Wolf Hunted

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “Axlam?” I called. Was the Yggdrasil magic embedded in my scalp somehow connecting to an ancient heritage of East Africa?

  She’d been hurt. Shot, just before the dome formed. She’d been standing right next to me. And Dagrun, she’d slammed her fist into St. Martin and he’d responded. He’d torqued her body.

  Where were the women?

  “Frank.”

  Axlam was right there, right next to me, seated on the end of the closest pew. She stared at her blood-covered, now-gloved hands. The wound on her shoulder had soaked her bright blue jacket and added a sudden metallic acidity to the cold scent of the snow.

  “Your jacket is ruined,” she said.

  I also bled, and my blood had soaked the shoulder of my jacket more so than hers had her own. “I’ll be fine.” She was right on the edge of the pew, and like me, too close to the wall for comfort.

  “Are you…” Her wolf was here, somewhere. It, like us, was trapped inside the dome, and even though it tethered to her body, it wasn’t here.

  “I am taking… measures.” She scooted down the bench. “Sit, son of Victor.”

  Once, not long after I moved to Alfheim, I’d asked Gerard about the change. A werewolf could hold it at bay in much the same way as a person could hold a noxious smell at bay by holding their breath.

  It worked, but only for a moment.

  And after a while, that breath needed taking. You’d either black out, and then there’d be none of your humanity when the change came, or you could just gulp in the air and deal with the bad fumes, and the breaking bones. With the ripped skin and the popped eyeballs. With the teeth and the claws.

  Axlam must have found a way stay awake while jamming a breathing tube down her own throat.

  I glanced around the church. “Where’s Dagrun? St. Martin?”

  She pointed with her chin. “The altar.”

  I looked again.

  Ornately carved vines both coiled and grew around the living altar while also being of the main column of wood. Leaves that were green—yet also golden, orange, and red—grew, rustled, and fell. Rain touched the crown over the altar, as did wind and snow.

  The unconscious St. Martin lay facedown on the snow-covered floor. He suffered at least two fractures to his right leg. Blood pooled under his mouth and nose. He breathed, if barely.

  Dagrun, her back pressed against the altar, sat with her legs out and her arms at her sides. Her armor had vanished, and she wore only the jeans and t-shirt she’d been in at my house. Yet she showed no wounds, nor had her personal magicks been disrupted.

  “She still glamours.” Axlam twisted enough to brush against my pocket. “Leave those plates here, Frank. Set them on the pew.”

  “Plates? What plates?” I saw no food.

  Axlam twisted her head as if listening to someone. “They’re in your pocket.”

  I patted along my jacket, and sure enough, I carried two daguerreotype photographic plates. One was of St. Martin close up, and the other was St. Martin and the descending wolf maw. “I don’t remember finding these.” Perhaps they fell out of Rose’s notebook before we were attacked.

  Axlam pinched her eyes closed. “My wolf makes a deal.”

  A deal? “Axlam…”

  She shook her head. “Please, Frank.”

  “Okay.” I pulled both plates from my pocket and set them on the wood of the pew.

  “Thank you,” Axlam said.

  Something huge and wild brushed against my side. It pushed between us and the wall as it ran headlong into the dome between the altar and the front pew.

  A howl erupted from the spirit. The dome vibrated, and for another split second, the reality of the blizzard reasserted itself. A bone-chilling gust hit my face. Shadows snapped down onto us. Axlam and I sat on the ground. Dagrun leaned against a tree with St. Martin at her feet.

  Then it was gone, and we were back in Yggdrasil’s church.

  “The moon calls,” Axlam said.

  She should be changing. Dagrun should be at her side filtering the wolf’s rage and offering magical support.

  But she was not. “Is this your deal?” I asked. “To hold off your wolf until it is safe for you to turn?”

  She nodded.

  “What did you trade? Besides the plates.”

  “The same as you, son of Victor. A promise to help when the time comes.” She gripped her arm. “Do you know what the elves do, when we run?” she asked.

  I didn’t go out. I wasn’t privy to the magic, but I did listen to what the elves said. “Hold the feral in check,” I said.

  “They tell the other elves that it’s their guidance that keeps our feral side under control, but that’s not correct. They act as flashlights in the dark. They illuminate Alfheim so that we can clearly see our human lives.” Axlam pressed her hand over the wound on her arm. “The wolf, it can consume a person. It can eat the sun and the moon and it can leave you with nothing but an eternal blackness. Nights like tonight make the wolf stronger.”

  Gerard and Remy once told me the same thing. That the elves illuminate the dark corners where the beast draws its power.

  The power that brushed my side rammed the dome again. The magic rumbled, but held.

  The power howled.

  “Your wolf is trying to escape, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Axlam nodded. “I am the last of the pack to change. My mate’s scent touches my wolf. I smell his fear and his rage. I am missing. Our cub is missing. The Elf King blazes for Gerard and holds high that bright flame to illuminate his humanity.”

  Could I help? I had no idea what to do.

  She glanced toward the altar. “We are the only pack that runs with elves.”

  I knew that. They were also the largest and most stable pack in the world.

  “They do help.” She stared at St. Martin. “But the truth is that the politics of the run helps the elves just as much, maybe more, than they help us.”

  All the magicals in Alfheim understood the symbiosis of the elves and the werewolves, though like most people, I’d held the belief that the elves held a stronger position than the wolves.

  “We need to get you out of here,” I said. “Both you and Dagrun.”

  Axlam’s wolf rammed the dome again. This time, she flinched.

  She wasn’t controlling it as well as she usually did.

  “The silver has weakened my hold,” she said. “I’m having an allergic reaction along with bleeding all over my coat.” She looked down at the wound. “Help me with this,” she said. “Rip the coat, but not too much. I still need it against the cold.”

  My damaged insides, though still painful, had reformed into something passible as a shoulder blade, and allowed movement. I carefully ripped her jacket, but not so much that the sleeve fell off.

  She removed the pins that held her hijab in place, and pulled off the scarf. Underneath she wore a second scarf, wrapped tightly around her head.

  “It’s cold out, Frank,” she said.

  I chuckled.

  Axlam grinned. “Tie it around the wound.”

  I wound the scarf tightly around her bicep and knotted it off just as her wolf slammed into the magic again.

  “Help me stand,” she said. “The silver is making me woozy.”

  I offered my hand. She took it, and together we exited the pew.

  “The elves, like their gods, think they have all things wolf under control,” Axlam muttered.

  She wasn’t wrong. We were all well aware of elven blind spots. I’d long believed one of the reasons Arne and Dag brought in strays was because we filled in the holes. We strays were strategic.

  “He might have a revenge fantasy, but this magic,” Axlam waved her good hand at the dome, “it doesn’t care about me.” She took a step toward the altar. “Nor did his father.”

  We also knocked into the pews. “Careful,” I said.

  “I think you and I have that in common, Frank. Suffering at the hands of entitled men of hubris.”

 
I helped her toward Dagrun. “Aye, Axlam, this we do.” Though I fully understood why her strength and resolve needed to be so much stronger than my own. I could pass as one of those men of hubris. Axlam could not.

  “Legend says the first werewolf was brought to heel by a god.” Axlam gripped my arm. “The wolf manifests when the moon obscures that god and unleashes the many rages of repression.”

  Arne did say the magicals were born of the friction of mundane against the nature of the world. Las Vegas Wolf had described some of these frictions as new ways. And here was Axlam, a woman who’d been sucked into another culture’s old rage by an evil man.

  But the first werewolf? The poor soul who originated the curse that Axlam, her husband, his brother, her son—all of the Alfheim Pack and every werewolf everywhere—carried? He was lost in the mists of time. Unlike the vampires who traced their origins to Vlad the Impaler, no one knew the first werewolf’s name. They did, though, know that werewolves have been with mundanes since the mundanes turned wolves into dogs.

  Perhaps that first werewolf wasn’t a good soul. Perhaps he was. No one knew. But he did make the first Faustian deal with one of the Earth’s most primal gods.

  Axlam paid the price to contain that dark canine magic every time she changed.

  “Gerard and Remy have always suspected a major Wolf spirit out there. One bigger and meaner than all the individual cultural manifestations. There’s too much continuity between all of the variations of werewolf. We’re all pack, unlike the elves and the fae or the kami. There are a lot of different types of werewolves, but the magic is the same.”

  I nodded.

  “I feel it, Frank,” she whispered. “The World Wolf. I feel its presence every day.” We took another step toward Dagrun. “After Rose passed, did you ever feel her presence?” Axlam asked.

  “Like a ghost?” Presences could mean all sorts of different things, when magicals were involved.

  “Not a ghost ghost,” she said. “Not like the manifestations your brother sent after you when he showed up. I mean that memory presence, the kind you get when your memory of someone, your longing and your loss, hits the parts of your mind that build your perception of the world. That injection into reality of a very real part of you is, was, will always be your mirror of the missing.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I think so.”

  “I felt that way for decades after his father bit me.”

  I didn’t say anything. I let her speak.

  “Werewolves—all of us—feel that all the time about the Wolf world-spirit. Sometimes it’s small. Sometimes it takes over. Sometimes it’s old school loup-garou. Sometimes it’s a teenager in a Kenyan refugee camp.” She steeled herself for another step. “That mirror, that very real part of me that is the World Wolf, is right here.” She tapped her chest. “And here.” She tapped her temple. “I am pack first, no matter who I am.”

  Sometimes I felt that way about the presence of my father. I mirrored Victor Frankenstein the way Axlam mirrored the World Wolf, even though we didn’t mean—or want—to do so.

  “That is why the elves do not have everything wolf under control.”

  No, they didn’t.

  “There is no room in the pack for those who steal and whine,” Axlam muttered. “No place for the conniving or the manipulative. Everyone behaves or there are consequences.”

  We stopped within kicking distance of St. Martin.

  “I fear for my son.” Axlam’s wolf manifested in front of the altar and directly over St. Martin as a sleek midnight-black beast. Violets and blues danced along her coat, and reds and oranges through her snarling teeth.

  I’d never seen the wolf this real without a turning, yet she sniffed at St. Martin, a ten-foot-tall at the shoulders bundle of the raw rage of nature.

  Dagrun and St. Martin gasped awake at exactly the same time. But Dagrun, unlike the insect with the broken leg, was our Warrior Queen.

  She had one foot on St. Martin’s shoulder and a hand on his forehead before he finished sucking in his breath.

  He shrieked. She moved her hand so it covered his mouth, but not his nose, and looked up at Axlam’s wolf. “My friend,” she said. “What do you need?”

  The wolf sniffed her face, and magic moved between them.

  “Yes,” Dagrun said. “I understand.”

  “Your protocols be damned, Dagrun. You need to help Ed and his family,” Axlam said. “He is the town monster slayer. He is not a mundane who will hurt you.”

  She was talking as if she wasn’t going to make it out of this alive.

  Dag pinched her lips.

  “I will get you to the pack,” I said. “I promise.”

  Axlam touched my chest. “Thank you.”

  A new bolt of amber magic blasted from St. Martin’s eyes, ears, and mouth. It coiled out of his nose. And it pushed Dagrun away.

  He rolled onto his side. “Look at the puppy!” He wheezed. “You open my magicks, and she’s going to rampage, aren’t you, darling? Your mate is frantic out there in the snow, isn’t he? You exit my trap and all that dark wolf power is going to do exactly what my genie said it would! You’ll kill an elf or two. Maybe go into town and kill that annoying sheriff. You’ll do exactly what—”

  Dagrun slammed a hand over his mouth again, and lifted her free hand. Her fingers moved, and a sigil formed. “Frank,” she said. “You two need to leave now, while I can manipulate the magic.”

  She wasn’t coming.

  Dagrun moved so that she straddled St. Martin’s chest. “I can’t open the dome, but I can force it to allow you to leave. Do you understand?”

  Axlam touched my arm. “We will still be inside, but not at this location.”

  Dag nodded. “Get her to the pack, Frank. Find my husband. The shell must be ripped open.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  Dag pressed down on St. Martin’s face. “I am sorry, Axlam. I’m sorry I allowed this to happen. I’m sorry this magic hid its true nature.”

  Axlam closed her eyes. “Can you get Frank outside the magic?”

  Dag shook her head. “No.”

  “Frank.” Axlam gripped my hand. “You are inside the shell with me. When I change, you won’t be able to get away. Don’t let me hurt you.”

  I wouldn’t hurt her. Not to save myself.

  Axlam wiped at her eye. “Damn it, Frank.” She gave me a quick side-hug.

  “You need to be Axlam’s elf until you find the pack,” Dag said. “Talk to her. Keep her awake, do you understand? Her wolf will overwhelm everything we’ve done to hold it off. You must keep her awake so she turns and not the rage.”

  “I will,” I said to Dag, then to Axlam, “I will.”

  She nodded.

  “Go,” Dag said, and flashed her sigil against the side of my head.

  The piercing white-hot agony between my tattoo’s branches returned. It lifted off my skin as if drawn into the ice and snow of the blizzard and floated for a moment above St. Martin as a negative space relief of the magic that, right now, mitigated the worst of his amber shell.

  He stopped struggling.

  Axlam’s wolf pushed her snout into his face. “You came here because you wanted to see yourself as the tamer of the Wolf. That’s why you keep on about civility and management,” Axlam’s beast said-growled. “You want me on the ground begging. You want me to relive your father’s death to show your dominance because you’re perpetually terrified of your own shadow. You’re just another weak, twisted mind doing someone else’s evil.”

  He yelled once again against Dagrun’s hand.

  “You will never understand how pathetic you are.”

  “Frank!” Dagrun said. “Remember! Keep her awake.” Then the Queen of the Elves hit the dome with the fragmented relief of my scalp’s Yggdrasil.

  Chapter 25

  Cold wind raked across my face. Ice stuck in my ears, and snow to my eyelashes. The blizzard hid everything—trees, the ground, the sky—behind a veil of gunmetal g
ray.

  “Axlam,” I shouted. She had been right next to me. Dagrun and St. Martin had been in front of us no more than five feet away.

  But I could barely see my own hand in front of my face.

  “Dagrun!” I stumbled forward—and into Axlam. She was on the ground, on all fours. She panted and growled, and couldn’t be more than minutes from turning.

  “I’ll get you to the pack. I’ll get you to Arne. He’ll get the silver out of your arm. You’ll be okay.”

  The wound wasn’t tied. She still wore her scarf and her hands were bare again and showing signs of turning into claws.

  She was also located where, when we were inside the dome, her wolf had been standing over St. Martin. But he wasn’t here, and neither was Dagrun.

  “Axlam,” I touched her back. “Stand up. Please. Dag wanted me to get you to the pack.”

  She sat back on her heels. “Mate,” she snarled.

  Her eyes were fully wolf-like, and a hint of a muzzle pushed out around her nose and mouth.

  Axlam howled, and the wind howled right along with her. A gust hit us, but her howl didn’t travel with it. It reverberated inside the shell we still carried.

  I sucked in my breath as the vibration set my teeth on edge.

  Axlam yipped and covered her ears. “Hold it hold it hold it,” she said.

  I only wore my jacket. No gloves, no hat. I’d be fine, but Axlam in her human form would not. “Can you walk?” She’d said the silver was causing an allergic reaction and throwing off her balance.

  She snarled again, and shook her head. “Where… cub?”

  “I don’t know.” St. Martin hadn’t taken the kids. That was clear. And he had no knowledge of his boss taking them, either.

  But the “genie” could have still taken Jax and the girls.

  I swung Axlam up into my arms. “Can you get a scent through the shell? Do you smell Dagrun? The pack?”

  She stiffened as if holding her wolf back hurt worse than the gunshot wound. I had no doubt that it did. “Dag is…” she growled. “I will… hurt you… if change…”

  “Then hold it,” I said. “Which way should I go to get you to the pack?”

  Dagrun could take care of herself. Axlam needed to be my main worry at the moment.