Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  The water was too cold. The surf chuffed against the stones, backing me with it. Then I kicked, once, and speared the dark water, salt stinging my eyes. My snout broke the surface, and I could not scent or hear her. She had vanished.

  The tide ran outward very gradually, a gentle surge that was growing stronger as though my heartbeat powered it. This was too much like the night of the hounds. The sea was my enemy, and I thrashed one way, toward the headlands, and then urged myself toward the heart of the bay, all the while calling in my mind: where are you?

  Johanna: speak to me.

  Her laughter broke within me, and I let myself sink, ashamed. She was right: the water was not so cold, and the stronger ebb of the tide was nothing, really, compared with my strength. I powered toward the blur in the swells ahead of me, and she darted through the black water to nuzzle me.

  “Angel Island,” she said, to answer the question I had not asked. “It’s where I always go on nights like this.”

  There had been many such nights in her life, I realized. She had survived like this, living only to run.

  I gazed back toward the breakwater. The beam of light played across the water, illuminating the wrinkled current, but we were so far from the shore the light died long before it reached us.

  I snouted the wind, and felt a low rumble start deep within me. My teeth showed themselves, and I realized only after a moment that I was growling. It was thunder, the grumble of a giant engine, a sound that told me how much I hated the thoughtless creatures who wanted us dead.

  Some of the stars were moving. A jet, a propeller-driven airplane, and, far off, a helicopter. It was a big chopper, with a low, thudding motor. I included the sky in my long curse. The enemy used even the sky, cheating its way across distance. I would show them what it was to hunt. I would show them how to slaughter. They were only men, and knew nothing of death—or life.

  “Remember,” said her voice within my body, “when I told you that I had a secret to tell?”

  Tahoe. Much colder than this. Just before we found Gneiss. I could not forget.

  “Tonight, I will tell you my secret.”

  It was a long swim through the heavy tide, but we made it short by bounding through the water, looping in and out of it, in a way that reminded me of the play of two otters. This was all play, I marveled. Our lives had collapsed around us, and she was playing.

  But she was right. There was nothing for us to do but enjoy our power. At one point she dove deep, into the lightless bottom, and I followed her. There was life there, a current of silver perch, and far down a creature like a weapon, a creature which could not stay still, but wove back and forth across the bottom. I could not guess what this living rapier might be, until I was nearly back to the surface, and my human memory, and human logic told me: shark.

  The shore was a scatter of broken stones, not the crumbled gravel of Tahoe, but jagged, noisy stones. She was the center of an aura of water, and I flung the salt water from my fur, too, and then trotted up a slope, through leafless shrubs like black wires thrusting upward out of the soil.

  It was clear that Johanna was following a trail. The trail was invisible, but she read it easily. She turned to make sure I was following her. She jogged upward in a way that told me: almost there. It told me also: at last I’m sharing all of this with you.

  Angel Island is a hill that rises out of the bay, shaggy with eucalyptus, a second to the hills that form the bay. It is big enough to allow cyclists to roam for hours, but this night the island smelled and sounded abandoned.

  In a fracture of the basalt was a crack, and Johanna vanished into it. My first thought was that she had discovered a cave. But when I squeezed into the fractured stone, I saw that it was little more than a split rock into a culvert that was open to the sky.

  The sky was above, dim stars. The stone was buckled by roots. For a moment I could not sense Johanna, and had the cold feeling that I was alone.

  Then her hand stroked my fur, the thick curls along my spine and the tangle of my mane. Her human hand.

  Johanna stood beside me, huddled in a quilt. “You must be the finest of our kind,” she breathed. “The largest and quickest that ever lived.”

  I wanted to laugh, and did, but it was that amazing, ragged sound again. There were clothes here, and another blanket. It looked like a campsite, or at the very least a trysting place for lovers.

  I was reluctant to slip into my human form. It was a puny, tight figure. But once I had made the transformation, I was at home in it again. The change made me breathless for a moment, and I stretched out my arms to take her in, to feel her and reassure myself that I was really here with her.

  “Wrap yourself in a blanket,” she said. “You’re cold.”

  The blanket was warm enough, but it was scratchy with a twig and bits of dry weed. I understood how hard it had been for her to hide in places like this, and how her resources had suffered. She had freedom and power, but she had to huddle in a worn blanket.

  “Is this your secret?” I asked. “This place?”

  She laughed softly. “I have many places like this. Hiding places where I keep clothes, a blanket. Places where I go to ground when the hunt is too brisk.”

  “You’ve been through this before.”

  “I have. Our kind has.”

  I did not want to ask. This had happened so many times before that she must know the end in store for us. “What’s going to happen?”

  Forty-Four

  “I hope what I tell you won’t trouble you,” she said.

  I wanted to say: considering all I have been through, what could possibly trouble me? What could disturb me, after all we had been through together? But I did not speak. I put my hand to her cheek. I understood that she was about to express something essential to her—essential and painful.

  “There is something I haven’t told you about myself. It’s something terrible, and I didn’t think—forgive me, Benjamin. I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.”

  Her tone shook me. Am I, I wondered silently, ready now?

  She seemed to hear my thought. She looked up at me. I had my dim, human eyesight, and the only light fell from above, the gray light of stars and the city glow off the clouds that gradually closed over the sky. But even in this poor light I could see her eyes.

  Yes, her eyes said. You are ready. “I don’t like to talk about this.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she said, “I understood why you wanted to turn yourself in. I felt the same way, once. You wanted to be punished.”

  Her words were nearly too true. They hurt. I wanted to deny them, and say that I wanted freedom, not punishment, but I stopped myself.

  “The truth is, Benjamin, that when I first started—” She could not continue. “I keep it secret, because it still burns, inside.”

  Her cheek was warm under my palm. I could do nothing but wait for her to continue.

  “Benjamin … when I first began, I killed people, too.”

  She trembled as I held her. Of course. How could she have avoided it? And yet, there was a moment in which my eyes closed. I wished, just then, that she could have been spared that. It must have terrified her. I tried to console her, but no word seemed capable of soothing such a memory.

  “It was in Zurich,” she continued. “In the heart of the city, surrounded by spires and trees, and the gold and green striped roofs.” She told it like a story she had saved too long in her heart. “And later, in the hayfields, where the rain steamed on the hay just after dark, and farmers smoked with their cigarettes cupped inward, the glowing end hidden by the hand. The men are inward, guarded people, kind—but it seems as though they want to hide from any danger under the sky. Cautious men, maybe because in their dreams they see a creature like myself, taking them in their innocence. Benjamin … I hate to remember it.”

  She looked down. “I killed several, over several nights. I found the solitary farmer, and the man smoking beside a stream, and the man in love with the smell of
hay cutting. I leaped, and drank their blood—and I loved it. In villages with cone roofs, and in the new mown meadows. I killed men, always men.”

  She could not continue. I ran my fingers through her hair. Her voice was hoarse when she said, “I nearly killed myself for it. In the daylight, Benjamin. I nearly hanged myself, or cut my own throat. I knew why my family could not bear this … madness, as I thought it. It was too terrible. The night running was life itself—but the other, the poor, innocent people, Benjamin … It twists in me, even now.”

  She steadied herself. “But then it changed. As the nights went by, I did not want to kill. I wanted to run, and nothing more. And when I had to move, and to keep moving, because there was always someone beginning to discover me, I was not running away from what I had done. I was surviving, and learning the sort of creature I really was meant to be.”

  She looked up at me again. “It’s all over, Benjamin. The killing. You can continue it if you want, but I know you well enough—it’s time to finish what you’ve begun.”

  “Finish what they began,” I said, correcting her. I knew how important it was that they be melted down. They gleamed within me, silver bright, the beautiful, deadly treasure. “I have to make sure Zinser destroys them.”

  “The fangs aren’t to blame.”

  “They do a terrible thing.”

  “But don’t they do a wonderful thing, too?”

  I shook my head. Perhaps “wonderful” wasn’t the word I would choose.

  Wind slipped into the culvert, a breath of air moist and scented with the ocean. It was not the first time that I had felt that the entire world was against us, but it seemed then that this was what liberated us. We were alone.

  There was nothing better than this—to be alone together.

  I felt this all the more strongly when she slipped out of her quilt and said, “I liked it here, this little refuge. I’ll miss this place.”

  “We’ll come back—” I began.

  She shivered, naked, and I put my arms around her to warm her, and then I was not keeping her warm, I was caressing her, and searching her, taking her as I might retake my own body, climbing into it as a soul might, after wandering the night.

  This time we were the first creatures who had ever mated, the first lovers, or the last. I no longer knew whether we were human, or animal, or some other, unnamed creature.

  At last, lying still under the wonderfully itchy blanket, we both did not want to break the silence. Stay here, I thought. Both of us should stay here, and all would be well.

  “I feel so sorry,” she said, “for everyone else. Their little lives.”

  Yes, I thought. Their narrow lives, cluttered with televisions, and calendars, and objects they think are precious.

  She sat up. “Do you hear something?”

  Vague wind. A spray of thistle high above us shivering in the growing fog. The strangely warm eddy of air shifting one grain of sand, and another.

  “They aren’t close,” she said, “but they are thinking about us. I can feel it in my skin.”

  “But we’re safe here—”

  She put her hand to my lips. “Never think that. Never, anywhere.”

  “They can’t find us here.”

  She did not answer.

  “Think about it. How can they trail us here?”

  She tilted her head, listening. “In their blindness, they sometimes blunder in the right direction.”

  “Somehow I just can’t imagine—”

  “But, Benjamin, we don’t intend to stay here for weeks, in this little hiding hole.”

  I chuckled, feeling slightly rebuffed. “Maybe not for weeks.”

  “I can smell the danger. Can’t you? Like coal dust, like powdered steel. Guns and airplanes, and hatred.” She put her hand on my arm. “We can’t stay here.”

  I could scent only the fog, and stone, and plants. “Isn’t it more dangerous to run?”

  She thought for a moment. “The people who are after us are afraid to believe that we are real. That is to our advantage. They are embarrassed to be hunting us, and, except for a few men like Gneiss, even the most committed policeman will feel foolish trailing us. What are we, he will think, but a harmless man and woman? But we cannot stay here long, Ben. The instinct governments have—the unthinking hatred—against even the possibility that there are creatures like us is too strong.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “Remember, this night is like nothing you have ever experienced before. Are you ready?”

  I had to laugh. “Still. Always.”

  But I was speaking to no one. She had moved so quickly she had disappeared. The quilt beside me was still warm, but Johanna was air, and water, and stone. She was gone, except for the far-off sound of paws scattering stones down the slope, and splashing into the water of the bay.

  The moon was up, a glowing fragment. The salt water was cold, but there were layers in it of warmth, and of color, like the striated stone of a canyon wall.

  This time we followed the tide as it swept outward, under the span of the Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond, into the ocean. The tide ran swiftly and it was no effort to find ourselves in a spreading surge of water. The cliffs, dull guardians on either side, receded and became a long, sullen line of dark shore.

  The taste of the water changed, and was less salty and more like dissolved steel. It was easy to swim like this, and dive downward into the cold water, but I could not keep myself from a certain trembling deep in my bones, because this was not a mountain, or the north, with its ice.

  This was the sea, and creatures like us were fragile here, abandoned. It seemed to me that we did not have any place here at all, and while I swam in good faith, I felt the deepening of the water, and the growing dark. Stars brightened, multiplied, and the fuzz of city sky became a memory.

  This no longer resembled the bay, this shifting peak after peak of swell. We coursed our way up the face of one hill, only to have it glide away, out from under us. Johanna snorted water, rolled over and over, sporting herself in the dark, tossing fluorescent foam, but I was not so sure of myself.

  I had the strength. It was clear that I could out-power Johanna when it came to sheer force, the ability to leap a crest, or drive a trough. But I could think only: too far.

  Too far from land. We don’t belong. What are we doing so far from home?

  Home. The word echoed back at me, a sharp slap. It was Johanna speaking to me.

  We don’t have a home, Benjamin.

  A low rumble, a thought like a churning boulder: I wanted a home.

  Every place is ours.

  But this—this water. This was not a place.

  Then it happened. There was a scent, a warm, animal smell, not a fragrance so much as a presence, the way warm stone has a presence that is nearly a scent, wrinkling light with its radiance. The water around us seemed warmer, and that sense of desertion, of a continent vanished, was gone.

  We were not alone.

  I welcomed this new warmth, but in my confusion I must have bared my teeth, because I heard Johanna say, “Friends!”

  Warmth, and a crowd.

  There was a blow, and a body speared under me, rolling me, and then shot up on the other side of me, frisking. Our kind, I thought. Was it possible? Were there creatures like us in the sea? Dozens of frisking animals, splashing, and snorting, a sound that struck me as a rebuke to my doubt, a dozen companions tossing water and blowing air in my direction.

  The beast in me had no clue. Not enemies, I thought. But not my kind, either. Was I trapped, or was I being rescued in some way I did not understand?

  The world made no sense. It was as baffling to me as though the skyscrapers of a city sprouted winds and took to the air, or the passing figures of businessmen burst into flocks of pigeons and took to the clouds. Alive. The very darkness was alive.

  Alive, and so exuberant it was nearly frightening. I could not understand. It makes no sense at all, I thought. This sudden explosion, the wa
ter coming alive with animals that seemed to know me, to support me, to buoy me on their backs.

  Yet, I seemed to have been here before. It was like a dream of an old friend, an old, intimate friend. In such a dream we embrace him, and share all our favorite memories, and feel the deliciousness of the future. But on waking we ask: who was this companion, this other?

  No one, we discover. He does not exist.

  These friends were real. They had always been real, and I was the one who had fallen to falsehood. We played for a long time, perhaps for hours. I had no sense of time, or of having a wolfen form. We played as children play, thinking of nothing else.

  The porpoises danced around me, delighted with my four paws, my shaggy flanks, corkscrewing around me, and seeming to laugh. As though stone could come alive and laugh, or the very salt of the water itself.

  We raced. They looped in and out of the water, in a way I found difficult to copy. But I was fast, as fast as any of them. Mountains swelled beneath us and collapsed. Valleys opened and lifted upward into hills. Each black field of water was laced with white, sizzling nets of foam.

  Then something went wrong.

  There was a snort, and a sound like a human voice speaking far away. It was a cry, and it was not human. It was one of our companions, and the meaning was a lance.

  Danger.

  Danger be careful danger be careful.

  Even Johanna’s song came to me: leave with us, Benjamin. Come back. Don’t stay here.

  Danger danger don’t even try it.

  My paws kept me easily in one place. What threatened my friends? What intruded upon us in our play? Who was he, this bad hunger, open-mouthed and mindless? This cold thing.

  It was too late for one of us. His blood plumed through the water, and the smell of it was a shriek. The intruder had killed him as he struggled to warn us.