Michael spat out the pill he’d been holding in his mouth. Under Adam’s corpse, his body shivered. Prickles of pain shot through his nerves. The Gestapo agent was reaching down for him, and Michael surrendered himself to the change.
It was like stepping from a secure shelter into a maelstrom of wild winds-a conscious choice, and once decided, difficult to reverse. He felt the primeval shriek in his bones as his spine bowed, and with a thunder that boomed in his head, his skull and face began to alter their shape. He shivered, and moaned uncontrollably.
The Gestapo agent’s hand froze in midair. One of the soldiers laughed. “He’s begging for mercy!” the man said.
“Get up!” The Gestapo man stepped back. “Get up, you swine!”
The moaning changed pitch. It lost its human element and turned bestial.
“Bring a light!” the Gestapo agent shouted. He didn’t know what was wrong with the man who crouched before him, but he didn’t care to stand any closer. “Somebody get a light on h-”
There was the noise of ripping cloth, and cracking sounds of bones being broken. The soldiers stepped back, and the one who’d laughed now wore a fractured grin. One of the soldiers produced a hand torch, and the Gestapo agent fumbled to switch it on. Before him something heaved, laboring under the stiff corpse at his feet. His hands shook; he couldn’t get the balky switch clicked. “Damn it to Hell!” he shouted-and then the switch moved, and the light came on.
He saw what was there, and his breath froze.
Hell had shining green eyes and a sleek, muscular body covered with gray-streaked, black hair. Hell had white fangs, and hell moved on all fours.
The beast shook violently, a powerful motion that broke the corpse’s arms like matchsticks and threw the body aside. It cast off, as well, the last of its human masquerade: a blood-covered gray suit, white shirt with the tie still knotted in the ripped collar, underwear, socks, and shoes. Amid the debris was a holster that held a Luger; the beast had deadlier weapons.
“Oh… my…” The Gestapo agent never got to call on his deity; Hitler was absent, and God knew the meaning of justice. The beast sprang, its jaws gaping, and as it hit the Gestapo agent its teeth were already sinking into the throat and ripping away flesh and arteries in a crimson shower of carnage.
All but two of the soldiers and one of the other Gestapo agents shrieked and fled for their lives. A German soldier ran the wrong way-not toward the doorway but toward the street. He ended there, on a crushed note. The second Gestapo man, a heroic fool, lifted his Mauser pistol to fire at the beast as it whirled toward him; the fierce green glare of its eyes hypnotized him for perhaps a half second, and that was much too long. The beast leaped upon him, claws making a bloody tatters of the man’s face, and the man’s strangled, lipless scream shocked the two soldiers from their trances. They ran, too, one of them falling and tangling the second in his legs.
Michael Gallatin raged. He snapped the air, his jaws cracking together. Blood was dripping from his muzzle, its hot perfume heightening his abandon. A human mind calculated in the skull of the wolf, and his eyes saw not the darkness of night but a gray-hazed twilight in which blue-edged figures ran for the doorway, their screams like the high squeals of hunted rats. Michael could hear the panicked beating of their hearts-a military drum corps hammering at an insane speed. The smell of their sweat had sausage and schnapps in it. He bounded forward, his muscles and sinews moving like the fine gears of a killing machine, and he turned on the soldier who was trying to struggle to his feet; Michael looked into the German’s face, and in a split second judged him a youth, no more than seventeen. An innocent corrupted by a rifle and a book called Mein Kampf. Michael seized the boy’s left hand in his jaws and crushed the fingers without breaking the skin, removing the possibility of further corruption by rifle. Then, as the boy screamed and flailed at him, Michael turned away and bounded across the roof after the others.
One of the soldiers stopped to fire his pistol; the bullet ricocheted off the stones to Michael’s left, but did not slow him. As the soldier spun around to flee, Michael jumped up and slammed into the man’s back, knocking him aside like a scarecrow. Then Michael landed nimbly, and kept going in a blur of motion. He saw the others barreling into the door that led down the staircase, and in another few seconds they would be throwing the latch. The last man was about to squeeze through; the door was already closing, and the Germans were hollering and trying to pull him in. Michael lowered his head and propelled himself forward.
He leaped, skewing his body in midair, and crashed against the door. It flew open, knocking the Germans down the stairs in a tangle of arms and legs. He landed amid them, clawing and tearing with fevered indiscrimination; then he left them behind, bloody and broken, as he raced down the stairs and through the corridors still marked with the furrows of Adam’s shoe tips.
As he came down the sweeping staircase from the main auditorium, he met the crowd that milled in confusion and shouted for refunds. As Michael bounded down the stairs, the shouting ceased; the silence, however, didn’t last long. A fresh wave of shrieks crashed against the Opera’s marbled walls, and men and women in their elegant attire jumped over the balustrades like swabbies off the sides of a torpedoed battleship. Michael leaped down the last six steps, his paws skidding across the green marble as he landed, and a bearded aristocrat with an ivory cane blanched and stumbled backward, a wet spot spreading across the front of his trousers.
Michael ran, the power and exhilaration singing in his blood. His heart pumped steadily, his lungs bellowed, his sinews worked like iron springs. He snapped left and right, scaring back those who were too dumbfounded to move. Then he was streaking through the final vestibule, clearing a path of screams, and onto the street. He raced under the belly of a carriage horse, which reared and danced madly. Michael glanced back, over his shoulder; a few people had run out after him, but the panicked horse was in their midst and they scattered away from the pounding hooves.
There was a fresh shriek: worn brakes, and tires clenching stones. Michael looked ahead and saw a pair of lights rushing at him. Without a hesitation, he bounded off the ground and up over the car’s front fender and hood. He had an instant to see two shocked faces behind the windshield, and then Michael scrambled up over the top of the car, down the other side, and raced away across the Avenue de’ L’Opera.
“My God!” Mouse gasped as the Citroen shuddered to a stop. He looked at Gaby. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.” She was stunned, and her mind seemed to be full of rusted gears. She saw people coming out of the Opera House, among them several German officers, and she said, “Go!”
Mouse hit the accelerator, swerved the car around, and tore away from the Opera, leaving a backfire and a poot of blue smoke as his last salute.
9
It was after two o’clock in the morning when Camille heard a knock at her door. She sat up in her bed, instantly alert, reached under her pillow, and pulled out the deadly Walther pistol. She listened; the knock came again, more insistently. Not the Gestapo, she reasoned; they knocked with axes, not knuckles. But she took the pistol with her as she lit an oil lamp and went to the door in her long white gown. She almost bumped into Mouse, the little man standing wide-eyed and frightened in the hallway. She put a finger to her lips as he started to speak, and then she walked past him to the door. What a damnable mess! she thought angrily. She’d barely gotten the sorrow-racked girl to sleep twenty minutes before, the fool Brit had gotten both himself and Adam killed, and now she was stuck with a Nazi lunatic! Only a miracle could save this situation, and Joan of Arc was dust.
“Who is it?” Camille asked, making herself sound sleepy. Her heart pounded, and her finger hugged the trigger.
“Green Eyes,” said the man on the other side.
No hand in Paris had ever moved faster to unlock a door.
Michael stood there, hollow-eyed, his jaw and chin in need of a shave. He wore a pair of brown corduroy trousers that were two sizes too small, and a white shirt meant for a fat man. On his feet he wore dark blue socks, but no shoes. He stepped into the apartment, past Camille, who stood openmouthed. Mouse made a choking sound. Michael closed the door gently behind him and locked it. “Mission,” he said, “accomplished.”
“Oh,” someone said: a rush of breath. Gaby stood in the bedroom doorway, her face pale and her eyes rimmed with red. She still wore her new blue dress, now misshapen and full of wrinkles. “You… died. I watched you… take the pill.”
“It didn’t work,” Michael said. He walked past them, his muscles sore and stretched, and his head throbbing with a dull ache: all aftereffects of the change. He went to a bowl of water in the kitchen and splashed his face,
