had not loved him. She had not even liked him. And he had not liked her either. That was the truth. It had all been vanity, he thought suddenly, her wanting the “handsome boyfriend” as she called him so often to others in that high mocking tone, and him believing he ought to want such a smart and adorable woman whom his mother liked so much. The truth was Celeste had made him miserable, and as for his family, well, he’d needed to escape them for a while if he was ever to find what it was that he wanted to do.

“And now thanks to you,” he whispered, “I live in this world.”

And remembering suddenly her love for Felix, her grief for him, her weary conviction that he was dead and gone, he knew a pain that he could hardly bear. What right had he to the Felix for whom she’d mourned? The injustice of it, the horror of it, paralyzed him.

For a long moment he sat there shivering, shivering as if he were cold when he wasn’t cold, his eyes closed, wondering at all of it, and very far now from the terror and the shock he’d felt only moments ago. There were worse things in this world than fear.

A sound came from the bed, the sound of the springs and the mattress creaking, and he felt the mattress shifting just to his right.

The blood drained out of his face, and his heart began to skip.

She was sitting next to him! He knew it. He felt her hand suddenly on his hand, supple flesh this, and the pressure of her br**sts against his arm.

Slowly he opened his eyes, and looked into hers.

“Oh God in heaven,” he whispered. He couldn’t stop the words from coming though they were slurred and low. “God in heaven,” he said as he forced himself to look at her, truly look at her, at her pale pink lips and the fine pen-stroke lines of her face. Her blond hair was glistening in the light. The silk of the white negligee, right against his arm, was rising and falling with her breath. He could feel her breath. She drew even closer, her cold hand covering his right hand as it tightened its grip, and her other hand closing on his left shoulder.

He looked right into her soft moist eyes. He made himself do it. But his right hand moved away from hers in a sudden jerking motion that he couldn’t control, and with it he made the Sign of the Cross. It had been like a spasm and he was suddenly red with shame.

A little sigh came from her. Her eyebrows puckered and the sigh became a moan.

“I’m so sorry!” he said. “Tell me.…” He was stammering, clenching his teeth in his panic. “Tell me … what can I do?”

The expression on her face was one of unutterable torment. Slowly she lowered her gaze and looked away, her bobbed hair falling down over her cheek. He wanted to touch her hair, touch her skin, touch all of her. Then her eyes veered back to him, full to the brim with misery, and it seemed she was about to speak; she was struggling desperately to speak.

At once the vision brightened as if it were filling with light and then it dissolved.

It was gone as if it had never been. And he was alone on the bed, alone in her room, alone in the house. The minutes ticked as he sat there, unable to move.