The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

“Listen to them, my darling Marchent,” Felix said with feeling. “Listen to them and let them dry your tears.”

16

WHERE WERE THEY? Did it matter? Reuben and Stuart were so hungry they didn’t care. They were exhausted too. The crumbling old villa was on the mountainside, and the writhing equatorial jungle was reclaiming it, the arched windows without glass, the Grecian columns peeling, the floors caked with decaying leaves and filth. A hoard of hungry creatures scurried through the fetid debris and the broken withered undergrowth that choked the passageways and stairs.

Their host, Hugo, was the only other Morphenkind they’d ever seen, except for the Distinguished Gentlemen, a great hulking giant of a man, with long snarled and matted brown hair, and maniacal black eyes, dressed in rags that might have once been a shirt and khaki shorts. Barefoot, covered in dirt.

And after he’d directed them to the filthy rooms in which they might sleep on soiled and rotting mattresses, Sergei said under his breath, “This is what happens when a Morphenkind lives as a beast all the time.”

The villa had the smell of an urban zoo in the middle of summer. And indeed the heat was simmering and soothing after the relentless cold of Northern California. Yet it was like a toxin, wearying and weakening Reuben with every step.

In a small voice, Stuart asked, “Must we stay here? Like what about an American motel? A little B&B? Or a nice lodging with some old native in a hut somewhere?”

“We haven’t come for the amenities of the house,” said Margon. “Now listen to me, both of you. We don’t spend all our lupine hours hunting humankind and there’s never been a law that says we have to. We’ve come here to prowl the ancient ruins in these jungles—temples, tombs, the ruins of a city—the way men and women can’t possibly do it—as Morphenkind—and we’ll feed off the jungle rodents as we do it. We’ll see things that no eye has seen in centuries.”

“This is a dream,” said Reuben. “Why didn’t I think of such things?” A thousand possibilities were opening before him.

“Fill your bellies first,” said Margon. “Nothing can hurt you here—not the beasts, not the serpents, not the insects, and not the natives if any dare to approach. Drop your clothes where you stand. Breathe and live as Morphenkinder.”

At once, they obeyed him, stripping away shirts and trousers that were already soaked with sweat.

The wolf coat rose all over Reuben’s body, sealing out the heat as it always did the cold. The enervating weakness in his limbs evaporated in a surge of power. At once the zinging, sighing, rippling voices of the jungle assailed him. Over the hills and valleys around them, the jungle seethed like one great undulating fungoid being.

They dropped down effortlessly from the cliff and into the rattling web of sharp-edged leaf and prickling vine, the night sky pink and luminescent above them, allowing themselves to slide fearlessly down the mountainside.

The noxious squirming brown-coated rodents slithered away from them everywhere. The hunting was easy, the prey large and pungent, gasping impotently with razor teeth, as the Morphenkinder ripped through fur and sinew to spouting blood.

They feasted together, thrashing and rolling noisily in the undergrowth, the jungle around them erupting with the alarms of the living things who feared them, large and small. The night monkeys screamed in the treetops. Rotted crumbling branches and old tree trunks shattered beneath them, the tough fibrous vines whipped and torn by their simplest movements, snakes thrashing wildly through the foliage as the insects swarmed, seeking to blind them or stop them to no avail.

Again and again, Reuben brought down the fat succulent rats, big as raccoons, ripping back the twitching silky coat to bite into the meat. Always the meat. The same salty blood-soaked meat. The world devours the world to make the world.

At last all were satisfied and lay about in a bower of broken palm leaves and clawing branches, lazy and half dozing. How embracing was the hot motionless air, the deep rumble of malignant life all around them.

“Come,” said Margon. He was the smallest of the Man Wolf pack, moving with a feline grace and swiftness that often dazzled Reuben.

They followed him on and on as he broke a tunnel through the dense growth, moving on all fours, springing upwards from time to time to chart a swift passage through the jungle high above the earth.

They came to a deep valley, slumbering beneath its writhing blanket of green.

Far off they could smell the sea, and for a moment Reuben thought he heard it, the rise and fall of the waves, equatorial waves, windless, and lapping again and again on an imagined beach.

There was no scent of humans here any more than there had been around the villa. The deceptive yet soothing quiet of the natural world reigned, with the simmering boiling sound of death, death in the treetops, death on the jungle floor—unbroken by a human voice.

It chilled Reuben suddenly to think of how long the world in its entirety had been like this place, devoid of human eyes or human ears or human language. Was Margon thinking of these same things? Margon, who’d been born in a time when the world had had no savage pedigree of biological evolution.

A terrible loneliness and sense of fatality came over Reuben. And yet this was a priceless perception, a priceless moment. And he felt wondrously alert, marveling at the universe of varying shapes and movements that he could pick from the airy darkness. He knew he was man and Morphenkind in one. Sergei rose on hind legs and threw his head back, his mouth gaping, fangs gleaming as if he were swallowing the breeze. Even the big shadowy brown wolf figure of Stuart, almost as big as Sergei, seemed content for the moment, crouched but not to spring, merely looking out with gleaming blue eyes at the valley beneath them and the distant slopes beyond.

Was Margon dreaming? He swayed slightly from one foot to the other, great hairy arms slack at his sides, as if the breeze were washing him clean.

“This way,” Margon signaled finally. And they plunged with him now into what for human beings would have been an impassable tangle of knotted vines and sharp, prickling, and menacing leaves. Breaking loudly through pocket after pocket of fetid and wet underwood, they moved on, inexorably, birds screeching heavenward, lizards wriggling out of their path.

Ahead Reuben saw the great hulk of a pyramid. On all fours they traveled along its huge base, and then mounted its high steps, tearing loose like so much wrapping paper the living thatch that covered it.

How clear under the rosy sky were these curious twisted Mayan figures, so exquisitely carved, limbs seeming to writhe like the snakes and vines of the jungle around them, solemn faces in profile with half-closed eyes and noses like the beaks of great birds. Heads were wreathed in feathers. Bodies were embedded in mysterious configurations and patterns, as if imprisoned in the very fabric of the tropical world.