saliva, from their sockets. Dark bands of hair rose over the naked flesh, and his fingers and toes began to hook into claws.
Krolle scrambled up, slipped, got up again with a strangled yelp and ran. Not toward the gate, because the monstrous figure blocked his way, but in the opposite direction, into the depths of Falkenhausen. Michael, his spine contorting and his joints cracking, followed like the shadow of death.
The major fell to his knees beside a barracks and tried to get his bulk into the crawl space beneath. Failing that, he struggled up once more and staggered on, calling for help in a voice that did not carry. A wooden building was on fire perhaps three hundred yards away, hit by a mortar shell. Its red light capered in the sky. The searchlights were still probing, their paths interweaving, and guards shot at each other in the confusion.
There was no confusion in the mind of the wolf. He knew his task, and he would relish this one.
Krolle looked back over his shoulder and saw the thing’s green eyes. He gave a bleat of fear, his robe dusty and undone, and his well-fed, white belly hanging out. He kept running, trying to call for help between gasps of air. He dared to look again and saw the monster gaining on him with a steady, powerful loping stride-and then Krolle’s ankles hit a low pinewood barrier, and with a scream he pitched over it and slid facedown a steep dirt incline.
Michael leaped nimbly across the barricade-set there to keep trucks from tumbling over-and stood on the edge of the incline, peering at what lay before him. In his wolf’s body his heart hammered with a fearsome rhythm as he saw the beast’s banquet laid out at the bottom of the pit.
How many corpses were strewn there was impossible to say. Three thousand? Five thousand? He didn’t know. The steep-walled pit was about fifty yards from side to side, and the naked dead lay tangled in obscene, bony piles, thrown one on top of another so deep that he couldn’t see the pit’s floor. In that gray, hideous, unfathomable mass of rib cages, emaciated arms and legs, bald skulls and hollowed eyes, one figure in a red robe struggled toward the pit’s opposite side, crawling across the bridges of decaying flesh.
Michael held his position on the edge, his claws gripping the soft dirt. The firelight leaped, painting the huge mass grave with hell’s radiance. His mind was numbed; there was so much death. Reality seemed warped, a bad dream from which he must surely soon awaken. This was the fingerprint of true evil, beyond which all fictions paled.
Michael lifted his head to heaven, and screamed.
It came out as a hoarse, ragged wolf’s wail. In the pit Krolle heard it, and looked back. Sweat glistened on his face, flies swarming around him. “Stay away from me!” he shouted to the monster on the pit’s edge. His voice cracked, and madness broke through. “Stay away from-”
A corpse shifted beneath him with a noise like a whisper. Its movement caused other bodies to part, and Krolle lost his balance. He clawed at a broken shoulder, trying to grip a pair of legs with his sweaty hands, but flesh rippled under his fingers and he went down amid the dead. The corpses rose and fell like sea waves, and Krolle thrashed to stay at the surface. He opened his mouth to scream; flies rushed into it, and were sucked down his throat. Flies blinded him, and winnowed into his ears. He clawed at rotting flesh, his boots finding no purchase. His head went under, corpses shifting around him like waking sleepers. Taken one by one, the bodies weighed about as much as the shovels that had pitched them down here; together, in their twisted linkage of arms and legs, they closed over Krolle’s head and crushed him down into the suffocating depths. He was borne to the bottom, where a slender arm hooked around his throat and flies struggled in his windpipe.
Krolle was gone. The corpses kept shifting, all across the pit, making room for another. Michael, his green eyes burning with tears of horror, turned away from the dead, and ran toward the living.
He scared the yellow piss out of two Dobermans that were being held on leashes by their masters, and then he streaked past them and across the open ground near where the wrecked motorcycle lay. A truckful of soldiers was about to drive through the broken gate, in pursuit of the rescue team. Michael changed their plans by leaping up over the truck’s tailgate into the rear, and the soldiers yelled and jumped out as if they’d grown wings. The driver, intimidated by the sight of a thin and obviously hungry wolf snapping at his face on the other side of the windshield, immediately lost control and the truck slammed into Falkenhausen’s stone wall.
But the wolf was no longer perched on the hood. Michael bounded through the blown-open gate, and out into freedom. He cut across the dirt road and entered the forest, his nose sniffing. Engine oil, gunpowder, and… ah, yes… the rank odor of a Russian fighter pilot.
He kept to the brush on the road’s edge, following the scents. The smell of blood: someone had been wounded. About a mile away from Falkenhausen the truck had turned off the main road onto one that was little more than a… well, than a wolf’s trail. The rescue team had been prepared; what looked-and smelled-like a second truck had come out of this trail and roared away to leave tire treads for the pursuers, while the original vehicle had entered the dense forest. Michael followed Lazaris’s reek, through the silent sylvan glades.
He followed the twisting trail for almost eight miles, and then he heard the voices and saw the glint of flashlights. He crouched amid the pines and watched. In a clearing before him, shielded from aerial observation by a camouflage net overhead, were the armored truck and two civilian cars. Workers were dismantling the truck, rapidly removing the armor and taking the machine gun off its mount. At the same time others were hurriedly painting the truck white with a Red Cross on the cab doors. The cargo-bay area was being transformed into an ambulance, with tiers of stretcher beds. The machine gun was wrapped in burlap, put into a wooden box lined with rubber, lowered into a trench. Then shovels went to work, covering the weapon.
A tent had been set up, and from it protruded a radio antenna. Michael was flattered. They’d gone to a hell of a lot of effort for him, not to mention risking their lives.
“I tried to get him to come, damn it!” Bauman suddenly walked out of the tent. “I think he went crazy! How was I to know he was about to snap?”
“You should have made him come! God only knows what they’ll do to him now!” A second figure stalked out, following Bauman. Michael knew that voice, and when he sniffed the air he caught her fragrance: cinnamon and leather. Chesna wore a black jumpsuit, a holster and pistol around her waist, her blond hair hidden beneath a black cap and her face daubed with charcoal. “All this work, and he’s still in there! And instead of him, you bring this thing!” She motioned angrily at Lazaris, who emerged from the tent placidly chewing on a biscuit. “My God, what are we going to do?”
A wolf could smile, in its own way.
Two minutes later a sentry heard a twig snap. He froze, questing for movement in the dark. Was there someone standing by that pine tree, or not? He lifted his rifle. “Halt. Who’s there?”
“A friend,” Michael said. He dropped the twig he’d just broken and came out with his hands upraised. The sight of a naked, bruised man emerging from the forest made the sentry shout, “Hey! Someone come over here! Hurry!”
“What’s all that damned noise!” Chesna said as she, Bauman, and a couple of others rushed to the sentry’s assistance. Flashlights were turned on, and they caught Michael Gallatin in their crossfire.
Chesna stopped abruptly, the breath shocked out of her.
Bauman whispered, “How the hell…”
“No time for formalities.” Michael’s voice was raspy and weak. The change, and the eight-mile run, had tapped the last of his reserves. Already the figures around him were blurring in and out of focus. He could let himself go now. He was free. “I’m… about to pass out,” he said. “I hope… someone will… catch me?” His knees buckled.
Chesna did.
TEN – Destiny
1
His first impression upon awakening was of green and golden light: the sun, shining through dense foliage. He thought of the forest of his youth, the kingdom of Wiktor and the family. But that was long ago, and Michael Gallatin lay not on a pallet of hay but on a bed of white linen. The ceiling above him was white, the walls pale green. He heard the song of robins and turned his head toward a window on his right. He could see a network of interlocking tree branches and slices of blue sky between them.
His mind, even with all the beauty, found the emaciated corpses in the mass grave. That was the kind of thing that, once viewed, opened your eyes forever to the reality of human evil. He wanted to weep, to cleanse
