Read Online Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman - Free Book Online Page B

things?”
    His eyes had gone back to mapping the floorboards. “It was a dare.”
    “A dare? To do what? Who dared you? Did Kelan put you up to this?”
    Seth raised his head, his eyes blazing. “Fuck you,” he said. When Grizz stood he was still bigger than his son, but if they fought the outcome was no longer sure. Seth lowered his head and came toward him but turned at the last second, only brushing past him as he went up the stairs. A moment later his door slammed, and then his stereo came on: electric guitars, a blast of drums, a voice wailing from the speakers.
    A dare? His best friend had been Kelan Gunderson, the sheriff’s older boy. Kelan was a lanky, handsome child, black haired with long-lashed gray eyes the girls all swooned over. Unlike Seth, Kelan was well liked, a congenial kid who put on a smiling face for all the adults, but Grizz always had the feeling he had egged Seth on. Kelan had a tagalong little brother, too, a boy with what the unkind called mongoloid features. The brother was always practicing spastic karate moves while trying to defend himself from the bigger boys and so they took to calling him Odd Lee instead of his given name of Bruce and the name stuck. Now he thought of Kelan and his little brother out there grieving their father, likely as mystified as Grizz, and he regretted thinking meanly of them. His son had murdered his best friend’s father. His only friend.
    He stood looking at Seth’s closet door, hung with a poster of the Four Horseman charging out of red clouds, a city below them in flames, the words JUDAS PRIEST at the top and NOSTRADAMUS at the bottom. He tore the poster from its Scotch-tape moorings, picked up the scattered cassettetapes and survival magazines, because these things were not his son. As he gathered them in a garbage bag for the burn pile, his eyes were drawn to papers scattered on the desk. They were drawings mostly, wolves and strange giants in a far, frozen country. The boy had a fine hand for sketching. A creature with its arm torn off howled in the woods. In another, a child looked into a pond, but his watery reflection turned monstrous and fanged. A final one showed a hallway clotted with bloody bodies, a woman’s severed head lolling on the floor. The sheriff’s men hadn’t taken these papers; there was no need with Seth dead.
    When Grizz picked them up, he saw something that caught his breath. Seth had gouged a single word into the desk: WERGILD . The wounds in the wood were fresh, dark walnut surface peeled to show blond wood underneath. Seth had worked at this recently with a knife, prying up the slivers carefully. Grizz didn’t know what the word meant but knew someone who did. It was time he got ready to head into town.
    He ripped the bandages from his palms, scrubbed the wounds clean, then put on fresh blue jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, steel-toed boots he favored while driving loads for the co-op or taking trips to town, and then pulled his cap low to shade his eyes before setting out.
    He drove the winding stretch of road between his farm and town, his hands light on the wheel. He’d driven past the church for many years without stopping, but today he parked out front. Grizz checked the office down the hall forthe pastor, his hollow greeting echoing. It figured. He went into the sanctuary, where it was so quiet he could hear a few pigeons cooing up in the bell tower.
    On a hunch he stepped through a side door, saw the path that went over to the parsonage, and almost ran right into a woman standing in the grass in her bare feet. She was staring off toward the cemetery, a single piece of paper in her hand. She had long auburn hair and was wearing a billowy blouse and skirt that could not disguise her pregnancy. She startled when she heard the door clamp shut and saw him come toward her.
    He took off his cap as he approached. The way she stood, on the balls of her feet, it was as if she was preparing to run. Like she thought he was going to