Ulrik

by Steven E Wedel

  Kiona shrugged.

  “Come, Shara,” Thomas urged. “Let’s go inside.” He released her hand, but remained close to her.

  “This isn’t finished,” Shara said to Kiona. She shouldered her way past Adam and threw open the screen door of the house, barely noticing the elegance of the place as she headed for the staircase. Thomas took her by the arm and slowed her ascent.

  “Until you regain your Gift, you cannot defeat her,” he said.

  Shara turned on him. “I could just shoot her.”

  “Aye, you could. But remember that your son has come to care a great deal for her. You have to destroy that relationship first or he’ll resent you for it.”

  Shara tried to answer, but found no words. She dropped her head, then nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Now … about this bedroom situation,” Thomas said. The uncomfortable tone of his voice made Shara look up. He was blushing, and she couldn’t suppress a smile. “For your safety, I think I should stay in the room with you. I can do it as a wolf if you prefer it that way.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “As I said, for your safety. I don’t like the thought of you being alone with that woman in the house.”

  “Adam is watching over her.”

  “And I will watch over you.”

  Shara laughed. “Okay. At least until Ulrik gets back with Joey.”

  “Good. Let’s find a room, then find the kitchen. As that rock band sang in the 1980s, I am hungry like the wolf.”

  Shara groaned. “I thought Duran Duran sucked then, and I still do. I was a big Styx fan back then” She paused, thinking of eating. “My stomach has been hurting most of the day. I just want to lie down for a while.” She started back up the stairs, not minding that Thomas kept his hand gently on her arm.

  Ulrik

  Ulrik slept in the warm sunshine of a Mexican afternoon. There was snow in his dreams, though, and he was in another place, a long time ago and far to the north. A blizzard had just ended and he had returned to a small cabin, changed his shape and was trying to warm his cold hands by holding them near a pot-bellied stove.

  He fought the dream. He didn’t want to remember it. Not now. But it came, anyway.

  * * *

  Inside the small log cabin high in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory, Ulrik extended his hands toward the warmth of the stove’s open door. Snow melted and dripped from his thick beard, matting the hair so the new gray highlights were slicked against the dark hair of his youth. Except for the heavy blanket draped over his shoulders, he was naked. A dead white rabbit lay on the floor beside him, a droplet of blood occasionally falling from the wound on its neck.

  When his hands were warm, Ulrik lifted the rabbit by the ears and flopped its limp body onto a rough-hewn table in one corner of the cabin’s single room. In the strange logic of dreams he knew that over one hundred years later he would put sacks of groceries and clothes on a similar table for Shara Wellington, then he would brand her with the mark of the Pack and leave her to fend for herself. But that was far in the future.

  Ulrik plucked a knife from a shelf over the table and deftly peeled away the white fur of the rabbit. He tossed the skin toward the door of the cabin, then sliced the rabbit into pieces. He placed an iron skillet on the top of the stove, added a glob of lard, and dropped the pieces of rabbit into the skillet. Soon the cabin was filled with the smell and sound of sizzling meat.

  Ulrik absently pushed the pieces of meat around in the skillet to keep them from sticking. He plucked light, loose hair from his arms and brushed more from his naked torso. He was thinking of how nice it would be to have a hot, cooked meal and considered adding potatoes to his dinner menu when he heard a sound outside his cabin. He pulled on his trousers and grabbed his rifle, then threw the blanket around his shoulders again as the sound neared his front door.

  Footsteps. Two sets of them crunching through the snow. Now one hurried away. Ulrik threw the door open, his carbine held loosely in his right hand. An Indian girl stood meekly on his small porch, her head down. An older man was running away.

  “Stop!” Ulrik commanded. The Indian turned to look, but kept running. Ulrik fired a shot over the fleeing man’s shoulder. The Indian stopped running. He waited a long moment before turning around. “Come here,” Ulrik called. The Indian trudged through the snow back toward the cabin until he was standing on the porch beside the girl.

  “Who are you?” Ulrik asked.

  “I am called Dark Feather,” the Indian answered in the language of the Sioux. He was dressed in leather pants and shirt with a coat of buffalo hide hanging from his shoulders to his knees. Except for a knife at his waist, he was unarmed.

  “Why do you come here? Why do you leave this girl at my door?” Ulrik asked in the Indian’s language.

  The Indian kept his head high, but his face showed internal pain as he answered. “She is my daughter. She — she is no longer welcome in our village. She has been touched by the wolf spirit.”

  “Explain what you mean,” Ulrik said.

  The man took his daughter’s head in his hands, gently but firmly, and tilted her face back. He spread her lips so that Ulrik could see her teeth. One of her incisors was broken off so that it was shorter than the surrounding teeth. Ulrik saw that the broken tooth had a jagged edge. When Dark Feather saw that Ulrik noted the tooth, he released his daughter. She lowered her head again.

  “Her name is Kiona,” Dark Feather said. “She is called Broken Tooth now. She runs with the wolves. She sings with the wolves. She broke her tooth eating a buffalo killed by the wolves. She was sharing in their kill.” He looked at Ulrik as if he expected the white man to say his daughter was crazy.

  “Why do you bring her to me?” Ulrik asked.

  “Because you, too, sing with the wolves. You know them even better than my daughter. She cannot return to our people. I would not leave her to die in the forest,” the Sioux finished quietly. “I have no other children.”

  Ulrik looked at the child. She was a slender thing, probably eight years old, dressed much like her father, though she wore a leather skirt instead of pants. Rabbit fur was tied around her shins. Her moccasins were wet. Her bare hands trembled at her sides.

  “I do not take her as a wife,” Ulrik said. “I will take her as a daughter and teach her that which she needs to know. She will be safe here.”

  “I will come to see her. I – ”

  “No. You will not see her,” Ulrik said. “She is dead to you, and you to her. To have it otherwise would cause her to return to your village. Your people will not allow that. She will be well. You have my promise.”

  The Indian stared at Ulrik for a moment, his face set, then he turned on his heel and trotted away through the snow. He did not look back at his daughter or the white man he left her with. Not that Ulrik saw. Once the Sioux disappeared into the tree line, Ulrik heard the warrior raise a cry of despair. He knew the Indian would tell his people he had killed his strange daughter.

  “Come inside, child,” Ulrik said. He could smell his supper burning behind him. Reluctantly, the girl obeyed. Ulrik closed the door. “Sit down and I will bring you some hot food.” He pointed toward the table and the single chair before it. The girl sat mutely, her head still bowed.

  They ate in silence. The girl kept her eyes on her tin plate, tearing her meat with her fingers and chewing quickly. When she was finished, she put her hands in her lap and continued to stare at her empty plate.

  “Do you think you are a wolf?” Ulrik asked at last. The girl nodded, paused, and shook her head. “Which is it? Yes or no?” She finally raised her eyes to look at him.

  “I think that my spirit leaves my body and becomes a wolf,” she said. “I thought it was dreams. My father says that I sing the wolf song in my sleep.

  “One day I was gathering wood for our fire and I saw the wolves and they saw me and they came to me and were around me and I ran with them as I am. They accepted me. Since then, they have c
ome close to our village and called to me. I go to them. I hunt with them.”

  “Have you been bitten by a wolf, child?”

  “No.”

  “This is strange,” Ulrik said. “I have not heard of this before. Did any of these wolves ever change its shape and become a man or woman?”

  Her eyes showed her confusion. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Is it true that you have that power? My people say you were once a wolf and the coyote tricked you into becoming a man. You are only allowed to return to your wolf skin when the moon is full.”

  “I have always been a man,” Ulrik answered. “But I have also been a wolf for all of the life I can remember. It is true that I can change from man to wolf and back again. I do so at will, but when the moon is full, I am the wolf only.”

  “You will give this gift to me?” Her face was eager. She placed her palms on the top of the table and leaned forward.

  Ulrik studied her for a long moment. At last he nodded once.

  “It is told that the Pack will gather,” he said. “When that happens, there will be one among us who can produce our kind naturally, without violence. Perhaps ...”

  “You think I am that one?”

  “I do not know,” Ulrik said, shaking his head. “It is not natural, the things you say you have done. The things you say you can do. Perhaps you are the one. Have you had the blood yet?”

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  “The blood that makes you a woman?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Ulrik nodded slowly.

  “Will you give me the gift now?”

  “No. Not now. I must think first. I must know. The freedom to release the beast within is not something to be given lightly. Go to sleep now.” He waved one thick hand toward the narrow bed in another corner of the cabin.

  The girl looked at the bed and back at him warily.

  “Sleep child.” Ulrik smiled. “I will sit here and think and when I am ready I will sleep on the floor.”

  The girl went to the bed and soon Ulrik heard her breathing deeply and steadily. He remained at the table, waiting. Soon he heard the howl of a wolf. It was answered by another. Then a chorus took up the song. It was a call to the hunt. The girl stirred restlessly in the bed. Ulrik watched her.

  Kiona clawed the blankets off her body and writhed on the thin mattress stuffed with autumn grass. She bared her teeth and licked her lips. Finally she arched her back and answered the call, her thin, high voice filling the cabin. She sprang from the bed and ran for the door. Ulrik caught her and held her in his arms, pressing her close as she struggled against him. Her eyes were savage blanks, her face an angry snarl. She snapped at him, saliva spraying his face as he dodged her mouth.

  With a great effort, Ulrik got a heavy blanket around the girl. He rolled her in it, pinning her arms tightly to her sides, then he bound the blanket with a piece of rope. He lifted her from the floor and put her back on the bed. She thrashed against her binding, her face still contorted with rage, pausing only occasionally to throw her head back and answer the wolves that had moved closer to the cabin.

  Near dawn, the wolves outside gave up and moved away. Slowly, the girl in the bed settled back into a peaceful sleep, her eyes closing and her limbs relaxing. Ulrik touched her soft face, moved a lock of long black hair off her sweaty brow.

  He spread a blanket on the floor and slept until the sun was high in the sky.

  When he awoke, he was greeted by the solemn, steady gaze of the Sioux girl. She lay where he had left her, still bound in the blanket. Ulrik got to his feet, stiff from the hours spent on the hard dirt floor.

  “Good morning, Kiona Brokentooth,” he said.

  “Why am I tied like this?”

  “You do not remember anything from the night?”

  “No. Did I have the wolf dream again?”

  “You did. I bound you to keep you from going to them.”

  “Why?”

  “They are pure animals, without reason,” Ulrik said. “That you do not remember trying to go to them makes me believe you would become like them in mind as well as body. You are not the one I spoke of last night. You are not the Mother of the Pack.”

  “But you will still give me your gift.”

  Ulrik didn’t answer. He only looked at the girl and watched the hope die in her black eyes.

  “Untie me, please,” she said. “I must make water.”

  Ulrik untied her and helped her out of the bed. He watched her leave the cabin, then went to the shelf over the table and took some pieces of dried venison from a bag. He tried to ignore the disappointment he felt. He knew in his heart the time was not right for the Mother of the Pack to emerge. Still, he felt it was his destiny to find the one.

  Sighing, he dropped the meat onto the table and pulled off his clothes. He closed his eyes and called the wolf, then bounded through the door after the Indian girl.

  Ulrik found her squatted over a bowl she’d carved in the snowy grass behind the cabin. She showed no surprise when he trotted up to her. She finished urinating, a fast hard stream of pungent fluid, then stood up, letting her buckskin skirt fall past her knees. She stepped away from the puddle she had made, toward the wolf. His head was on a level with her chest. She raised a hand and stroked the area between his ears.

  Ulrik knew if he thought about what he was doing he would stop himself. He didn’t want to stop. She was young, but she obviously had some gift already. There was something special about the child. No one could deny that she was meant to receive the Gift.

  Ulrik pushed his muzzle into her chest, tearing open her shirt with his teeth and finding the smooth young flesh beneath. He nipped her, just enough to bring the blood. He licked the wound roughly, forcing the child to put both hands around his neck just to remain on her feet. It was enough, he knew. It took very little of the wolf’s saliva to pass the gift to another.

  He smelled them as they drew near. From all around, the wolves came to witness the passing of the Gift to this child. They raised their voices, dozens of them, and sang to the afternoon sun.

  Even as Ulrik lapped the blood from her bosom, the girl threw back her head and howled with the wolves.

  Then she pushed Ulrik away and tore blindly at her clothes until she stood naked before him. Astonished and wary, Ulrik watched the child change shape as if she had been born with the ability. Soft black hair sprouted from the pores of her flesh; a tail erupted from her backside while her fingers drew into her palms and her hands thickened into the paws of a beast. She dropped to all fours, her face a picture of childish ecstasy. Her mouth opened and he saw that her canines had already grown long and sharp; the broken incisor remained damaged, but Ulrik knew it would not hinder her ability to rend flesh.

  At last she was done. Kiona Brokentooth stood before him, an eager young wolf ready for her first hunt. All around them, the natural wolves welcomed her, calling her to join them. Ulrik raised his own head and joined the song. Kiona sang with him.

  * * *

  Ulrik awoke to the sound of the singing. Joey was standing next to him, his wolf ears pricked forward as he listened. Ulrik listened for a moment, then sprang to his feet and returned the call. He was answered immediately. Ulrik kept howling at intervals until a brown wolf emerged from the trees, panting from exertion. The wolf stopped and quickly changed into a man, Curtis Hammond, a sandy-haired Virginian.

  “Kiona’s friend has killed Andreas,” Curtis said. “And the Mother has arrived.”

  Signaling that Joey should follow him, Ulrik broke into a run toward his house.

  Thomas

  “This one should do,” Shara said after opening the fourth bedroom door along the upstairs hallway and stepping inside.

  Thomas looked over her shoulder, noting that this was the first room they’d found with two full size beds. He made an effort to hide his disappointment. “Aye, this one looks just right to me. The door has a lock on it?” He turned and checked, already knowing it did.

>   “Seems every door has a lock on it,” Shara said. “And I bet Ulrik has a key to every one of them.”

  “No doubt,” Thomas agreed. “We didn’t bring much, but I will be the gentleman and fetch what little we have. Lock the door.”

  “Oh, come on,” Shara protested. “You don’t really think she’ll try something. Do you? I mean, that Adam guy is watching over her.”

  “It seems he isn’t the first babysitter she’s had.”

  “True. But she said it was the Indian guy who killed the other one. Maybe Kiona doesn’t dare do it herself in Ulrik’s house.”

  “That other guy can become a bear,” Thomas argued. “And he killed a man who could become a wolf. And I would not attach any honor or inhibitions to the name of Kiona Brokentooth. Whether she would attack you herself or send her bear friend to do it is something I’d rather not learn. Lock the door and keep your pistol ready.”

  Shara blushed before admitting, “I left it in the truck.” She then bent slightly and put a hand over her stomach.

  “You must keep your gun with you,” Thomas scolded, then grew concerned as Shara’s face wrinkled in pain. “Are you all right, lass?” He came to stand beside her, putting a hand on her back. She straightened and shook her head.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just a stomach cramp. Nerves, I guess. Or maybe it’s going back to eating meat. I’ll be okay. Go on. I’ll lock the door.”

  Her face was paler than he liked, but Thomas decided Shara seemed to be all right. He left the room, waited until he heard her turn the lock, then walked quickly back down the hall, descended the stairs and left the house. Adam and Kiona were no longer on the porch. Thomas grabbed the suitcases and bags containing the things they’d brought with them or purchased on the way from Oklahoma, retrieved all the weapons, and hurried back to the locked door. He knocked softly.