by Jen Haeger
This corridor was less abused by vandals than the others had been. Walking through the doorway was like taking a step back in time, and Evelyn was unprepared for what lay on the other side. The hallway had a green, floral motif with a painted vine running along the length at about waist level. The paint was faded and peeling off the wall in places, but still lent the place a certain peace. There was also less debris here, like someone had taken the time to tidy up after the facility was shut down. The only mess on the tiled floor of the hallway was a copious covering of dust, flakes from the walls, and chunks of plaster fallen from the ceiling.
Evelyn stared at the walls and tried to imagine what they had looked like when they were freshly painted and vibrant. She closed her eyes to try to see them more clearly in her mind’s eye, but then her more acute sense of smell took over and the sinister odors of neglect and rot sullied the vision. Opening her eyes again, she spied David and Kim staring into a room a few paces ahead of her. The tension in David’s stance gave Evelyn pause, and Kim’s tail thrashed uneasily as she let out a soft whine. Evelyn’s curiosity propelled her forward and she angled in behind them to peek over their shoulders. The bright illumination from the nearly full moon outside lit the room’s interior through thick and dusty windows adding a spectral quality to the scene. Ward C3, as outlined by the stairwell door, must have been the children’s ward of the facility. Here a hidden fairy landscape played out on the walls in intricate, though vanishing, detail. The ceiling might have once been a pale blue to mimic the sky on a sunny day, but that color was now diminished and Evelyn could just barely make out the borders of a few fluffy clouds.
One side of the room was a slightly darker rendition of a forest with lovely, magical trees stretching up to the ceiling and a forest floor of dead leaves, green shrubs, and brightly-colored toadstools. Within the forest the fae, clad in leaves dyed a myriad of autumn hues, danced on the tops of the mushrooms gleefully, hid from each other within the hollows of the trees, or used the shrubs as miniature maypoles. On the other side of the room was a field of wildflowers full of little folk frolicking between the stems, clothed in petals, and with pupils like the slits of predators rather than the rounder, more human eyes of the fairies in the woods.
Evelyn thought that the artist, whoever they were, had done a spectacular job of bringing a surreal awe to the room. But her enjoyment of the décor was soured by two things: one was the superficial gouges in the walls from about three feet down and spaced about as wide as a child’s fingers, and the other was the small bed with cracked and disintegrating leather restraining straps. Evelyn’s mind immediately envisioned Katie strapped down in the bed screaming and flailing with wide, bloodshot, lunatic eyes. The horrific mental apparition made Evelyn think of the Scribe, mad and alone, howling his vocal chords raw in his own private underground Hell. Staggering backwards, she tore her eyes away from the ghostly glow of the room as she felt the rage slipping loose inside of her, fueled by fear, grief, worry, and revulsion. The Vulke were forcing grisly futures like this onto innocent people all over the world, and Evelyn was sick with fury at the thought of it.
Spinning on her heel, Evelyn tore down the hall back the way they had come. When she reached the stairwell she flung herself at the metal cage and gripped it with her wolf-hands until she felt the edges cutting into her flesh. Howling now, not with abandon but with rage, her vision dyed crimson; she poured her anger into the structure, kicking and rattling it as it screeched and groaned in protest. Then abruptly she was on the ground with restraining arms encircling her. Growling and snarling she broke away and turned on her attacker to find David, his palms raised in a defensive posture, eyes wary and confused. How could he not understand? How could he not have seen the horrors I saw when I looked into that room? Evelyn wanted to explain to him why she was so angry, but it was impossible when all he saw was her freaking out. Barely able to control herself from slamming her fist into the cage, Evelyn took in several deep, shuddering breaths and pictured a vault inside her mind. In this mental vault she would lock away her rage. Save it, Evie. Save it for those bastards tomorrow night. She caught David’s stare, shook her head, and held out a hand to help him up.
38
Nicolas finished tearing apart the coyote and threw it aside with disdain. He had expected more of a fight from the scrawny predator. Having been so busy with preparations for the next night’s confrontation with the other packs, he hadn’t scrapped with another Wolfkin in several months, and Nicolas felt weak and untested. For a moment he seriously considered attacking one of his own Wolfkin guards, but then disregarded the idea because maiming or killing one of them would only mean more work for him tomorrow when they moved the strays. Howling in contempt and vexation, he began running again. One of the two guards stopped briefly by the dead coyote and sniffed its still warm corpse, but then turned up his nose and followed Nicolas into the brush.
Breathing in deeply, Nicolas craved the scent of flesh, anything living that he could rend with his claws and teeth. They were still close to human habitation and the constant wafts of tantalizing human maddened him. The temptation to slay one of the mindless herd was almost too much for him, but then he thought of what Taras’s reaction would be to Nicolas drawing the attention of human authorities so close to their moment of triumph over the other packs. Already dreading the punishment for allowing a stray to escape from one of the compounds so close to the battle, there was no way that he was going to make things worse for himself.
A terrified doe exploded from the underbrush and shot out in front of him, and Nicolas let out a primal snarl, honing in on the hapless animal. He toyed with deer, first closing in and swiping her superficially with his claws, then opening up a gap to allow her the faint hope of escape. Breathing in her fear, her desperation, and her panic, he let it fill him, feed the rage, and sharpen his killer instinct to prepare him for tomorrow night’s carnage. He pictured the deer as a smug, condescending member of the Wahya pack trying to control and manipulate him in their cowardly ways, and his vision blurred into a red haze. When Nicolas emerged from his frenzy, the deer was a mutilated mess of flesh and he was covered in blood and innards. His two guards crouched together nearby, but Nicolas didn’t need their whimpers and submissive behavior to tell him that he’d lost control.
Looking down at the remains of the deer, Nicolas felt a sudden strong wave of revulsion. This act wasn’t one of a superior being, but one of a mindless monster. Nicolas’s bursting stomach full of venison turned sour and a bitter acid taste filled his mouth. He stumbled away from the butchery and away from the other Wolfkins’ furtive glances. Thrusting the seed of doubt and self-loathing down, he forced himself to think of the grand new order that Taras had promised them in so many speeches. It was a world of perfect natural order where the human prey no longer ruled with their pathetic political society pretending to be the top of the food chain. The Wolfkin, true predators, would rule just as nature intended and flawless balance would be restored.
Nicolas calmed, but he still felt far from contented. He felt the repressed seed of doubt take root in a crack in his resolve. Suddenly he felt as though he had gotten caught up in a great wave that for a time he thought carried him swiftly towards his destiny but now he feared was growing tumultuous and drowning him slowly. Nicolas longed for the clarity he once felt, but it eluded him. No matter, he thought. The wheels were already in motion and regardless of what he thought or felt, the revolution had come and no one could stop it now. He could either be one of the victors or be one of the countless casualties of change.
In a rare moment of sentimentality, Nicolas thought about his family before his rebirth as a Vulke. Taras insisted that it was weakness to dwell on time spent in the inferior form, but this night Nicolas couldn’t help himself. He’d never had a wife, but he’d had a mother and a sister. His mother had taken ill before he was arrested and sent to Siberia, and much of his illegal profits had gone to her care. He wondered how long she’d lasted without
his support, how long until she died coughing and wheezing in the winter cold. When he was in Siberia, his sister, Anna, had sent him letters nearly every day to keep him up to date on their mother and rail against the injustice of his imprisonment. Anna had a fire in her soul and a similar moral flexibility to Nicolas which made him think that she might hunt down his former partner and bring him her own justice. He half-heartedly dissuaded her from such actions, as was his brotherly duty, but he had to admit that he often imagined Anna punishing the bastard.
Trying to imagine where Anna was now, he pictured her happy, with a doting husband and several fat babies, but the fantasy crumbled into the much less pleasant but more likely scenario of his sister destitute and selling their mother’s heirloom brooch for food money. He hadn’t considered making her a Wolfkin before, but perhaps if he could show Taras that Anna had the same dauntlessness as Nicolas did, Taras would agree to allow the transformation. The idea of Anna by his side stirred a cacophony of emotions deep within Nicolas. Why wouldn’t I want to share this gift with my sister? Then he remembered the cruelties that he’d had to endure and the brutal things that he’d done. It wasn’t a question of whether Anna was tough enough to handle physical torture or if she could inflict pain on others, Nicolas knew in his heart that she was capable of these things. In fact, Nicolas was certain that she would outstrip his own abilities and likely replace him as Taras’s favorite given time. It was instead a question of whether he wanted his sister to travel the same path as he’d traveled and become the thing that he’d become.
Nicolas’s heart throbbed in his chest, and he felt alone for the first time since becoming part of the Vulke. He wanted to believe that he shared a connection with the rest of his pack because they were all the same kind, they were all Wolfkin and were united together in purpose. His brethren would obey his commands as if Taras had spoken them himself, and they would throw themselves into the fray ahead of him as was their place. But as the ache grew, Nicolas questioned whether his pack mates would come to his aid in the battle tomorrow if he should be ambushed or outnumbered, or if they would sit by in the hopes that one of them would be Taras’s next lieutenant.
Nicolas looked back at his two guards picking the deer carcass clean. Even they, who were supposedly bound to protect him, showed only subservience. There was no true companionship there, and when he pictured them being slaughtered on the battlefield, he felt no remorse. Nicolas had no one who truly cared for him as an individual, only as one of the leaders of a cause, and he wouldn’t even attempt to deceive himself about whether Taras was concerned whether or not Nicolas lived through tomorrow night’s endeavors. Taras had a plethora of eager young Vulke ready to take Nicolas’s place.
The thoughts and aching chewed at Nicolas from the inside out. He clawed at himself, trying to dull the inner anguish and he howled again. The cry welled up from a bottomless pit of emptiness inside Nicolas and rose through him until it erupted out of his throat and he felt that his chest might burst open. It was a cry that might have perforated a human eardrum if one had been nearby, and so filled with sorrow and longing that the other two Wolfkin guards could not stop themselves from joining it in a mournful chorus that echoed through the trees. When Nicolas’s breath gave out, he hunched his shoulders in defeat. He decided that he had to survive the battle tomorrow night because not surviving meant dying alone, unsung, and forgotten.
39
The morning came too soon in Evelyn’s opinion. When David finally consented to let them go outside the clinic into the woods, Kim did much better and Evelyn almost forgot what was coming until David initiated some attack training. Kim took to the training well, but all too soon the dawn came, forcing the three of them back into the complex to change and let Clem out of his lonely cell. Not much was said as they regressed in their trespass and stole back into the woods replacing the combination lock on the outbuilding door. Hunger nagged at Evelyn’s insides, almost edging out the cold, solid mass of fear and worry as they made their way back to the car. Today was the day and she felt completely naïve and unprepared. It still felt like a bad dream that had no business in reality. Today people were going to die, and some would have no idea for what cause they were even fighting. The injustice galled Evelyn, and with that bile again came the bitter feeling that this was all her fault.
Evelyn reminded herself that the delicate balance of peace that the other packs had with the Vulke and the Wolfkin Council before she was involved was nothing but a sham anyway. The Vulke had still been murdering innocent people on a regular basis, but everyone had just ignored their transgressions in favor of keeping the peace. Logic dictated that another war between the Vulke and the other packs was inevitable, and that Evelyn had nothing to do with it, but she definitely felt responsible for the way that it had come about and for the Vulke mutating the virus to their own ends. Evelyn doubted that the Vulke would have had that weapon in their arsenal without her intervention.
Her reverie was interrupted by their arrival at the car and David breaking the silence that had followed them from the old hospital.
“Do we want to eat before we get on the road?”
“Yes please.”
“I’m starvin’”
“Absolutely.”
David nodded absently and unlocked the vehicle so they could all pile inside. He drove them to the nearest IHOP and the greeter’s smile wavered at the motley crew that walked through the door mere moments after starting her shift. Evelyn tried to smooth her hair once they were seated at the table, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about her appearance enough for more effort than that. She did take a little more notice of the state of the others at the table in response to the woman’s obvious disquiet. David’s hair was disheveled and an introspective scowl hung on his scruffy face. Clem was trying to look pleasant, but his eyes were very red and there was still a hint of a scar running through his eyebrow and another snaking through his beard that screamed ex-convict. Evelyn figured Kim would be the most respectable of the four of them, but she was sporting the beginnings of a black eye and looked morose.
Evelyn didn’t normally have coffee in the morning, but it smelled good and she figured that it couldn’t hurt much, so she flipped her cup over when the waitress came by with a carafe for the table. After many helpings of pancakes, bacon, and sausage were ordered in an overly cheery way, Clem levelled his gaze at Evelyn.
“Did you always wanna be a vet?”
The question caught Evelyn off guard. “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”
“You made your dream come true.”
Evelyn’s brow furrowed. “I suppose I did.”
Clem leaned back in the booth and closed his eyes. “You per-se-vered, you sacrificed.”
Evelyn frowned and looked to David for support, but he was staring off across the restaurant and appeared to have missed the entire exchange. She glanced at Kim, who just gave her a weak smile. Evelyn was at a loss for words, but fortunately the uncomfortable silence didn’t last very long with the speedy arrival of their food. As she ate, Evelyn tried to block everything out of her mind that might spoil her appetite. She needed as much nourishment as possible, and the closer that it got to the battle, the less likely it was that she would be able to force herself to eat despite the fact that she should, in order to lessen the effects of the deer carcasses on her inner wolf. She focused on the sweetness of the syrup, on the slightly salty taste of the butter, on the bitter notes in the coffee, and the bacon’s rich, fatty flavor.
The bacon stirred aching memories in her chest, as it had for a while now, and evoked the scent of a campfire in a fall forest. The memory felt like it should have been from long ago, but only a few years had passed since the day David told her that he was a werewolf. She’d felt a certain dread that day, which she had thought had unfolded several times over, but she realized was only just now coming into true fruition, though it was a different kind of fear now. Then, she’d feared only for her own life. Now, there were so many more liv
es at stake that Evelyn could hardly breathe.
Evelyn envisioned the face of evil as she knew it: Christoff, Darya, and the woman who had killed Sara. But these would not be the faces that she would be fighting tonight. She had no reference for the faceless evil that destroyed the lab, drew Kim into the middle of a conflict that she should have no part of, and destroyed the life of at least one innocent little girl. And it wasn’t going to necessarily be true evil they were facing, but a shield of confused and brainwashed innocents. This conflict was so much larger, sinister, and impersonal than those she’d already faced, yet she wondered what the present might be if David had never become a werewolf or if he had never found the Vulke nor stumbled upon her research. She thought of Clem’s talk of sacrifice and lamented that she hadn’t known at the start of all this that by sacrificing her life, she might have prevented the cataclysmic events that were now unfolding.
“Evie? Are you ready?”
David’s voice infiltrated Evelyn’s thoughts. She blinked and found that she’d been drawing patterns in the syrup dregs on her plate with her knife. She reprimanded herself for becoming lost in thoughts that would not help them in the present. This was the way things had worked out and no amount of thinking, wishing, or even praying would change anything. She needed to stop thinking of herself as a victim or life’s pawn, and start thinking of herself as crusader. They were acting like they were going to face their doom, when they should have been marching to meet evil head on and turn it back towards the gates of hell.
