Night of the Wolf interweaves a tale of the Roman Empire with magic, romance, and--lycanthropy. It follows The Silver Wolf, Alice Borchardt's absorbing story of the coming of age of a young woman who must learn to control and enjoy her wild side within the exotic setting of decadent Rome. This sequel begins by focusing on a mysterious figure from The Silver Wolf, Maeniel, a wolf who must contend with being a part-time human. Some of the other characters are magical in their own ways, such as Dryas, a warrior queen and priestess of the Caledoni. Others are resolutely human, such as Lucius, a Roman noble who finds himself at the mercy of Caesar and Cleopatra. Maeniel gradually begins to understand the quirks of human nature and in time finds that all roads lead to Rome, where Caesar's life is in the hands of Maeniel and his allies. With an adventurous plot, an unusual historical background, and a large helping of steamy sex scenes, this series should be much to the taste of fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon or Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. --Blaise Selby


From Publishers Weekly
This pseudo-historical fantasy sequel to last year's The Silver Wolf needs an exhausting amount of novelistic foreplay to stoke its climax, the assassination of Julius Caesar. Maeniel, the man who was empowered in the previous novel with the ability to turn into a wolf, now meets menopausal Dryas, a fiercely independent warrior from the White Isle's northern highlands. Dryas has been summoned by Archdruid Mir as the Celts' last hope to stem the Roman invasion by assassinating Caesar. First, though, she is supposed to seduce and kill Maeniel, who has been savaging Mir's people to punish them for having sacrificed a Celtic princess with whom he had an affair. (Their libidinous entanglement provides grist for several sexy flashbacks.) Many pages later, Maeniel and Dryas have become allies and are in Rome as the fateful Ides of March approach. Borchardt effectively conveys her sympathy with wolf psychology, but she rides militant feminism into the ground. Her dialogue runs to the cheesy, especially the vaporings of Caesar's doomed wife, Calpurnia, and the stock chitterings of stereotypic gay Roman epicureans. Undigested chunks of familiar Latin and Shakespeare constantly impede the action, so that hunky primitives and gratefully lustful middle-aged temptresses notwithstanding, Borchardt's attempt at mingling wolves and women, Avalon's mists and the debauchery of Rome turns out irrevocably sterile. Author tour; foreign rights sold in Germany, Holland and the UK. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
For her fourth outing, a sequel to the well-received The Silver Wolf (1998), Anne Rices older sister once again plays to her strengths by drawing readers into the sensibilities of her werewolf protagonists. Borchardts semi-mystical style keeps the reader in a state of half-comprehended wakefulness, aflow with information drawn from scent and from the werewolfs moonlit pre-Cambrian mind. Awareness is all. During the time of Roman power in the Alps, as Caesars eye turns toward the conquest of Britain, the man-wolf Manael, leader of his pack, is captured and trained as a gladiator, a job for which his natural battle-madness lends him unconquerable ferocity. Manaels rise among the Romans climaxes with the Ides of March and Caesars visit to the Senate. What really sells this tale, however, is the depth of animal identification that Borchardt achieves. Whether eating, having sex, or reading the feeling-signatures of all living things on leaves, twigs, bushes, or the ground, Borchardts wolves have a sensuous intensity that matches the best suspense fantasy being written today. Even stronger and deeper than The Silver Wolf. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"A writer with the vision and scope to conjure up her own thrilling mythos and the craftsmanship to render it in breathtaking, shimmering prose."
--ANNE RICE


Review
"A writer with the vision and scope to conjure up her own thrilling mythos and the craftsmanship to render it in breathtaking, shimmering prose."
--ANNE RICE


Book Description
The fearsome legions of Julius Caesar have crushed resistance to Roman rule. Watching the tragic aftermath through yellow eyes afire with curiosity and intelligence is Maeniel, a gray wolf . . . and a shapeshifter unaware of his preternatural duality. But a new Maeniel is about to be born from the ruins.

The sight of the beautiful Imona fills Maeniel with unfamiliar feelings and desires, triggering his transformation from wolf to man. In her arms he learns what it means to love. It is a knowledge that will change him forever. When Imona vanishes, Maeniel follows her trail--unaware that he is being pursued by a warrior-woman sworn to kill him. But the hunt upon which the two adversaries embark will lead them farther than they can imagine: to the gates of Rome itself--to the gates of their very souls . . .



From the Inside Flap
The fearsome legions of Julius Caesar have crushed resistance to Roman rule. Watching the tragic aftermath through yellow eyes afire with curiosity and intelligence is Maeniel, a gray wolf . . . and a shapeshifter unaware of his preternatural duality. But a new Maeniel is about to be born from the ruins.

The sight of the beautiful Imona fills Maeniel with unfamiliar feelings and desires, triggering his transformation from wolf to man. In her arms he learns what it means to love. It is a knowledge that will change him forever. When Imona vanishes, Maeniel follows her trail--unaware that he is being pursued by a warrior-woman sworn to kill him. But the hunt upon which the two adversaries embark will lead them farther than they can imagine: to the gates of Rome itself--to the gates of their very souls . . .


From the Back Cover
"A writer with the vision and scope to conjure up her own thrilling mythos and the craftsmanship to render it in breathtaking, shimmering prose."
--ANNE RICE



About the Author
Alice Borchardt shared a childhood of storytelling with her sister, Anne Rice, in New Orleans. A professional nurse, she has also nurtured a profound interest in little-known periods of history. She is the author of Devoted, Beguiled, and The Silver Wolf. She lives in Houston.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The wolf awoke. He lifted his head from his paws. Above, the moon was full, but only a drifting ghost through the mixed pine and cedar on the mountainside. The rest of the pack slept.

He alone felt the touch of ... he knew not what. Wolves don't grieve. Not even for themselves.

He rose and went through the rite of fur straightening, then drifted down silently to a stream formed by overflow from a lake above. It was just wide enough to mirror the sky in its water.

Since she died ... no, since she was killed, he had awakened every night at this hour, an hour when all else sleeps ... remembering.

The night has rhythms of its own. Rhythms that resonate in the flesh, blood, and bones of all earth's creatures. Man, alone, has forgotten them, forgotten they ever mattered.

But to the wolf, they came as memories, memories not his own, fragments of a dream. He touched an immortal consciousness as old as life, the experience of a creature not yet self-aware and so immortal. The first of our kind, swimming in the water column of the Cambrian sea. At this time in the night, it ceased the flexions of its muscular body and drowsed in a shimmer of moonlight.

He, the wolf, understood that a catastrophic disruption of his consciousness had taken place, depriving him of the birthright handed down to him by that first dreamer of the ocean sea.

His muzzle shattered the image of the moon in the water in the way sorrow shattered his sleep.

Above, the drifting clouds drowned the moon. Near their kill, the wolves of his pack slept soundlessly and without dreams.

The air around him was cold. It was late autumn, nearly winter again, but he felt a fire within himself--a fire that the wind from the glaciers towering over the mountain passes couldn't quench. A fire that heated his skin under his heavy winter coat.

Fire! They were creatures of fire. And fire followed them everywhere. The smell of burning always tainted the air around their dwellings. Earth, air, fire, and water. All living beings on earth partook of those elements, but of them all, only man was the master of fire.

Why? How did they seize such power? Nothing in his memories could tell him.

When his kind first met them in the darkness and struggle of the world's winter, they controlled flames, extinguishing and kindling them at will, their only advantage in a ruthless battle for simple survival against the omnipresent night and cold. Otherwise, they were pitiable, naked things.

Pitiable, naked things like he himself was, at this moment, because as the last rays of moonlight were caught by the drifting clouds, he became a man.

He remembered that she said--she told him--fire was a gift of the gods.

He had laughed at the word gift. He had already seen enough of the humans to know they stole and despoiled without conscience or compunction and read in the minds of the gods the things they most wanted for themselves. Worship and submission to the feckless, arbitrary commands of those who maneuvered themselves into a position to rule their own kind.

"A gift," he had asked, "stolen perhaps?"

"Perhaps," she answered with a shrug. "The thieves were mocked by their theft, because, as always, power is a two-edged sword."

But power, the man by the stream thought, whatever it costs, power is life. Without the theft, they and all their kind could never have survived that long-ago endless winter and they would have been winnowed out, as were so many others.

The man stretched his arms upward as if to embrace the moon, just as the cloud in its passage was silvered at the edges by the returning glow.

Then the silver light shone full in his face. He wondered what the gods really did want.

She, whose touch gave him the power to change from wolf to man and back again, seemed careless of worship and had never asked for thanks.

And, indeed, he didn't even know if he should thank her because, like fire, this gift brought suffering and sorrow in its wake. A gift garnished with cruel knowledge and an awareness of absolute loss.

Then he was wolf again, satisfied to extinguish a comprehension of life that he didn't, at the moment, want.

He remembered fire, and only fire--that spirit, that everlasting ambiguity that could protect, create, and destroy.

And the wolf set out, the only wakeful creature in a sleeping world.

Being aware and knowing awareness was a gnawing curse ... a curse to be extinguished in blood, fire, and vengeance.

How did he know who the man was? He had seen. Why was he sure of his guilt? To the wolf this would have seemed a ridiculous question. He had smelled it, with a certainty that could not be denied--the scent of guilt that is beyond resolve, or anger, or fear.

Even his most ancient ancestor swimming in that first sea had seen, had known. And somewhere its rudimentary consciousness had been able to store the information presented by its deployed senses.

Humans, in their blindness, think intelligence has one path--theirs! But his brain--older and wiser, though not as acute--knew knowledge has many facets and routes.

None of us is any one thing. No more than a bush, a tree, or even an unloved weed is. We are all a combination of many factors, shapes, sizes, odors, movements, habits. Each impinging on the consciousness of others--others we never notice.

So the wolf knew this man. He had marked him, along with those others, in the hour between day and night, in the place that was neither water nor land, never guessing the man's fell purpose until it was too late. Too late to stop him and the others from the completion of their task. A task his mind, as a wolf or human, could never comprehend, understand, or, for that matter, forgive--not in the year since, not ever.

ANNOTATION

While readers will recognize names like Caesar and Charlemagne among Borchardt's cast of characters, it is the unfamiliar and magical presence of Borchardt's shape-shifting protagonists that makes these titles truly extraordinary.
Night of the Wolf and get Silver Wolf for free!

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The fearsome legions of Julius Caesar have crushed resistance to Roman rule. The power of the druids is broken, the shattered tribes retreating to the dubious safety of the high mountains or fleeing north into lands as inhospitable as those left behind. Watching all the while through yellow eyes afire with curiosity and intelligence is Maeniel, a gray wolf...who is also a man.. "It begins with a woman. She is Imona: young, proud, beautiful. The sight of her fills Maeniel with unfamiliar feelings of desires, triggering his transformation from wolf to man. In her arms he learns for the first time what it means to love. It is a knowledge that will change him forever. For when Imona vanishes following a Roman massacre, Maeniel begins to learn a very different lesson.. "Following Imona's trail as wolf and man, Maeniel is himself pursued by a warrior woman sworn to kill him. She is Dryas, a queen without a kingdom. But the two adversaries will prove to have much in common. And the hunt upon which they embark will lead them farther than they can imagine: to the gates of Rome itself. To the gates of their very souls...

SYNOPSIS

Silver Wolf

Into decadent Rome of the Dark Ages comes Regeane, an enigmatic young woman distantly related to Charlemagne. But the blood she has inherited from her murdered father makes her much more than a child of royalty. Regeane is a shapeshifter--woman and wolf, hunter and hunted--possessed of preternatural agility and strength, primal memories extending back thousands of years, and senses so keen they can pierce the veil of death itself.

Betrothed to a barbarian lord she has never seen, Regeane is surrounded by enemies. But outside the gates of Rome, baying at the moon, there is a mysterious dark wolf whose scent awakens the animal in Regeane. Now, as deadly plots tighten like a noose around her neck, Regeane must fight to live with dignity as the proud creature she is: civilized and savage, partaking of both, yet infinitely more than either . . .

Night of the Wolf

The fearsome legions of Julius Caesar have crushed resistance to Roman rule. Watching the tragic aftermath through yellow eyes afire with curiosity and intelligence is Maeniel, a gray wolf . . . and a shapeshifter unaware of his preternatural duality. But a new Maeniel is about to be born from the ruins.

The sight of the beautiful Imona fills Maeniel with unfamiliar feelings and desires, triggering his transformation from wolf to man. In her arms he learns what it means to love. It is a knowledge that will change him forever. When Imona vanishes, Maeniel follows her trail--unaware that he is being pursued by a warrior-woman sworn to kill him. But the hunt upon which the two adversaries embark will lead them farther than they can imagine: to the gates of Rome itself--to the gates of their very souls . . .

FROM THE CRITICS

Anne Rice

A daring and vibrant new voice on the female literary frontier . . . The Silver Wolf is a stunning initiation into a dark and dazzling realm.

Johanna Lindsay

A fascinating tale--brutal, ribald, engrossing, poignantly beautiful.

Romantic Times

Mesmerizing . . . Astounding . . . A lush, richly crafted tale . . .With intricate detailing and hypnotic prose, Alice Borchardt unleashes a new world to readers.

Publishers Weekly

This pseudo-historical fantasy sequel to last year's The Silver Wolf needs an exhausting amount of novelistic foreplay to stoke its climax, the assassination of Julius Caesar. Maeniel, the man who was empowered in the previous novel with the ability to turn into a wolf, now meets menopausal Dryas, a fiercely independent warrior from the White Isle's northern highlands. Dryas has been summoned by Archdruid Mir as the Celts' last hope to stem the Roman invasion by assassinating Caesar. First, though, she is supposed to seduce and kill Maeniel, who has been savaging Mir's people to punish them for having sacrificed a Celtic princess with whom he had an affair. (Their libidinous entanglement provides grist for several sexy flashbacks.) Many pages later, Maeniel and Dryas have become allies and are in Rome as the fateful Ides of March approach. Borchardt effectively conveys her sympathy with wolf psychology, but she rides militant feminism into the ground. Her dialogue runs to the cheesy, especially the vaporings of Caesar's doomed wife, Calpurnia, and the stock chitterings of stereotypic gay Roman epicureans. Undigested chunks of familiar Latin and Shakespeare constantly impede the action, so that hunky primitives and gratefully lustful middle-aged temptresses notwithstanding, Borchardt's attempt at mingling wolves and women, Avalon's mists and the debauchery of Rome turns out irrevocably sterile. Author tour; foreign rights sold in Germany, Holland and the UK. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

For her fourth outing, a sequel to the well-received The Silver Wolf (1998), Anne Rice's older sister once again plays to her strengths by drawing readers into the sensibilities of her werewolf protagonists. Borchardt's semi-mystical style keeps the reader in a state of half-comprehended wakefulness, aflow with information drawn from scent and from the werewolf's moonlit pre-Cambrian mind. Awareness is all. During the time of Roman power in the Alps, as Caesar's eye turns toward the conquest of Britain, the man-wolf Manael, leader of his pack, is captured and trained as a gladiator, a job for which his natural battle-madness lends him unconquerable ferocity. Manael's rise among the Romans climaxes with the Ides of March and Caesar's visit to the Senate. What really sells this tale, however, is the depth of animal identification that Borchardt achieves. Whether eating, having sex, or reading the feeling-signatures of all living things on leaves, twigs, bushes, or the ground, Borchardt's wolves have a sensuous intensity that matches the best suspense fantasy being written today. Even stronger and deeper than The Silver Wolf.