The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

“You went to see Jim,” said Reuben.

“That’s exactly right,” said Phil with a smile. “Jim was saying the six a.m. Mass as usual when I got there. There was, what, fifty people in the church? Probably half that many. And the street people were all lined up outside waiting to get in to go to sleep in the pews.”

“Right,” said Reuben.

“And I caught Jim right after Mass, right after he’d said farewell to the people at the front door, and he was heading back up the aisle towards the sacristy. And I told him what she’d said. ‘Now you tell me,’ I said to Jim, ‘is this conceivable? That this Man Wolf creature is not some simple freak of nature, but that there’s a tribe of them, and that your brother is in fact part of that tribe? That this is some secret species that’s always existed, and when Reuben was bitten up there in that house in the dark, he became one of them?’ ”

Phil stopped and took a deep swallow of the hot coffee.

“And what did Jim say?” asked Reuben.

“That was just it, son. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me for a long time, and the expression on his face, well, I don’t have words to describe it. And then he looked up at the high altar. And I saw he was looking at the statue of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. And then he said, in the most sad, discouraged voice, ‘Dad, I don’t have any light to shed on this.’

“And I said, ‘Okay, son, we’ll let it go, and your mother can’t remember any of this anyway.’ And I just went on out, but I knew. I knew it was all true. I knew it was true, really, when your mother was laying it out, I felt it was true, felt it, felt it in here. But I knew it was true then when I watched Jim walking on back to the sacristy behind the altar—because there were a million things he might have said if it had been nonsense, and he didn’t say any of them.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, and refilled his mug with coffee. “You do know that Lisa makes the best coffee in the world, don’t you?”

Reuben didn’t answer. He was feeling so sorry for Jim, so sorry that he’d ever burdened Jim, yet what would he do without Jim? Well, there was time to deal with Jim, to made amends, to give thanks, to thank him for taking over with Susie Blakely.

“But, Dad, if Mom knew,” Reuben asked, “why ever did she let you come up here to live with us?”

“Son, she blacked out that night, I told you. What she’d revealed had come from someplace deep down inside that’s closed off to her when she isn’t drinking. And the next day she didn’t know. And she doesn’t know now.”

“Ah, but she does,” said Reuben. “She does. What the liquor did was let her speak of it, confess it, face it. And she also knows she can’t do anything about it, that she can never mention it out loud to me, she can never become an accessory to it. The only way she can live with it is to pretend she doesn’t have an inkling.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “But to get back to your question, what did I think when I saw all of you out there in the forest on Christmas Eve? Well, I was shocked. I’ll grant you that. It was as shocking a spectacle as anything I’ve ever seen in my life. But I wasn’t surprised, and I knew what was happening. And I knew that wily Helena, I knew her by her Polish accent when she picked me up out of my bed with her great hairy arms, when she said, ‘Are you willing to die for your son, to teach him and his friends a lesson?’ ”

“She said that to you?”

He nodded. “Oh yes. That was her scheme, apparently, and I knew the voice of Fiona, who was with her. Ah, such monsters! And right here in this room. ‘Foolish man,’ she said, that Fiona. ‘That you ever came here. Most humans have better instincts.’ ”

He sipped the coffee, then put his elbows on the table and ran his hands back through his hair. He seemed a man some twenty years younger now, whatever the stamp of age on his face. His shoulders were remarkably straight and his chest was broader. And even his hands were larger and stronger than they had been.

“I blacked out after they appeared here,” he said. “But when I came to in the forest, I understood their evil plan, those two, to use me as the living proof that Felix’s way with Nideck Point, of living in the very midst of human beings, of carrying on as if he were a living man, a normal man, a generous man—that this was all, as Fiona called it, folly. I saw and heard all that when the spectacle unraveled.”

“Then you know what happened to Fiona and Helena,” said Reuben.

“Not at first I didn’t,” said Phil. “That is the one part that wasn’t clear, that was puzzling me. But as I was lying there in that bed, I was having nightmares some of the time, nightmares that they’d burn down Nideck Point, and burn down the village.”

“She spoke about those very things,” said Reuben.

“Right, I’d heard that part,” said Phil. “But what wasn’t clear to me was that she and Helena were gone. I hadn’t seen what happened to them. The nightmares were terrible. I grabbed hold of Lisa and tried to get her to understand that Nideck Point was in danger from those two. And that’s when Lisa told me, told me how Elthram and the Gentry had driven them into the fire. She explained to me who the Gentry were, or at least she tried to. She said something about them being the ‘woodland spirits’ and not people like us.” He laughed softly under his breath, shaking his head. “I should have known. Well, Lisa said no one had ever seen the Forest Gentry do such a thing. But the Forest Gentry would never have done it without ‘grave cause.’ And then Elthram was there, I mean by my bed, right beside Lisa. I saw him looking down at me. And he placed one of his warm hands on me. And Elthram said, ‘You are all safe.’ ”

“That’s what happened,” said Reuben.

“And then I knew they weren’t coming to harm anybody, and I better understood all the rest of what I’d heard—what I’d heard Hockan saying out there, with his voice like Giazotto’s notorious Adagio in G Minor.”

Reuben gave a little bitter laugh. “Yes, it’s exactly like that, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, that Hockan has quite a voice. But then they all do. Felix has a voice like a Mozart piano concerto, always full of light; and Sergei, well, Sergei sounds like Beethoven.”

“Not Wagner?”

“No,” said Phil, smiling. “I like Beethoven better. But about Hockan, I sensed a sadness in him at the banquet, a kind of deep broken melancholy, I guess I’d call it, and how he seemed to love that Helena even though she frightened him. I could see that. Her questions to me frightened him.” He shook his head. “Yeah, Hockan, he’s the violin in the Adagio in G Minor all right.”