Storm Wolf

by Stephen Morris

  “They seem to all still be children,” Alexei muttered to himself, trying to count the children he could see inside. “He hasn’t made any of them into his apprentices, yet.” But he knew that he would never be able to defeat the man inside the cottage unless he donned the great wolf pelt he had left beside the tree. He was turning to slink back to where he had left the pelt and cap when he saw the man lift something in his hand. Alexei paused to see what would happen next.

  The man barked a few words in Lithuanian to the older boy he had slapped, and the boy, clearly struggling to not burst into tears, spat at the man. The man had pulled something out of his coat pocket. It was the bronze pyx he had stolen from the church. He opened it and held up one of the consecrated hosts. The boy struggled to stand up to the man, defiant, as if daring the man to strike him again.

  The man growled something at the boy and then turned, showing the consecrated host to all the shackled children. He stepped forward, himself spat on the boy before him, and reached forward with the host as if to touch the boy’s forehead.

  “No!” cried Alexei, bounding onto the sagging porch and throwing himself against the door of the house. There was no time to retrieve the pelt. The man was clearly about to begin making his prisoners into his apprentices, and Alexei could not let that happen to even one of the captive children.

  The door stood surprisingly firm. Children started shouting inside. Alexei threw himself against it again. It still refused to yield. The wretched hovel was sturdier than it had appeared. He looked around for a weapon of some sort to break the door down. He could hear the children calling and shouting within the house, and the man seemed to roar something at them in response.

  Alexei tried to pull loose one of the supports from the porch railing and it cracked in his grip. He needed the wolf pelt. He tumbled back down off the porch toward the trees. He stumbled back to where he had left the pelt and cap. Light from inside the house cut a thin swathe through the trees as someone opened the door Alexei had tried to break down. Knocking the cap aside, he tugged at the laces tied around the pelt to wrestle it free.

  The low rumble of a man’s voice growled behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, Alexei saw the greasy-haired man standing a few feet away. The cap on the ground twisted in convulsions. The tuft leaped through the air from the cap towards the man-wolf. Alexei pulled the pelt free from the laces and threw it across his shoulders.

  The transformation swept through Alexei. His muscles and tendons stretched and popped as his bones grew and twisted. His clothing tore and fell away. His pains and bruises faded as the wolf’s fur swaddled and covered him. A similar transformation swept across the greasy-haired man as he grinned in anticipation of his triumph. Two nearly pony-size wolves stood facing each other, snarling and drooling. Alexei snapped at the monster wolf, who growled and swatted a paw as if to strike Alexei’s snout.

  Children cried and shouted inside the house, unsure of what was going on outside. No doubt they wondered if the person who had found them and tried to break into the house was coming to set them free or intended to terrify them further. Shackles and links of chain rattled and clanged against each other as the children struggled against them yet again.

  The monster leaped at Alexei, snapping at his throat. Alexei ducked aside and skidded through the muddy snow, slipping as he attempted to turn and face the monster again. The monster slipped through the snow himself, striking his barrel chest against a tree. Roaring in fury, he flipped over and snarled at Alexei’s flailing form. Alexei stopped and righted himself, snarling at the monster in return.

  The monster stalked Alexei in a circle, maneuvering through the trees to come up behind Alexei, but Alexei kept turning in a much smaller circle, keeping the monster always in his sight.

  Without warning, the monster leaped through the air again, sailing just over Alexei’s back and sinking his teeth into Alexei’s shoulder. He pulled Alexei down and Alexei, yelping with pain, tore himself free from the monster’s jaws. Blood spurted. Alexei roared and darted into the air, circling around the monster from above.

  The monster stared at him, momentarily stunned at Alexei’s ability to hover in the air. Then he heaped up at Alexei from below, snapping at Alexei’s vulnerable throat. Alexei staggered further up and backward. The monster leaped again, snapping his great jaws at Alexei’s exposed belly. Alexei knocked the monster aside and darted onto the monster’s back, locking his jaws around the base of the monster’s skull.

  The monster reared on his back legs, roaring and thrashing about. Alexei’s jaws lost their grip and he was hurled across the small clearing, striking a tree and falling to the ground, stunned.

  The monster roared again and hurled himself toward Alexei, twisting aside at the last instant to avoid striking the same tree.

  Groggy, Alexei stood and shook himself. He was apparently evenly matched against the monster wolf, and the fight would continue until one of them tired and made a fatal mistake. He needed something to shift the odds in his favor.

  The monster snarled at Alexei, beginning to circle him again.

  Alexei noticed a spot of red in the snow, out of the corner of one eye. Was it his blood staining the ground? He backed away from the monster, toward the house. If he could use the house as an obstacle, he could plan a strategy to stop the monster.

  Something on the ground felt different under his paw. He glanced down. The spot of red he had noticed was not blood. It was Javinė’s cap, tossed aside and trampled in the snow.

  The sprite had said that Alexei might share some of the sprite’s abilities if he were to don the cap. Alexei snatched the cap up in his teeth. He could not wear it as a wolf, but maybe one of the children in the house could.

  He continued backing towards the house, the monster wolf growling and following him through the trees. Then Alexei turned and ran toward the house, onto the porch, and through the door. The monster roared and ran after him.

  The children screamed as the two wolves came crashing through the door together into the room. The monster wolf snapped and nipped at Alexei’s limbs. Alexei turned and twisted, momentarily trapped under the monster. He turned his head as best he could and threw the cap towards the terrified and screaming shackled children.

  Now that he was no longer holding the cap between his teeth, Alexei could fight back. He sank his fangs into the foreleg of the monster. More blood spurted and the monster lunged at Alexei’s shoulders. The two wolves wrestled and rolled across the floor, knocking over a table and chair. They tumbled into the fireplace, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney and causing burning logs to roll across the floor. The stench of burnt wolf fur filled the room. The wolves tumbled across the hearth again, their fur singed and smoking.

  Some of the children rubbed their eyes, which must have been irritated by the smoke and stench, causing further jangling of their chains. But one of the children, seeing the red cap on the floor, seemed to realize that the wolf who had thrown it towards them must have meant to help them in some way. Edita snatched the cap from the floor and, apparently not knowing what else to do with it, handed it to her sister Amalija. Amalija stared at it. Their brother Dovydas pushed them all aside as the wolves tumbled towards them. He grabbed the cap from Amalija and smashed it atop his own head.

  The wolves untangled themselves from each other and stood, gasping for breath as they stared across the room at each other. Dovydas could not tell one wolf from the other. He had no idea which one had tossed the cap and was, presumably, a friend of the twelve captives. In fact, he was certain that one of the wolves was not only a friend of the captives but, without knowing how he was certain, that the friendly wolf was their former guest Alexei. He knew his knowledge was somehow related to the cap he was wearing but there was no time to puzzle it all out.

  The wolves snarled and roared at each other again, leaping at each other’s throats and smashing through the dirty window back out into the forest.

  Dovydas turned back to where the shac
kles were all bolted to the stone wall. With the other captive children all screaming and crying around him, he tugged and pushed his way to the wall. Pressing himself against the bolts holding the shackles, he whispered and bargained with the ironworks, begging the bolts to release them. In one part of his mind, he knew this was foolishness and folly. Iron bolts were not living things to be reasoned with. But with another part of his mind, which seemed clearer and brighter now that he was wearing this strange red cap, he knew that this was their best hope.

  “Please!” he whispered to the bolts. “Let us go so we can return to our homes! Whatever that—that, man—wanted to do with us, he’s done before, hasn’t he? And it would have been something terrible, wouldn’t it? You’ve seen him do that before, haven’t you?” he asked the bolts. “You don’t want to see him do that again, do you? To us?”

  He paused, daring to hope. The bolts trembled slightly.

  “Please!” Dovydas repeated. “You don’t want that to happen again, do you?”

  The bolts trembled again.

  He could hear the wolves roaring and fighting outside.

  “Now! Please!” he urged the bolts. “While they are fighting outside, we can get away while he is not watching us!’

  The bolts wrenched themselves out of the wall and clattered to the floor.

  Dovydas snatched up the chains linking the children together and shouted in victory. Edita and Amalija cheered. Some of the others noticed and began screaming in excitement. The cacophony was deafening and chaotic. Dovydas and his sisters began to pull the links that ran through the shackles around each child’s wrists. But the links were irregular sizes and would not slide free of the shackles. Amalija began to shout orders.

  “Stop crying! Listen to me! If we hurry and walk together, we can get away through the forest and back home!” she told the others. “But we have to stop screaming so that he—HE—doesn’t notice and come after us again! Can we do that?”

  There was a sudden quiet as all but the youngest children stopped shouting. Then even the youngest, still whimpering, nodded in agreement with the others. Amailija led them out the door, showing them how to gather and hold the lengths of chain in their hands to reduce the clanking sounds as they walked. They began to slip out the door onto the porch.

  Dovydas, following his sister, saw a glint of bronze amid the smashed remnants of the table and chair on the floor. It was the pyx the man had been holding. The consecrated hosts were scattered on the floor around it.

  “Stop, Amailija!” he hissed. “Wait!”

  He knelt down, pulling the two children linked to him on either side down as well. They gathered up the scattered hosts and put them back into the pyx. Dovydas kept one host in his hand, however, as he stowed the pyx holding the rest in one of his pockets.

  “What’s that for?” Amalija wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But it’s important.”

  Amalija shook her head and the twelve children began to slip out of the house again.

  The porch sighed and creaked beneath them. But the two wolves, circling and snarling at each other, seemed not to notice them. Amalija led the children between the trees and away from the house in a direction that she hoped led toward home, but she really wasn’t sure what direction home was. She really just wanted to get away from the house first.

  There was a sudden roar from the wolves. The children froze.

  One wolf had leaped onto the back of the other and had his great jaws closed around the other’s throat. Blood was spurting and the injured wolf was panting and thrashing about, gurgling sounds coming from his throat.

  Dovydas stepped forward and held aloft the consecrated host he had kept ahold of. Unsure of how he knew it, he called “Slogutis!” and knew, without anyone having told him, that he had called the greasy-haired man by his name.

  As soon as Dovydas cried out, the monster’s attention flickered from the other wolf toward Dovydas. Dovydas called out the same word again and the monster’s jaws seemed to go slack, allowing the other wolf to turn and throw the monster off his back. The great monster wolf struck a tree and lay stunned.

  Dovydas marched up to the stunned wolf, pulling the other children along with him despite their cries as they pulled against him. They wanted to be nowhere near the monster wolf. But Dovydas, certain of what had to be done, marched insistently up to their captor and tormentor and pressed the consecrated host against the great beast’s forehead.

  The fur singed and smoked, an acrid stench curling into the air. The other wolf, appearing injured or weak from loss of blood, could only stand where he was and watch.

  The monster stirred and whimpered, seemingly coming back to consciousness. Dovydas kept pressing the host against the monster wolf’s forehead. The younger children screamed and pulled away. The older ones, realizing what they were watching, grabbed hold of them to keep them still.

  Dovydas repeated whatever it was he had told the wolf. The wolf’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a low snarl, then the wolf was gone and the greasy-haired man was there, naked and cringing before Dovydas. Dovydas kept the host pressed against the man’s brow, his lip still pulled back in a snarl.

  The man moved as if to leap up and was thrown back against the tree, his cries of rage dying in his throat as he realized what was happening.

  Dovydas pressed the communion wafer even more forcefully against the man’s greasy forehead. The paper-thin host broke and dissolved in the sweaty moisture of both Dovydas’ hand and the man’s forehead. Dovydas snatched his hand away from the man and tumbled back, pulling the other captive children with him.

  “Run!” he cried.

  The man stood and screamed at Dovydas. But even as he stepped away from the tree to recapture the escaping children, the remnants of the host smeared across his forehead burst into brilliant flame and engulfed the man-wolf with the greasy hair and yellow teeth. The man-wolf screamed in the fire and then collapsed onto the ground and flared white-hot in the night. Dovydas glanced back and thought he saw the man’s skeleton crumple into a pile of bones in the midst of the brilliant fire. Both the scream and the light were cut off, sudden quiet and darkness engulfing the clearing.

  A few wisps of ashes drifted away under the trees.

  The children, heeding Dovydas’ warning, had kept running into the trees until the house was far behind them. Finally stopping to catch their breath, Amalija asked him, “It’s that cap, isn’t it? That’s how you knew what to do, to destroy that—that beast. Isn’t it?” She pointed to the cap atop his head.

  He nodded, too winded to talk yet.

  “Can you lead us home, Dovydas? Can you find the way through the trees with that cap?”

  He stood and looked around. “Yes, I think I can,” he answered. “Yes, I can. And then… and then, I think that I am supposed to leave the cap in the barn. The cap wants me to leave it in the barn.”

  Edita held up her wrists, displaying the shackles and the chains that still linked the twelve children together. “What about these, Dovydas? What about these?”

  “I’m sure any of the blacksmiths in town can remove the chains and shackles, Edita,” Dovydas promised.

  “What about that other wolf, Dovydas?” Amalija asked him. “Should we go back? Should we try to help him? Should we…?”

  Dovydas shook his head.

  “That other wolf needs time to recover, Amalija, but he will be fine. He needs… he needs to keep traveling somewhere,” Dovydas told her. “That other wolf? That was Alexei, Amalija, and he needs to keep going somewhere to find what he is looking for.”

  Chapter 5: Wilkolak

  Alexei

  (Poland, late spring 1890)

  Beatrycze set the bowl of porridge and a mug of tea on the table in front of the man she had met in her yard. He was gaunt and his clothes were tatters. He carried a large bundle that he seemed afraid to let out of his sight. He had been drinking from the trough of water in her yard, and though he had startle
d her when she stepped out the door into the mid-April dawn to feed the hens and tend her small collection of goats, he had seemed just as startled, but not dangerous. She had told him to come inside for some porridge and bread. He had seemed wary but then delighted to accept her offer.

  “Where am I now?” he asked her in broken German.

  “You are in Silesia,” Beatrycze told him, in her own broken German. “We have always been Polish speaking people in Silesia, but the rulers? They come and go. We became a province of the German Empire almost twenty years ago, but most of us in this region are Polish speakers, forced to adapt to the ways and language of the Germans. Our men are miners and farmhands and weavers; here, in this village, so close to many of the big iron and coal mines, the men are all miners. We women tend the homes and animals and children while our fathers and brothers and husbands go down every morning to hack away at the ribbons of coal and iron in the earth.” She paused and then asked him, “Can I ask where you are from, friend?”

  “Me? I… I come from Estonia,” he answered her, staring into his bowl of porridge as he spoke. “I had to flee from my home and I set out to go south and west. I have come through Latvia and Lithuania and have followed the paths in the forests or along the edges of the fields into… you say this province is called Silesia?”

  Beatrycze nodded. She pointed to the scars around the man’s throat.

  He noticed her gesture but slowly chewed another mouthful of bread before he answered. “I came to a small town in Lithuania. A… a man had stolen twelve children from their homes, intending… intending to do terrible things. I tracked him to his lair and was able to save the children, but the… man? He injured my throat. I was able to rest in his hovel for a time and heal my wounds, regain my strength. I took some of the clothes I found and set out again. Many of the townsfolk thought I was responsible for stealing the children and… even if the children had spoken up for me, I don’t think there was a future for me in that town. So I began my journey again.”