The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

"They,re searching for you," she said. "You know that."

"Of course." He still was not used to the depth of this voice or its huskiness. Maybe he was lucky that he had a voice at all.

"You,re not afraid here, alone, in this house?" he asked. "I see that you aren,t. I,m asking why."

"What is there to fear?" she answered. She was speaking confidentially, naturally, her hand playing with the long hair on his shoulder. Gradually her fingers found the nipple amid the hair of his chest. She pinched it.

"Wicked girl!" he whispered. He winced. He gave that low hungry growl again and heard her muted laughter.

"Truly," he said. "I,m afraid for you; I,m afraid for you alone in this house."

"I grew up in this house," she said simply, without drama. "Nothing has ever hurt me in this house." She paused, then said: "You,ve come to me here in this house."

He didn,t answer. He was stroking her hair.

"You,re the one I fear for," she said. "I,ve been sick with fear for you since you left. Even now, I,m afraid that they,ve followed you here, or someone,s seen you...."

"They haven,t followed me," he said. "I would hear them if they were out there. I would pick up their scent."

They were quiet for a while. He was watching the fire.

"I know who you are," he said. "I read your story."

She didn,t answer.

"Everyone today has a story; the world,s an archive. I read about the things that have happened to you."

"Then you have the advantage, as they say," she replied. "Because I do not have the slightest idea who you really are. Or why you came here."

"I don,t know myself at the moment," he said.

"Then you weren,t always what you are now?" she asked.

"No." He laughed under his breath. "Most certainly not." His tongue pressed against his fangs, ran against the silky black liplike tissue around his mouth. He shifted comfortably in the chair, and her weight was like nothing to him.

"You can,t stay here, I mean in the city, I mean here. They,ll find you. The world,s too small now, too controlled. If they catch the slightest hint that you,re in the forest, they,ll swarm over it. It only looks like a wilderness. It,s not."

"I know that," he said. "I know that very well."

"But you take risks, terrible risks."

"I hear voices," he said. "I hear voices and I go to them. It,s as if I can,t help but go to them. Someone will suffer and die if I don,t."

Slowly, he described it to her, pretty much the way he,d described it to Jim - the scents, the mystery of the scents. He talked about the various attacks, how the victims had been crying out in the darkness, how it had been so clear to him who was evil and who was good. He told her about the man who shot his wife.

"Yes, he would have killed the children," she said. "I heard the story on the way home tonight in the car."

"I didn,t get there in time to save the woman," he said. "I am not infallible. I am something that can make terrible mistakes."

"But you,re careful, so very careful," she insisted. "You were careful with that boy up north."

"The boy up north?"

"The reporter," she said, "the handsome one, in the house in Mendocino - up north."

He hesitated. Current of pain. Pain in the heart.

He didn,t answer.

"They surprised that woman, didn,t they?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"If they hadn,t, you would have - ." She stopped.

"Yes," he said. "They surprised her. And they surprised me."

He went quiet.

After a long time, she asked softly, tentatively, "What brought you down this far?"

He didn,t understand.

"Was it the voices, that there are so many more here?"

He didn,t answer. But he thought he understood. She was thinking he,d come down from the forests to the cities of the Bay Area. It made a kind of sense.

He was burning to pour it all out for her, burning. But he couldn,t. Not yet. And he couldn,t forsake holding her like this, the power of it, the protective and loving power. He couldn,t tell her that he wasn,t always like this, that he was in fact "that boy up north." If he confessed that to her and she turned from him in scorn or indifference it would cut him to his soul.

That boy up north. He tried to picture himself as just Reuben, Celeste,s Sunshine Boy, Grace,s baby, Jim,s little brother, Phil,s son. Why would that vapid "boy" interest her? It seemed absurd to think that he would. After all, Marchent Nideck hadn,t really been interested in him. She,d thought him sweet and gentle and a poet, and a rich boy with the means to take Nideck Point off her hands. But that was not interest, really; and that was hardly love.

What he felt for Laura was love.

His closed his eyes and listened to the slow rhythm of her breathing. She,d fallen asleep.

The forest whispered beyond the windows. Scent of bobcat. It maddened him. He wanted to stalk it, kill it, feast on it. He could taste it. His mouth was watering. Sound of the creeks running deep in the redwoods; sound of the owls in the high branches, of things unnamable slithering in the brush.

He wondered what Laura would think if she saw him as he was in the forest, crushing that thrashing hissing bobcat and gorging on his hot flesh. That was the thing about these feasts: the flesh was so fresh. The blood was still pumping in it, the heart still quivering. What would she think if she really saw what it was like?

She had no idea, really, what it meant to see a man,s arm ripped out by the root, to see a head torn off a neck. She had no idea. We human beings live perpetually insulated from the horrors that happen all around us. No matter what she,d suffered, she had not witnessed the viscous ugliness of that kind of death. No, it had to be unreal to her, even Laura who had endured so much.

Only those who work day in and day out with the killers of the world know what they really are. It hadn,t taken him long as a reporter to realize that - why the cops he,d interviewed were so very different from other people, why Celeste was becoming so different as she worked on more and more cases for the district attorney, or why Grace was different because she saw the bodies rolled into the emergency room with the knives in their bellies and the bullet wounds in their heads.

But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren,t there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn,t smell the scent of evil; they didn,t hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.