A low growl echoed along the floor; he felt it more than heard it. But Sasha wiggled back, tried to get deeper beneath the shelf. Not a threat, but a plea. Go away. Leave me alone. In a back corner of his mind, behind the protective layers of order and authority, Nikita felt something break.
“What did he do to you?” he whispered. “Are you still in there, Sasha? It’s Nikita. Do you know me?” Not knowing what else to do, he extended the backs of his fingers for inspection, like he would when meeting a strange dog for the first time.
Sasha growled again, but his head lifted a fraction and his nostrils flared. Scenting, Nikita thought. Just like a canine.
“It’s okay. Come on.”
No one else in the room was speaking. He couldn’t even hear them shifting on their feet.
“Come on, Sasha. It’s me.”
Sasha stopped growling. Some of his tension seemed to ease, his knees gapping apart so his face peeped through them.
Nikita dared to inch a little closer.
Sasha leaned toward him, still testing the air with his nose. And then slowly, slowly, he uncoiled and shifted forward. Close. Closer.
Nikita felt a single, tooth-chattering lick of fear when Sasha leaned in and smelled the back of his hand like some strange animal thing instead of the boy he’d just been comforting on the table minutes before. He felt the hot, wet dart of Sasha’s tongue on his knuckles.
And then Sasha heaved a deep sigh and he went boneless. “Nikita,” he said, voice full of relief and checked tears. He slumped to the floor and crawled the last distance, curling up at Nikita’s side, head tipping to rest on his shoulder, letting Nikita support his weight.
Nikita sat very still, his heart pounding.
Sasha breathed a warm sigh against his neck, shut his eyes, and passed out.
16
BODARK
Nikita.
Good. Kind. Dangerous.
Friend. Pack.
There was so much pain. So many sounds. And smells.
Chaos. Too bright, too cold, too much.
He smelled blood, and something dead, and the rank fear-sweat of humans. Humans afraid of him.
He was hungry. And he hurt.
He wanted his family. His pack.
And then there was Nikita, good-smelling and soft-voiced, and trustworthy. Good, good, pack-Nikita.
He curled up at his side and let the exhaustion take him. A good alpha wasn’t supposed to sleep at a time like this, but he could trust Nikita to keep watch. At least for now. At least until it wasn’t so much…
He slept.
~*~
He was heavier than he looked, but Nikita didn’t accept Ivan’s offer to carry him. He was worried the shift in – in scents – might wake Sasha, and then they’d have a repeat of his first outburst on their hands. He carried him bridal style, head carefully balanced on his shoulder so the boy’s face was against his throat, right where he’d placed it himself. Ivan held the doors, instead, and they left the steel tables, soldiers, and too-bright lights behind, going into the small, and thankfully empty, bunk room several feet down the hall.
Nikita tried to lay Sasha down on a cot, but his fingers clenched in the fabric of his shirt. A short spasm, a reflex. So Nikita sat down on the cot himself, slumping back against the wall, and let Sasha settle in next to him, still curled up in an impossibly tight ball of white limbs.
He glanced up to find his men gathered around him, faces caught in expressions of mixed horror and fascination.
Philippe was there too, smiling; he’d followed them.
In a voice so calm it startled him, Nikita said, “What the fuck did you do?” He was too wrung-out to put any heat behind it.
“Exactly what I set out to do,” the old man said. “We won’t know for sure just how strong he is, or how reasonable he’ll be until after he’s rested, but the ceremony was otherwise successful.” His smile threatened to crack his face in two. “I couldn’t have hoped for a stronger wolf than the alpha we used today. Just splendid.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand the mechanics of it. But I could try to explain–”
“Do.”
“At its most basic, it’s a summoning spell. As powerful as I am, I can’t force the wolf into the man; I can only act as an energy source and a conduit for the power. I extend a conditional invitation – you can come into corporeal form, but only if you help me unite the souls of wolf and man.”
“Invitation to who?” Pyotr asked, voice high and shaky.
“A demon, of course,” Philippe said, patiently, like Pyotr was an especially dense child.
“You turned Sasha into a demon,” Nikita said. It was ridiculous and impossible. But he’d seen the change with his own eyes.
“No. I’ve turned him into a bodark. Sasha is a werewolf. We have to hope he’s strong enough to still be himself, too.”
~*~
A tin cup of tea materialized in front of his face and Nikita fought his startle reflex. The hand holding the cup belonged to Kolya, his frown concerned.
“Thanks,” Nikita said, reaching with his free hand for the tea. The other rested on Sasha’s ribs, against the steady beat of his heart, his arm curled around the boy’s shoulders.
“I brought you a sandwich too.”
“Hmm.” He sipped the tea, grateful for the burst of too-sweet jam across his tongue.
“I’ll force feed it to you if I have to.”
“Mmhm.”
Kolya sank down onto the cot across from theirs. “How is he?” He looked at Sasha with a blend of sadness and fondness, like someone visiting the sickbed of a dying relative.
It made Nikita’s insides squirm. “Still asleep.” And in truth, he was grateful for that. None of them had any idea what would happen when Sasha woke. Philippe, the bastard, had confessed that the last bodark he’d turned had proved too weak to keep hold of his own mind during the melding, and was a limping, drooling idiot, snarling and snapping, wandering barefoot down the streets. Mitya, his name had been. Everyone thought he’d had some sort of traumatic brain injury, and in a way, Nikita guessed he had.
“I haven’t ever…” Kolya started, and wiped a hand across his mouth. “Jesus. I saw it with my own eyes, and I still can’t believe it happened.”
“Yeah.”
Kolya studied the boy a long moment, head tipped to the side, considering. “I can sit with him a while if you want. You can catch some sleep that way.”
“No.” The longer he stewed on it, the more he realized it was a miracle no one had shot him amid the chaos. Whatever Sasha was now, whatever his powers were, he seemed heartbreakingly vulnerable right now, sleeping trustingly at Nikita’s side. “I’m fine.”
Kolya made a face but didn’t argue, produced a sandwich from his pocket and handed it over.
~*~
He dreamed wolf dreams. Snow beneath his paws, wind in his face. Smell of ice, and cold, and humans. The fast-beating heart of some small mammal hiding in a burrow down below. He ran and he felt joy, the perfect bunching and stretching of his muscles as he flew across the snow, breathing deep lungfuls of frigid air.
Around him, he smelled his pack, their individual scents as distinct as their faces. Ivan, and Feliks, and Pyotr, and Kolya, and Nikita – closest of all.
There was a hollowness, though. Members missing. Mournful howls shivering on the edges of his hearing.
He skidded to a stop in the snow and threw his head back so he could add his own voice to the chorus.
He woke with the howl echoing deep in his chest. And around him, he realized, as his eyes snapped open and he registered the sound bouncing off close concrete walls.
Concrete. Walls. Bunk room.
Oh.
He knew where he was.
Knew himself.
Nikita.
Pack.
He blinked and sat up to find five Chekists blinking and sitting up too, all of them staring at
him, even Nikita, who probably now had a crick in his neck from whipping toward him so fast. He searched for words, and found them, his voice a hoarse croak. “What’s going on?”
“You can talk?” Pyotr asked, sitting up a little higher, face relieved.
“Yeah, I–” He felt a bubbling pressure in his chest, like when he ate bad fish. It traveled upward, barreling up his throat. He opened his mouth and pitched forward, afraid he’d be sick. But it wasn’t lunch that left his lips…it was a growl.
Sasha clapped a hand over his mouth and the sound cut off, the pressure in his throat with it. “Shit,” he whispered through his fingers.
“Try it again,” Nikita suggested, amazingly calm considering he was pressed up against someone who’d just growled.
“I don’t know how.” He let his hand fall slowly into his lap, and stared at the scuffed toe of Ivan’s boot, frowning. “I don’t…” He thought about it, tunneled deep into his body and let his mind go quiet. He could smell them, all of them, each tangy and vibrant and all different. He could smell the staleness of the blankets and sheets beneath them on the cots. Smell faint echoes of others who’d slept here before them, the little flakes of dead skin they’d pressed into the pillow creases, the oil and dirt they’d tracked across the floor with their boots. It was amazing and overwhelming how many things he could smell. And hear – the buzzing of activity beyond the walls, soldiers moving around, busy bees in a hive.
He thought about the sound he’d made, and then he felt it building in his chest again, rolling up his throat. It didn’t scare him this time, and it rumbled out through his teeth, loud and threatening as it reached out into the room.
He felt himself smile afterward. “So I can do that.”
“I think,” Nikita said, “you can probably do a lot of things.”
“Can we eat? I’m starving.”
~*~
Sasha was ready to walk to the cafeteria, but Pyotr hurried off and returned with a tray laden with a watery stew with chunks of SPAM floating in it and a slice of pumpernickel without butter. Sasha reached for it readily, though his nose wrinkled at the scent. He was too hungry to be picky, he guessed, but he hadn’t realized before how terrible SPAM smelled.
Pyotr handed over the tray and took a quick step back, jerking his hands so they wouldn’t make contact with Sasha’s.
Sasha hesitated, bread half-dunked in the bowl, sadness overtaking him. Pyotr, his friend, was afraid of him now.
He took a hesitant bite of the bread, and once again hunger overrode everything, even the urge to gag the stew inspired. His belly was empty, and it needed filling, that was all there was to it. He finished the bread in four big bites and then took the hot bowl in both hands, put his lips to the edge, tipped it back, and drank it, SPAM chunks and all.
When he lowered it, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he found the others watching him with funny looks on their faces. All except Ivan, who grinned broadly.
“What?”
“Let’s find you some pants,” Feliks suggested.
~*~
Dressed in a cobbled-together uniform of black borrowed from the boys’ Cheka uniforms, and some of his own things, Sasha found that he was eager to go aboveground. To go anywhere, really. He wanted to explore. With his new heightened senses, every scent and sound and sight was an adventure. He felt safe, now, wrapped in the scents of Pyotr’s shirt and Feliks’s pants. They smelled familiar – his pack, a voice kept saying in the back of his mind – but it was a familiarity that he experienced in a whole new way. Before, he’d known that they were his friends, and that, whatever their moral shortcomings, they wished him well and wanted to keep him safe. But now the individual, razor-sharp scents of them traveled up his nose and burst inside his brain in warm pulses of love, and good, and brothers. Packmates. He had both kinds of knowledge now, and the combination of knowing and feeling intensified his need to be with them to something as elemental as his own heartbeat.
“You really are a pup now, I guess,” Ivan said with a chuckle, reaching to straighten the hat he’d plopped on Sasha’s head.
Sasha could smell the old, stale scent of dead wolf on the fur now, and a ripple of sadness moved through him. It was brief, though, and soon replaced by exuberance. “I want to go outside.”
Kolya, Feliks, and Pyotr couldn’t seem to decide if they were amused or horrorstruck by him, all with varying degrees of expression. Pytor’s eyes were wide, and damp; he kept chewing on his lip. Kolya, meanwhile, kept a hand hovering at all times near his belt, where he kept his collection of knives. Feliks fell somewhere in the middle, staring.
Ivan was still Ivan, though, and Nikita, though he looked asleep on his feet, with deep smudges under his eyes, smiled at him with the patient fondness of a parent.
“Why do you want to go outside?” he asked.
“I want to run.”
Ivan chuckled. “I think we have to check with the old man, first.”
The growl that left his mouth startled everyone, even Sasha himself.
“Well there’s the first sensible thing you’ve said,” Kolya said.
Ivan’s brows went up. “You don’t like that idea?”
“I…” He frowned, unable to explain it. He wasn’t angry, but a part of him wanted nothing to do with Monsieur Philippe. He could remember him, the smell of him still caught in his sinuses from before, an acrid, charred-wood smell that was nothing like the warm, musky scents of his packmates. “I don’t…he’s not pack,” he tried to explain, shrugging helplessly.
That earned some cautious looks.
But Nikita nodded and said, “I bet not. But. We’ve still got to check in. He knows more about all this than we do. Come on.”
~*~
Monsieur Philippe was in the room he’d established as his office, eating his own SPAM stew with seeming enjoyment, his face radiant with a contented sort of happiness. He beamed when they entered the room.
“Sasha!” He stood up so fast the spoon clattered out of the bowl and onto the table, slopping broth. “There you are. How are you feeling? Can you speak? Can he speak?” he asked Nikita.
Nikita sounded offended. “Yes. He can speak.”
Though he didn’t want to. He wanted to growl again, put himself between Philippe and his pack and lower his head, show the old man his teeth. It was an effort to hold his ground. “Hello,” he said, stiff and formal.
If anything, Philippe smiled wider. “You can smell me now, can’t you? All mages smell like fire. You’ll grow used to it, don’t worry.”
Sasha nodded, but his anxiety continued to wind tighter.
A hand settled on his shoulder, Nikita’s, grounding him, easing some of the tension growing in his belly. “Sasha wants to go outside.”
“A wonderful idea. Let’s go see what you can do.”
~*~
Outside! The smells! The sun!
A wedge of sun, anyway, silver fading into gold along the distant tree line as dusk fell. The compound stretched out flat and treeless, same as before, muddy where the snow had melted, a few stubborn, dirty white patches hanging on before the spring thaw finally claimed them. There was no permafrost here, as at home, and the earth had a tangy, wet smell. Beyond the grounds was the same looped barbed wire fence with its hand-built posts, the same guard tower and gate.
It was beautiful. The most dazzling thing he’d ever seen. He’d always had a predator’s eyes, his father had said, and now he had a predator’s nose and ears too. Not just a predator, but a wolf.
A shiver overtook him, rippling pulses of delight that made him shake all over. If he had a tail, he thought he’d be wagging it. Run, that voice in his mind told him. Run, run. Just for the sheer joy of it.
So he ran.
~*~
“Is he going to, you know, turn into a wolf?” Pyotr asked. He sounded terrified by the prospect.
“I wouldn’t think so,” Philippe said. “I’ve heard of outright shifting in several cases, but that’
s usually in much older wolves. Maybe he’ll be able to eventually, but for right now, this is Wolf Sasha.” He gestured to him, the way he was running full-tilt across the mud, cheeks pink from cold, grinning open-mouthed.
Sasha ran – he just ran, with no greater purpose than to take step after step after step and feel his legs eat up the ground. He ran with the unselfconscious glee of a child, and with the speed and precision of a beast born in the woods. It was oddly calming to watch. He was alive, and obviously healthy. Nikita hadn’t gotten him killed after all, and for that he was grateful.
His stomach growled, so empty it was twisting up on itself, and he ignored it. Low, where Sasha couldn’t hear him, he said, “He’s half wolf now. Alright. How is that part of your plan?”
But Sasha must have heard – wolf hearing – because he halted and turned his head their way.
“Let’s test that,” Philippe said. “Sasha, come here, please. Ivan, I’m going to need you to step up here. Yes, like that. Sasha, good.” He shooed and waved them into place, until they were standing opposite one another. “Sasha, I want you to pick Ivan up and throw him over your shoulder. Ivan, I want you to try to stop him.”
Both of them stared at him, blinking.
Feliks snorted.
“Um,” Sasha said.
“Go on,” Philippe said. “Try it.”
“He’ll throw his back out,” Kolya said.
“Philippe,” Nikita said with a sigh. “I don’t–”
Sasha lunged.
“–shit.”
He was so fast he caught Ivan off guard, but the big man recovered, bracing his feet wide and catching Sasha by the arms, trying to stop him with his superior size and strength. Trying – because Sasha shook him off, dodged his grip, and hooked both arms around Ivan’s waist. And as they all watched, Sasha lifted Ivan off his feet and slung him over his shoulder. Like it was nothing. He made it look easy. Laughed, even.
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