So he had to live; that was a simple truth. And if he wanted to live, he would have to force down the bloody meat. He waved the persistent fly away again and picked up the rabbit flesh. It felt slick and slightly oily between his fingers. Maybe there was a little bit of fur on it, too, but he didn’t look too closely. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth. His stomach lurched, but it needed to be filled before it could be emptied. He pushed the flesh into his mouth and bit down.
Juices flooded over his tongue; they were sweet and gamy, a taste of wildness. Mikhail’s head pounded and his spine ached, but his teeth worked as if they were the masters and everything else was servant to them. He tore hunks of flesh off and chewed them; it was a tough old rabbit, thickly muscled, and it didn’t want to be swallowed without a struggle. Blood and juice trickled over his chin as he ate, and Mikhail Gallatinov-six days and a world away from the boy he used to be-tore the flesh between his teeth and swallowed it with famished relish. When he came to the bones, he scraped them clean and tried to crack them open to get at the marrow. One of the smaller bones burst apart, red marrow exposed. He thrust his tongue into the broken bone and dug out the congealed blood. He ate as if it were the grandest meal ever served on a gold plate.
Sometime later, the hollowed-out bones fell from his bloody fingers, and Mikhail sat on his haunches over the little pile and licked his lips.
It hit him with a frightening force: he’d liked the bloody meat. He’d liked it very much. And that was not all. He wanted more.
Andrei suffered another fit of coughing that ended on a strangled note. The body stirred, and Andrei called out weakly: “Wiktor? Wiktor?”
“He’s gone,” Mikhail said, but Andrei kept calling for Wiktor in a voice that rose and fell. There was terror in that voice, and an awful weariness, too. Mikhail crawled across the stones to Andrei’s side. There was a bad smell over here, a sour and decayed odor. “Wiktor?” Andrei whispered, his face hidden in the folds of the cloaks, only his pale brown, sweat-damp hair showing. “Wiktor… please… help me.”
Mikhail reached down and pulled the cloak away from Andrei’s face.
Andrei was perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old, and his face-gleaming with sweat-was as gray as a well-used dishrag. He looked up at Mikhail with sunken brown eyes and gripped Mikhail’s arm with skinny fingers. “Wiktor,” Andrei whispered. He tried to lift his head, but his neck wasn’t strong enough. “Wiktor… don’t let me die.”
“Wiktor’s not here.” Mikhail tried to pull away, but the fingers clenched tighter.
“Don’t let me die. Don’t let me die,” the young man pleaded, his eyes glassy. He coughed once, softly, and Mikhail saw his thin, sallow chest lurch. The next cough was stronger, and the one after that made Andrei’s body shake. Andrei’s coughing turned into strangling, and Mikhail tried to work his arm loose but Andrei wouldn’t let him go. There was a terrible rattling deep in Andrei’s chest, a wet, thick, sliding noise. Andrei’s mouth opened wide, and he coughed violently with tears streaming from his eyes.
Something oozed out of Andrei’s mouth. Something long and white and wriggling.
Mikhail blinked, and felt the blood drain out of his face as he watched the worm writhe on the stones beside Andrei’s head.
Andrei coughed once more, and there was a sound of a heavy mass breaking apart in his lungs. And then they flooded out of his mouth. The white worms tangled and entwined around each other, the first hundred or so clean and ghost white, but then the next ones dappled with crimson lung blood. Andrei shivered and retched, his eyes staring at the shock-frozen boy, but he couldn’t open his mouth wide enough for all the worms to get out. They began to ooze through his nostrils as well, and Andrei strangled and choked as his body expelled its cargo. And still they surged out, now dark scarlet and sluggish, and as they spilled onto the stones Mikhail screamed and wrenched his arm loose, leaving bits of his skin under Andrei’s fingernails. Mikhail tried to rise, stumbled over his own feet and fell backward to the floor, landing hard on the base of his spine. Andrei reached for him, trying to find his hand, and lifting up out of his bed of cloaks, with blood-black worms frothing from his mouth. Mikhail began to choke, too, and as he scuttled away across the stones he felt the rabbit meat rising; he swallowed it down again, thinking of wolf fangs tearing him to shreds. Andrei got to his knees, and then with a terrible lung-ripping cough he expelled a black knot of worms the size of a man’s fist. They streamed from his mouth and down his chest, and were followed by dark ribbons of pure blood. Andrei fell onto his face. He was naked, his body already the yellowish-gray of a corpse. His wiry muscles jittered, his flesh rippling and seething under a sheen of sweat. Mikhail saw darkness spreading across Andrei’s back: brown hairs, bursting from the pores. In a matter of seconds hairs covered Andrei’s back and shoulders and were creeping down his buttocks and thighs, darkening his arms, bursting from his hands and fingers. Andrei lifted his face, and Mikhail saw it caught in the change, blood still drooling over the lengthening jaw. His eyes had retreated further under a protruding brow, his scalp hair sleek and shining, his throat banded with dark hair. Andrei shivered as his spine began to crack and contort, and he opened his fanged mouth to shriek-a hideous commingling of animal and human anguish.
A hand gripped Mikhail by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off the floor. Another hand-the fingers rough and purposeful-twisted his face away from the grisly spectacle. He was pressed into a shoulder, and he smelled the musky odor of deerskin. “Don’t look.” It was Renati’s voice. “Don’t look, little one,” she said, and put her hand firmly against the back of his head.
He could still hear, and that was bad enough. The half-human, half-wolf shrieking went on, coupled with the noise of bones popping. Someone else entered the chamber, and Renati shouted, “Get out!” Whoever it was quickly retreated. The shrieking turned into a high, thin howling that made Mikhail’s skin crawl and drove him to the edge of madness, and he squeezed his eyes shut as Renati gripped the back of his skull. Mikhail realized then that he had put his arms around her neck. The agonized howling echoed through the chamber.
And then there was a choking whine, like a machine losing power and dying down. A last few fits of raspy breathing, and silence.
Renati put Mikhail down. He kept his face averted as she walked to the corpse’s side and knelt down. Nikita, the almond-eyed Mongol with coal-black hair, came into the chamber, glanced quickly at Mikhail and then at the woman. “Andrei’s dead,” he said, a statement of fact.
Renati nodded. “Where’s Wiktor?”
“Gone hunting. For him.” He jerked a thumb at Mikhail.
“Just as well, then.” Renati reached down, scooped up a handful of bloody worms and tossed them on the fire. They writhed and crisped. “Wiktor didn’t want to watch him die.” Nikita came forward to stand beside Renati, and as they talked-something about a garden-Mikhail’s curiosity pulled him across the chamber. He stood between Nikita and Renati and peered down at Andrei’s corpse.
It was the carcass of a wolf with brown fur and dark, sightless eyes. Its tongue lolled in a little pool of blood. Its right leg was the leg of a human being, and at the end of its wiry forelegs were two human hands, the fingers gripping at the stones of the floor as if trying to wrench them apart. Instead of horror, Mikhail felt a stab of pain in his heart. The fingers were pale and skinny, and they were the same fingers that only a few moments ago had been clutching his arm. The absolute power of death hit him with full force, somewhere between the chin and the crown of his head. But it was a blow that cleared his vision, and he saw at that instant that his mother, father, and sister were gone forever, and so were his days of dreaming on the end of a kite.
Renati looked at him and snapped, “Get back!” Mikhail obeyed, and only then did he realize he’d been standing on worms.
Nikita and Renati wrapped the carcass in a deerskin cloak, lifted it between them, and took it away, into a part of the white palace where shadows reigned. Mikhail sat on his haunches next to the fire, his blood moving in his veins like ice-clogged rivers. He stared at Andrei’s dark blood on the stone. Mikhail shivered and held his palms toward the fire glow. You’re going to be sick soon, he remembered Wiktor saying. Very soon.
Mikhail couldn’t get warm. He sat closer to the fire, but even its heat on his face didn’t thaw his bones. There was a tickling in his chest, and he coughed, the noise as explosive as a gunshot between the damp stone walls.
2
The days merged, one into the other, and in the chamber there was neither sunlight nor moonlight, just the fire’s glow and spark as someone-Renati, Franco, Nikita, Pauli, Belyi, or Alekza-fed pine branches to the flames.
