Wolf's Cross (25 page)

S
he found Karl’s farm in the midst of a horrible storm at the end of harvest season. Ice fell like needles from a sky boiling and black as ink. The wind howled and bit with a force that felt as if it could tear flesh from bone.

Her howls were louder than the storm, louder than the thunder. Karl heard her cries as he huddled with his family around the fire in their cottage. At first he didn’t want to admit to himself that he knew what made those terrible, terrifying sounds.

But he knew.

Even though he had never seen his dreamlike winter lover in other than her human guise, he knew. Just as he knew that his trysts were no dream, and the wood where they had happened no fairyland.

He had bought more than meat, and at a much dearer price.

Karl took an axe and told his wife to protect their young son, to bar the door and the shutters and let no one in before morning—not even him. Then he left the cottage to face the beast that cried for him in the storm.

She stood in front of the cottage, waiting for him. She was naked, but no longer human. Lips that had borne his kisses were curled in the lupine snarl of a feral she-wolf. The hands that had
caressed him were now dark-furred and long-fingered, ending in hooked claws. The legs that had straddled his body were now the crooked legs of a wolf.

He didn’t want to know her. He wanted this apparition to be something new and strange to him. But he looked into her eyes, and he knew whom he faced, and what.

“You left me.” Her voice, always rough from lack of use, came out of her lupine throat as little more than a growl.

“I had to tend the harvest.” The words were empty in Karl’s mouth. She had come to him, true. She had been the one to place her lips on his—but he had never pulled away. He had never said that he had a family, a wife, a son. He had pretended, because the situation was unreal, that it wasn’t real. That because she wasn’t human, it didn’t matter.

And the horror he felt was more for what he had done than for the monster standing in front of him. She panted, steam rising from her muzzle as lightning carved highlights from black ice-matted fur.

“You left me alone, with child.” She growled and took a step toward him. His axe dangled impotently from his hands and he shook his head, trying to deny the truth of the allegation.

“I didn’t know,” he said finally, as knives made of falling ice scoured the tears from his cheeks.

“I birthed your whelps, alone in a cave, and swaddled them in the skin of a bear I had killed …
for you
.” She stood before him, barely taller than he and starvation-thin, but still seemed to loom over him. He felt her breath on his face as she growled.

“I didn’t know,” he said again, as if those were the only words he knew anymore.

“You will care for our children.”

As she stared into his face, he saw the head of a starved she-wolf, ice matting her fur into spikes, muzzle wrinkled into a snarl.
But the eyes were hers, and in them he saw the pain, the loneliness.

“Yes,” he said.

The creature before him froze, as if she couldn’t quite understand the word. Her muzzle lost its snarl as she pulled back from him. “You will come back with me. To your daughters.”

“I will go with you,” Karl said. He thought of his wife and child, barricaded in the cottage. He couldn’t leave them to the anger of this beast. Better that the she-wolf received what she wanted, what he’d implicitly promised her.

“You will come back? With me?” The voice softened in her inhuman mouth, and her eyes shone from more than melted ice. In a flash of lightning, Karl thought he saw one side of her mouth pull up in a melancholy smile. “Our children are beautiful.”

“Take me to them,” he said, all the time thinking of his wife and son, in the cabin.

And, in a moment of fear and weakness, he glanced back. He knew it was a mistake as soon as he turned his head, because he could hear Lucina growl.

“Liar.”

He turned back. “No, I—”

She backhanded him in the chest—a blow that knocked him rolling into the icy mud of the path.

“Liar!”
she shrieked at him, jaws snapping at air. When the lightning lit her face, he saw nothing but fury.

He raised a hand, hoping to pull back the thread of hope he had seen in her eyes a moment ago. “No, I will—”

She pounced on him, knocking him down, pressing his shoulders to the ground with her massive clawed hands. “You will tire of me, like you did before. You will come back with me, but you will leave. Like you always have. You will
always
come back here.”

“No, not this time.”

In another flash of lightning, he saw her lupine mouth smiling again, but this time it was the rictus grin of death staring down at him, dripping saliva that burned a cheek that was frozen from the icy needles of the storm. She bent down so her muzzle was next to his ear, lips brushing him as they had the first time they met. “No,” she whispered. “Not this time.”

She leapt off him, growling words that had lost their meaning in her fury. To his horror, she ran to his cottage.

His wife. His son.

The sudden threat drove all thought of his own guilt away. The woman Lucina had been was wiped from his mind as he saw this atavistic shadow bearing down on his family. As she attacked the door, slamming herself against the splintering wood, he pulled his axe out of the mud and ran after her.

Strong as she was, she had been weakened by her troubled childbirth and months of hunger. Were she the same Lucina that had greeted Karl in the woods, naked under her red cloak, the door would have given way with a single blow. But now she splintered one board at a time, reaching in with a furred arm to cast aside the bar sealing the door.

Karl came upon her as her shoulder pressed against the hole she had smashed between the planks of the door. She turned her head to see him, and as the axe came down on her neck, he saw resignation in her eyes.

The first blow was grave—an awful wound tearing through her neck, spilling her life out over frozen black fur. Had she run then, she might have survived, healed from even such a massive insult. But she didn’t run. Instead, she used all her strength to say two words to Karl through her damaged throat—words that came in a froth of blood.

“Our children.”

The second blow landed before Lucina’s weakened body could
begin to seal the damage from the first. The third took Lucina’s life. The fourth was just the formality that completely removed her head from her body.

K
arl left his wife and son, and his dead lover, to find his daughters. He slogged through the ice storm, deep into the dark woods, to the clearing where he had made his trysts with the wolf. As he searched he raged and cried—cursed himself, and Lucina, and God. As he stumbled in the dark, he selfishly hoped for the peace death would bring him.

Then he heard an infant’s cry.

He found them in a shallow hollow in a hillside, wrapped in the raw hide of a bear that smelled foul with decay. For two infants, it was already too late. Their bodies were blue and cold. But the last child was pink and healthy, and screamed as the ice bit her skin.

He brought all three home, the tiny corpses slung across his back in their rotting bearskin. His one living daughter he carried tightly inside his shirt, so that she would have his body for warmth. When he reached home, the storm had broken, and a cold dawn had begun chasing clouds from the sky.

Anno Domini 1353

M
aria stayed silent throughout the story. Her heart ached for Lucina, and she could see her fate written even as Hanna described Lucina’s first meeting with Karl. Maria’s mother had been doomed from the start, and it was all the more heartbreaking because Lucina didn’t even understand why.

Her stepmother wiped her cheeks and said, “We had lost a daughter, less than a month before. She would have been barely older than you. You took her place at my breast. I know where you came from, what gave birth to you. But you were my husband’s child, and you became mine.”

“I had sisters,” Maria whispered.

Her stepmother gave her a long look and said, “Come with me.”

She led Maria along the stone fence marking the edge of the field, to a trail into the woods. The trail ended in a clearing marked on opposite sides by two piles of stone, one somewhat smaller than the other. The rocks were weedshot and reflected bone-white in the moonlight.

“This is where we placed them to rest.” She pointed to the larger of the piles and said, “Lucina is here.”

Maria walked up to the rocky pile and tried to picture what
Lucina had looked like, what her voice might have sounded like, what she might have told her about what she was.

And as she did, she felt twin stabs of shame. The first came from not having spared the time to think about her mother before now, before she’d had cause to question what she was. But worse than that was the shame of having doubted her stepmother. The woman who’d raised her had shown her more grace, more loving forgiveness, than Maria had thought the human heart was capable of.

She knelt by Lucina’s cairn and said, “Thank you.”

“You’re right. You deserve to know your own history, whatever it is.”

Maria turned to face her stepmother. “Thank you for being my mother.”

“How could I do anything else?”

“When I hurt Władysław, you could have let my father take me away.”

“I—” Her stepmother sucked in a breath and turned her face away. Maria realized that Władysław had told the truth when he’d said that their parents never knew he had overheard them.

“And you gave me this.” She touched her cross.

“It was to keep you safe. We weren’t trying to imprison you. We didn’t want …” Her shoulders shook as she wept, and Maria stood to place an arm around her.

“You didn’t want me to end as she did,” Maria said, holding her still. “I understand it now.”

Her stepmother hugged her, and Maria realized that sometime in the last few years, she had grown taller than her.

“Don’t hate your father,” Hanna sobbed into Maria’s shoulder. “He made mistakes, bad ones. But he loved his family, and
all
his children.”

“I know.”

“Please, whatever happens, always remember that you have a family, and that we love you.”

“I know,” she whispered quietly, as her own tears came.

S
he returned to her own bed, with her stepmother and her brothers. And for the first time since her father had died, it felt like home to her. Yet through some evil sleight of hand, the feeling made her situation all the worse. Could she hang on to this, knowing what she did about herself? Knowing that the Order hunted her kind?

Curled up on her bed, in the loft above her brothers, she lay without sleep. Her nerves strung themselves tight beneath her skin, her muscles tense with unexpended energy. She felt as if she could jump out of bed and run into the woods, and keep running and running, away from all of this.

She ran her fingers over the dagger she had set next to the bed, the inscription rough and cold against her skin.

Josef …

What about Josef? She could explain things to her mother. All children leave home in the end, and she was no different in that respect. But could she explain things to Josef so that
he
understood?

Why had he given her this? Why had he kissed her so tenderly? Why did he incite the evil hope that there could be something more between them?

He belonged to the Order, and she was the demon they hunted. By all sane measure, he was her enemy—and a deadly one. So why did she care what happened to him?

And, as far as he knew, she was a lowborn bastard servant. Why should
he
care what happened to
her
?

I’m defying everything I’ve trained to be to tell you this
.

She thought of him saying that, and her heart ached. He had no idea he was trying to aid the very thing he fought. Should he do anything else to help her, he might lose everything. She couldn’t let him sacrifice himself for a lie.