Saint Peter’s Wolf (34 page)

Morning was sunny, but the sort of sun that is tin-bright in a white sky. The weather would change soon.

We both sipped hot chocolate from mugs, and I felt uneasy at our theft of yet more nourishment in shelter from an unwitting host.

The bullet had plowed her ribs, a welt she had let me cover with gauze, all the while assuring me that it would cause her no further trouble. Strengthened by our hours of sleep, we sat within the robes of strangers, an unlikely collection of clothing scattered at our feet.

“The cold would kill anybody,” I said, hating even to refer to him. “Don't even think about him. He's gone.”

She gave me her sad smile, a smile that said that she had seen much more than I had. But she made no remark, and simply looked away. At last she said, “We have to go back.”

I must have slipped into deliberate obtuseness for a moment, because I did not understand her.

“To San Francisco,” she added. “We have to return.”

I looked away. “If we go back …” I did not want to finish the thought, “… they'll kill us.”

“You're so sure of that?”

I nodded. I was sure.

“You'll be surprised, Benjamin. For creatures like us life does not follow any logic. Our lives are rich with surprise, which is another way of saying ‘magic.'”

I said something that pained me, but I forced myself. “You don't have to come with me. You can stay here.” It was obvious to me that she could survive in the world of lake and forest. I was the human, now. I was the one who would, inexorably, lose the night self.

“How can you say that, Benjamin?”

I was appalled to see her on the verge of tears.

“We stay together,” she continued. “Why do you think I followed you? To save my own.…” She did not say “skin.” She did not say which shape-changing body she considered most her own, and I saw how much Johanna needed me. She was, for all her power, weary of her shifting life. She needed me, as humans so often come to need each other, and I was warm at the realization. She needed someone to share her life, and I was that partner, that mate.

“I won't abandon you,” I promised her. “Whatever we do, we'll do together.”

But it was a bitter thought, the thought of returning to those streets. Perhaps the police had been deceived by Belinda's bones. That was possible. But I knew the truth. I would have to turn myself in to some sort of authority. I would have to confess, otherwise I would not be able to endure the future. I was a human being, and I had killed. “I'll have to call Lieutenant Solano,” I said, thinking out loud.

“If you feel you have to.”

“What else can I do?”

“There is no reason to feel trapped, Benjamin. We have a gift of freedom. You won't kill any more. All of that is behind you.”

To be a human, I wanted to say, is to accept human guilt.

She put her hand on mine. “I don't kill people. I had a few terrible nights at first, years ago. All of our kind have such nights. But now I am simply as you see me.”

I had to smile, despite my' doubt. She was much more than what I saw before me. And yet I knew exactly what she meant. She was one whose night self was a miracle, and did no harm to the world in which she lived.

“They'll separate us,” I said, and then emotion silenced me.

“Perhaps they will surprise you.”

“You know how it will be. They'll want to punish me, and I don't blame them. I deserve it.”

“Is that a little spark of self-pity I detect in you, Benjamin? Or is it self-hatred? For us, self-pity is a foreign accent. Don't torture yourself, Benjamin. You imagine the future, and then you hurt yourself with the story you have created in your mind.”

I took a deep breath, and when I could speak again I asked, “What will become of us?”

“You have so little faith, Benjamin. You still see things with the eyes of your old, human soul. Do you think the fangs bring only harm? To many, it is true. But to those like you and me, who survive long enough, they bring a gift of compassion, and a kind of joy impossible for normal humans.”

“It wasn't a gift for the woman I raped. Or the people I killed.”

“Don't you see how fate runs, Benjamin? How it was their fate, in that chapter of their lives, to come to an end in your jaws, as it is your tale to have broken free at last? You are not an ordinary man, who can be punished for a crime. You cannot be blamed, any more than a meteor can be blamed for where it falls.”

“That's awfully convenient. Excuses everything, doesn't it, this way of blaming everything on the fangs?”

“You musn't work so hard at hating yourself, Benjamin. I assure you there are forces sufficient to destroy us. If we allow them to. These forces certainly do not need any help from us. Besides, Benjamin—what harm can you do, now that you know what you know?”

The truth was that she saw more than I did, knew more than I knew. I was a changed man, but not the radiant creature which she so plainly was. Some final step, some final evolution, had to be made. And somehow I knew that it had to be made in San Francisco, where all this had begun for me.

Could she read my thoughts? “We will go back this morning.” She picked up a knit cap, and struggled with it, forcing it down over her head. We both laughed. It was many sizes too small, a cap for a child.

“If we are going to go back and be shot,” I said, “we should at least have decent clothes.”

“We will have to wear the clothes of three small children, and two adults who are also very small.”

“This seems to be the cabin of a family of elves.”

“Oh, Benjamin,” she laughed. “You look so silly.”

I could not keep myself from laughing. I had struggled into a flannel shirt that confined me. I could barely stretch it across my chest. I flexed my shoulders and there was a definite rip in one of the seams. A down vest was little better, but I imagined that if I wore enough of the miniature clothing I would at least not be naked. At last I had clothes that fit me well enough. Johanna fared better, but she is one of those women who can wear a tablecloth and make it look stylish.

She became serious once more. “I don't have to run every night. I actually rarely do, Benjamin. Weeks can go by and I sit at home, reading and eating cookies. I can choose when to be transformed, as some might choose when to go for a long drive in the night. That is, at heart, all that I do. I run in the night.”

She was silent for a moment, and then her voice was changed. “A few people saw me, and yet they had no way of knowing what I was. A few calls to the police, to the animal shelter reporting a large dog.”

A large, golden, beautiful, wolfen streak of magic, I wanted to say, but I only smiled.

She continued, “And that man. That man Gneiss followed me yet again.”

His name made us both cold. He was danger. He was the tireless fate, dragging itself after us, the cat we could not elude.

“But perhaps,” I suggested, “it was his fate to come looking for you. Perhaps you should not blame him.”

“There is evil in the world, Benjamin. Not all is peace and night running.”

“Then it is a blessing that he is dead.”

“If I could only believe that he is dead, Benjamin. If only I could feel it in my blood.”

“That is the only thing I really know,” I said. “Karl Gneiss is at the bottom of the lake.” I had begun to doubt it, though, and she knew it. “Where else could he be?”

She turned away. “There is something you don't know about me, Ben.” She said this as though in response to my question about Gneiss, but she had forgotten about Gneiss for the moment. “I have another secret to tell you some day.”

I touched her arm, felt the warmth of her skin, her life, unable to ask. Something shook her, a memory. Whatever this secret might be, it was powerful enough to silence her completely. “You don't even begin to guess,” she said when she could speak again, “what sort of creatures we really are.”

Before we left we stood beside the lake. The surface withered and smoothed, a slow shift and slumber of a thing that could not die. When I was about to turn away, she gripped my shoulder, and hissed, a long low sound.

It was not a hiss, I realized after a moment. It was a long, whispered growl. She pointed along the shore, and when I saw him I fell into a crouch, dragging her with me.

Gneiss was on the beach, lifting himself on one arm.

The air was cold, painfully cold, on my teeth. I was in my human form, and yet my night self acted upon me, empowering me to stay where I was, my eyesight clear, every detail hard.

He was on the stones of the shore, lifting himself up, forcing himself high, and he saw us. His eyes glittered. He knew us, and he would not let us escape him now.

He was smiling. Even as I saw the gleam of his smile, I began to creep forward. He forced himself upward on one arm, pushing himself so far off the stones that it would have to hurt his spine.

This man who hungered for our deaths, this man who, in a way, understood what we were, was grinning. His eyes would not leave us, and he did not move.

I straightened. I motioned her forward.

His teeth were bared, his skin a glaze of crystals, his eyes frozen into opaque and glistening spheres. His posture was plainly not one a living man could maintain for long. Like a brutal yoga, his position was at once contorted and ecstatic. He wasn't smiling at all. The flesh had shriveled away from the teeth.

Black snow, and a smoking, black-timbered hulk.

The Sentra was parked beyond the trampled black muck. I tried to avoid looking at the charred ruin of my family cabin. I could hear my mother's voice: “Such a beautiful morning. I simply can hardly stand it. It's so beautiful it hurts my heart.”

I had left the car in what seemed like another lifetime. The starter merely chuckled, in a feeble way, so I used a can of purloined carburetor spray. The can had just enough inflammable juice to cause the small car to backfire, stutter, and then steady into a pleasing hum.

The stolen clothing bound me, but not as badly as I had feared. With any luck I would be able to stay in the car, wearing the vehicle as a kind of armor.

“You look so serious, Benjamin,” she said. “Such a serious man, in such tight pants.” Her mourning for Gneiss had been genuine, and mine, too, surprised me with its weight. Our enemy was dead. The thought gave both freedom and pain.

But we had to go on. I put the car into gear, and rocked across the ugly ruts. Talk was a salve. “Tight is not the word. They are positively painful.” They weren't, really, but the joke gave comfort.

Leaving the lake allowed us to forget Gneiss, and achieve something like calm again. Faith is a strange quality. Sometimes a person may not feel any faith at all, and yet go on enduring difficult times, and continue striving against all hope. Sometimes faith is not an emotion at all, but a fact of the psyche, as calcium is a fact of bone. We live. We learn by living.

We still had enemies. There were forces in the world that would wish us dead. Treasure the moment, I told myself. Regret nothing, and don't look too far ahead into the future. This narrow morning, this little road of freedom, would not last long.

They will seek you all the harder for having killed Gneiss. I tried to ease my fear as we rolled through Emigrant Gap, through the unseasonably warm morning, down into the winter green of the foothills, aware that we approached the world of men, the world that understood so little, the world that would, I was certain, destroy us.

Part Five

Thirty-Eight

I did not waste time. The drive back took six hours, and as soon as we arrived I put on clothes that fit me, the sort of clothes I would wear to my execution, a dark suit, a dark tie, comfortable shoes. What I would wear for my gallows speech.

Johanna watched my preparations with something like amusement, sitting in a dark burgundy robe that had belonged to my father. I could not bear to say good-bye to her. What would happen to her, in the days and nights to come?

On the drive back I had explained to Johanna that I wanted to act that afternoon, reasoning that the law would be easier on me if I found them before they found me. She had listened patiently, concerned for the strength of my feeling.

I would never tell them about her, I had promised. She was my secret.

Now she said, gently, “Don't assume that you know how things stand. Go and find out, Benjamin. Ask questions. I think you will be surprised.”

I did not want to leave her. She sat in my study as though she belonged there, a new, most precious, work of art. “Will you be all right?” I found myself asking. It was such a pale question. I meant: what will happen to us, to our love, in the weeks to come? Would we survive?

“Of course I'll be fine.” She laughed, perhaps answering even my unasked questions. “I will sit here in my human body, looking at some of your wonderful books. Why are you so worried?”

I had stored up a great need to confess to the police, to some official, responsible person, and yet now I could not explain my need to do this. She could not keep herself from an expression of kind amusement.

“I don't know what will happen.”

“Do you think you will march into the police station and exclaim that you are a werewolf and have them hurl you into a cage? Do you think you will be on ‘Eyewitness News' as America's first verified human wolf?”

“No, I don't want to be hurt. I don't want the publicity.”

There was fire in her voice when she asked, “What do you want?”

My voice was weary. “I want to atone for what I have done.”

“The world is not what you think it is. You will be surprised.”

Surprises, I thought.

I did not want any more surprises.

Lieutenant Solano waved when he saw me. I had insisted that I needed to speak with him, and identified myself to four different voices, and finally to his wife who said that he was playing soccer at the Marina.