The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

Gently he scooped up the body of Phil and laid Phil gently against his shoulder. Lisa secured the warm wrappings around Phil, walking beside Sergei as he moved towards the passage out of the clearing.

The other Morphenkinder were all in motion, moving ahead and behind, Laura moving right with them.

The Forest Gentry began to melt away as if they’d never been there. Elthram had vanished.

Reuben wanted to go along with the others, but something held him back. He watched them as they made their way into that narrow passage just beyond where the discarded drums and pipes lay in the dust. The gold-trimmed drinking horns lay about everywhere. And the cauldron still gave off steam on its bed of coals.

Reuben groaned. With his whole soul he groaned. He felt a pain in his belly. It grew bigger and bigger, constricting his heart, throbbing in his temples. The cold air lacerated him, bruised him, and he realized the wolf hair had fallen away from him, leaving him naked.

He saw his naked white fingers trembling before him and felt the wind tear at his eyes.

“No,” he whispered. And he willed it to return. “You come back to me,” he said in a half whisper. “I won’t let you go. Be mine now.” And at once the old tingling surged in his hands and in his face. The hair once more grew thick and smooth over him spreading with the inexorable force of water. His muscles sang with the old lupine strength and the warmth enclosed him.

But the tears had risen in his eyes. The bonfire hissed and spat and rustled in his ears.

From his right, Laura approached, this comely gray she-wolf whose face and form resembled his own, this savage pale-eyed monster who was so unutterably beautiful in his eyes. She had come back for him. He fell into her arms.

“You heard him, you heard all the terrible things that he said,” Reuben whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “I did. But you are bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Come. We will make our truth together.”

23

FOR DAYS, ELTHRAM SAT in the cottage by Phil’s bed. Phil slept. A powerful drink was given to Phil over and over again to make him sleep, this drink concocted by Elthram and Lisa, and Phil dozed sometimes moaning or singing under his breath, his wounds visibly healing, his fever rising and ebbing and finally dying away.

Slowly, the subtle changes began to appear—the thickening of his white hair with its reddish blond streaks, the restlessness in his legs and arms as his muscles grew stronger. And his eyes, of course, his pale hazel eyes were now a deeper shade of green when from time to time he opened them.

All this time Reuben slept either on the floor near Phil’s bed, or in a chair by the fire, or from time to time in the spacious attic above, on a simple mattress bed Lisa made up for him.

Laura brought down Reuben’s laptop computer for him, and spent the nights on the attic mattress by his side or alone as he remained below, in the leather recliner by the fire, listening in a half sleep to the rhythm of Phil’s breathing. But Laura was often gone. She could not yet control the transformation, and she and Thibault slipped off again and again together in the forest.

Felix and the others looked in on Phil often. A terrible gloom gripped Felix, but he showed no desire to talk with anyone about it. It was as if a dark and tortured soul had taken up residence in Felix’s body, claiming Felix’s face and voice for his own, though it could not be Felix.

Reuben went out to him and they stood in silence in the rain, merely embracing one another in shared and wordless grief for the terrible twists and turns of Modranicht. Then Felix wandered off alone, and Reuben returned to his vigil.

Margon whispered that they must all leave Felix alone, in the wake of Hockan’s scathing excoriations. Sergei snorted with contempt. “Hockan, the judge,” he said. “He is the high priest of words and words and words. His words couple with his words and breed more words. His words run rampant.”

Stuart appeared from time to time, as tormented as the others. “And so there can be war amongst us,” he said to Reuben in anxious whispers. “There can be terrible strife. I knew it.” Stuart needed to talk to Reuben and Reuben knew this, but he couldn’t leave Phil just now. He couldn’t take his mind off Phil. He couldn’t answer Stuart’s many questions. Besides, who better to answer those questions than Margon, if only Margon would.

Lisa told Reuben that the first thing Felix had done on Wednesday morning was to commence plans for a sprinkler system to protect the house, hooked to the county water supply, but also to a huge reserve tank that would be installed in the parking area behind the servants’ wing.

“Nobody will ever burn down Nideck Point,” said Felix. “Not while I have breath in my body.” Other than those few words, nothing more on the horrors of Modranicht came from Felix.

“He is in Marchent’s old room,” said Lisa. “He sleeps there on top of her bed. He won’t disturb anything. This is not good, this must stop.” She shook her head.

But what of Margon, Reuben asked Lisa in furtive whispers—Margon, who was so opposed to the Forest Gentry on general principles? Was he not alarmed that the Forest Gentry had marshaled such physical power on Modranicht? How many times had Reuben been told that the Forest Gentry never harmed anyone?

Lisa waved all this away with the soft answer, “Margon loves your father. He knows why they did what they did.”

From time to time, Margon checked on Phil with the careful scrutiny and precision of a doctor, with Stuart always nearby. Margon was easy with Elthram there. They nodded to one another, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the history of the Forest Gentry, as if they had not massed together to kill two Morphenkinder before everyone’s eyes.

Finally Phil was out of all danger.

Yet now and then Phil cried out in his sleep, and Lisa knelt beside him whispering. “In the beginning he was with the living and the dead,” she told Reuben. “Now he is only with the living.”

Elthram spoke to no one. If he could sleep in his material form, he gave no evidence of it. Each morning, people of the Gentry came to bring fresh flowers, which Elthram arranged in vases and glasses around on the windowsills and the tables.

Lisa was as easy with Elthram’s presence as she’d ever been. And Sergei and Thibault spoke to him casually now and then when they came to visit the guesthouse, though Elthram only nodded, rarely taking his eyes off Phil.

But surely the massive show of physical power by the Forest Gentry had meant something to the others. It had to have shocked them all. This was much on Reuben’s mind. The Forest Gentry could indeed do harm to others when they chose. Who could deny it now?