The Ice Wolves

by Mark Chadbourn

  Hellboy pointed to a thin column of smoke trailing up into the sky from the middle of the dark forest. “Looks like that’s our destination. We can take our time getting there, and do it with a bit more stealth.”

  They descended the steep slope and entered the next patch of forest, which was just as rich with wildlife. Hellboy kept his bearings and guided the others unerringly toward where he had seen the smoke, but the distance was deceptive, and the forest so dense it took them most of the day to reach their destination.

  “Hey, these people are really defensive,” Hellboy said when they were close enough to smell the wood smoke on the breeze. Hidden in the undergrowth were sharpened sticks, angled so as to impale anyone who approached at speed. Further on they found pits dug at random intervals, disguised with a thin covering of branch and bracken.

  “Maybe that’s how they hunt their game,” Lisa whispered hopefully.

  “This looks like a long time ago. People aren’t going to be waiting for their food to come to them,” William said. “Every day would be a battle for survival.”

  Hellboy decided the cairns were the outer limits of the defenses, but their devastating nature suggested a huge threat. Were the werewolves here in force too?

  They continued until they stood on the edge of a small community of makeshift shelters constructed from branches and leaves among the trees. Women had emerged from some of them to greet the returning men. Other women and a small group of children scampered from the depths of the trees with hands full of forest plants. In the center of the camp, a fire was kept alive by an elderly man with long white hair.

  Hellboy watched one of the men crawl into the largest shelter, built around the trunk of the biggest and oldest tree in the area. He came out a moment later, clearly troubled, and spoke in a guttural dialect to one of the guards.

  “So how long are we supposed to sit here?” Brad eyed the lengthening shadows. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”

  “Be patient,” Hellboy chided. “They’ve got something on their minds.” Hellboy nodded toward the men who kept flashing uncomfortable glances into the forest in all directions. Every now and then, men would return to the camp and engage in brief, intense conversations with the one who was obviously a leader, before loping back out among the trees.

  Night fell quickly, the gloom that gathered among the trees sweeping in to press hard against the small circle of light from the campfire. As each moment passed, the villagers’ faces became tauter, their eyes wide and uneasy, continually searching the dark. On the perimeter of the community space, men patrolled with spears.

  Then, when the dark was complete and a swollen full moon could just be glimpsed gleaming through the branches, a chilling howl rose up far off in the trees. Shudders leapt from one member of the tribe to the next, the blood draining from their faces.

  “Uh-oh,” Hellboy said. “Looks like we found the connection.”

  “Thanks to Eliza,” Brad said in a voice that didn’t appear to be thanking her at all.

  Another howl, this time much closer.

  “How can it move that fast?” Lisa asked, unnerved.

  “Maybe there’s more than one,” Brad replied.

  “Is that meant to reassure me?”

  The one Hellboy had identified as the leader ran back into the large shelter, and emerged a moment later, the frustration clear on his face. The men edged to the point where the firelight started to die, their spears directed toward the impenetrable night. Standing behind them, Hellboy tried to see what was out there.

  None of them were prepared for the terrifying roar blasting from the trees just a few feet away. Unable to prevent themselves, the men took several steps back, still leveling their spears, while the women shrieked and cried around the campfire, pulling their children to their breasts.

  Seconds later, another roar erupted from far away to Hellboy’s left. The men rushed over to defend that area.

  “Fast,” Hellboy said. “It’s circling.” The crack of a branch crushed underfoot, a hint of something moving, silhouetted against the greater darkness under the trees, impossibly huge. “That’s a wolf?” Hellboy muttered. “It’s some kinda giant.”

  The beast continued to circle the camp, toying with the terrified tribe. The bellowing roar that made blood run cold echoed on all sides, sometimes only feet away from the edge of the light. With each explosion of sound, the tribespeople became more frantic and filled with dread as they awaited the inevitable.

  Desperately wishing he could help, Hellboy watched as the beast used the dark to its advantage, circling swiftly, sometimes silently backtracking so the forest people could never be quite sure where it was. Occasionally the crack of a trunk or a falling tree gave away its terrifying size.

  A ferocious roar echoed across the camp as the wolf lunged from the dark and snatched one of the men up in its jaws. His spear was futile, snapped and discarded.

  As the screams resounded across the clearing, Hellboy caught a glimpse of the man disappearing into the trees: a broken doll, tossed indifferently. Of the wolf, there was only a cloud of darkness being enveloped by the shadows.

  Sprinting across the camp, Hellboy hurled himself into the forest. He smelled the penetrating musk of the beast and the sickening iron scent of blood. Though it was too dark to perceive any more than impressions, he realized it was almost as big as a house, its eyes red lamps in the upstairs rooms. With a roar that made his ears ring, it snapped its jaw furiously so that body parts and gore rained down all around him. When it had emptied its mouth, it lunged toward the camp, revealing rows of stained teeth and the hot blast of meaty breath. Another victim was plucked from the camp before the wolf retreated rapidly. Crashing trees marked its passage, punctuated every now and then by a disappearing roar.

  Hellboy’s shoulders slumped. It might only have been a vision, but he felt the deaths of the two men as acutely as if he had been really there. “Wish they’d invented beer back in this time,” he muttered.

  Trudging back into the circle of firelight, he found the tribe waiting desolately. Lisa, Brad, and William hurried up. Lisa had tears in her eyes. “Why do we have to see things like that?” she asked.

  After a moment’s thought, Hellboy decided to investigate the largest shelter. The others followed.

  It was dark and smoky inside. A few hot embers glowed in one corner, casting a devilish hue over a cluttered interior of feathers, hides, and animal bones hanging all around. As they pushed through the ritual clutter, they came across a man in his forties squatting near the fire, his face streaks of ghastly colors, marked by the fruits, herbs, and clays of the forest.

  “Sit,” he said.

  They all jumped.

  “You can see us?” Hellboy said incredulously.

  “I see all the spirits that visit me, and there are many. I speak all languages that the spirits teach me.” He threw a handful of leaves onto the embers and inhaled the fragrant smoke.

  “What is he? Some kind of shaman?” Lisa whispered.

  The shaman waved a finger at her slowly, but said nothing. For a moment, he studied them before nodding, as if their appearance was the most normal thing.

  “Shouldn’t you be out there helping your people fight that beast?” Hellboy said.

  “I help them here.” He gestured to a series of ritual objects—skulls, polished stones, strangely shaped pieces of wood—carefully placed near the embers.

  “What is that thing?” Hellboy asked. “It’s bigger than any wolf I’ve ever seen. Heck, it’s bigger than any animal.”

  “It is more spirit than animal,” the shaman said.

  “An avatar,” Hellboy said.

  Understanding the concept, the shaman nodded slowly. “It escaped from the control of the gods to stalk this world, filled with a hunger for blood that cannot be quenched. It is the wildness of the storm and the brutality of the harsh mountain snows. It cannot be stopped. It can never be deterred. Its sole purpose is to hunt, and kill.”

&
nbsp; Hellboy weighed this information, and said, “So it’s the first. The original werewolf.”

  “Every night it attacks. Every night we do what we can to drive it back, and every night one of us dies. The battle never ends. We are weary, and our numbers diminish. Soon we will be gone, and there will only be the wolf, and the great forest of the night.”

  “If you get together, make some traps—”

  Brad was cut short by the shaman shaking his head. “It cannot be destroyed. It is not of this world. It can only be contained.”

  “And that’s what you’re trying to do here?” Hellboy asked.

  The shaman climbed to his feet, stretching limbs that had not moved in many hours of his ritual. “And now I am ready.”

  Before Hellboy could see, he plucked up two items from next to the embers and pushed his way out of the shelter. Hellboy and the others followed into the chill night, where the tribespeople stood around, scared and disoriented. The shaman barked at them in their own language, and gradually they drew nearer, dropping into a crescent around him.

  With a sense of momentousness, he revealed the items he had hidden in his hands: a sliver of pure white quartz, like a tear, that he must have recovered from the mountain, and a heart-shaped clump of the same quartz.

  “That’s it,” Hellboy guessed. “The Kiss and the Heart of Winter.”

  The two pieces of quartz appeared to glow with their own inner light, echoing the gleam of the full moon high overhead.

  “What’s he done to the stones?” Lisa whispered.

  “Empowered them through his ritual.” William’s eyes reflected the gleam of the quartz. “This is the start of it all.”

  “Quiet,” Hellboy cautioned.

  The shaman placed the two pieces of the quartz on the forest floor in front of him, and after a moment’s reflection began a ritual dance, slowly at first, growing more frenzied with each circuit of the stones, until he was whirling wildly, his eyes rolled back so only the whites were visible, his voice humming a strange series of notes that rose and fell in an unnerving pattern.

  “Look at the stones,” Brad hissed.

  The inner glow of the quartz became more intense with each circuit of the dance, until finally the shaman’s voice reached a pitch and white light burst out of the stones, lancing into the forehead of every member of the tribe. It caused them no pain, for they continued to blink, their expressions baffled, but after a while their eyes closed and their heads nodded onto their chests. At the same time, the shaman slowly crumpled to the ground and lay still.

  For a few intense moments, nothing moved across the clearing, until a tremendous wind began far off in the forest, rushing toward them. It tore into the camp, sweeping around the open space, throwing the shelters up into the air and buffeting Hellboy and the others before it centered on the unmoving tribespeople, circling them repeatedly. One by one, they convulsed, their eyes snapping open, an expression of painful incomprehension on their faces. The shaman was the last, and once he had risen to his feet, the wind died away and all was still once more.

  In a daze, the other tribespeople swayed from side to side where they stood, but the shaman’s head snapped around toward Hellboy, and after a moment he lurched over as if walking for the first time. When he swayed before Hellboy, he opened his eyes wide to reveal they were all black.

  “We will meet again, in some distant time and place.” The shaman’s voice was a low growl, more animal than human.

  “What’s happened to him?” Lisa asked in horror.

  The Shaman turned his head toward her, and she flinched at the touch of that gleaming, oily gaze. “I see the unfolding pattern across the ages,” he said. “I see you in times to come. This does not end here. What your kind thought was victory has only delayed the inevitable. Has created a new path through the forest of existence.”

  “The wolf’s inside him somehow,” Hellboy said.

  “Inside all of them,” the shaman said. “A fragment of the fury at the heart of the night. A sliver of the boiling heat of the beast frozen in fragile humanity. You think it is a prison?” He let out a low, growling laugh.

  “Doesn’t matter what you call it. You’re not going to be attacking these people night after night,” Hellboy said.

  “Is it me, or is it getting cold?” Lisa whispered. Shivering, she allowed Brad to put an arm around her shoulders and pull her close for warmth. Large snowflakes began to drift down through the branches; a cold wind blew.

  “Winter is coming,” the shaman-wolf said.

  Around the crescent, the other tribespeople were slowly awakening from their trance, struggling to comprehend what had happened to them as they rubbed their limbs for warmth. The shaman-wolf retrieved the Kiss and Heart of Winter from the ground in front of them, and held them on his open palms. An icy cold washed off them, their glow brighter.

  “The long winter is coming,” he corrected. “Soon this one’s mind will drive me further inside him. I will sleep and wait.”

  Snow gusted all around the camp. Glancing nervously at the clouds sweeping across the moon, the tribespeople began to collect their weapons and children together.

  “Forget it. You’re going to be stuck inside these people forever. The Kiss and the Heart of Winter will bind you to them,” Hellboy said.

  The shaman-wolf’s grin was unsettling. “These people will breed, and their young will multiply, and spread across this world, until they exist in all parts of the great forest. And in each one of them will be a part of me, frozen deep in their thoughts, in their hearts. Waiting for the day when the moon will call to it.”

  With a flash of insight, Hellboy realized the truth of what Kate Corrigan had told him about people turning into wolves all over the world. These tribespeople were their distant ancestors, and they had been moving through their lives without realizing the wolf was inside them. And then, one day, right across the globe, every wolf had woken as one.

  The shaman-wolf saw that Hellboy understood, and nodded. “The power of these things,” he said, weighing the quartz in his hands, “waxes and wanes, like the moon. On the times when the binding power is weakest, I will break free of my bond and transform my hosts, and we will sweep through the great forests and across the mountaintops, searching for these things.”

  “What we saw in Bulgaria,” Hellboy said. “The mass exodus of the wolves, on a hunt for the Kiss and the Heart.”

  “And one day . . . one day . . . away in time, the power will wane, and we shall find the Winter’s Kiss and the Heart of the Cold and we will destroy them. We will never be locked away again,” the shaman-wolf stated. His eyes were starting to lose their oily quality as the human mind reasserted itself. “And on that day the wolves will rise forever, and we will usher in the Time of the Black Sun, when the moon shall rule, and our power will be so great we can shape the material world to our will. It will become a place where the pack can hunt freely, and you, and all your kind, will be our food.”

  The shaman staggered back a step as the wolf slipped beneath the waves of his consciousness. As he gradually came to terms with his situation, he nodded with satisfaction, gripping the Kiss and the Heart tightly to his chest. By then, the snow was beginning to cover the ground and the tribe was preparing to move on.

  “Is this the start of the Ice Age?” Brad asked. “The ritual to make the Kiss and Heart of Winter set it in motion?”

  Hellboy shrugged. “It’s the start of the Wolf Age, that’s for sure. These people carried the spirit of the wolf right across the world without realizing it.”

  “All those people going about their lives without knowing what was inside them, waiting to burst out,” Lisa said.

  “We need to move too, before we freeze,” William said. “It’s not going to be easy staying ahead of this storm front.”

  The tribe had already trailed out of the clearing, but as Hellboy and the others followed they passed between two trees with branches arching together to form a gateway. When they emerged on
the other side, they were back in the house.

  CHAPTER 21

  —

  The ground-floor kitchen was almost unbearably still. The wind outside had dropped and the snow was no longer falling, but deep in the depths of the house the steady boom-boom-boom continued to pound, dim, but always there. The noise no longer sounded like a heartbeat, or even like machinery, but like someone beating on a door, close to breaking in, and it only added to the potent sense of dread that seethed in every room.

  Hellboy found another lamp and lit it, and as the light drove away the oppressive dark they all breathed a little easier. “Home sweet home,” Hellboy said.

  The words of the wolf-shaman haunted him. He now knew exactly why the wolves wanted the Kiss of Winter: to destroy it along with the Heart, so the beasts would never again be bound into human form. Then they would have their time to hunt, an age that they called the Time of the Black Sun. He could now understand the symbolism in the phrase.

  William steadied himself against the table, one hand on his forehead. “The wolf . . . that creature circling the camp . . . If we allow the beasts outside to find the Kiss of Winter, it will be back, here. We won’t stand a chance. The human race could never survive.”

  “Then we make sure they don’t get the Kiss of Winter,” Hellboy said.

  William didn’t look reassured. “All those years wrapped up in my own desire,” he began. “Before, finding out what happened to my wife was the only thing that mattered to me. Now this is about so much more.” He shook his head in disbelief that it had come to such a state, casting a troubled eye towards Brad and Lisa.

  Brad rested a tentative hand on his father’s shoulder. “We stick together, we’ll get through this.”

  Nodding, William absently placed his own hand on Brad’s.

  Hellboy was touched by the depth of emotion he saw in Brad. Since his first meeting with Brad in his apartment, Hellboy had watched him slowly shake off the frozen emotional state that had gripped him. He deserved something better than the pain he’d struggled with all his life.