Storm Wolf (19 page)

Alexei was sitting down to lunch in Vakarė’s kitchen when a neighbor woman burst into the house, words spilling rapidly from her mouth.

“It was terrible, terrible!” she exclaimed, wringing her hands. Vakarė rapidly translated the words for Alexei. “It was over at Bronislovas’ farm, last night! The wolf must have come in through the window again, as he did before. Bronislavas and his wife were sitting in the kitchen, keeping watch, it seems—like so many of us now, Vakarė, don’t we?—and the wolf killed them there and then in the kitchen. Not satisfied with tearing out their throats and spewing blood all over the kitchen, the wolf tore the house apart. Everything! Silverware, cushions, pots, furniture! Torn and thrown about, broken and bloody! Even the bedrooms, the sheets and pillows and blankets—feathers all over the floor and in the bloody paw prints.”

“What about the children?” Dovydas wanted to know. “What about little Dominykas, Herkus, and Ilona?”

“Gone!” the neighbor woman shrieked. “Gone! All three of them, with their parents left dead in the kitchen. But no sign of the three little ones at all! Terrible news, isn’t it? I must tell the rest of our neighbors. We must do something to stop this terrible wolf!”

She darted back out the door and continued on her way to spread the word of the death and destruction at Bronislovas’ house and the missing children.

Alexei stared after her as the rest of the household erupted into shouting and crying. Lunch was forgotten.

“I must find out what I can and try to track this monster back to its lair,” Alexei said, taking Vakarė aside. “Where can I find the household that was attacked?”

Vakarė studied his face and told him where to find Bronislovas’ house. “Be careful, my friend,” she warned him. “The monster seems to have no fear of anything! It may still be about, even in the daylight.”

“I will keep my wits about me,” Alexei promised as he hurried out the door and across the farmyard.

He made his way, following Vakarė’s directions, to the poor sad house on the other side of the market. As he reached it, he saw that it had indeed been reduced to rubble inside. Broken furniture and torn fabric that had once been tablecloths or towels in cupboards or upholstery on a chair was littered everywhere. The house was strangely quiet for a scene of such destruction. The only sound was that of Alexei creeping about, trying to disturb the wreckage as little as possible. He took deep breaths, hoping to catch the scent of the wolf that had done all this. There was a strange scent, a wolf scent, but it was more than a single scent, tangled up together like a rope made of many strands, and it was overlaid by the scents and fragrances of the family that had lived here together with the blood and fear of their last moments. Reaching the kitchen, he realized that the bodies of Bronislovas and his wife were nowhere to be seen, and he was glad of that.

He thought others might have been searching through the house for clues as to how to track the monster, but all the neighbors must have been out either tending to the corpses or looking for the missing children. He sniffed about the kitchen, unable to avoid stepping in the sticky pools and smears of blood on the floor. He recognized the scent of people and found the scent of a wolf was stronger here beneath the other smells, but was still too difficult to trace apart from the scents of cooking and shed blood that filled the room. He made his way back out into the parlor and then up to the bedrooms.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, evidently one for Bronislovas and his wife and another for the three children. Both were full of feathers from pillows ripped to shreds. Tattered blankets and sheets hung from half-open closet doors. Mattresses hung off the bedframes, which were scored by fresh claw marks. Dry and drying bloody paw prints were all over the floors outside the bedrooms and inside the room that had apparently been for Bronislovas and his wife. But the other room with the three small beds, evidently the children’s room, had no bloody paw prints inside, and the sheets and pillows were not torn, although they had been thrown around the room.

Alexei caught himself smiling. It reminded him of the bedroom he had slept in as a child, after a pillow fight with his brothers and sisters. Or of the pillow fights between his own children. Under other, happier circumstances, he could have imagined the room looking just like this, but filled with the cheerful shrieks and laughter of the three children as they pelted each other with the pillows and blankets, jumping on the mattresses as they slid half-off of the bedframes. Maybe there would be tears, if one of the children slipped and hit their head against the wall, but the tears would be quickly dried and wiped away, the injury healed by their mother’s kiss.

But now the room was silent, and the knocked-out blankets, pillows, and mattresses seemed like silent testimony about another, much grimmer sort of battle in which the children had been…

“Had been what?” Alexei asked himself. He got down on the floor and sniffed. There was still the wolf scent, but there was a smell he had not noticed downstairs. He detected the stench of a man long unwashed and… what were the other scents? Urine, maybe? Beer, for certain. But there was another scent as well. Magic? A certain kind of nightmarish magic, fueled by both desire and rage. But the man’s many-layered scent only began at the entrance to the children’s room and then, once inside the room, the strand of wolf scent vanished and the unwashed-man scent was too tangled up with the scents of the children and the sour, tangy scent of fear.

Alexei sat back on his heels and thought.

“The wolf clearly burst into the house and killed the man and his wife in the kitchen,” he said to himself. “Then it went searching through the house, maybe looking for something? Maybe just for spite? Then it came up the stairs here, tore apart the parents’ bedroom and then found the children in this room here… then, what? It shifted into the form of a man and… took the children?”

He got up and entered the room again, prodding sheets and blankets aside with his foot. He looked carefully across the floor again. There was no blood anywhere in the children’s room.

“He changed back into a man and took the three children,” Alexei decided. “He is adding to his collection of would-be apprentices. So that makes… how many? He took these three and he has three others already. So that makes six.”

Alexei stopped to count. “He has six. He needs twelve. Twelve by Epiphany so that he can change them into monsters like himself on the day after Epiphany, and today is…? Epiphany will be on January 6 but today is December… December, what?” Alexei realized he had lost track of the days. He counted on his fingers. “Christmas Day was December the twenty-fifth, and that was the day I rekindled the lantern. Then there was the next day, and the next day, so that it was three days after Christmas that we heard of the great wolf killing Audra and her father. That would have made it December the twenty-eighth. Then I met Javinė the next day. That must have been December twenty-ninth, and I spoke with Javinė again the next morning—yesterday—which would have been December thirtieth. So that makes today, what? December thirty-first? New Year’s Eve? But no one has said anything about the New Year.” He remembered the celebrations back home in Estonia for the New Year.

“Of course no one has said anything about the new year,” he chided himself. “Who can talk about celebrating when this monster wolf is stalking the town?”

Alexei turned to go back down to the parlor. “But that means there are six days remaining for the wolf to hunt and kill and kidnap children,” he realized. “Six more days of terror for the town before… before there are thirteen of these monster wolves hunting here, not just the one there is now.” But until then, the missing were still only children, not monsters, and the man-wolf would not kill them because he needed them alive on the day after Epiphany, so they must still be alive now. He had to find a way to trace the monster back to wherever it was hiding itself and wherever it was hiding the kidnapped children.

Smirking and pleased with himself for figuring out the dates and how many children had been kidnapped and how many days remained before they would be lost forever, he came down into the parlor and turned to exit the house through the kitchen to avoid any suspicious neighbors who might have returned.

But a cluster of townspeople stood in the entryway to the kitchen, blocking his exit. His smirk faded.

The townspeople, mostly men but one or two women that Alexei did not recognize, stood there, as surprised to see Alexei as he was to see them. Alexei and the townspeople stood staring at each other, shock and surprise immobilizing them.

But then then one of the men shouted something at him, something that he could not understand, but it was filled with anger and hate. Two of the men picked up sticks that had been table legs once and stepped toward him.

Alexei glanced from the men approaching him towards the door from the parlor to the outdoors, but the men saw that and scurried to block him going out through that door as well. The other four or five men in the group stepped forward, shouting at him in Lithuanian and picking up a rolling pin, a discarded skillet, pieces of broken furniture, anything that could be used as a weapon.

Alexei shuddered and held his breath, afraid that the wolf transformation might overtake him here. “I have to get out of here,” he realized, “before these townpeople’s fear of me is confirmed.” The men came closer, lifting their weapons and taunting him in Lithuanian. They stepped out into a line, joining the two men by the parlor exit to the farmyard and making a semi-circle facing Alexei at the bottom of the staircase.

Alexei closed his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and darted forward.

Crack! A table leg came down across his shoulders and another came up across his stomach. The skillet smashed against the back of his head as he stumbled and fell, rolling into a half-crouch against a wall. He heard one of the women shouting in Lithuanian as a table leg struck him in the ribs and a foot kicked him in the shin. Alexei cried out in Estonian as the men shouted and struck, words Alexei couldn’t understand or even make out as the blows rained down on him. The skillet struck his wrists. He jerked his hands away from around his head and pushed himself away from the wall, stumbling up and forward. He heard himself shouting and crying out with his voice even as he felt snarls rumbling in his chest.

“I have to get away before the transformation comes!” he realized.

More blows fell on him, the men shouting at Alexei and the women shouting at the men. Alexei shoved one of the women away from the entrance to the kitchen. The men stumbled after him, tangled up with each other and the weapons they held as they all struggled to get through the doorway into the kitchen at the same time.

Alexei reached up to push the hair out of his eyes and saw the blood smeared across the back of his hand as he pulled it away from his face. He felt bruises across his back and legs, his ribs and scalp swelling up. He nearly tripped over the fallen kitchen table.

One of the men pushed his way past the others and through the door into the kitchen, waving the makeshift cudgel in his hand. Another blow cracked against Alexei’s shoulders as he made it out the door into the farmyard. He slammed the door shut behind him and began to run, running across the farmyard and back towards the market. An eye was swelling shut, making it difficult to see. It hurt to breathe, his lungs pressing against his ribs, and as he gasped for breath, the air cut his throat. He ran as best he could, hunched over and clutching his side.

He could hear the shouting behind him but it quickly faded. The men did not seem determined to chase him and he nearly wept with relief. He took a turn to go down a side street and stopped, his chest heaving and burning. Eventually he was able to look up and around, and carefully trudge back to Vakarė’s family farm.

Few people were on the street, and the ones who saw him through their windows only watched the bloodied, beaten stranger make his way back to the farm where he had been staying.

Seeing him enter the kitchen, Vakarė cried out and demanded to know what had happened. Getting water into a pot and putting it onto the stove to warm, she insisted that Alexei take a seat at the table and—as she washed his wounds and tied bandages around his bruised ribs—tell her what had happened. He did, his words coming in gasps and grunts, and Vakarė shook her head.

“You are lucky, my friend,” she conceded as she finished her ministrations. “If they had chased you and beaten you, you would be much more badly wounded. You were lucky to escape so easily. Did I not tell you that there are those who think you responsible for these killings and disappearances? What drove you to go look through that house alone?”

Alexei raised his head and looked Vakarė directly in the eye.

“I need to find a way to track the wolf,” he told her.

Vakarė shook her head and muttered under her breath.

New Year’s Eve was a sober affair that night.

“Everyone knows that you’ll spend the year the same way you spend the eve of New Year’s!” insisted little Edita as Aušrinė brushed Edita’s long hair and tied festive ribbons in her braids. “We should be singing and eating and being happy! Otherwise we will be sad and scared all year long!”

“Yes, yes, I know,” her mother comforted her. “But it is too dangerous this year. Everyone must stay inside and stay safe tonight. This year, we must be careful until the men are able to hunt the wolf down and kill it. Then, next year, on New Year’s Eve we can go back to singing and dancing outside and visiting all our neighbors. That will be good then, right?”