The Wolves of Midwinter (2 page)

Maybe it wasn’t fair to her for him to do this, but maybe again it was. He loved her, loved her more than he had ever loved any girlfriend or lover before her. He couldn’t stand being without her, and maybe he ought to say so. Why shouldn’t he say so? What could he lose? He wouldn’t make or break her decision for her by what he did. And he had to stop being fearful as to what he would think or feel about whatever she chose to do.

It was just getting dark when he pulled into her drive.

Another urgent message came in on his iPhone from Celeste. He ignored it.

The little steep-roofed house in the woods was warmly lighted against the great dark gulf of the forest, and he could smell the oak fire. It struck him suddenly that he should have brought a little gift with
him, flowers perhaps, or even maybe … a ring. He hadn’t thought of this before, and he was suddenly crushed.

And what if she had company, a man of whom he knew nothing? What if she didn’t come to the door?

Well, she did come to the door. She opened it for him.

And the moment he set eyes on her he wanted to make love to her, and nothing else. She was in faded jeans and an old gray sweater that made her eyes look all the more smoky and dark, and she wore no makeup, looking quietly splendid, with her hair free on her shoulders.

“Come here to me, you monster,” she said at once, in a low teasing voice, hugging him tightly, kissing him all over his face and neck. “Look at this dark hair, hmmm, and these blue eyes. I was beginning to think I dreamed every minute of you.”

He held her so tightly he must have been hurting her. He wanted a moment of nothing but holding her.

She drew him towards the back bedroom. She was rosy-cheeked and radiant, her hair beautifully mussed and fuller than he’d remembered, certainly more blond than he’d remembered, full of sunlight, it seemed to him, and her expression struck him as sly and deliciously intimate.

There was a comforting blaze in the black-iron Franklin stove. And a couple of little glass-shade lamps lighted on either side of the oak bed with its soft lumpy faded quilts and lace-trimmed pillows.

She pulled the covers down and helped him take off his shirt and jacket and pants. The air was warm and dry and sweet, as it always was in her house, her little lair.

He was weak with relief, but that lasted only a few seconds, and then he was kissing her as if they’d never been separated. Not too fast, not too fast, he kept telling himself, but it didn’t do any good. This was hotter, all this, more exuberant and divinely rough.

They lay together after, dozing, as the rain trickled down the panes. He woke with a start, and turned to see her with her eyes open looking at the ceiling. The only light came from the kitchen. And food was cooking there. He could smell it. Roast chicken and red wine. He knew that fragrance well enough and he was suddenly too hungry to think of anything else.

They had dinner together at the round oak table, Reuben in a terry-cloth robe she’d found for him, and Laura in one of those lovely white flannel gowns she so loved. This one was trimmed with a bit of blue embroidery and blue ribbon on the collar and cuffs and placket, and it had blue buttons, a flattering complement to her dazzled, confidential smile, and her glowing skin.

They said nothing as they ate the meal, Reuben devouring everything as always, and Laura to his surprise actually eating her food rather than pushing it around on her plate.

A stillness fell over them when they’d finished. The fire was snapping and rustling in the living room fireplace. And the whole little house seemed safe and strong against the rain that hammered on the roof and the panes. What had it been like to grow up under this roof? He couldn’t imagine. Morphenkind or not, he realized, the great woods still represented for him a wilderness.

This was something he loved, that they did not make small talk, that they could go hours without talking, that they talked without talking, but what were they saying to one another, without words, just now?

She sat motionless in the oak chair with only her left hand on the table, her right hand in her lap. It seemed she’d been watching him as he cleaned the plate, and he sensed it now and sensed something particularly enticing about her, about the fullness of her lips and the mass of her hair that framed her face.

Then it came over him, came over him like a chill stealing over his face and neck. Why in the world hadn’t he realized immediately.

“You’ve done it,” he whispered. “You’ve taken the Chrism.”

She didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

Her eyes were darker, yes, and her hair was fuller, much fuller, and even her grayish-blond eyebrows had darkened, so that she looked like a sister of herself, almost identical yet wholly different, with even a darker glow to her cheeks.

Dear God, he whispered without words. And then his heart began tripping and he felt he was going to be sick. This is how he’d looked to others in those days before the transformation had come on him, when
those around him knew something had “happened” to him and he’d felt so completely remote, and without fear.

Was she that remote from him now, as he’d been from all his family? No, that couldn’t be. This was Laura, Laura who’d just welcomed him, Laura who’d just taken him into her bed. He blushed. Why had he not known?

Nothing changed in her expression, nothing at all. That’s how it had been with him. He’d stared like that, knowing others wanted something from him, but unable to give it. But then, in his arms, she’d been soft and melting as always, giving, trusting, close.

“Felix didn’t tell you?” she asked. Even her voice seemed different, now that he knew. Just a richer timbre to it, and he could have sworn that the bones of her face were slightly larger, but that might have been his fear.

He couldn’t get the words out. He didn’t know what the words were. A flash of the heat of their lovemaking came back to him, and he felt an immediate arousal. He wanted her again, and yet he felt, what, sick? Was he sick with fear? He hated himself.

“How do you feel?” he managed. “Are you feeling bad at all, I mean are there any bad side effects?”

“I was a little sick in the beginning,” she said.

“And you were alone and no one—?”

“Thibault’s been here every night,” she said. “Sometimes Sergei. Sometimes Felix.”

“Those devils,” he whispered.

“Reuben, don’t,” she said in the most simple and sincere way. “You mustn’t for a moment think that anything bad has happened. You mustn’t.”

“I know,” he murmured. He felt a throbbing in his face and in his hands. Of all places, his hands. The blood was rushing in his veins. “But were you ever in any kind of danger?”

“No, none,” she said. “That simply doesn’t happen. They explained all that. Not when the Chrism’s passed and there are no real injuries to the person. Those who die, die when their injuries can’t be overtaken by the Chrism.”

“I figured as much,” he said. “But we don’t have a rule book to consult when we begin to worry, do we?”

She didn’t answer.

“When did you decide?”

“I decided almost immediately,” she said. “I couldn’t resist it. It was pointless to tell myself I was pondering it, giving it the consideration it deserved.” Her voice grew warmer and so did her expression. This was Laura, his Laura. “I wanted it, and I told Felix and I told Thibault.”

He studied her, ignoring the impulse to take her to the bed again. Her skin looked moist, youthful, and though she’d never looked old, she’d been powerfully enhanced, there was no doubt of it. He could hardly bear to look at her lips and not kiss them.

“I went to the cemetery,” she said. “I talked to my father.” She looked off, obviously not finding this easy. “Well, talked as if I could talk to my father,” she said. “They’re all buried there, you know, my sister, my mother, my father. I talked to them. Talked to them about all of it. But I’d made the decision before I ever left Nideck Point. I knew I was going to do it.”

“All this time, I was figuring you’d refuse, you’d say no.”

“Why?” she asked gently. “Why would you think such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Because you had lost so much and you might want so much more. Because you’d lost children, and you might want a child again, not a Morphenkind child, whatever that would be, but a child. Or because you believed in life, and thought life itself is worth what we give up for it.”

“It is worth dying for?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

“You speak like you have regrets,” she said. “But I guess that’s bound to happen.”

“I don’t have regrets,” he said. “I don’t know what I feel, but I could imagine your saying no. I could imagine your wanting another chance at a family, a husband, a lover, and children.”

“Reuben, what you have never grasped … what you seem absolutely unable to grasp … is that this means we don’t die.” She said it without drama, but it was cutting to him and he knew it was true.
“All my family have died,” she said, her voice low and a little scolding. “All my family! My father, my mother, yes, in due course; but my sister, murdered in a liquor store robbery, and my children gone, dead, taken in the most cruel ways. Oh, I’ve never spoken of these things to you before, really; I shouldn’t now. I hate when people tout their suffering and their losses.” Her face hardened suddenly. Then a faraway look took hold of her as if she’d been drawn back into the worst pain.

“I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I don’t know about death. Not anything. Until the night Marchent was killed, I only knew one person ever that had died, Celeste’s brother. Oh, my grandparents, yes, they’re dead, but they were so old. And then Marchent. I knew Marchent for less than twenty-four hours, and it was such a shock. I was numb. It wasn’t death, it was catastrophe.”

“Don’t be in a hurry to know all about it,” she said, a little defeated.

“Shouldn’t I?” He thought of the people whose lives he’d taken, the bad guys the Man Wolf had ripped right out of life, thoughtlessly. And it came down on him hard that very soon Laura too would have that brute power, to kill as he’d killed, while she herself would be invulnerable.

There were no words now for him.

Images were crowding his mind, filling him with an ominous sadness, and a near despair. He pictured her in a country cemetery talking with the dead. He thought of those pictures of her children that he’d glimpsed. He thought of his family, always there, and then he thought of his own power, of that limitless strength he enjoyed as he mounted the rooftops, as the voices summoned him out of humanity and into the single-minded Man Wolf who would kill without regret or compassion.

“But you haven’t fully changed yet, have you? Not yet?”

“No, not yet,” she said. “Only the small changes so far,” she said. She looked off without moving her head. “I can hear the forest,” she said with a faint smile. “I can hear the rain in ways I never heard it before. I know things. I knew when you were approaching. I look at the flowers, and I swear I can see them grow, see them blossoming, see them dying.”

He didn’t speak. It was beautiful what she was saying and yet it was frightening him. Even the soft secretive look on her face frightened him. She was staring off. “There’s a Norse god, isn’t there, Reuben, who can hear the grass grow?”

“Heimdall,” he said. “The keeper of the gate. He can hear the grass grow and see for a hundred leagues in the day or in the night.”

She laughed. “Yes. I see the stars themselves through the fog, through the cloud cover; I see the sky no one else can see from this magical forest.”

He should have said,
Just wait, just wait until the full change comes on you
, but his voice had died in him.

“I hear the deer in the forest,” she said. “I can hear them now. I can almost … pick up the scent. It’s faint. I don’t want to imagine things.”

“They’re there. Two, out there, just beyond the clearing,” he said.

She was watching him again, watching him in that impassive fashion, and he couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. He thought about the deer, such tender, exquisite creatures, but if he didn’t stop thinking about them, he would want to kill both of them and devour them. How would she feel when that happened to her, when all she could think of was sinking her fangs into the neck of the deer and tearing out its heart while the heart was still beating?

He was aware that she was moving, coming around the table towards him. The soft clean scent of her skin caught him by surprise as the forest in his mind receded, dimmed. She settled in the empty chair to his right and then she reached out and put her hand on the side of his face.

Slowly he looked into her eyes.

“You’re afraid,” she said.

He nodded. “I am.”

“You’re being truthful about it.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“I love you so much,” she said. “So much. It’s better that than saying all the correct things, that you realize now we’ll be together in this, that you will never lose me now as you might have, that I’ll soon be invulnerable to the same things that can’t hurt you.”

“That’s what I should say, what I should think.”

“Perhaps. But you don’t tell lies, Reuben, except when you have to, and you don’t like secrets, and they cause you pain.”

“They do. And we are both a secret now, Laura, a very big secret. We are a dangerous secret.”

“Look at me.”

“I’m trying to do that.”

“Just tell me all of it, let it flow.”

“You know what it’s about,” he said. “When I came here, that first night, when I was wandering out there in the grass, the Man Wolf, and I saw you, you were like some tender, innocent being, something purely human and feminine and marvelously vulnerable, standing there on the porch and you were so …”

“Unafraid.”

“Yes, but fragile, intensely fragile, and even as I fell in love with you, I was so afraid for you, that you’d open your door like that, to something like me. You didn’t know what I was, not really. You had no idea. You thought I was a simple Man of the Wild, you know you did, something out of the heart of the forest that didn’t belong in the cities of men, remember that? You made a myth of me. I wanted to enfold you, protect you, save you from yourself, save you from myself!—from your recklessness, I mean your inviting me in as you did.”