XVIII
Maria walked out of Gród Narew wondering if she could ever repair the damage she had done after she had spoken so insolently to her brother. Could she go home after that, after what she knew dwelled within her?
She held her cross and looked out over the woods, watching the evening shadows grow to engulf them. She had left without bringing Josef his meal, but she didn’t want to face his questions—spoken and unspoken.
She believed that she knew the answers, and they frightened her.
I can return, she thought. I can pretend nothing has happened.
The events of the previous evening had already taken on the hazy aspect of a nightmare. The fury that had burned in her then had flickered out, leaving only ashes behind.
Dusk was coming soon, and her brother would be approaching the walls. She watched the sky and thought of what a disaster it might be if Darien met them in the woods. She remembered how he had overpowered Lukasz; she did not want anything similar to happen to her brother.
Her hand tightened on the cross as she thought of the other reason she had left early and alone.
She turned and walked around Gród Narew, to the northern side. The side without any gates or paths, just hilly pasture ending in a wall of unbroken forest. She walked across the pasture, away from the fortress, from her brother, from Darien. She climbed over the low stone fence marking the pasture and walked north, through the trees.
Her heart raced and her face flushed as she pushed inside the shadowed wood. Within a hundred paces she was truly alone. She hugged herself against the first prickings of fear.
I am not a wicked person, she thought, even as her breath shuddered and her flesh tingled with the anticipation of …
“I need to know,” she whispered.
Had it been some uncontrolled fantasy? Or was it her?
She took off her shoes and placed them neatly by a tree. She took off her belt, her surcote, her chemise, and carefully placed her clothes so they would not be soiled. For nearly half a minute she stood wearing nothing but her father’s cross. The wind was chilly against her exposed skin, and her arms drifted unconsciously to cover herself, even though the only eyes watching belonged to birds and insects.
She shivered, and only partly because of the cold.
It took a long time for her to muster the courage to remove the cross. When she finally lifted the chain off her neck, she did so very slowly. She held it in her hands and kissed it before placing it upon her folded clothes.
“God help me,” she whispered.
She took a step back and stood before the tree where her clothes lay. She felt wicked, blasphemous, evil. Not for her nakedness but for what she felt inside herself. What she wanted.
She told herself that she didn’t want this thing inside her. She wanted it to be a dream, some bewitchment that had addled her memory or twisted what she’d seen and felt and heard. Even some form of insanity would be less threatening to her soul; a madwoman was blameless in the eyes of Church and God.
She opened her arms to the woods around her.
“Is it me?” she whispered to the evening sky.
Even possession by some sort of demon—that would be beyond her volition; she could ask succor of the Church. They would help her to exorcise the evil within her.
“Is it me?” she repeated, more loudly, looking upward toward God.
She shouldn’t want this thing. She shouldn’t want to feel that bestial strength.
She shouldn’t.
But she did.
“Is it me?” she screamed.
And what God refused to answer, her body did. Pain cracked her like a whip, twisting her voice into a breathless scream. The sudden flare of pain seemed to radiate beyond her, resonating through the woods, causing insects to go silent and birds to cascade upward in an apocalyptic flutter of wings.
This time, without the focus of rage, she felt every bone in her body come alive, twisting and growing, pulling writhing muscles and tendons in a throbbing dance under her flesh. She fell to her knees and pulled in a shuddering breath. The sensation rapidly passed beyond mere pain. Every fiber of her body screamed to her of its existence; every nerve an eye staring into the sun.
She watched her hands as they lengthened, the flesh darkening and sprouting a pelt of midnight-black fur, claws growing to dig agonized grooves into the dirt. She tried to scream, and her mouth and nose fell down toward the ground, pushed by a growing muzzle. Each tooth twisted and sharpened as her legs bent and reshaped themselves.
Her body twisted itself in an ever-increasing spiral of agony.
And then it released her.
When the release came, it was a shuddering climax through the core of her body—an ecstatic inverse of all she had just endured, all at once. It dropped her shaking to the ground, moaning. Lesser shocks jerked through her body five or six times before she could move without trembling.
When the ordeal was over, she lay panting on the sweet-smelling pine needles coating the forest floor. For several moments she couldn’t think clearly of anything except what she had just felt—something that was simultaneously the best and the worst thing she had ever endured.
“It is me,” she whispered, surprised that she could still speak.
The character of the woods had changed with her. The smell of the pine-needle mulch was sharper, deeper, filled with traces of things she could almost taste. Even the air felt different, the breeze now pulling against a fur pelt rather than her naked skin. The colors of the evening seemed deeper and of a different character.
She pushed herself into a crouch and realized that the woods were silent around her. She rested on her haunches and ran her newly strange hands across her face. The rough pads of her fingers traced a narrow muzzle and a fringe of fur around her neck. She touched a cold nose, and ears that projected above her head.
She shuddered, realizing that this was no dream. She had called this thing forth from inside her. She didn’t move for the longest time, waiting for the will of this creature to overcome her, to feel the overwhelming rage she had felt the last time it had come.
She licked her lips, her broad, thin tongue tracing teeth made for rending flesh. She stretched her unnatural hands until the joints creaked and her claws ached in the tips of her fingers. But the will of this creature did not come to bewitch her mind.
It began to sink in that this was her: her bones, her flesh, her skin, her fur, her teeth, her claws …
Her will. Her mind. Her anger.
Her soul.
She reached over to her folded clothes and picked up the cross. She half-expected it to burn her or to forcefully evict the monster that had taken over her body. Lightning should strike, she thought, or a fissure open in the earth.
But nothing dramatic happened when she touched the cross, or when she lifted it up.
The metal appeared blood-red in the evening light as she held it before her face. She whispered a prayer to God, begging for forgiveness, and strength, and understanding. God did not rebuke her for such words coming from an unnatural mouth, but He didn’t answer her, either.
“I want to be myself again,” she whispered.
She tried to will herself back into the woman she had been, will the beast inside herself.
But nothing happened.
Her heart began racing. What if she had done something wrong, broken some rule? What if she was forever confined to this bestial form?
No. Please God, no …
She concentrated, tensed her muscles, tried to reenvision the ecstatic anguish of the transformation, but nothing happened. Something about her new body made it easer for her emotions to cascade, grow in intensity, and she could feel the fear and rage bearing down upon her like a panicked warhorse.
“Stop it!” she growled at herself.
It made no sense that she couldn’t change back. She had done it the first time without even thinking about it, and if she couldn’t now there must be a reason. She didn’t need to panic; she needed to think.
A calm heart, Darien had said.
Thinking of him made the anger begin to rise again. It was Darien who had brought this upon her, telling her to remove her cross.
She looked down at the cross, still dangling from her clawed, black-furred hand.
Was this really what kept this monster from claiming me?
Yet could the cross also keep the monster from leaving? That made no sense. If a cross kept a beast at bay, shouldn’t it also drive it out? Shouldn’t it force her back to her natural body?
“Is it the cross?” she asked.
It is silver? Josef had asked her. The chain as well?
They use those silver chains to drag you down, Darien had said.
Silver was supposed to have power over unnatural things. Could it be that it wasn’t God that had kept this beast slumbering within her but the metal this cross was made of? Perhaps it didn’t suppress the beast, only its ability to change.
“My ability to change,” she whispered.
She gently replaced her father’s cross on top of her clothes and looked at it resting there. Then she pulled her hand away and sucked in a breath, trying to will the beast back into herself.
This time her body responded with a shuddering force. She fell backward, toppling off her wolf legs. It felt as if her whole body had melted and was draining through a hole inside herself. There was pain, but not the orgasmic agony of the beast. Instead she felt the empty ache of a long-cramped muscle finally relaxing.
She sprawled, naked and sweating, on a bed of pine needles.
She brought a hand up to touch her face, and her lips were human. Her fingers traced the outline of her jaw, and she felt the same face that she had worn all her life. She got unsteadily to her feet and looked down at herself, and saw the same breasts, the same stomach, the same thighs, knees, and feet.
There was no sign of the creature.
Not on her body, anyway. Next to her feet, pressed deep into the forest floor, was a single pair of footprints where the creature had—where she had—crouched on her haunches. The prints were those of the splayed rear paws of a gigantic dog or wolf. Only the pair, without any prints coming or going.
She bent and traced the pawprints with her fingers. If she needed to confirm that she was not mad, that what she had seen and felt existed outside her own head, here was proof, embedded in the forest floor.
She dug her fingers into the damp earth and buried the pawprints—filling them in, tamping them down, erasing any evidence of their presence.
By the time she had brushed her skin off and replaced her clothing, the sounds of birds and insects had returned. Apparently they were satisfied that the creature had gone.
She left the forest, uncertain about exactly where she was going. She ended up by the walls of Gród Narew because that was the closest place she knew to go. She walked around to the southern gate and stared out at the path back toward her family.
How could she return? Not only after running from her brother, but going home to face her stepmother. How could she, knowing what secrets her stepmother had kept from her? They had hung this cross around her neck without giving her the vaguest inkling as to why. She shuddered when she thought what might have happened if Lukasz had ripped the cross from her neck.
The first time she had been rage without a thought. If Darien had been just a little slower—
No, I did strike him.
She had been so tied up in what had happened to her, she hadn’t spared much thought to what she had done. Now that she had brought the creature forth herself, she knew it hadn’t been a vision or a nightmare. And if that transformation had been real, she had to assume that her blow to Darien’s back had been just as real.
She closed her eyes and pictured it: her leap at him, her clawed hand striking, slamming into his back, claws digging deep into the muscle. She had felt his flesh tear under her fingers. She had seen him slam into the ground with the force of the blow. She could have killed him.
“Maria?”
She whipped around, eyes wide, half-expecting Darien to be looming behind her.
“Josef?” The unexpected name escaped her lips before she fully realized who was standing there, his face drawn and pale, his body listing slightly to the right as he pressed his fist against his stomach just above his belt.
All her thoughts fell apart. She ran to his side and took hold of his shoulder to support him. “Josef, you should not be out of bed.”
“I am fine. The wounds are healing.”
He was not fine. He was strong, but she could feel the tension in his shoulders, and she could hear the catch of pain in his breath however much he tried to hide it. She imagined that she could even smell the agony that possessed him.
Please don’t hurt yourself, Josef. I am losing everything else. Don’t let me lose you, too …
But it was already sinking in: she was what the Order was hunting.
Her heart ached as she realized that this might be the last she’d ever see of him. Knowing what she was, she would have to leave here. Unfallen tears blurred her vision as she forced her voice to be as firm and cheerful as she could manage. “Your wounds won’t stay healed if you go wandering about like this. Come, let me take you back to your room.”
“No.” He pulled from under her supporting arm and faced her, taking her hand in his. “You need to go home, before all the light of day is lost.”
She looked him in the face, wanting to ask him what he knew of what she was. Instead, she whispered, “Is there anything in these woods at night that isn’t there in the daytime?”
“It likes the dark,” he replied, turning his gaze away from the gate, toward the woods. “It is there now, but given the chance it prefers surprise, slaughtering its victims with no warning at all.”
“Josef, you said you couldn’t—”
“Listen!” he snapped. “I’m defying everything I’ve trained to be to tell you this. It hunts in the dark, traps its victims in confined spaces. It can come to you looking like a human, but it is not. Do not trust any strangers you might see. Most important, only silver can truly wound it.”
Like a blow it struck her: her healing bruise, and the wounds that still itched in her palm. It was her.
“W-why are you telling me now?” Did he know about her slipping into the woods? Did he know that she was the monster of which he spoke?
“I was frightened for you. You didn’t come this evening, and I thought my silence had driven you away. I was afraid that I had lost my chance to protect you.”
He pressed something into her hand. She looked down and saw a silver dagger. It had been hidden against his stomach, beneath his fist.
“What is—”
“Shh. Take it. It is the only protection I can offer while we are kept by the Duke. But once he satisfies himself of the legitimacy of our hunt, we shall finish this thing.”
“This thing,” she whispered. Me, she thought.
“I know you must have suspected its presence, seen something of it, for you to talk of wolves. So, perhaps, I may be forgiven my disobedience. I would rather have that hang upon my conscience than anything happening to you.”
Then he bent and kissed her forehead, and the touch of lips on her skin fired a panic of impossible emotions—a tumult that might have called forth the wolf from within her if the silver on her breast had not kept it dormant. Instead, it left her with a shuddering weakness that made her stumble backward as he turned to reenter the fortress.
She turned to face the road home before the guards could catch sight of the weapon in her hand, or Josef could see the tears on her cheeks.
“Thank you,” she whispered.