Don't Call the Wolf

by Aleksandra Ross

  He gave her a very strange, unreadable look. Ren wished he would just say what he was thinking out loud. But that was not the way of these humans. They kept their thoughts close to themselves. They lied.

  Lukasz crawled back toward the opening over the embankment of dead strzygi. He examined the sky and the forest floor carefully before he returned.

  “The Dragon’s gone,” he said. “But something is moving in that pit. We need to find the others and get out of here.”

  20

  THE DRAGON CIRCLED OVERHEAD. IT watched the strzygi burn, and it watched the pit open. Then it watched the girl and the Wolf-Lord crawl out from their pathetic hiding place and return to their little group.

  The Dragon watched them.

  It had expected more. It had expected her to fight—to burst out from under that tree, to challenge it for the forest. The Dragon smiled to itself. Wasn’t that why the girl was coming—to test it?

  The girl’s mother had fought. Bravely. The Dragon wouldn’t soon forget that day, seventeen years ago, when the pair of them had gone up in golden flames. No one had been able to stop it that day. No one could stop it now.

  Not even this little princess.

  It wondered if she knew how reckless she was being. After all the effort that had been taken to hide her, here she was, burning like a torch in the forest. Surrounding herself with all that humanity . . .

  It had been all too easy to find her. They had a particular scent, those humans: like blood and sweat, like greed and pride. Like hope.

  And one of them . . .

  The Dragon took another breath, just to be sure.

  One of them smelled like death.

  21

  THEY RODE NORTHEAST, CIRCUMVENTING THE dead strzygi, and around them, the forest darkened.

  They agreed they would cover more ground on horseback, and Felka quickly partnered up with Jakub. When Koszmar didn’t volunteer to take Ren, she ended up with Lukasz. She didn’t completely hate it. Besides, she had noticed that the silver-eyed soldier preferred being on his own.

  The branches had closed overhead, sky and sun disappearing behind tangled boughs. The dampness was lit only by the eerie glow of the antlers on Lukasz’s horse and by the Dragon’s flames. Golden fire crowned the blackened branches, licking lazily at the blistered trunks. It didn’t spread at all, just burned steadily. Silently. Dreamlike.

  The air was hazy with heat, shimmering. Blurring. Everything was red, warm, and dull, a hundred alternating shades of crimson. It was hot. Ren could already feel sweat beading on her forehead. It was silent. Owls didn’t call. Wolves didn’t cry. Crickets didn’t chirp.

  The silence was broken by their hoofbeats and by Felka’s and Jakub’s quiet voices. Czarn loped beside them, still favoring his paw, and Ryś trotted ahead, trying—without success—to sneak up on Ducha.

  This world was bloodstained and empty.

  Click, click.

  The lighter clicked on and off in the silence.

  On impulse, Ren slid her hands up Lukasz’s chest. He half turned, and she could just make out the edge of his shadowed jaw as she tugged herself high enough to murmur, by his ear: “I forgive you for shouting.”

  She felt his heart pound faster. His hair brushed her cheek. It was coarser than she had expected, like someone had cut it off in a hurry and never paid attention to it since. And then he said: “I forgive you for going through my stuff.”

  Ren bristled.

  “Well, I don’t forgive you for hitting me.”

  She had never noticed his eyelashes were quite so dark as he grinned. “Me neither.”

  Ren wondered, for the first time, if they were starting again. Right, this time.

  On they went, flames burning silently on every side. In the midafternoon, Lukasz’s horse—Król—threw a shoe. Their group stopped while Lukasz hammered a new one into place.

  Ren moved on to scout out the path ahead with Ryś and Czarn. The smoke had thickened, now weighing down the branches like dusky red snow. Gauzy drifts floated down to the ground and sparked.

  The haze was so dense that Ren could barely see in front of her. Czarn was panting.

  Shapes materialized from the smoke. Four wine-colored bundles huddled on the ground while birds circled above them. They swooped down, pecking, taking flight again.

  Storks.

  “Czarn,” she whispered. “Do you see that?”

  “Hard to miss,” interjected Ryś. “You should change, Ren.”

  “Don’t order me around in my forest,” snapped Ren, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “I don’t know if this is still your forest,” whispered her brother.

  The little group advanced on the shapes and the birds. Czarn barked, flinging strings of saliva across the forest. The sound was deafening in the silence. The storks barely stirred. Ryś growled.

  The closest stork, a shock of white in the red, turned to them. There wasn’t any fear in its beady black eyes.

  Czarn fell back and growled. The shapes on the ground had taken on terrifyingly familiar forms. From the trees, Ducha screeched.

  Almost lazily, the storks spread their wings. They sailed up to disappear into the smoke overhead. The flames had begun to expand, moving out of the periphery of Ren’s vision. They cast the bodies in flickering, red-orange light.

  Ren reeled. The flames were taller than she was, her vision rippling with heat. The warmth was crushing. Ren felt her hair growing heavy and wet, pressing along her neck. Then she looked down and screamed.

  Five bodies lay on the ground. And Ren knew them: Jakub, Koszmar, Felka, Lukasz. . . .

  Tree roots entwined them. One black root snaked out of Jakub’s empty eye socket, ran down his cheek, burrowed into the skin. Tiny, spidery roots twisted out of his open mouth, like black veins, running down his chin and encasing his throat.

  In spidery fingers, they forced open Koszmar’s mouth and surged down his lifeless throat. Another one, as thick around as the Dragon’s tail, curled lazily around his legs. Next to him, five cuts scored Lukasz’s body. Something wriggled beneath his skin, bubbling, slithering. Ren almost screamed as black, twisted fingers started to force their way out of the open wounds.

  No. She sank to her knees. No, not—

  BANG.

  A shot echoed across the forest.

  Ren staggered and spun around. It was . . . Lukasz? Alive and well, he stood five feet behind her, still silhouetted in red smoke. He lowered his rifle.

  “What’s going on—?” she choked.

  The others materialized behind Lukasz. Also alive. She twisted around, looked back at the bodies. The roots pulsed like blood vessels.

  “Stay back, Ren,” said Jakub, somewhere behind her. “It’s an illusion.”

  Ren suddenly registered that Lukasz had shot his own corpse. A bullet hole yawned in its chest, and through the hole, a red-rimmed eye blinked. Fingers emerged once more, wriggling free of the body’s chest.

  Lukasz—the real Lukasz—fired two more shots in quick succession. The corpse danced on the ground. Deep within it, something began to howl.

  Koszmar used the hilt of his saber to knock away Lukasz’s rifle.

  “Don’t waste bullets,” he ordered. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

  Ren wasn’t listening.

  “It’s some kind of warning,” murmured Jakub. Despite the situation, there was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. “Notice that the only corpses here are human. None of the animals are represented. . . .”

  Ren was moving toward the last body. She couldn’t stay away. It was impossible. It pulled her in. One stork remained, ignoring her and picking at its back. Even facedown, Ren recognized the body. The flames closed in as she knelt down. There was no room for fear. Only cold, bone-chilling realization.

  Her hand, blue in all the red, reached out and closed on the shoulder. She turned the body over.

  Ren met her own dead eyes.

  There were no roots. Nothing black
pushing out of her eyes, creeping out of her throat. The dead version of her looked just like her. Only its color was faded, lips going white, eyes filming over. Even the darkness seemed to drain from her hair.

  She was dead.

  Someone touched her shoulder, and Ren whipped around, fangs bared.

  “Hey—” Lukasz jumped back. Her hair, wild and sweaty, fell in her eyes. “It’s okay. It’s a trick. We’ll be all right—”

  A roar split the forest. It blasted across the trees and blew out the flames. The horses reeled.

  Probably instinctively, Lukasz grabbed her shoulder and dragged her in. For a moment they were close, so close that Ren could see the tiniest nick of a scar on the underside of his jaw, and then he looked up and away from her.

  “What the hell is that?” he shouted.

  The shout reverberated in his chest.

  The earth shook. The trees trembled, branches raining down on them. Another jarring tremor. The horses reeled again. A third tremor.

  Are those—?

  “Those are footsteps!” bellowed Czarn.

  “Is it a giant?” stammered Koszmar. He spun around, brandishing his saber.

  “I AM NO GIANT,” boomed a voice far above them.

  Lukasz didn’t let Ren go, and she was glad. She wrapped her fingers in the collar of his shirt, stared up at the sky overhead. Her eyes raked the trees. She was so focused on the world overhead that she never noticed that the bodies at their feet had disappeared.

  The booming voice continued, and the forest shook once.

  “I AM A GOD.”

  22

  NOW THAT THE VOICE WAS joined by a body, Lukasz realized that the giant—or the god, or whatever it was—was a bear. It stood as tall as the trees as it stepped toward them, each of its claws the length of Król’s body.

  Ren’s hand tightened and she pulled herself closer to him. It irritated him how easily she distracted him, how her tangled hair warmed his skin wherever it touched, how every time she was there, he wasn’t thinking, and then she whispered to him, “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

  “Didn’t realize I was allowed to,” he muttered back. “Isn’t it your forest?”

  Ren released him, jostling his wounded shoulder as she let go. It sent a stab of pain down his arm.

  Jakub’s and Koszmar’s horses kept backing up into one another. Ryś was hissing. Czarn was barking. But Lukasz wasn’t panicking. He was still focused on where her hand had landed on his shoulder to push him away, and that was exactly the kind of thinking that was about to get him killed.

  “WHO DARES DISTURB MY WOOD,” boomed the bear. With each word, its eyes blazed more furiously.

  Felka was brandishing one of Koszmar’s revolvers. Lukasz had a feeling that of all of them, she was the only one who wasn’t scared. Well, he wasn’t scared either, but that was because he was being stupid. Felka was actually being brave.

  “I am the queen of these woods!” Ren shouted, almost deafening him.

  Where her touch distracted him, that shout always brought him back. It usually meant someone—he—was risking evisceration.

  “Ren.” He grabbed her arm, but she wrenched away. “What are you—?”

  Ren ignored him.

  “I was raised on the courage of lynxes and the wits of the wolves,” she screamed. “I have faced the monsters of hell and I am not afraid of you!”

  Lukasz might not have been the toothiest psotnik in the rafters, but even he knew that threatening this thing—whatever it was—was not a good idea. And he wasn’t sure what he expected to come next, but it certainly wasn’t . . .

  The bear guffawed.

  . . . laughter?

  The trees shook and birds scattered. Then somewhere, someone snapped their fingers.

  And all of a sudden, the bear began to shrink. Its shoulders narrowed and its snout shortened and then it was slender instead of heavy, winnowing down by the second. A moment later, the creature—for there was no way it could possibly be a bear—disappeared into the trees.

  Lukasz could hear Ren breathing hard.

  “Why did you yell at it?” he exploded. “Ren, it said it was a bloody god, for Christ’s sake—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” retorted Ren. “Did you want to hit it with a shovel?”

  “Come on, you two—” started Koszmar.

  The trees rustled, and a tiny man emerged from the bushes. Reflexively, Lukasz dragged back on Król’s reins.

  Not a man. Whatever it was, it was barely waist high and nearly covered in thick brown hair. It had a long gray-brown beard that trailed on the ground and a bright blue cap pulled low over a pair of enormous, fuzzy ears. An uncomfortably big club trailed from one furry hand.

  “What’s the matter?” growled the little creature.

  As he shuffled toward them, his beard swept up a generous quantity of bugs. Lukasz stifled a gag as a spider skittered up his arm and crawled into one long, tufted ear.

  The little creature asked gruffly: “Never seen a forest god before?”

  Lukasz couldn’t help it. He laughed.

  The club swung with terrifying dexterity, and then the little creature was pointing it straight at him.

  “Watch it, boy,” he snapped. “Or I’ll knock that pretty head of yours clear off, understood?”

  Lukasz heard Ren giggle.

  “I came to see her,” said the little man. His voice abruptly changed. It had a silky, wheedling quality to it. “The queen.”

  Ren stopped giggling.

  The creature sank to one knee and swept the cap off his head. A few mice fell out and dashed away across the path. Ryś followed them with hungry eyes but thankfully stayed put.

  Then, to Lukasz’s shock—and minor horror—Ren smiled. With her odd, liquid grace, she slipped forward to kneel in front of the creature. His escaped mice came back and began playing in the folds of her skirt.

  “Stay on this path, and you will never the leave the woods alive,” said the creature in a soft voice. “The trees are encircling you. They are holding hands and singing sweet nightmares into your minds.”

  Lukasz suddenly remembered his dream from the night before.

  Then the creature added gently: “Did you see the storks?”

  “Who are you?” murmured Ren.

  Lukasz wasn’t quite sure what he was witnessing, but instinct told him not to interrupt. One of the mice crawled up on Ren’s shoulder and examined her intently.

  “I am Leszy—” began the little man, before breaking off.

  Looking slightly confused, he inserted a long finger in his ear and wiggled it.

  “Itchy-scratchy,” he muttered, wiggling furiously, momentarily forgetting them. “Itchy-scratchy, really quite nasty—”

  Lukasz remembered the spider and winced.

  Koszmar had sidled up beside him, and now he muttered, “What the hell’s a Leszy?”

  “The Leszy is the protector of these woods,” interjected Jakub in a low voice. “He is both god and spirit, shape-shifter and trickster.”

  “I thought she was the protector of the woods,” said Koszmar, nodding toward Ren.

  The queen straightened up, the Leszy’s mice now gathered in her arms. Far from being suspicious of the little god, she looked calm. Almost serene. Before Lukasz could look away, she glanced toward him. And even then, her face softened. He barely recognized her as she raised her cupped palms to show him her tiny charges. They scampered out of her hands up to her shoulders, playing in her hair and squeaking at each other. She looked, he realized, happier than he’d ever seen her before.

  Despite the very real possibility of being clubbed to death by a tiny madman, Lukasz couldn’t help finding Ren and her mice oddly charming.

  “Leszy is different,” Jakub was explaining. “He is an ancient shape-shifter. He’s very wise and very powerful.”

  The so-called Very Wise and Very Powerful himself had at last extracted the spider from his ear by one long hairy leg. With exquisite care, he
deposited it on the ground.

  “Doesn’t make sense to me,” muttered Koszmar. “Why now? We’ve been in the woods for days.”

  “Me neither,” agreed Lukasz, feeling a little off-kilter. “We’re missing something here.”

  “Your brains, perhaps?” suggested the Leszy in a snide voice.

  With a strangely nimble gait for someone so round, the Leszy danced up to Jakub, who looked confused. All the same, the Unnaturalist knelt down. The Leszy leaned in so close that his slightly animal nose almost touched Jakub’s mostly incomplete one. Then, while the Unnaturalist remained as still as death, the Leszy put a knobbly hand on his face and pulled it down, gently tracing the scars.

  He smiled.

  “Well done, my queen,” he whispered.

  He had a strange mouth. His upper lip was parted down the middle, curving up on either edge. The mouth of a cat, covered in fine fur.

  Ren looked up sharply—almost guiltily.

  Before any of them could reply, the Leszy leapt up and danced away. He flashed up the hill adjoining them, disappearing in and out of the trees. With his fur the exact color of the bark, he was practically invisible in the underbrush—

  “Well? Come on, you lot! Come on!”

  He reappeared, dancing among the trees. He hopped from one hairy foot to another like an impatient, slightly ugly child.

  “Follow the god!” he trilled. “Follow the trickster! The saints know where I’ll take you, but the gods will it will be good! Follow the god, follow the god!”

  Ren glanced back at Lukasz, and he had the sudden conviction that she was looking for his agreement. For some ridiculous reason, the possibility made him happy.

  “You can’t be serious,” he started.

  Koszmar had gone very pale.

  “We should go,” murmured Felka.

  Beside her, Jakub nodded.

  “I think we can trust him.”

  The Leszy’s bandy legs had already taken him far ahead. He whistled for them and called back:

  “Follow the god!”

  And with that, they were scrambling up the hill, leaving the path, and disappearing into the heart of the woods.