White Fangs (22 page)

"Come on!" Ghost roared behind them. He was standing atop the gentle slope, and Lesya seemed to be squirming in his arms, thin, pale branches arcing out from her body and caressing the air. Her head was still lowered, however, and Jack could sense her weakness.

"You go!" Jack shouted. He turned to Sabine and, quieter, said, "You too."

"No, Jack!"

"She's everything you came for," he said. "Everything you've lived for all these years."

"No," Sabine said. "That's you. If I lose her, I can go on living in mystery. I lose you . . ." Her eyes were wet, face set in determination. "I don't think I'd go on another moment."

Callie was running uphill, the two werewolves at her side. She looked tired and sweaty, but behind her tiredness Jack could see that she was thoroughly alive. This was what she was meant to do.

"Can't kill 'em all!" Callie said as she came closer to them. "Run!"

Sabine grasped Jack's hand and pulled, and together they followed Callie toward where Ghost was already disappearing over the ridge. Jack heard conflict behind him and he looked back as he ran, knowing what he'd see but unable to
not
look.

Louis and the Reverend were embroiled in the greatest fight of their lives. They leapt, slashed, bit, jumped, rolled, ran, kicked, sometimes together, sometimes alone. Monstrous creatures came for them, and changing things fell away from them, reverting to their original state — Tlingit Indians, trappers, gold prospectors, men and women and children. The two werewolves were like forces of un-nature, and each time some monster came at them they changed it back to what it should have been. Human, and dead.

Louis took a bite to the shoulder from a fox, and he spun around, flipping the creature down across his leg and breaking its back. Still it snapped at him, teeth clacking shut again and again, until he plunged his claws into its pelt and ripped the broken creature in two. He turned to the next attacker without even acknowledging the ugly blood-gushing wound on his shoulder.

The Reverend seemed to dance. In his wolfish state he was taller, thinner, even leaner than his human guise, and he
flowed
across that hillside, never engaging an enemy for more than a moment before moving on to another. He bit and slashed and gouged, then slipped away to do the same again, drawing monsters after him and away from Jack and the other. He was dealing violence and pulling it along with him, and Jack paused and raised his shotgun in an instinctive desire to help.

"Look!" Callie said. "Off to the left!"

There was Jack's wolf again, streaking in to the fray with teeth bared and pelt flowing. Jack connected with the animal in such a natural way that it was almost like breathing, and he growled with the wolf, felt its strength, and sensed it casting fear aside. There was a story to its fear, a history. It was one born of anger, because it had been furious at these beasts — these travesties of nature — for some time. Furious at their tainting of the land, and even more enraged at its own inaction. Instinct had ensured its survival, but by not combating the vampires it had felt itself lessened.

Now, watching its unnatural brothers tackling the monsters, the wolf had found its cause once again. Smaller than most of the vampire beasts, its rage carried it through — teeth gnashing, claws rending, jaws clamping shut on necks and crushing vertebrae until heads hung limps and lifeless. The werewolves saw the wolf, and Jack sensed them drawing encouragement from its natural state. This was nature fighting back against the evils wrought upon it, and Louis and the Reverend found themselves on the side of righteousness.

"We must go," Sabine whispered into his ear, and Jack knew that she was right. Painful though it was, he felt his wolf urging him to flee also, not in words or images, but with a pressing intent.

They ran for their lives, and Jack began to feel that he had been running forever.

The sounds of battle continued behind them. With every few steps Callie glanced back, and several times she paused, aimed and fired, bringing down a vampire that had escaped to come after them. Jack always slowed when she did, bringing his shotgun to bear in case she missed or ran out of bullets.
How many left?
he wondered, but he did not ask. He did not really want to know the answer.

"She's almost there!" Sabine said. Jack looked ahead, searching for Ghost and Lesya but unable to see them in the dark. Moonlight painted the landscape, but down beneath the trees shadows hid the truth.

"Is she stronger?" Jack asked. "Is Ghost still carrying her?"

"I think so," Sabine said. "But she's . . . getting ready."

"Ready for what?" Callie asked, breathless. She glanced back, ran on.

"Ready to get back home," Sabine said.

"And we have to be there when she does," Jack said.

He thought of Louis and the Reverend as he ran, and wished them well. He could hear the screams and roars and growls falling behind them, and any one of them could be one of the wolves' death-calls. He felt back for his own wolf and sensed its ferocity. It was relishing the fight, releasing pent-up frustrations that channeled through its teeth and claws. Shadows fell all around, and in his mind's eye Jack saw them changing form.

The wolf howled and bled, but pain could not touch it.

"I'll tell it to let them come," he panted. "When we're there, I'll let the wolf know. Maybe they can survive. Escape."

Neither Callie nor Sabine answered. They all knew the chances of seeing the wolves alive again.

Following the stream, it was not long before Jack began to recognize the shape of the landscape — how the hills sat around them, the weight of the land, the shadows of trees and the twinkling of the stream. He knew that they were very, very close.

Come to us
, he thought, connecting with the wolf and hoping that the others would see it leaving.
We're there, leave the fight and
—

Callie shouted in surprise and fired three times. Sabine uttered a short, sharp cry. Jack turned to see a polar bear was bearing down on Callie, one giant paw already swinging around with wet claws promising a killing blow. Callie had stumbled onto her back and now held only one gun, and Jack could hear the
click, click, click
of its hammer on empty chambers like a death rattle in the night.

He fired the shotgun from his hip and a smudge of darkness opened across the bear's head and shoulder.

Callie rolled aside and the dying vampire fell where she had been lying. She quickly cast aside her empty gun and snapped up the one she had dropped. She broke it open, glancing up at Jack wide-eyed.

"Three," was all she said. Jack knew that "Thank you" could wait until later.

"This way!" Jack said. The three of them ran along the course of the stream, then Jack took them left across the shoulder of a low hill, heading for the dark shadows of what he knew to be the extremes of Lesya's forest. He had once run away from this place in fear for his life, and now the opposite was true.

He only hoped that Lesya's powers had not been drained too much.

"Oh, Jack," Sabine said. He glanced around, breath held in his throat as he expected to see the vampires bearing down upon them. So unfair, to be taken so close to potential safety.

But Sabine was smiling instead of frowning, her moonlit eyes reflecting wonder.

"What is it?" Callie asked, weariness smoothing her voice.

"She's home," Sabine said. "Lesya is home. Leshii breathes thanks, though I think he'll soon be too far gone even for that. And now . . . everything has started to change."

They entered the forest together, the darkness welcoming them in. Jack probed back and sensed his wolf running toward them, its body battered and torn but still filled with vigor. It was alone.

"What the hell . . . ?" Callie said, unable to complete her sentence because there were no words large enough.

The forest was alive.

Through that final, incredible onslaught, there was no sign of Ghost. But Lesya was everywhere. Jack could feel her life-spirit flooding through the forest, touching everything previously sickened and bringing it back to ebullient life. He knew that Sabine could feel it as well. At their time of direst peril, he had never seen her so filled with wonder.

In this final battle there was little place for humans. Even Sabine acknowledged the greater powers at play, and she allowed Jack to lead her deeper into the forest, until they found shelter beside a large rocky outcropping from where they could hear, and sometimes see. Callie knelt beside them, nursing the gun that contained her last three silver bullets. Jack knew that she craved to use them — that the killing of the monsters and releasing of their cursed souls was far from over for her. But the stakes were totally different now. The vampires had met their match.

Jack hugged Sabine to him as the forest and vampires clashed.

They heard the unnatural creatures entering the forest. They surged in, snapping branches, trampling undergrowth, and it was only moments before the first of them let out a hideous shriek. Jack saw a shadow being flung aloft by a flexing, creaking tree, and then the larger shadow became many smaller ones as other trees reached to join in. Objects pattered wetly across the forest floor.

Branches whipped at the air and sometimes met flesh. Boughs groaned as they moved. The roars of fury became growls of consternation as the vampires found their routes blocked, the forest shifting and transforming around them. Jack recalled his attempted flight through these woods, and how he had been steered and controlled by the landscape around him, and how to begin with he had not understood. These vampires might understand, because they had been attempting to bleed Lesya's power for some time. But understanding would not help them.

He had once thought of Lesya as something of a monster herself, but no more. He did not have to be like Sabine to sense how
right
this was, and sharing a glance with Callie, he knew that she understood as well. This was nature versus evil. This was what was allowed, fighting what should never have been. Lesya was the purest spirit of the wilderness, and she was stamping out the stain of the vampires.

More growls and screams and confused cries. More impacts as things were held aloft and torn apart.

Then Sabine said, "There she is," almost breathless with wonder. Jack and Callie looked in the direction she indicated and Lesya was there, glorious and exultant in her natural form at last. She had been taken and held against her will, tortured perhaps, and maybe damaged too much to truly find herself again. But now her anger gave her power, and she marched through her domain proud and amazing.

Moonlight bathed her in purity. The size of a tree, her arms were sweeping limbs sprouting with shiny green leaves, the very image of rebirth. Her body was bark-covered, yet malleable enough to twist and turn to her desires. Her legs stomped across the landscape with a surety born of ancient familiarity, and her face . . .

Her face was one that Jack London knew so well, and had seen in his dreams ever since he had first set eyes upon her. Though far from her human form, Lesya retained features that Jack would always recognize, and fear and respect in equal measure.

She glanced his way. Blinked. And her face cracked open into a wooden grin that Jack could not help but mimic. Sabine laughed beside him, and even Callie lifted her face to the sky and chuckled. LLL

"We're going to make it," Sabine said. Her voice was filled with relief. Jack knew that she was already thinking beyond this fight, to when she and Lesya might meet properly and sit to talk, and find their ways into each other's lives and histories.

Jack's wolf appeared from the shadows, limping toward them. It glanced at Sabine, paused, and tilted its head. Then it came close to Jack and lay by his side, allowing him to touch its head and feel his way across its wounds. Its pelt was wet with blood, but he could feel the strong beating of its heart. It panted, but proudly. And watched.

Lesya strode back and forth through her forest, snapping up vampire beasts and lifting them high. Some she tore to shreds, mangled human parts tumbling back down. Then Jack saw something that made him shiver, and gave the grin she had granted him a manic edge.

Some vampires she impaled high in the trees. Pinned there against the moonlit sky, their agonized silhouettes squirmed — bears, a cougar, and three men whose thin limbs looked pathetic against the infinite heavens.

"Glorious," a voice said, and Ghost jumped down from the rock behind them. He landed beside Jack's wolf and knelt there, big hand resting on its back, but he spared not a glance for Jack and the others. He only had eyes for Lesya.

"She's torturing them," Sabine said.

"Yes?" Ghost said, still not looking.

"Yes," Callie said. Jack was not sure how to read her voice. Satisfaction, or disapproval?

"We have no idea what they did to her," Jack said, surprised that he wanted to defend Lesya's actions.

"I do," Ghost said. "I know." His voice was low, heavy, filled with anger and something else that Jack could not place for a while. "They bled her and kept her trapped in their caves like an animal. They
taunted
her. They promised to keep her alive, and never let her go. So yes. She's torturing them."