Under his paws the earth spoke in a language known only to the beasts. It urged him to run as only his kind could run, able to outpace the swiftest deer and outlast even the ordinary wolves the loups-garous resembled.
There were no wolves left here. They’d long since been killed off by hunters and settlers, driven to more northerly climes. Quentin had the hills and the woods to himself.
He gave in to the call and burst into a dead run from the very place he stood. He plunged among the trees and raced west, higher into the hills. Hardly a branch stirred at his passing. His paws were silent as they struck the ground, curved nails biting deep and releasing. Muscles bunched and lengthened with the perfect efficiency of a machine, and with far more grace. He let his tongue loll between his teeth in a grin of sheer happiness.
This was the way he’d always lived before: for the present, driving away memory in the pursuit of pleasure, whether it came in the form of sex or drink or games of chance… or the Change itself. This was the only escape that held a trace of honor.
He ran until he reached the crest of the summit dividing one valley from the next. Napa lay behind him, and another cultivated land spread under his gaze from the foot of the range to the silver ocean miles away. Beyond that ocean were other lands, India among them…
Suddenly cold, he crouched low and whined in his throat. Fear was back. And it seemed that somewhere inside him a presence reached out, took him by the scruff of the neck, and shook him furiously back and forth, this way and that, until he began to slip out of his skin.
No.
He howled. He jumped to his feet, turned about, and fled as if that same dark presence were a thing he could evade.
Time lost its meaning. He only became sensible of it again when the last stain of sunset bled away behind the western range. He found himself at the foot of the hill beside the Haven’s whitewashed fence.
Instinct had carried him to the nearest thing to home he possessed.
As a wolf he lacked the ability to laugh, but inwardly he roared. What was the use in contemplating flight—from his lust, from Johanna, from facing the secrets she might expose—if even his lupine self turned against him?
Exhausted, he circled the house to the back door, tail tucked and head low. He wouldn’t go to Johanna. He wasn’t ready to face her yet.
What he needed was a good stiff drink. If anything resembling one could be had in this place, he’d sniff it out.
The door was open a crack; it was easy for him to nose his way in. No one saw him. He crept down the hall until he reached Harper’s room, and stopped at the sound of weeping from within. The door swung in at the tap of his forefoot.
Harper sat in his chair by the window, a tray of half-eaten food on the table beside him. Quentin entered the room, keeping to the shadows along the wall.
Harper didn’t notice. Tears streaked his face and pooled in his beard. The rasping noises he made were too soft to be heard by anyone outside the room, unless the listener were more than human. Harper had sanity enough to wish to hide his shame.
Driven by a sense of kinship and pity he didn’t fully understand, Quentin padded to Harper’s side and touched his nose to the man’s dangling fingers. Harper’s hand twitched. He shifted in the chair and felt blindly, touching Quentin’s muzzle, his forehead, his ears.
“Here, boy,” he said, his voice little more than a rattle. “That’s a good dog.” He stroked Quentin’s head with the utmost gentleness.
Quentin stood still, his heart tight in his chest. Hadn’t Johanna said something about Harper responding to a dog she’d brought to visit? Harper thought that he was a dog. A natural assumption for a man so detached from the world.
But he’d spoken, to a creature he believed could not judge him. The contact was oddly comforting to them both. Quentin closed his eyes and sighed.