Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  There was the sound of a man’s cry, and a man’s curses. I could not make out the words over the rattle of the chopper’s blades, but I worked myself toward the hand, and licked it, as though playfully, and then licked the man’s jerking, howling head, laving him with my spit.

  Then I gave a great tug, and the thump of the propellers was joined by the reedy, descending scream of a falling man. The cry ceased at the lake’s perfect black surface, and I could not keep myself from a moment of compassion.

  My body jackknifed. I powered my way into the cabin. Instrument lights glowed where a figure struggled to wrench the craft to greater altitude. Someone ripped a shot, and the wall of the chopper was punched with an irregular star through which the night sky streamed cold.

  Another shot exploded and the pilot jolted upright. I snapped my jaws and found an arm, the hot savor of blood in my mouth. Working quickly, I closed my teeth around his throat. I snapped his spine, and hurled the body aside. In the small compartment the dead man fell over me and I wasted a moment, flinging him aside again.

  The craft was spinning now, wheeling through the sky, out of control. Gneiss wormed his way behind his sole remaining shadow and the muzzle flash seared me. There was an explosion of metal and wires, and a stink of blistered plastic. The helicopter flung itself through the black.

  Far below us the burning cabin cast a scarlet sheen on the lake. The tangle of flames and the glitter of the lake whipped past us time and again, as I slammed the remaining shadow into unconsciousness.

  All the while my eyes were on his master, the large, pale face, the glittering gray eyes. He was a big man, bulky in the way that endows strength. His eyes were golden in the swinging light, and while he had to brace himself with an outflung arm, he seemed to enjoy my own struggle to climb toward him. The centrifugal force staggered me, threw me against the shattered plastic window, and then back against the pilot’s crumpled form. My great weight was a disadvantage to me as I found myself ripping a seat out of the floor to disentangle myself.

  The big man was smiling, tranquilly raising a pistol, and I gathered myself for a last spring, my hindquarters against the sizzling instrument panel. He said something, and I could not make out the words.

  He said it again, calling it out, merrily, as though this were all a wonderful sport, a rare moment he had sought for years.

  I realized what he was saying.

  “Loving arms!” he cried, laughing, delighted, aiming the black pistol into my eyes.

  And then a force flattened me, crushed me, a blank numb slam that brought silence.

  Loving arms.

  Utter, granite silence.

  In this blankness, this slow settling downward, Gneiss’s words repeated themselves. “Loving.” But surely, I struggled to think. Surely he’s silent; surely he’s not still talking.

  Love. His words, and the silence. Silence, and a gentle downdrift, slowly spinning. And cold, too, great cold. But even as I experienced it as cold, I felt it as warmth. Pleasing warmth, like warm blood rising around my body.

  Which body? I found myself wondering without much care. Which of my two bodies was it that felt such pleasant warmth? It didn’t matter, did it? Both bodies, both lives, all of me, was descending forever.

  My father smiled at me. “Look at me,” he said. “My hands shaking so much I can’t get my tie to knot.”

  I woke when the chopper settled to the bottom of the lake. The pressure of the water crushed me against the shattered window. The weight of the lake was so great I could not move. This was not water, this was a black stone mountain that pressed me even farther into the earth.

  I would be alive just long enough to feel the weight of the world burst my lungs.

  Thirty-Seven

  Things floated, vague debris, things I did not want touching me. The arm of one of the floating corpses trailed across my eyes, and I wrestled the dead man out of the way, only to rock into the snaking wires of the instrument panel.

  Calm yourself. Be calm. Find out which way is up.

  It seemed like a simple task, but in this black so perfect it was blindness there was no filtered light to tell me where the surface was, and there was no sense of anything trying to float upward. Only inward, toward me. There was a tangle of trash about me. A paper cup grazed my ear, and scraps of paper drifted over my forepaws, clinging to me. And the dead men seemed to stagger, bumbling in their confinement, floating and yet kept in place.

  No air. The signal from my lungs drove every other thought from my mind. No air no air get out now.

  I threw myself against what I imagined was the windscreen, and was bounced back by the force of my own attack, dislodging a rack and a metal cylinder which I recognized, in one of my last cogent seconds, as a fire extinguisher.

  I crashed upward, or outward, hurling my back against a wall that buckled. I rammed it again, and had the dull sense of something giving, whether some part of my shoulder or a part of the wreck I could not tell.

  Then there was a crack, a split I snaked my body into and through, twisting from side to side. I forced the rent wider, and metal groaned. The great cold was gradually kneading into my muscles, stilling my body, turning it to iron, but with a final spasm I burst from the wreck.

  An ascent can be like a fall, a spiral that has its own life. We are not free creatures at all, even the most graceful human. We go where our bodies take us.

  Some powerful creature held me, and dragged me from the water. Someone I knew. Someone I knew well, and loved.

  Was I alive? I wanted to laugh at my own stupidity. Of course I was alive—I hurt. The sand on the shore there is, essentially, crushed granite. I opened my eyes and gazed at the beach, and then, barely able to move, I managed to pull my beast shape into a thicket of mesquite.

  I shuddered, and had no feeling in any of my limbs. I barked once, a sharp note: where are you?

  Sleep, came the command from my bones. Lie down and sleep.

  I barked again. Are you alive? Am I alone?

  Only silence, and the steamy pant of my own breath.

  Sleep now. Too much weariness.

  I let myself fall to the pine needles, and then someone was with me. Her shape stood guard over me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was still there. A golden wolf.

  She sang a low tune: Don’t worry. I am with you.

  I had been mad to doubt her again. I scrambled to my feet, for the moment no longer weary, and laughed. I shook the water from my fur. I staggered at first, but soon found my stride.

  I barked, telling the sugar pines that I had been a fool. She was here! Look at her, golden in the starlight. She was hurt, though. There was a tar-splash of blood along her side.

  I followed Johanna, and to my surprise she was not seeking refuge in the forest. She was dragging something from the water. And then she splashed into the lake, and retrieved something else, something long and heavy with water.

  And then I understood what she was doing.

  Here was the man who had tried to shoot me with the pistol, the man whose wrist I had squeezed so hard. How helpless he looked, gazing upward at the stars, his clothing sodden about his arms and legs.

  She seemed to be able to find bodies by their fading warmth in the water. Here were the others, all still, glistening in starlight. All except for one. One was missing.

  One very important corpse was not here.

  Gneiss.

  A growl rose from within me as I gazed over the black lake. Gneiss was here somewhere. He was dead. He had to be. I wanted to see him, cold and still.

  I wanted him here on the sand.

  Was there even more to that night? Did we crawl to watch a struggle against flame, firemen in yellow hardhats and freezing gouts of water, failing to kill the fire?

  There is a memory of that, and a memory of a continuing search, with Johanna, for the sole absent body, the one man we most wanted to find.

  Then we escaped, running through the night, ice bearding us, weighi
ng us down, into a cabin farther along the shore. It was one of dozens of lakeside cabins boarded up for the winter, an aluminum boat lashed to the side of its carport. This diminutive version of my family’s now ruined cabin was a refuge where we shuddered, melted into our human forms, and slept.

  Even in sleep I ran, until at last the slumber purified me of the flight, and I slipped into a new, fertile country, not oblivion so much as deepest peace. I knew exactly who was with me, and we held each other as we rose from time to time to the surface of sleep, only to drift downward again.

  She sighed in her sleep, and said my name once. The sound woke me, and I held her, praying that I not cause her pain, and praying, too, that her great powers of recovery might continue to heal her.

  “He’s still out there,” said Johanna, sitting in a borrowed bathrobe, an electric blue plush that had seen better days.

  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.