The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

On and on they went, running their paws over these stone images as they yanked back the veil of foliage.

How private, how intimate, these moments seemed. Far back in the workaday world such relics were enshrined in museums, untouchable, and out of context, unconnected to such a night as this.

Yet here, against this monument, Reuben pressed the pads of his paws, and his forehead, relishing the rough surface and even the deep smell of the breathing, disintegrating stone.

He broke away from the others and bounded up the slope of the pyramid, clawed feet gaining easy traction as he moved—until he was under the infinitely faint and twinkling stars.

The blowing mist, filled with the light of the moon, was seeking to swallow the lamps of the heavens. Or so a poet might imagine, when in fact the whole odoriferous and quivering world around him, of earth and flora and helpless fauna, of gaseous cloud and humid air—all this sighed and sang at a million cross-purposes, and ultimately with no avowed purpose—an accidental chaos blindly serving up the unaccountable beauty he now saw.

What are we that this is beautiful to us? What are we that we are now powerful as lions and fear nothing, yet see this with the eyes and hearts of thinking beings—makers of music, makers of history, makers of art? Makers of the serpentine carvings that cover this old and blood-drenched structure? What are we that we feel such things as I am feeling now?

He saw the others running, stopping, and moving on. He went down again to join them.

For hours they prowled, over broken walls, low flattop buildings, and the pyramids themselves, searching out again and again the faces, forms, geometrical designs, until finally Reuben grew weary and wanted only to sit again under the sky, drinking in with all his senses the unmistakable ambience of this secret and neglected place.

But the little pack kept moving, towards the scent of the sea. He too wanted to see the shoreline. He dreamed suddenly of running on endless deserted sand.

Margon was in the lead with Sergei moving fast behind him. Reuben caught up with Stuart and on they traveled at the easy pace until Margon stopped suddenly. He rose to full height.

Reuben knew why. He too had caught it.

Voices in the night where there should have been none.

Up a small bluff they climbed.

The great warm ocean stretched beyond, sparkling wondrously under the bright incandescent clouds. So different from the cold northern Pacific, this inviting tropical sea.

Far below they saw a winding road leading on with a broken jagged beach beyond it. The sand appeared white, and the waves black with white foam as they crashed on the rocks.

The voices came from the south. Margon moved south. Why? What did he hear?

Then they all heard it as they followed him. Reuben saw the change in Stuart as he himself felt the delicious hardening of his body, the seeming expansion of his chest.

Voices crying in the night, the voices of children.

Margon began to run and they all tried frantically to keep up with him.

Further south they moved and further up onto a belt of cliffs where the vegetation died away, leaving only a rocky promontory.

The warm wind came strong and fresh, flooding over them as they found themselves standing there together.

Far below to their left, tucked into the mountainside, they saw the clear outline of an electrically lighted house and near it sprawling and manicured gardens, lighted swimming pools, and paved lots. The house was a conglomeration of tile roofs and broad terraces. Reuben could hear the low strum and rumble of machines. Cars crowded the lots like exotic beetles.

The voices rose, in a soft chorus of cries and desperate muted words. Children in this house. Boys, and girls, frightened, agitated, and without hope. And over the dismal choir of misery came the deeper voices of men, English-speaking men, mingling with one another in easy camaraderie. And the low drumbeat of women’s voices in another language, speaking of discipline and pain.

“The best here, the very best,” came a deep masculine voice. “You will find nothing like this anywhere in the world, not even in Asia.”

A girl child wept without words. An angry, bruising woman’s voice in a foreign tongue commanded obedience, so transparent the cajoling and bullying woven together.

Scent of innocence and suffering, scents of evil, and other scents, strangely ambiguous and unclassifiable, odious and ugly, rose all around them.

Margon dropped off the edge of the cliff, arms raised, falling down and down till he landed heavily on the tile roof. They all followed, landing silently on their padded feet. How could they not follow? A low rumble came from Stuart’s chest that was not a roar, not a growl. Sergei answered.

Once more they dropped down, this time to a wide and spacious terrace. Ah, such a heavenly place, with soft, fluttering flowerbeds aglow in the gentle electric light, and the swimming pools shimmering and twinkling like rare jewels. The palm trees rattling in the caressing wind.

The walls of a villa rose before them, with glass windows and subtle soothing lights, sheer curtains billowing out into the night and twisting in the breeze.

Whisper of a child praying.

With a roar, Margon passed into the room as shrieks and screams rose all around him.

The children scrambled off the high-backed bed and ran for the corners as the woman and the half naked man fled for their lives.

“Chupacabra!” roared the woman. Smell of malice, old habitual malice. She hurled a lamp at the approaching Morphenkinder. A string of curses poured out of her like noxious fluid.

Margon caught the woman by the hair, and Stuart caught the man with her, the sniveling, sobbing man. Instantly, they were dead, remains dragged through the room and flung out over the terrace wall.

Naked, a boy and girl cowered, faces and limbs dark and twisted with terror, black hair shining. Move on.

But something was confusing to Reuben, something deviling him as they ran through the wide corridors, into room after room. There were men fleeing who gave no evil scent, only the rank smell of fear flying off them, and the reek of bowels cut loose, and urine gushing. And something else that might have been shame.

Against a wall two men stood, white men, men of ordinary build and ordinary clothes, stark terrified, faces wet and blanched, mouths loose and watering. How many times had Reuben seen that very attitude before, that helplessness, that blank stare of a broken human being on the verge of madness? But something was missing here, something was confusing, something was not right.

Where was the clear imperative? Where was the decisive scent? Where was the undeniable evidence of evil that had always goaded him to kill instantly in the past?

Margon stood beside him.