This is what all of these things have done to my mother, Reuben thought. His mother stood on the front step staring up at the house, at the dark trees gathered to the east of it, her eyes haunted, unhappy. She looked back to Reuben, and there came that warm affectionate smile on which so much of his well-being depended, but only for an instant.
"Mom, I,m so glad you came up here this evening," he said. He put his arms around her. "I can,t tell you."
"Yeah, I,m glad we came too," she said. She held him close, looking into his eyes. "You are all right, aren,t you, Baby Boy?"
"Yes, Mom, I,m just worried about Stuart."
Reuben promised to call her in the morning as soon as he,d been to the hospital.
Chapter Thirty-Three
A WILD BOAR HAD COME into his woods - a lone male. He heard the boar about two in the morning. He was reading, fighting the change. Then came the scent and the sound of the male, hunting on its own, the family left behind somewhere in a makeshift den of broken branches and leaves.
How his senses told him these things he could not quite grasp. He stripped, heart pounding, spasms rolling, and entered the forest in full wolf-coat - taking to the heights and then plummeting to the forest floor to track the thing on foot as it was on foot, gaining on it, and at last bringing it down, powerful hairy brute, fangs chomping deep into its back, and finally into its throat.
This was a feast, all right, a feast he,d been hungering for. He took his time, feasting on the boar,s belly, and other soft innards, and devouring the dripping heart. The great white tusks gleamed in the dimness. What a fierce thing it had been. He glutted himself with the juicy and fragrant flesh.
A sleepiness came over him as he devoured more and more, chewing the meat now more slowly, draining the blood juice out of it, and feeling an immense satisfying warmth throughout his chest and stomach and even his limbs.
This was heaven, the soundless rain all around him, the scents of the fallen leaves rising, the boar,s scent intoxicating him, the flesh more than he could possibly consume.
A scream shocked him. It was Laura, screaming for him in the darkness.
He raced towards the sound of her voice.
She stood in the clearing behind the house, in the glare of the yellow floodlights. She was calling and calling, and then she bent her knees and let out another scream.
He bounded out of the forest towards her.
"Reuben, it,s Dr. Cutler," she cried. "She can,t reach your mother. Stuart,s broken out of the hospital, broken out of the second-story window, and disappeared!"
So it had happened. It had happened to Stuart in half the time. And the change was on Stuart and Stuart was alone.
"My clothes, the big clothes," he said. "And clothes for the boy. Put them in the Jeep and drive south. I,ll find you around the hospital or wherever I can."
He took off for the forest, determined to follow it all the way to Santa Rosa, heedless of whether he had to cross busy roads or freeways, or grasslands - soon certain that he was traveling infinitely faster towards Stuart than he might in any other way - praying to the gods of the forest, or the God of his heart, to please help him reach the boy before anyone else might.
By the highways of the world, the distance was about ninety miles.
But there was no accounting for the way that he traveled, taking to the canopy of the forest when he could or racing by foot when he had to, traversing any fence, road, or obstacle in his path.
Only one thought governed him, and that was to find Stuart, and the abandon he knew in the name of that cause was sublime. His senses had never been so acute, his muscles as powerful, or his direction so certain.
The forest never failed him, though at times he smashed branches in his path, leapt huge distances, and crashed noisily through the underbrush or risked exposure as he bounded over open fields.
The voices of the populated south rose to meet him, the mingled scents of humankind deepening the spell of the woodland, and at last he knew he was now traveling through the parklands of forested yards of the city, the wolf-mind and the human-mind scanning for Stuart, for the