He leaned his head down, sank his fangs into the throat, and bit deep. The berserker didn’t move. And then Mikhail braced his paws against the berserker’s body, and ripped upward. He didn’t know his own strength; the throat tore open like a Christmas package, and its bright gift spilled out. The berserker shuddered and clawed the air, perhaps fighting not death, but life. Mikhail stumbled back, flesh between his teeth and his eyes glazed with shock. He had seen the others tear the throats of prey, but never until this moment had he understood its sensation of supreme power.
Renati lifted her head to the sky, and sang. Alekza added her higher, younger voice in harmony, and the music soared over the snow. Mikhail thought he knew what the song was about: an enemy had been killed, the pack was victorious, and a new wolf had been born. He spat the berserker’s flesh from his mouth, but the taste of blood had ignited his senses. Everything was so much clearer: all colors, all sounds, all aromas were heightened to an intensity that both thrilled and scared him. He realized that up until the moment of his change he had been living only a shadow life; now he felt real, gorged with strength, and this form of black hair and muscle must be his true body, not that weak pale husk of a human boy.
Dazed with the blood fever, Mikhail danced and capered as the two wolves sang their arias. And then he, too, lifted his head and opened his jaws; what came out was more of a croak than music, but he had time to learn to sing. All the time in the world. And then the song faded, its last notes echoed away, and Renati began to change back to human form. It took her perhaps forty-five seconds to alter from a sleek wolf to a naked woman with sagging breasts, and then she knelt down beside Franco. Alekza changed as well, and Mikhail watched her, fascinated. Her limbs lengthened, the blond fur re-formed into the long blond hair on her head and the golden down between her legs and on her forearms and thighs, and then she stood up, naked and glorious, her nipples hardened by the cold. She went to Franco’s side, too, and Mikhail stood on all fours, aware that something had grown hard at his groin.
Renati inspected Franco’s mangled leg and scowled. “Not good, is it?” Franco asked her, his voice groggy, and Renati said, “Quiet.” She shivered, her bare flesh covered with goose bumps; they were going to have to get Franco inside before all of them froze. She looked at Mikhail, the wolf. “Change back,” she told him. “Now we need hands more than teeth.”
Change back? he thought. Now that he was here, he had to go back there?
“Help me lift him,” Renati said to Alekza, and they struggled to get Franco up. “Come on, help us!” she told Mikhail.
He didn’t want to change. He dreaded going back, to that weak, hairless body. But he knew it had to be, and even as the knowledge sank into him he felt the change taking him in the other direction, away from the wolf toward the boy again. The change, he realized, always began first in the mind. He saw his skin, smooth and white, his hands ending in fingers instead of claws, his body supported upright on long stalks. And so it began to happen, just as the images were held in his mind, and his black hair, claws, and fangs left him. There was a moment of searing pain that drove him to his knees; his broken rib was returning to the rib of a boy, but it remained broken, and for an instant the jagged edges ground against each other. Mikhail grasped his white side with human fingers, and when the pain had cleared, he stood up. His legs were shaky, threatening collapse. His jawbones clicked back into their sockets, the last of the dark hair itched fiercely as it retreated into the pores, and Mikhail stood in a mist of steam.
He heard Alekza laugh.
He looked down, and saw that neither pain nor cold had unstiffened him. He covered himself, his face reddening. Renati said, “No time for that. Help us!” She and Alekza were trying to cradle Franco between them, and Mikhail stumbled forward to add his dwindling strength.
They carried Franco to the white palace, and on the way Mikhail retrieved his robe and hurriedly put it around himself. Renati and Alekza’s robes lay on the snow, just outside the palace wall. They let them lie until they’d gotten Franco down the stairs, a treacherous trip, and had put him down near the fire. Then Renati went up to get the cloaks, and while she was gone Franco opened his bloodshot eyes and gripped the front of Mikhail’s robe. He drew the boy’s face close.
“Thank you,” Franco said. His hand slipped away, and he’d passed out again. Which was fortunate, because his leg had been all but severed.
Mikhail sensed a movement behind him. He smelled her, fresh as morning. He looked back, over his shoulder, and found his face almost pressed into the golden hair between Alekza’s thighs.
She stared down at him, her eyes glinting in the ruddy light. “Do you like what you see?” she asked him quietly.
“I…” Again, his groin brittled. “I… don’t know.”
She nodded, and gave him a hint of a smile. “You’ll know, soon enough. When you do, I’ll be waiting.”
“Oh, get out of the boy’s face, Alekza!” Renati came into the chamber. “He’s still a child!” She threw Alekza her robe.
“No,” Alekza answered, still staring down at him. “No, he’s not.” She slid her cloak on, a sensuous movement, but she didn’t draw its folds together. Mikhail looked at her eyes and then, his face flaming, looked to the other place again.
“In my youth you’d be burned at the stake for what you’re thinking,” Renati told the girl. Then she pushed Mikhail aside and bent over Franco again, pressing a handful of snow against his shattered leg bones. Alekza drew her cloak shut with nimble fingers, and then she touched the two bloody furrows on Mikhail’s back; she regarded the smear of red on her fingertips before she licked it off.
Almost four hours later Wiktor and Nikita came home. They had intended to tell the others how their search had failed, because the berserker had marked every one of the caves with his spoor and Wiktor and Nikita had been caught by the winds on a narrow ledge overnight. They’d intended to tell them this, until they saw the huge red wolf lying dead in the snow and the crimson carnage all around. Wiktor listened intently as Renati told him how she and Alekza had heard the berserker howl and had gone out to find Mikhail locked in combat. Wiktor said nothing, but his eyes shone with pride, and from that day on he no longer looked at Mikhail and saw a helpless boy.
In the firelight Franco offered his right leg to the sharp edge of a piece of flint. The bones were already broken, so it was only a matter of cutting through torn muscle and a few tatters of flesh. His body oozing sweat, Franco gripped Renati’s hands and clenched a stick between his teeth as Wiktor did the work. Mikhail helped hold Franco down. The leg came off, and lay on the stones. The pack sat around it, deliberating, as the smell of blood perfumed the chamber.
The wind had begun to scream outside again. Another blizzard was sweeping across Russia, the land of winter. Wiktor drew his knees up to his chin, and he said softly, “What is the lycanthrope, in the eye of God?”
No one answered. No one could.
After a while, Mikhail got up and, pressing his hand against his wounded side, went up the stairs. He stood in a large chamber and let the wind flail him as it shrieked through the broken windows. Snow whitened his hair and gathered on his shoulders, making him appear aged in a matter of seconds. He looked up at the ceiling, where faded angels dwelled, and wiped blood from his lips.
SEVEN – The Brimstone Club
1
Germany was Satan’s country: of that, Michael Gallatin was certain.
As he and Mouse rode in their hay wagon, their clothes filthy and their skin even more so, their faces obscured by over two weeks’ beard growth, Michael watched prisoners of war chopping down trees on either side of the roadway. Most of the men were emaciated, and they looked like old men, but war had a way of making teenagers look ancient. They wore baggy gray fatigues, and swung their axes like tired machines. Standing guard over them was a truckload of Nazi soldiers, armed to the teeth with submachine guns and rifles. The soldiers were smoking and talking as the prisoners labored, and off in the far distance something was on fire, a pall of black smoke hanging against the gray eastern horizon. Bomb strike, Michael figured. The Allies were increasing their bombing raids as the invasion drew closer.
“Halt!” A soldier stepped into the road in front of them, and the wagon driver-a wiry German member of the Resistance named Gunther-pulled in the horse’s reins. “Get these loafers out!” the soldier shouted; he was a young
