Nadia's Children

by Steven E Wedel

  Thomas’s strong hands pressed her to him now. He stroked her back, her hair, and said the right things, though she didn’t hear them. Instead, she remembered something else, a letter Ulrik had written to her a long time ago. They’d been in the mountains and her training was at an end. He’d taught her how to live as a wolf, then left her in the night, leaving behind a letter and a small fortune.

  The time has come. We must go our separate ways.

  You have learned well, and I have much confidence you will be fine without me.

  “I don’t know how,” she whispered into the denim of Thomas’s shirt. “I don’t know how.”

  You have been a wonderful friend to an old man. My time with you has made me very happy.

  Shara sniffled one more time, then stopped. Ulrik would not want her to cry. He’d trusted her. He’d always trusted her. He’d always known her, even when she thought he’d been wrong. She remembered her two years as a wolf, when she’d been unable to regain her humanity and how he’d trapped her, taken care of her, helped her find herself again, then let her leave when she said she would find a cure for her curse.

  I know you will take care of yourself, he’d said before they’d parted.

  She took a deep breath, then pushed herself away from Thomas’s chest. She looked up at him and smiled, then whispered, “Thank you.” She hugged him quickly, then turned around, wiping the last tears from her face.

  Ulrik’s body was laid on the top of the pyre. His hands were folded on his chest, his face more peaceful than she’d seen it since before his last cycle, when he’d been shot. His suicide bullet had been through the heart, and somehow Shara knew he’d done that for her, too, so that she could see his face.

  The pallbearers stood by, each with a can of gasoline in their hands. They watched her, waiting.

  Shara approached the pyre, her eyes on Ulrik’s face, and for just a moment she felt the tears wanting to come back, the sobs wanting to break her down again, but she fought them off. I am done crying. There is work to be done. She stepped up and leaned over the still face of her mentor. Someone had neatly trimmed his gray-and-black beard, but his thick eyebrows were as bushy as she’d ever seen them. The deep lines around his eyes were smoothed and she recalled how they’d deepen when he laughed. His eyes were closed, but she could picture them. She remembered how they’d sparkle when he was happy and how dark and fierce they would look when he was angry. Shara sighed.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. She put her hand over his and leaned down to kiss his forehead. One final, lingering look, then she turned away and nodded at the men with the gasoline. They hurried forward and doused the body and the wood, then backed away.

  Holle came to Shara, her ancient, wise eyes sad but knowing. She held a burning torch in her right hand. “He was a great man,” Holle said, holding Shara’s gaze. “A great leader for the Pack. But you are the Mother. This falls to you.” She extended the torch to Shara.

  “I’ll need you,” Shara said as she took the flaming torch. Holle nodded. “Thank you.”

  Shara returned to the pyre, then turned to face those gathered around it. There were nearly fifty werewolves on the ranch now. About forty of them were gathered around her; the rest were on patrol. Shara took a deep breath.

  “Josef Ulrik brought us together,” she said, surprising herself with the firmness of her voice. She found Thomas’s eyes and he smiled at her. She looked from him to Holle and the ancient woman nodded. “He was a great man,” Shara said. “He set the course for us, and now it is up to us to continue on. He told me he doesn’t know the meaning of the ancient prophecies. The meaning, he told me, is up to us. And so it is.”

  She turned back to face the pyre and, without hesitation, shoved the torch into the pile of wood. The air exploded with heat, but she remained where she was as fire licked through the piled wood, then found the body. Finally, the smell of burning meat caused Shara to drop the torch onto the pyre and back off.

  Away from the roar of the fire, the world was filled with the sounds of howling. Shara turned and saw that everyone had taken to the in-between stage of their transformations, standing on thick, furry legs, wolfish heads lifted, mouths open so that their voices rose to heaven with the thick black smoke of the fire.

  Shara threw back her head and howled with them, her pregnant body refusing the change she’d not experienced fully in almost nine years. She longed for it now, wanted to be one with those around her, and the one who had left them. Her body wouldn’t change, but her voice was that of the wolf, of the wild, and she sang with her Pack.

  Fenris

  The night tide crashed against the rocks at the base of the cliff. Fenris didn’t really have a back yard, just a thin strip of grass that ended in rock, then a long, long drop to the ocean below. Sometimes, when the tide was out, as Kelley put it, there was sand at the bottom of the cliff. Other times, it was water. Jennifer Brown was seldom allowed near the edge of the precipice, or the front of the house. She spent most of her time on the patio that ran the entire length of the back of Fenris’s house. The seven-year-old girl was drawing pictures of her mother and father when she heard Walter talking in Fenris’s room. Fenris liked to leave his patio door open, with just the screen closed.

  Jenny looked up when Walter started talking. He probably hadn’t noticed her sitting outside, coloring in the near dark. Jenny saw that Fenris was watching Walter, too.

  The burly mercenary leaned forward and poured more brown liquid into a glass. Jenny knew it was called whiskey, and that Walter liked the kind that came in a purple cloth bag. He scared her, but he usually gave her his whiskey bags and she kept things in them. As she watched, Walter dropped into a chair, waving at the glass with the half-empty bottle he held. Fenris picked it up, his blue eyes fixed on the bigger man.

  “You think liquor will loosen my tongue?” Fenris asked. “What is it you want to know?” He sipped, never taking his eyes from Hess.

  “You’re not drunk enough,” Hess said.

  “And I won’t be. Out with it. What are you up to? I don’t think you’re stupid enough to try to get me drunk, then kill me.”

  Jenny dropped her eyes back to her picture when he said that. She’d seen men fight here and it scared her. Walter and Fenris were both very mean when they got mad. They’d never fought each other, though. Jenny colored her mom’s long brown hair the way she wore it when they’d go on picnics during the summer.

  Walter laughed. “Kill you? You’re my meal ticket, you white-haired bastard.”

  Fenris grunted. “One of us may be nearly too drunk for whatever you want.”

  “Who are you?” Walter blurted. “No one knows a damn thing about you. Where do you come from? What is it you want? What will you do with the boy?”

  Fenris put his glass down. “This is it?” he asked. “You wanted to get me drunk to find out what my plans are? Who put you up to it?”

  “No one. It’s information I want for myself,” Walter answered.

  “Why?”

  Walter seemed to think about his answer for a long, long time. “These people who are against you,” he began at last, “they have a purpose. They want that boy, the one you want, they want him to become a leader. Right?”

  “Yes.” Fenris picked up his glass again and swirled the alcohol near his face, like he was smelling it before he took a sip. “You know I never get drunk,” he offered. “The loss of control is dangerous.”

  Walter made a noise that wasn’t a word, but sounded like he was trying to say he was sorry about something. He picked up his own glass and took a swallow, then put it down too hard, making the whiskey jump. “Well, an enemy with a purpose is dangerous. They’re willing to die for a cause,” he said. “An opposing force without a cause, with nothing to hold them together, that ain’t as strong.”

  “I see,” Fenris said. Jenny could see that he had that funny little smile on his lips, the one that meant you were close to an answer, but didn’t have it right yet. “A
ll I have to keep my forces together is fear that I’ll send you to kill them, unless I do it myself.”

  “History shows that fear will only last so long,” Walter agreed.

  “You read, Walter? What historians do you like?”

  “Well, no, I don’t read. I watch some History Channel, though.”

  Fenris laughed. “The younger generations,” he said. “Read a book? Not when they can get a visualized, though distorted picture from the television. Would you like me to give you a history lesson, Walter? Not a TV history lesson with actors and stuffy professors talking about things they’ve only read about. How about an eyewitness account?”

  Fenris liked to teach. Kelley, the pretty red-head, was usually Jenny’s teacher, but a lot of times Fenris would send her away and he would take over teaching for a while. He usually taught history, or reading, and he made everything into a fun story, but they usually had sad endings.

  Walter shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Yeah. All right.”

  “You have no idea how old I am, and I don’t have any desire to tell you,” Fenris began. Jenny saw him look over Walter’s shoulder at her and she knew that was his way of saying she could listen if she wanted, that it would be good for her. Walter turned to see where he was looking and seemed to realize Jenny was there. She saw something light up in his dark eyes, something scary, but then he turned away and she couldn’t see his eyes anymore.

  “I will tell you that I was a young man when Sweden was still a major European power,” Fenris said. “There was war between Sweden and Russia. Most of the monarchs in Europe were related to each other, but they made alliances with and fought against one another as if there was no shared blood between them. When cousin fought cousin, the people who did not share any of their blood paid for the feud. I lived in a village called Tatarsk, which was in the path of a Russian retreat. Charles the Fourth of Sweden was chasing Russia’s Peter the Great, as he came to be known, across Russia. Because winter was coming on and the advancing Swedes needed food for themselves and their horses, Peter ordered his army to destroy everything as they retreated. My family’s farm was burned and our livestock killed. That would have been bad enough, but then word got out that someone from town had a store of hidden grain he planned to sell to the Swedes. Nearly everyone in and around Tatarsk was rounded up and slaughtered.”

  Fenris paused to take a sip of his whiskey. He was looking at her, Jenny knew without looking up. She focused hard on the picture of her mother and father sitting on a red-checked cloth. She’d left herself out of the picture so far. “Slaughtered.” She knew what the word meant. She had heard it used to describe what had happened to her parents and lots of other people at the hospital where she’d been after Joey bit her. Fenris told her some man named Ulrik had done that. She began coloring a tree trunk as Fenris continued his story.

  “I was spared because my father sent me with what little dried meat we had into the woods. Somehow, he knew what was coming. I saw the cassocks, saw what they were doing, and wanted to go back, but there had been a look in my father’s eyes as he sent me away. So I hid in the forest.” Fenris paused again and watched Walter take a drink, but he didn’t drink from his glass again. “I saw the smoke from the fire as Peter’s army burned the village and the bodies. I could smell it. And I wasn’t the only one that smelled it.” He put the glass down and faced Hess.

  “War brings out the scavengers and the predators. I won’t bore you with my transformation story, as we all have one. The scene there brought a werewolf bitch and she adopted me as her son, gave me her Gift, and taught me how to use it.”

  “What happened to her?” Walter asked.

  “That is not your business, Walter.” Fenris’s voice left no room for further questioning. He started talking about something else. “Sweden’s time as a power faded. Russia rose, has changed several times since, expanded, shrank, changed some more. Tell me, Walter, what every civilization has in common?”

  The big ugly man had to think about it. He shrugged. “They’re all civilized?”

  “Umm. Your astuteness is astounding, Walter. Astounding. Every civilization eventually becomes corrupt and falls apart, either from within or because it can no longer repel outside forces.”

  “Like Rome and the Germanic hordes!” Walter blurted. That’s how Joey had usually answered questions in class, Jenny remembered. He didn’t talk very often and he was wrong a lot of the times, but when he was sure about something he’d yell it out before anybody else could answer.

  “And the History Channel pays dividends at last,” Fenris agreed. “Yes, like Rome. Do you read at all? Literature? Fiction?”

  “Made-up stuff? Nah,” Walter said. “I have better things to do.”

  “Of course. There are drugs to use and women to fornicate with, plus the random robbery and needless murder.”

  Jenny looked up and into the lighted room quickly. She saw Walter’s shoulders tense and his empty hand doubled up in a fist, but he didn’t say anything.

  Fenris laughed at him. “You think I don’t keep tabs on you even when you’re not working for me? Don’t be a fool. I don’t care about those things when you’re on your own time. I asked about literature because we can see the truth about civilization reflected there. There was an American author during the Depression years who understood it. He knew that civilization was just an unnatural circumstance, that it’s doomed, that the natural state of mankind is a form of barbarism. We are a dog-eat-dog race, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  A pun was a joke. Jenny knew that, but she didn’t get it. She thought Walter didn’t get it, either.

  “People come together for whatever reason,” Fenris continued, “And when times are good they form groups that they define as civilization. If it gets rooted and grows tradition and influence and power, it becomes corrupt. It sickens everything around it, then it either dies or has to be destroyed.”

  “I don’t understand how this answers my question,” Walter said.

  “What do I want?” Fenris offered. “You don’t see it because you’re all brawn and no brain.” There was a pause. Jenny didn’t dare look up. Fenris said, “That bothers you, but it shouldn’t. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, Walter. It is a wise man who recognizes his own and works within them.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it is you want? Why are we trying to find and kill that boy?”

  The boy they were talking about was Joey Wood. They talked about him a lot. Jenny didn’t really understand why. Joey was mean to her. Her mom had told her that’s how boys show girls they like them. Even Mom thought Joey was mean after he bit Jenny, though.

  “Kill him? Don’t you even think about that,” Fenris warned. “That’s a decision I’ll make once I have him. We are trying to find him because Ulrik wants to set him up as a leader. He wants to build a civilization around him. A civilization of werewolves can’t be any better than a civilization of humans, since we are all still human in too many regards. The first thing a civilization will do is establish rules, then force everyone to conform to those rules. Those who don’t will be hunted down and killed. Do you want to follow some snot-nosed pup being manipulated by Ulrik?”

  “Of course not.”

  “None of us should. And yet too many of our kind are willing to rally around this child because he was born with the Gift most of us came to have through violence. Does that qualify him to tell me or you or anyone else how to live our lives? I think not.”

  “You know for sure that’s what Ulrik wants to do?”

  “Why else would he care about the boy? He wants to be the one controlling the Alpha. He can’t be the Alpha himself, but he can be the next best thing.”

  Walter was quiet for a long time. Jenny heard the clink of glass on glass. She looked up quickly from the green foliage she was coloring at the top of her tree. Walter was pouring more whiskey into his glass. He put the big bottle down and asked, “Didn’t you fight for Germany in the last world war? I thought I he
ard that about you.”

  “Yes, in a sense. He never knew it. I prowled the forests around his Wolf’s Lair, keeping spies away. That’s how I came to know Ulrik the first time.”

  “Wasn’t Hitler kind of making a civilization?”

  “Hitler was doomed to fail,” Fenris said. “What he did that I approved of was breaking up little power bases, little clusters of civilization. He brought chaos and disorder to Europe, and that’s good. It’s better that people not congregate, not become too organized. Living on the edge of destruction is best, especially for us. It’s harder to take a goat from a herd, right?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Walter agreed.

  “You wanted this knowledge only for yourself?” Fenris asked. There wasn’t an answer, so Jenny looked up again and saw Walter stop nodding his head. “You know, Walter, if I ever suspected you were sharing your knowledge with Ulrik, I would make yours a slow and painful death.”

  “I know. Don’t worry about that. I only wanted to know because the other side has a purpose. I wanted to know your goal.”

  “The only goal you need to worry about is in the short term. I want the boy and his bitch of a mother,” Fenris said. He sighed. “I don’t often feel regret, but I have to wonder if I did the right thing in not killing Shara that night I had her alone in a motel room. I might have done it if McGrath hadn’t shown up, but she didn’t have the boy with her and I thought she would lead me to him.”

  “We’ll get him,” Walter promised. “And her.”

  “Yes, I know we will.”

  The men stopped talking. Walter got up and left after a few minutes. Jenny stayed outside, though it was now almost too dark to see what she was doing. The sun had set and the only light came from Fenris’s open patio door, filtered through the screen. Jenny colored the sky of her picture a bright blue, but she did it absently, thinking about what she’d just heard. Then the screen door slid open and Fenris came out and sat across from her.

  “Your mother and father?” he asked, reaching across the table and taking the picture from her. He held it before him and studied it. “Did you go on picnics often?”