Hellenic Immortal (22 page)

“They know I am here.”
 

I smiled. “Come here a lot?”
 

He stared hard at me, and the hairs on the back of my neck decided to do a little dance. “You should leave me alone.”
 

“Okay,” I replied pleasantly, trying very hard to pretend he didn’t scare me. “Just making conversation. I don’t find many other people here who think the wolves are as fascinating as I do. You seem to like them a lot.”

“I hate them,” he grunted.

“Oh. My mistake.”

My new friend stared at the sky with significant trepidation; the sun had just set.

“You have someplace to be?” I asked.

“Yes.” He stepped away and started down the path, trying to get some distance between us, which wouldn’t do. I caught up with him and put my hand on his shoulder. He reacted as someone might if touched by a hot pan.

“What is the matter with you?” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”

I offered him a handshake. “Take my hand. My name is Greg.”

“I am not your friend! Now get away from me!”

“I think you should shake my hand,” I repeated. “It will help you get the scent.”

“What?”

“For later. When the moon comes up, you’ll want to look for me.”

“You are insane.”

“One of us is. Might be me. We’ll find out in an hour, won’t we?”

He stared at me, and for a change he looked more frightened than intimidating. Then he turned and ran.
 

I watched him up until he hit the trees and disappeared into the brush and the twilight. Definitely much faster than he should have been. And he never shook my hand. That was okay, though; that’s why I’d touched his shoulder. In a little while, he’d realize I knew he was the legendary Lykanthropos and decide he had to protect himself.

*
 
*
 
*

I drifted through the gardens as dusk begat nighttime and the attendant darkness that wasn’t really all that dark. There were streetlights, of course, but there was also the full moon to contend with.

Moonlight used to be considered a source of madness. I remember not so long ago seeing grown women walk around with parasols at night to prevent moonlight from striking them on the head. People are weird. But it’s easy to see how the werewolf mythos ended up conflated with the supposed power of moonlight. (That and the whole howling at the moon thing, which real wolves don’t actually do.) I always thought it was terribly inconvenient. I mean, if you’re going to be a monster, wouldn’t you rather be one during the new moon? It’s a whole lot easier to sneak up on somebody without the gigantic source of illumination in the sky. What a hassle.

Anyway, real werewolves don’t transform by the light of the full moon. They simply are. It’s a genetic condition.

For the first hour, I made a point of sticking close to the zoo, but it was so well lit, I decided I’d make much better bait somewhere more secluded. So I wandered down the path until I found a nice clearing a decent enough distance away from the streetlamps to allow my night vision to return, and also so I could be overwhelmed by a large community of aggressive ducks near a small pond. Never mind that I was there waiting for a werewolf; the ducks were frightening enough.

Soon, I heard a growl coming from the trees about twenty feet away. “There you are,” I said. “Thank goodness; maybe you can help me with these damn ducks.”

He didn’t answer, but it would have gone a lot easier for everybody if he had. Instead, he charged forward, scampering at me on all fours. I didn’t have much time to register anything about him other than that he was the same kid I’d spoken to in the zoo, and that he’d managed to tear off all of his clothing. The ducks scattered before him, which I appreciated.

At the last second he leapt at me, arms outstretched and mouth open intending to rip out my throat. And if I were too afraid to move, or perhaps were I some sort of exotic statue, he would have succeeded. But it was a simple attack to counter.

I don’t care how big and strong and fast you are; unless you’re a bird, the minute you leave the ground you’re vulnerable. Your nastier creatures—like, say, real wolves—don’t do it until they’re right in front of you, when their large teeth can latch on before you have an opportunity to evade them. But this boy had a normal-sized mouth and it was a few feet behind his outstretched arms. I swatted the arms aside with a sweep of my own right arm, punched him in the exposed kidneys with my left fist, and let his momentum do the business of carrying him away from me. He landed clumsily on his side with a couple of the slower ducks trapped beneath him.

“There, see what a bad idea that was?” I called out.

He rolled to his feet and howled, while the injured ducks limped off and quacked angrily.

“C’mon, cut that out.”
 

He wasn’t listening. He lunged forward again, and I reminded myself that even though this was just a kid, he was still faster and stronger than a normal human and I should maybe take him a little seriously.

He swung hard with his left arm, showing off a nasty set of claws. (Or rather, unreasonably long fingernails.) Instead of jumping away—which would have put me off balance and made me a nice target for the right arm—I stepped forward, blocked him with my elbow, and punched him as hard as I could in the nose.

The boy staggered backward, covering his face and emitting a little whimper.

I kept my fist up, ready to hit him again. “Are you ready to talk yet? Because I could beat you up all night.”

But no; we weren’t in our reasoning place yet. He pounced. The move was so surprising I had time only to catch his arms with my hands. His superior strength propelled me backward so I went with it, falling onto the ground and in one neat move flipping him over my head. I was up again before he even hit the ground.
 

“Okay, that does it. You want me to beat the crap out of you? Fine. I’ll beat the crap out of you. Just remember; this wasn’t my idea.”

He clambered to his feet as I took off the light jacket I was wearing in anticipation of the cool evening that never arrived. Holding it by the sleeves, I stood still and waited for the new attack.

It came in the form of a half-crazed charge, both arms reaching out to me in just about the stupidest attack he could have possibly devised. One thing was pretty obvious—whatever this child had done before puberty, fighter had not been one of them.

I waited until he was close enough, flipped the jacket up and around, and before he realized exactly what was happening, I had his arms tied up in a nice little knot. I jerked them up over his head and punched him in the stomach with my free hand. When he crumpled forward, I elbowed him in the back of the head.

He tried to fall down, but I was still holding him securely by his bound wrists, so he just sort of sagged to the side, trying hard to keep his feet under him.

“Tell me to stop,” I said, slapping him with my open palm in his already broken nose. The trick was to keep him staggering. If he got his feet under him properly, he’d be able to overpower me pretty quickly.

He made a muffled noise, but didn’t offer anything else. So I kicked a particular part of his leg in such a way that it probably felt like I’d broken it.

“A naked man has an awful lot of good targets to hit,” I threatened. “Tell me to stop.” Still nothing. I stabbed two fingers into a tender spot between his ribs. Hurts like hell. He howled.

“Tell me to stop,” I repeated. I was about to do something really terrible to his free-hanging testicles when he finally spoke.

“S-stop . . .”

“What?”

“Stop!”

I did. With a quick yank, his arms were free of my jacket, and he sagged to the ground. I slipped the jacket back on and sat down beside him.

After a time, he asked, “Have you cured me?”

“There was nothing wrong with you to cure.”

He sat up, and I saw how badly I screwed up his nose. I’d have felt bad about it, but he was trying to kill me at the time.

“Then how?”
 

“How come you can sit here and talk to me under the light of a full moon when you should be peeing on a tree or something?” I finished the thought.

“Y-yes.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Piotr.”

“Piotr, do you know what you are?”

“I am a monster.” He looked at the ground in shame. “Lykanthropos.”

“Very true. And do you know what that is?”

He looked confused. “I am cursed. A tool of the devil.”

I laughed. “Tell me, since you started having these little moonlight jaunts, did you ever look in a mirror?”

“No, I was . . .”

“. . . too busy wreaking havoc on the countryside, I know. Well, Piotr, I looked at you a few hours ago, and aside from the broken nose, you look about the same. Except for the nudity. Speaking of which, I hope you didn’t rip your clothes apart.”

“I removed them before the moon rose,” he explained. “I’ve learned this much.”

“Good. Otherwise, the bus ride home is going to be pretty awkward.”

He managed a smile. “Why are you not afraid of me?”

“You’re just a scared kid, Piotr. And there are people other than myself who can help you understand what you are without resorting to silver bullets and torches. That’s where our needs come together nicely.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I’d like you to introduce me to your family.”

*
 
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*

Three hours later, I was sitting in the kitchen of a small apartment on the third story of a private residence in the Plaka, not at all far from my hotel and even closer to the Acropolis, which loomed seemingly just overhead. The smell of all of Greece wafted through the open windows every few minutes, and I realized that as much as I longed for the Athens of yore, the present-day version was pretty pleasant, too.

Piotr sat beside me, his head bowed with either shame or exhaustion. Or pain; I had pounded him pretty badly. His nose had swelled, although some of that might have been the tissues he’d shoved up his nostrils. I could already see black eyes forming. I imagined under all that hair he had some other bruises as well.

Opposite the table was a man named Nikolaus—Piotr’s father. He was serving us some coffee. The Greeks don’t do coffee well, in case you were wondering.

“I want to thank you again, Mr. Lenaios,” he was saying, for something like the tenth time. “Every night I feared . . .”

“Please, Niko, call me Greg.”

Nikolaus was aware of his son’s so-called curse and had been torturing himself about it for a while. This never translated into much more than praying for his soul nightly and twice on Saturdays, but it was all he knew to do.

Nikolaus stared off into the middle distance, and for a minute there I thought he was going to start crying again. It was shaping up to be a long evening.

“You are a godsend, sir,” he whispered.

I sighed. “Niko, what can you tell me about Piotr’s mother?” Because it turned out this was not going to be as easy as I’d hoped. I learned on our way over from the Gardens that Piotr’s mother had died in childbirth.

“Maria?” Nikolaus asked. “My Maria?”

“Yes, her. Did she have a large family?” I was crossing my fingers that at no point in the ensuing conversation would the word
adoption
come up. If it did, I was screwed. And, perhaps, so was Piotr.

Niko snapped back to reality. “I don’t understand the question.”

“Let’s start with her parents,” I said. “Are they still living?”

“Yes, yes . . . but . . . I have not spoken to them since . . . you see, they did not approve.”

Not a huge surprise. Not because Nikolaus wasn’t a prize; I’m sure he was quite handsome in his day. More along the lines of why a Jewish household has a problem with a Gentile in the family.

“But I don’t understand,” Niko said. “Now that my Piotr is cured . . .”

“It isn’t that simple,” I insisted.

“But . . .”

“Papa,” Piotr said, “I am still a Lykanthropos.”

“Son . . .”

Piotr rolled up his sleeve and revealed the ample body hair he’d developed in just the past few months.

Niko’s eyes darted between his child and me. “Then the curse is not lifted?”

“Great Zeus, there is no curse!” I exclaimed. Niko looked like he was about ready to begin a litany of Hail Mary’s. “Your son is different. Not cursed. Just very rare.”

I had seen this happen enough times to understand the psychology behind it. When Piotr hit puberty and discovered his body changed in quite a few ways differently than any of the other kids on the block, he looked for explanations. The only one that made any sense to him—and to his father, who I think had a hand in the whole idea—was that he was a werewolf. To that end, they were right. And since all they had going for them was the legends, like a werewolf was how Piotr behaved. By the time he ran into me, he’d gotten good at it.

The thing is, we all have a little animal in us, and if you ask us to, we can do a very good job of behaving like one. Hypnotize a guy and tell him he’s a bear, and watch him act like a bear. Nothing magical about it, just tapping into an older part of the brain is all. Piotr was lucky I’d reached him before he got too carried away. Usually, rogue werewolves end up shot.

Nikolaus worked through the problem in his head. This took a minute or two. “Rare? And you think this comes from Maria’s side of the family?”

“It would have to,” I said. “They can help Piotr learn to deal with his peculiar condition, and they can also help me.”

“How can they help you, Mr. Lenaios? Is there anything I can do?”

“Arrange an introduction, Niko. That will be help enough.”

Niko’s eyes fell. “I fear you will not find them hospitable.”

“Let me worry about that.”

*
 
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*

From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger, text corrected and translated by Ariadne

DIONYSOS

SILENUS, DIONYSOS, AMBROSIA

DION. BEHOLD, MIGHTY SILENUS, I HAVE RETURNED FROM MANY GREAT TRAVELS TO FIND YOU STILL HALE AND HEARTY. HOW CAN THIS BE SO?