The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

Grace was thankful the paramedics had thoroughly cleaned up Reuben,s wounds. That was only proper. But certainly they could get a decent sampling from the bites on the dead men that would tell them whether the animal had been rabid or not.

"Well, they had a massacre on their hands, Grace," said Celeste. "They weren,t thinking about rabies."

"Well, we have to think about rabies, and we,re beginning the rabies protocol now." It wasn,t nearly as painful as it had been in the old days, she assured Reuben. He,d have to take a series of injections for twenty-eight days.

Rabies was almost uniformly fatal once the symptoms presented. There was no choice but to treat for rabies at once.

Reuben didn,t care. He didn,t care about the deep pain in his gut, his aching head, or the ice pick of pain that kept stabbing his face. He didn,t care about the nausea he felt from the antibiotics. All he cared about was that Marchent was dead.

He closed his eyes and he saw Marchent. He heard Marchent,s voice.

He couldn,t quite grasp that all life had gone out of Marchent Nideck just that quickly, and that he himself was somehow improbably still alive.

They wouldn,t let him watch television news till the next day. People in Mendocino County talked about wolf attacks that happened every few years. And then there were bears up there, no one could deny. But folks in the vicinity of the old house put their money on a mountain lion they,d been tracking for the last year.

The fact was, no one could find the animal, whatever it was. They were combing the redwood forest. People claimed to have heard howling in the night.

Howling. Reuben remembered those gnashing growls and snarls, that savage torrent of sound when the beast had descended on the brothers, as though it could not kill in silence, as if the sounds were part and parcel of its lethal strength.

More medication. More painkillers. More antibiotics. Reuben lost track of the days.

Grace said she wondered if plastic surgery would even be necessary. "I mean this bite has healed remarkably. And I must say, the incision in your stomach is healing too."

"He ate all the right things growing up," said Celeste. "His mother is a brilliant doctor." She winked at Grace. It pleased Reuben so much that they liked each other.

"Yes, indeed, and she can cook!" said Grace. "But this is just marvelous." Gently her fingers moved through Reuben,s hair. Gingerly she touched the skin on his neck and then on his chest.

"What is it?" Reuben whispered.

"I don,t know," Grace said absently. "Let,s say you don,t need any vitamins through that IV."

Reuben,s dad sat in the corner of the hospital reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Now and then he said something like, "You,re alive, son, that,s what matters."

Everything might be healing, but Reuben,s headache got worse. He was never fully asleep, only half asleep, and he overheard things he didn,t understand.

Grace talking somewhere, perhaps to another doctor. "I see changes, I mean, I know, this has nothing to do with the rabies virus, of course, we have no evidence he,s contracted it, but well, you,ll think I,m crazy but I could swear that his hair is thicker. You know, the bite marks, well, I know my son,s hair, and my son,s hair is thicker, and his eyes ..."

He meant to ask her, What are you talking about, but only thought about it dully with a multitude of other tormenting thoughts.

Reuben lay there speculating. If drugs could really numb your consciousness, they,d be a good thing. As it was, they slowed you down, confused you, kept you vulnerable to violent flashes of recall, and then agitated you and made you unsure of what you knew and didn,t know. Sounds startled him. Even smells woke him from his shallow uneasy sleep.

Fr. James rushed in a couple of times a day, always late for something back at his church, and with just enough time to tell Reuben he was obviously improving and looking better and better. But Reuben saw something in his brother,s face that was entirely new; a kind of fear. Jim had always been protective of his younger brother, but this was deeper. "I gotta say, though," said Jim, "you do look quite ruddy and robust for someone who,s been through all this."

Celeste did as much hands-on care as he would allow. She was amazingly capable. She fed him Diet Coke through a straw, adjusted his covers, wiped his face over and over, and helped him up for his required walk around the ward. She slipped out again and again to call the D.A.,s office, and then she,d be back assuring him he had nothing to worry about. She was efficient, matter of fact, and never got tired.

"The nurses have voted you the most handsome patient on the ward," she told him. "I don,t know what they,re giving you here, but I could swear your eyes are actually a deeper shade of blue."

"That,s impossible," he said. "Eyes don,t change color."

"Maybe drugs can change them," she said. She kept looking at him, not in his eyes, but at them. It made him slightly uneasy.

Speculation about the mysterious animal continued. Couldn,t Reuben remember anything else, asked his editor Billie Kale, the feminine genius behind the San Francisco Observer. She stood beside his bed.

"Honestly, no," Reuben said, pushing hard against the drugs to look and sound alert.

"So it wasn,t a mountain lion, you,re sure of that?"

"Billie, I saw nothing, I told you."

Billie was a short, rotund woman, with neat white hair and expensive clothes. Her husband, after a long career, had retired from the state senate and bankrolled the paper, giving Billie a second chance at a meaningful life. She was a terrific editor. She looked for an individual voice in each of her reporters. She fostered that voice. And she had liked Reuben from the start.

"I never saw the creature," said Reuben. "I heard it. I heard it and it sounded like a huge dog. I don,t know why it didn,t kill me. I don,t know why it was there."

And that was the real question, wasn,t it? Why did this animal wander into the house?

"Well, those crazy junkie brothers tore out half a wall of dining room windows," said Billie. "You should see the photos. What a pair, to murder their own sister like that. And the old woman in back. Good God. Well, look, you get to work on this when you can. You don,t look sick to me, by the way. What are they giving you?"

"I don,t know."

"Yeah, well, I,ll see you when I see you." She went out as abruptly as she,d come in.

When he got a moment alone with Celeste, Reuben volunteered the information about him and Marchent. But she,d already known, of course. It had made the papers, too. That was a blow to Reuben, and Celeste saw it.