"You killed somebody," he said. "Are you going to think about that? Stop thinking about scents, and sensations, and leaping over rooftops, and jumping some twelve feet in the air. Stop it. You killed somebody."
He couldn,t be sorry. No, not at all. The man was going to kill the woman. He had already done irreparable damage to her, terrifying her, strangling her, forcing his fury upon her. The man had harmed others. The man lived and breathed to hurt and harm. He knew this, knew this from what he saw, and oddly enough from that powerful reek. The man was a killer.
Dogs know the scent of fear, don,t they? Well, he knew the scent of helplessness, and the scent of rage.
No, he wasn,t sorry. The woman was alive. He saw her running down that alley, falling, rising again, running not only towards the busy street, the lights, the traffic, but towards her life, her life yet to be lived, a life of things to learn, and things to know and things to do.
He saw Marchent, in his mind,s eye, rushing out of the office with the gun in her hand. He saw the dark figures close in on her. She fell hard on the kitchen floor. She died. And there was no more life.
Life died around her. The great redwood forest outside her house died, and all the rooms of her house died. The shadows of the kitchen shrank; the boards beneath her shrank. Until there was nothing, and the nothing closed her in and shut her up. And that was the end of it for Marchent.
If there was a great blossoming on the other side, if her soul had expanded in the light of an infinite and embracing love, well, how are we to know it, until we go there too? He tried for a moment to imagine God, a God as immense as the universe with all its millions of stars and planets, its unchartable distances, its inevitable sounds and its silence. Such a God could know all things, all things, the minds and attitudes and fears and regrets of every single living thing, from the scampering rat to every person. This God could gather a soul, whole and complete and magnificent, from a dying woman on a kitchen floor. He could catch it up in His powerful hands, and carry it heavenward beyond this world to be forever united with Him.
But how could Reuben really know that? How could he know what lay on the other side of the silence in the hallway when he,d been struggling there to breathe and live, and those two dead bodies had been tangled with his body?
He saw the forest die again, and the rooms shrink and vanish; every visible thing collapsed - and all life winked out for Marchent.
He saw the rapist,s victim again, running, running towards her life. He saw the entire city take shape around her with myriad scents and sounds and exploding lights; he saw it expand in all directions from her running figure. He saw it tumbling and boiling towards the dark waters of the bay, the distant invisible ocean, the faraway mountains, the rolling clouds. The woman was screaming and reaching for life.
No, he didn,t regret it. Not one bit. Ah, the hubris, the greed of that man as he,d clutched at her throat, as he,d sought to take her life. Ah, the gluttonous arrogance of those two crazed brothers as they sank the knife over and over again into that magnificent living being that had been their sister.
"No, not at all," he whispered.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he was aware that he had never thought of such things before. But observing himself just now was not the point. He was observing them, the others. And he had no regrets at all, only a marvelous calm.
Finally, he got up. He went to wash his face and comb his hair.
Only absently did he glance at his own reflection. But it shocked him. He was Reuben, of course, not the man wolf, but he wasn,t the Reuben he used to be. His hair was fuller, and longer. And he was slightly bigger all over. Whatever he,d become, a factory of alchemical changes, he was different now externally. He housed a crucible that required a more durable body, didn,t he?
Grace had talked about hormones, his body being flooded with hormones. Well, hormones make you grow, don,t they? They lengthen your vocal