“I’m okay,” she said, but the way she was panting through her shoulders made her look like a human wolf. Beethoven entered last and she rasped, “It’s an airlock. We have to seal that door.”
Beethoven put his shoulder into closing the heavy door, smearing bloody handprints across the shiny metal.
“Mantle!” Lon yelled, realizing they were another man down. “Wait for Mantle!”
But Beethoven didn’t wait. He put his back against the door and took deep breaths as it sealed and the air pressure shifted. His uniform was covered in new bloodstains, his face full of turmoil. One glance and Lon understood what had happened to Mantle.
Here the four of them stood, hands on their knees, in stillness for the first time in eons. Lon could have slept on his feet (maybe died on his feet). And yet, as the next door hissed, he found the strength to achieve locomotion again.
The next room was spectacular.
They entered a large, circular mission control room, the kind you might find at NASA. It was least 30 feet in diameter, with stations at several elevations, all facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking…
Well, overlooking Central Park.
They were twenty feet above a beautiful garden, where a stone walkway wandered past flower patches, wrought-iron benches, and garbage cans. The trees trembled in a tender breeze. Lon wouldn’t have believed they were underground if not for the crisp, clear night sky that he knew to be a lie. It had to be a projection, though it was far more convincing than the planetarium he’d visited in fourth grade.
In sci-fi books, people in space habitats adjusted their lighting for day or night to maintain the illusion of life on Earth, so they didn’t go all Shining. Lon thought they must’ve constructed this place with the same philosophy. And it was synchronized to real time; the trees on the horizon were backlit with the glow of the rising moon. Even as he stepped away from the thick curved window, he could barely break the illusion that he was looking outside.
Considering how amazing the shelter looked, the mission control room was hardly high-tech. In fact this stuff was probably outdated before Lon was born. Black and white monitors displaying temperature, oxygen rate, and humidity alongside paper seismographs and—wow—corded phones. He couldn’t place the names of some of the instruments; he’d only seen them in flea markets or old movies.
Everything was calm except for the console of mini TVs showing security camera feeds. As if the images weren’t dire enough, warning lights were flashing and some sort of automatic typewriter was clicking away.
On the far side of the control room, Tildascow had found the door into the shelter. She slammed it in frustration. “No handle!” she roared. No visible hinges, either. It had a small clear portal, through which you could see that it was at least six inches thick.
“Can we torch it?” Beethoven asked.
“Not enough time,” she said despondently, fingering the paper-thin crack between the door and its metal frame. “Try the window.”
Beethoven dropped to a knee and produced a torch and goggles from his pack. “Controls?” he asked.
“No,” she grunted. “This is just a monitoring station. They wouldn’t allow someone to open it from the outside and contaminate the ecosystem.”
Beethoven took his torch to the window.
Tildascow collapsed against the door, gasping desperation. Her limbs jerked as she fought the painful transformation. “Fuck,” she whispered. “Hurts.”
Ilecko leaned against a station within reach of her, staring her down.
“I’ve got it,” she whispered, and he did not answer.
“Not getting anywhere,” Beethoven said, blowing on the untarnished glass and starting over.
And then a Godlike voice echoed through the chamber, causing each of them to discover the speakers in the ceiling.
“Yannic Ilecko,” it said. It was deep and powerful, with a romantic Romanian accent that was in stark contrast to Ilecko’s clunky drubbing. “You promised we would not meet again.”
“And you promised there would be no more death, Lord Valenkov,” Ilecko responded in Romanian. He was solemn and unsurprised, and looking through the window at the garden below.
Lon followed Ilecko’s eyes and saw him, finally, just twenty feet away and looking up at them through the window.
Demetrius Valenkov.
Five
Airspace South of Manhattan
6:49 p.m.
The Lunar Eclipse cruised toward Manhattan at five hundred miles per hour. By all accounts, this was an easy run. No need for stealth, no fear of retribution, and a wide margin for deployment. The bomblets were like mini cropdusters, with GPS-controlled navigation systems that would direct them to low-altitude distribution zones and minimize wind dispersion. And since the biological weapon would die in the water, they could paint outside the lines.
Colonel Murdock ripped open the envelope given to him by President Weston and removed a plain sheet of paper with two simple series of random letters and numbers. “Home Room, this is the Lunar Eclipse. We are two minutes to Verification Point. Requesting code confirmation.”
General Ryan Jermaine, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, responded with the authentication codes matching the first sequence, which would be Defense Secretary Ronald Greenberg’s gold code. “—Tango, Delta, Niner, Niner, Charlie, Echo.”
Murdock repeated the code back to him, and then a moment passed before he radioed again. Aside from system reports, the flight crew had been quiet for the entire run. “Roger that, Home Room. Verification confirmed.”
Next Jermaine radioed Weston’s gold code. Both codes would already have been authorized with the United States Strategic Command Headquarters in Nebraska and NORAD in Colorado. The weapons system computer would also confirm the code digitally before allowing launch.
“Roger, Home Room. Verification confirmed.”
The B-1B’s weapons system officer’s voice came through the radio next. “Home Room, we have 136 to VP, requesting permission to deploy.”
Six
6:50 p.m.
The White House Situation Room had gone silent.
All eyes were on the president, waiting for his order. But William Weston remained fixed on the grainy overhead footage from the exit zones. Werewolves were massed at the exits, but they hadn’t made a serious run at escape. They’d disengaged from conflict everywhere but the UN.
“They’re not attacking,” Leslie whispered, but even she knew that was irrelevant; they had to act ahead of the wolves, not in response to them. Were it even possible, containing the outbreak on the mainland could cost millions more lives.
But still. They weren’t attacking.
“Sir?” Jermaine asked. The Lunar Eclipse was waiting for a green light.
“Time is 18:50,” Truesdale said quietly, urging him to remember that they’d reached the pre-agreed deployment time.
“Negative,” Weston said into his steepled fingers. “Have them loiter.”
“Lunar Eclipse, light is yellow,” Jermaine radioed, pent-up tension rumbling under his voice. “Repeat, light is yellow.”
“Roger that, Home Room. Cycle time is 278.”
It would take 278 seconds for the bomber to return to its verification point.
“Contingency?” Truesdale asked. They had two contingency bombers behind the Lunar Eclipse, but Murdock would be credited with the flight no matter what. The identities of the back-up planes and their pilots would remain top secret forever.
Jermaine read over the shoulder of his flight control tech. “18:56 for number one. 18:59 for number two.”
“They’re in the bomb shelter?” Weston called, still never looking away from the monitor, as if he could hold off the werewolves himself.
An aide from the Watch Center responded from the doorway. “Yes sir, November team is in the airlock.”
“They can’t get into the shelter unless it’s opened from the inside,” Truesdale reminded them.
No one had forgotten.
Four and a half minutes for a miracle.
Seven
United Nations Underground Habitat
6:50 p.m.
The shadows of the trees retreated as the false moon crested the horizon.
This show had no effect on the curse, but it was synchronous with the rise of the moon outside. And no walls could stop that light.
No matter where Demetrius Valenkov hid, the moon always found him.
“Of course there is more death,” he responded to Ilecko. “As long as the scourge of my family lives, we will always bring more. Death to the Ottomans. And to the Turks and the Saxons and the Ţigani and the Americans. Death to your wife, Yannic, and to mine.”
Valenkov felt himself slipping between man and wolf with each draw of breath. The full moon was upon him, the time when even his years of rigorous preparation could not contain the animal. Were he at home, he would have locked himself in his chamber, secured iron shackles to his wrists and ankles, and prayed for morning to come quickly and without incident.
But he was far from home.
“Shoot him,” he heard the woman agent growl. She was the perfect American warrior, immune to influence and to compassion, void of conscience.
“Glass is bulletproof,” the soldier warned her.
She stepped back and shot her silver at the window. It did not break.
“No longer can you hurt us,” said Valenkov.
“My government can’t allow the wolves to escape the island,” she said. “They’re going to kill everyone in Manhattan, infected or not. Hundreds of thousands… of…“ She trailed off, distracted by something over his shoulder.
His baby boy had come out from hiding.
Wearing only a diaper, eighteen-month-old Zee teetered forward. His little hands were in his mouth, exploring for new teeth.
Valenkov crouched with outstretched arms, encouraging Zee to stay up on his wobbly legs. It was important to him that his son learn to walk upright.
“And why are any of those lives more important than my own?” he asked the agent. “Than those of my family?” He lifted Zee with his throbbing, distended hands. His yellowing eyes and sharpening teeth looked monstrous, but his boy melted into his arms nonetheless. “Why do you fight so hard to protect them, and yet you ignore our pleas for help? Is it because we are not American? But are we not human?”
The woman agent was too preoccupied to respond. Instead, she blurted out the obvious. “The Cooke child...”
Perhaps, Valenkov calculated, she was not as smart as she thought. Perhaps her scientists were overconfident in their superwoman. For all of her supposed investigative prowess, she assumed he’d chosen Holly Cooke as his first victim because she was high profile, a person whose injury would spark the attention of the government and the media. Indeed, this great American manhunter had forgotten the missing child altogether.
Valenkov had chosen Cooke many months ago, when he learned that she and her diplomat husband were looking to adopt a child from Italy. It took little effort to put his son in their hands; simply a trip to the country and the wolf’s influence over one woman in the Tribunale per i Minorenni. And thus, his little Zee travelled to America with Holly Cooke.
Distasteful as it was to see another woman mothering his son, Holly Cooke was a fine soul. More innocent blood on his family’s crest.
“Perhaps we are only animals to your government,” he said. “Wolves. Meant to be hunted. Like you hunt my father, Yannic. And now you come for me.“
“You are not a wolf, Demetrius,” said Ilecko in limba română. “You are a man. I let you live, because you promised—“
“I make good on my promise, Yannic!” His fury loosened his grip on the beast. “I make no more wolves! But it does not matter to these men in the village. They live in fear of the past. Moon after moon, there are no wolves. I promise to find the cure. I only ask for time!” His teeth pushed further from his jaw, coursing agony through his chin and interfering with his speech. Hands trembling, he put Zee on the grass. The boy cried in protest.
Ilecko responded and the woman agent spoke over him. But Valenkov did not listen. Instead, he turned inward.
It had become natural to focus on his heartbeat as a tuning mechanism, and organize his brainwaves to the Harmony’s vibrations. In this deep meditation, his bodymind became one with the total collective consciousness. Distinctions between himself and his own observations and the universe faded away, and there was only the Harmony. Here he cultivated his body’s life energy, his qi, and harmonized its movement within his physical body and the universe.
His consciousness was free of the wolf, but his qi was locked forever in battle with it, as the curse had latched onto the vital meridians through which the qi must travel. It hid between his lungs and his heart, his kidney and his stomach, his liver and his pericardium, and it attacked from everywhere at once under the light of the moon. Here, in the Harmony, the collective consciousness struggled against the invader. Most nights it was kept restrained. Under the full moon, however, the ţigani curse was too powerful.
Valenkov returned to the ego-consciousness, having stayed the wolf’s approach. His gaze fell on the face of his child, the loving boy who was blissfully unaware of the monster lurking within him.
Zee’s canine teeth had yet even to break free of his gums.
“The villagers learn we have a son,” Valenkov told Ilecko and his Americans. “And they know the curse will continue within him when I die. So they attack. They kill my Ecaterina. My innocent Cat.”
He could still hear the mayhem as the villagers ravaged his home. And there he was, sealed in his dungeon, as they knew he would be on the night of the full moon. The key to his shackles would not be released but for a rudimentary timer constructed by his great-grandfather. And so he pulled helplessly as he listened to the men ram the gate. His beloved Cat was alone and terrified. In his shame, he had hidden the entrance to the dungeon from her. It was the worst mistake of his life.
Still swollen from pregnancy, she hurried to the mausoleum and hid their infant son inside a tomb. She called out to Valenkov, praying that he could hear, that he would know to save the boy come morning. He cried back for her, but the dungeon had been made soundproof to her unsophisticated senses.
She faced the savages alone. They tortured her, demanding to know where her men were hiding.
They thought he had hid from them and left his wife to be their victim.
“And they call us monsters,” Valenkov said. “Dracula. Sons of the Devil.”
For six long years, Demetrius Valenkov had contained the beast by mind or by force. It was a promise to himself, to his father, to Yannic Ilecko, even to the smug ghost of the ţigani who had put this curse upon his family. He swore he would thwart their witch and restore honor to their family crest.
He sympathized with the villagers, though, and he tried to still their fears, for they too had been through horror. He promised them he would not have a child until a cure had been found. But Zee had come unplanned, from a feverish and perhaps irresponsible moment of passion. They tried to hide him, but the villagers had spies inside his castle.
When he heard Ecaterina’s screams, when he realized they would show no mercy—God forgive him, he thought they would give him the time he needed—it was then that he unleashed the monster.
He fueled its strength with his own, working in concert with the wolf only this once, and even still it took too long to break the manacles and the door. Precious minutes, during which his beloved wife was impaled upon a stake. Slowly, agonizingly, her own weight pulled her to her death as the wood tore through her organs.
These men—these cowards—would have thought of her as another of Vlad Dracula’s victims. But she was not. Her blood was on their hands.
When he was free, Demetrius Valenkov the werewolf caused the villagers suffering. The men and their wives were made to watch their children die, and then the men watched their wives die. And th
en they were wounded, so much more delicately than their loved ones, so that they had time to wallow as their lives slowly escaped from their stomachs.
Only the worst did he let live, the very men who put Ecaterina upon that stake. He put the wolf’s curse upon their souls and used his influence to lay waste to their minds. Now they dreamed forever of their loved ones’ horrific deaths, waking from slumber only to feel the pain of the transformation. And then, as his slujitori, they keep watch over his beloved’s body.
This was his revenge. For the anguish had driven him mad.
Had it not?
Only a madman could have eaten the flesh of those women and children. Only a madman could have caused the ruin that had come to New York City, executing such a wicked plan while remaining deaf to the screams of innocents. Innocents like the honorable Mrs. Cooke, whose only crime was to love his son.
Certainly only a madman could have committed the same atrocities, yet again, for which his family was cursed some twenty generations ago.
Alas. If only he had gone mad.
“There has been enough death, Demetrius,” said Ilecko. “Too many lives lost. Think of how many more will die. You are too good a man to let this to continue.”
If only he had gone mad, Ilecko’s words would not ring true.
“But it must!” he insisted. “It must continue, it always continues as the curse passes down. For all of his life, my son will be punished for crimes he did not commit. You will come for him one day, Yannic, as you came for my father. As you come for me. Or worse, he will be hunted by the likes of her. Soldiers stripped of their compassion.”
Valenkov attuned himself to the Harmony, where the collective consciousness was one with the minds of his slujitori, including the woman who wished to know herself only as Tildascow. He thrust further, calling to her wolf within. Let her try to ignore his plight while suffering the pain of the curse.
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