The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

Wait; photograph it. Get to the mirror and witness it, he thought. But there was no time for that. He heard the voices again: "We,ll burn you alive, old man!"

He leapt up to the rooftop. The rain scarcely touched him. It was no more than a mist.

Towards the voice he bounded, clearing one alley and street after another, scaling the taller apartment houses and flying free over the lower buildings, springing over the broader avenues effortlessly, and heading towards the ocean, buoyed by the wind.

The voice grew louder, mingled with yet another voice, and then came the cries of the victim. "I won,t tell you. I won,t tell you. I,ll die but I won,t tell you."

He knew where he was now, traveling at his greatest conceivable speed over the buildings of the Haight. Ahead he saw the great dark rectangle of Golden Gate Park. Those woods, yes, that dense fairy forest with its secret hollows. Of course!

He plunged into it now, moving along the wet grassy ground and then up into the fragrant trees.

Suddenly he saw the ragged old man running away from his pursuers, through a tunnel in the bracken, surrounded by a sylvan camouflage in which other witnesses cowered under shining tarps and broken boards as the rain came pouring down.

One of the attackers caught the man by the shoulder and dragged him out into a grassy clearing. The rain soaked their clothes. The other attacker had stopped, and was setting afire a torch of curled newspapers, but the rain was putting out the fire.

"The kerosene!" shouted the man who held the victim. The victim was punching, and kicking. "I,ll never tell you," he wailed.

"Then you,ll burn with your secret, old man."

The scent of the kerosene mingled with the scent of evil, the stench of evil, as the torchbearer splashed the fluid on his torch and it burst into flame.

With a deep rolling roar, Reuben caught the torchbearer, his claws digging into the man,s throat and all but splitting his head from his shoulders. The man,s neck snapped.

Then he turned on the other assailant who had dropped the shuddering victim and was loping across the clearing in the downpour towards the shelter of the far trees.

Effortlessly Reuben overtook him. His jaws opened instinctively. He wanted so with all his being to dig out the man,s heart. His jaws were hungry for it, aching for it. But no, not the teeth, not the teeth that could give the Wolf Gift, no, he could not risk that. His snarls coming like curses, he tore at the helpless man. "You would have burned him alive, would you?" - clawing the flesh off his face, and the skin from his chest. His claw raked through the carotid artery and the blood spurted. The man sank down on his knees and fell over, as the blood soaked his old denim coat.

Reuben turned back. The kerosene had spilled in the grass and was burning, spitting and smoking in the rain, giving the ghastly scene a hellish light.

The old man who had been the victim knelt huddled, his arms tightly wrapped around his body, staring at Reuben with large unquestioning eyes. Reuben could see the old man flinching in the rain, flinching as the cold rain beat down on him, but Reuben couldn,t feel the rain.

He approached the man and reached out to help him to his feet. How powerful and calm he felt, the blaze flickering near him, the warmth barely touching him.

The dark undergrowth surrounding them was swarming with movement and whispers, with desperate accolades and ejaculations of fear.

"Where do you want to go?" Reuben asked.

The man pointed to the darkness beyond the low-hanging oaks. Reuben lifted him and carried him under the low boughs. The earth was dry and fragrant here. The matted vines formed veils. A shack of broken boards and tarpaper hung amid the swallowing ivy and giant shuddering ferns. Reuben put the man down on his nest of rags and woolen blankets. He shrank back amid the bundles that surrounded him, pulling the covers up to his neck.

The scent of dusty cloth and whiskey filled the little enclosure. The scent of raw earth surrounded them, of wet and glistening green things, of tiny animals burrowing in the dark. Reuben pulled away as if the little man-made space were a form of trap.

He moved off, quickly, taking to the sturdy treetops, arms reaching for one limb after another, as the forest grew thicker, moving back towards the dim yellow lights of Stanyan Street with its steady traffic hissing on the asphalt along the eastern border of the world of Golden Gate Park.

He seemed to fly across the breadth of the street, into the soaring eucalyptus trees of the Panhandle, the narrow arm of the park that went east.

He traveled as high as he could in the giant weedlike eucalyptus, breathing the strange bittersweet scent of their long thin pale leaves. He followed the ribbon of park, almost singing aloud as he moved from giant tree to giant tree with fluid movements, and then he made for the roofs of the Victorians that climbed the Masonic Street hill.

Who could see him in the darkness? No one. The rain was his friend. He went up over the slippery roof tiles with no hesitation and found himself traveling to the blackness of yet another small woodland - Buena Vista Park.

Out of the low simmering melee that was the voices, he picked out another despairing plea. "To die, I want to die. Kill me. I want to die."

Only it wasn,t spoken aloud; it was the drumbeat behind the moans and cries he heard that were beneath or beyond language.

He landed on the roof above the victim, high atop a grand four-story mansion that bordered the steep hill leading up to the little park. Down the front of the house, he made his way, clutching the pipes and ledges, until he saw through the window the ugly spectacle of an old woman, skin and bones and bleeding sores, tied to a brass bed. Her pink scalp shone beneath her thin hanks of gray hair in the light of one small lamp.

Before her on the tray was a plate with a steaming pile of human feces, and the hunched figure of a young woman across from her held out a spoon of the loathsome mess, pressing it to the old woman,s lips. The old woman shuddered and was near to fainting. Stench of filth, stench of evil, stench of cruelty. The young woman sang her bitter taunts.

"You never fed me anything but slop in all your life, you think you will not pay for it now?"

Reuben shattered the mullions and the panes as he broke into the room.

The young woman screamed and backed away from the bed. Her face was full of rage.

He bore down on her as she scrambled to pull a gun from a drawer.

The shot rang out, deafening him for one split second, and he felt the pain in his shoulder, sharp, ugly, disabling, but at once, he moved beyond it, a deep growl rising out of him as he snatched her up, the gun falling, and slammed her into the plaster wall. Her head broke the plaster; he felt the life go out of her, the curses dying in her throat.