forward, held out a finger, and ticked it back and forth in front of Petyr’s muzzle. The blue eyes followed it-and then Petyr’s head lunged out, the jaws opened, and clamped down on Wiktor’s finger.
Wiktor worked his finger out of the pup’s jaws and held it up. A little drop of blood had appeared. “Congratulations,” he said to Mikhail and Alekza. “Your son has a new tooth.”
Petyr, at least for the time being, had given up the battle with gravity. He squirmed across the floor, sniffing at the stones. A roach burst from a crack under Petyr’s nose and ran for its life, and Petyr gave a high yip of surprise, then continued his explorations.
“He’ll turn back, won’t he?” Alekza asked Wiktor. “Won’t he?”
“We’ll see,” Wiktor told her, and that was all he could offer.
About halfway across the chamber Petyr stubbed his nose on a stone’s edge. He began yelping with pain, and as he rolled on the floor his body started changing back to human form again. The fine dark hair retreated into the flesh, the muzzle flattened into a nose-one of the nostrils bloody-and the paws became hands and feet. The yelping was now a steady, full-throated cry, and Alekza rushed to the baby and picked him up. She rocked him and cooed to him, and finally Petyr hiccuped a few times and ceased crying. He remained a human infant.
“Well,” Wiktor said after a pause, “if our new addition survives the winter, he should be very interesting to watch.”
“He’ll survive,” Alekza promised. The glint of life had returned to her eyes. “I’ll make him survive.”
Wiktor admired his bitten finger. “My dear, I doubt if you’ll ever be able to make him do anything.” He glanced at Mikhail, and smiled slightly. “You’ve done well, son,” he said, and motioned Alekza and the baby back into the fire’s warmth.
Son, Mikhail realized he’d said. Son. No man had ever called him son before, and something about that sounded like music. He would sleep that night, listening to Alekza crooning to Petyr, and he would dream of a tall, lean man in a military uniform who stood with a woman Mikhail had all but forgotten, and that man would have Wiktor’s face.
4
At winter’s end Petyr was still alive. He accepted whatever food Alekza gave him, and though he had the habit of changing to a wolf pup without warning and driving the rest of the pack crazy with his constant yapping, he stayed mostly within human bounds. By summer he had all his teeth, and Wiktor kept his fingers away from the baby’s mouth.
Some nights, Mikhail sat on the ravine’s edge and watched the train go past. He began counting the seconds off as it roared from the western tunnel into the eastern. Last year, he’d run the race halfheartedly with Nikita. It had never really mattered to him how fast he could change. He knew he was fairly quick about it, but he’d always lagged behind Nikita. Now, though, Nikita’s bones lay in the Garden, and the train-an invincible thing-breathed its black breath and shone its gleaming eye through the night. Mikhail had often wondered what the crew had thought when they’d found blood and bits of black-haired flesh on the cowcatcher. We hit an animal, they’d probably thought if they considered it at all. An animal. Something that shouldn’t have been in our way.
Toward the middle of summer, Mikhail began to lope along with the train as it burst from the tunnel. He wasn’t racing it, just stretching his legs. The engine always left him in a whirl of sour black smoke, and cinders scorched his skin. And on those nights, after the train had disappeared into the tunnel, Mikhail crossed the tracks to where Nikita had died, and he sat in the weeds and thought, I could do it, if I wanted to. I could.
Maybe.
He would have to get a fast start. The tricky part was staying on your feet as your arms and legs changed. The way the backbone bowed your body over ruined your balance. And all the time your nerves and joints were shrieking, and if you tripped over your own paws, you could go into the side of the train, and a hundred other terrible things could happen. No, it wasn’t worth the risk.
Mikhail always left telling himself he wouldn’t come back. But he knew it was a lie. The idea of speed, of testing himself against the beast that had killed Nikita, lured him. He began to run faster, alongside the train; but still not racing it, not yet. His balance still wasn’t good enough, and he fell every time he tried to change from human to wolf while running. It was a problem of timing, of keeping your footing until the front legs could come down and match the speed of the hind legs. Mikhail kept trying, and kept falling.
Renati returned from a hunt one afternoon with startling news: to the northwest, less than five miles from the white palace, men had started cutting down trees. They’d already made a clearing, and were building shacks out of raw timbers. A road was being plowed through the brush. The men had many wagons, saws, and axes. Renati said she’d crept in close, in her wolf form, to watch them working; one of the men had seen her, she said, and pointed her out to the others before she could get back into the woods. What did it mean? she asked Wiktor.
The beginning of a logging camp, he thought. Under no circumstances, he told the pack, were any of them to go near the place again, in either human or wolf form. The men would probably work through the summer and leave. It was best to let them alone.
But from that point on, Mikhail noted that Wiktor became silent and brooding. He forbade anyone to hunt except at night. He was nervous, and paced back and forth in the chamber long after everyone else had settled down to rest. Soon, when the wind was right, Mikhail and the others could recline in the sun outside the white palace and hear the distant sound of axes and saws at work, gnawing the forest away.
And the day came.
Franco and Renati went out to hunt, as a crescent moon hung in the sky and the woods thrummed with the sound of crickets. Little more than an hour had passed before the noise of distant gunshots silenced the insects and echoed through the corridors of the white palace.
Mikhail counted four shots as he stood up from Alekza’s side. Petyr played with a rabbit bone on the floor. Wiktor dropped the book of Latin he’d been reading to Mikhail and rose to his feet. Two more shots were fired, and the sounds made Mikhail flinch; he remembered very well the noise of gunfire, and what a bullet could do.
As the last shot faded a howling began: Franco’s hoarse voice, panicked and calling for help.
“Stay with Petyr,” Wiktor told Alekza, and as he strode toward the stone stairway he was already changing. Mikhail followed, and the two wolves left the white palace streaking through the darkness toward Franco’s wall. They had gone not quite a mile when they smelled the gunsmoke and the odor of men: a bitter, frightened sweat smell. Lanterns glowed in the woods, and the men were calling to each other. Franco had begun making a high, frantic yipping noise, an aural beacon that led Wiktor and Mikhail directly to him. They found him crouched on a bluff, amid dense underbrush, and before them lay a circle of tents around a campfire. Wiktor rammed his shoulder into Franco’s ribs to shut him up, and Franco lay on his belly in a submissive posture, his eyes glittering with terror-not of Wiktor, but of what now occurred in the firelit clearing.
Two men with rifles slung around their shoulders dragged something out of the woods and into the light. There were six other men, all armed with either pistols or rifles and carrying lanterns. They gathered around the form that sprawled in the dust, and thrust out their lanterns over it.
Mikhail felt Wiktor shiver. His own lungs seemed full of icy needles. There on the ground was the carcass of a wolf with russet fur, pierced by three bullet holes. Renati’s blood looked black in the lamplight. And there, for all to see, was a dead wolf with one human arm and a human leg.
My God, Mikhail thought. Now they know.
One of the loggers began to pray-a coarse, ranting Russian voice-and as he reached the end of his prayer he put the barrel of his rifle against Renati’s skull and blew it apart.
“We heard the men,” Franco said when they’d gotten back to the chamber. He was shaking, and sweat gleamed on his skin. “They were laughing and talking around their fire. Making so much noise you’d have to be deaf not to hear them.”
“You were stupid to go there!” Wiktor raged, spraying spittle. “Damn it to hell, they killed Renati!”
“She wanted to get closer,” Franco went on dazedly. “I tried to turn her back, but… she wanted to see them. Wanted to get right up and hear what they were saying.” He shook his head, fighting shock. “We stood at the edge of the clearing… so close we could hear their hearts beat. And I think… something about them, so close, hypnotized her. Like seeing creatures from another world. Even when one of the men looked up and saw her, she still didn’t
