The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

She wasn’t coming back, he knew it. Whatever in God’s name she was now—ghost, spirit, earthbound—she’d taxed herself to the limit of her powers, and she wasn’t coming back. And he was sweating again, his heart thudding in his ears. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet burned. He could feel the wolf hair under his skin like myriad needles. It was torture to hold it back.

Without resolving to do it, he got up and hurried down the stairs and out the back door.

The cold darkness was descending, the molten clouds lowering, and the woods turning into shadow all around. The invisible rain sighed like a living thing in the trees.

He got in his Porsche and he drove. He didn’t know where he was headed, only that he had to be away from Nideck Point, away from fear, from helplessness, from grief. Grief is like a fist against your throat, he thought. Grief strangles you. Grief was more awful than anything he’d ever known.

He kept to the back roads, vaguely aware that he was moving inland and the forest was on either side of him wherever he went. He wasn’t thinking, so much as feeling, stifling the powerful transformation, again and again feeling the tiny needlelike growth of the hair all over him as he forced it back. He was listening for the voices, voices from the Garden of Pain, listening, listening for the inevitable sound of someone crying out frantically, someone who could speak, someone who was yet alive, someone who was crying for him though he or she couldn’t know it, someone he could reach.

Pain somewhere, like a scent on the wind. A little child threatening, kicking, sobbing.

He pulled off the road and into a grove of trees and, folding his arms defensively over his chest, he listened as the voices came clear. Again the wolf hair pushed at him like needles. His skin was alive with it. His scalp was tingling and his hands were shuddering as he struggled to hold it back.

“And where would you be without me?” the man snarled. “You think they wouldn’t put you in jail? Sure, they’d put you in jail.”

“I hate you,” sobbed the child. “You’re hurting me. You always hurt me. I wanna go home.”

And the man’s voice rolled over her voice, in guttural curses and threats—ah, the grim, predictable sound of evil, the greed of utter selfishness! Give me the scent!

He felt himself breaking through his clothes, every inch of his scalp and face burning as the hair broke out, his claws extended, his thick hairy feet pushing out of the shoes. He tore off his jacket, shredding the shirt and pants with his claws. The mane came down to his shoulders. Who I truly am, what I truly am. How quickly the fur covered all of him, and how powerful he felt to be alone with it, alone and hunting as he had hunted on those first thrilling nights before the elder Morphenkinder had come, when he’d been on the very edge of all that he could comprehend, imagine, define—reaching for this luscious power.

He took to the forest in full wolf coat, running on all fours towards the child, his muscles singing, his eyes finding the jagged and broken ways through the forest without a single mishap. And I belong to this, I am this.

They were in an old decrepit trailer home half concealed by a thicket of broken oaks and giant firs. Small ghostly windows flashing with bluish television light gleamed before him in a cramped wet yard of butane tanks, trash cans, and old tires, with a rusted and dented truck parked to one side.

He hovered, uncertain, determined not to blunder as he’d done in the past. But he was ravenously hungry for the evil man only inches away from his grasp. Television voices chattered inside. The child was choking now and the man was beating her. He heard the thwack of the leather belt. The scent of the child rose sweet and penetrating. And there came the rank foul smell of the man, in wave after wave, the stench mingling with the man’s voice and the reek of the dried sweat in his filthy clothing.

The rage rose in his throat as he let out a long, low growl.

The door came off too easily when he yanked it, and he threw it aside. A rush of hot fetid air assaulted his nostrils. Into the small narrow space, he forced himself like a giant, head bowed under the low ceiling, the whole trailer rocking under his weight, the jabbering television crashing to the floor as he caught the scrawny screaming red-faced bully by his flannel shirt and drew him back and out into the clattering cans and breaking bottles of the yard.

How calm Reuben was as he picked the man up—Bless us, O Lord, for these are Thy gifts!—how very natural he felt. The man kicked at him and pounded at him, face savage with terror, like the terror Reuben had felt when Marchent embraced him, and then slowly and deliberately Reuben bit into the man’s throat. Feed the beast in me!

Oh, too rich, this, too rich in salt and rupturing blood and relentless heartbeat, too sweet the very viscid life of the evil one, too beyond what memory could ever record. It had been too long since he’d hunted alone, feasting on his chosen victim, his chosen prey, his chosen enemies.

He swallowed great mouthfuls of the man’s flesh, his tongue sweeping the man’s throat and the side of his face.

He liked the bones of the jaw, liked biting into them, liked feeling his teeth hook onto the jawbone as he bit down on what was left of the man’s face.

There was no sound in the whole world now except the sound of his chewing and swallowing this warm, bloody flesh.

Only the leftover rain sang in the gleaming forest around him as if it were now bereft of all the small eyes that had seen this unholy Eucharist and fled. He abandoned himself to the meal, devouring the man’s entire head, his shoulders, and his arms. Now the rib cage was his, and he went on delighting in the crackling sound of thin hollow bones, until suddenly he could eat no more.

He licked his paws, licked the pads of his palms, wiped at his face, and licked his paw again as he cleaned himself with it as a cat might have done. What was left of the man, a pelvis and two legs? He hurled the remains deep into the forest, hearing a soft shuffling collection of sounds as they fell to the earth.

Then he thought the better of this. He moved swiftly through the trees until he’d recovered the body, or what was left of it, and he carried it with him farther away from the trailer until he came to a small muddy clearing by a little stream. There he dug quickly down into the damp earth, and buried the corpse there, covering it as best he could. Here the world might never find it.

Then he started to wash his paws in the stream, splashing the icy water over his hairy face, but he heard the child calling him. Her voice was a shrill piping sound: “Man Wolf, Man Wolf.” She called it over and over again.