The crowd screamed and howled at the constricting concrete sky and steel beams, wanting the stars. They broke and beat at themselves and one another in a frenzy.
Sam sat in the wings and shivered on the lip of his own private delirium as Willie sang hate and burning, sang anger and the final fire that burns in every man’s heart. And he saw the wolf.
202
Wolfstroker
But it wasn’t gray this time. It was a twisting, spinning ball of four-legged yellow flame that shifted in his arms. Willie’s right hand was stroking its flank and the crowd shrieked. His left hand scratched an ear and they moaned. Then Willie played a note that shouldn’t have been. The wolf-thing opened its jaws and howled an unearthly sound poor Sam Parker could never have imagined. It didn’t come from Willie’s throat, was sure.
Hunching in his arms, the wolf-thing spun and clamped its fire-teeth over Willie’s mouth, and seemed to swallow. Willie Whitehorse became a pillar of flame.
Sam whimpered and fell to the floor, covering his eyes.
Eventually, lots and lots of sirens came.
VHL
Estes Park, Colorado, is a tourist town, an attractive tourist town, at the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Once upon a time, the park and the rest of Colorado belonged to the Shoshoni and Wind River Shoshoni, the Ute and the Arapahoe. Today most of the state belongs to the Colorado River Land and Development Company and innumerable bastard cousins.
But it was beautiful country and as tourist towns go, Estes Park wasn’t bad. Neither were the neat little homes that nestled in the hills behind the town.