The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

He felt a heavy sadness that he couldn,t talk to Grace, couldn,t present her with all of this, and have her loving counsel, but what right had he to dream of such a thing?

All her life Grace had saved lives. She couldn,t live without saving lives. And he would not ask her sympathy and complicity now for what he was. It was bad enough that he had brought Laura into this. Bad enough that he,d given Jim troubled sleep for the rest of his days.

"You do realize what this means," said Laura. "All that talk on the television about human DNA and manipulating the evidence."

"Oh, yes, I certainly do realize it. It,s just talk." He nodded. "That,s what I was saying. It,s talk. Laura, they have no evidence of any kind against me at all."

They looked at one another.

Reuben reached up, felt the fur at his neck where the monster had bitten him in his most effective and dangerous strike. No blood there. The blood was gone.

They both stared at the head and the body. They were now heaps of what looked like ash. A wind could have swept them into invisibility. But even the ash was growing lighter, fainter.

There were only gray streaks, like streaks of dust on Laura,s white gown.

For a quarter of an hour they continued to watch. Nothing now remained of the monster but a few dark streaks on the woven fabric of the carpet, streaks dissolving into the rosy flowers and the twining green leaves.

Even the blade of the ax was clean as if it had never struck a blow.

Reuben gathered up the creature,s shredded clothes. There was nothing personal, no identification, nothing in the jacket pockets or the pants pockets.

The shoes were soft expensive heelless moccasins - and small. The jacket and pants had Florentine labels. None of this was cheap. But none of it identified the man or gave a hint of where he had come from. He,d obviously come here prepared to lose these clothes, which might mean that he had a lodging and a vehicle close by. But there was one thing - the gold wristwatch. Where was it? It had become almost invisible against the flowered pattern of the rug.

He picked it up, examining its large face of Roman numerals; then he looked at the back. The name MARROK was inscribed there in Latin block letters.

"Marrok," he whispered.

"Don,t keep it."

"Why not?" he said. "All the evidence is gone. That includes the evidence that might have been on this watch ... prints, fluids, DNA."

He put it on the mantel. He didn,t want to argue, but he couldn,t destroy it. It was really all he had that gave him any clue as to the identity of the beast.

They put the rags on the fire, and watched them burn.

He was now painfully tired.

But he had to try to fix the front door and its broken locks before he reverted back to Reuben Golding who could barely turn a screwdriver or drive in a nail.

And he and Laura attended to that now.

It took much longer than either of them expected, but Laura knew all about how to stuff little splinters into the gouged-out screw holes, which filled them up and allowed the screws to catch and secure the lock mechanisms, and so it got done. Galton could take care of the rest.

He needed sleep.

He needed for the transformation to come, but he had the sense that he himself was holding it off. And he was a little afraid of its coming, of being weakened and unable to defend himself if another one of these creatures appeared.

He couldn,t think anymore, couldn,t analyze, couldn,t absorb. Chrism, Morphenkinder. Did these poetic terms help?

The horror was this: the others. How would the others respond when they knew this Morphenkind had been destroyed?

There could be a tribe of them, couldn,t there? There could be an entire race.

And Felix Nideck had to have been one of them, and maybe he was alive now, a Morphenkind still. His Marchent. Felix was the primary other. He had come here and taken the tablets, hadn,t he? Or was it that thing that had done it?

He pondered. He had caught no scent from the man wolf who had come to kill them! No scent at all, no scent of animal or man, no scent of evil.

All through the battle with the creature there had been no scent of evil to intoxicate him, and drive him forward.

And perhaps that meant that the dead Morphenkind had not detected any scent of evil from Reuben as well, no scent of malice, no scent of the will to destroy.

Was this why they had struggled so clumsily, so hopelessly with one another?

And if I can,t detect a scent from them, I will not know if they come here and are close by.

He wouldn,t tell this to Laura.

He got up slowly and made a round of the house.

Neither he nor Laura could figure how the creature had gotten in. They,d locked all the doors. He,d checked the locks all over the first floor when he,d arrived.

Yet Laura explained that the beast had come upon her as she was sleeping in the library and awakened her with a steady stream of low explanations as to why her life had to be forfeit much as he disliked to shed innocent blood. He,d said that he loathed killing women, he,d wanted her to know that, that he wasn,t "insensible" to her beauty. He,d compared her to a flower that had to be crushed underfoot.

The cruelty of it made Reuben wince.

Perhaps he had come in through an upper window. Such was conceivable.

Reuben went through all the rooms, even the smaller northern bedrooms that faced the forest behind the house. He could find no window that was not securely latched.

For the first time, he searched all the linen closets, and extra coat closets and bathrooms off the inside walls of the four hallways, and found no openings or secret staircases to the roof.

He went through the gable attic rooms on all four sides of the house and could find only locked windows there as well. None contained a rear stairway. In fact he could not quite figure how anyone could get to the roof of this house.

Tomorrow, he vowed, he,d walk the property and search for some vehicle that the creature had driven to the house, or some hiding place in the forest where he might have left a backpack or duffel bag hidden in the trees.

It was growing light.

The change had still not come.

Laura was in the master bedroom when he found her. She,d bathed and dressed in a fresh nightgown and brushed her long hair. She was pale with exhaustion but looked as fresh and tender to him as she always had.

For fifteen minutes or more he argued with her furiously, that she should leave here, take his car, go south back to her home in the Marin woods. If Felix Nideck was coming, if he was the primary other, who knew what strength and cunning he possessed? It was all in vain. Laura wasn,t leaving him. She never raised her voice; she never became agitated. But she never budged.

"My only chance with Felix is to appeal to him, to talk to him, to somehow - ." He gave off, too tired to go on.