Wolf's Cross (38 page)

“What is this?” Heinrich said.

“You will lead us to this beast,” Telek called back.

“This is our charge, Rycerz Telek Rydz. We are called to fight this agent of Satan.”

“As my uncle calls me. And, Brother Heinrich, you have not shown great skill in containing this
animal
.”

Even in his limbo of pain, fatigue, and disorientation, Josef had the lucidity to catch the emphasis on Telek’s last word.

“Do not presume—”

“Presume? You are not in Prussia, you arrogant monk. You walk in our lands, and if we say, ‘Put your weapons down and strip the armor from your backs,’ you will do so and be glad of the chance to march barefoot back to your own lands.”

“You have no right to command us. The Duke—”

“Duke Siemowit has charged me to deal with this. You would do well not to challenge my authority here.”

Heinrich took a step forward. “You would lead your men against the Devil armed only with steel?”

“‘They are a beast like any other, but one that can at will disguise itself as a man. Also, like any beast, they are deadly to man when wild and untrained,’” Telek said.

Heinrich took a step back.

“I have a good memory for things I’ve read. Do I recall Brother Semyon’s words correctly?”

Semyon? That name again
.

“Those letters are only for the initiated. You cannot understand!”

“I understand that this thing is no more demonic than a rabid dog. And according to your own Brother Semyon, if we take its head, with or without the aid of silver, it will be done with. Healing or not, a man with a pike should hold it at bay for the length required for my men to complete the task.” He glared at Heinrich. “Now, where is it you’re intending to go?”

J
osef followed Poles with pikes and battle-axes and the Order, with their silvered swords and crossbows. The Poles marched, and the Germans and Telek rode. Josef sat astride a Polish warhorse, his knuckles white on the reins, every step sending jolts of pain through his gut.

But at least the pain kept him awake.

He tried asking his master once who Semyon was, but the only response was: “A brother knight in the Order, long dead.”

Brother Heinrich’s curt response fed Josef’s already growing doubt. When Maria had challenged him—had asked him if the monsters he hunted ever talked, if they did things any worse than men did—his response to all such questions had been that these things were soulless demons.

Doubt had come first when he’d realized that she was asking for her own sake. Now, with Telek’s statements, doubt had taken an equal footing with faith.

Josef had believed they were demons solely because of the words of his masters in the Order and the creature’s actions. Now
Telek gave Josef reason to doubt his masters’ words; he could quote another knight of the Order upon the creature’s earthly nature without Brother Heinrich contradicting him.

That left the beast’s actions and Maria’s question: Were they worse than the actions of men? He had seen and heard much evil done in the wake of the great pestilence, and the burning of Jews in Strasbourg had not been the worst of it.

If he was left to judge based on actions alone, how could he judge these beasts to be demonic?

How could he judge Maria when her only crime was being this thing?

How could he judge her family?

The mixed group of marching Poles and mounted Germans drew to a halt in front of the cottage of Maria’s family. Her brother Władysław walked out to meet them as Telek and Heinrich dismounted.

Josef’s heart sank because he saw no way that this could end well.

D
arien chased after his mate.

His bitch.

He wanted to hold her, hurt her, force himself inside her and pin her to the ground until she whimpered his ownership of her. He had told her—he had
shown
her—the fact that she had nothing else. He was all she had. And still she pushed away from him.

He called to her again, to tell her of the uselessness of man. How they would kill her just for the sake of what she was. She didn’t listen, didn’t understand, saying how he had somehow made her a murderer in the humans’ eyes.

Don’t you understand? You were a killer in their eyes as soon as you shed their ugly pink skin
.

“You don’t know anything!” she howled at him. “Just because some humans hurt you, you think they
all
deserve the same fate? My human family knew all along and—”

“I don’t know?” He could barely form words, the rage choking him as badly as it had back at the stronghold. She could say that? She, who’d suckled at the human teat, who had never slept in a true den, nesting in the skins of her kill. She had never smelled the burnt flesh of her own kin. How could she? “How dare you!”

He snapped and leapt at her, to take her down and show her the pain he felt. But she had already run away.

He caught her scent, and tasted fear within it.

He growled and chased after her again.

H
e caught up with her, her black silhouette suddenly appearing out of the mist; she was standing still, facing away from him. He prepared to leap at her, driven by a confused mixture of rage and lust, but something held him back. It might have been the fear in her scent—fear that, he realized, had nothing to do with him.

He slowed and saw the tension in her, the fear bristling on her back as if she had sprouted spines, the muscles on her flanks so taut they might have been carved from stone. Her jaw hung open in a silent growl as she stared forward, ignoring him.

As he padded up behind her, he felt a flare of renewed anger when he recognized where they were. These were the woods surrounding the cottage where she had been kept as a human. Would she always return here? Would she always search for these human chains to bind her again? How could she not understand what they were?

He needed to grab her by the neck and make her see …

Then he was in sight of Maria’s cottage and saw that, for once, fate was with him.

In front of the cottage stood a score of men or more, the knights of the Order and the more colorfully dressed Polish footmen. He could smell and hear more men than he could see through the fog. The knights had dismounted to surround Maria’s human “family.”

The German leader yelled something at the large Polish
knight with him. He waved and gestured at the woman who stood at the focus of the knight’s attention. Darien felt his muzzle turn up in a near smile. He could not have asked for a clearer demonstration.

Especially when the woman said something and the German struck her with the back of his hand, dropping her to her knees. Maria recoiled as if she had felt the blow herself.

Darien started talking in a growling whisper: “You see now? They cannot abide you. You are predator, they are prey.”

“No,” she whispered, her voice crumbling into a gratifyingly submissive whimper. “My parents loved me.”

“See how even their own kind turns on them?”

The German drew a dagger and held it up to one boy’s throat. He screamed at the woman, demanding that she admit her sins and tell them where Maria was.

“This is why we must kill them all,” Darien said.

But she was no longer listening to him. She had started walking, changing as she went, and Darien watched her as his satisfaction slowly turned to horror.

T
hey were going after her family. She stopped, frozen, watching as Heinrich shouted questions at her mother. The scene so stunned her that she could barely breathe.

“Where is this monster?” he yelled at her. “Where is this agent of Satan you’ve concealed?”

“My daughter is not a monster.”

Heinrich struck her mother, and Maria flinched from the blow.
Have I done this?

Darien stood with her, whispering that she was a predator, a killer. A monster.

She wanted to deny it. She wasn’t Lucina, bent on bringing death and pain. Her parents had loved her, whatever her origin.

Heinrich grabbed Władysław’s arm and pulled her brother forward, bringing a dagger up to his throat. “You are
all
complicit in concealing this thing! Do I need to demonstrate the seriousness of this to you? Confess that you’ve harbored this demon …”

Darien whispered that they must kill them all.

She was the predator; they were prey. Seeing the German hold her brother, she could easily imagine her jaws crushing the life from Heinrich’s throat. She could tear out his belly and feast on his steaming entrails.

She
could
kill the whole wretched lot of them. They needed to die, and it was her purpose to slaughter them. The wolf conceded that Darien was right, and that she truly lusted for the blood of these men.

All these thoughts gripped her, and she knew she was damned.

Because if Darien was right, then so was Heinrich. A monster such as she had no place within God’s creation. Josef was right, and she was a soulless demon spawned from Hell to deceive the righteous.

To deceive herself.

She prayed for strength even though she knew that for her to do so was probably a blasphemy. She walked out of the woods, pulling the demon wolf back inside herself. When she stepped upon the road across from her home, she was clothed only in naked human flesh.

I
f he hadn’t already known that something was deeply wrong, Josef understood it when Maria’s stepmother looked into his eyes. When she said that her daughter was not a monster, she said it to Josef, even though it was Heinrich questioning her. But
if Komtur Heinrich noticed the direction of her pleas, he didn’t care to acknowledge it.

Josef looked around and saw fear in everyone’s eyes. The Poles held back in the wake of Heinrich’s anger, watching the German interrogate their own without a whispered objection. Even Telek seemed loath to challenge Heinrich now.

Josef wondered if everyone was trapped in the same nightmare paralysis he felt. When Heinrich struck the woman, Telek finally moved, saying, “Brother Heinrich, that is enough.”

Josef wondered if he was the only one who heard Telek’s voice. Josef’s master certainly didn’t acknowledge it. Instead he pulled the oldest of her sons to him, holding a dagger to the boy’s throat.