“My God, you’re right!” Stefan agreed. He instantly picked up his rifle and cocked it.
The noise made Mikhail open his eyes again. The two soldiers stood not fifteen feet from him. “We’d better tell Novikov about this,” Stefan said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going any closer.” He turned away, hurriedly striding through the woods. The first man flicked his cigarette butt aside and followed his companion.
Mikhail rose up from his crouch. He could not let them get back to their camp. Could not; must not. He thought of bones being wrenched from the Garden like fragile roots, of Renati’s skull being blown to pieces, of what these men would do to Alekza and Petyr once they returned with their guns and explosives.
Rage burned in him, and a low growl started in his throat. The soldiers were crashing through the woods, almost running. Blood was still in Mikhail’s mouth from the dead rabbit; his body darted after the soldiers, a black streak through the gray forest. He ran silently, with the tight grace of a killer. And even as he closed on the two men and judged the point to begin his leap, he knew a simple fact: a wolf’s tears were no different from a human’s.
He sprang up and forward, his hind legs like iron springs, and he landed on the cigarette smoker’s back before the man even knew he was there.
Mikhail drove the man down, into the dead leaves, and clamped his jaws on the back of his neck. He wrenched the head violently left and right, heard the sound of bones splintering. The man thrashed, but it was the death throes of nerves and muscle. Mikhail finished breaking his neck, and the man died without a sound.
There was a shuddered gasp. Mikhail looked up, his green eyes glittering.
Stefan had turned, and was lifting his rifle.
Mikhail saw the soldier’s finger tightening on the trigger. An instant before the bullet left the rifle Mikhail leaped aside, diving into the underbrush, and Russian lead kicked up a gout of Russian dust. A second shot rang out, the bullet passing over Mikhail’s shoulder and thunking into an oak tree. Mikhail swerved left and right, sliding to a sudden halt on a carpet of dead leaves, and heard the soldier running. The man bellowed for help, and Mikhail went after him like silent judgment.
The soldier tripped over his own boots, scrambled up, and kept going. “Help me! Help me!” he screamed, and spun around to fire a shot at what he thought was coming up behind him. Mikhail, however, was circling around to cut him off from his camp. The soldier kept running and screaming, dead leaves in his hair, and Mikhail burst out of the underbrush and started to leap but in the next second there was no need to waste the energy.
The ground opened under the soldier’s feet, and the man went down into the dirt and leaves. His screaming stopped, on a strangled note. Mikhail stood carefully on the trench’s edge and looked down. The soldier’s body twitched, even with seven or eight sharpened stakes piercing him. The smell of blood was very strong, and that coupled with Mikhail’s rage, caused him to spin around and around, snapping at his tail.
In another moment he heard shouts: more soldiers, rapidly approaching. Mikhail turned and sped back to where the first man lay dead. He gripped the corpse’s neck between his jaws and struggled to haul the body into the brush. The body was heavy, and the flesh tore; it was a messy job. From the corner of his eye he saw a flash of white; Wiktor came to his side and helped him drag the corpse into the darkness beneath a thick stand of pines. Then Wiktor snapped at Mikhail’s muzzle, a signal for him to retreat. Mikhail hesitated, but Wiktor roughly shoved him with a shoulder and he obeyed. Wiktor crouched down in the leaves, listening to the sounds of the soldiers. There were eight of them, and as four pulled the dead man off the stakes the other four began to stalk through the forest, their rifles cocked and ready.
The beasts had come, as Wiktor had always known they someday would. The beasts had come, and they would not be denied their bloody flesh.
Wiktor stood up, a ghost amid the trees, and ran back to the white palace with the foul scent of the beasts in his nostrils.
5
A hand gripped Mikhail’s shoulder, rousing him from a restless two hours of sleep, and a finger pressed against his lips.
“Quiet,” Wiktor said, crouching next to him. “Just listen.” He glanced at Alekza, who was already awake and clutching Petyr close, then back to Mikhail.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Franco stood up, with the help of his staff.
“The soldiers are coming,” Wiktor answered, and Franco’s face blanched. “I saw them from the tower. Fifteen or sixteen of them, maybe more.” He’d seen them in the deep blue predawn light, darting from tree to tree, thinking they were invisible. Wiktor had heard the squeak of wheels; they’d brought their machine gun with them.
“What are we going to do?” Franco’s voice quavered on the edge of panic. “We’ve got to get out while we can!”
Wiktor looked at the low-burning fire, then slowly nodded. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go.”
“Go?” Mikhail asked. “To where? This is our home!”
“Forget that!” Franco told him. “We’ll have no chance if they catch us down here.”
“He’s right,” Wiktor agreed. “We’ll hide in the forest. Maybe we can come back after the soldiers clear out.” The way he said it told them all he didn’t believe it; once the soldiers found the pack’s den, they might move in themselves before the first snow. Wiktor stood up. “We can’t stay here any longer.”
Franco didn’t hesitate. He cast aside his staff, and gray hair began to scurry over his flesh. Within a minute he was changed, his body balanced on three legs. Mikhail would have changed, too, but Petyr still wore human skin and so Alekza couldn’t change either. He elected to remain human. Wiktor’s face and skull began the transformation; he threw off his robe, sleek white hair emerging from his chest, shoulders, and back. Franco was already going up the stone stairs. Mikhail grasped Alekza’s hand and pulled her and the child after him.
Fully changed, Wiktor took the lead. They followed him through the winding passageways, past the high vaulted windows where the trees had broken through-and suddenly they saw the dawn sky light up. Not with the sun, which was still a red slash across the horizon, but with a sparkling, sizzling ball of white fire that rose from the forest and arced down, bathing everything with garish, incandescent light. The ball of fire fell in the palace’s courtyard, and two more rose up from the woods and fell after it. The third one smashed the remaining stained glass from a window and came into the palace itself, sputtering and glowing like a miniature sun.
Wiktor barked at the others to keep moving. Mikhail lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the blinding glare, his other hand locked on Alekza’s. Franco ran on his three legs just behind Wiktor. Beyond the windows, darkness had turned to false, cold white daylight. Something about this was dreamlike to Mikhail, as if he moved through the corridors of a nightmare on sluggish legs. The glaring light cast grotesque, distorted shadows on the walls, merging those of human and wolf into new life-forms.
Mikhail’s sense of unreality remained even when the soldier-a faceless shape-appeared in the corridor before them, lifted his rifle, and fired.
Wiktor was already leaping for the man, but Mikhail heard Wiktor grunt and knew the bullet had hit its target. Wiktor drove the soldier down under his weight, and as the man screamed Wiktor tore his throat out with one savage twist.
“They’re here! Over here!” another soldier shouted. “A dozen of them!” The noise of boots echoed on the stones. A second rifle fired, and sparks leaped off the wall just above Franco’s head. Wiktor turned, slamming into Franco to back him up the way they’d just come. Mikhail saw perhaps eight or nine soldiers in the corridor ahead; escape through that route was impossible. Wiktor was barking, his voice hoarse with pain, some of the soldiers were shouting, and Petyr wailed in Alekza’s arms. Two more shots rang out, both of the bullets ricocheting off the walls. Mikhail turned and ran, pulling Alekza with him. And then he came around the bend of a passage and stopped short, face-to-face with three soldiers.
They gaped at him, surprised to see a human being. But the first man regained his wits and trained his rifle barrel at Mikhail’s chest.
Mikhail heard himself growl. He reached out, a blur of motion, grasped the barrel, and uptilted it as the gun fired. He felt the hot streak of the bullet as it kissed his shoulder. His other arm lunged forward, and it was only when his hooked claws sank into the man’s eyes that he realized his hand had changed. It had happened in an instant, a miracle of mind over body, and as he tore the man’s eyes out the soldier screamed and staggered back
