The Wolves of Midwinter

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.”

She seemed to be weighing something. She started to speak but didn’t.

“I wanted to just take away all your pain,” he said. “And the more I learned of your pain the more I wanted to annihilate it. But of course I couldn’t do that. I could only compromise you, bring you halfway into this secret with me.”

“I wanted to come,” she said. “I wanted you. I wanted the secret, didn’t I?”

“But I was no primal beast of the woods,” he said, “I was no innocent hairy man of myth, I was Reuben Golding, the hunter, the killer, the Man Wolf.”

“I know,” she said. “And I loved you every step of the way to the knowledge of what you are, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “So what am I afraid of?”

“That you won’t love the Morphenkind that I become,” she said simply. “So you won’t love me when I’m as powerful as you are.”

He couldn’t reply.

He sucked in his breath. “And Felix, and Thibault, do they know how to control when the full change happens?”

“No. They said it would be soon.” She waited, and when he said nothing, she went on. “You’re scared you won’t love me anymore, that I won’t be that tender, vulnerable pink thing that you found in this house.”

He hated himself for not answering.

“You can’t be happy for me, you can’t be happy that I will share this with you, can you?”

“I’m trying,” he said. “I really am, I’m trying.”

“From the very first moment you loved me you were miserable that you couldn’t share it with me, you know you were,” she said. “We talked about it, and it was there when we didn’t talk about it—the fact that I could die, and you couldn’t give this gift to me for fear of killing me, the fact that I might never share it with you. We talked of that. We did.”

“I know that, Laura. You’ve every right to be furious with me. To be disappointed. God knows, I disappoint people.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Don’t say those things. If you’re talking about your mother and that dreadful Celeste, well, good, you disappoint them for being far more sensitive than they can guess, for not buying into their ruthless world with its greedy ambition and nauseating self-sacrifice. So what! Disappoint them.”

“Hmmm,” he whispered. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”

“Well, I’m not Little Red Riding Hood anymore, now, am I?” She laughed. “Seriously. They don’t know who you are. But I do and your father does, and so does Felix, and you’re not disappointing me. You love me. You love who I was and you’re afraid of losing that person. That’s not disappointing.”

“I think it should be.”

“It was all theoretical to you,” she said. “That you might share the gift with me, that I might die if you didn’t. It was theoretical to you that you had it. It all happened too quickly for you.”

“That’s the truth,” he said.

“Look, I don’t expect anything of you that you can’t give,” she said. “Only allow me this. Allow me to be part of all of you, even if you and I can’t be lovers anymore. Allow that, that I’ll be part of you and Felix and Thibault and …”

“Of course, yes. Do you think they would ever allow me to drive you away? Do you think for a minute I’d do that? Laura!”

“Reuben, there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t feel possessive of the woman he loves, who doesn’t want to control his access to her and her access to him and his world.”

“Laura, I know all that—.”

“Reuben, you have to be feeling something about the fact that they gave me the Chrism, whether you wanted them to do it or not, that they made their decision about me and with me essentially without seeing me as part of you. And I made my decision the same way.”

“As it should be, for the love of—.”

He stopped.

“I don’t like what I’m finding out about myself,” he said. “But this is life and death, and it’s your choice. And do you think I could endure it if they’d left it up to me, if they’d treated you as if you were my possession?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “But we can’t always reason with our feelings.”

“Well, I love you,” he said. “And I will accept this. I will. I will love you as much after as I love you now. My feelings might not listen to reason. But I’m giving them a direct order.”

She laughed. And he did in spite of himself.

“Now, tell me. Why are you here alone now, when the change might come at any time?”

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Thibault’s here. He’s been here since before dark. He’s out there, waiting for you to leave. He’ll be with me every night until it’s resolved.”

“Well, then why don’t you come home now?” he demanded.

She didn’t answer. She was looking off again as if listening to the sounds of the forest. “Come back with me now. Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

“You’re being very brave,” she said quietly. “But I want to see this through here. And you know that’s better for both of us.”

He couldn’t deny it. He couldn’t deny that he was terrified that the transformation might come on right now as they sat there. The mere thought of it was more than he could bear.

“You’re in safe hands with Thibault,” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“If it was that Frank, I’d kill him with my bare claws.”

She smiled, but didn’t protest.

He was being ridiculous, wasn’t he? After all, hadn’t Thibault—whenever he’d received the gift—been invigorated by it? What was the practical difference between the two men? One looked like an elderly scholar and the other like a Don Juan. But they were both full-blooded Morphenkinder, weren’t they? Yet Thibault conveyed the grace of age, and Frank was forever in his prime. And it struck him suddenly with full force that she would look as beautiful as she was now forever; and he himself, he himself, would never grow older, or look older or seem older—never become the wise and venerable man that his father was, never ever age beyond this moment. He might as well have been the youth on Keats’s Grecian urn.

How could he have failed to realize these things, and what they must mean to her, and should mean to him? How had he not been transformed by that awareness, that secret knowledge? It was theoretical to him, she was right.

She knew. She’d always known what the full import of it all was. She’d tried to get him to realize it, and when he did let it penetrate now, he felt even more ashamed than ever of fearing the change in her.

He stood up and walked to the back bedroom. He felt dazed, almost sleepy. The rain was heavy now, pounding the old roof above. He felt an eagerness to get on the road, to be plowing north through the darkness.

“If Thibault weren’t here, I wouldn’t think of leaving,” he said. He pulled on his clothes, hastily buttoning his shirt, and slipping on his coat.

Then he turned to her and the tears rose in his eyes.

“You will come home just as soon as you can,” he said.

She put her arms around him and he held her as tightly as he dared, rubbing his face in her hair, kissing her over and over again on her soft cheek. “I love you, Laura,” he said. “I love you with all my heart, Laura. I love you with all my soul. I’m young and foolish and I don’t understand all of it, but I love you, and I want you to come