Werewolf: Impossible Love (5 page)

             
In fact, it was much easier to rinse and disinfect the stitches and cuts on her thigh this time. For one thing, her wounds had begun to heal a little better; for another, the memory of the pain she’d felt in that awful fever dream overshadowed the stings of water and iodine.

             
Although bathing was easy, standing on her right leg was not. She figured that a few of her muscles were still pretty much shredded. By the time the shower was over, she was standing with all her weight on her left leg.

             
Yandel took notice as she hopped to grab a towel. He pulled a dose of morphine from the bottle while she got herself dried off. Wordlessly, Serenity sat at the kitchen table and let him inject it into her arm.

             
“This is gonna knock you out for a while,” he said. “I guess it’s better than sitting bored in bed all day.”

             
Serenity nodded. The dose began to hit her as she stood up and limped to the bed. She laid her hair out on the pillow to dry and shut her eyes, letting the painkillers take her off to sleep.

****

              She woke again at some point after sunset, desperate for some water. Yandel was sitting at the kitchen table, mending socks. He glanced up when Serenity wobbled out of bed and hurried over to straighten her up.

             
“Save your leg,” he cautioned, helping her over to the sink. Serenity poured the mug of water, gulped it down, and poured another. She’d drained three mugs and filled another before she sat down at the kitchen table.

             
“I ate already,” Yandel said.

             
Serenity looked at the clock; it was well after eleven at night. “Oh, wow,” she said, her brows shooting up.

             
“There’s a reason they don’t fill hospitals with chairs,” Yandel said, standing. “The wounded need sleep above all else.”

             
Serenity sipped on her water as he got the pot of chili out of the fridge and stuck it on the stove. It soon began to hiss and bubble, and Yandel ladled out a good-sized bowl for her.

             
“You’re up late,” she said.

             
Yandel shrugged. “We’re running low on meat,” he said. “And I need to check the rabbit traps before the wolves get to them.”

             
Serenity nodded and took a bite of her chili. “There’s packs around here, then?”

             
“Just often enough to be a pain in the ass,” Yandel replied. “Better safe than—”

             
Their faces whipped around to face the door as it slammed open. Snow whirled inside around a lean, coat-wrapped silhouette.

             
Serenity’s throat twisted when her eyes caught the long, black steel flashlight in the stranger’s right hand.

             
“No,” she said, staring frozen at the door as Yandel marched toward it. “No—”

             
Marshall stood stock-still in the doorway, arching his spine back from Yandel’s advance. He wasn’t cowering. Just as it looked like he was about to topple over, he whipped his arm around to strike Yandel across the face. If Yandel’s size was fear-inducing, then seeing his form fall to the ground was even more so. Marshall surveyed the room as he stepped over Yandel’s groaning body, a knife-sharp grin piercing his round, freckled face.

             
“Where is he?” His eyes darted to the bed. “Oh.” He pulled a knife from his pocket, strode to the bed, and picked up Mr. Binky. Tears welled in Serenity’s eyes as he absorbed himself like an insane child in the task of shredding that one last thing that he hadn’t given her. He looked up at her now and then to make sure she watched as he destroyed it, shredded it too small to patch together and get punished for it later. A little square of black plastic skittered to the floor, a little green LED flashing silently.

             
“Oh,” Serenity said, staring at the radio transmitter. “You didn’t need the dogs—”

             
“They’re
hounds
, you stupid goddamn bitch.” Marshall dropped the frayed mess of strings that he’d made of her teddy bear.

             
He looked to his left and switched his knife to a fighting grip before Serenity even realized that Yandel was getting off the floor. It only took him three steps to get up the momentum to jump onto his chest, knife bearing at his neck. Yandel blocked his arm just in time, but it threw him off balance enough to give Marshall an opportunity to swing up on his shoulders.

             
Serenity screamed and stood as her ex held his flashlight against Yandel’s throat and held it tight—but the grin on Marshall’s face struck a fear into her that would not let her move. She sunk to her knees, weeping, pleading with him to stop as Yandel’s eyes rolled back in his head. Horrified, desperately wanting to look away, she knelt transfixed instead as the kind, handsome stranger’s skin grew pale—began sprouting fur?

             
Her jaw dropped and her breath caught in her throat as Yandel let out a roar that shook the very walls of the cabin, he raised a great, sharp-clawed
paw
and struck Marshall across the face with it.

             
Serenity’s ex yowled, bewildered. Yandel convulsed, spine curling unnaturally as his head sank between—shoulders? forelegs? When he raised it up it was twisted in an animal scowl, handsome human features replaced by the bloodthirsty visage of a wolf in a corner.

             
“Aww,
fu—”

             
Marshall didn’t get to finish his exclamation. Serenity jumped up on the table in horror as he sprawled under the wolf’s pouncing hulk. She expected it to go for his throat---instead, it pawed him over and raked at the shirt on his back until his skin was exposed.

             
The wolf’s face seemed to plunge straight into Marshall’s back; when it pulled back, it dragged a rib out with it. Claws and teeth worked together until Serenity’s ex fell silent, his lungs torn and hanging from his ribs. The beast paused for a few moments to finish off the pink, spongy delicacy before picking up Marshall’s carcass by the arm and worrying it until it came apart from his body.

             
Serenity could do nothing but stare in horror as the beast that had been Yandel tossed the arm toward the shower, scrambled for it, and picked it up again. It carried it to the other corner, dropped it, and started rubbing its face on it gleefully.

             
When Serenity let out a horrified whimper, the beast turned its gleaming grey eyes on her. A low growl rumbled from its throat as it stalked towards her, hackles on end and teeth fully bared.

             
She screamed as the wolf leapt up at her, knocking her off the table with both paws and landing on top of her. Serenity covered her throat with her hands, familiar enough with being attacked by Marshall’s hounds that she at least knew how to prolong this misery a little longer.

             
“Please,” she begged, staring up into the wolf’s eyes as it pawed at her chest and snarled in her face. “Please, Yandel, please, come back.” She sobbed at the memory of what he’d been, the memory of how his body was supposed to feel on top. “I don’t care what you are,” she pleaded. “I don’t care if you want me to leave, I don’t care if you want me to love you—” she gasped for breath. “Just, please,
please, be Yandel again!
”

             
The wolf’s eyes stayed fixed on hers; its lips stayed curled above its teeth. Suddenly, it yelped and jumped back; it clawed at its face as it began to warp and stretch. The transformation that had happened only a few long minutes ago was somehow reversing, as hideously and bizarrely as before.

             
When it was done, Yandel lay naked on the floor, his body covered in sweat. He stared silently at Serenity for a few moments before rolling over and curling his knees to his chest.

             
Serenity stood up and looked around the cabin. She decided that she no longer wanted to be naked, and went to the bed to pick up some of her clothes. The very act of doing something so mundane was enough to calm her, to get the gears of her brain working again. Once she was dressed, she returned to Yandel’s side. His eyes were clamped shut; his jaw worked beneath the skin.

             
For a moment, Serenity tried to think of something to say. Nothing came to her. The smell of blood made her look to the corner, where Marshall’s carcass still lay in a pool of blood. Numb and silent, Serenity picked up the arm and threw it out the front door. She tried her best to drag the rest of his body out, but the pain in her leg wouldn’t let her. It wasn’t long before she gave up and sat down by the corpse, her head in her hands.

             
She looked up at the sound of Yandel picking up the body by a leg and dragging it across the floor toward the door.

             
“I got pigs,” he said. “They’ll grind his bones. Buckets and bleach are under the sink.”

             
Serenity nodded and got on it. She rinsed the blood down the shower drain as best she could, and then proceeded scrubbing the floor with a brush.

             
Naked as he was, Yandel didn’t return for several minutes. He stood there for a moment or two in silence, watching her scrub the floor.

             
“My mother said that medicine was for better families than ours,” he said, eventually. “But Hitler said that if I had that good German aptitude, I could get the training.”

             
Serenity looked up at him, her hands still clutching the rag soaked in blood and bleach water.

             
“It didn’t take long, where I was,” Yandel went on, pulling a drawer out from under the bed. “You hear about those defecting SS officers being academics, coming to this—this educated realization that this was not for Germany.
Their
Germany.” He put on a T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxers. “Academics,” he laughed. “Mengele was an academic. Really.” He looked Serenity in the eye. “Loved what he did with every nerve in his body.”

             
Her stomach churned, realizing what he was trying to explain to her. “Mengele,” she said. “Josef Mengele?”

             
“He was very, very particular about being addressed as Herr Doktor,” Yandel said. A warning seventy years old echoed in his voice. “Except with the children.”

             
Serenity’s eyes went wide; she’d heard the stories, muttered under sanitized history lectures, of the original mad scientist. The experiments. The tortures. The kindergarten where he introduced the children to Uncle Josef, who would inject dye in their eyes and sew them together and give the others sweets to keep them quiet.              

             
“Like I said,” Yandel said, “it didn’t take long. That’s what happens when you round up all the poets and all the philosophers and all the mathematicians and lock them in a slaughterhouse—they start making plans.” He was sitting at the kitchen table, grey eyes distant. “A coded message scratched in the dirt here, a note hidden under a tongue there, and soon enough you’ve got fifty shackled Jews and a dumb-assed medic conspiring to bust out of Auschwitz and kill everyone who’d kept us there.”

             
He swallowed, staring at the opposite wall. “We got caught,” he said. “When they talked about the Boxenwulf Project, I thought it was a code name for something they were doing to the Jews.” A sigh shuddered into his chest through his throat. “Instead of executing me, they decided that I would be the first SS officer to volunteer for the—for the
improvement
program.”

Yandel stared at his hands and shook his head. “I was five-foot-ten when they gave me the first series of injections,” he said. “I weighed one hundred sixty pounds
—” his voice broke off.  “I was supposed to finish out bigger, I think, but Heinrich never fucking learned his lesson about cutting corners on security checks.”

A smile crawled out of the depths of despair on his face. “I don’t have the best memory of when I change, but I know
I ate a few of them before I had to get into the woods. That’s where I met Linda’s dad, you know—I couldn’t help but make friends with a guy who was too bothered to see a wolf change into a man while he was on duty.”

They were silent for several minutes; Serenity began to scrub the floor again, just for the sake of something to occupy her hands. She was starting to realize what Linda had meant when she’d said the spirits would take their price.

“Did I change you back?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Linda says—well. Linda says a lot of things, and I say we need to get you the hell out of her before the feds come sniffing around and haul your ass to prison.”

Serenity stood up. “What does Linda say?” she said, walking toward him.

“Linda says that if my—the part of me named Hans Kirstein or Yandel Wright or whatever you want to call me—she says if somebody connects strongly enough with
that
part, she can call me back.” He glared at Serenity. “But it doesn’t always work, and I’d just as soon not have your blood on my hands. I have a hard enough time replacing my mules.”