by David Leslie Johnson; David Leslie Johnson; Catherine Hardwicke Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
The Wolf whirled on Roxanne, growling until her legs gave way, and she crumpled to a silent heap in the dirt. The Wolf, uninterested in Roxanne’s fate, turned its eyes back upon Valerie. The demon voice came again, filling her mind, her body.
“We are alike, you and I.”
“No.” Valerie was quick, her very soul rejecting the idea. “No. You’re a murderer. A monster. I’m nothing like you.”
She reached behind her, groping blindly for something to grab hold of. There was nothing.
“You’ve killed, too. I know your secrets.”
Valerie felt her breath rush back into her body, mixing with her heartbeat hammering in her chest. What the Wolf said had landed in a place deeper than hearing.
“You’re a hunter,” the Wolf continued, taunting her. “I can smell it on you even now.”
Valerie couldn’t help but wonder what the Wolf had said to Lucie. Her thoughts exploded all at once, paralyzing her.
The Wolf came closer. Valerie studied those gorgeous yellow eyes.
“What… big… eyes… you… have….” she said faintly.
“The better to see you with, my dear.”
Mesmerized by the intensity of that incredible stare, Valerie couldn’t look away from the horror of what happened next. The skin on either side of the Wolf’s brow separated, slit open in an ungodly blossoming to reveal… a second pair of eyes.
A pair of eyes more striking than the first. Sensitive and intelligent. All-knowing.
Human.
Before Valerie could react, the Wolf spoke again, its massive tail swishing the dust from side to side.
“I see what lies in your heart,” it said. Its wet charcoal lips were so black that they were purple, and its craggy teeth were spaced in uneven rows, with only darkness where some were missing or misaligned.
“You want to escape from Daggorhorn. You want freedom.”
For a moment, Valerie thought like a wolf. She found that she could.
She felt what it would be like to run free, to race through a dark forest, blood awakened, to close in on the kill. To live a life unfettered by fear, by ties or bonds. To do whatever she wanted, unburdened by place, freed from living the life of an insect, shuttling back and forth within the same minuscule radius. She felt the vision of this new life overwhelming her, severing her connection to the present.
“No…” she tried to say.
But the Wolf, those eyes, saw that it had touched something, a truth.
“Come away with me,” it said. Valerie hesitated, and the Wolf filled the gap of silence. “Come away with me,” it repeated.
I’ve heard that before.
Somewhere in the distance, there were shouts, the clamor of soldiers, the clanking of armor. The noise helped clear her head.
“Father Solomon will stop you.” Valerie heard how she sounded. Like a little girl, helpless, alone, covering her face, waiting for someone else to appear to make everything better.
The Wolf straightened to its full height, drawing its shoulder blades back. Its shadow fell over both girls’ faces.
“Father Solomon doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.” The Wolf had taken on a new tone. “Come away with me or I will kill everyone you love.”
Valerie shook with the weight of what she was being asked to do; how could she choose?
The Wolf’s ears flicked back in impatience. “Starting with your friend here.”
It made a lunge for Roxanne, snapping its colossal jaw.
Impossibly, at that exact moment, two figures appeared out of the shadows. The masked bowman was already opening fire on the Wolf even as he and Solomon rounded the corner into the alley.
“I’ll return for you.” The Wolf bent to Valerie. “Before the blood moon wanes.”
As the Wolf heaved itself over the wall, Solomon snatched the crossbow and fired off a flurry of arrows, but the Wolf was already disappearing into the night.
Solomon clambered up after it but could not make it over the top of the wall. He shot and rearmed, shot and rearmed, not taking his eyes off the Wolf as it loped into the distance.
Quivering with the strain of holding in his rage and power, Solomon jumped catlike back to the ground. Valerie saw that his cheek was black and red and yellow, like different candles melted together. He reached down to feel the dye in the vats, bringing a scoop to his face, smelling it. He let the handful drop and flicked the water off his palms.
He began to lead the girls to the churchyard, but as they passed through the square, where the fire was only embers now, he was intercepted by a panic-stricken woman. “God save us!”
“God will save only those who have earned his love through faith and action,” he said, looking past them in the direction the Wolf had gone. He reminded Valerie of a hornet, a quick-eyed commander buzzing with wounded vanity.
Valerie remembered Roxanne and looked over at her. She was gnawing on her thumb. All color had left her face, making her freckles stand out like speckles dotting a robin’s egg.
The Captain was speaking in another language to a soldier at the church gate, his voice dipping into lower tones. He paused to usher them into the churchyard. The image on the gate of Christ as a wolf slayer, thrusting a dagger through a wolf’s chest, gave Valerie shivers.
“Here you will be assured of your safety.” The Captain switched tongues, sliding easily into English.
“But my brother! I have to find him,” Roxanne protested.
“If he is alive, you’ll find him inside.”
“Wait!” she shouted, but he’d already slammed shut the heavy iron gate behind them.
Valerie looked at her friend with pity. She was still worried about where Peter had gone, too.
“I’m sure he’s safe, Roxanne. He has his own ways.”
Roxanne stared back at her as though she were a stranger.
“You talked to the Wolf,” Roxanne whispered accusingly, her thin voice cut with fear.
“I had to. It talked to us.” Valerie thought she was agreeing with her.
“No,” Roxanne corrected. “It growled at us….” The fear in her eyes took on new depths. “You heard it talk to you?”
Valerie realized then the enormity of what had just occurred. Roxanne hadn’t heard a word. It was only her. In a town like this, the hazard of anyone knowing she possessed such a skill was monumental. She glanced around to see if anyone was listening.
Valerie thought of the rumors that would proliferate if anyone knew. And then she turned those same glares and whispers upon herself. Why had the Wolf spoken to her? Why hadn’t Roxanne also understood? Valerie felt claustrophobic in her own skin.
“They’ll call me a witch. Don’t tell anyone,” she begged, her voice raw.
Roxanne gave her a look. She seemed to accept Valerie’s fear as an acknowledgment of her own.
“Of course not. Obviously.”
Valerie felt grateful that Roxanne was not the kind of girl who would think to ask what the Wolf had said.
She snuck a look at her friend, who was stalking forward to the church door, her colorless face staring willfully ahead. She looked exactly the way a girl who had been hunted by a werewolf should look. Valerie again wondered why she herself wasn’t more traumatized. It all seemed… like nature’s way, as if this were the order of things.
Looking at Roxanne, Valerie saw a drop of blood fall, and then another.
Roxanne reached for her face and felt wetness beneath her nose. After all the slaughter she had seen, it was only a simple nosebleed.
Roxanne shook her head and walked into the church. Valerie watched her friend, and then she tilted her face up to the sky. A revelation struck Valerie as she stood alone looking up at the spire of the church. Those eyes, the second pair of eyes the Wolf had revealed to her.
They had been familiar.
Part Three
19
Waking at dawn, Valerie could taste the bitter cold on her tongue like rust. She looked around, embarrassed. She
had been dreaming of Peter, of his touch. And yet, the image went sour when she remembered the carnage.
Where is he?
Valerie fought back the thought and stood up from the hard church pew to stretch her back. The door to the refuge was wide open. She could see that Daggorhorn was draped in a fog, a gauze curtain through which the village looked pale and desolate.
The Captain had opened the churchyard gates. She passed through them and saw a few men at work gathering the charred and bloody remains that littered the square.
All was quiet but for the scraping of shovels against winter ground. The mist wound its way around a maze of trees. The air felt too close, and the people were antsy.
She saw Henry passing through the square, but he did not seem to see her. Maybe he was embarrassed about how he had acted at the festival. She almost called out to him but stopped herself, thinking of what had followed, of Peter’s hands on her. Little did Henry know that she was the one who should have been feeling shamed.
She heard the clatter of hooves as Solomon’s horse came into view. With its legs cloaked in the low-lying fog, it looked like it was floating. Its rider, his face blackened and bloody, came to a halt and surveyed the carnage. He wore long black robes with embroidery on the shoulders. Holding one glove between his teeth, he deliberately pulled off the other. Valerie was stunned to see that his fingernails were plated with silver and sharpened into daggers. They gleamed dully, matte and clean, his cuticles pushed back neatly to meet the nail bed.
Clutching his robes in his hands, Father Auguste bustled to catch up with the older man. Father Solomon looked down at him, not bothering to mask his scorn.
“I am sorry,” Auguste said in a clammy voice. “We never should have doubted you. We will never make that mistake again.”
Those gathered waited for Father Solomon’s reaction. From now on, the villagers silently decided, we will place our hopes on him.
He dismounted his horse and walked slowly, with purpose, knowing the eyes of the village were on him.
“I’ve never seen a beast as strong as this. The curse is hereditary, and each generation is more potent than the one before, but I’ve never seen one from such a long bloodline. I don’t just want to kill this beast.”
Not kill the beast?
“Not anymore. I want to make it suffer.”
He came to the Reeve’s fallen body, lying beside the overturned banquet table. “I hope he enjoyed his celebration,” Solomon said, lightly kicking the snow beside the wounded man. The body looked so lifeless lying among the rest of the wreckage that no one even flinched. Everyone felt certain that the Reeve had not felt it, that whatever he might have been had long departed and nothing of him remained there on that barren, frost-hardened ground.
Solomon noticed the Captain, bent over his brother’s body, clutching a leg as though it were a baby. Poisoned tendrils radiated from the wound. The body looked like it had been packed full, like the muscles were straining beneath his skin.
Solomon strode over. “A man bitten,” he said to the Captain, expressionless as marble, “is a man cursed.”
Valerie watched in shock as Solomon drew his sword and plunged it into the man’s chest. The Captain closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they had hardened. He released his brother’s limb and turned away.
Solomon turned, unaffected, to address the crowd. “Villagers of Daggorhorn,” he said, his voice unbroken. “Now it is time to be serious.”
The villagers liked his authoritative tone; they wanted to be given a plan. They were impressed with the action he had just taken: The Captain’s brother had been an outsider, and in death, he had become a threat to their safety. He had been taken care of swiftly, unsentimentally.
“There will be no more celebrating”—Solomon bent down to retrieve a pig mask abandoned in the snow—“until the werewolf is found in its human form. And destroyed. By whatever means necessary.”
Solomon let the mask drop. His men gathered around him. This time, they did not conceal their weapons.
“It could be any of you. Which is why we will look everywhere. The signs will be subtle: isolation, witchcraft, black arts, strange scents…. Your homes will be searched. Your secrets will be brought to light. If you’re innocent, you have nothing to fear. But if you’re guilty, I swear on my children that you will be destroyed.”
Solomon saw the villagers noticing his soldiers, their weapons.
“My wife died. Your fathers, your sons, your daughters have died. Let some of us remain alive to remember them,” he said, stepping through the strewn detritus of the previous night.
There were murmurs, emphatic nods throughout the crowd, as the villagers looked at their neighbors, friends, husbands and wives, children. Valerie felt a strange need to speak up but couldn’t bring herself to. She felt uneasy, seeing how eager her neighbors were to obey this new authority.
Her stomach creaked like a door, and Valerie realized she’d forgotten about eating. She ducked behind the crowd and headed for home, glad for a reason not to listen.
Valerie’s father and grandmother were there, but all she saw was her mother. Suzette looked small and thin, her skin hanging loose like it didn’t fit, as though she’d purchased a face that was a size too large. Her chest and neck were covered in a thin sheen of sweat, her wavy hair matted to her skull. Lying on the bed, she was dwarfed by a quilt that Grandmother’s mother had made.
Suzette’s face had been slashed by the Wolf.
The blood had dried in a thick clump over her cheek like a crust of bread, and it was impossible to see how much damage had been done.
Cesaire looked up as Valerie entered. He pulled her to him. Then Grandmother took Valerie’s hand while Cesaire tended to the water boiling in the fireplace.
Watching her father, Valerie drifted into thoughts of another time.
We used to know a bath was coming when we saw the four pots of water set over the fire. My mother would come in, pulling her dress over her head, disheveling her hair. Her body was beautiful, I knew even as a girl. It glowed like there was something magical underneath her skin. She would put the two of us into the trough first, lifting us under our armpits and resting us gently in the warm water. And then she’d ease herself in slowly, her legs slipping around us, careful as they hugged our sides, my sister next to her, and then me. I always felt like I was on the outside with Lucie and my mother.
We girls took turns leaning back to dunk our heads underneath. When it was my turn, I would swish my hair around from side to side, back and forth, back and forth, so that I felt like a mermaid.
That time was gone now. Valerie was afraid her mind would shed her sister’s image, a coping mechanism that Valerie didn’t want to kick in. Memory was always decaying. She had so many memories that she wished she could stop creating new ones, because there was already so much experience to make sense of, and yet with every moment she was making more.
She looked now at what remained.
Her father was caring for his wife, bringing warm, wet rags to dab at her face. Was this tenderness? Valerie wondered. A performance for Grandmother? Or had Lucie been right? Was this love?
Valerie saw Cesaire’s eyes resting upon Suzette’s reclining form. Valerie wondered whether he really saw her there anymore. After eighteen years of marriage, Cesaire did not seem to notice her gentleness with their children or her sun-streaked hair in the summer months. Was that what marriage was, an inability to see who the person was, the way that we don’t know ourselves because we stand too close? Was that what she would have with Henry? With Peter?
Valerie knew her parents had been present for the same traumas and tragedies, and yet, they had not experienced them together. They’d gone through them separately, at the same time.
Suzette, perhaps sensing this appraisal, swung her hand, sending a tin basin on the bed stand clattering to the floor. As Valerie bent down for it, her mother continued to moan.
Remembering Solomon’s story, Valeri
e went over the details of the night before: Had she seen the Wolf get slashed? Where had her mother been?
Is my mother the Wolf? Valerie could not stand to think about it, and so when Grandmother nudged her toward her mother, Valerie went without hesitation.
20
There was the sound of heavy boots mounting the ladder, then pounding on the door. So they had come, just as they’d said they would, to tear apart their homes, to strip them bare. The inquisitors would pry open their lives, dig out their secrets.
What do we have to hide? Valerie asked herself.
Bang! Bang! Bang! The pounding became more insistent.
Valerie kept the chain lock bolted as she cracked open the door, expecting to greet the Captain or Solomon himself.
Instead she met a pair of eyes that were burning, urgent… frightening. Like those she had seen in a dark alley.
“Peter?”
“Valerie, open the door.”
Valerie hesitated; something in her felt she shouldn’t. He pushed on it, and it cracked under the pressure, but the chain held.
“Open it.”
Why was he being so savage?
“You shouldn’t be here,” she heard her voice say.
“We’re all in danger,” Peter hissed. “We’ve got to leave.”
Through the crack in the door, his pupils were needle thin, glowing like they’d been heated in a fire. She thought of the boy he’d been and finally acknowledged he was not that boy anymore.
“Get your things. Quick. Come away with me.”
Valerie thought of the granary, of his breath on her body, how it had felt like he wanted to devour her.
Come away with me or I will kill everyone you love.
He hadn’t said that—had he? No, that was the Wolf.
But here were his blazing, dangerous eyes, staring in at her. Pushing on the door. Pulling on her heart. Trying to lure her away.
She stepped back the way she’d step back from a wagon hurtling by at full speed.
“Valerie, there’s no time.”
It had been only two days, but so much had changed since she was ready to go away with him, since she’d trusted him enough for that. Since then, her sister had been murdered. Her town had been ravaged. Her mother, attacked.