Ghost of Doors (City of Doors) (12 page)

She stuck out a foot and tripped him. He knew she would try to stop him. Everyone always tried to make him do the opposite of everything he ever wanted to do. "No," he wheezed, the wind knocked out of him. "You can't...stop me. Stop!"

He looked up in horror to see that everything did, indeed, stop, slowed to a sickening stop. All the wolves in the pack turned their glowing, wild eyes to the scene of Wolfgang flat on his face and Marie standing threateningly over him. Some of them relinquished their dog-like form to become half-man, half-animal, snarling, drooling beasts. Even the Huntmaster, his black, hooded coat trembling in the mist from a breeze which no one felt--or perhaps even his cloak feared him, and so it shook--tall upon his black horse, the only one who rode and did not run under his or her own power, even he stopped, and Wolfgang knew. He knew the importance of this hunt. He knew that they would not let him leave, they would not let Marie stop him. They would help him. They must help him! He was a pack member now. He belonged! Every creature in the hunt was eyeing him, angry that their hunt was interrupted, wanting only to continue, and for him to come back.

"If we run, they'll kill us for sure," Marie whispered to him.

"You mean, if you run," he said. "And you're right."

Marie smirked, obviously amused. But not fearful. What changeling ever had anything to fear? Even if the pack destroyed her, she would only see it as an experience. Whatever came next would be an adventure. Fear was for mortals. She lived and breathed magic. "And you'd let them?" she asked. Wolfgang did not readily answer. "Wow," she said. "That's cold."

As the group of wolves snarled and closed in on them, Wolfgang turned triumphantly to Marie, and said, "You see? They understand me-" and the rest of his words fell away under the weight of Marie's reply.

"Maybe," she said. "I sure don't understand you."

How could she understand? Her feelings were limited to blood lust and passion, and total disinterest. Fickle, random, unpredictable. As weak and worthless as any monster he had ever met. The sky, the moon above him, began to wobble in his sight. He felt sick, and thought he might throw up. He once loved Marie more than he loved anyone, but she felt dead to him now. The city was more important than his petty problems. Pairs of wild eyes drew steadily closer, hungering, savage. What would they do? Would they tear him apart, too, for falling, for failing? His hunt over, Wolfgang began to feel the fog lifting from his thoughts. He was an idiot for trusting them, for feeling like he belonged with them.

The Huntmaster's steed surged through the throng and its rider lurched an unsteady dismount that spoke of his undead nature. He ambled forward, legs struggling against each other as if they could not agree on the best way to proceed. Wolfgang grinned at this in spite of the throbbing of his heart with terror. Light-headed and nauseous, the strangest things seemed funny to him. He stifled his grin into a grimace and scrambled away, backward, over the stones and branches that scratched at his hands and face like claws, drawing blood. The wolves, pressing all around, finally gave in to their urges and dove for Marie. Horrified, Wolfgang could not look away. But the wolves were not the only ones with super-human reflexes. Before Wolfgang could blink, Marie sprang for the Huntmaster, her hands gripping his coat, her body shifting to his form. The excited hoard almost didn't react, so determined were they for flesh and blood. She lunged behind the Huntmaster, sprang for his horse, and took to its back as fast as anyone whose life depended on it. Riding off into the fog, she didn't utter a word or look back. A voice in the back of Wolfgang's mind wondered if she would ever return.

The wolves in the dark glen pitched their ears forward, uncertain of what this meant. Noses hit the air, quivering, trying to sniff out the truth. Cocking their heads in confusion, most of the wolves seemed to reach a collective agreement. Someone, something, was running, and that was good enough. Paws scrambled after this new Huntmaster then, but whether she was the hunted or the hunter, Wolfgang didn't know. Several wolves--perhaps those whose minds were not yet completely gone--wouldn't have it. After following the fleeing pack with their eyes, they turned on Wolfgang. And the Huntmaster, whom Wolfgang had expected to see against him, too, instead faced these stragglers from the pack, stood tall between them, and was in fact ready to catch the first foolish werebeast that dared to attack him, their better, their master.

He didn't have to wait long. White fire surged around the wolfman's body, fire that flowed from the hands of the Huntmaster as he struck. But when the wolfman fell limp to the ground moments later, Wolfgang realized that he had seen something similar before. That wasn't a burning fire but rather the burning life force of the wolf that this Huntmaster--this wight, this widerganger, this dead who walked again--consumed. It was enough to give the remaining stragglers pause. As the drained victim stumbled to his feet, the others fled into the woods, leaving him to stumble off into the dark, aimless, alone.

Now it was just Wolfgang and the Huntmaster. Even on his best days, Wolfgang was too inexperienced to take on a widerganger, and he knew it. The vampires he knew were powerful and quick, but they lived by a strange code that allowed them to always find fresh victims yet still grow in number, as a farmer might cull and raise sheep. But widerganger were even stronger, and they didn't live by any code of which Wolfgang was aware. And now, only slightly recovered from what Wolfgang was sure was a curse, a curse of the Hunt, and as unfamiliar with his surroundings as he was, there was no way he would be able to escape. Why had he been such a jerk to Marie? It was the curse, she had to know he never meant anything he said. He didn't want it to end like this, without her ever knowing that he loved her. If he could just have one more day...one more hour...if she would just come back, he could shout it to her, his apology, and, if he had enough guts, that he loved her. But the widerganger would drain him dry long before then.

With shaking hands that lived only through the sheer will to finish the unfinished, the Huntmaster pushed his hood away. The huntsman's black cloak blocked out everything, the smell of death thick as the widerganger stared at him with the unblinking the eyes of a deep water fish, pale, wan, dead. His face was the only thing to emerge from the blackness, becoming the moon, leering at Wolfgang like a mirror through time.
Is this me?! Me in the future?
The Huntmaster reached out to him, his bloodless lips parted as if to speak, but his voice, if he managed to speak at all, was lost in the faint howls of the new hunt and the wind that, like an angry ghost, dragged the treetops around. Only one word carried to Wolfgang, so strangely clear that the spirits of the air must have willed it. "SUN," came the whisper. And the widerganger, jerking away as if he could bear no more, or perhaps as if it had finished something important or finally shrugged off a huge burden, pulled up his hood. Free from the blackness of the cloak, the moon came back, hanging in the sky like another cold and distant face. The wight raised a hand into the night, reaching for something, drawing something toward him. And there, born from a rift in the night itself, was his horse, stamping, waiting for him. He swept a lanky leg quickly upon its back, and was gone.

Wolfgang picked himself up off of the cold earth feeling drained, even though nothing had touched him. All the ecstasy that he had felt during the hunt was lost to him now, and the absence left him feeling as dead inside as the Huntmaster. He wondered vaguely how long Marie would have to run with the pack before escaping them, if she ever could; as he stumbled numbly along, he noticed a slip of white, shining bright against the dark forest floor. It was a small card, laying on the ground. The background was a wild pattern of scribbled but purposeful colored lines around a big green eagle. This was an official document from one of the lands that the doors led to.

Bundesrepublik Deutschland
, it said, then,
Personalausweis
, and the rest of the other words were too small to read in the dim light.
Home!
he realized excitedly. The place he and his father came from. Trembling, he adjusted his smudged glasses as his eyes fell on the picture next. The man looked like an older version of Wolfgang, and beside the picture, among other things, was a name, a name that infected him with a horrible writhing in the pit of his stomach: Schäfer. And, below that, Markus.
Markus Schäfer.
His father.

His fingers were glued to the little card; his eyes could not turn away. His tired brain struggled to free itself from the shock and make sense of all the evidence it had taken in tonight. He felt as if he was looking at a puzzle lying in pieces on the floor, a thousand pieces that he had to put together to make some sense of them. The only problem was, he was the puzzle.

Staring at the picture, Wolfgang knew where he had seen this man before. This was the widerganger long before his humanity had been stripped away and he had become a walking husk of all the dreams and desires he'd had when living. "He didn't say SUN," Wolfgang said out loud to help himself come to grips with this revelation. "He said son." The wind blew wildly, the trees cheered at this revelation.

"Who did?" Marie asked. She was herself again, blue cat suit and blond hair white and silver in the colorless night. She couldn't feel the chill, not like Wolfgang did, anyway. He wanted to pull Marie to him for comfort, but his hands were too numb, and not from the cold.

"The Huntmaster," Wolfgang whispered. "How did you know where to find me?"

She slipped cigarette and lighter from her belt pouch. "It's easy to find you. You've got a soul. Burns like, like the head of this match," she said, lighting the cigarette. "A little flame, a soul. That you can...feel, not see." Her words sent shivers down his spine.

"But you would know that," she said, "if you were one of us."

They both remained silent for too long in the dank forest, Wolfgang's mind doing everything it could to prevent itself from realizing the inevitable conclusion that this Ausweis and the widerganger's words and face all told him was true. Avoiding the conclusion, he remembered what he had wanted to say to Marie, but was too embarrassed to admit to all of it. "Listen, Marie, I'm...sorry. Really sorry about what I said to you before. What I did."

She shrugged, the cigarette smoke making halos around her hand and face in the moonlight, her glamour making her shimmer brilliantly, if only briefly every once and awhile, a woman any man would die for. "Don't apologize," she said. "When you change, none of that will matter anymore."

"When I change?" he said. "That's how you think I'll end up?"

"It's what I know," she said. "How long can you keep making things this hard on yourself? Even your father said, once you go to the human world, you'll want to come back. And the only way to do that is to--"

"--change," he finished for her. He turned the Ausweis around in his hands before mumbling, "Maybe you're right." He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his short hair, slick with sweat. "But it won't be tonight. Marie, this...this Huntmaster..." He sucked in a deep breath before continuing. The air was thick and moldy, swamp-like and foul tasting. "He was human once. And not just any human." He handed her the Ausweis with trembling hands. She took it with a concerned look and transferred the squint to the tiny paper in the dim light. He gave her a moment to read it before continuing, "But something changed him. Something stole his soul." He rambled like an idiot stating the obvious, but the only way for him to deal with this was to spell it out, aloud, to think it through with spoken words. "Someone stole his soul." Her eyes moved from the Ausweis to his face, and her eyes told him that she reached the same terrible conclusion that he had. "But you know that, don't you, Marie? You know that. There is no soul in him to take."

She blew out some smoke. "Yes," she said quietly. "I can. I can feel it. Just like anyone here can. Just like your mom can. What does that mean to you?" There was no anger in her words, just acknowledgment of his rambling, and that she wanted to know if there was any more to this, if he knew something more that she didn't.

"Just like my mom can," he repeated. "Oh, my God. If this...thing is my father...who is the man I have been calling father all this time?"

"That man has a soul," she said, "a life force. It's strong."

"He also has a soul-stealing weapon," Wolfgang added. Marie blew out more smoke, blue and hazy in the cold, but said nothing. His mind was obviously clear, clear as the night was now cold. "We need to go back," he said.

ACT 2

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world."

—Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:8 (37a)

Chapter 8