The Wolf's Hour

by Robert R. McCammon

  She waited, her heart pounding, as she watched for the figures coming after them. When Michael had caught up with her again, she turned and started off. They neared the front of the roof, with the sprawling, glittering city spread around them in all directions. The massive statue of Apollo rose from the roof’s apex, and pigeons took flight as Michael and Gaby approached. Michael felt his legs weakening; he was holding Gaby back. He stopped, supporting himself and Adam’s weight against the base of Apollo. “Keep going,” he told Gaby when she paused again. “Find a way down.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” she said, staring at him with her sapphire eyes.

  “Don’t be a fool! This isn’t the time or place for argument.” He heard the men shouting back and forth to each other, coming closer. He got his hand into his coat—and touched not his own Luger, which was trapped in its holster, but the poisoned pocket watch. His fingers gripped it, but he couldn’t make himself bring it out. “Go!” he told her.

  “I’m not leaving,” Gaby said. “I love you.”

  “No, you don’t. You love the memory of a moment. You don’t know anything about me—and you wouldn’t want to.” He glanced at the figures, approaching cautiously about thirty yards away. They hadn’t yet seen him or Gaby underneath the statue. The pocket watch was ticking, and time was running out. “Don’t throw your life away,” he said. “Not for me. Not for anybody.”

  She hesitated, and Michael could see the strain on her face. She glanced at the oncoming Germans, then back to Michael. Maybe she did only love the memory of a moment—but what was life, if not simply the memory of moments? He pulled the pocket watch free and popped it open. The cyanide capsule awaited his choice. “You’ve done what you can,” he told her. “Now go.” And he shook the capsule into his mouth. She saw his throat convulse as he swallowed the pill. He grimaced.

  “Over here! Here they are!” one of the men shouted. A pistol fired, and the bullet knocked sparks off Apollo’s thigh. Michael Gallatin shivered and fell to his knees, with Adam’s weight atop him. He looked up at Gaby, his face sparkling with sweat.

  She couldn’t stand to watch him die. Another shot was fired, and it zipped by close enough to unthaw her legs. She turned away from Michael Gallatin, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she ran. About fifty feet from where Michael lay dying, Gaby’s shoe hit the hand grip of a trapdoor. She pulled it open and looked down at a ladder. Then another glance toward Michael; the figures were surrounding him, victors of the hunt. It was all Gaby could do to keep from firing into their midst, but they’d surely shoot her to pieces. She went down the ladder, and the trapdoor closed over her head.

  Six German soldiers and three Gestapo men stood around Michael. The man who’d blown Adam’s head open sneered. “Now we’ve got you, you bastard.”

  Michael spat out the pill he’d been holding in his mouth. Under Adam’s corpse, his body shivered. Prickles of pain shot through his nerves. The Gestapo agent was reaching down for him, and Michael surrendered himself to the change.

  It was like stepping from a secure shelter into a maelstrom of wild winds—a conscious choice, and once decided, difficult to reverse. He felt the primeval shriek in his bones as his spine bowed, and with a thunder that boomed in his head, his skull and face began to alter their shape. He shivered, and moaned uncontrollably.

  The Gestapo agent’s hand froze in midair. One of the soldiers laughed. “He’s begging for mercy!” the man said.

  “Get up!” The Gestapo man stepped back. “Get up, you swine!”

  The moaning changed pitch. It lost its human element and turned bestial.

  “Bring a light!” the Gestapo agent shouted. He didn’t know what was wrong with the man who crouched before him, but he didn’t care to stand any closer. “Somebody get a light on h—”

  There was the noise of ripping cloth, and cracking sounds of bones being broken. The soldiers stepped back, and the one who’d laughed now wore a fractured grin. One of the soldiers produced a hand torch, and the Gestapo agent fumbled to switch it on. Before him something heaved, laboring under the stiff corpse at his feet. His hands shook; he couldn’t get the balky switch clicked. “Damn it to Hell!” he shouted—and then the switch moved, and the light came on.

  He saw what was there, and his breath froze.

  Hell had shining green eyes and a sleek, muscular body covered with gray-streaked, black hair. Hell had white fangs, and hell moved on all fours.

  The beast shook violently, a powerful motion that broke the corpse’s arms like matchsticks and threw the body aside. It cast off, as well, the last of its human masquerade: a blood-covered gray suit, white shirt with the tie still knotted in the ripped collar, underwear, socks, and shoes. Amid the debris was a holster that held a Luger; the beast had deadlier weapons.

  “Oh… my…” The Gestapo agent never got to call on his deity; Hitler was absent, and God knew the meaning of justice. The beast sprang, its jaws gaping, and as it hit the Gestapo agent its teeth were already sinking into the throat and ripping away flesh and arteries in a crimson shower of carnage.

  All but two of the soldiers and one of the other Gestapo agents shrieked and fled for their lives. A German soldier ran the wrong way—not toward the doorway but toward the street. He ended there, on a crushed note. The second Gestapo man, a heroic fool, lifted his Mauser pistol to fire at the beast as it whirled toward him; the fierce green glare of its eyes hypnotized him for perhaps a half second, and that was much too long. The beast leaped upon him, claws making a bloody tatters of the man’s face, and the man’s strangled, lipless scream shocked the two soldiers from their trances. They ran, too, one of them falling and tangling the second in his legs.

  Michael Gallatin raged. He snapped the air, his jaws cracking together. Blood was dripping from his muzzle, its hot perfume heightening his abandon. A human mind calculated in the skull of the wolf, and his eyes saw not the darkness of night but a gray-hazed twilight in which blue-edged figures ran for the doorway, their screams like the high squeals of hunted rats. Michael could hear the panicked beating of their hearts—a military drum corps hammering at an insane speed. The smell of their sweat had sausage and schnapps in it. He bounded forward, his muscles and sinews moving like the fine gears of a killing machine, and he turned on the soldier who was trying to struggle to his feet; Michael looked into the German’s face, and in a split second judged him a youth, no more than seventeen. An innocent corrupted by a rifle and a book called Mein Kampf. Michael seized the boy’s left hand in his jaws and crushed the fingers without breaking the skin, removing the possibility of further corruption by rifle. Then, as the boy screamed and flailed at him, Michael turned away and bounded across the roof after the others.

  One of the soldiers stopped to fire his pistol; the bullet ricocheted off the stones to Michael’s left, but did not slow him. As the soldier spun around to flee, Michael jumped up and slammed into the man’s back, knocking him aside like a scarecrow. Then Michael landed nimbly, and kept going in a blur of motion. He saw the others barreling into the door that led down the staircase, and in another few seconds they would be throwing the latch. The last man was about to squeeze through; the door was already closing, and the Germans were hollering and trying to pull him in. Michael lowered his head and propelled himself forward.

  He leaped, skewing his body in midair, and crashed against the door. It flew open, knocking the Germans down the stairs in a tangle of arms and legs. He landed amid them, clawing and tearing with fevered indiscrimination; then he left them behind, bloody and broken, as he raced down the stairs and through the corridors still marked with the furrows of Adam’s shoe tips.

  As he came down the sweeping staircase from the main auditorium, he met the crowd that milled in confusion and shouted for refunds. As Michael bounded down the stairs, the shouting ceased; the silence, however, didn’t last long. A fresh wave of shrieks crashed against the Opera’s marbled walls, and men and women in their elegant attire jumped over the balustrades li
ke swabbies off the sides of a torpedoed battleship. Michael leaped down the last six steps, his paws skidding across the green marble as he landed, and a bearded aristocrat with an ivory cane blanched and stumbled backward, a wet spot spreading across the front of his trousers.

  Michael ran, the power and exhilaration singing in his blood. His heart pumped steadily, his lungs bellowed, his sinews worked like iron springs. He snapped left and right, scaring back those who were too dumbfounded to move. Then he was streaking through the final vestibule, clearing a path of screams, and onto the street. He raced under the belly of a carriage horse, which reared and danced madly. Michael glanced back, over his shoulder; a few people had run out after him, but the panicked horse was in their midst and they scattered away from the pounding hooves.

  There was a fresh shriek: worn brakes, and tires clenching stones. Michael looked ahead and saw a pair of lights rushing at him. Without a hesitation, he bounded off the ground and up over the car’s front fender and hood. He had an instant to see two shocked faces behind the windshield, and then Michael scrambled up over the top of the car, down the other side, and raced away across the Avenue de l’Opera.

  “My God!” Mouse gasped as the Citrfen shuddered to a stop. He looked at Gaby. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.” She was stunned, and her mind seemed to be full of rusted gears. She saw people coming out of the Opera House, among them several German officers, and she said, “Go!”

  Mouse hit the accelerator, swerved the car around, and tore away from the Opera, leaving a backfire and a poot of blue smoke as his last salute.

  9

  It was after two o’clock in the morning when Camille heard a knock at her door. She sat up in her bed, instantly alert, reached under her pillow, and pulled out the deadly Walther pistol. She listened; the knock came again, more insistently. Not the Gestapo, she reasoned; they knocked with axes, not knuckles. But she took the pistol with her as she lit an oil lamp and went to the door in her long white gown. She almost bumped into Mouse, the little man standing wide-eyed and frightened in the hallway. She put a finger to her lips as he started to speak, and then she walked past him to the door. What a damnable mess! she thought angrily. She’d barely gotten the sorrow-racked girl to sleep twenty minutes before, the fool Brit had gotten both himself and Adam killed, and now she was stuck with a Nazi lunatic! Only a miracle could save this situation, and Joan of Arc was dust.

  “Who is it?” Camille asked, making herself sound sleepy. Her heart pounded, and her finger hugged the trigger.

  “Green Eyes,” said the man on the other side.

  No hand in Paris had ever moved faster to unlock a door.

  Michael stood there, hollow-eyed, his jaw and chin in need of a shave. He wore a pair of brown corduory trousers that were two sizes too small, and a white shirt meant for a fat man. On his feet he wore dark blue socks, but no shoes. He stepped into the apartment, past Camille, who stood openmouthed. Mouse made a choking sound. Michael closed the door gently behind him and locked it. “Mission,” he said, “accomplished.”

  “Oh,” someone said: a rush of breath. Gaby stood in the bedroom doorway, her face pale and her eyes rimmed with red. She still wore her new blue dress, now misshapen and full of wrinkles. “You… died. I watched you… take the pill.”

  “It didn’t work,” Michael said. He walked past them, his muscles sore and stretched, and his head throbbing with a dull ache: all aftereffects of the change. He went to a bowl of water in the kitchen and splashed his face, then took an apple and crunched into it. Camille, Gaby and Mouse followed him like three shadows. “I got the information,” he said as his teeth whittled the apple down to its core; it also served to clean his teeth and get out the last of the crusted blood. “But it wasn’t enough.” He looked at Camille, his green eyes shining in the lamp glow. “I promised Mouse I’d take him to Berlin. I have my own reasons for going there as well. Will you help us?”

  “The girl said she saw you surrounded by Nazis,” Camille told him. “If the cyanide pill didn’t work, how did you get away from them?” Her eyes had narrowed: it was impossible that this man was standing here. Impossible!

  He stared at her, unblinking. “I was faster than they were.”

  She started to speak again, but she wasn’t sure what to say. Where were the clothes he’d left here in? She looked at his stolen trousers and shirt. “I needed a change,” he said, in a calm and soothing voice. “The Germans were after me. I took clothes hanging on a line.”

  “I don’t…” She glanced at his shoeless feet. He finished the apple, tossed the stripped core into a trash basket, and reached for another. “I don’t understand.”

  Gaby just watched him, her senses still wrecked. Mouse said, “Hey! We heard it on the radio! They said a dog got loose in the Opera House and raised hell! We saw it, too! Right up on our car! Didn’t we?” he prodded Gaby.

  “Yes,” she answered. “We did.”

  “The information I got tonight,” Michael said to Camille, “has to be followed up. It’s vital we get to Berlin as soon as we can. You can help us get there, by arranging the route.”

  “This… is such short notice. I’m not sure I can—”

  “You can,” he said. “We’ll need new clothes. Identity cards if you can get them. And it’ll have to be arranged for Echo to meet me in Berlin.”

  “I don’t have the authority to—”

  “I’m giving you the authority. Mouse and I are going to Berlin, as soon as possible. Check with whoever you want to. Do whatever has to be done. But get us there. Understood?” He smiled slightly, showing his teeth.

  His smile chilled her. “Yes,” she said. “Understood.”

  “Wait. What about me?” Gaby finally shook off her shock. She came forward and touched Michael’s shoulder to make sure he was real. He was; her hand gripped his arm. “I’m going to Berlin with you.”

  He looked into her beautiful eyes, and his smile softened. “No,” he said gently. “You’re going west, back where you know your job and you do a damned fine one.” She started to protest, but Michael put a finger to her lips. “You’ve done your best for me. But you wouldn’t survive east of Paris, and I can’t be your guardian.” He realized the nail of the finger pressed against Gaby’s mouth had blood crusted under it; he took it quickly away. “The only reason I’m taking him with me is because I made a bargain.”

  “Yes, you sure did!” Mouse piped up.

  “And I’ll honor it. But I work best alone. Do you see?” he asked Gaby.

  Of course she didn’t. Not yet. But she would see, in the fullness of time; when this war was over, and she was an older woman with children and her own vineyard where German tank treads once tore the earth, she’d see. And be glad that Michael Gallatin had given her a future.

  “When can we leave?” Michael turned his attention to Camille, whose brain was already working feverishly on the possible routes from Paris to the diseased heart of the Reich.

  “A week. That’s the soonest I can get you out.”

  “Four days,” he told her, and he waited until she sighed and nodded.

  Home! Mouse thought, giddy with excitement. I’m going home!

  Damnedest mess I’ve ever been in in my life, Camille thought. Gaby was split; she yearned for the man who stood before her—returned miraculously from death—but she loved her country more. Michael had two thoughts. One was of Berlin, and the other was a phrase, a key to a mystery: Iron Fist.

  In the bedroom, as the candles burned low, Gaby lay on the goosedown mattress. Michael leaned over her, and kissed her lips. They sealed to each other with moist heat for a moment—and then Michael chose the cot, and lay down to ponder the future.

  Gaby reached for his hand, and he took hers.

  The night went on, and dawn broke with crimson fire.

  SIX

  Berserker

  1

  My hand! Mikhail thought, panicked, as he sat up on his bed of hay. What’s wrong wi
th my hand?

  In the gloom of the white palace’s depths, he could feel his right hand throb and burn, as if liquid fire ran through the veins instead of blood. The pain that had awakened him grew, running up his arm to his shoulder. His fingers were twisting, contorting, and Mikhail clenched his teeth to hold back a scream. He gripped his wrist as his fingers spasmed open and clenched closed; he heard little frail popping sounds, and each one drove a new dagger of agony into him. His face began to sweat. He dared not cry out, for the others would mock him. In another few torturous seconds his hand became gnarled and deformed, a freakish dark thing on the end of his white, pulsing wrist. He ached to shriek, but all his throat would allow was a whimper. Bands of black hair rose from his flesh, and they entwined around Mikhail’s wrist and forearm like sleek ribbons. His fingers were retreating into their sockets, with crunching noises as the knuckles changed shape. Mikhail gasped, near fainting; his hand was covered with black hair, and where his fingers had been there were curved talons and soft, pink pads. The tide of black hair flowed up his forearm, lapped over his elbow, and Mikhail knew that in another instant he must get up and run screaming for Renati.

  But the instant passed, and he didn’t move. The black hair rippled, began to draw back into flesh with raw, needling pain, and his fingers cracked again and lengthened. The curved talons drew into his skin, leaving the remains of human fingernails. The hand resurfaced, moon pale, and his fingers hung like strange pieces of meat. The pain ebbed, then went away. All of it had lasted perhaps fifteen seconds.

  Mikhail drew a breath, and almost sobbed.

  “The change,” Wiktor said, sitting on his haunches about seven feet to the boy’s left. “It’s coming on you.” Two large hares, oozing blood, lay on the stones beside him.