Wolf's Cross (23 page)

“
My
ability to change,” she whispered.

She gently replaced her father’s cross on top of her clothes and looked at it resting there. Then she pulled her hand away and sucked in a breath, trying to will the beast back into herself.

This time her body responded with a shuddering force. She fell backward, toppling off her wolf legs. It felt as if her whole body had melted and was draining through a hole inside herself. There was pain, but not the orgasmic agony of the beast. Instead she felt the empty ache of a long-cramped muscle finally relaxing.

She sprawled, naked and sweating, on a bed of pine needles.

She brought a hand up to touch her face, and her lips were human. Her fingers traced the outline of her jaw, and she felt the same face that she had worn all her life. She got unsteadily to her feet and looked down at herself, and saw the same breasts, the same stomach, the same thighs, knees, and feet.

There was no sign of the creature.

Not on her body, anyway. Next to her feet, pressed deep into the forest floor, was a single pair of footprints where the creature
had—where
she
had—crouched on her haunches. The prints were those of the splayed rear paws of a gigantic dog or wolf. Only the pair, without any prints coming or going.

She bent and traced the pawprints with her fingers. If she needed to confirm that she was not mad, that what she had seen and felt existed outside her own head, here was proof, embedded in the forest floor.

She dug her fingers into the damp earth and buried the pawprints—filling them in, tamping them down, erasing any evidence of their presence.

By the time she had brushed her skin off and replaced her clothing, the sounds of birds and insects had returned. Apparently they were satisfied that the creature had gone.

S
he left the forest, uncertain about exactly where she was going. She ended up by the walls of Gród Narew because that was the closest place she knew to go. She walked around to the southern gate and stared out at the path back toward her family.

How could she return? Not only after running from her brother, but going home to face her stepmother. How could she, knowing what secrets her stepmother had kept from her? They had hung this cross around her neck without giving her the vaguest inkling as to
why
. She shuddered when she thought what might have happened if Lukasz had ripped the cross from her neck.

The first time she had been rage without a thought. If Darien had been just a little slower—

No, I
did
strike him
.

She had been so tied up in what had happened to her, she hadn’t spared much thought to what she had
done
. Now that she
had brought the creature forth herself, she knew it hadn’t been a vision or a nightmare. And if that transformation had been real, she had to assume that her blow to Darien’s back had been just as real.

She closed her eyes and pictured it: her leap at him, her clawed hand striking, slamming into his back, claws digging deep into the muscle. She had felt his flesh tear under her fingers. She had seen him slam into the ground with the force of the blow. She could have killed him.

“Maria?”

She whipped around, eyes wide, half-expecting Darien to be looming behind her.

“Josef?” The unexpected name escaped her lips before she fully realized who was standing there, his face drawn and pale, his body listing slightly to the right as he pressed his fist against his stomach just above his belt.

All her thoughts fell apart. She ran to his side and took hold of his shoulder to support him. “Josef, you should not be out of bed.”

“I am fine. The wounds are healing.”

He was not fine. He was strong, but she could feel the tension in his shoulders, and she could hear the catch of pain in his breath however much he tried to hide it. She imagined that she could even smell the agony that possessed him.

Please don’t hurt yourself, Josef. I am losing everything else. Don’t let me lose you, too …

But it was already sinking in:
she
was what the Order was hunting.

Her heart ached as she realized that this might be the last she’d ever see of him. Knowing what she was, she would have to leave here. Unfallen tears blurred her vision as she forced her voice to be as firm and cheerful as she could manage. “Your wounds won’t stay healed if you go wandering about like this. Come, let me take you back to your room.”

“No.” He pulled from under her supporting arm and faced her, taking her hand in his. “You need to go home, before all the light of day is lost.”

She looked him in the face, wanting to ask him what he knew of what she was. Instead, she whispered, “Is there anything in these woods at night that isn’t there in the daytime?”

“It likes the dark,” he replied, turning his gaze away from the gate, toward the woods. “It is there now, but given the chance it prefers surprise, slaughtering its victims with no warning at all.”

“Josef, you said you couldn’t—”

“Listen!” he snapped. “I’m defying everything I’ve trained to be to tell you this. It hunts in the dark, traps its victims in confined spaces. It can come to you looking like a human, but it is not. Do not trust any strangers you might see. Most important, only silver can truly wound it.”

Like a blow it struck her: her healing bruise, and the wounds that still itched in her palm. It
was
her.

“W-why are you telling me now?” Did he know about her slipping into the woods? Did he know that she was the monster of which he spoke?

“I was frightened for you. You didn’t come this evening, and I thought my silence had driven you away. I was afraid that I had lost my chance to protect you.”

He pressed something into her hand. She looked down and saw a silver dagger. It had been hidden against his stomach, beneath his fist.

“What is—”

“Shh. Take it. It is the only protection I can offer while we are kept by the Duke. But once he satisfies himself of the legitimacy of our hunt, we shall finish this thing.”

“This thing,” she whispered.
Me
, she thought.

“I know you must have suspected its presence, seen something of it, for you to talk of wolves. So, perhaps, I may be forgiven my
disobedience. I would rather have that hang upon my conscience than anything happening to you.”

Then he bent and kissed her forehead, and the touch of lips on her skin fired a panic of impossible emotions—a tumult that might have called forth the wolf from within her if the silver on her breast had not kept it dormant. Instead, it left her with a shuddering weakness that made her stumble backward as he turned to reenter the fortress.

She turned to face the road home before the guards could catch sight of the weapon in her hand, or Josef could see the tears on her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

W
ładysław had been sitting on a log at the edge of the woods, waiting for her.

She stopped when he saw him.

He stood, bending to pick up his axe.

“You came back,” she said.

“You’re my sister.”

She ran to him, tears welling up in her eyes, and threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry.”

He patted her back. “I forgive you.” He coughed and added, “Now let me go, so I can breathe.”

She released her embrace and said, “I thought …”

Władysław laughed. “It’d take more than a little yelling for me to stay angry at you. But who was the man with you at the gate?”

Maria froze, uncertain about how to respond. When she saw the true inquiry in her brother’s eyes, she turned away to hide her flush.

“Josef,” she said. “His name is Josef.”

“What trinket did he give you that was so shiny?”

“He gave me a dagger, to protect myself. Like you, he is overly concerned.”

“Such interest must be flattering,” he said, but there was a
kernel of hard suspicion in the statement. It felt worse because she knew, for her part, that it might be merited.

She tried to answer the unspoken question. “Josef’s taking holy orders. He was wounded and I’ve been tending to him—”

“You mean he’s one of the Germans?”

“—and I think he meant to repay my service,” Maria finished, ignoring Władysław’s increasing alarm.

“Maria, do I need to remind you—”

“No, you do not,” she snapped.

There had been a point in her life when her brother’s concern for her chastity might have made her collapse in shame or embarrassment. Today, after what she had seen of herself in the woods, his alarm about Josef’s attentions was less than trivial, and she had to strain to keep her frustration from igniting into true anger at someone far from deserving it.

He opened his mouth, but when she looked into his face something in her expression kept him from pursuing the topic. They walked a few more moments in silence; then he finally asked, “May I see it?”

Maria handed him the hilt of the dagger, and Władysław held it up before him. The polished surface glinted in the evening light. Now she could see the scrollwork and the German script engraved on the sides. It seemed more an item of jewelry than a weapon.

Władysław grunted, obviously gripped by his own frustration. “And this toy is supposed to protect you from what, exactly?”

The same Devil as the cross around my neck
.

Maria couldn’t bring herself to speak. She couldn’t repeat Josef’s words—not after having learned that she was what the Germans hunted. She also couldn’t give voice to yet another lie.

“Maria?”

“Władysław,” she said finally, “did you know my mother?”

“What do you mean? Mother is—” He paused for a moment, and all the tension drained out of him. The frustration in his face turned to melancholy as he said quietly, “Oh.”

Maria loved him dearly for that moment of confusion.

“Do you know anything of her?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, but I was two years old.”

“Father never spoke of her?”

“Not to me.” He handed the dagger back to her. “I’m sorry.”

Maria nodded and took the dagger. When she did, he reached out and touched her hand. “Please, if you speak to Mother about this, be kind with her. Anything that happened was not her doing.”

“I promise.” She looked across at her brother, who stared steadfastly down the path ahead. The evening dusk had faded into night, and his face was cloaked in shadows that made it hard to read his expression. “Is there something you’re not saying?”

“I truly know nothing about your mother …”

“But you know something about me?”

Władysław was silent for a long time before he said, “I might have been five, and you were just three, when you first put that cross around your neck. Do you remember what happened?”

Maria shook her head. “I thought I always had this.” She reached up and touched the chain around her neck.

He craned his neck and echoed her gesture with his free hand, tracing the ghost of a scar on his neck. “It wasn’t really your fault. For some reason I thought that yanking your hair was great fun.”

“I did that?”

“Only after I made you burst into tears.” He lowered his hand. “I don’t remember much of anything after you stopped crying. But you certainly put me in my place.”

Maria’s heart thundered in her chest. Ever since Darien had loosed this thing in her, her greatest fear was that she might strike
out at her family. It had never occurred to her that she might have already done so. “I
hurt
you?”

“Nothing serious. Cuts and bruises, a black eye, a bite on my neck.”

“God have mercy.”

“Please, don’t be upset. It was sixteen years ago.”

His reassurances did nothing to calm her. If she had changed, bitten his neck, she could have killed him.

“He gave me the cross after that, didn’t he?”

“It was Mother, actually.” He stopped and sighed. “I was feverish, bedridden, and they thought I was asleep. I never told them otherwise. For a while I thought I’d dreamed it …”

“Dreamed what?”

Władysław was silent for a long time, and his silence allowed her dread to grow unchecked. Something small and still told her that she didn’t want to know what her brother might have dreamed.

“What?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t—”

She grabbed his arm, stopping him, and pulled him around to face her.
“Tell me!”

“Father wanted to get rid of you,” Władysław said finally.

Maria dropped his arm and backed away as his words came spilling out.

“Mother and Father argued. They screamed. He was horrified about what had happened. He kept saying that if I died, it would be his fault for bringing you into the house. Mother finally convinced him not to abandon you in the woods. She left that night, making him pledge that he would keep us both safe. She was gone for two months. When she came back, she had your cross with her.”

He paused, probably expecting her to argue, to yell again, to
insist that Father would have done no such thing to her, say no such thing. Yesterday, she might have.

“She brought this cross?”

“Yes. I don’t know how or where she found it. I never asked about the night she left. I don’t think Mother or Father knew what I had heard.”