The Wolves of Midwinter Read Free Page B

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 thegift 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,