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Maria had snatched Josef from Darien’s jaws, praying that she knew enough of her bestial lover’s heart. She had taunted Darien, pushed him, testing his dominance to the point of fury. To the point of arousal.
When she leapt, she knew there was no question that he would follow.
Her actions were moving so far ahead of her thoughts that the ground was racing to meet her through the mists before she fully understood what she had done. Every instinct in her body screamed that she had just committed suicide.
God help me was the only prayer she had time to compose, as she drew her legs up and closed her eyes.
She slammed into the ground on all fours with an impact that felt as if it shattered every long bone in her body. She rolled to the side, groaning, realizing that was probably the case. She could feel her skeleton moving, realigning, her muscles snaking to pull the damage back in line, the pain exploding and then evaporating in an orgasmic release.
She made it to her feet just as she heard Darien thud to the ground next to her.
He chased her over the inner wall and through the empty alleys of Gród Narew. In the mist, it seemed as if the whole village were dissolving into nothingness.
For her, it was. There would be no coming back here, not after Darien’s massacre.
She climbed the outer wall of earth and logs, scrambling over it as if it were only a deadfall in the forest. She paused, crouched on a high point to make certain Darien followed.
He emerged out of the mists, running on all fours now, intent on nothing but her. At first, she feared that he wouldn’t be able to follow her up the wall in his wolf form, but the inside of the wall sloped enough, and he leapt onto it with so much forward momentum that, even with a wolf’s forelegs, he could scramble to the top.
She waited until his forepaws touched the walkway where she crouched; then she vaulted over the side. As she fell from the wall, she called to the rest of the wolf to claim her, and she landed square on four paws. When Darien jumped after her, she had already run halfway to the edge of the woods.
She led a race through trees that were a black reflection of her previous day with Darien. The woods had dressed as an anteroom of Hell, cloaked in a chill fog that stole light and color, decapitating the trees and erasing the world more than twenty paces away. Whatever lived here had fled or stood mute in the face of the two demon wolves charging through their midst. The only sounds she heard were paws pounding through the mulch of the forest floor and the ragged panting as they ran.
She heard him, she smelled him, she could feel him as an angry presence behind her. She knew that, eventually, he would have to catch her.
But she had resigned herself to that fate. He was her kind, and he was right; she had given herself to him already. In her own heart, where the old human Maria still clung to herself, there was something irrevocable, inviolate about what she had done. A promise between him and herself, and to God, tying them together.
And even if she could break that bond, it was the only power she had to keep him from continuing the slaughter. She had to lead him far away from all this.
After it seemed they had run for hours, she heard a growling cough followed by the breathless words “Maria. Stop.”
Something in his voice, some semblance of reason, made her slow. Inside, she tensed, expecting that this would be the moment when he took her.
“Maria,” he repeated.
She slowed and padded to a stop, turning to look in Darien’s direction. She smelled his exertion, heard his panting, but he was invisible behind the veil of gray that wrapped the forest.
“We belong together,” he said between breaths. “You know that.”
“Then stop this killing!”
“Why, Maria? Why are they more sacred than the elk we slaughtered?”
“They are people!”
“Yet they would kill us for what we are.”
“Of course they want to kill you, Darien! How many of them have you murdered?”
“They want to kill you as well.”
Maria stood briefly mute at Darien’s horrible logic. Then a growing realization made her ask, “How did my cross find its way there?”
There was a long silence, where all she heard was Darien’s breathing.
“Tell me!” she growled into the featureless gray.
“You needed to understand.”
She felt her own rage building. “Understand what?”
“You ran back to them! I couldn’t let that happen.”
“You left it on purpose, to make me into a murderer in their eyes.” And right now, her mind did drift toward murder.
“Once the humans knew what you were, you’d be doomed. It was better you find out now, when we both could punish—”
“You don’t know anything! Just because some humans hurt you, you think they all deserve the same fate? My human family knew all along and …”
Her words trailed off.
They wouldn’t …
Of course they would.
She turned and ran, no longer listening to him.
How long had she played this game with him in the forest? An hour? How long would it take Heinrich’s men to find her family?
And what price would the Order want from someone who’d raised one of their demons?
Josef walked through the next hour as if through a nightmare. He spoke little and moved as if another intelligence directed his legs. He faded in and out of awareness. He wore a borrowed shirt and surcote that he did not recall being given. He also carried a scabbard on his belt, probably from the same anonymous source. He didn’t remember descending from the stronghold, but he now stood with his few living brothers by the gate leading out toward the rest of Gród Narew.
The mist refused to burn off with the advancing day, and the cold and damp clutched at him like the hands of a drowning man, pulling him back down toward unconsciousness. Brother Heinrich commanded the more able-bodied men to open the door, and a voice called “Hold!”
Josef turned slowly, feeling the motion in his abdomen, wondering idly, with the unconcern of the dreaming:
Am I bleeding again?
Telek stood in the doorway of the stronghold, at the head of a mass of men bearing on their tabards the odd devices of the Poles: multiarmed crosses, horseshoes impaled by swords and arrows, and glyphs less comprehensible—all red and blue, gold and white. They outnumbered the Germans easily four to one.
“What is this?” Heinrich said.
“You will lead us to this beast,” Telek called back.
“This is our charge, Rycerz Telek Rydz. We are called to fight this agent of Satan.”
“As my uncle calls me. And, Brother Heinrich, you have not shown great skill in containing this animal.”
Even in his limbo of pain, fatigue, and disorientation, Josef had the lucidity to catch the emphasis on Telek’s last word.
“Do not presume—”
“Presume? You are not in Prussia, you arrogant monk. You walk in our lands, and if we say, ‘Put your weapons down and strip the armor from your backs,’ you will do so and be glad of the chance to march barefoot back to your own lands.”
“You have no right to command us. The Duke—”
“Duke Siemowit has charged me to deal with this. You would do well not to challenge my authority here.”
Heinrich took a step forward. “You would lead your men against the Devil armed only with steel?”
“‘They are a beast like any other, but one that can at will disguise itself as a man. Also, like any beast, they are deadly to man when wild and untrained,’” Telek said.
Heinrich took a step back.
“I have a good memory for things I’ve read. Do I recall Brother Semyon’s words correctly?”
Semyon? That name again.
“Those letters are only for the initiated. You cannot understand!”
“I understand that this thing is no more demonic than a rabid dog. And according to your own Brother Semyon, if we take its head, with or without the aid of silver, it will be done with. Healing or not, a man with a pike should hold it at bay for the length required for my men to complete the task.” He glared at Heinrich. “Now, where is it you’re intending to go?”
Josef followed Poles with pikes and battle-axes and the Order, with their silvered swords and crossbows. The Poles marched, and the Germans and Telek rode. Josef sat astride a Polish warhorse, his knuckles white on the reins, every step sending jolts of pain through his gut.
But at least the pain kept him awake.
He tried asking his master once who Semyon was, but the only response was: “A brother knight in the Order, long dead.”
Brother Heinrich’s curt response fed Josef’s already growing doubt. When Maria had challenged him—had asked him if the monsters he hunted ever talked, if they did things any worse than men did—his response to all such questions had been that these things were soulless demons.
Doubt had come first when he’d realized that she was asking for her own sake. Now, with Telek’s statements, doubt had taken an equal footing with faith.
Josef had believed they were demons solely because of the words of his masters in the Order and the creature’s actions. Now Telek gave Josef reason to doubt his masters’ words; he could quote another knight of the Order upon the creature’s earthly nature without Brother Heinrich contradicting him.
That left the beast’s actions and Maria’s question: Were they worse than the actions of men? He had seen and heard much evil done in the wake of the great pestilence, and the burning of Jews in Strasbourg had not been the worst of it.
If he was left to judge based on actions alone, how could he judge these beasts to be demonic?
How could he judge Maria when her only crime was being this thing?
How could he judge her family?
The mixed group of marching Poles and mounted Germans drew to a halt in front of the cottage of Maria’s family. Her brother Władysław walked out to meet them as Telek and Heinrich dismounted.
Josef’s heart sank because he saw no way that this could end well.