“Owen!”
He stumbled to stand in response, shaking the cobwebs off and accepting a glass of wine from a bemused Tanya, “Sorry, I just…”
“I know,” Her tongue glided across full lips, voice deeper and in complete tonal control.
Owen watched her fingers teasing along the polished edge of her glass; the burgundy colored wine lightly lapping below, her gaze predatory.
Tanya could see how nervous Owen felt and stifled a smile, wondering if she were laying it on a little thick. However, she so badly wanted him to reward her attention. She spun around, her clinging dress caressing her legs as she bent deeply at the waist, elegant fingers setting her glass on a handsomely carved end table next to a deeply cushioned sofa where she took a seat.
Owen swayed, the blazing fire heating the room, and doing nothing to calm his swirling emotions. Just then he noticed a book perched on the table’s edge. He craned his neck to see, making out a series of indecipherable woodcuts on the cover, barely readable was the author’s name written in white on a black background…Montague Summers. Above it he spied letters printed in red but he couldn’t quite read them in the dark. A strange feeling tickled the back of his mind as he glanced at the author’s name again.
“Ahhh that, it’s just a dry old tome,” Tanya said, pushing the book into the shadows. She patted the couch next to her.
Owen stepped forward, and promptly tripped over the rug.
Tanya bit her lip to keep from smiling, catching him staring at her dress as he recovered. She responded. One leanly muscled leg came up and crossed over the other, wispy material sliding up her superbly toned thigh.
Owen sat down, drinking deeply from his glass, the brunette’s leer evoking powerful but vulnerable sensations within. He blushed for the umpteenth time, “Nice place you’ve got here.”
This time she laughed, “Is that what you want to do, talk about my house?”
The question hung in the air, unanswered.
Owen gulped, steeling himself to respond but Tanya stood in one swift motion, slipping the dress off her shoulders. Owen dove into her welcoming arms, his divorce, friends; everything was forgotten but this extraordinary woman before him. Tanya kissed him as Owen inelegantly shed his clothes. They slid to the floor, Owen holding their kiss the entire time, a moment of tender connection centering a need of something more. His searching eyes met hers - betraying the powerful depth of his feelings. She guided him to her, providing him with a contented closeness and hope that he hadn’t felt in years. Afterward, they came down together, breaths of exertion lessening into softer pants of joy. Owen’s throat tightened, a swirling vortex of emotions consuming him.
He didn’t know how long they lay, silently staring into one another’s eyes. There was a look of gentle sadness evident on her face. It was an expression he hadn’t seen from her before. It triggered within him a brief twinge of anxiety quelled by the hope that maybe they had more in common than mere physical attraction.
The fire had mostly consumed itself when Tanya propped herself up. She liked being with him and her right hand trailed down his stomach, fingernails playing lightly back and forth, moving lower.
“You still haven’t asked,” Owen said with a sharp intake of breath; her searching fingers had found what they were seeking.
“About?”
“My divorce,” Owen felt himself stir once more.
“At dinner I thought we—”
“We discussed nothing.”
“It’s not my place,” Tanya said, her hand curling around his thickening response.
“I did something. Something I shouldn’t have.”
“Was it wicked?” Tanya said, her grasping hand rhythmically moving up and down.
“Very much so,” Owen said with a moan.
“And…” Tanya tightened her grip.
“I enjoyed it.”
“How exquisite,” Tanya’s full lips curled into a smile. “That’s the why I want to know.”
“Something inside told me to do it, so I did. Even after she caught me I couldn’t help but feel that I would’ve done it again.”
“Some people are drawn to the dark forest, or the bad part of town,” Tanya’s hand stroked faster. “Is that so wrong?”
“Yes,” Owen gasped.
“It’s only wrong if you let it be,” Tanya’s grin broadened, then froze.
She snapped her head around, the clock confirming what her body knew, “You need to go. Now.”
Owen obeyed, not once questioning what she said. Within minutes they stood dressed at the open front door. A faint twinge of concern tugged at a dim corner of his mind. Maybe she didn’t really like him. His worries vanished when she leaned in to kiss him.
“This won’t be a one-time thing?” Owen’s plaintive question when she pulled away all too nakedly revealed his raw vulnerability.
Tanya smiled and gave him a good-bye peck on the cheek, sending him on his way. She shut the door behind and leaned against it, eyes darkening as her happiness was replaced by a seething anger at what they wanted her to do.
She should have been full of joy, for the first time in she didn’t know how long she had connected with someone. Instead, a single tear ran from her eye and down her cheek.
It came racing up from within.
She cried out, falling to the floor.
Owen was never going to make it back to town.
She didn’t have a choice.
She was going to kill him.
Chapter 19
March 1944 – The Western Ukraine
Dawn loomed gray. The nights inky grip fading out as Dietrich dragged deep on his cigarette, hand rolled rice paper rough between shaking fingers. Gusts of frigid air pushed the previous day’s precipitation into billowy white drifts blanketing the land. The fetid odor seeping from the pungent mess spread across the clearing overpowered even the tobacco’s acrid bite, a sick lurching feeling roiling Dietrich’s stomach.
The veteran Stabsfeldwebel scratched at the puckered scar slithering down his cheek, a gift courtesy of a Soviet rifleman’s bayonet one year prior. Heavy lidded eyes surveyed his squad, arrayed in a loose semi-circle and squeezed into the icy meadow by the relentlessly dark forest. To a man, they looked away when their Sergeant searched their faces, puffs of breath hanging in the frosty air.
Dietrich savored the cigarette’s woody flavor. Strong Turkish tobacco sent to him from a comrade in the Luftwaffe, far better than the Juno or Eckstein the men received from the quartermaster. He appreciated one last aromatic pull and flicked away the butt of burning embers.
He scanned the wall of spruces, gripped by a sense of something inexplicable.
After a long moment, he turned away. Shrugging off his lingering unease he squatted, the snow crunching under his fur lined boots. His cold blue unblinking left eye and watchful hazel right eye scanned across Gefreiter Erich Bekensteiner’s remains, scattered about like so many discarded toys in a kindergarten.
As a child, his parents had chastised him when he stared too long at those made uncomfortable by his discomfiting focus. In the army, however, his eyes became an asset. His commanding officer once admitted that Dietrich reminded him of a predator; how he could fix someone in his stare without even turning his head. He pursed his lips, knowing a fellow predators work when he saw it. To his right, a Marschstiefel stuck inverted out of the snow. In it a ragged ankle bone stripped of flesh, providing a sharp contrast against the black leather of the slick jackboot. Pieces of hooded parka fluttered past, stained reddish-brown from the rank discharge of its former owner’s bodily fluids. In the center of it all Erich’s headless torso leaned against a log, scraps of meat stuck to the ribs like gristle on a picked-over holiday goose.
Dietrich gagged at the corpse’s noxious odor but knew what he had to do. Wanting more than anything else to get it over with,
he faced over his shoulder and inhaled a whooshing gulp of crisp, fresh air. Then he dropped to his knees. Fingers probed inside, flesh squishing like the fibrous pulp of a freshly opened squash. He held his breath, fighting off his rising nausea. The seconds dragged by, his vision dimming. He dug deep under the slippery collarbone, pulling aside clinging purplish tissue.
After another agonizing moment, he spun away, taking deep sucking breaths as the color flooded back into his face. Several more seconds had passed before he rose on unsteady feet, perturbed as much by what he hadn’t found as what that might mean. As he caught his breath, he spied something a few feet away, projecting from the sea of reddened snow.
He stepped over, recognizing the flashing Erkennungsmarke. He bent down to pick up the soldier’s identification tag, choking back bile and sipping at the crisp air. Brow furrowed he let his fingers roam over the disk’s smooth zinc surface, wanting to lick his cracked lips but having survived too many Russian winters to make that mistake. The disk should have been woven into the laces of Erich’s boot; with the issuing unit name, ID number, and blood type stamped on the tag. In the event of death, the perforated center was meant to be snapped in half. One part was supposed to go to graves registration. The other half stayed with the body. That is not what happened here.
He dragged a finger through the snow, staring off.
Nature’s pitiless smile confronted him. Forested hills rolled away to the west, steadily rising up into the mountains overlooking the violence marring the morning’s otherwise stunning beauty. He silently cursed the orders detailing his squad to this godforsaken valley. Candle straight pines towering one hundred feet above created a dank, gloomy canopy. Spruces and firs formed an intricately laced web of needled green underneath. Even on the sunniest day the wild existed in a semi-permanent state of twilight, settlements rare—
Goosebumps danced across his flesh. This time he could feel it, as sure as he felt his heart pounding under his tunic. A palpable presence hung in the air, stilling the wintry woodland. Even the crows were quiet. The men’s eyes darted everywhere and nowhere at once. Teeth chattered to Dietrich’s right. He fixed the soldier with an icy stare. Gefreiter Peter Bix had been with Erich in the listening post and had stumbled into camp not two hours prior, babbling nonsense. Dietrich turned his attention away from the young soldier.
Everything he needed to know was in the footprints.
Two tracks. One ran from the listening post, Erich’s. They marched toward the second set. These were of bare human feet big as snowshoes, descending from the foothills as if on holiday at a Baltic beach. That is until the tracks met Erich’s. What remained of the soldier’s body looked like a pig on a spit after Oktoberfest. Hailing from the Black Forest, Dietrich knew the stories - the legends. The insistent warnings from his grandmother…Stay on the path. Don’t go into the forest.
He shook his head in disgust. It had started with the farmer’s house. They had been sweeping the area for partisans when they found it, fallow beet and potato fields surrounding the tidy homestead. They would have moved on had not Heinrich discovered an MP-38 hidden under a bale of hay. The wayward German machine pistol prompted a more thorough investigation. No sooner had they started when a loud explosion ripped the air. He remembered coming around the side of the house to see the cellar door wrenched off its hinges, shattered planks scattered across the yard. Erich stood on the stairs, staring. The pull cord from a stick grenade dangled from his shaking hand. Dietrich ducked inside to see a farmer, his wife, and what looked like a ten-year old boy painted across the cellar walls. That had been three days ago.
Dietrich balled his left hand into a fist, his face hot as he stared at the abnormally large footprints. They tracked back into the forest, accompanied by droplets of blood. The trail too obvious, Erich’s killer wanted them to follow.
Dietrich raised his eerie heterochromatic stare. He had slain just about every kind of person that walked this continent. It was time to kill one more.
With a murderer’s gleam in his eyes, he gathered his men.
They were going hunting.
------------------
August 2016 – Lviv, The Western Ukraine
Ernie fidgeted in his car seat, looking out the window. Eastern European woodlands normally hummed with activity during this time of year. Parked cars would be lined up along the roadside, marking locations where people had plunged into the forest in search of the wide variety of mushrooms favored in so many of the region’s dishes. But not this afternoon, beech trees interspersed with firs, maples, and alder blanketed the land undisturbed. Only the rattling rental car marred the suffocating stillness as the narrow winding lane finally broke free of the sullen woodlands.
Small farming villages pressed tight to the road. Modern homes featuring red tiled roofs and brilliant yellow or burnt orange colored walls were interspersed with communist era designs, some touched up, others looking like drab concrete blockhouses. Traditional wooden houses also dotted the landscape. Blue stripes marked several, reminders of a time when families advertised their daughter’s eligibility for marriage. Ernie gazed in wonder, thinking of more recent events that had scarred this land.
“What’s so fascinating?”
He jumped at Cindy’s voice. Her formidable intelligence aside he remembered that she was no historian. He explained to her how in the spring of 1944 one of history’s great battles had unfolded amidst these peaceful villages.
As Ernie narrated men and machines jumped from the shadowed landscape. The black clad Germans in their massive steel beasts facing off against wave after wave of diesel powered Soviet tanks, chattering machine guns lacing the air with bullets. When Soviet T-34 shells found the mark they often ineffectually defected skyward in long arcing blue streaks cast from thick German armor turned white hot from the heat generated by the powerful blows. In turn, often the last sound and sight a T-34 tank crew knew was the crack of the German tank’s high velocity cannon. Armor piercing shells would then hiss shoulder high over rippling stalks of grain to rip into the thirty ton Soviet main battle tanks, and send long gouts of orange flame bursting forth in deafening explosions that left burning oily wrecks behind. To a layperson like Cindy, Ernie knew it would seem that the Germans couldn’t possibly lose such lopsided engagements. As he explained however, when forced to maneuver the mechanically complex German panzers all too often came clacking to a halt as transmissions or engines faltered.
Cindy listened. Though not having more than a passing interest in the Second World War she enjoyed the distraction. However, she couldn’t escape feeling worried. Nor could she ignore the tingle of dread that raced through her when she looked out the window, the sky turning iron gray as the sun settled ever lower on the horizon.
They crested a rise, and Lviv loomed before them.
Within minutes they had driven into the centuries old informal capital of Galicia. Regardless of Poland’s overwhelming centrality to Lviv’s past, Hapsburg, Jewish and Russian influences also stood out in the city’s eclectic mix of Central and Eastern European architecture assimilated into buildings bedecked with limestone carvings, delicately constructed brickwork, ornamented balconies, spires, turrets, domes, and more. After a few more moments they entered neighborhoods featuring rows of orange, aquamarine, peach and yellow colored Art Nouveau residences and shops crowding close to tree lined streets that finally gave way to the bustling medieval city center.
Ernie gaped at the diversity of architecture perhaps most evident in the city’s churches; the distinctive triple dome of a Ukrainian Orthodox church; a spectacular bell towered Baroque-Rococo style Greek Orthodox church; Latin; Dominican; Jesuit, Armenian, and the only surviving active synagogue from the brief but brutal Nazi occupation. Cindy keyed in on the countless cafés; including one she eyed while sitting at a stop light. It was on the corner of a pink, white trimmed Renaissance building where under different circumstances she could
have seen herself lost in a book and a cup of the local blend.
The light changed and she accelerated away, within minutes pulling up to their hotel near the old town center. The five-story neo-Renaissance building was surrounded by a dizzying array of restaurants, shops, and homes painted stunning shades of yellow, turquoise, and pink. Ernie ignored all of it, taking just enough time to check in, drop off their bags and get back to Cindy; who had been idling out front. After a short drive, the library’s symmetrical cream and yellow façade came into view. Intricately designed iron street lamps stood at attention up and down the sidewalk where Cindy parked.
As she stepped from the car a tight feeling in the pit of Cindy’s stomach pulled her eyes upward. The night had fallen like a black cloak on the unsuspecting city. She hustled Ernie across the library’s dark courtyard and through an arcaded portico. As they entered the library, however, they missed the Mercedes sedan that cruised up behind their rental car. Had either of them glanced back they would have seen the car slow to a near standstill as a large figure slipped out from the back seat. Instead, Ernie and Cindy let the library’s front door slam shut behind them as they spotted a librarian tending the quiet main greeting desk, youthful skin contrasted against eyes betraying a weariness of someone older. Her name tag read Kateryna.
Cindy couldn’t shake her jumpiness. The building’s gloomy interior hardly helped. She cast ever longer glances at the woman’s teeth and shape of her jaw. After a moment, she caught herself, flushing red. What were you looking for? A set of fangs?
The librarian finally looked up.
Ernie greeted her in Ukrainian.
Kateryna smiled broadly, answering in English, “You are the American professors, yes?”
Ernie nodded.
“Unfortunately, the head of the research department has left for the day,” Kateryna said, darting from behind the desk, “I would love to help you with your work. It has been big news here.” She waved them through a Romanesque combination of arched walls and doorways as Ernie explained a summary of his research needs. The trio passed through a veritable cornucopia of learning, their footfalls echoing across the hardwood floors in room after room packed full of manuscripts, archives, periodicals, incunabula, paleotypes, cartographic publications, engravings, sculptures, drawings, watercolors, gouache paintings, photographs, music collections, and countless books. Kateryna directed her charges into yet another hallway, this one darker and narrower than those before.
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