The Wolf Came on Christmas (Johanna and Alexander) novel Chapter 19

“No, they won’t hear it from me. Come on-the seven families?”

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I looked at him almost pleadingly, but he looked so stern and diplomatic that I nearly convinced myself I wasn’t going to get much more than what Alexander decided was necessary and sufficient. It’s hard to put into words why I suddenly wanted to know more; I didn’t even understand myself. I think that once the initial fright had passed, all that remained in me was a ravenous curiosity and the desire to know, the anxiety to try to understand. I had opened the door by deciphering his name and his true identity. I had already told him-how many times would someone ever be in my place? And I, of all the people in the world, wanted to understand him. To know them. The first step to losing fear is to know everything about the thing that frightens you, isn’t it?

Alexander looked back at me with irritation, the bridge of his nose slightly furrowed; but in the end he clenched his teeth and pointed at me with his finger, very serious.

“You’re not putting any of this in your novels,” he said, coercive.

“I write about ghosts and haunted houses. So, no. Come on! Please?”

He sighed again, and a low growl drifted through the room.

“…the seven families are different sub-races of werewolves,” he began. “My family is that of the

Siberian White Wolves, originally from northern Russia and with some Greenland Arctic wolf

heritage. Our neighbors are the European Gray Wolves, from England to the Middle East. They

have dark gray and toasted brown coats. In the United States and Mexico there are mainly

Mexican Red Wolves, which have dark brown and reddish fur. The Japanese Hattai are a variant of the gray wolf, native to Hokkaido; they have black along the back and the rest of the body light gray-there’s some domestic akita in their genetics. Then there are the Australian Black Wolves, who are the minority and have coats black as night the Egyptian Golden Jackals, who by size are considered wolves like the others; and the South American Red Fox-Wolves, who are also very few

and have an intense red coat like a fox-they live only in a strip of Argentine Patagonia. There are

other small groups in China, but… no, well, I think that sums it up pretty well.”

I nodded, mute with astonishment.

When I managed to recover my voice (and my coordination, because I was very stunned), I

remarked:

“That’s why I heard you making your calls in so many languages this afternoon. You were talking to people from other clans!”

He didn’t like learning that I’d been listening to him, but could he blame me?

“That’s right. And, as I told you, in forty-eight hours they’ll come for us,” he confirmed with another

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Chapter 19

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snort. “There’s someone closer who will be here tomorrow morning; but the most prudent thing will be for him to wait for the others-I need their resources. I’ll return home.”

“…all right, I understand that. And we’re back to what interests me: you still haven’t told me what happened for someone to shoot you and for you to have to flee with your children in tow. What

worries me most, at the moment, is knowing who shot you.”

“…that’s much more complicated.”

“You can’t go quiet now, Alexander,” I accused, almost pleading.

He made another grimace, more reluctant to talk about that than about his own people.

…I wouldn’t know where to start.”

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“Try me-they say I’m smart,” I encouraged him with a sarcastic smile.

“I could say that the one who did this to me is the worst enemy of my people.”

I fell silent for a moment, weighing the possibilities I had already gotten that far and heard it all with an open mind, accepting that not only did he and his son exist, but also the staggering sum of several million or so werewolves around the globe and we were at the most troubling stage of all. Honestly, after that interesting dissertation about his species, I can swear I expected Alexander to

say his enemies were Martians, and I would have believed him.

If he said it-this man who transformed into a being half human, half canine….

I crossed my arms and snorted.

“Don’t tell me-what? Werewolf hunters? Because, mean, if you exist and you have your ‘secret

society, it seems to me there are more people like me who know your secret, people who don’t like

you. Isn’t that so? It’s logical,” I started talking nonstop, enthusiastic. “At least in the movies it’s like

that. I understand that they shot you and all, look-but why didn’t they shoot you with silver bullets?

That can kill you, right? Or aconite, which drives you mad. And with all that, are you sure it doesn’t

hurt? Because it could-”

I stopped, only because he was smiling in that way that showed all his fangs and sharp incisors. I

shivered again when I realized he was making fun of me.

Oh, of course he was making fun of me, and that made me uncomfortable.

“Do you hear yourself, Johanna? Silver bullets?” This time Alexander laughed and shook his head,

very amused by my suppositions. “Try a bullet contaminated with mercury instead. Lead, silver,

1. I also shouldn’t have been so impressed when he declared that his attacker was a feline.

severe to me. “Please-having a corpse get up and suck people’s blood is as ridiculous as having

another wander around looking for brains! Why would they want blood, or brains? They can’t be

hungry-they’re dead, and their organs no longer function. One should fear the living, Johanna, not

the dead. Nature is wise; I suppose that’s why it made us-and unfortunately it also made our

counterparts, the felines.”

It made sense, if I thought about it with sufficient bluntness. Canines and felines were the two

largest groups of existing wild predators, and the most efficient. If, as Alexander had told me,

people like him were the product of a strange hybridization forged by Nature-wasn’t it logical, on

a biological level, that the opportunity to exist as a superior human being would be granted to the best hunters? Incredible. It sounded like beginner science fiction, and it was hard for me to grasp even as I accepted it.

I listened to him to the end, yes-but at some point my mind began to work on its own and draw its own conclusions. The shock of information didn’t take long to hit. I know I blinked very fast several times, and that I got up to go back to the counter. In silence, I opened the bag of meat and with my other hand unhooked the cutting board from the wall, then reached for one of my treasured

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kitchen knives-one of the few wedding gifts I had kept. All of that while I tried to discern

coherently between what was real and what was fictitious-or rather, between what I was willing

to believe and what I wasn’t.

Because, if I’m being honest…

All right-no vampires (and I was very grateful for that); but… cats?

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