The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

Yet he felt comfortable with Elthram, indeed, more comfortable perhaps than he’d ever been. Elthram’s presence had a soothing affect on him. If Phil took a turn for the worse, Elthram would be the first to see it, and call attention to it. Of that Reuben was sure.

One early morning while Laura slept, Reuben wrote out all that he could remember of Hockan’s condemnations. He did not attempt a reconstruction of the speech so much as an accurate record of it. And when he was finished, he lay restless in the warm dry quiet of the attic, the window a patch of white light, feeling a deep dull misery.

On the morning of the fourth day—December 28—Reuben went up while it was still dark to shower and shave, and get fresh clothing. He and Laura made love in their bedroom, and Reuben fell helplessly to sleep afterwards in Laura’s arms. It wasn’t good, however. It had not been enough. Reuben wanted her in the beast shape; he wanted both of them coupling in the forest, savage as they’d been by the Yule fire. But that would have to wait.

It was ten a.m. when he awakened, alone, filled with guilt and worry for Phil. How could he have left Phil like this? Hastily he pulled on his jeans and his polo shirt, and searched for his shoes and jacket.

It seemed to take him forever to reach the cottage. He came in to find Phil at his desk, writing in his diary. Lisa was assembling his breakfast in the kitchen. Setting down the tray and carafe of coffee, with cups and plates for father and son, she slipped out of the cottage. Elthram was gone.

On and on Phil wrote, and then finally, he shut the diary and rose to his feet. He wore a fresh black sweatshirt and black sweatpants. His dark green eyes regarded Reuben calmly, but abstractly, as though he were struggling to bring himself out of his deepest and most crucial thoughts.

“My boy,” he said. He gestured to the breakfast on the table before the window.

“You know what’s happened to you?” asked Reuben. He sat down at the table with the window to his left. The sea was a steel blue beneath a bright white sky, and the inevitable rain fell hard in silent sheets of sparkling silver.

Phil nodded.

“What do you remember, Dad?”

“Just about all of it,” Phil said. “If I’ve forgotten anything, well, I don’t know what that would be.” Hungrily he sliced through the fried eggs, making a mixture of them with the bacon and grits. “Come on, aren’t you hungry? A man your age is always hungry.”

Reuben stared at the food. “Dad, what do you remember?”

“All of it, son, I told you,” said Phil. “Except being carried through the woods, that I don’t remember. It was the cold that brought me around, and it took a few minutes. That and the light of the fire. But I remember everything after that. I never lost consciousness. I thought I would. But I never went completely under.”

“Dad, did you want us to do what we did?” asked Reuben. “I mean, what we did to save your life. You know now what’s happened to you, don’t you?”

Phil smiled. “There’s always plenty of time to die, isn’t there, Reuben?” he answered. “And plenty of opportunity. Yes, I know what you did, and I’m glad that you did it.” He looked youthful, vigorous in spite of the familiar creases in his forehead and the slight jowls he’d had for years. His white hair was shot through with thick locks of reddish blond.

“Dad, have you no questions about what you saw?” asked Reuben. “Don’t you want an explanation for what you saw? Or what you heard?”

Phil swallowed a couple more forkfuls of food, scooping up plenty of the thick grits with the eggs. Then he sat back and ate the last of the bacon with his fingers.

“Well, you know, son, it wasn’t a shock, though to see it that way was a shock all right. But I can’t say I was entirely surprised. I knew you’d gone out there to celebrate Modranicht with your friends, and I pretty much figured how that might go for you, the old Yuletide customs being what they are.”

“But Dad, you mean you knew?” Reuben asked. “You knew all along what we were, all of us?”

“Let me tell you a story,” said Phil. His voice was the same as ever, but his sharp green eyes kept startling Reuben. “Your mother doesn’t drink much, you know that. I don’t know that you’ve ever seen your mother drunk, have you?”

“One time, tipsy, maybe.”

“Well, she stays off the sauce because she tends to go crazy on it, and always did, and then she blacks out and she can’t remember what happened. It’s bad for her, bad for her because she becomes emotional and carries on and cries and then she can’t own what happened.”

“I remember her saying all that.”

“And of course, she’s a surgeon, and when that phone rings she wants to be ready to go into the operating room.”

“Yes, Dad. I know.”

“Well, right after Thanksgiving, Reuben, I think it was the following Saturday night, your mother gets completely drunk all by herself and comes into my room crying. Of course she’d been telling the newspapers and the televisions twenty-four/seven that she’d seen the Man Wolf with her own eyes, seen him here at Nideck Point when he broke in the front door and killed those two Russian scientists. Yes, she’d been telling everybody who asked that it was no myth, the California Man Wolf, and that it was some kind of physical mutant, you know, an anomaly, a one-off as she kept saying—a biological reality for which we’d all soon have an explanation. Well, anyway, she comes into my room and she sits down on the side of my bed, just sobbing, and she tells me that she knows, just knows in her heart, that you and all your friends up here are the very same species—‘They’re all Man Wolves,’ she sobs, ‘and Reuben’s one of them.’ And on and on she goes explaining that she knows this to be true, just knows, and knows that your brother Jim knows, because Jim can’t talk about it, which can mean only one thing—that Jim can’t reveal what was told him in Confession. ‘They’re all in it together. Did you see that big picture of them all over the library fire? They’re monsters, and our son is one of them.’

“Well, of course, I helped her back to bed, and I lay down with her until she stopped crying and went to sleep. And then in the morning, Reuben, she didn’t remember a thing except that she’d gotten drunk and she’d cried over something. She was humiliated, terribly humiliated like she always is over any excess emotion, any loss of control, and she swallows half a bottle of aspirin, and goes to work like nothing happened. Well, what do you think I did?”