Ulrik

by Steven E Wedel

  “Was it fun?” His chin tilted up and his dark eyes probed her face.

  “No.” Her voice cracked on the new lie. “I’m sorry, Joey. Yes, I guess it was fun. But it was bad. You can’t hurt people. I –”

  “You mean like I hurt Jenny today?”

  “Yes.” There was no sound in her voice. Shara cleared her throat, licked her lips with a dry tongue and tried again. “Yes, Joey. That was a very bad thing you did. You must never, ever bite anyone.”

  “But she tasted good. I wanted to bite her again, but Mrs. Lentz wouldn’t let me. She got mad, but I think she was scared, too. Her face looked funny and she smelled bad.”

  “Joey ... you just can’t do that,” Shara said. “If you bite people, it might make them sick, too.”

  “Jenny might turn into a wolf?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then we could play together.” He seemed to brighten at the idea. “Maybe she’d like me better if she was a wolf, too.”

  “The other kids don’t like you much, do they?” She knew the answer. It had been the same for her, and she had not known the curse of the wolf as a child.

  “The boys fight with me. And the girls tell me to go away when I try to play with them.” He couldn’t look at her as he said it. Shara wanted to hug him, to tell him it would be okay. But it wouldn’t – at least not for a long time. I’m trying to discipline him; this is no time for hugs.

  “They’ll outgrow it,” Shara said. Children are like animals … more sensitive than adults.

  “I don’t want my shot, Mom,” Joey said. “I want to be like the wolf in my dreams. The other wolves like me when I’m with them.”

  “No, Joey, you can’t do that.”

  “Why not? You did it. You said it was fun. I want to do it, too. I want to go see Jenny while I’m a wolf. She’ll like me then. If she doesn’t, then I’ll – ”

  “No!” Shara covered his mouth with her hands. His eyes widened and he tried to back away. She couldn’t stop herself this time. She grabbed her son and pulled him close, pressing his head against her breast and holding him there. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. It’s the wolf talking.” She lifted his face and held him at arm’s length. “You have to take your shot. Next week. On Monday, before you go to school.”

  “No!” He jumped from his mother’s arms and stood glaring at her, his small fists clenched against his thighs, his eyes large and dark and angry. This, Shara realized, is the child two teachers requested be transferred from their classes.

  “Settle down, Joey,” Shara said. “The shot is –”

  “I’m not taking it!” he screamed.

  Shara reached for him and he slapped at her hand. She started to rise from the bed and their eyes locked. She froze halfway off the bed. Joey’s eyebrows, always dark, had grown heavier, thicker, and were pointing down his nose in a sharp “V.” His lips drew back and Shara could see his teeth. His teeth. The fangs she had not seen in six years, not since improving the serum to a point it didn’t have to be given during the transformation.

  “Joey, come here,” Shara said in as calm a voice as she could manage. He didn’t move. Shara slowly left the bed and took a step toward him, approaching him as most people would approach a strange, injured animal. Joey backed up a step.

  Shara lunged for him and her hand caught his shirt, tearing the sleeve. Joey’s head bobbed in a quick motion and his teeth tore the flesh of Shara’s wrist. She jerked her hand back and stood looking at the flowing blood for a moment.

  A moment too long.

  Joey was gone when she looked away from her wound.

  Shara went after him. The front door of the house was open and his footprints in the light snow led to the gate. The electricity was turned off because Chris was repairing a section damaged by a fallen tree limb. Joey had climbed the tall gate. His footprints led away through the snow, toward the south of the house. Shara went over the gate and after her son.

  Within a hundred yards of the fence she found his clothes, torn to rags, and the footprints in the snow were no longer those of a boy.

  Oh dear God. He’s growing too fast. How long have I been miscalculating his serum, not giving him enough? What if I’d given him too much?

  She shook off the thoughts and concentrated on following the wolf prints into the woods. She lost the trail on the south side of a slope where the sun had melted the snow, leaving only a rocky surface that held no prints.

  A movement in the brush at the top of the slope caught her eye and she ran toward it. A young wolf stepped out of the bushes. Shara stopped, staring at the animal that was her son. The wolf was yellowish except for a mark of black on his chest. His eyes were full of wonder. The beast stayed several yards away from her.

  “Come here, Joey.”

  The wolf retreated, gave a last look, then darted between two trees and streaked toward the distant mountains.

  “Come to me,” Shara whispered, no longer talking to her son but to the wolf in her own soul – the beast that had plagued her for so long. There was no response. It had been over seven years since she had allowed the wolf to take her. Now, the beast would not come.

  “What would Ulrik do?” she asked herself.

  He never would have taken the shot.

  Shara went home. She was cold. Her feet, covered only in heavy socks, were wet and numb from running through the snow. Inside her home, she gathered some gear: a rifle loaded with tranquilizers, food, a pup tent, her .357 handgun and a box of silver bullets. She considered waiting for Chris, or going to him before leaving, but decided against it.

  He would be furious. He would hate her again for a while. He would be reminded that his wife and son were not normal. He would complain again about having to live his life under a false name to avoid their enemies.

  Shara left him a note, leaving the details unspoken, then went out to her Jeep. Joey was young; he would be reckless, and that should make him easy to catch. Shara’s concern was that, since it was not yet time for his cycle, Joey would not be able to hold the wolf shape after his anger waned and he would be alone, naked, and human in the woods.

  Her eyes found her wrist as she drove away from her house. The bleeding had stopped. Joey had tasted blood – that was sure to make him more dangerous.

  Ulrik

  Ringing, ringing, ringing. The man known as Josef Ulrik opened his eyes and stared at the beige telephone for several seconds before letting a hairy hand snake from the covers and slip the receiver from the cradle. He held it to his ear and listened for a moment.

  “Hello,” he said at last.

  “I have him.” It was a female voice; a familiar voice. Ulrik thought for a moment, then placed the voice’s owner.

  “Kiona?” he asked. “Have who?”

  “The boy,” she answered. “Our Alpha.”

  “You have Joey?” Ulrik jerked to a sitting position. “Why? How? What are you doing? I did not yet order that.”

  “I have him,” she repeated. “We’ve been together for several hours. He is having his first cycle. The first he can remember. I am comforting him.”

  “What?” Ulrik forced himself to clear his mind and focus on what she was saying. “Why do you have him? Did you steal him?”

  “I found him in the woods,” she said. “He’s confused. He says he dreams about being a wolf, and that his mother makes him take medicine he doesn’t like. He said he bit a girl at school and his mother got mad at him. He ran away from home. He says he wants to learn the truth about himself.”

  “You did not tell him?” Ulrik raised a hand to his face and pressed hard against his forehead. Shara will be so angry with me. “What does he know?”

  “Not much,” Kiona answered. “I’m leaving it for you to explain to him.”

  “Yes.” Ulrik sighed. “It is for me to explain. Go to Las Sombras, to my house. I will leave immediately and meet you. Use the route we discussed so that you cannot ea
sily be followed. Tell Joey as little as possible.” He hung up the phone and got out of bed to find his suitcase.

  Ulrik packed clothes, toiletries, personal records and a few books, then looked around the small house at the disarrayed collection of brick-a-brack he’d accumulated in the few years he’d lived there. The only items he considered taking were the photographs of Dora and of Shara and her family. He walked over to study them, staring especially at Joey’s face.

  “I will see you in the flesh very soon, my cub,” he said. “Sooner than I would have liked, and under circumstances I did not choose. But it will be good.”

  Ulrik had seen the boy himself once before, very soon after he was born. He’d stayed with Shara and her family for a short while, arriving days after Joey’s birth and leaving very soon after Shara first injected him with the serum that repressed the Gift. He’d not seen any of them himself since he left that day, though Kiona regularly sent him photographs.

  “You will have many questions for me,” Ulrik said to Joey’s picture. “Just as I had for my own mentor.”

  * * *

  “There are only a few people in the world who share our Gift?” Magwa asked Gar as they walked through the forest in human form. His father was teaching Magwa which of the native nuts, berries and roots were edible.

  “A few? Did I say that? Well, there are not many. When compared to the human population, we are few,” Gar said.

  “How many?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Where did we come from? Who was first to have the Gift?”

  “I do not know.”

  “You must know something.”

  Gar stopped walking and finally turned to face Magwa, now thirteen years old, tall and muscular, his flesh browned so that he looked almost like an Indian boy, except for the hair that always lightened under the summer sun, darkening during the shorter days of winter. “This is not the lesson I planned for today.”

  “But it is the lesson I want,” Magwa answered.

  Gar chuckled. “I will not have all the answers you want.”

  “I will accept what you have.”

  “So be it.” Gar looked around, found a fallen tree trunk and sat down. He took a strip of dried venison from his pouch, offered it to the boy, who refused, then bit into it himself. “It is told that our Gift was meant as a curse,” he said.

  Magwa frowned. “How can such a thing be thought a curse?”

  “To people raised to believe in different gods, it is seen as a curse to become an animal,” Gar said. “They believe animals have no souls and so cannot go to a life after death.”

  “A life after death? Is there such a thing?”

  “I do not know,” Gar answered. “It would be welcome if I could meet my Gretchen there, but I do not expect other than a bed of earth when I die.”

  “Who was first to receive the Gift?”

  “An entire village of Northmen, so the legend says,” Gar said. “They were a brutal lot. They lived by killing others, eating human flesh, the livestock their victims owned, and selling whatever valuables they found. After one raid in which they thought they had killed everyone, they feasted, then danced round a huge fire. But they had not killed an old witch who lived in the village. She found them and cast a spell, turning them into wolves and bears. They ran from the fire and anyone who lived through an attack by those creatures earned the Gift that we share.”

  “What happened to those people? The villagers? Could they become human again?”

  “I do not know.”

  “How did you receive the Gift?”

  “I was bitten by a wolf in my homeland,” Gar said. “He was killing our sheep, so one day I went out to kill him. He was a monster of a wolf, I thought when I found him approaching our pen. I shot him with my musket, and you know that I always hit that which I shoot at. My ball stopped the wolf, but it did not knock him down, even. He turned to look at me where I hid behind a tree. Ah, I was afraid. I began trying to reload my musket, but I knew I would never be ready to fire again before he was upon me.

  “The wolf came running at me, his eyes full of burning moonlight. I stopped trying to ready my musket for firing and turned it around to use as a club. When the wolf leapt at me, I swung my musket hard enough to break the stock against his skull. He fell. I dropped the pieces of my gun and ran toward the house. Gretchen was in the doorway, ready to slam it closed as soon as I got inside.

  “But the wolf caught me,” Gar said. “He dragged me down from behind. I turned to fight, but all that did was give him the chance to get my throat in his jaws. He was monstrously big. He held me there and I waited to die. I heard Gretchen screaming and hoped she’d stay in the house. The sheep were bleating, but they were not as scared as me.” He paused and pulled another bite from his jerky.

  “He let go of my throat. He let me scramble to my feet. I backed away from him, then turned to run again. He jumped on my back and brought me down again. This time he rolled me over and nuzzled my throat. And then … and then he bit me on the arm.” Gar tapped his left bicep with the piece of meat. “He bit me on the arm, then ran away. A month later, I turned into a wolf and killed four of my neighbor’s goats during the five days I was a wolf.”

  “What of the wolf that bit you?” Magwa interrupted. “What did he teach you?”

  “Nothing. He taught me nothing. I never saw him again. I never saw him as a man. I do not know who he was.”

  “Then how do you know about the village and the old witch?”

  “A traveler told me. A gypsy. They are people without homes, who travel the countryside of Europe, dancing, telling fortunes and selling charms to the people. They passed near our village. I hoped they might help me, so I followed them when they left and when they next set up camp I went to them and explained what had happened. An old woman told me about the village and the spell the witch cast on it. She said the world was younger then and magic was stronger. Those first dancers, she said, are called the Old Ones and part of their curse is to live forever as animals unless someone learns how to free them. She had no spell to take away the curse.”

  “Curse? You called it that once before.”

  “Yes. I thought it was a curse then. My neighbors feared me without knowing it was I who killed their livestock. For a time. Then they grew suspicious. That’s when Gretchen and I decided to come here, to the New World. She died on the voyage. It was not until I met our Indian hosts that I realized what we have is a Gift.”

  “What else did the gypsy tell you? What else do you know of us?” Magwa asked.

  “Only one thing,” Gar answered. “She told me that someday the Pack would gather again. That the weak would be culled like I used to cull the weak lambs. There would be a woman who could give birth to our kind without an act of violence. She would have a son and he would lead the Pack to a great victory.”

  “A victory? Over who?”

  “I do not know. She said only that the Mother would come from a faraway place.”

  “The New World?”

  “I do not know. My Gretchen is the only woman I care about, and she is gone.”

  Magwa’s eyes were thoughtful. “The Mother,” he said. “And a battle. I would like to find the Mother. Do you think that I could?”

  “I think that you ask a lot of questions and that you should concentrate on learning what you can eat if you find yourself alone in the forest,” Gar said, swallowing the last of his jerky and rising from the log. “Enough with your questions. Come.”

  * * *

  “Yes, you will have many questions,” Ulrik repeated, still looking at Joey’s photograph. “You are younger than I was when I asked them. And I have better answers than Gar. Your mother asked me the questions you will ask and I did not answer her honestly. Would she have acted differently had I been more truthful?” He shook his head.

  “The Pack is gathering. If Shara does not accept her role as Mother, she may become a cull herself,” Ulrik said quietly, letting his eyes s
lide from Joey to Shara. “There can be no culls among us.”

  Shara

  Shara put the Jeep Cherokee into four-wheel-drive mode and left the narrow highway, bouncing through the snow cover toward the tree line. She parked close to the trees and killed the engine, looking into the depths of the forest. According to her best judgment, she was parked near where she’d last seen Joey. The sun was sinking and the blowing wind promised another snow. Shara pocketed her keys, grabbed the rifle loaded with tranquilizer darts, and got out of the Jeep.

  The wind had more of a bite than it had when she left home. She scanned the darkening sky and saw that the clouds, which had been only scuds earlier, were now thick and ominous. She hurried into the woods, the wind blowing after her, howling between the trunks of trees, pushing at her back, telling her to hurry, hurry, although her quest was useless.

  Out of sight of her vehicle, Shara paused. She looked around, saw nobody, and leaned her rifle against a tree. Should I take off my clothes? She decided it probably was useless, but if there was a hint of success, she would strip.

  Shara closed her eyes and concentrated, searching for the mental trigger that would transform her from a woman out of her element in the winter forest to a wolf that could scent a trail and run with the wind. But there was nothing. Nothing but thoughts of Joey, of the cold, of the serum she injected herself with monthly to prevent her body from changing shape. Nothing but failure. She opened her eyes, grabbed the rifle and hurried onward.

  After about an hour of searching – and just as the last of the sunlight was waning in the forest – Shara found Joey’s tracks. They meandered here and there, obviously with no real purpose. She followed them, pulling a flashlight from a coat pocket when the night became too deep to allow her to follow the tracks in the snow.

  The trail led southeast, looping around trees and boulders and hopping over frozen streams. She found a place where her son had stopped and urinated on a rock, the snow at the base stained yellow. As she was looking at the stain she noticed something else. Not all the wolf prints in the snow were the same size. She knelt beside one of the strange tracks and studied it.