Storm Wolf Read online

  There was no mirror hanging above the basin and pitcher where he washed his face, but he had no need of one. He knew his teeth were broken and yellowed, his eyes bloodshot and jaundiced, his skin cold and paler than was typical among the men in the town. He splashed the cold water on his face, ignoring the tiny crystals of ice that had formed along the edges of the dirty water in the basin, left over from his ablutions the day before and the days before that. He pressed one grimy hand against a nostril and snorted, clearing the snot from his beaked nose into the basin water.

  One of the children—the youngest boy, maybe?—who slept huddled in a corner whimpered in his sleep.

  He ladled some of the cold porridge from the pot over the hearth into a cracked bowl, which he sat down to eat at the cracked wooden table nearby. The three-legged stool on which he sat, one leg just enough shorter than the other two to make it difficult to stay balanced as he ate, creaked beneath his shifting weight.

  Another of the children—the girl?—shifted about, causing the floorboards to creak beneath her and the small shackles that linked them all together, bound to the ring set into the stonework of the chimney, to clink and rattle. But the children—tired, cold, hungry, and frightened—still slept. He had heard them whispering and shivering in the night until they had finally fallen asleep only a little while ago. They had refused his offers of porridge, but they would eventually succumb to their hunger. He knew they would. They would eat the porridge he offered them and they would be glad to have it.

  After all, they hadn’t refused the water he had offered them, had they? He had brought in chips and chucks of ice from the nearly dry well in the yard, ice full of bits of dirt and leaves, and he had let the ice melt in the pitcher on the floor beside them. They hadn’t been too proud to drink the dirty water as the ice melted. They would soon happily take the porridge as well.

  He had lived alone there, in that broken-down hut in the forest, since that lantern had been lit to keep him away from the town. He had remained there, patient, knowing that sooner or later the light would go out and the protection the lantern afforded the town would fail. While he waited, he had slept and hunted the animals in the forest, brewed his own beer, and occasionally found a traveler lost in the woods. He licked his lips as he ate the cold porridge, remembering some of the travelers he had encountered. Some of their gnawed-on bones were still scattered about the floor of the hut.

  Outside, a rusty steel cage leaned against the hut and its bottom was also—beneath the snow that blanketed the woods—strewn with dead leaves and the bones of the half-dozen would-be apprentices he had collected during the time he had hunted in the town before. But those foolish old gossips had found a way to keep him from hunting in the town, and he had been forced to eat the apprentices he had collected. Without the full number of twelve, he could not change the little ones into apprentices, and so the hunt had been for nothing.

  But now? Now he had begun collecting again. But he had learned that keeping the children in the cage outside in the cold weakened them too much and so he had decided to keep the results of his hunt this time inside the hut with him.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes, content to anticipate his next excursion into the town. He smiled. The fresh meat of the young girls who were to be married beckoned to him. And the would-be apprentices that he would add to his collection beckoned as well.

  The sun had finally set. No one in the town could remember a day on which the moments had seemed to pass so slowly. With little work to be done in the barns until after Epiphany, there was nothing to distract the men from the fear and anger that gripped them. A few kept looking for the missing children, but there had been no sign of them, and most folk agreed that they must have been taken by the monster wolf into the forest and eaten near its lair. Few hearts held any hope that the missing children would ever be found.

  What should have been a festive evening meal in the homes of the town to mark another of the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany was instead a quiet, somber meal, as each household barred its doors and parents planned to keep watch through the night to prevent their children from becoming victims of another attack.

  In a house on the other side of the market from Vakarė and her family’s farm, a mother and father tucked their three children—ages twelve, ten, and seven—into their beds for the night. The mother sang a lullaby and then another as the children tried to be brave and not show their fear. But how could they not be afraid, when they had heard all the grown-ups that came to pass the day in their mother’s kitchen tell the stories about the wolf attacks? Attacks in which the wolf always seemed to break into houses during the night?

  But they could tell that their mother was trying to be brave so as not to frighten them, and so they had agreed, without needing to say a word about it between themselves, to look brave so as not to disappoint her. Finally, the mother’s singing was rewarded by the soft and gentle rhythmic breathing of the sleeping children, and she slipped out of their bedroom back into the kitchen to join her husband.

  So far, the only homes the wolf had broken into were homes in which a young woman about to be married lived. None of their children were anywhere near marrying age. So the mother thought their house safe.

  “But how can we know for sure that the wolf won’t change his habits and begin hunting in homes with younger children?” her husband had demanded. So now he was sitting in a rocking chair beside the stove, the kerosene lamp on the table turned down low and his shotgun resting in his lap. The mother sat at the table and rested her eyes. She had reluctantly agreed to take turns with her husband, watching through the night, shotgun ready to stop the great wolf if it should attempt to break into their house.

  The rocking chair creaked quietly in the dim light.

  Eventually the father’s snoring mingled with his wife’s gentle breathing. The moon set and the stars prepared for sunrise, but there was no hint of the coming dawn yet when the window near the kitchen door exploded inward as the great wolf came snarling and lunging through it.

  The mother screamed as the shattered glass rained down around her and the wolf sank its teeth into her throat. The father cried out, startled, and shot the gun hastily and without aiming. The wolf dropped his wife back into her chair and leapt across the table onto the father’s lap.

  Alexei was sitting down to lunch in Vakarė’s kitchen when a neighbor woman burst into the house, words spilling rapidly from her mouth.

  “It was terrible, terrible!” she exclaimed, wringing her hands. Vakarė rapidly translated the words for Alexei. “It was over at Bronislovas’ farm, last night! The wolf must have come in through the window again, as he did before. Bronislavas and his wife were sitting in the kitchen, keeping watch, it seems—like so many of us now, Vakarė, don’t we?—and the wolf killed them there and then in the kitchen. Not satisfied with tearing out their throats and spewing blood all over the kitchen, the wolf tore the house apart. Everything! Silverware, cushions, pots, furniture! Torn and thrown about, broken and bloody! Even the bedrooms, the sheets and pillows and blankets—feathers all over the floor and in the bloody paw prints.”

  “What about the children?” Dovydas wanted to know. “What about little Dominykas, Herkus, and Ilona?”

  “Gone!” the neighbor woman shrieked. “Gone! All three of them, with their parents left dead in the kitchen. But no sign of the three little ones at all! Terrible news, isn’t it? I must tell the rest of our neighbors. We must do something to stop this terrible wolf!”

  She darted back out the door and continued on her way to spread the word of the death and destruction at Bronislovas’ house and the missing children.

  Alexei stared after her as the rest of the household erupted into shouting and crying. Lunch was forgotten.

  “I must find out what I can and try to track this monster back to its lair,” Alexei said, taking Vakarė aside. “Where can I find the household that was attacked?”

  Vakarė studied his face and tol
d him where to find Bronislovas’ house. “Be careful, my friend,” she warned him. “The monster seems to have no fear of anything! It may still be about, even in the daylight.”

  “I will keep my wits about me,” Alexei promised as he hurried out the door and across the farmyard.

  He made his way, following Vakarė’s directions, to the poor sad house on the other side of the market. As he reached it, he saw that it had indeed been reduced to rubble inside. Broken furniture and torn fabric that had once been tablecloths or towels in cupboards or upholstery on a chair was littered everywhere. The house was strangely quiet for a scene of such destruction. The only sound was that of Alexei creeping about, trying to disturb the wreckage as little as possible. He took deep breaths, hoping to catch the scent of the wolf that had done all this. There was a strange scent, a wolf scent, but it was more than a single scent, tangled up together like a rope made of many strands, and it was overlaid by the scents and fragrances of the family that had lived here together with the blood and fear of their last moments. Reaching the kitchen, he realized that the bodies of Bronislovas and his wife were nowhere to be seen, and he was glad of that.

  He thought others might have been searching through the house for clues as to how to track the monster, but all the neighbors must have been out either tending to the corpses or looking for the missing children. He sniffed about the kitchen, unable to avoid stepping in the sticky pools and smears of blood on the floor. He recognized the scent of people and found the scent of a wolf was stronger here beneath the other smells, but was still too difficult to trace apart from the scents of cooking and shed blood that filled the room. He made his way back out into the parlor and then up to the bedrooms.

  There were two bedrooms upstairs, evidently one for Bronislovas and his wife and another for the three children. Both were full of feathers from pillows ripped to shreds. Tattered blankets and sheets hung from half-open closet doors. Mattresses hung off the bedframes, which were scored by fresh claw marks. Dry and drying bloody paw prints were all over the floors outside the bedrooms and inside the room that had apparently been for Bronislovas and his wife. But the other room with the three small beds, evidently the children’s room, had no bloody paw prints inside, and the sheets and pillows were not torn, although they had been thrown around the room.

  Alexei caught himself smiling. It reminded him of the bedroom he had slept in as a child, after a pillow fight with his brothers and sisters. Or of the pillow fights between his own children. Under other, happier circumstances, he could have imagined the room looking just like this, but filled with the cheerful shrieks and laughter of the three children as they pelted each other with the pillows and blankets, jumping on the mattresses as they slid half-off of the bedframes. Maybe there would be tears, if one of the children slipped and hit their head against the wall, but the tears would be quickly dried and wiped away, the injury healed by their mother’s kiss.

  But now the room was silent, and the knocked-out blankets, pillows, and mattresses seemed like silent testimony about another, much grimmer sort of battle in which the children had been…

  “Had been what?” Alexei asked himself. He got down on the floor and sniffed. There was still the wolf scent, but there was a smell he had not noticed downstairs. He detected the stench of a man long unwashed and… what were the other scents? Urine, maybe? Beer, for certain. But there was another scent as well. Magic? A certain kind of nightmarish magic, fueled by both desire and rage. But the man’s many-layered scent only began at the entrance to the children’s room and then, once inside the room, the strand of wolf scent vanished and the unwashed-man scent was too tangled up with the scents of the children and the sour, tangy scent of fear.

  Alexei sat back on his heels and thought.

  “The wolf clearly burst into the house and killed the man and his wife in the kitchen,” he said to himself. “Then it went searching through the house, maybe looking for something? Maybe just for spite? Then it came up the stairs here, tore apart the parents’ bedroom and then found the children in this room here… then, what? It shifted into the form of a man and… took the children?”

  He got up and entered the room again, prodding sheets and blankets aside with his foot. He looked carefully across the floor again. There was no blood anywhere in the children’s room.

  “He changed back into a man and took the three children,” Alexei decided. “He is adding to his collection of would-be apprentices. So that makes… how many? He took these three and he has three others already. So that makes six.”

  Alexei stopped to count. “He has six. He needs twelve. Twelve by Epiphany so that he can change them into monsters like himself on the day after Epiphany, and today is…? Epiphany will be on January 6 but today is December… December, what?” Alexei realized he had lost track of the days. He counted on his fingers. “Christmas Day was December the twenty-fifth, and that was the day I rekindled the lantern. Then there was the next day, and the next day, so that it was three days after Christmas that we heard of the great wolf killing Audra and her father. That would have made it December the twenty-eighth. Then I met Javinė the next day. That must have been December twenty-ninth, and I spoke with Javinė again the next morning—yesterday—which would have been December thirtieth. So that makes today, what? December thirty-first? New Year’s Eve? But no one has said anything about the New Year.” He remembered the celebrations back home in Estonia for the New Year.

  “Of course no one has said anything about the new year,” he chided himself. “Who can talk about celebrating when this monster wolf is stalking the town?”

  Alexei turned to go back down to the parlor. “But that means there are six days remaining for the wolf to hunt and kill and kidnap children,” he realized. “Six more days of terror for the town before… before there are thirteen of these monster wolves hunting here, not just the one there is now.” But until then, the missing were still only children, not monsters, and the man-wolf would not kill them because he needed them alive on the day after Epiphany, so they must still be alive now. He had to find a way to trace the monster back to wherever it was hiding itself and wherever it was hiding the kidnapped children.

  Smirking and pleased with himself for figuring out the dates and how many children had been kidnapped and how many days remained before they would be lost forever, he came down into the parlor and turned to exit the house through the kitchen to avoid any suspicious neighbors who might have returned.

  But a cluster of townspeople stood in the entryway to the kitchen, blocking his exit. His smirk faded.

  The townspeople, mostly men but one or two women that Alexei did not recognize, stood there, as surprised to see Alexei as he was to see them. Alexei and the townspeople stood staring at each other, shock and surprise immobilizing them.

  But then then one of the men shouted something at him, something that he could not understand, but it was filled with anger and hate. Two of the men picked up sticks that had been table legs once and stepped toward him.

  Alexei glanced from the men approaching him towards the door from the parlor to the outdoors, but the men saw that and scurried to block him going out through that door as well. The other four or five men in the group stepped forward, shouting at him in Lithuanian and picking up a rolling pin, a discarded skillet, pieces of broken furniture, anything that could be used as a weapon.

  Alexei shuddered and held his breath, afraid that the wolf transformation might overtake him here. “I have to get out of here,” he realized, “before these townpeople’s fear of me is confirmed.” The men came closer, lifting their weapons and taunting him in Lithuanian. They stepped out into a line, joining the two men by the parlor exit to the farmyard and making a semi-circle facing Alexei at the bottom of the staircase.

  Alexei closed his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and darted forward.

  Crack! A table leg came down across his shoulders and another came up across his stomach. The skillet smashed against the back of his head
as he stumbled and fell, rolling into a half-crouch against a wall. He heard one of the women shouting in Lithuanian as a table leg struck him in the ribs and a foot kicked him in the shin. Alexei cried out in Estonian as the men shouted and struck, words Alexei couldn’t understand or even make out as the blows rained down on him. The skillet struck his wrists. He jerked his hands away from around his head and pushed himself away from the wall, stumbling up and forward. He heard himself shouting and crying out with his voice even as he felt snarls rumbling in his chest.

  “I have to get away before the transformation comes!” he realized.

  More blows fell on him, the men shouting at Alexei and the women shouting at the men. Alexei shoved one of the women away from the entrance to the kitchen. The men stumbled after him, tangled up with each other and the weapons they held as they all struggled to get through the doorway into the kitchen at the same time.

  Alexei reached up to push the hair out of his eyes and saw the blood smeared across the back of his hand as he pulled it away from his face. He felt bruises across his back and legs, his ribs and scalp swelling up. He nearly tripped over the fallen kitchen table.

  One of the men pushed his way past the others and through the door into the kitchen, waving the makeshift cudgel in his hand. Another blow cracked against Alexei’s shoulders as he made it out the door into the farmyard. He slammed the door shut behind him and began to run, running across the farmyard and back towards the market. An eye was swelling shut, making it difficult to see. It hurt to breathe, his lungs pressing against his ribs, and as he gasped for breath, the air cut his throat. He ran as best he could, hunched over and clutching his side.