Wolf's Edge (The Nick Lupo Series Book 4)

by W. D. Gagliani

  “Listen to me,” he hissed into Giovanni’s ear, “they’re close to finding one of our secret entrances, and if they do we are all fucked in the ass. You understand? We have to slip out and fight them, kill them all before they can report. Are you up to it?”

  “Up to it?”

  Up to it?

  Killing people?

  Who was this idiot, asking him to kill…

  Giovanni thought through the last pieces of his memory and found that he had already killed, hadn’t he?

  Corrado’s band of partisans was gathering behind them, facing a wall that until now Giovanni had thought solid. But there was a slit, a sort of narrow, sloping passage, and the men were slipping through one by one.

  “We’ll need you. Here.” Corrado handed Giovanni an old revolver, which he tucked into his belt. Then someone else handed him a Breda submachine gun. It felt strange in his hands, heavy and awkward. He took it, reluctantly, and looked back at Maria—but a tall man behind him was crowding him toward the passage, his arms also cradling a stubby submachine gun.

  It appeared he would have to pay his way.

  The tall man and another fell in behind him, and all he could do was nod and try to smile at Maria before she disappeared behind them, and then he was stumbling into the passage. It was a ruined staircase, brick and mortar debris underfoot. Boots and shoes scraped in front of him, climbing, so he followed instinctively even though he could barely see. He tripped on an invisible step and was steadied by the man behind him.

  They climbed single file up and up, seemingly endlessly, until they reached a collapsed corridor. He started feeling dizzy, the events of the last few hours catching up. But then Giovanni smelled the evening air and then they were outside, emerging from a hidden fissure between leaning stone walls. He filled his lungs gratefully, his head clearing. The short column of men snaked around the corner, and he realized they were attempting to flank the German patrol before the shelter was sniffed out.

  He gripped the Breda tightly, his mind a jumble of fears.

  They were nearly around the ruined building’s front corner when someone’s shoe kicked over a pile of debris, which groaned and came tumbling to the ground in a clatter of stone and wood, raising a cloud of dust.

  A shout in German, and then another, and then there was a burst of submachine gun fire and Giovanni realized that the partisans, not yet in position, had been forced to open fire without cover.

  “All’attacco, ragazzi!” Corrado shouted, urging his men on the attack, their surprise flanking shattered by the shouting and the gunfire. “Per la patria!”

  The enemy was a series of indistinct shapes, like ghosts, and they had cover.

  A man went down on Giovanni’s left, his chest split raggedly open.

  Giovanni screamed and squeezed the Breda’s trigger, letting loose a burst. Recoil tugged the barrel upward, and he saw his rounds shatter a surviving window too high up to catch any of the enemy. Another man went down on his right, screaming that he was hit in the head, but then a bullet silenced him altogether. Giovanni was crying now, as he held the barrel down and sprayed lead until his breech locked open, the magazine empty. Someone shoved another magazine at him and he reloaded, somehow catching on instinctively. Tears running, he shot at the ghostly shapes again, this time seeing one of the shapes throw up his arms and collapse, broken, against the bricks.

  Gunfire raged around him, and for a moment he thought the partisans were holding the enemy back, their bursts exacting a terrible toll.

  Suddenly they heard a series of loud snarls, followed immediately by an unearthly howling. Giovanni stopped short, feeling a shiver shoot down his spine. Despite the gun battle, this sound was viscerally more terrifying.

  “Lupi!” someone shouted. And then his voice turned to a gurgle as a dark shape lunged from out of the cloudy darkness and ripped out his throat.

  Whatever it was, it snarled and shook its long snout and Giovanni heard a slaughterhouse ripping of bone and flesh and the dead man’s head came rolling to a stop at his feet.

  Dio mio!

  Giovanni couldn’t help staring for a split-second down into the dead man’s terrified eyes, and then he stumbled aside so he couldn’t see the head and the jagged piece of spine protruding from its torn neck.

  All around him he heard men screaming, and more four-footed shapes materialized. For the first time he saw that they were giant dogs—

  No, they were wolves.

  Giovanni had spent some time in the mountains working for his father, and he had seen wolf packs on long winter nights. These were wolves, their fur mostly black or gray and mottled, and they were larger than any he had ever seen or heard of.

  And they lunged at men who shot at them over and over without any effect, their jaws then snapping and tearing necks and limbs. Here was a partisan going down under a slashing, biting jaw full of fangs. There was a man with a wolf’s snout buried in his belly, tearing out loops of bloody intestines.

  Out of the corner of his eye Giovanni saw one man shoot a wolf, and the animal went down, screaming in rage, trying to reach around its back and bite the smoking wound. The tall man who had been behind him on the staircase leaped onto the wolf’s back, a silver blade flashing, and stabbed it twice in the neck before slitting the animal’s throat.

  It was all happening in mere seconds, but Giovanni swore he saw the wolf catch fire and scream in agony as its blood boiled. And then its body blurred, and it became a naked man, a human, whose greasy hair the tall partisan grabbed with a fist and pulled up, using the glowing blade to sever his head. He tossed it aside with a shout of fury and victory, and turned to help another partisan who was being menaced by a wolf.

  Giovanni knew he wanted to scream—his mouth was open, but no sound came out. The battle had degenerated into single shots and snarls, and screams of terror and pain, and gurgling sounds of bloody death.

  And he heard the tearing of bone and tissue, the howling of victorious wolves.

  He turned in time to see a wolf leaping for his throat. With no time to sidestep, he brought up the Breda’s barrel and let loose a long burst.

  The bullets stitched across the wolf’s body and head and should have cut him to pieces, but Giovanni was horrified to see that the deadly lead barely knocked the animal off its stride. Its weight smashed into him and tossed him to the ground, jaws snapping at his neck.

  The Breda flew out of his grasp, and he threw his hands up to avert the wolf’s continuous attacks. Giovanni risked one hand and scrabbled for the Beretta in his belt, the other hand desperately holding off the biting wolf’s snout. Its raging eyes seemed to be red in the near-darkness.

  He brought up the pistol by feel and shoved the barrel under the wolf’s jaws. Those eyes held his as the wolf gathered for a final push, and Giovanni pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. And then a fourth time. The bullets ripped through the fur and bone and skull.

  Giovanni sucked in air and prepared to throw off the dead animal’s weight.

  But the wounds caused by his bullets began to close up and disappear. The wolf’s red eyes found his and it seemed to smile at his shock and terror.

  Then he was awash in a gush of gore as an anonymous hand bearing a flashing silver blade slit the wolf’s throat just before it could press its advantage and bite off his face.

  The dead animal was heaved off him, and it was the tall man from the tunnel who’d done it, a grim smile on his face as he nodded and then jumped to the aid of another partisan locked in a struggle for his life.

  The tall partisan won, his blade once again slashing open the wolf’s throat. The animal’s shriek of pain as the blade burned through its flesh and tendons would haunt Giovanni forever, he knew. And so would the sight of the dead wolf blurring into a dead human. He looked at his right and saw that where his own attacking wolf had been now lay sprawled a dead human. The tall partisan severed both heads.

  “Must make sure, eh?” he said gruffly.

 
; Giovanni got to his knees unsteadily, his head spinning, his muscles screaming with fatigue and overuse. He realized the battle was over, won—apparently—by Corrado and his men, but at a terrible cost. A half dozen partisans lay dead, their bodies scattered near the side of the building, several grotesquely disemboweled. Four of five naked, decapitated men marked where the wolves had died. Several uniformed German soldiers also lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets.

  Corrado was alive, his coat covered with splattered blood.

  “Thank you, Turco,” he said, clapping a hand on the tall man’s shoulder. “Without you, I don’t know—” He stopped, his haunted eyes finding Giovanni’s. “You fought well. You’re one of us now. We saved the shelter, this time. But now you must not watch. Turco, I don’t envy you this job.”

  The tall man shrugged. Then he went to each of the dead partisans and stabbed them in the heart before sawing off their heads.

  Giovanni thought he had been horrified by everything up to now. But this was too much!

  He brought up the Beretta pistol, instinctively wishing to defend the dignity of his dead countrymen. But Corrado pushed the barrel down until it pointed at the ground.

  “It’s necessary, believe me,” he said, making a half-hearted sign of the cross. “We must be sure they are dead, and that they were killed with that blade. Otherwise there’s a possibility—”

  Turco was finished. They rallied the surviving partisans around them, and wounds were inspected. They were minor, and Giovanni noticed that Turco remained nearby, the unsheathed silver blade touching every survivor—including himself.

  Corrado noticed Giovanni’s questioning look. “We have learned to look after ourselves,” he explained, but it was no real explanation as far as Giovanni was concerned.

  Exhausted, his body aching and his mind still reeling at all he had seen, all he wanted to do was climb down those stairs and see his wife.

  And then he would go find his son.

  Se Dio vuole, he thought. God willing.

  Franco

  They had watched carefully to avoid vehicles and patrols on the road, but he had not expected the quiet padding of a monster wolf to come up behind them on the path.

  Franco led the way, occasionally turning to coax on his friend Pietro, who had been rendered almost catatonic by the horrors he had witnessed. His steps wooden, his eyes glazed and almost unblinking, Pietro followed Franco by rote like a dog whose only guidance is the master’s urging.

  Now there was a snarl from behind them, and Franco was startled into leaping forward instinctively.

  When he turned, knowing in his heart that it was too late, what he saw he knew immediately would be etched into the back of his mind forever, until the day he died.

  A huge gray wolf had shadowed them—who knew how long it had been behind them?—and had pounced on Pietro, its claws driving his slight body into the dirt of the path, while its jaws opened and closed on the boy’s head, wrenching it up and back until…

  Franco screamed as he watched his friend’s head suddenly ripped from his body, the jagged remains of his spine indicating where it had been moments before. The gout of blood that erupted from the ruptured arteries in Pietro’s neck was like a fountain, and the wolf shook the deflated head like a bone before tossing it aside and tearing into the boy’s tender back and ribs with hungry jaws.

  Franco stumbled away backward, down the inclined path, until he lost his footing and rolled down the hill, rocks and sharp branches stabbing him painfully.

  The sound of the wolf’s hungry attack on his friend’s corpse would be with him forever. The sight of the headless body being torn asunder like a Sunday roasted chicken sickened him, and the memory brought up a thin stream of vomit.

  But having put some distance between himself and the monster, albeit accidentally, Franco now allowed his instinct to take over his legs, and he ran, slid and tumbled down the path toward the city outskirts, where he knew at least one place he might be safe, if the bombers had spared it—and his family.

  It was the only place he could think to go.

  Giovanni

  Corrado had shucked his bloody coat and now wore a thin, once-white dress shirt. He shivered in the night’s chill.

  “Now you know what we are up against,” he told Giovanni. “Since late last year, the Germans have sent those things against us. We lost many good men to their fangs. And again tonight, damn their hearts.”

  “But…what are they?”

  “Do you not remember the stories your parents told you when you were young? They are wolf-men, just like the legends. They are men, but the full moon makes them wolves. We have learned the hard way they can also control their shapeshifting and become wolves whenever they choose.”

  “It’s just too— It’s impossible.”

  “You saw it with your own eyes. One almost tore you apart, but for Turco there. We know what they are, but they are almost impossible to kill. The Germans are retreating, but they have deployed a rear guard made up, partly, of this Werwolf Division. The monsters have done their worst in the hills and used to stay out of the cities, mostly, but now they are being used against us here as well.”

  “You said you can’t kill them? But they did die.”

  Corrado snorted quietly. “Sure, but at what cost? They can be killed, but it takes special…” He leaned over and whispered even more quietly. “That man there, hunched in the corner?”

  Giovanni saw a man whose look was haunted. His eyes seemed feverish, his skin pale. He hadn’t been part of the gun battle.

  “He’s a priest. He has fought with us. He is a Jesuit. You know what that means?”

  Giovanni shrugged. He knew who Jesuits were, of course, but…

  “He has done exorcisms. He has faced evil before and survived. And he has brought us more than just his own fighting spirit. From Rome, he has brought us a weapon.”

  “Rome?”

  “From the Vatican.” Corrado scratched his stubble. “You want to talk with him? Will it make you feel better about what you have seen?”

  Giovanni’s eyes unfocused as he stared at the priest. Then he nodded once.

  “Hey, Babbo, this guy wants to talk to you,” Corrado called out across the room.

  The priest stood, and he was no longer graceful as he might have been, but moved as if uncertain of his footing. Or as if his feet were submerged. He had been muscular and then run to fat, but now the fat had dissipated and his skin was sallow and bag-like.

  He came to a stop near Giovanni and Corrado. His priest’s collar was long gone. His eyes were glazed by lack of sleep or war-weariness.

  “You’re that new one,” he said. “You have a pretty wife.”

  “Yes, and a son. But I don’t know what happened to him. I wanted him here with me, but he’s missing. And now I’m not sure I want him here. I don’t know what I want. I want to know that what I saw out there cannot exist.”

  Corrado moved away, shaking his head as if there was nothing more disgusting than someone who would deny the evidence he had seen and touched.

  The priest sighed and sat stiffly.

  He said: “He calls me Babbo, dad, because he’s not very religious.” His expression was more sympathetic now. “I see how much you fear for your son. What happened?”

  “I was out working when the Germans picked me up for one of their damned slave-labor details. I didn’t intend— I found myself fighting even though it was the last thing I wanted. My son was out with his friend Pietro, playing, as he does every day since school was closed. That was when Corrado’s men grabbed my wife too, but my son wasn’t home. I’m grateful, they may have saved her, but now I want to find Franco, and they won’t let me go.”

  “My name is Father Tranelli. I will have a word with Corrado. He’s a good man, but he feels responsible for his men, and he cannot separate his hate for Germans from his responsibilities. But you saw what the Germans use against us…”

  “What are they, Father?” Gi
ovanni’s voice betrayed how he felt haunted by the horror. He half-wondered if he had suffered a blow to the head, and all this was hallucination, or a nightmare. Perhaps he would awaken and find that things were no different than two days before, when his world did not include monstrous creatures.

  “They are men who have the ability to turn into wolves. You must remember the legend of the uomo-lupo, the wolf-man. Mothers still terrify their unruly children with tales of the uomo-lupo, or the lupo mannaro—the werewolf—and the Middle Ages were full of sightings, convictions, and executions of so-called wolf-men. And women.”

  Tranelli hung his head lower, as if the burden of holding it up were almost too much.

  He continued: “We have always had the legends, especially in the hill villages. But when the Germans became our occupiers after the government finally surrendered to the Allies, they brought in the Werwolf Division as a rear guard. You know the damned Nazis, they like all that occult stuff. Nobody paid any more attention than to anything else they do. They have already a reputation for shooting civilians and imprisoning anyone they deem dangerous. But as Corrado here will tell you, partisan units began coming into contact with groups of these wolves. First they found sentries killed, torn apart and disemboweled. Men on lonely outposts, killed by mysterious animals. Everyone thought so. But then the attacks became brazen, and sometimes several werewolves will attack a patrol or safehouse.”

  “But what about guns? Why can’t you kill them?” Giovanni slapped his hand on the table. “I saw your men shoot them at point blank range, and yet the wolves still reached them, using their claws and their fangs…” He stopped, realizing he had been one of those men.

  “Werewolves are magical beings, young man. I have no other explanation. They are of the devil, perhaps. They cannot be killed by normal means.”

  “Then if there are many of them, we’ll all die…”

  “These monsters are vulnerable to one thing. You saw yourself. They are averse to silver. Any weapon made of silver will have an effect on them, and bullets cast from pure silver can kill them. It acts like liquid fire inside their bodies. We have dispatched quite a few, recently. And tonight. But we are still susceptible to their attacks.”