Storm Wolf Read online

  Alexei kept his eyes on his plate. The monster would not go away before Epiphany, he knew. He raised his head to ask, “What is today’s date? I have been sleeping so soundly—for some reason, I cannot say—that I have lost count of the days.”

  “Today is January the third,” Edita burst out. “Everyone knows that.” She giggled.

  “It is not polite to laugh at our guest,” Vakarė chided her youngest grandchild. “Alexei has been ill.” She turned to him and asked, “Have your bruises and the swelling gone down any?”

  Alexei nodded and returned his gaze to his plate. The bruises and swelling were far from gone, but they were enough better that he was sure that he would go on his own patrol that evening.

  The day had been quiet. Alexei had rested. After supper and an evening of embroidery, knitting, and whittling, the family had all retired to their rooms. Alexei waited until the house itself had settled in the darkness, the floorboards’ groaning and creaking having subsided for the night. Sometime after midnight he finally pushed himself up from his bed and, pulling the knots of the bandages around his chest tight, he stepped into the parlor.

  “Adomas is asleep upstairs,” he reminded himself. “I must be sure to avoid the men on patrol tonight. They’ve surely heard about the beating the others gave me, and if Adomas is not there, I cannot expect anyone to defend me except myself. And that would be dangerous for them, too.” He winced as he turned to the door, the bruised ribs still making him move slowly and cautiously. He took his coat from the hook by the door and stepped out. The door quietly clicked shut behind him.

  He took a deep breath. The scents of the night flooded his nostrils: the snow, the hay in the barn, the wooden slats of the fencing, the mud in the streets, the farm animals, the mice.

  “No people out on the street, so the night patrol must not be near,” he decided. He bent low, sniffing at the ground, and set out across the farmyard and down the muddy street, hoping to detect some hint of the wolf or the unwashed man.

  Alexei trudged along the streets, between the snow drifts, creeping close to the barns of neighbors. He kept sniffing and smelling. Nothing. He detected an occasional whiff that might have come from the wolf, and once he thought he caught the whispering tendril of a suggestion of the scent of the unwashed man, but neither was enough to follow.

  Alexei was so intent on finding the scent of either the wolf or unwashed man that he paid little attention to the other scents in the air or along the ground. So, as he turned a corner out of a farmyard and started down the road, he glanced up and froze. He’d been too careless! The men of the night patrol were coming toward him, heavy clubs and cudgels or shotguns over their shoulders as they talked and laughed among themselves.

  But one of the men saw Alexei and pointed at him, shouting something in Lithuanian that Alexei could not understand. The rest of the men in the patrol stood, transfixed as Alexei was, staring at him as he stared at them.

  Another man shouted something else at him and again Alexei didn’t understand what the men wanted.

  One of the patrolmen raised his shotgun and fired.

  Alexei turned to run and the men came running toward him, shouting and waving their weapons. Alexei grunted and struggled to move quickly, but his wounds still hurt too much. There were shots of pain and cartilage snapped. He felt his muscles and tendons give way. Was his wound more serious than he had realized or was it—? The men surrounded him, shouting and threatening him with their clubs. He heard the shotgun snap as the man readied it to shoot again.

  Crack! Before the man could shoot, a club came cracking down across Alexei’s shoulders. Another struck him in the hip. He cried out, trying to twist away from the clubs raining down on him, the men shouting angrily with words he did not understand. More cartilage snapped and more tendons stretched in ways that Alexei was too frightened to notice or recognize. Someone kicked him as he attempted to stumble away from the patrol, and he went sprawling in the muddy road. He heard the men shout at each other and the watchmen stepped away from him. He heard the second shotgun snap into readiness and braced himself, his shoulders broadening and tearing the coat across his back.

  A gun blast roared in the night. But that sound was buried by the explosive sound of the snarling of the nearly man-sized wolf that rose from where Alexei had lain sprawled across the road. The Alexei-wolf roared and turned on his attackers, his great jaws snapping on the arms and legs of the men around him. He wrenched clubs from fingers and tossed them aside like matchsticks. Men screamed and stumbled, tripping over each other as they tried to get away from the unexpected wolf attack. Alexei’s wolf jaws closed tight on their coats and exposed flesh, tearing away the fabric and the skin and muscle. Blood spurted in great fountains, drenching the mud and the snow.

  His jaws closed around the barrel of one of the shotguns and wrenched it from the man’s grasp. The wolf tossed the weapon aside and lurched onto his hind feet, dropping his front paws onto the man’s chest and closing his jaws around the man’s face. The man screamed and collapsed, blood pouring down his chest as the Alexei-wolf dropped down atop the fallen gunman.

  He heard shouting and calling from the houses down the road. Lights began to flicker in the windows. He heard men whimpering, and another shotgun readied to shoot. He leaped up and twisted in the air, searching for where the other gunman might be.

  He saw the man with the weapon standing across the road beside a fence. The man looked up at Alexei-wolf, hovering in the air, and dropped the gun. He stood for an instant, as if not believing that he was seeing the wolf in midair, before he turned and ran, screaming down the road. Others, too wounded to escape, whimpered and cried out. But most of the men of the night patrol were dead.

  From his vantage point in the air above the road, Alexei-wolf could see men coming, running with weapons to protect or aid their neighbors. He heard shouting and screaming as men stumbled over the corpses and limbs strewn about the road, slipping in the blood.

  “Get away! Get away before you kill more of them!” some part of Alexei’s humanity shouted in his mind. “Go before you kill them—or before they kill you!” Alexei turned in the air and ran across the rooftops. The men in the road below never looked up, not expecting to see the monster that had attacked the patrol in the sky above their homes. One of the wounded men tried to gesture at the sky, but the blood gurgled in his torn throat and none of the would-be rescuers could understand what he was trying to tell them.

  Alexei ran across the town, not recognizing where he was going in the night. Coming to a neighborhood that was quiet, where the shouting and shooting and mayhem had not reached, he came down from the sky and ran, then trotted, along the road. He turned a corner and recognized the barn. It was Vakarė’s family farm! Unable to enter the house, he ran into the barn and climbed through the air to the hayloft, where he burrowed as far into the corner and as deeply under the hay as he could to escape himself and the destruction he had brought to Vakarė’s neighbors.

  “Vilkolakis! Is that you, my friend?” Javinė kicked at the straw in the loft. “Answer me, Alexei!” He kicked again and Alexei cried out, rearing up from the straw and clutching his bleeding nose.

  “Watch yourself, Javinė!” Alexei retorted. He wiped his nose with his sleeve, smearing it with blood, but after a wipe or two the bleeding seemed to stop.

  Javinė stood tapping his foot with his arms crossed across his chest.

  “What do you want, Javinė?” Alexei slumped back, leaning against the wall behind him.

  “What do I want?” Javinė repeated Alexei’s words. “Why are you hiding here in the barn, vilkolakis? Does it have anything to do with what happened in the streets last night?”

  “Why? What happened?”

  Javinė continued to tap his foot. He arched an eyebrow and his red cap slipped to one side.

  Alexei closed his eyes. He remembered meeting the night patrol. He remembered the men attacking him. He remembered hearing a gunshot. He dimly remembered f
eeling the wolf transformation come over him and that there had been blood. Lots of blood.

  “Much blood,” he muttered to himself, his eyes still closed.

  “It was you, then?” Javinė waited for Alexei to confirm his suspicions. “Not the monster wolf that has been killing the betrothed girls and stealing the children?”

  Alexei shook his head and opened his eyes to look at the sprite. He told the sprite about going to Bronislovas’ house and the wolf scent and the scent of the unwashed man he had found there. He told the sprite about meeting the townsfolk in the house and the beating they had given him. He told the sprite about resting for two days because the bruises hurt so much. “But then, last night, I went out to find the monster wolf’s scent. I wanted to track him, find his hiding place and try to stop him. Try to save the missing children. But the townsfolk think I am involved with the killings and kidnappings because it all started after I arrived and Vakarė’s family took me in. The men on patrol last night met me and must have thought I was out looking for someone to kill or a child to steal. They attacked me with clubs. They shot at me. But then… then, I think… I’m not certain…”

  “You became the wolf, didn’t you vilkolakis?” Javinė shook his head. “Do you remember anything that happened after that?”

  Alexei shook his head. “I did not want to become the wolf. But I have lost control of the wolf magic and now it sometimes just comes upon me. I do not wish it, but it comes upon me and I do terrible things, Javinė. Terrible things! I think I attacked the night patrol…”

  “Yes. From what I heard Adomas talking about with his son as they cleaned the stalls this morning, most of the men on the patrol were killed.” Javinė confirmed Alexei’s fears.

  “But… I did not want to hurt them,” Alexei confessed. “I was able to make myself stop before they were all dead, I think, and I came here to hide. I cannot go into the house again, Javinė. I know that. The townsfolk will come looking for me. They will want to kill me. They will tear the house apart looking for me, and if Vakarė or her family try to stop them, the townsfolk will kill them as well.”

  Javinė sat down beside Alexei. “The townsfolk want to protect the girls and little children, and they think that by killing you, the attacks will stop. They think that killing you means protecting the town. But it won’t, will it?”

  “No.” Alexei leaned his head against the barn wall. “The monster will continue to kill the betrothed girls and steal the children until he transforms the children on the day after Epiphany.”

  Javinė calculated on his fingers. “Today is the fourth of January. Epiphany will be on the sixth. He will transform the children on the seventh.” He turned his head to look at Alexei. “Counting today, you have three days to track him, find his hiding place, and stop him.” Javinė looked away from Alexei. “But you can hardly move, can you, vilkolakis? You are hurt even more badly than you were before. Am I correct, vilkolakis?”

  Alexei sighed with a grimace and nodded. “I am hurt,” he admitted. “It is difficult for me to move about. At least, as a man. I seem to have had no problems moving about as the… the vilkolakis.” He borrowed Javinė’s Lithuanian word to describe himself. “But I cannot simply hide here. Yet if I become the wolf, I cannot always control my actions. I can forget who I am. But I must find the missing children and stop the monster.”

  A loud argument broke out in the barn below them. From the sound of the voices, several men were arguing with Adomas and Dovydas. Javinė slipped to the edge of the hayloft and peered down at the men. After a moment he crawled back to Alexei.

  “They are arguing about you, vilklolakis,” the barn sprite explained. “The men want to search the barn. They have already seen the small room where you sleep and you are not there. So they come looking for you in the barn, but Dovydas asks them if you would be so silly as to hide here. And his father Adomas agrees.”

  The sprite and the man listened to the argument continue below them. Eventually Adomas and Dovydas seemed to have persuaded the men to leave. Chickens began to strut about the barn floor again, clucking and rustling their wings. Cows chewed their cud.

  “I will do what I can to protect you as well, vilkolakis,” Javinė promised Alexei. “If the townsfolk come to look for you again, I can confuse them and lead them astray. I can make them see things that are not there as well as convince them that they did not see what was in front of their faces. You are the best hope these townspeople have, even if they do not realize that. I will keep you safe so that you can heal enough to go hunting for the monster wolf.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Alexei told the sprite.

  “But do not take long to recover,” the sprite warned. “You only have three days to stop him.”

  Alexei slept again, even without Vakarė’s special tea. It was the next day, about noon, when he woke and stretched, daring to gingerly touch his ribs.

  “How are you feeling now, vilkolakis?” Javinė asked, strutting about with his arms crossed across his chest.

  “Still sore.” He grimaced. “But much better.”

  “I should hope so,” Javinė chided. “You have slept much too long. I overheard Adomas and Dovydas as they cared for the cattle and chickens and pigs this morning. Another small child was stolen during the night.”

  “Were any betrothed girls killed?” Alexei wanted to know.

  Javinė shook his head. “From what I could make out from what Adomas and Dovydas were saying, I think not. But a seven-year-old boy was taken from his bed. His mother discovered that he was missing. Then, after the livestock were cared for, a handful of men came to search the barn, thinking to find you and the boy.”

  “Adomas allowed them into the barn?” Alexei pushed himself up, worried that his friends might begin to believe the stories being told by their neighbors.

  “No, the men just showed up here,” Javinė told him. “They came into the barn and threw straw and bales of hay about, hoping to find your hiding place. But they lost track of each other—thanks to me!” Javinė made a little bow, flourishing his hat in an extravagant gesture. “They could hear each other but could see nothing but the hay and straw they were throwing about until Adomas heard them calling to each other and came storming into the barn with a cudgel. He drove them all out onto the road.” Javinė stood upright again. “But I do not think he will be able to drive them off again, vilkolakis. They will come again, with cudgels and shotguns themselves. And more of them, I think. They will not rest until they have found you—you and the missing children.”

  Alexei slumped against a bale of hay. “I need to go out hunting for the monster again, Javinė. But how long has it been since I’ve eaten? Can you can bring me something to eat? And something to wear? I need to regain my strength as well as heal my bruises if I am to hunt down and stop the killer wolf.”

  Javinė crossed his arms. “Do I look like a nurse to you, vilkolakis? Or a maidservant?” The sprite tapped his foot impatiently. Alexei, familiar now with the sprite’s grumpiness, looked down and struggled to hide his grin.

  “Very well,” the sprite finally muttered. “I will bring you what I can. But don’t think that it will be much or that I can always find whatever you need, vilkolakis!” Javinė tramped off and climbed down into the barn below, continuing to mutter under his breath.

  The man with the greasy hair slipped around the side of the church as the evening shadows crawled along the church’s walls. He felt confident that in the growing darkness no one passing the church would see him, as long as he did nothing to attract attention. He wrapped his dirty palm around the handle of one of the church doors and gently tested it.

  Locked.

  He glanced up and around as he looked back across his shoulder. He twisted his head, looking up and down the street outside the church. There were a few figures in the street but none in the immediate vicinity of the church. He turned back to the door and wrenched the handle in his grip. Wood cracked and splintered. The paltry lock came apart. H
e pushed one of the doors open and stepped into the church. He pushed the door shut so no one would notice that it had been damaged. He slunk down the aisle between the pews toward the altar.

  “Four children more I need,” the man muttered, his eyes darting hither and thither in the dark interior of the church. He wanted to be sure that he was alone. Candles sputtered at the feet of saints along the walls on either side, causing the shadows to leap and dance, but the darkness between the saints was nearly impenetrable. Only his eyes, used to the dark, could make anything out, and he was relieved to see no one kneeling in a pew or before a saint.

  He paused at the low marble rail running along the front of the church from one side to the other. Another candle burned more steadily above him, a large candle in a lamp hanging from a chain. He looked up at it and smiled, his yellow eyes delighted and his yellow teeth exposed as he hungrily licked his cracked lips.

  “Four children and this I need,” he muttered, stepping through the gap in the marble rail and up the three shallow steps to the altar. A strip of heavy, rough linen covered the other, fairer linen cloths that lay atop the altar and hung nearly to the floor on either side. Six candlesticks atop a shelf behind the altar gleamed in the candlelight, three on each side of the small tabernacle in the center of the shelf.

  He licked his dry lips again and leaned forward, resting one dirty hand on the altar as he reached up and fumbled along the shelf where the tabernacle stood. He found the small key that he had expected to be nearby and reached up under the brocade coverlet draped over the tabernacle. He slipped the key into the tabernacle door and turned it. There was a quiet click as the door popped open. He reached inside and pulled out the pyx and set it down on the altar.