Cry Wolf

He looked isolated, and A

Beside her, Charles let out a low growl that caught his father’s attention. Bran looked over at them, and one eyebrow climbed up his face, robbing it of its blankness. He patted the bench beside him as he asked his son, “What? You expected them to be happy with me?”

Charles turned on his heel, so A

“Fools,” he said, loud enough that everyone in the church would hear him.

Bran laughed. “Come sit down before you scare them all silly. I’m not a politician to worry about what they think of me, as long as they obey.”

After a moment, Charles complied, and A

As soon as Charles was facing the front of the church, the whispering began, built up speed, and regained its previous level. There were undercurrents here, thick enough to choke on. A

“Where’s Samuel?” Charles looked over her head at his father.

“He’s coming in right now.” Bran said it without looking behind him, but Charles turned around so A

The man strolling up the aisle was almost as tall as Charles, his features a rougher version of Bran’s. That roughness made them not so bland or young-looking as his father. She found him oddly compelling, though not handsome like Charles.

His ditch-water brown hair was cut carelessly, but somehow he managed to look neat and well dressed anyway. He held a battered violin case in one hand and a dark blue Western-cut jacket in the other.

When he was nearly at the front, he turned around once, taking in the people in a single glance. Then he looked over at A

He sat next to Charles and brought with him the crisp scent of snow over leather. His smile widened, and he started to say something, but stopped when a wave of silence swept through the crowd from the back to the front.

The minister, bedecked in old-fashioned clerical robes, walked slowly up the central aisle, an ancient-looking Bible resting in the crook of his left arm. By the time he reached the front, the room was silent.

His obvious age told her that he wasn’t a werewolf, but he had a presence that made his “Welcome and thank you for coming to pay your respects to our friend” sound ceremonial. He set the Bible on the podium with obvious care for graying leather. He gently opened the heavily embossed cover and set aside a bookmark.

He read from the fifteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And the last verse he spoke without looking down. " ’O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ ”

He paused, letting his eyes trail over the room, much as Charles had, then said simply, “Shortly after we moved back here, Carter Wallace came to my house at two in the morning to hold my wife’s hand when our retriever had her first litter of puppies. He wouldn’t charge me because he said if he charged for cuddling pretty women, he’d be a gigolo and not a vet.”

He stepped away from the pulpit and sat on the thronelike wooden chair on the right-hand side. There was the sound of shuffling and the creaking of wood, then an old woman stood up. A man with bright chestnut hair escorted her down the aisle, a hand under her elbow. As they walked by her pew, A

It took the old woman a few minutes to make it all the way to the top of the stairs to the pulpit. She was so small that she had to stand on a footstool, the werewolf behind her with his hands on her waist to steady her.

“Carter came to our store when he was eight years old,” she said in a breathy, frail voice. “He gave me fifteen cents. When I asked him what it was for, he told me that a few days before, he and Hammond Markham had been in, and Hammond had stolen a candy bar. I asked him why it was he and not Hammond who was bringing the money. He told me that Hammond didn’t know he was bringing me the money.” She laughed and wiped a tear from her eye. “He assured me that it was Hammond ’s money, though, stolen from his piggy bank just that morning.”

The werewolf who had escorted her raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it. Then he lifted her into his arms, despite her protests, and carried her back to where they’d been sitting. Husband and wife, not the grandson and grandmother they appeared to be.

A

Other people stood up and told more stories or read verses from the Bible. There were tears. The dead man, Carter Wallace-or rather Dr. Carter Wallace, since he evidently was the town’s vet-had been loved by these people.

Charles stretched his feet out in front of him and bowed his head. Beside him, Samuel played absently with the violin case, rubbing at a worn spot on the leather.

She wondered how many funerals they’d been to, how many friends and relatives they’d buried. She’d cursed her ageless, regenerative body before-when it had made it darned hard to commit suicide. But the tension in Charles’s shoulders, Samuel’s fidgeting, and Bran’s closed-down stillness told her that there were other things that made virtual immortality a curse.

She wondered if Charles had had a wife before. A human wife who aged as he did not. What would it be like when people she’d known as children grew old and died while she never got her first gray hair?

She glanced at Charles. He was two hundred years old, he’d told her, his brother and father even older. They’d been to a lot of funerals.

A rising nervousness in the congregation interrupted her thoughts. She looked around to see a girl walking up the aisle. There was nothing about her to suggest why she caused such a stir. Though she was too far away to scent over this many people, something about her shouted human.

The girl climbed the stairs, and tension sang in the air as she paged through the Bible, watching the audience under her lashes.

She put her finger on a page and read, “ ‘For this is the message that ye heard from the begi

“Shawna, Carter’s granddaughter,” Charles murmured to her. “This is going to get ugly.”

“She didn’t study too hard,” said Samuel just as quietly but with a faint touch of humor. “There are sharper-tongued writers than John in the Bible.”

She continued a few more verses, then looked straight at the Marrok, who obliged her by meeting her eyes. A

“She’s been away at school,” said Charles in that almost silent voice. Anyone, werewolf or not, who was much farther from him than A

Ah. Suddenly the tension and the anger made sense. Carter Wallace had been Changed. He hadn’t made the transition well, and Bran had been forced to kill him.

Carter had been Bran’s friend, he’d said. Somehow, she thought as she glanced up at his shuttered face, she didn’t think he had many friends.