killers - though Felix reminded him that they often died by terribly violent and painful means.
Margon and Stuart went with them twice. Stuart was a lusty, blustering hunter, ravenous for any experience, and wanted to hunt the surf off the cliffs if only Margon would allow, but Margon would not. Margon seemed infatuated with Stuart, and gradually their conversations involved more questions from Margon about the world of today than Stuart had ever asked about the past or anything else.
Margon moved his room from the back of the house to the front, obviously to be closer to Stuart, and the two could be heard talking and arguing late into the night. They had periodic squabbles over clothing, Stuart taking Margon to purchase jeans and polo shirts, and Margon insisting that Stuart buy a three-piece suit and several dress shirts with French cuffs. But most of the time they were plainly and exuberantly happy.
Servants arrived from Europe, including a solemn quiet French-speaking man who had been Margon,s valet, and a cheerful and uncomplaining old woman from England who cooked, cleaned, and baked bread. Thibault hinted that more would be coming.
Even before Thanksgiving, Reuben was hearing casual talk of a private airport above Fort Bragg that the others were using for short flights to distant hunting grounds. He was blazing with curiosity and so was Stuart. Stuart spent his days deep in study of werewolf lore, world history, evolution, civil and criminal law, human anatomy and endocrinology, archaeology, and foreign film.
Frequently the distinguished gentlemen disappeared into the Inner Sanctum, as they called it, to work with the ancient tablets which they were putting in some kind of order, and which they were not eager, for obvious reasons, to move again.
Felix spent much time trying to put his own galleries and libraries in reasonable order. And could often be found in the gabled attic over the master bedroom, reading in the very place where Reuben had found the little book of theology by Teilhard de Chardin.
Thanksgiving night, after the family left, Laura went south to spend a few days alone in her little house on the edge of Muir Woods. Reuben begged to go with her but she insisted that this was a trip she had to make alone. She wanted to visit the cemetery where her father and mother, her sister, and her daughter were buried. And when she came back, she said, she,d know what the future held for her. And so would Reuben.
He found this damned near unbearable. He was tempted more than once to drive south just to spy on Laura. But he knew that Laura needed this time. He did not so much as call her.
Finally, the distinguished gentlemen gathered up the cubs, and took them by plane for a hunt in the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
This was to be a hybrid hunt, according to Margon, and that meant clothing had to be worn - the predictable hooded sweatshirts and loose raincoats, baggy pants and loafers that would accommodate their transformed bodies.
Stuart and Reuben were both powerfully excited.
It was thrilling beyond their sharpest dreams - the hollow stripped-down cargo plane landing at the secret airstrip, the black SUVs tunneling through the jet-black night, and then the trip over the rooftops when the company spread out like cats in the dark, lured by the scent of the suffering girls and women held captive in a brothel-slave barracks from which they,d soon be smuggled into the United States under threat of torture and death.
They cut the power to the barracks before they invaded it, and quickly locked the women away for their own safety.
Reuben had never dreamed of such carnage, such abandon, such a massacre in the low concrete building, its escape routes latched from the outside, and its vicious male inmates scrambling like rats in the wet slippery corridors and dead-end rooms - to escape the remorseless sharp-toothed enemy that descended on them.
The building shook with the roars of the Morphenkinder, the shrieks and bellowing of dying men, and the screams of terrified women huddled in their filthy dormitory.
At last the stench of evil had died out; in remote corners of the compound, Morphenkinder still feasted, chomping on the remains. Stuart, the great shaggy Boy Wolf, in his long open coat, stood dazed staring at the bodies scattered around him. And the women had ceased their wailing.
Now it was time for them all to slip away - for the women to