XXXI
Darien chased after his mate.
His bitch.
He wanted to hold her, hurt her, force himself inside her and pin her to the ground until she whimpered his ownership of her. He had told her—he had shown her—the fact that she had nothing else. He was all she had. And still she pushed away from him.
He called to her again, to tell her of the uselessness of man. How they would kill her just for the sake of what she was. She didn’t listen, didn’t understand, saying how he had somehow made her a murderer in the humans’ eyes.
Don’t you understand? You were a killer in their eyes as soon as you shed their ugly pink skin.
“You don’t know anything!” she howled at him. “Just because some humans hurt you, you think they all deserve the same fate? My human family knew all along and—”
“I don’t know?” He could barely form words, the rage choking him as badly as it had back at the stronghold. She could say that? She, who’d suckled at the human teat, who had never slept in a true den, nesting in the skins of her kill. She had never smelled the burnt flesh of her own kin. How could she? “How dare you!”
He snapped and leapt at her, to take her down and show her the pain he felt. But she had already run away.
He caught her scent, and tasted fear within it.
He growled and chased after her again.
He caught up with her, her black silhouette suddenly appearing out of the mist; she was standing still, facing away from him. He prepared to leap at her, driven by a confused mixture of rage and lust, but something held him back. It might have been the fear in her scent—fear that, he realized, had nothing to do with him.
He slowed and saw the tension in her, the fear bristling on her back as if she had sprouted spines, the muscles on her flanks so taut they might have been carved from stone. Her jaw hung open in a silent growl as she stared forward, ignoring him.
As he padded up behind her, he felt a flare of renewed anger when he recognized where they were. These were the woods surrounding the cottage where she had been kept as a human. Would she always return here? Would she always search for these human chains to bind her again? How could she not understand what they were?
He needed to grab her by the neck and make her see …
Then he was in sight of Maria’s cottage and saw that, for once, fate was with him.
In front of the cottage stood a score of men or more, the knights of the Order and the more colorfully dressed Polish footmen. He could smell and hear more men than he could see through the fog. The knights had dismounted to surround Maria’s human “family.”
The German leader yelled something at the large Polish knight with him. He waved and gestured at the woman who stood at the focus of the knight’s attention. Darien felt his muzzle turn up in a near smile. He could not have asked for a clearer demonstration.
Especially when the woman said something and the German struck her with the back of his hand, dropping her to her knees. Maria recoiled as if she had felt the blow herself.
Darien started talking in a growling whisper: “You see now? They cannot abide you. You are predator, they are prey.”
“No,” she whispered, her voice crumbling into a gratifyingly submissive whimper. “My parents loved me.”
“See how even their own kind turns on them?”
The German drew a dagger and held it up to one boy’s throat. He screamed at the woman, demanding that she admit her sins and tell them where Maria was.
“This is why we must kill them all,” Darien said.
But she was no longer listening to him. She had started walking, changing as she went, and Darien watched her as his satisfaction slowly turned to horror.
They were going after her family. She stopped, frozen, watching as Heinrich shouted questions at her mother. The scene so stunned her that she could barely breathe.
“Where is this monster?” he yelled at her. “Where is this agent of Satan you’ve concealed?”
“My daughter is not a monster.”
Heinrich struck her mother, and Maria flinched from the blow. Have I done this?
Darien stood with her, whispering that she was a predator, a killer. A monster.
She wanted to deny it. She wasn’t Lucina, bent on bringing death and pain. Her parents had loved her, whatever her origin.
Heinrich grabbed Władysław’s arm and pulled her brother forward, bringing a dagger up to his throat. “You are all complicit in concealing this thing! Do I need to demonstrate the seriousness of this to you? Confess that you’ve harbored this demon …”
Darien whispered that they must kill them all.
She was the predator; they were prey. Seeing the German hold her brother, she could easily imagine her jaws crushing the life from Heinrich’s throat. She could tear out his belly and feast on his steaming entrails.
She could kill the whole wretched lot of them. They needed to die, and it was her purpose to slaughter them. The wolf conceded that Darien was right, and that she truly lusted for the blood of these men.
All these thoughts gripped her, and she knew she was damned.
Because if Darien was right, then so was Heinrich. A monster such as she had no place within God’s creation. Josef was right, and she was a soulless demon spawned from Hell to deceive the righteous.
To deceive herself.
She prayed for strength even though she knew that for her to do so was probably a blasphemy. She walked out of the woods, pulling the demon wolf back inside herself. When she stepped upon the road across from her home, she was clothed only in naked human flesh.
If he hadn’t already known that something was deeply wrong, Josef understood it when Maria’s stepmother looked into his eyes. When she said that her daughter was not a monster, she said it to Josef, even though it was Heinrich questioning her. But if Komtur Heinrich noticed the direction of her pleas, he didn’t care to acknowledge it.
Josef looked around and saw fear in everyone’s eyes. The Poles held back in the wake of Heinrich’s anger, watching the German interrogate their own without a whispered objection. Even Telek seemed loath to challenge Heinrich now.
Josef wondered if everyone was trapped in the same nightmare paralysis he felt. When Heinrich struck the woman, Telek finally moved, saying, “Brother Heinrich, that is enough.”
Josef wondered if he was the only one who heard Telek’s voice. Josef’s master certainly didn’t acknowledge it. Instead he pulled the oldest of her sons to him, holding a dagger to the boy’s throat.
Telek stopped moving toward Heinrich. “Enough! Lower your weapon, Brother Heinrich.” He placed a hand on the pommel of his sword. “You have exhausted what leave I have given you.”
Now people seemed to hear Telek. Josef felt the shift in attention, the Germans moving hands toward their weapons, the Poles turning to face the small knot of Germans.
A small bead of blood rolled down the edge of Heinrich’s dagger. “I will not allow these peasants to hide the work of the Devil!”
“Those are my peasants.” Telek pulled his sword so that an inch of steel was visible. “Will you test my vow to protect them?”
“Do you defy God with these unrepentant wretches?”
“Let the boy go.”
“I—”
Heinrich’s words were cut off by a familiar voice.
“Please, let them go.”
Josef turned toward the road and saw Maria, just close enough to be visible through the mist. She stood on the road, naked, her arms clutching herself against the cold in the barest pretense of modesty. Even though she was half-hidden in the fog, he could tell that she had been crying.
“They’ve done nothing wrong. It’s me you want, isn’t it?”
For the space of several heartbeats, nothing moved. Everyone stared at the young woman pleading with them. Even the Wolfjäger knights didn’t move; they had spent their vocation hunting monstrosities of claws and teeth, fur and muscle. Never once had their quarry approached as a sobbing young woman pleading for her family.
It was enough to give even Heinrich a moment’s pause.
But only a moment’s.
“No, Maria, run!” her mother yelled as Heinrich called out an order: “Shoot her!”
Of the two crossbowmen, one seemed reluctant to shoot a naked woman, but the other, near Josef, raised his crossbow without hesitation. Josef grabbed for his brother knight’s arm just as the man fired. Josef felt the tensing of the man’s arm muscles under his hand.
Josef wasn’t quick enough. He saw, with unnatural clarity, the impact of the bolt into the flesh of Maria’s left shoulder. Without so much as a layer of clothes to retard it, the silver-tipped bolt tore completely through her. She grabbed the bloody wound and fell to her knees with a cry.
And a horrifying howl tore through the forest around them.
She stood before the men of Gród Narew, the Germans of the Order, and her family. She felt the fate of her true mother, Lucina, bearing down upon her, a weight on her soul. There was no escape from what she was, but she could not join in Darien’s bloodlust. She believed in God and Christ, which meant that she could no longer believe in her own redemption.
So she did all she could do: she offered herself up to the agents of God in a sacrifice for the sins of her family. She called on them to stop, to take her offer, and no one moved.
Then Heinrich, still pressing a dagger to Władysław’s throat, yelled over her mother’s cries, and one of the Germans fired. Pain tore through her left shoulder. She had the odd thought that a crossbow bolt should feel like a stab wound, not like the near-crippling hammer blow she felt.
She clutched the wound as the pain drove her to her knees, pain worse than that when Josef had impaled her with a sword.
Of course, she thought. That blade wasn’t silver.
She heard Darien howl.
“No!” she screamed. “Let this be!”
Josef was struggling with the man who had shot her, but the agonized lupine howl froze him in place. The scream came from the throat of Hell itself, as if Darien had been struck by the same bolt that had torn through her shoulder. Heinrich finally lowered the dagger from Władysław’s neck and started yelling orders too quickly for her to understand.
Then the forest exploded behind her, branches and shredded underbrush scattering across the road. Darien fell into the ranks of Poles before they could bring their weapons to bear.
The Germans tried to close on the beast, but the Poles were in the way, blocking their attack.
“No,” Maria whispered, gritting her teeth from the pain.
A knight fell back from the chaos, the broken shaft of a polearm run through his chest. A Pole fell to the ground, clutching an arm that now ended short of the elbow. One of the footmen from Gród Narew tried to take the beast’s head with an axe, and Darien grabbed his neck in his massive jaws and shook his head from his body with a few quick snaps.
Josef stayed by her family, sword drawn, pushing them back toward the side of the cottage, away from the massacre.
Still clutching her shoulder, Maria rose to her feet.
Pikes snapped like toothpicks, and Darien knocked the Polish defenders aside, to attack the knights of the Order who still stood.
“No!” she screamed.
A silver sword rose, and the wrist holding it met lupine jaws, tearing free of its owner with just a flex of Darien’s neck.
Maria ran.
Heinrich screamed to God and charged the wolf monster. Darien backhanded the attacking knight, shredding his surcote and sending him tumbling and bloody into Maria’s path.
She jumped over the man as she charged Darien. His gold fur now rusty with blood, he stood in front of the cottage, looming over the scattered bodies of his attackers. The surviving Poles fell back, pikes lowered as if they expected a cavalry charge.
Josef was the only knight left within Darien’s reach. He held his sword one-handed, the other arm clutching his belly as he stood between her family and the beast. Darien held up a blood-crusted hand to strike him down.
Maria tackled Darien. The size difference between the wolf monster and her still-human body was huge, but no more so than the difference between her own monster and the elk, and she attacked him in the same way, diving at the knee of one outthrust leg, forcing it to bend, toppling him into the open door of the cottage. Even though she felt the pain of re-forming bone and twisting muscle, she didn’t yet have claws to slash or fangs to shred, but as Darien fell, she heard his own weight do the damage for her. She heard and felt tendons tear, and the cracking of the canine ankle joint as it bent underneath him.
Darien howled as he slammed into the floor of the cottage. A clawed hand swung out and grabbed her, claws sinking into the flesh of her stomach. He lifted her up, holding her in a slime of her own blood. She felt a blinding flare of pain as he pierced a kidney.
Then he threw her.
Maria slammed into a window on the far side of the cottage, blowing the shutters aside with her back. She felt her ribs crack as she crashed through, falling facedown into her mother’s herb garden.
The pain in her ribs, her kidney, and her shoulder all flared in time to her pulse. Her muscles joined the throbbing agony, moving, slithering under her flesh to twist her bones into their new shapes.
She pushed herself upright in a spasm of relief, the hole in her shoulder the only pain that didn’t evaporate with the force of her change. She ignored it.
She stood, a low growl leaving her muzzle.
In front of her, she saw her brothers running around the side of the house, then clustering around their mother as if they could protect her. Maria’s stepmother chanced to look in her direction, and her eyes went wide. She stopped moving. Władysław tripped over her and fell to the ground.
In the moment they stared at each other, Maria realized they knew who she was. Like her father staring into Lucina’s eyes.
Josef was on their heels, screaming at them to move.
Then Darien pounced on him.