The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

"But there has to be some way to preserve it, to save it so that someone eventually can."

"What? Stow it in a freezer? Risk having somebody find it here, connect it to us? You are seriously suggesting we conceal this body on the premises of this house where we live?"

"I don,t know," she said frantically. "But Reuben, you can,t simply take this thing, this mysterious thing, and consign it to the dirt, you can,t just bury it. My God, this is an unimaginable organism, of which the world knows nothing. It points the way to understanding - ." She broke off. She stood quiet for a moment, her hair tumbling down on either side of her face like a veil. "Could it be put somewhere ... where someone else would find it? I mean miles from here."

"Why, to what purpose?" Reuben asked.

"What if it were found, and analyzed and blamed for all the crimes that have occurred?" She looked at Reuben. "Just think about it for a minute. Don,t say no. This thing tried to kill us. Say, we left it somewhere off the highway, in plain sight, so to speak, and what if they found some strange mixture of human DNA and wolf fluids ... the Chrism, as he called it - ."

"Laura, the mitochondrial component of the DNA would prove that this wasn,t the being who slaughtered the others," Reuben said. "Even I know that much science."

He stared at the head again. It seemed even more shriveled than before, and to be darkening slightly like a piece of fruit ripening into decay. The body too was shrinking and darkening, the trunk particularly, though the feet were shriveling to nubs. Just nubs.

"And do you realize what this creature told us?" said Reuben, patiently. "He sentenced me to death for the trouble I caused, the ,prodigious achievements,, as he called them, the fact that I,d attracted notice. These things want secrecy; they depend on it. And how do you think the other Morphenkinder would respond if I dumped this body unceremoniously into the public domain?"

She nodded.

"There are others, Laura! This thing managed to tell us a great deal."

"You,re right, on all counts," she said. She too was watching the subtle changes in the body and the head. "I could swear it,s ... disappearing," she said.

"Well, shriveling, drying up."

"Disappearing," she said again.

She came back to him and sat down beside him. "Look at it," she said. "The bones inside are disintegrating. It,s flattening out. I want to touch it, but I can,t."

Reuben didn,t answer.

The body and the head were deflating, flattening; she was right. The flesh now looked powdery and porous.

"Look!" she said. "Look at the carpet. Look where the blood - ."

"I see it," he whispered. The blood was a tissue-thin glaze on the surface of the rug. And the glaze was silently cracking into a million tiny bits and pieces. The blood was turning into infinitesimal flakes. And the flakes were dissolving. "Look, look at your gown."

The blood was crusting, flaking off there as well. She crumpled the flannel, brushed at it. She reached up to grasp the flaky residue that still clung to her hair. It was all crumbling.

"I see now," Reuben said. "I understand. I understand everything." He was in awe.

"Understand what?" she asked.

"Why they keep saying the Man Wolf is human. Don,t you see? They,re lying. They don,t have proof of this or anything else. This is what happens to us, to all particles of us, to all fluids. Look. They don,t have any samples from the Man Wolf. They took samples of what they found at the crime scenes, and probably even before they,d completed their work, the samples were no good, dissolving, dissolving like this."

He crawled forward and leaned down over the head. The face had fallen in. The head was a small puddle on the rug. He sniffed at it. Decomposition, human scent, animal scent - a mixture, subtle, very subtle, so subtle. Was he himself scentless like this to others, or only to others of this species?

He sat back again on his heels. He looked at his own paws, at the soft pads that had replaced his palms, and the shining white claws which he could so easy retract or extend.

"All of it," he said, "the transformed tissue, it dissolves. That is, it dehydrates and breaks into particles too fine to be seen, and finally too fine to be measured, even in whatever laboratory chemicals or preservatives that they have. Oh, it explains everything - the ridiculous contradictions from the Mendocino officials, and from the San Francisco laboratories. I see now what,s happened."

"I don,t follow."

He explained to her about the failure of the tests on him at San Francisco General. They,d gotten some results, then gone back only to find that all the original material was useless, or contaminated or lost.

"In the beginning, with my tissues, perhaps the process of dissolution was slower. I was still evolving. What did the man say about the cells ... you remember ..."

"I do. He referred to pluripotent progenitor cells, cells we all have in our bodies. We,re a tiny mass of pluripotent progenitor cells when we are embryos. Then those cells get signals, chemical signals to express themselves in different ways - to become skin tissue cells, or eye cells, or bone cells - ."

"Right, of course," he said. "Stem cells are pluripotent progenitor cells."

"They are," she said.

"So we all still have such cells inside us."

"Yes."

"And the wolf fluid, the Chrism, it caused those cells to express themselves to make me into a Morphenkind, into this."

"Chrism," she said, "it has to be in the saliva, a metaphysical word for a toxin or a serum in the bodily fluids of the Morphenkind that triggers a whole string of glandular and hormonal responses for a new kind of growth."

He nodded.

"And you,re saying that even right after you were bitten, while you were still evolving, the tests they took still went bad."

"More slowly, but yes, the specimens definitely went bad. They lasted long enough to get results about hormones, and extraordinary amounts of calcium in my system, but my mother said that eventually all the lab results failed."

He sat quiet for a long while, thinking about it.

"My mother knows more than she,s letting on," he said. "She must have realized after the second battery of tests that something in my blood itself was causing the specimens to destruct. She couldn,t tell me this. She might have been trying to protect me from it. God knows what she feared was happening. Oh, Mamma. But she knew. And when the authorities came back to her, asking for another DNA sample from me, she said no."