“They’re not for eating,” Nikita said, his captain’s bite in his voice, hat tipped at a stern angle. “Get the fuck back or I’ll confiscate the gold teeth out of your head.”
The man grumbled, but complied, ducking his head and stepping aside. Everyone was afraid of the Cheka, even starving men.
Sasha and his wolves led the way, and they proceeded up the dock to the ruined city, Ivan and Feliks lugging an empty footlocker between them, everyone else with a gun cradled in their arms.
The worst of the bombing had taken place in the west of the city, where the Germans were trying to break up the Red Army lines, and along the lakeshore, where the trucks had driven across the frozen water in the middle of winter. But even the intact parts of the city, such as this, bore the marks of war. The boarded-up Bronze Horses – a desperate attempt to preserve art. The ash like smudged fingerprints on the gaily painted building facades. Ash in piles, drifts like dirty snow against the building foundations. They walked past ruined and stripped cars, nothing but empty shells. Looted storefronts, their glass broken out, and never replaced; inside a few tattered bits of furniture that hadn’t yet been used for firewood.
It was late afternoon, and overcast, a fog rolling in off the river. Katya glanced back over her shoulder after they’d gone a ways and couldn’t see the barge anymore; a cold shiver skated down her back, and she faced forward again, jogging to keep up.
Three hours. They were running.
At least until they hit the first police checkpoint.
For a city so large, it was unnervingly quiet. People were keeping indoors for safety. Drapes were drawn in all the upper windows, some covered with patchwork quilts, some with blackout curtains. None of the streetlamps were lit, and it was an eerie gray twilight they walked through, the wolves halting suddenly, growling low in their throats.
Sasha froze and flashed his teeth, tested the air with his nostrils.
A voice called out, “Who’s there?”
The wolves fanned out and disappeared into the gloom, circling, Katya knew. They weren’t as foolish as humans; they never walked abreast up to a threat, like their two-legged pack members were about to.
The fog swirled, and the beam from a shuttered lantern blasted through it, revealing three uniformed officers who recoiled visibly when they spotted the Chekists in their trademark black.
The one who’d spoken before, the leader of their little band, did an impressive job of gathering his composure, though his authoritative frown was wobbly. “If you’ve come raiding from the capital, there’s not shit for you to take,” he said with a snarl. “I suggest you go back the way you came.”
The other two glanced at Katya, her uniform, the hefty Mosin-Nagant in her hands, much more sinister than the others’ carbines.
Sasha slid in beside her, and the officers went goggle-eyed at the sight of his white wolf pelt, the snarling upper jaw with its teeth poised above his face.
“We’re not a raiding party,” Nikita said smoothly, producing their paperwork from inside his coat. “We’ve come to retrieve a particular artifact on Stalin’s direct order. We’ll be gone in three hours.”
The man stared at the papers a long moment before he took them. “What sort of artifact? Shit and rubble? That’s all we’ve got here.” Except for the art they’d hidden from the Nazis, which they were now no doubt fearful the Cheka might take, too.
Katya wanted to reassure them, but this mission was too dangerous and important, so she kept quiet, squirming inside.
Nikita was the picture of cold, unfeeling impatience. “You won’t miss it, I assure you. Some sentimental trinket for one of the generals; we’re just his errand boys and we don’t have time for this.” He gave a move aside gesture with one hand.
The officer’s frown deepened.
“But if you’d like, I can report back that you stood in our way.”
The man gave way with an angry sigh, knowing there was no way to refuse, but unhappy to have done so.
“Thank you,” Nikita said, tucking the papers away with a curt nod.
They started off down the street again.
“There’s cannibals,” the officer called after them. “You’d better watch yourselves.” Because no citizen or police officer would come to the aid of the Cheka.
The wolves melted out of the fog, joining their ranks once more, and Katya had never been so glad of their company. If there were cannibals, the wolves would scent them well before they appeared.
Still.
The army was present, T-34 tanks and troop transport trucks rumbling through the streets. But not the street where they walked, the echoes low and deep, coming up through the soles of their boots. But otherwise silent, the fog blanketing everything.
“You’ve been awful quiet,” Kolya said to Monsieur Philippe, a threat evident in his voice.
“Yeah,” Ivan grumbled. “You couldn’t do a little magic intervention back there?”
The old man was puffing a little, thanks to their quick pace. “I rather thought…it would be beneficial…to save my strength…as it were.”
“Well, unless your magic can dig a fucking hole–”
“Quiet,” Nikita said. “Listen.”
They all froze. Katya heard her pulse throbbing in her ears, loud as a kettle drum.
“What?” Pyotr said, voice wavering.
But there was nothing save the grinding of truck gears a few streets over, and the relentless cadence of her heart beating.
“Nothing,” Nikita said. “Keep moving.”
They walked in a tight bunch along one side of the street, up against the curb, but not so close to the broken-out first floor windows that someone could leap out and onto them. Their heads swiveled, scanning the desolate streets. Katya saw a few curtains twitch in upstairs windows; tattered bits of cloth on the street, an unwearable and abandoned shoe. She heard the others breathing through open mouths around her, quiet little anxious gasps. They were brave men, all of them, but there were so few of them, walking deeper and deeper into the maze of a ruined and desperate city.
She itched for a sniper’s nest, some high perch from which she could watch their progress and guard their backs, but she didn’t have the luxury. She’d chosen this band of rebels over the Red Army, and thus become a foot soldier in an even more impossible war.
The body the Bolsheviks had burned years before had not, Philippe had assured them, been Rasputin, but an unfortunate lookalike that Philippe’s ilk had planted on the (valid) fear that the corpse would be disturbed. The real Rasputin lay – sleeping, and not dead, according to the mage – in the grave whose stone proclaimed it belonged to a long-dead minor noble in a churchyard just off the Nevsky Prospekt. That was where the they headed now, Nikita consulting a map as they jogged.
They moved quickly, but the fog seemed to tighten. The evening came on quicker, and quicker, almost exponential. It seemed too good to be true that they didn’t encounter anyone, skirting around the army and keeping to the quiet streets.
The church loomed, old-fashioned, the top of its pointed stone façade sheared off, a pile of rubble blocking the entrance to the front door.
“Here we are,” Philippe said. “This is it.”
“You’re sure?” Nikita asked.
“Quite.”
The graveyard was crowded with stones and choked by weeds. Two ravens looked down at them from the gnarled branches of a tree that had just started to bud for spring, croaking at them, ruffling their wings and looking displeased by the interruption.
“Better fly off before someone eats you,” Feliks grumbled, flapping his arms at them.
They cawed and stayed put.
“Let me see, let me see…” Philippe kindled a small flame in his palm and held it up to gravestones like a candle, searching for the right decoy name.
Katya reminded herself that she was supposed to be on watch and put her back to the old man, pinning her gaze on the street beyond the wrought-iron graveyard fence, squinti
ng against the haze of fog for signs of a threat.
A gentle huff of breath announced that one of the wolves had joined her, the strong beta male with the shaggy black fur. She spared him a scratch behind the ears and they watched together.
Behind her, she heard muttering and clanking as shovels were pulled from the footlocker and distributed.
“Aha!” Philippe said, triumphant. “This is the one. Here.”
Spades struck earth, and now it was a race to exhume the body.
No, not a body. Body implied the spirit had passed on. What they dug up now was a sleeper, very much alive.
Katya shivered and the wolf pressed against her leg, offering comfort.
Sasha stepped up beside her, face hidden beneath the cowl of his cloak in the half-light, more wolf than boy. His voice vibrated, a low undercurrent of a growl. “Something’s not right.”
Katya swallowed hard. “What do you hear?”
He shook his head a fraction. “I feel something. Something wrong.”
“It’s a war zone,” she pointed out, but couldn’t quite manage to sound critical. “Everything’s wrong.”
“Yes, but–”
A long, rising wail filled the air all around them. Loud enough to hurt her ears.
Air raid sirens.
All the wolves immediately threw their heads back and added their howls to the din. Sasha did too, head tipped back, a purely lupine sound coming out of his mouth. It wasn’t a man mimicking a wolf – it was all wolf, and nothing human about it.
Katya’s scalp prickled.
Was that the drone of German bombers?
“Move!” Nikita shouted, as forceful as she’d ever heard him. “Dig, damn it!”
“I can dig!” Sasha spun around, and when Katya glanced over her shoulder, she saw that he and his wolves had fallen on the grave, digging with paws and hands, flinging dirt and weeds. All save the beta who stood guard with her, his ruff erect, growling low and threatening.
She caught Nikita’s gaze across the distance, his frightened but determined. She nodded, and he nodded back, and then she turned back to her watch duty, the sirens blaring.
She thought she heard shouts, the distant scuffle of feet across pavement. Behind her, the digging sounded rabid, furious.
The siren screamed, and every part of her wanted to lie on the ground, curl up, cry. The Nazis were coming, the Nazis were coming…
“Hide, Katya, hide!” Her father’s voice, echoing through her memory.
Mama’s scream.
Her sister Sofia’s pleas.
Dead, all of them dead, all of…
The wolf at her side growled, and then lunged –
And then she was tackled to the ground.
She landed flat on her back and all the breath was knocked out of her. Her lungs clenched and she couldn’t take a breath, gasping for air as a man with a face like a skull drove his knees into her stomach and clawed at her throat with bony fingers.
In that first horrible moment of stunned paralysis, dizzy from lack of oxygen, she noted the way the man’s hair was lank and patchy; the open sores around his mouth from malnutrition; the wild, hungry gleam in his eyes.
He made a low, moaning, hissing sort of sound.
No longer a man at all anymore, but a creature that ate men’s flesh. A cannibal.
Her lungs open and she sucked in a huge, pained breath, and it gave her the strength to twist hard and buck the man off to the side.
He gave an outraged bellow, hand flashing for her throat again…and the beta wolf’s jaws clamped down on the join between his neck and shoulder. The bellow turned into a pained scream, just audible above the cry of the air raid siren, and then it was pandemonium.
The cannibals were a whole pack, at least a dozen, melting out of the fog, falling on their well-fed and healthy group like the starving animals they were. They swarmed over the fence, grabbing the iron rail with skeletal hands covered in sores. All their eyes had the same rabid, inhuman look in them. These were no longer beings that lived: if they survived the war, when the blockade was lifted…there was no going back to before for someone who’d eaten their neighbors. There just wasn’t.
That was what Katya told herself, rather than think about the fact that it was a Russian citizen – a compatriot – that she shot to save herself and her friends.
Her rifle cracked, and another gun echoed it: Nikita on the other side of the grave, a cannibal crumpling at his feet.
“Keep digging!” he shouted. Ivan and Feliks worked furiously, pitching shovels full of dirt over their shoulders.
Three hours. Or was it two now?
She snugged the butt of her rifle into her shoulder and took aim again. Fired. Crack.
Behind her: crack.
Click-clack to eject the cartridge. Another shot. Crack. Three more shots, and then she’d have to reload, or, since there wasn’t time, switch to her pistol instead. The knife at her hip felt terribly heavy, suddenly, weighty in its expectation of use.
“Jesus,” she whispered, lining up her next shot. It was so easy. She could hit a target across a field, and they were coming right at her, spilling over the fence, rifle rounds taking them at almost point blank range. “Oh, Jesus.”
Overhead a low flash, like lightning embedded in the clouds. And then the ground shook, and it wasn’t thunder all around them, but the rumble of a German bomb exploding a few streets over.
Katya had her finger on the trigger, ready to pull it, when Sasha leapt into her sightline. She gasped and let her hand go slack, heart hammering wildly. He ran at the cannibals with his head down, hands held out like claws, snarling like the devil, his cloak the vivid white of snow against the gray-on-gray landscape of the foggy street. He led his four-legged pack at the cannibals, and Katya turned away, not wanting to watch.
~*~
In his former life of university studies, and hunting with Papa, cozy evenings around the fire and laughing with his friends at the market, Sasha had never thought he would ever kill a man. Soft boys like him couldn’t have stomached it – that’s what he’d thought. But he was killing one now, and he was glad to do it.
A small part of him wondered if his aggression was a direct reaction to the threat to his pack – or if, somehow, under his sweet and smiling exterior, he’d always had the capacity for violence.
Now, though, this moment, these kills, were because of his pack. His pack versus theirs, and he was the alpha, and he would dirty his fangs and claws before he let his vulnerable humans bloody theirs. And the humans he fought weren’t much in the way of humans anymore. He could smell the abomination on their skin, taste it in their blood. They’d eaten the flesh of their own kind, and so he felt no remorse as he clawed open a throat, bit through a tendon.
His wolfpack surged around him, snarling, snapping, working together.
The man in Sasha’s arms died with a strangled, choking gasp, and he let him fall to the ground, limp like a broken toy.
The siren hurt his ears, and he cringed from it now, shrinking down into the hood of his cloak, fighting the urge to clap his bloody hands over his ears.
“Sasha,” a hesitant voice said behind him. Katya.
He turned and she was staring at him with large, frightened eyes.
“They’re dead,” she said. “Nik wants you to help dig.”
He nodded. Spat a glob of blood onto the ground. “Yeah. Okay.” He scanned the street one last time, but all was quiet save the siren.
~*~
He should have told her to go back to her post, that the siren was still wailing and more fucking cannibals could come streaming out of the twilight at any moment, but Nikita was grateful to feel Katya sidle up next to him, and so he didn’t. She trembled slightly; he could feel it where their arms touched. But when he asked if she was alright, she said “yes” right away. His brave sharp-shooter.
He wondered if the sight of Sasha – blood on his lips, running down his chin, his throat, staining his shirt, dripping from
his fingers – had rattled her as badly as it had rattled him. He was going to see him like that in his nightmares from now on, he knew.
Now, with the awful din of the siren providing a soundtrack, with the distant thumps of artillery fire, Sasha had his wolves help with the digging. Dirt clung to the wet blood on Sasha’s hands as he dug with his fingers, pulling up chunks of earth faster than Ivan and Feliks could dig with shovels. It took a long time to dig a grave – whether to put something in it, or take something out of it – and Nikita didn’t know if they could have it done in time.
But with Sasha’s help…
“Almost there,” Philippe said on Nikita’s other side. The mage held a ball of flame in his linked, cupped hands, no brighter than a lantern. “Almost–”
The siren cut off, and in its absence, the silence buzzed and crackled. Or maybe that was just his eardrums. He realized now that they were all breathing through open mouths, panting, terrified, harsh echoes off the gravestones around them.
“- there,” Philippe said, smiling.
Ivan’s shovel thunked against something solid.
Sasha growled.
Nikita’s nerves were already drawn tight as a bowstring, but he felt them, impossibly, tighten another fraction. “What is it, Sashka?” He sounded afraid, and there was nothing to do for that. Sue him: he was.
Sasha growled again, lower, deeper. He reached up and pushed his hood back, the white of the wolf’s ruff giving way to his own platinum hair, bright against the mud all around him. If he’d had true hackles, they would have been standing on end, like the ruffs of all the four-legged wolves.
“It’s…” he started, and broke off to growl again. “The smell…”
“A vampire smell,” Philippe said. “It’s alright, you’ll grow accustomed to it.”
Sasha looked up at the old man, eyes glowing in his face, lips pulled back off his teeth so the sharp points of his canines showed. “It smells like old blood,” he snarled, face screwing up with disgust. “It smells rotten.”
Ivan, and Feliks, and Kolya, and Pyotr watched him, faces pale, expressions pinched.
White Wolf (Sons of Rome Book 1) Page 33