Wolf's Cross (40 page)

Darien’s entire body went rigid, and his jaws opened in a breathless gasp, letting her shoulder slip free. Her back slid down the tree against a slick of her own blood as she twisted her hand, making him feel the pain she did. When he fell from her, she tore her hand away, castrating him in a spray of fresh blood.

Then she ran, limping, deeper into the forest.

She knew he would recover from the insult, just as the wound she had chewed into his neck had healed.

She panted as she limped into the ghost-gray woods. She was horribly handicapped now. Darien outweighed her and was stronger. The only advantage she’d had over him was speed, and the bolt embedded in her thigh had cost her that. But she had to stop him somehow. Otherwise he would just keep killing and killing and killing …

She had distracted him twice now, focused his attention on her, but that couldn’t last. She knew that the next time he caught up with her, he would either kill her or leave her in such a state that she’d be unable to do anything to stop him.

She couldn’t do anything
now
. She didn’t have the strength to sever his neck the way he had done so casually to the people he had attacked.

Behind her, she heard Darien’s howls, and in it she heard a cry for her own blood.

Why wasn’t she healing? He had only bitten and clawed her, but the savagery he had done to her wasn’t repairing itself. Blood poured from her ragged shoulder, and her left arm hung limp, hand dangling from a flayed wrist. But none of that had been done by silver. The only wounds that shouldn’t heal were the wound in her shoulder and the bolt in her leg …

God in Heaven, the bolt!

Darien howled, closer now.

She half-fell, half-leaned against a tree. The silver tip of the
bolt in her leg was preventing her body from healing. She reached down and gripped the shaft with a shaking hand.

The pads of her inhuman, half-lupine hand were slick with smears of Darien’s blood, and she couldn’t find a grip. Her hand slid off, firing an agonizing spasm down her leg that dropped her to the ground.

“Please God, don’t let me bleed to death because of this.” She rubbed the gore off on the fur of her leg and gripped the bolt again. She gasped. “At least not before I end this.”

She pulled, tearing the bolt free. She felt it rip from her flesh, the pain echoing through all her wounds, her shoulder and arm trembling as her body finally began to repair the damage. She tried to push herself upright, but her wounded leg gave way beneath her.

She rolled onto her back and groaned, feeling as if all her strength was leaking away through her shoulder and leg. As if her body itself was collapsing, draining away. She grabbed her leg, trying to hold herself inside.

Her hand held on to the wound—a wound in soft, hairless flesh.

“Please, God, no,” she whispered. She glanced down at herself and saw her body: the same human body she had grown up with. The wolf had abandoned her. “No, no, no!”

She tried to push herself up, tried to call the beast back before Darien—

As if the thought had called him forth from Hell, Darien sprang from the fog—furious, intact, and covered in the blood of a dozen people. His forepaws twisted into clawed hands as he landed on top of her, painfully slamming her naked shoulders into the root of a tree, holding her upper arms to the ground.

He stared down at her with a distorted lupine face, the fur of his cheeks matted black with blood, panting foul gore-tainted
breath. Threads of drool dripped onto her face, her neck, her breasts.

“Maria,” the wolf growled, bending down so his face was a hairsbreadth from her own. “This will stop now.”

She struggled, pushing against him with her arms and her one good leg. But even if she hadn’t been weakened, she never would have had the strength to dislodge him.

“No place to run,” he whispered into her ear, the clotted fur of his muzzle brushing against her cheek. “My mate, my bitch.”

She felt the wolf’s unsheathed manhood burning against the naked flesh of her leg, and she screamed at him:
“No!”

Not like this, not ever again
.

“You can’t refuse me,” he said. “You don’t have the strength. You don’t have the will.”

She pushed against him with her leg, but it was like trying to hold up a toppling tree. She tried to kick his newly healed testicles, but the sole of her foot slid on still-bloody fur, and then a massive paw came down and slammed her ankle to the ground, pinning it.

He grabbed her face, cupping her chin, squeezing her cheeks in a furred inhuman hand. “Do you enjoy the pain?” he whispered.

Her free right arm pounded on his back. With his hand holding her jaw shut, she couldn’t even scream anymore.

He forced his muzzle down in a perverse kiss as he forced himself between her legs. Her hand flailed ineffectively against him until she felt something on the ground next to her.

Her fist seized on the crossbow bolt as he lifted his face from hers and rammed himself inside her, tearing her open. “You were always meant to be mine.”

“No, I wasn’t!”
She brought the bolt up over her head, and his eyes widened as she brought it down with all the strength she had left, impaling his pale blue eye. It hit some resistance as his body
spasmed in shock; then it tore free from her hand as he pulled his head away.

The sounds from him were incoherent—half howl, half scream: the growling voice of Hell itself. With a jerk, he tore the bolt out of his face, leaving a dark crater hemorrhaging blood. And unlike the wound she had bitten in his jugular, it didn’t heal.

“You. A-are. M-mine.” His voice slurred and growled, so much the wolf now that she may have imagined the words. He trembled oddly, and his right arm dangled limp at his side. But his left hand wrapped itself around her throat, crushing her windpipe, stealing her breath.

“You. Are. Mine.” Blood poured from his ruined face, and his muscles twitched asymmetrically. And as her consciousness faded, she prayed that she had spent the last of her life giving him a mortal wound.

A
s the monster ran for the woods, Josef got to his feet in time to see one of the surviving knights of the Order take aim with a crossbow.

“No,” he called out. “You might hit—”

The man didn’t listen, and Josef’s fears were confirmed when he saw the bolt sprout from Maria’s thigh before the pair of them disappeared into the forest.

Behind him, Maria’s mother sobbed, “My daughter!”

Władysław cradled his mother and looked at Josef with an accusing stare more cutting than any words.

“I will do what I can to save her,” Josef whispered.

He ran toward the road. As he passed the front of the cottage, a mailed hand grabbed his shoulder. “What fool thing are you doing?”

He turned to faced the barrel chest of Wojewoda Telek Rydz.

“My duty.”

Telek hooked his head back toward the road. “To him?” A few of the uninjured Polish guardsmen were tending to the Komtur’s wounds. He lived, but appeared unconscious. Josef looked about and saw that half the men had fallen injured, and half who had
fallen were unquestionably dead. He was one of only four men of the Order still breathing.

“To God,” he said carefully. “I made a vow to protect the innocent.”

“There’s no honor in suicide, lad.”

“Is there honor in blocking my way?”

Telek lowered his hand and said, “Take some men with you, so you have some chance.”

“No,” Josef said. “You cannot leave the wounded here alone. Take them into the cottage, where it’s defensible.” Then he ran, before Telek could delay him any longer.

From behind him, he heard the Polish knight say, “Godspeed.”

God help us all
, Josef thought.

H
e ran through the forest, following gouges the beast had left in the forest floor as it ran. The woods were silent except for an occasional demonic howl that seemed to echo from everywhere at once. He passed a horrid scene where blood and fur and bits of flesh were smeared thick on the ground and the trees.

From there he followed an unmistakable trail of blood, and the howls became louder, more urgent, more horrible.

But worst was when he heard a human voice—Maria’s voice—screaming,
“No!”
Followed by what had to be the voice of Satan come to earth—a pained, manic howl that sounded as if it should rend the very flesh from its throat.

He came upon the hellish scene and nearly howled himself.

The beast’s fur was red and black with clotted gore across the whole of its body. It snarled, the left side of the face toward Josef, dominated by an empty, bleeding eye socket. It cared nothing for
Josef. Blind to him, it was focused on the tiny white form underneath it.

It was crouched over Maria’s limp human body, horribly violating her as it kept one hand wrapped around her neck. It choked her, slamming her head into the ground.

Josef couldn’t find the breath to scream. He ran, swinging his silvered sword, bringing it down on the beast’s neck.

But he didn’t have the strength or the momentum to sever the monster’s neck. He managed only to tear a gaping wound, exposing the monster’s spine but not severing it. The creature reared, dropping Maria’s body, and turned to face him.

It made a predatory sound deep in its throat, dragging its right leg as it turned and raising its left hand toward him. Half its face was ruined, and it stared at him with a single, hideously human eye. The left half of its face, under the ruined eye, turned up in a fang-bearing smile that could chill death itself.

Then it sprang at him—faster than a man, even in its horribly crippled state. It was all Josef could do to lift the point of his sword, only to have the hilt jerk free with a wrist-snapping force.

The fetid jaws opened to tear out his throat as they fell upon him. He felt the teeth against his skin, and the hot outrush of breath, the slither of its tongue against his Adam’s apple.

But the jaws did not close.

He looked up, pain flaring in his wrist and arm as the full weight of the thing pressed him into the ground. He stared up into the bloody crater that had been its left eye. No breath, no motion. Dead.

He sucked in a breath, calling out, “Maria!”

Please, God, do not let her be gone. Please …

“Maria!”

He heard someone grunt, and the corpse pinning him shifted. For a panicked moment he thought the monster was coming back to life; then it rolled off him. It landed on its back next to
him, a silvered sword impaling it through the neck upward, burying itself deep inside the monster’s skull.

Above him, Maria stood gasping for breath, sweating, covered in blood. She wobbled on her wounded leg and fell to her knees next to him. “Josef,” she whispered, placing her hand on his chest. “I’m glad it’s you.”

He reached up with his uninjured hand and grasped hers.

She closed her eyes and lowered her head. “Please be quick.”

He sat up, wincing at the pain in his stomach and his wrist. “Be quick?”

“You came to kill us, didn’t you?”

He touched the side of her face and said quietly, “Him. Not you.”

Her eyes opened and she looked at him almost as if he had offended her. “I am a monster, just as he was. A soulless demon. You said so.”

“I was wrong.”

“Do you mean to torment me now? Do you know what I could have done—”

“What have you done?”

“I could—”

“Maria?” She looked at him, her eyes moist with tears, skin pale from loss of blood. “What have you done? How many lives have you taken? How many men have you left crippled or dying?”

She shook her head. “None yet. You have to stop me before I do. Before I become like him.”

“You aren’t going to become like him.”

“How can you say that? You’ve seen what I am.”

“I can say that because I’ve seen
who
you are.”

Her lip trembled and she half-leaned, half-collapsed into his arms. He held her with his good arm as she sobbed into his shoulder, “I don’t want this.”

“It’s over,” Josef said. “The monster is dead.”

“I’m a monster, too. The Devil has taken me.”

“Have you killed innocents? Have you renounced Christ?”

“No, but I—I—gave myself to Darien. He took me and I
wanted
it.”

He held her tighter. “Are those worse than the sins of any man?”

“I’m a servant of the Devil.”

“I am unarmed.”

“What?”

“A true servant of Satan would finish me in my weakness. If you believe you are evil, if you
are
a monster, why don’t
you
kill
me
?”

She let him go and stared at him in horror. “Josef, I couldn’t.”

He smiled. He placed his fingers on her lips and said, “Do you wish God to forgive you?”

“Y-yes.”

“Then He will.”