The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

"Althea," Billie shouted. "Turn that damn TV off."

Reuben had the urge to just walk out now. But that was out of the question.

"What about the kidnapping?" Reuben murmured.

"What about it? You,re off it. You,re on the wolf man full-time. Althea, get Reuben,s tape recorder."

"Don,t need it, Billie," said Reuben, "got my iPhone." He set the iPhone to record.

She slammed the door as she went out.

For the next half hour, he listened to the woman, his thumbs busy as he wrote his notes, his eyes returning again and again to the woman,s face.

But again and again, he faded out on her words. He couldn,t stop trying to picture "the beast" that had almost killed him.

Again and again, he nodded, he squeezed her hand, and at one point he took her in his arms. But he was not there.

Finally her husband showed up and insisted she leave, though the woman herself wanted very much to go on talking, and Reuben ended up walking them to the elevator doors.

Back at his desk, he stared at all the little paper phone messages taped to his computer monitor. Althea told him Celeste was on line 2.

"What did you do with your cell phone?" Celeste demanded. "What,s going on?"

"I don,t know," he mumbled. "Tell me something. Is the moon full?"

"No. Not at all. I think we,re in the quarter moon. Hold on." He heard the keys of her computer clacking. "Yeah, quarter moon, so you can forget about that. But why are you asking? They just got a ransom demand from the kidnappers, for heaven,s sakes. And you,re talking about the wolf man thing?"

"They put me on the wolf man story. There,s nothing I can do. How much is the ransom demand?"

"That,s the most insulting and demeaning thing I ever heard," Celeste stormed. "Reuben, stand up for yourself. Why, because of what happened to you up north? What is Billie thinking? The kidnappers have just demanded five million dollars or they will start killing the kids one by one. You should be on the way to Marin. The ransom,s to be transferred to an account in the Bahamas, but you can be sure it will pass through that account like lightning and vanish into the cyber-banking twilight zone. It might never even reach that bank. They,re saying these kidnappers are tech geniuses."

Billie was suddenly standing over his desk.

"What did you get?"

He hung up the phone. "A lot," he said. "Her perspective. Now I need some time to catch up on the coverage out there."

"You haven,t got time. I want your exclusive on the front page. You realize the Chronicle,s going to offer you a job, don,t you? And you know what? Channel Six is making noises about wanting you. They have been since you were attacked in Mendocino."

"That,s ridiculous."

"No, it isn,t. It,s your looks. That,s all broadcast news cares about, your looks. But I didn,t offer you this job for your looks. I,m telling you, Reuben, the worst thing that could possibly happen to you is to go into broadcast news at your age. Give me the Reuben take on all this in your own voice, your distinctive voice. And don,t disappear on me again the way you did this morning."

She was gone.

He sat there staring in front of him.

All right, the moon,s not full. It meant that what had happened to him had nothing to do with the moon, and that it could happen again anytime. It might happen again tonight. So much for the old legends, and why was he trapped here when he should be investigating every shred of fact or fancy that had to do with "beast men"?

A memory came back to him, of gliding over the rooftops, his legs throbbing with their new strength. He,d looked up and seen the quarter moon behind the clouds that surely veiled it from human eyes.

And will this happen again as soon as it,s dark?

How beautiful it had looked, that quarter moon hanging amid so many vibrant stars. He felt himself again flying with arms out as he cleared the street before him, landing effortlessly on the sloped roof. He felt a powerful exhilaration. And then the horrifying thought came: Will this happen every night?

Althea put down a fresh cup of coffee for him. She smiled and waved as she moved away.

He stared at all the people around him, coming and going from their white cubicles, some glancing his way, a few nodding, others passing in inevitable silence, locked in their thoughts. He stared at the row of television monitors that ran the length of the far wall. Images of the empty school bus, the Goldenwood Academy. A woman crying. Lon Chaney Jr. again looking like a giant teddy bear rushing through the misty English forest, his lupine ears standing up.

He turned away in his swivel chair, picked up the phone, and punched in the number of the coroner,s office and agreed to hold.

I don,t want to do any of this, he was thinking. I can,t do any of it. It,s all slipping away from me in the blaze of what,s happened. I can,t. Sure, I,m sorry for Miss Larson and what she suffered, and that nobody believes her, but hell, I saved her life! I don,t belong here doing this. I,m the last person who should be doing it. None of this matters, that,s the problem. At least not to me.

A kind of cold settled over Reuben. One of his colleagues, a very friendly woman named Peggy Flynn, appeared with a plate of cookies for him. He flashed the inevitable warm smile. But he felt nothing, not even that he knew her, or had ever been connected with her, or that they even shared the same world.

That was it; they didn,t share the same world. Nobody shared the world in which he lived right now. Nobody could.

Except maybe that thing that had attacked him in Mendocino. He closed his eyes. He felt those fangs biting into his scalp, into his face, that deep horrific pain in the side of his face when those teeth sank in.

And if he hadn,t killed that man in the North Beach alley, would that man have gone on to become a beast thing, too, just like Reuben! He shuddered. Thank God, he,d killed the guy. Oh, now, wait a minute. What kind of a prayer was that!

He went blank.

The coffee in his cup looked like gasoline. The cookies looked like plaster.

And it wasn,t reversible, was it? It was no matter of choice; in fact he had not the slightest control at all.

The voice of the coroner,s assistant snapped him back to life. "Oh, it was an animal all right. We can tell by the lysozyme in the saliva. Well, humans don,t have this amount of lysozyme in their saliva. Humans have a lot of amylase, which starts to break down the carbohydrates that we eat. But an animal doesn,t have amylase, and it does have a powerful amount of lysozyme, which kills the bacteria it ingests, which is why a dog can eat from a garbage dump or a rotted carcass and we can,t. But I,ll tell you something strange about this beast, whatever it is. It had more lysozyme than any dog would ever have. And there were other enzymes in the saliva that we can,t properly analyze here. Tests on this are going to take months."