The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

There was more. Stuart,s mother, a bottle-blond named Buffy Longstreet, had been a teen actress in a short-lived sitcom for a few years, and Stuart,s father had been a computer tech genius who made a killing in Silicon Valley before the dot-com crash, leaving Stuart well off and the mother moderately comfortable when he died of an infection in Salvador da Bahia while on a dream trip to the Amazon. The stepfather,s crime had been for the money all right and because he devoutly hated Stuart. He was denying everything, and threatened to sue Stuart.

Stuart was now a student at the University of San Francisco, living alone in his own Haight-Ashbury apartment three blocks from the school, and had been back in Santa Rosa for a visit with his boyfriend, Antonio, at the time of the g*y bashing. Stuart,s whole goal in life, or so he repeatedly told the press, was to become a lawyer and work for human rights. He was a frequent guest on radio talk shows by call-in, and he was the first survivor of a Man Wolf encounter willing to talk to the press directly since Susan Larson had spoken to Reuben at the offices of the San Francisco Observer.

Reuben was processing all this as rapidly as he could when he was interrupted by two officers from the Mendocino sheriff,s department who wanted again to talk to him about the Man Wolf, and whether or not he had remembered anything more about that terrible night when Marchent had died. Did he know the Man Wolf had struck in Santa Rosa?

The interview was brief because Reuben actually didn,t remember "anything more" about that terrible night. And both officers really wanted to express their fury that people were not getting to the bottom of this Man Wolf thing by catching this maniac before he took a chunk out of an innocent person.

Five minutes after they had left, Reuben was interrupted again by a phone call on his cell from Stuart.

"You know who I am," came the energetic voice through the phone. "Well, listen, I just got off the phone with your editor, Billie Kale, and I read the piece you did on that woman, the first person to ever really see the Man Wolf. I wanna talk to you. I really do. If you,re the least bit interested, please come to Santa Rosa. They won,t let me out of here right now. And look, if you,re not into this, okay, but I need to know now because I want to call someone else if you,re not, all right? So yes or no, what do you think? Otherwise I,m calling your editor back, she said this was a long shot - ."

"Stop. Tell me exactly where you are. I am coming."

"Oh, my God, I thought I was talking to your machine. It,s you? Cool. I,m at St. Mark,s Hospital in Santa Rosa. And hurry because they,re threatening to shut me down."

By the time Reuben got there, Stuart had started to run a fever and Reuben wasn,t permitted to see him. Reuben decided to wait, no matter whether it was a couple of hours or a couple of days, and finally, about two o,clock, he did get in to see the boy. By that time, Reuben had texted Grace twice urging her to get in touch with the Santa Rosa doctors and "share" whatever protocol she,d used with Reuben, just in case the kid had been scratched or bitten, who knew?

Grace was reluctant to take that initiative. She texted back: "Nobody said anything about the kid being bitten."

But the kid had been bitten.

When Reuben walked in, Stuart was propped up on a mound of pillows and had two different packages of IV fluids pumping into his veins. There were bandages on his face and on his left hand and arm, and probably more bandages under his hospital gown, but he was making a "miraculous" recovery. He was drinking a chocolate milk shake, and grinning. The freckles and the big laughing eyes made Reuben think of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

"I got bitten!" Stuart said, holding up his bandaged left hand, with the tubes dangling from it. "I,m going to turn into a werewolf." He broke into seemingly uncontrollable laughter.

Pain meds, Reuben thought.

Stuart,s mother, Buffy Longstreet, a fatally cute blond who had the same plump freckled cheeks as her son and a tiny upturned plastic surgery nose, was sitting in the corner with her arms folded staring at her son with a combination of fascination and horror.

"Seriously, let me tell you right now," declared Stuart, "if this guy is wearing a costume, which nobody sane has the slightest doubt of, it,s a primo number. I mean this is the costume to end all costumes, and the guy has got to be on PCP, because there,s no other drug that can give a guy that kind of strength. I mean this guy rushes in where angels fear to tread. You wouldn,t believe this guy in action.

"Myself, I am not ruling out that this is some unknown species of animal. But I,ll tell you my pet theory, no pun intended."

"Which is what?" asked Reuben, but in truth this was the type of interview where the reporter does not have to ask any questions.

"Okay," said Stuart, jabbing a thumb in the direction of his own chest, "this is what I personally think is happening with this guy. I think he,s a normal human being to whom something horrible happened. I mean, forget the werewolf crap, it,s getting old, it,s going nowhere, and we,ve seen the mugs and the T-shirts. What I mean is, this guy got some kind of infection or disease - like acromegalyia-something-or-other - and it changed him into this monster. Now, my father went to the Amazon which was his big dream, I mean, all-time huge dream to go to the Amazon, go down the river, walk in the jungle, whatever, and he got an infection that within one week destroyed his pancreas and his kidneys. He died in a Brazilian hospital."

"That,s horrible," murmured Reuben.

"Oh, yeah, right, it was. But this, this creature has had something like that happen to him. The hair, the bone growths - ."

"What bone growths?" asked Reuben.

"He,s got huge bony hands, bony feet, bony forehead, you know. There are diseases that produce this kind of growth, and in his case he,s covered with shaggy hair on top of it. He,s isolated like the Phantom of the Opera, like the Elephant Man, like a freak in a carnival, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, and he,s out of his mind. And this guy has feelings! I mean intense feelings. You should have seen him standing there looking at Antonio. I mean he was just staring and staring at Antonio. And he put his own hands up, like this, oops, almost pulled out the IV, shit - ."

"It,s okay. You didn,t."

"He put his hands up to his head like this, like the sight of Antonio lying there dead - ."

"Stuart, stop!" screamed his mother. Her tiny little body squirmed in the chair. "You,re just going on and on and on!"

"No, no, no, Mom, I am talking to a reporter. This is an interview. If this guy did not want to hear about Antonio and what happened, he wouldn,t be here. Mom, can you get me another milk shake? Please, please?"