“I am together with a fatuous optimist.”
“Your English is very good,” Noel noted. “Fatuous optimist. If I wasn’t an optimist, I’d be curled up on the floor right now, and useless to you.”
“Or perhaps you have foolish thoughts of heroism,” she said. “I told you, I have been held captive by this Kauz before. He has guards at his command, more than we can fight.” She paused and added, “Unless you would prefer to die fighting them. I would be willing to attempt that, though I would prefer not to have their filthy hands touch me. And there are other creatures. Sometimes they are watching.”
“Other wolves?” Noel asked. “German wolves?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never saw any of them change form, nor smelled their human forms on them. They stink of…I cannot describe it.”
“Do they smell of wolf, or not?”
“I don’t know so many wolves,” she said. Her expression turned abstracted, her brows tipping together in a way that he found endearing. At last she said, “They did not smell like wild creatures. The stink of the laboratory clung to them. Like an apothecary’s storeroom.”
“Could they be like us, and concealing their natural scents in some way?”
“Perhaps—” she grinned, flashing sharp canines “—they would not want me to know them for who they really were.”
“Could they also have been prisoners?”
“No. They wandered the corridors freely. I heard them pacing in the night, back and forth in front of my cell. When I was caged, they stood outside the bars, watching.”
“How many?”
She shrugged. “Three? Four? They stayed in the shadows, and when one’s nose is blinded, also, it is difficult to tell.”
“Do you know if any of them are guarding us now?”
“I do not think any of them were guards, or there would be no need for human guards, as well. You don’t need to worry. Kauz will not leave us unguarded.” She lifted her head defiantly. “Or unwatched.” She paused. “You realize why he has caged us together.”
“Convenience?”
She laughed bitterly. “In addition to his foul experiments, he wishes to have more werewolves. And he expects us to produce them.”
INTERLUDE
THREE DAYS AFTER PASCAL’S BRIEF VISIT TO THE hospital, Lucilla received a letter from him, carefully encoded using a volume of Dumas that he’d left for her, and sent by courier to avoid the censors. She pored over the letter into the early-morning hours, painstakingly counting letters with a sharp pencil and extracting his message, letter by letter.
His spies had discovered and reconnoitered the remote laboratory where several guards were employed, and where they suspected prisoners might be held. The spies assigned to Kauz’s more visible lab heard rumors of experiments that would change the face of the war. Lucilla knew that rumors of this kind ran rampant in every sector of society, even when there was no basis for them, but she believed Pascal would not waste his time telling her of mere rumors.
A day later, she received by courier a small vial of volatile powder, with a request that she discover its use. Lucilla worked into the night testing the sample until it was all gone, but most of her tests were for her own curiosity, not necessity; she’d found immediately that the powder was poison, or would be as soon as the proper reagent was applied. She tested a small amount inside a beaker because she had no safe hood, and watched a thick, yellowish-green gas form. It burned the paper she’d put inside like acid. She’d never seen anything quite like it. The implications were chilling.
Not only would they need to rescue the werewolves, the laboratory where this horror was manufactured had to be destroyed, as well.
17
TANNEKEN COULD STILL FEEL THE IMPRINT OF Ashby’s warm fingers on her skin. She resisted the urge to lift her wrist to her nose and sniff. His scent was deeply intriguing. She had never met a full-blooded male werewolf before, and had not realized how…delicious…such a scent could be. She wanted to rub her face all over his skin, and push her nose into his throat and beneath his arm, and nuzzle him lower still.
Mentally, she shook herself. She refused to give in to such desires, not when it would give Kauz what he wanted. How ironic, that the one thing she’d never denied herself should be the one thing in which she could not indulge! She tried to convince herself it didn’t matter if Ashby was one of her kind or not. All that mattered was that he help her escape, in one way or another. She could deal with the rest later.
She said, “I will not attempt to gain time by pretending to acquiesce to Kauz’s demands.”
Ashby continued to stretch his arms and back. He was lean and rangy, but nicely muscular. He moved with grace. It would not be a hardship to engage in sex with him, if their situation had been different; if the choice had been hers alone. He said, “I wasn’t going to suggest it.”
“I could see the interest in your eyes.”
He leaned back, propping himself insouciantly on his elbows. “You’re the first female werewolf I’ve met in my life, excluding my mother and sisters. Of course I’m interested. So are you.”
“You overestimate your charms.”
“Do I?” He grinned, and she had to admit, it was a charming grin. She had a regrettable weakness for men, particularly confident men, if they were not obnoxious. He said, “I think you should consider me as a reason to escape this place instead of giving up and dying.”
He was foolish to reject the escape of death so easily. He had no idea what Kauz would do to him, or even more foolishly, did not care. Did he think his army would come to rescue him? They likely thought him dead. Fournier would not know where she had gone—or he might know by now that she’d gone to Antwerp, and would thus assume her beyond his reach.
She said, the words bitter in her mouth, “Our only other choice is to endure what sufferings Kauz will unleash upon us. I once thought a werewolf could withstand any tortures and emerge triumphant. However, I learned otherwise. Given sufficient resources, an evil man can break the strongest of creatures.”
Ashby smiled crookedly. “You don’t seem broken to me.”
“Not yet, perhaps,” she said. “If you let me kill you, I will be quick. I have hunted often, on my estate.”
“We hunt in England, as well,” he said. “Tanneken, I don’t think I’m able to kill you.”
“Because I’m a woman?” She decided not to protest his use of her given name. There was no point.
He shrugged. “Since I can’t, it wouldn’t be fair to take the easy way out and let you kill me. So perhaps we’d better both stay alive.”
After some hours, Tanneken still could not convince Ashby that her plan was the most viable. He continued to insist upon their survival as a necessary outcome for every plan. At least he agreed that, if necessary, humans other than the two of them could be killed. But even then, he thought having Kauz alive would be preferable, so they could extract information from him, perhaps handing him over to the military authorities. He knew of a man with the French army, he said. Tanneken eventually discovered that Ashby knew of Major Fournier. Fournier would appreciate the chance to question Kauz, she knew, but she would not put herself out for Kauz’s survival. If he needed to die, she would kill him without compunction. Besides, in wolf form she was not as logical as in human form, not when it came to matters of survival.
She was in the midst of arguing this point with him—they’d moved closer and closer to each other in the course of their conversation, until she could sense the heat of his skin on hers—when she saw a wisp of gas curling through a vent near the ceiling. She pointed to it just as the wisp changed to a spray, clouding the ceiling and sinking down upon them.
She had no time to change. If only she could smell properly, she might be alerted sooner to the gassings, but Kauz knew this and prevented it. He wanted full control of which form they took, and now he seemed to want them human.
She woke in a cage, together with Ashby. Crouched next to her,
both of them still naked, he looked more alert than she felt, probably because his larger form lent him more resistance to the gas. A hot electric light illuminated them alone, throwing the rest of the room into deepest shadow. Just at the edge of the shadow, Kauz sat on a plain wooden chair, rolling a rattan cane between his palms.
Her urge to snarl stopped before it reached her throat as fear slammed into her, unexpected and vicious as a blow. She had thought she’d forgotten, crushed her memories, but his unexpected appearance, her helpless at his will, was too much like it had been before, and her carefully built defenses crumbled.
Ashby laid a hand on the middle of her back, spreading his fingers wide over her spine. The touch was hotter than the light, tingling out to the ends of her fingers and toes. She sat up quickly, throwing off his hand, and summoned her most arrogant stare to aim at the old man outside the cage.
“Cowardly son of pox-ridden incest,” she said. “Come closer, and I will give you all that you deserve.”
Ashby said nothing. She could sense him near her, tension singing through his limbs. When she glanced at him, he settled back onto his heels, his hands loose at his sides rather than concealing his genitals. He smiled. “Like what you see, Herr Kauz?”
Kauz used his cane to lever himself from the chair, then stalked a step closer, then another. Tanneken willed herself not to cringe. Suddenly, he whipped the cane against the bars with a mighty rattling clang.
When she came to herself again, Ashby was gripping the back of her neck, holding her in place, and saying, “We won’t do it. There’s no profit in it for us. Would you sire children just to give them up?”
“These are not children, but subjects,” Kauz said, his voice oozing charm that nevertheless stank of falsity. “Think of the advances to the werewolf race. Think how few you are.”
“Fewer still, when you kill us,” Tanneken spat.
“I did not kill you,” Kauz said. “I tested you. I tested your fitness to be a new mother to a new race. It’s hardly my fault if you are too stupid to see the value in it.” He smiled, and she wanted to bash in his teeth with her hands. “It’s lucky that I will be able to pass my intelligence on through your children. They’ll be full werewolf, and thus able to breed successfully with one like me.”
Tanneken could not speak for rage. How dare he speak of defiling her children? She would die first—but of course, she would die. There was no doubt of that once Kauz had what he wanted. Ashby touched her lower back, light and fleeting, a signal of some kind. She clenched her jaw on her angry words.
She could feel Ashby’s anger, but his voice was calm as he said, “Surely, with the war, it’s a poor time for such a complex experiment.”
Kauz sneered. “You think only in the moment, wolf. Now is the perfect time. All of Europe will be turned up like soil ready for new seed. I will provide that seed, trained in the ways of science and logic, free at last of petty human politics.” He lifted his cane and lightly rapped it against the bars. “You are both flawed, but with sufficient attention to detail, my breeding program will bring out what’s needed to put the world to rights. In the meantime, my chemical experiments will bring in the government money I need to carry out my ultimate aims. And the immunity, as well. Once I’ve won their war for them, I’ll have all the resources I could possibly need.”
Tanneken said, “You won’t live so long.”
“On the contrary, though I cannot take a beast’s form, my body is quite strong. You would find me a formidable opponent, were I to give you the chance.” He smiled slowly, revealing teeth stained from tobacco. “Alas, I shan’t give you the chance. How sad.”
“We won’t do as you ask,” Ashby repeated.
“Oh, but you will.” Kauz trailed his cane along the bars of the cage, his smile not fading. “And until then, you can serve as subjects for my research. It is so rare that I can test an adult werewolf. I will need those statistics one day, so even if you fall dead before you provide me with future subjects, I will have that. And this war offers many opportunities. Perhaps if you expire untimely, I will find others who won’t be missed in the chaos of battle.” He dragged his cane along the bars, a sound that shook inside her bones. “Until then, alas, I must make do.”
“I will kill you,” Tanneken said.
Kauz walked back to his chair and settled into it with every evidence of relaxation. “You may say it as often as you wish. It won’t happen. Now, female, when you ran away, I lost track of your cycles, so we’d best take every opportunity.”
Tanneken couldn’t get to him; gradually, she became aware that the cage’s bars prevented her, and Ashby’s hard grip on her arms prevented her, as well. She tried to speak and could only howl. She couldn’t understand what Ashby was saying into her ear. Another moment and she would begin to change.
She couldn’t change. If she changed, Ashby might change, and their wolf selves would find it much harder to remember why they couldn’t breed with each other. Such a mating wouldn’t be fertile, but Kauz might not know it, and she refused to give him the satisfaction. Breathing heavily, she let go the bars and leaned back into Ashby, whose grip became a loose embrace. She concentrated, and managed to form words. “He won’t force me, and I won’t have him without force. How sad for you.”
Warmth pressed behind her ear. Ashby had kissed her there, a caress so completely unexpected she almost laughed. He said, “I suppose you’d better get on with your so-called testing, then.”
Noel probably shouldn’t have refused Kauz’s demands quite so vehemently. The epithet pus-eaten syphilitic corpse-fucker had possibly been unwise, as well.
He and Tanneken had been moved to an underground cell. He had no idea where exactly it was in relation to the surface; the corridors leading to this room were many, narrow and twisted, perhaps once intended as sapper tunnels. He couldn’t bring himself to care too much just now. If he didn’t move, and breathed steadily, he could almost ignore the pain of his fractured leg, so much more intense than that of his broken forearm. He tipped his head back against the wall and panted. He couldn’t breathe too hard, or that would jostle his arm and leg, and strain his fractured ribs. If he didn’t breathe deeply enough, the pain pooled inside him and built, as if his marrow turned to lava and burned its way out through his muscles, held taut against movement. “Tanneken,” he said. Her name emerged in a hoarse whisper, but she heard him, and turned to face him instead of the door. “Talk to me. Tell me a story.”
“I have none.”
“Tell me your story, then.” He’d been too vehement, and jolted his leg. He gasped and fought against the jagged pain until he remembered to breathe it out. “Please. Like a story, not you, not real. Unless you’d rather listen to me whimper.”
A long pause. Noel shifted and whimpered. Hastily, Tanneken said, “Before the summer of 1914, the life of a werewolf in the Belgian countryside was pleasant and gracious. I—Tanneken Claes grew up on a vast estate near Bruges, traveling into the city with her mother to visit the cathedral, care for her investments and to have clothing made for the social season. She would accompany her mother to dances and to salons where they would listen to overwrought poetry in Walloon and French, as well as their own Flemish, and fend off the suitors who flocked both to her and to her widowed mother. Tanneken never beckoned the suitors closer. When she wished to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh, she sought out heartier fare, men who knew little of her wealth and saw her only as a night’s entertainment, not realizing it was they who were entertainment for her. After a few months, they would return to the estate, shed their fine gowns along with their human skins and run wild in their ancestral forest, hunting the deer fostered for this very purpose.”
She paused. Noel said, “I liked the part about heartier fare.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “Please, go on.”
“Her mother maintained that running as a wolf was all the sweeter for having been trapped in corsets and skirts, besides the practical concerns of living in a human w
orld that were made much easier if one could conform and maintain a high level of financial security. Tanneken would prefer to do without those human trappings altogether, not being fond of poetry, except that she’d discovered early on that she liked sexual congress and required it on a regular basis. Thus it was necessary, as a human woman, to hunt for men as she hunted for deer, though with a much better outcome for her prey. A long-term partner might have been better, for the sake of convenience, but she didn’t see any way to effectively conceal her wolf nature from someone who lived with her. And though there were other werewolves in the world, they were few and far between, and like she and her mother, tended to keep to themselves for safety’s sake. Finding an appropriate unattached male might be the work of years. So she continued with her occasional partners, trying not to think of the day when she would want a child, and the difficulty werewolves often had in conceiving from solitary encounters, and what she would do then. She did not even allow herself to think of love, as her mother and father had shared when she was small. Such a thing was as rare as a comet in the sky.”
“Maybe it is,” Noel said. “But you were leading up to something.”
“Her mother’s powerful werewolf constitution at last failed her in 1908, and she died soon after of a devouring cancer. Tanneken inherited all, of course. She was the last of their line, and her mother had trained her for this.”
“I’m sorry,” Noel said.
Another pause. “Thank you,” she said, then continued her story. “She was well able to care for herself and her family’s money and secrets. However, she had not realized how lonely she would be, running the forests alone, wandering their fine manor alone, visiting Bruges and Antwerp and Paris and sometimes Berlin alone. It was the loneliness that drove her, after two years of isolation, to the foolish action of marrying a liaison officer of the kaiser’s Uhlans.”
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