Only the Moon Howls

by Connie Senior

  “Helios,” he cried hastily, and thrust the sunstone toward her. With a cry of agony, she collapsed in the bright light onto the boy’s prone body. Alexandru threw the garlic braid around her neck, dragging her toward him so that she was pinned against him, facing Caleb and the boy. She choked and struggled as if the garlic burned. Was it like a silver cord to a werewolf? Caleb wondered.

  Her hands reached out for Stefan, calling his name over and over in a strangled voice. The boy’s eyes opened, with the wild, disoriented look of a sleeper. He sat up clumsily, seeing only the vampire, and lunged, arms outstretched toward her, shouting incoherently. Caleb threw down his stake and grabbed Stefan with one arm thrown awkwardly around the boy’s chest. Stefan’s hands plowed furrows in the hay on the loft floor as Caleb dragged him back, away from the vampire he yearned to reach. In spite of Caleb’s greater strength, the boy fought him hard. Caleb was forced to toss the sunstone onto the floorboards and grasp Stefan’s arms with both hands, pinning them behind his back.

  “Neva, Neva, Neva,” the boy sobbed. He stopped fighting his captor, but continued to quake, his chest heaving with enormous, ragged breaths.

  “Sleep, boy,” intoned Alexandru coldly as he pointed his hand at Stefan. Caleb felt Stefan slump in his grip and laid him gently on the hay that lined the loft. He picked up the sunstone once again, winded and shaken by the sudden assault.

  The vampire struggled weakly, the combination of the garlic braid around her neck and the sunstone proving too much—indications that she was a young vampire.

  “Neva. That is your name?” questioned Alexandru harshly, angrier than Caleb had ever seen him on a vampire hunt. He had always been cold and dispassionate, even at the mention of Cuza, his maniacal obsession. Was there something about this particular vampire? Did he know her? But she did not seem to know him as she answered weakly.

  “Yes. What is it that you—?” She faltered. Perhaps she was a bit slow to realize that the two men meant to bring her a final death.

  “You!” she cried with more animation, her dark eyes drilling into Caleb. “You killed Emil! And the others.”

  “Who is Emil?” Alexandru asked curtly.

  “He is—was my…I met him three years ago, while I was still—”

  Human. Living. She could not say the words, but it was clear that she was a young vampire and Emil was responsible. She looked frightened, and that, too, betrayed her short time as one of the Undead.

  “At the Petrosna Caves, you killed him,” she finished weakly.

  Alexandru gave Caleb a furious look; clearly, he was still angry that Caleb had killed Emil without him, depriving Alexandru the chance to interrogate the vampire about Cuza.

  “Do you know other vampires?” queried Alexandru. “Have you met Cuza?”

  “Yes. Once,” she shivered. “Emil knew him. He’s an old, old vampire. Emil was…scared of him. They talked about the killings.” She struggled weakly, realizing anew that those same vampire killers held her prisoner. Surely she suspected what her fate would be.

  “Do you know where to find Cuza?” The old vampire-hunter’s words were clipped, but still angry.

  “I don’t,” she began, licking her lips and giving Caleb a pleading look. “But I could find him for you, if you want. If you let me go.”

  Alexandru allowed himself a sharp laugh, although his face was set in a grimace. Caleb noticed that he had released the garlic from his free hand and replaced it with a stake from his pocket.

  “You pollute the living,” Alexandru intoned, his fury transformed into icy resolve as he raised the stake above his head in a gesture unseen by the vampire. “You deserve no more than this.”

  She had no time to reply, or even cry out, as he plunged the stake into her heart.

  When Alexandru released the vampire into a crumpled heap between them, Caleb saw that the old man was shaking, obsessively fingering the garlic braid. It was all Caleb could do not to ask Alexandru why this vampire affected him so strongly.

  Caleb extinguished the sunstone, blinking in the afterglow for a few moments before helping Alexandru move Stefan back into bed. The boy slept an untroubled, charmed sleep.

  Neva rested, too, in the final sleep that vampires defied. Even at the new moon, when the wolf in him was at an ebb, Caleb felt the song of Nature. It told of the coupling between birth and death, of how Life rose and fell like a wave in an endless sea. Life was so precious to Caleb; he knew he would never understand the vampire’s hunger to step outside these bounds, to feed on the living without being part of the fabric Life.

  “Shall we finish?” he asked, hesitant to break into Alexandru’s reverie.

  Wordlessly, the old vampire-hunter nodded. Caleb picked up the lifeless body and the wizards left the barn in search of a secluded place in which to burn the corpse.

  Few words were exchanged as they completed their work. When it was done, Alexandru turned to his companion, looking exhausted and many years older.

  “I must speak with Lucian and the boy’s parents,” he said hoarsely. “Wake the boy and bring him into the house. He should not sleep alone.”

  Back in the loft, Caleb conjured a ball of light and found Stefan lying on the straw, still sleeping peacefully. The boy had a future now, one that involved growing up, growing old, perhaps having children and watching them grow. He could not help but think of Bela again, wishing those things for him, the only child he might ever have.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, he worked a spell to undo the sleep that Alexandru had imposed on the boy. Stefan opened his eyes suddenly, staring at the wizard with scant recognition.

  “How do you feel?” Caleb asked quietly.

  “Where is she?” cried the boy, as he cast about the loft and realized they were alone. He sat up quickly, searching frantically, and then grabbed Caleb’s tunic, shaking him as if to extract the lost vampire.

  “How much do you remember, Stefan?” Caleb gripped the boy’s wrists gently, but firmly. The boy still had the look of incoherent dreams about his eyes. He yielded to Caleb’s grip, lost in a waking dream.

  “She was so beautiful,” the boy murmured, “and she came…it was a secret. Don’t tell, she said, and I’ll take you away to where it’s always…Neva, her name…so beautiful.” Caleb could almost hear echoes of the song of the vampire in his words.

  “Neva was a vampire,” he said to the boy, sounding more harsh and cruel than he had intended. The boy shook his head and became more agitated. “She came back for the third time tonight. Do you know what that means?” Caleb took Stefan by the shoulders as the boy squirmed, rolling his head from side to side as if to deny everything but his memories.

  “Do you know what that means?” Caleb repeated, staring intently at the boy’s face, forcing him to meet his eyes.

  “I would have been—” Stefan broke off, cradling his head in his hands after Caleb released him from his grip. When he looked up after a moment, his eyes seemed fully conscious, the dreams replaced by horror at knowing what might have been.

  Caleb could not get another word out of him, but managed to persuade him to walk on his own and climb out of the loft. Back in the farmhouse, the entire family was awake and waiting. They surrounded the boy loudly and tearfully, not noticing in the least when the vampire-hunters slipped out for a silent journey back to the castle.

  “Brandy,” called Alexandru wearily as they came inside the entrance hall, shedding their cloaks and bags. Mihail was awake to greet them; Caleb again wondered if he had some magical way of anticipating his master’s every need.

  A fire still burned in the hearth of the Great Hall as they sat at the table. Uncharacteristically, Caleb welcomed the strong drink. The common human vices didn’t appeal much to werewolves; the harsh flavors of alcohol and tobacco hurt their heightened senses. This was fortunate, he supposed, as the Fives were difficult enough to discipline without their being a bunch of drunks. But on the new moon, after a vampire hunt, he didn’t refuse the deceptively smooth
brandy Mihail poured for them.

  “The boy will be all right, then?” Caleb ventured.

  “With time he will recover,” sighed Alexandru, swirling amber liquid shot with firelight in his glass. “With each bite, the victim becomes more…vulnerable, more susceptible to the vampire’s song. But, yes, he will recover.”

  “He wanted her so terribly much,” mused Caleb. “I would not have believed that the victim could desire so completely to—”

  “The victim always does,” growled Alexandru, setting his half-drunk brandy down violently and rising. “Resistance becomes impossible, until there is nothing left but death.”

  With that, he strode from the room, leaving Caleb confused at his parting words. Mihail glowered at the younger wizard as he removed the glass from the table.

  “You should not upset the master by bringing up things long forgotten,” he said through thin, tight lips.

  “What do you mean?” Caleb asked, but as he spoke, the answer became clear. “There was another boy, like the one tonight, wasn’t there?”

  Mihail froze with the crystal glass gripped tightly in mid-air.

  The fearful truth swept over Caleb in a crushing wave. “Mircea Arghezi was a vampire? Alexandru’s brother?”

  “We fought,” replied the servant, turning away abruptly. “But he was stronger than all of us that night.”

  25. The Feminine Mystique

  Three days before the August full moon, Caleb sat with Liszka in the cattails by the creek, watching the sun go down. They were barefoot, basking in the sun; Liszka had a line with a worm on it but wasn’t actually bothering to fish. Weary of their arguments, which were always the same, Caleb made his decision.

  “Would you like to lead the pack?” he asked quietly. “I know you’d be a great leader.”

  “If you hadn’t offered, I would’ve fought you,” Liszka said bluntly, leaning back to catch the last warm rays from the western hills.

  “There’s no need for that.” Caleb tried to smile. “Let’s do this amicably, shall we?”

  Liszka looked surprised. “We could be amicable and still fight.”

  That was why she would make a great leader. As their predatory instincts waxed along with the moon, she began to make plans—ones that would be difficult to carry out in any detail once they were transformed, but which at least would provide some structure for how the group would spend the night. She didn’t waste her energy snapping and quarreling the way the others did, or in suppressing her urges, like Caleb. It seemed so silly and futile now, the way he had prided himself in controlling his behavior so that Toby could not tell what phase it was until the very moment Caleb slipped into the Reserve to transform.

  He didn’t want to fight Liszka. He thought of her with her teeth in Vlad’s throat, and of the nightmare that made her awaken clawing and growling—a saber-toothed cat straight from the Ice Age, a fear not learned from her own experiences but imprinted somewhere in the collective pre-history of canine kind. “No, that’s all right, I’d just as soon skip that part. Take care of Bela, please, and I…I’ll try to make sure Vlad leaves you alone.”

  “What?” She threw down her fishing rod. “Vlad? Let that mangy cur come near me, and I’ll kill him.”

  No, he didn’t want to fight Liszka. “He disturbs me,” he said carefully. “I worry that he might…might try something worse than attacking Pack Five.”

  “What can he do, the toothless old mutt? I can take care of myself, Lupeni.” Her eyes blazed with anger and pride. “Don’t think you’re leaving to protect me.” She suddenly had an idea that made her scowl. “Or that you can hunt him down yourself. Vlad is mine to kill.”

  He felt the wolf in him growl competitively, but squelched it. “OK, OK, I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to have to answer for mistakes I’ve made.”

  “Not everything you’ve done has been a mistake,” Liszka told him honestly. “We have food, and money, and we’re organized.”

  He grimaced, not entirely sure that organized werewolves were exactly what the world needed.

  “But you went too far,” she persisted. “It’s unnatural. Raising sheep is unnatural, but that’s OK, it helps us. Not biting people…” She shook her head in disgust. “Are you still going to keep those cursed wards up?”

  “Of course.” He interrupted before she could get too angry again. “They work both ways. We can’t get into the villages at the full moon, but the humans can’t get into the forest. They have their territory, we have ours. It’s fair.”

  “They’re the enemy,” she raged, digging a clump of mud from the ground and heaving it into the river. “Never mind `fair’!”

  “Now you sound like one of them.” Had he really said that? Did he really hate humans? If so, why did he feel the imperative to protect them?

  “So? If they do it, so can we.”

  “But then they call us monsters.”

  “Who cares what they think?” She stood up, brushing grass and flowers from her front. “You think too much, that’s your problem.” She hunted among the reeds for her shoes.

  Caleb stayed seated, watching a fish jumping in the water. “We should think. We aren’t animals,” he said.

  Her look of utter bafflement at that statement confirmed that he would never succeed as a pack leader. “Oh, never mind,” he muttered, and stood up too. “We’re still friends, aren’t we? You’ll come to me if you need anything, if you have any problems?”

  “Of course.” She pushed her hair out of her face, streaks of red shimmering in the sun. She’d just had her twenty-first birthday, which a couple generations earlier was old for a Romanian werewolf. It wasn’t so old anymore, especially for the Fives. There was no reason to go back to starving and being shot. Surely she could preserve what he’d accomplished without distorting her goals with utopian dreaming, as he had done?

  “Promise,” said Caleb.

  She looked confused again. Wolves didn’t need to promise, because they didn’t lie. Or so said tradition. “Promise,” she said, humoring him.

  It was the friendliest conversation they’d had in many months. “Good-bye, Liszka,” he said, and squeezed her hand. He reached to the sky to summon Wind for the trip to the castle, not wanting to return to the cottage one last time. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t be accepted, or even that he would never run with them again, but Liszka’s cockiness only served to increase his concerns about Vlad. He intended to make his departure as abrupt and obvious as possible so that the leader of the Sixes would think that Liszka had taken over by force, that she hated Caleb. Maybe then she would be safe for a while.

  Deep down, where he was ashamed to admit it to himself, Caleb knew that his motivations were not entirely about providing Bela with a conflict-free puppyhood, or even about protecting the pack from humans and other werewolves. A small but significant part of his reason for leaving was that this was the only way to break up with Liszka…and he was beginning to suspect that there were other women in the world, ones who might even deign to speak to him.

  Was it anything to feel guilty about? Their relationship had lasted four years, and they had parted friends. She didn’t need him trying to turn her into someone like himself, confused and conflicted.

  A thought entered his head, like a small trickle of water snaking across a leaky dam. He saw again the odd, violet eyes of the mysterious Lamia. WHY? burst through his consciousness suddenly, almost making him shout out loud as he flew. Now that he allowed himself to think of her, even vaguely, the contradictions and mysteries came flooding into his head as if the dam had burst.

  Why was Lamia a physics graduate student? She clearly was as magical as Caleb, perhaps even as Alexandru. She had known for certain that Emil was a vampire, and she had driven away Vlad on a night of the full moon. What would make her spend so many years in academia? In several disparate fields of study, too, judging by her books. It was odd, too, that she scarcely looked twenty—though perhaps he had grown used to werewolves who lived ha
rd and died young.

  “I should not have come”… those were her words. Why?

  Of course, he had tried a similar life himself, but that only made the whole thing more fascinating. He couldn’t help wondering if she felt as miserable and out of place in the caves as he had been in Cambridge, doing homework problems and taking the subway and constantly yearning for something else. He wanted to think that Lamia, too, had a secret, that she might be the one person he’d ever met who could truly understand.

  With this sentiment he touched down a quarter mile from the castle, and started up the stone path. His lighthearted step was short-lived. In only a few feet, he found himself face to face with Vlad.

  Caleb took the offensive, knowing that worked best. “What are you sniffing around here for?” he inquired coolly. “No bones today.” He’d never quite forgotten that “Fido” business.

  “I wouldn’t hold my tail so high if I were you, Lupeni,” Vlad snarled. “I have ways to break into this pile of rubble that you could never guess.”

  Much too arrogant to keep a secret, Caleb decided in a flash. “Oh, yes?” His voice purred with an exaggerated calm. Sometimes being able to keep his cool near the full moon could pay off. “You and the Fleabite Army of 1602?”

  It didn’t look as though Vlad had anything with him—camera, bag, anything that Caleb should inspect or confiscate. The sarcasm infuriated Vlad, and he stood blocking the trail as if Caleb were the trespasser, twisting his hairy face into the intimidating scowl that had helped him stay leader for so long.

  “One skilled wizard could get through that dog door,” Vlad growled, waving his arms as if ready to hit Caleb.

  “Which is one more than you have on your side,” Caleb retorted, stepping aside as Vlad lunged and watching calmly as he nearly toppled down the rocky trail.

  Stumbling, Vlad regained his footing and stalked away. He pretended to mutter to himself, but obviously he intended for Caleb to catch every word. “I have friends,” he growled. “Ones you wouldn’t dare approach. You kill them because you’re scared of their power…and they’ve only just started feasting on those humans you try to protect.”