The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

“Let’s go,” he said.

Two blocks away in a charming Craftsman cottage nestled in a garden, they made love in an old brass bed below a close sloping ceiling. Yellow flowers in the wallpaper. Candle on the old cast-iron mantel. Rose petals on the sheet.

Laura was rough, urgent, inflaming him with her hunger.

Suddenly she stopped and drew back.

“Can you bring it on now?” she whispered. “Please, do it. Be the Man Wolf for me.”

The room was shadowy, quiet, white shutters closed against the fading afternoon light.

Before he could reply, the metamorphosis had begun.

He found himself standing by the bed, his body yielding up the wolfen coat, the claws, the rippling, elongating tendons of his arms and legs. It was as if he could hear his mane growing, hear the silken hair covering his face. He looked about him with new eyes at the quaint, fragile furnishings of the room.

“And this is what you want, madam?” he asked in the usual low, baritone voice of the Man Wolf, so much darker, richer than his own normal voice. “We are risking discovery, are we, for this?”

She smiled.

She was studying him as never before. She ran her hands over the fur on his forehead, her fingers gripping the long rougher hair of his head.

He drew her towards him and then down on the bare boards. She pushed and pulled as if she wanted to provoke him, beating against his chest with her fists even as she kissed him, pressing her tongue to his fang teeth.

6

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Reuben returned from Sonoma. The rain was thin but steady and the light almost as dim as twilight.

When he caught sight of the house he felt an immediate relief. Workers had finished lining every single window on the façade with tiny bright yellow Christmas lights in perfectly neat lines, and the front door was framed with thick evergreen garland wound with lights as well.

How cheerful and comforting it looked. The workmen were just finishing, and the trucks pulled off the terrace right after he pulled up. Only one truck remained for the crew that was working on the guesthouse on the lower slope, and it would soon be gone as well.

The main rooms were also extremely cheerful, with the usual fires going, and a great undecorated Christmas tree stood to the right of the conservatory doors. More thick and beautiful green garland had been added to the fireplaces and their mantelpieces. And the delicious fragrance of the evergreens everywhere was sweet.

But the house was empty, and that was odd. Reuben had not been alone in this house since the Distinguished Gentlemen had arrived. Notes on the kitchen counter told Reuben that Felix had taken Lisa down the coast for shopping; Heddy was napping; and Jean Pierre had taken Stuart and Margon to the town of Napa for dinner.

Strange as this was, Reuben didn’t mind it. He was deep in his thoughts of Marchent. He’d been thinking of Marchent on the long drive back from Sonoma, and it only now came to him, as he put on a pot of coffee, that his afternoon with Laura had been blissful—the lunch, the bed-and-breakfast lovemaking—because he had not been afraid anymore of the changes in her.

He took a quick shower, putting on his blue blazer and gray wool pants as he often did for dinner, and was on his way down the hall towards the stairs when he heard the low, faint sound of a radio coming from somewhere on the west side of the house, his side of the house.

It took him only a moment in the hallway to locate the origin of the sound. It was Marchent’s old room.

The hallway was grim and shadowy as always, as it had no windows, and only a few scattered wall sconces with parchment shades and small bulbs. And he could see a seam of light under her door.

There came that eerie throbbing terror again, only slowly. He felt the transformation coming but did all in his power to stop it as he stood there, shaken, and not certain what to do.

A dozen explanations might account for the light and the radio. Felix might have left on both after searching for something in Marchent’s closet or desk.

Reuben was unable to move. He fought the prickling in his face and hands, but he couldn’t entirely stifle it. His hands were now what somebody might call hirsute and a quick examination of his face told him it was the same. So be it. But of what use was this subtle enhancement against the possibility of a ghost?

The radio was playing an old dreamy melodic song from the nineties. He knew that song, knew that slow hypnotic beat and that deep female voice. “Take Me As I Am”—that was it. Mary Fahl with the October Project. He’d danced to that song with his high school girlfriend, Charlotte. It had been an old song by then. This was too palpable, too real.

Suddenly, he was so angry with his own panic that he knocked on the door.

The knob slowly turned and the door opened, and he saw the darkened figure of Marchent looking at him, the lamp behind her only partially illuminating the room.

He stood stock-still staring at the dark figure, and slowly her features became visible, the familiar angles of her face and her large unhappy and imploring eyes.

She wore the same bloodstained negligee and he could see the light glinting on countless tiny pearls.

He tried to speak, but the muscles of his face and jaw were petrified, as were his arms and his legs.

They weren’t two feet apart.

His heart seemed about to explode.

He felt himself backing away from the figure, and then the entire scene went dark. He was standing in the silent empty hallway, trembling, sweating, and the door to Marchent’s room was closed.

In a fury, he opened the door and walked into the darkened room. Groping for the wall button he found it and snapped on a collection of scattered small lamps.

The sweat broke out all over his chest and arms. His fingers were slippery with it. The wolf change had stopped. The wolf hair was gone now. But he still felt the pringling and the tremors in his hands and feet. And he forced himself to take several slow breaths.

No sound of a radio, no sight of a radio even, and all the room as he remembered it from the last time he’d inspected it before Felix and Margon and the others had ever come.

The windows were done in elaborate white-lace-ruffled curtains, and so was the canopy of the heavy brass four-poster bed. An old-fashioned dressing table in the far-north corner had been fitted with a skirt in the same starched white-lace ruffles. The bedspread was pink chintz and the overstuffed love seat by the fire was covered in the same fabric. There was a desk, ultra-feminine like all the rest, with Queen Anne legs, and white bookshelves half filled with a few hardcover books.

The closet door was ajar. Nothing inside but a half-dozen padded clothes hangers. Pretty. Some were covered in toile, others in pastel silk. Perfumed. Just there on the closet bar, empty hangers—a symbol for him suddenly of loss, of the horrid reality of Marchent having vanished into death.