The wolves didn’t like the dark, or the brackish water smell of the pipe, but Sasha shooed them in, and they all huddled together. Sasha ended up with two wolves crowding him, his arm linked through Pyotr’s.
Nikita made sure they were all safely inside, and then sat just inside the pipe, blocking the entrance with his body.
The bombing went on for a long time.
In the gaps between explosions, Sasha heard someone praying.
And then just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.
The siren cut off.
The silence in the pipe was the thickness and texture of cotton batting. The muffled kind of quiet that comes after hearing damage.
Nikita made a stay motion with one hand and leaned out into the ditch. He walked a few paces away, his legs and boots a long shadow against the brown-green grass.
He came back and poked his head in, mouth set in a hard line. “It’s stopped.”
Outside, the sun was still high and bright, but the air was hazy with smoke. Sasha took a deep breath of it and started to cough. It burned his lungs, and worse, his sinuses.
Everyone looked poleaxed.
Katya wrapped her arms tight around her middle and stared down the hill to the city with watery eyes.
“We need to go find Rasputin,” Nikita said.
Sasha had seen the aftereffects of battle outside of Moscow. He’d seen the devastation in Leningrad. But those had been cold wounds – ugly scars that had stopped bleeding.
This devastation, though, was fresh.
They walked into a city on fire. Where once there had been houses and cafés now stood black craters full of rubble. Buildings had been reduced to gravel, scattered across the road. A tattered bit of fabric lifted on the updraft from a fire and floated back down like an autumn leaf. There were bodies. And bits of bodies. Greasy smudges on the tarmac that should have been bodies.
A woman sobbed brokenly somewhere.
The sun reflected off a thousand points of broken glass.
It stank of fire, and scorched rubber, and roasting flesh, and death.
People ran past them, barefoot, hair standing up, smoke-stained, eyes sightless and wild.
Sasha’s stomach ached so badly that he stumbled over to brace himself against a section of intact wall and dry-heaved, long trails of saliva gathering on his lip.
That was when he heard the baby crying.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and lifted his head, scenting the air, trying to get a read on the sound. His wolves crowded around him, nosing at his hips, whining a question.
The crying wasn’t far.
“Come,” he told his wolves, and vaulted over the wall, stomach settling. He couldn’t be sick if he thought he was needed.
He walked across the blackened threshold of what had once been a house, but was now only a jagged skeleton of a foundation. The walls had burned all the way down to the ground, but a few odd bits had remained. A half-discernable chair. A section of light blue fabric dotted with flowers…which turned out to be an unscathed patch of dress on a woman who was nothing but a network of shriveled black shapes like branches.
The cries were louder, now, and as he crouched beside the woman’s corpse, he caught his first sweet whiff of clean baby. He stuck his hands in the rubble and started to dig.
And dig.
His wolves helped him, paws turning black in the soot.
There was a hollowed-out space beneath the floorboards, a place to hide valuables. That’s where the woman had managed to stow the baby before her house was struck. Sasha pried off one last warped board and there it was, pink and red-faced and squalling, totally unharmed.
The wolves poked their noses into the hole, tails wagging.
“Here you are,” he murmured, lifting the child up into his arms. “Come on, it’s alright.”
When he sat back on his haunches, he saw that there was a girl of about twelve watching him, her dress scorched at the hem, her eyes wide and wild.
“Is this your little sister?” he asked.
The girl nodded, and came forward silently, arms outstretched.
Sasha handed over the precious bundle carefully.
The girl tucked her sister in tight to her chest, fussed over her blanket a moment. She looked at Sasha, stared at him, then nodded, turned, and walked off into the smoke.
~*~
They found Rasputin sitting on the front step of the house they were renting, a house that was, miraculously, unharmed. He had both hands in his hair, yanking at it, weeping openly, tears running down his face and into a beard that was already shiny with moisture.
Philippe went to sit beside him, patted his shoulder.
“Why?” he asked. “Who was this? Who? Oh, never did I think I should have to see war like this. It’s terrible. Terrible!”
Nikita stared at the man with open, but weary hatred. “It’s the Germans. And this is only the beginning. They’ll come for us overland now.”
The starets swiped messily at his face and tipped his head back to meet Nikita’s gaze. “No they won’t, captain. Not if we get to them first.”
34
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Rain fell in soft, shifting curtains, breathtakingly cold, deceptively gentle. There were still enough leaves on the tree to provide a bit of shelter, but the rain leaked through in little trickles. The bark under her thighs and against her back was wet, soaking through her clothes. Her skin felt clammy, tight and prickly with goosebumps.
But this was the part she was good at. Best at. The waiting.
Katya stared down the rag-wrapped barrel of her Mosin-Nagant, breathing slowly through her nose so as not to create any steam. A green shadow in the still-green branches. She didn’t feel the cramping muscles in her legs, the crick in her neck, the empty growling of her stomach. She was only patience now, in this moment.
She heard the horse first: a quiet snort to expel the rain from its nostrils. Then the rustle of underbrush. The open-mouthed breathing of exhausted soldiers. Soldiers on their way to Stalingrad, to rape, and pillage, and plant their Nazi flag.
She heard the rumble of a German panzer next, and then the officer on the horse emerged at the head of the road, horse lathered, tongue hanging out of its mouth, high-stepping in the deep mud. Their uniforms were waterlogged and hanging off their bodies. They looked miserable, breath pluming like smoke.
Katya concentrated on the officer’s hat, the little eagle and swastika above the bill.
Inhale. Hold. Gentle pull of the trigger.
The officer toppled backward off his horse, dead instantly, his brains sprayed across his mount’s rump.
The horse screamed and whirled. The officer’s body fell off its back and landed in the mud. The soldiers shouted and brought their guns up, looking wildly up into the trees for the sniper.
The wolves melted out of the underbrush, low on their bellies, teeth bared.
None of the Germans got off a shot.
Sasha was the one, once the road was littered with bodies, who looked up at her and nodded. His mouth was red with other men’s blood.
~*~
The panzer – a Tiger – had broken down on the way to Stalingrad. It might have been the mud, or it might have been engine failure, but either way, it sat silent between two shaggy pines, a Nazi flagged draped across its front, its crew sitting on the mud-caked treads, smoking cigarettes.
Sasha gripped the bark of the tree he stood behind, and waited for the signal. He could smell them, the Germans, their sweat and body odor and the dirt caked into the creases behind elbows and knees. He could smell their desperation, that metallic tang of men who didn’t want to be here.
He’d become immune to that smell in the past weeks. Desperate men might fight harder – or they might flee faster. He would kill them no matter what.
He heard a faint hiss, and then a ball of flame arced through the air and landed square in the middle of the swastika flag, igniting it into a sheet of orange fire.<
br />
The men shouted and spun, grabbing for weapons, and that was when Sasha struck.
He was fast. So fast. His legs carried him across mud, faster than any human. He hit the first Nazi in the chest, punched him hard with both hands, and he crumpled with a wheeze, all the breath knocked from his lungs.
Sasha snarled, and spun, caught the next one in the throat with his hand, dug his fingers through flesh and pulled out his windpipe, tore his carotid.
A growl signaled his other wolves had joined. He heard snapping jaws. Screams. A gun cracked, its round whizzing up through the tree branches.
Sasha spun again, and all the Germans were down save one, who Rasputin cradled by the back of the head, his face tucked into the soldier’s throat as he drank.
Nikita’s rules about feeding didn’t apply to the enemy. Rasputin could feast all he liked.
Sasha let the body he held fall to the ground and spat blood.
His human pack stepped into view, guns held at the ready, just in case.
Nikita glanced over the carnage, dispassionate. He nodded.
Rasputin lifted his head with an obscene, satisfied sound. He licked the blood off his lips, and opened his hands; the dead German slumped to the ground at his feet.
Katya moved, suddenly, the Mosin-Nagant going off with a sharp crack.
Sasha whirled and saw there was one soldier they’d overlooked, now hanging dead from the open hatch of the Tiger.
“Nice shot,” Ivan said.
~*~
One of the children was screaming, still. It was the sound that had brought them running out of the woods and into the middle of a too-common tableau. A dozen German soldiers. A family fleeing their village for Stalingrad. The father lay dead, blood leaking from his ears. Four of the soldiers had their pants around their ankles; the mother and two older daughters were being raped. One of the children had been slapped to unconsciousness.
The crying child was a little boy, red-faced, dirty hair sticking up in tufts.
Kolya caught one of the rapists in the throat with his knife.
Nikita shot another soldier at point-blank range in the stomach. There was a lot of blood.
The wolves joined them.
It was over quickly.
Katya knelt with amazing tenderness to help the women right their clothes.
The child’s screams quieted to hiccupping sobs, and Pyotr pulled him into a hug.
It turned out that war was everything everyone had said it was. Blood, and mud, and shit, the stink of corpses, and forgetting that you were a person.
~*~
The major general was gray-faced with exhaustion. “We intercepted a German communication, and it was full of tales of a fanged white beast that eats men whole.” He gave Sasha a flat look. “I trust you’re not actually eating them?”
He twitched a smile beneath the cowl of his wolfskin cloak. “No, sir.”
~*~
The wind swept across the jagged steppe country in relentless gusts, bending the few scrubby trees almost double. It cut through their tents, through their blankets and coats, bit deep into bone. It would snow soon, and then, Nikita knew, the tide of war would turn. The Germans had superior equipment, but Mother Russia had winter on her side. She always had. Napoleon’s ghost could attest to that.
Katya murmured something wordless and rolled toward him, pressing her face into the scant warmth that had gathered in the hollow of his throat.
He shifted so he was curled around her, his arm snug around her waist. Her stomach was still mostly flat, but he thought he could feel the first curve against his own belly. The beginnings of a new life. A promise for After. And a vulnerability that scared him senseless.
She’d told him three days ago. Between one skirmish and the next, her rifle muzzle propped against her shoulder, face smudged with dirt, she’d taken his hand and pressed it to her stomach. “Be thinking about names you like,” she’d said with a tired smile. A smile that suggested she’d be happy about this one day, when the bloodshed had stopped and she didn’t have to spend every waking moment thinking about killing Nazis.
When he’d stared at her, stupidly, her small smile had collapsed. “You don’t want this.”
He’d come to his senses and grabbed her then, reeled her in close. “No, I do. I’m just…scared.”
She’d shut her eyes and leaned into him. “Me too.”
They hadn’t talked about it at any length, or let themselves make any sorts of plans. Life was too tenuous at the moment.
Rasputin was distracted for the most part now, but sometimes he still tried to stir something in her, and she turned to him in the dark, in their tent, seeking hands and mouth. Nikita always loved her like she wanted, and he nursed the bitterest of hatreds for the vampire.
Even if the creature – his insane troika of supernatural power – was fast-becoming a terrifying legend along the Eastern Front.
But it soothed Nikita a little to know that it wasn’t the vampire or the mage that stirred rumors. It was the wolf. The wolfman with the white pelt, and the pack at his heels. Russian vengeance and witchcraft.
The White Wolf, it said in the intercepted communications.
In the painful cold darkness, Nikita held his girl, their growing child between them, and he allowed himself to hope.
35
THE DEVIL INCARNATE
The snows came in October.
Stalingrad was in ruins.
They were alone, out in the wilderness, an army of nine.
Something was wrong.
Sasha knew it the moment he woke that morning – the scent of frost heavy in his lungs, rolling over beneath his cloak, warm fuzzy bodies of his wolves pressed around him – and cracked his eyes to see two figures sitting as silhouettes against the rising pink sun.
He recognized Philippe’s voice: “It’s time. We’ve waited too long as it is.”
“Agreed,” Rasputin said. “But they’ll never allow it.”
“No. They’ll have to be dealt with.”
Sasha sat up and pushed his hood back. His breath came out in thick, white puffs; it felt like his eyes were freezing in their sockets. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
Both of them turned to look at him over their shoulders, and for a moment, he was struck by how horrible they were. Bearded, and pulsing with energy, radiating a malice so thick it raised a growl in his throat.
But then Philippe smiled at him and Sasha was enveloped in calm. A thick, fluffy, warm sort of calm, like a blanket.
He’d imagined they were horrible, that was all. Some clinging remnant of a bad dream. They were wonderful, and powerful, and he belonged with them. Their wolf.
“Come and sit with us,” Philippe said, and Sasha did.
~*~
His sense of peace pervaded…up to a point. He felt sluggish, unconcerned. Tired and in need of a nap. But something tickled at the back of his mind. An uneasiness that threatened his calm, but which flitted away when he tried to pin it down, like a fly.
The snow was thick and wet, halfway to their knees, and like walking through stew that had been left on the stove too long. Everyone breathed raggedly through their mouths, already tired, and now drained by the effort of slogging through the drifts. Even the wolves seemed sleepy, Sasha noted, their tongues lolling, steps slow and careful as their group picked its way up a short rise and came to a break in the trees.
Again, he was struck by the sense that something was wrong. He was sweaty from exertion, but he shivered as he was hit by the notion that there was something lurking, something dark brewing.
He halted, breathing deep through his mouth and nose, trying to catch the scent of a threat.
A clearing lay stretched before them, smooth and white with virgin snow, the leafless trees standing like black matchsticks at its edges. He saw ravens perched in the trees, heard the squawks and croaks. Overhead, the sky promised more snow, gray with swollen clouds. The wind whipped through the clearing as if through a
funnel, tugging at his cloak and the bits of long hair that had slipped out from beneath it.
What was he…
Why was he…
They were on yet another errand to move into German-held territory and pick off units one by one. One of now-dozens of missions just like it. Killing had become commonplace to him; he didn’t flinch when the enemy screamed anymore. So why was he so uneasy now? What flickered at the edges of his consciousness that raised the hairs on the back of his neck?
Pyotr had noticed that he’d fallen behind, and stopped himself, turning around. His long black leather coat and black fur-trimmed hat were dusted with snow. The first new flakes were falling.
“Sasha, are you alright?”
“I…”
Feliks turned. And Kolya. Ivan. Kolya had a hand at his hip, on the hilt of a knife.
Nikita halted, and steadied Katya with a hand on her shoulder. Sasha had been able to scent the baby growing in her womb for a while now, sooner than even Katya had known about it. He was happy for them, and worried. But right now that, and all sentiments, seemed remote.
Something was wrong.
“Sasha,” Nikita said.
The wolves started to whine. The alpha female nosed his hand.
“Something’s not…” he started.
At the head of their procession, now in the middle of the clearing, Rasputin turned to face him, too, as did Philippe at his side. It was in their faces, that wrongness. Rasputin swept his black cloak tighter around his shoulders, and even from a distance, Sasha could feel the relentless heat of his gaze, his gray eyes sparkling like ice.
“…right,” he finished, and the air left his lungs in a puff of vapor.
He could smell it now, that thing he’d been chasing for miles, that thing that wasn’t Germans, or tanks, or gun oil, or corpse flesh.
White Wolf (Sons of Rome Book 1) Page 42