City Under the Moon (43 page)

Four and a half minutes for a miracle.

Seven

United Nations Underground Habitat

6:50 p.m.

The shadows of the trees retreated as the false moon crested the horizon.

This show had no effect on the curse, but it was synchronous with the rise of the moon outside. And no walls could stop that light.

No matter where Demetrius Valenkov hid, the moon always found him.

“Of course there is more death,” he responded to Ilecko. “As long as the scourge of my family lives, we will always bring more. Death to the Ottomans. And to the Turks and the Saxons and the
Ţigani
and the Americans. Death to your wife, Yannic, and to mine.”

Valenkov felt himself slipping between man and wolf with each draw of breath. The full moon was upon him, the time when even his years of rigorous preparation could not contain the animal. Were he at home, he would have locked himself in his chamber, secured iron shackles to his wrists and ankles, and prayed for morning to come quickly and without incident.

But he was far from home.

“Shoot him,” he heard the woman agent growl. She was the perfect American warrior, immune to influence and to compassion, void of conscience.

“Glass is bulletproof,” the soldier warned her.

She stepped back and shot her silver at the window. It did not break.

“No longer can you hurt us,” said Valenkov.

“My government can’t allow the wolves to escape the island,” she said. “They’re going to kill everyone in Manhattan, infected or not. Hundreds of thousands… of…“ She trailed off, distracted by something over his shoulder.

His baby boy had come out from hiding.

Wearing only a diaper, eighteen-month-old Zee teetered forward. His little hands were in his mouth, exploring for new teeth.

Valenkov crouched with outstretched arms, encouraging Zee to stay up on his wobbly legs. It was important to him that his son learn to walk upright.

“And why are any of those lives more important than my own?” he asked the agent. “Than those of my family?” He lifted Zee with his throbbing, distended hands. His yellowing eyes and sharpening teeth looked monstrous, but his boy melted into his arms nonetheless. “Why do you fight so hard to protect them, and yet you ignore our pleas for help? Is it because we are not American? But are we not human?”

The woman agent was too preoccupied to respond. Instead, she blurted out the obvious. “The Cooke child...”

Perhaps, Valenkov calculated, she was not as smart as she thought. Perhaps her scientists were overconfident in their superwoman. For all of her supposed investigative prowess, she assumed he’d chosen Holly Cooke as his first victim because she was high profile, a person whose injury would spark the attention of the government and the media. Indeed, this great American manhunter had forgotten the missing child altogether.

Valenkov had chosen Cooke many months ago, when he learned that she and her diplomat husband were looking to adopt a child from Italy. It took little effort to put his son in their hands; simply a trip to the country and the wolf’s influence over one woman in the
Tribunale per i Minorenni
. And thus, his little Zee travelled to America with Holly Cooke.

Distasteful as it was to see another woman mothering his son, Holly Cooke was a fine soul. More innocent blood on his family’s crest.

“Perhaps we are only animals to your government,” he said. “Wolves. Meant to be hunted. Like you hunt my father, Yannic. And now you come for me.“

“You are not a wolf, Demetrius,”
said Ilecko in
limba română. “You are a man. I let you live, because you promised—“

“I make good on my promise, Yannic!” His fury loosened his grip on the beast. “I make no more wolves! But it does not matter to these men in the village. They live in fear of the past. Moon after moon, there are no wolves. I promise to find the cure. I only ask for time!” His teeth pushed further from his jaw, coursing agony through his chin and interfering with his speech. Hands trembling, he put Zee on the grass. The boy cried in protest.

Ilecko responded and the woman agent spoke over him. But Valenkov did not listen. Instead, he turned inward.

It had become natural to focus on his heartbeat as a tuning mechanism, and organize his brainwaves to the Harmony’s vibrations. In this deep meditation, his bodymind became one with the total collective consciousness. Distinctions between himself and his own observations and the universe faded away, and there was only the Harmony. Here he cultivated his body’s life energy, his
qi
, and harmonized its movement within his physical body and the universe.

His consciousness was free of the wolf, but his
qi
was locked forever in battle with it, as the curse had latched onto the vital meridians through which the
qi
must travel. It hid between his lungs and his heart, his kidney and his stomach, his liver and his pericardium, and it attacked from everywhere at once under the light of the moon. Here, in the Harmony, the collective consciousness struggled against the invader. Most nights it was kept restrained. Under the full moon, however, the
ţigani
curse was too powerful.

Valenkov returned to the ego-consciousness, having stayed the wolf’s approach. His gaze fell on the face of his child, the loving boy who was blissfully unaware of the monster lurking within him.

Zee’s canine teeth had yet even to break free of his gums.

“The villagers learn we have a son,” Valenkov told Ilecko and his Americans. “And they know the curse will continue within him when I die. So they attack. They kill my Ecaterina. My innocent Cat.”

He could still hear the mayhem as the villagers ravaged his home. And there he was, sealed in his dungeon, as they knew he would be on the night of the full moon. The key to his shackles would not be released but for a rudimentary timer constructed by his great-grandfather. And so he pulled helplessly as he listened to the men ram the gate. His beloved Cat was alone and terrified. In his shame, he had hidden the entrance to the dungeon from her. It was the worst mistake of his life.

Still swollen from pregnancy, she hurried to the mausoleum and hid their infant son inside a tomb. She called out to Valenkov, praying that he could hear, that he would know to save the boy come morning. He cried back for her, but the dungeon had been made soundproof to her unsophisticated senses.

She faced the savages alone. They tortured her, demanding to know where her men were hiding.

They thought he had hid from them and left his wife to be their victim.

“And they call
us
monsters,” Valenkov said. “Dracula. Sons of the Devil.”

For six long years, Demetrius Valenkov had contained the beast by mind or by force. It was a promise to himself, to his father, to Yannic Ilecko, even to the smug ghost of the
ţigani
who had put this curse upon his family. He swore he would thwart their witch and restore honor to their family crest.

He sympathized with the villagers, though, and he tried to still their fears, for they too had been through horror. He promised them he would not have a child until a cure had been found. But Zee had come unplanned, from a feverish and perhaps irresponsible moment of passion. They tried to hide him, but the villagers had spies inside his castle.

When he heard Ecaterina’s screams, when he realized they would show no mercy—
God forgive him, he thought they would give him the time he needed
—it was then that he unleashed the monster.

He fueled its strength with his own, working in concert with the wolf only this once, and even still it took too long to break the manacles and the door. Precious minutes, during which his beloved wife was impaled upon a stake. Slowly, agonizingly, her own weight pulled her to her death as the wood tore through her organs.

These men—these cowards—would have thought of her as another of Vlad Dracula’s victims. But she was not. Her blood was on
their
hands.

When he was free, Demetrius Valenkov the werewolf caused the villagers
suffering
. The men and their wives were made to watch their children die, and then the men watched their wives die. And then they were wounded, so much more delicately than their loved ones, so that they had time to wallow as their lives slowly escaped from their stomachs.

Only the worst did he let live, the very men who put Ecaterina upon that stake. He put the wolf’s curse upon their souls and used his influence to lay waste to their minds. Now they dreamed forever of their loved ones’ horrific deaths, waking from slumber only to feel the pain of the transformation. And then, as his
slujitori
, they keep watch over his beloved’s body.

This was his revenge. For the anguish had driven him mad.

Had it not?

Only a madman could have eaten the flesh of those women and children. Only a madman could have caused the ruin that had come to New York City, executing such a wicked plan while remaining deaf to the screams of innocents. Innocents like the honorable Mrs. Cooke, whose only crime was to love his son.

Certainly only a madman could have committed the same atrocities, yet again, for which his family was cursed some twenty generations ago.

Alas. If only he
had
gone mad.

“There has been enough death, Demetrius,”
said Ilecko.
“Too many lives lost. Think of how many more will die. You are too good a man to let this to continue.”

If only he had gone mad, Ilecko’s words would not ring true.

“But it must!” he insisted. “It must continue, it always continues as the curse passes down. For all of his life, my son will be punished for crimes he did not commit. You will come for him one day, Yannic, as you came for my father. As you come for me. Or worse, he will be hunted by the likes of
her
. Soldiers stripped of their compassion.”

Valenkov attuned himself to the Harmony, where the collective consciousness was one with the minds of his
slujitori
, including the woman who wished to know herself only as Tildascow. He thrust further, calling to her wolf within. Let her try to ignore his plight while suffering the pain of the curse.

Come out. Join us.

Eight

She was a stranger in her own mind, conscious only through the dim light of a keyhole, wriggling from a powerful force that would pull her away. The wolf teased her, daring her to let everything go.

Physical torture, psychological coercion, the temptation of relief. Now, finally, she understood. This was a brainwashing, not a transformation. She wasn’t becoming the wolf. She was succumbing to it.

Valenkov’s trick, simple yet impossible, was not to succumb.

Ilecko’s sword glimmered in the dimming light, seesawing between the blue of the fake moon and the white overheads. He was tired, languid, not realizing his natural sway was letting the blade shift to the easiest angle for her to grab it between her palms.

Even if she could resist the compulsion, the pain might overtake her. The worst of it was in her spreading shoulders and back, but now her hips were constricting. Fireballs swelled in her joints as mutinous tendons pushed her bones apart. And then a sledgehammer came down on her knees, the impact spreading in excruciating slow-motion, breaking her tibia free.

Freefalling through conscious thought, rocketing past distant sensations. Hunger. Cold. Rage. Defiance. Agony.

Now a soothing at the base of her spine: the release of her tail, transcending the pain with an orgasmic wave sweeping her to salvation.

The pentagram in Lon’s hand. Deliverance, so close.

And her grip slipped further. The wolf pushed from behind her, desperate to let loose a howl. But it didn’t escape.

Not yet.

She closed her eyes and focused. The fleeting thoughts became one: her mother’s melodic voice.

She would not be distracted.

Nine

The storm in Valenkov’s heart raged dissonance in the Harmony. His
slujitori
felt it too, as their true power dawned with the moon. Never mind their screams as their bones twisted into the canine shape. A madman would not hear them.

The American woman’s howl echoed through the speakers. To resist would only intensify the pain. This he knew too well.

“Mister Valenkov!” It was the boy, this child they had brought with them, for what reason he’d never understood. “Please! I’m so sorry for what you’ve—“

“There is no ‘sorry!’ You can never be sorry enough!”

“That’s certainly true, but—“

“Certainly!” He pointed at Zee, who had been put to hide in a sarcophagus. “Certainly he does not deserve to suffer!”

“We’ll look after him, I promise.”

“What
promise?
” A fool, this boy.

“I promise, I do promise, we
will
cure him. You have to trust me. You’re a good man, Mister Valenkov, you don’t want this to continue.”

But Valenkov wanted. He wanted to want. Anger seared his tongue.

“You’ve come as far as you can. Your father would be proud.”

“Demetrius—“
Ilecko tried to interrupt.

“My father was a coward. He surrendered.”

“No, sir, he wasn’t a coward. He couldn’t have been. He suffered for twenty years. And
this guy
was chasing him. I’d be scared shitless if he was chasing me. Sorry, I didn’t mean to curse, but—”

“He was selfish. He held on only for the hope that I could cure him.”

“No, Mister Valenkov, he held on for you, to give you time to prepare. Selfish would have been to end it right away, to put himself out of his misery. You should be proud of him. And you should let your son be proud of
his
father.”

He could rip this stupid, arrogant American boy’s head off.

And yet his words left him heartstruck. He couldn’t help but turn to Zee, and he saw himself in his own father’s eyes, perhaps for the first time.

Nevertheless, the call pounded in his heart.
Run with the hunt,
it said.
Let the humans suffer if we should feast upon them.
It was the voice of the wolf, and of his mad ancestors.