One book, a French translation of an Arabic translation of the original Greek, prescribed a ritual for creating a wolf belt that involved the skin of a true wolf. A person who donned the belt could transform into a wolf at will. Unlike the true werewolf, who became a beast under the full moon, the transformee would retain some capacity for rational thought. This method of transformation was not without its dangers, as stories were rife concerning those unfortunates who had gone mad or got stuck. Caleb didn’t think he’d have any trouble coping with the smells and sights of being a wolf, but he did worry about changing back. Was it merely a matter of taking off the belt without opposable thumbs, or was there something more subtle and sinister going on?
At least he had the ingredients without having to resort to any more violence. Having killed once over this particular coat, he felt as if it belonged to him.
“If the wolf belt works as advertised,” Caleb remarked as he forced himself to touch the pelt, spreading it flat on the ground, “I’ll able to get into the cave, past the leptothrix. Even though it will be a full moon, I’ll keep my human mind, which means I can see if there are werewolves using the caves to get down to Albimare.”
“A human’s mind in a wolf’s body?” Liszka challenged. “What kind of sheeprot is that?”
Bela looked at his mother with sympathy. “Why have paws and teeth if you don’t know how to use them?” They both rolled their eyes in agreement that Lupeni Alpha had crossed the line from eccentric to barking mad.
“Well, Bela, it’s all in the name of science.”
Caleb’s remark elicited guffaws from the boy, who had heard that line all too often from his father. Caleb didn’t respond. Instead he took out the notes he’d written during his research on how to make a wolf belt, determined to pull an all-nighter if necessary.
He didn’t go to Grigore’s cottage the following night, since he worried that Liszka would try to follow him in case he got into trouble. She never quite trusted his skills as a wolf. Alexandru let him out the gates as on his very first full moon at the castle, but this time the air was warm and he enjoyed sitting naked in the grass watching the sunset.
“Here we go,” he said out loud to the rocks and the grasses as he looped the belt across his chest like a sash and fastened it. “It’s all in the name of science.”
The pain of transforming was something they were all used to. It even helped to unite them, to get them ready for a night of hunting, like a tribe’s warrior initiation rite. Caleb was somehow disappointed, then, when he felt nothing but a vague stretching sensation and raised his hand to his face only to discover that it was a paw.
No, it wasn’t right at all. Walking on all fours felt funny because he was thinking about every move. He wanted to grab things with his fingers, forgetting that his teeth were better for the purpose, and his mind was cluttered with a stream of interfering thoughts—What was that noise? What was that smell? What should he do next?—precious moments wasted as he pondered rather than acted.
He set out at a lope through the woods to the caves. Before going to Brasov he’d found the upper entrance, high in the hills where he would never have thought to set a ward. All he had to do was go in, find a narrow passage with enough available rocks, and cause a cave-in so that the Sixes couldn’t pass through. The thought of the leptothrix didn’t even occur to him, which almost certainly meant that he was immune.
Reaching the entrance to the cave, he sniffed once and plunged through the underbrush. There had been humans here very recently, and he hesitated, waiting for a twinge from the overwhelming killer instinct that had been part of him for eighteen years.
He didn’t so much as growl.
Not even when he broke through into the cave’s main chamber and found a complex array of scientific apparatus that all smelled human. Some of it hung from the ceiling, some was scattered on the floor. Huge blocks of metal (iron; it had the tang of blood) stood stacked along one wall. Green video screens blipped and bleeped in patterns of smooth or square waves.
There was no one here now, though, and he stepped nimbly through the main cave and into the narrower passage that led down, presumably into the village of Albimare. Leptothrixes swirled around him, but they didn’t seem to notice him, and he felt no emotions whatsoever. He could sense them only as a swirly, smoky presence, like the remnants of a bad campfire. It was so dark that even the wolf couldn’t see, but his fur and whiskers sensed the size of the passages and where the stone gave way to soft earth.
Some distance from the village, he began to dig at the roof of the cave. It was hard work, and he was there for many hours, but he grew neither tired nor bored. At last, the faintest hint of a breeze alerted him to a breach in the tunnel’s structure, and he began to back away.
The cave-in was larger than he intended, stretching ten or twenty feet, and he found himself pelted by clots of earth and falling rocks.
As the cave fell around him, he scrambled up the narrow passageways, bursting into the large chamber full of equipment. The wolf was suddenly face to face with a very surprised young man. Giving off a burst of fear-smell, the man turned and ran. The wolf sniffed the equipment briefly, confirming what he suspected on his first visit to the chamber.
He followed the scent of the human and soon stood at a large entrance to the caves. There was shouting in the distance; presumably the man was alerting others. Caleb slunk through the trees, keeping himself well hidden, until he saw a camp composed of a large pavilion and several small tents with a Jeep parked nearby. The shouting man was rousing others from the tents. Three others emerged, two men and a woman.
The man yelled, in English, that he had seen another wolf. That made it seem likely that the Sixes had been using the caves to get to Albimare. Well, Caleb was fairly certain that the way would be barred from now on. As the four campers hiked along the path to look for the elusive wolf, Caleb thought he’d better be going.
He had a lot to think about as he limped back to the castle. Dawn had broken, the moon had set, and his body was confused and sore. It didn’t expect to be a wolf after moonset, giving him strange tugs and twinges in his face, paws, and spine.
Not just wolves occupied his mind, however. He wondered about the people he’d seen: they’d spoken English and had a cave full of electronics. Spies? A CIA plot in the mountains of Transylvania? More worrisome, however, was the faint but unmistakable trace of vampire that he’d detected in the main cave.
Leptothrixes and vampires together in the same cave? He wasn’t sure they could co-exist. Perhaps that was why no one had made a thorough investigation of the Petrosna caves before. The grim task seemed to be called for now, although he wasn’t sure how to carry it out.
17. A Tangled Web We Weave
In the third quarter Caleb finally felt up for the journey south to investigate the caves in a normal human way. In Rosu he learned that the four people at the camp were students from a university in Italy. He was astounded—the political situation in Romania must have undergone a complete upheaval in the five years that he had been living in the castle. He had heard nothing of this, had no idea, and only knew that more hunters had been spotted in the forest within the past year. He hoped that wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.
Maybe he was getting anxious over nothing. After all, Hermann had slipped into Romania during the Communist repression. Perhaps the “physics grad student” thing was a cover story for the CIA, and they had come here to see the vampires and werewolves that had so interested Dean Arghezi back in the States.
Of course, they might see a lot more vampires and werewolves than they bargained for.
Grim thoughts occupied his mind as he made his way along the dirt track leading to the camp. An argument was taking place as he came in sight of it, conducted in bad Italian. That is, two very angry people, neither of whom spoke Italian well, were yelling at each other.
One of the combatants was the man that Caleb’s wolf had startled in the cave. He was a stocky man in
his early twenties; he looked Italian, but he had an American accent and a vocabulary he’d probably picked up in his grandmother’s kitchen. The other man appeared to be a local who had driven to the camp in a battered black car. The only other vehicle in the camp was the Jeep.
From comments that the Romanian made when he lapsed back into his native tongue, Caleb concluded that the man was trying to shake down the students for money with a story about needing a license. Smiling to himself, he moved behind the black car and surreptitiously waved his hand.
“Excuse me,” he said in Romanian, as he stepped around the front of the car and into the fray. “Is that your car? I think it’s on fire.”
Furious words ceased as both men turned to look first at Caleb and then at the car. White smoke with a hint of green (he was proud of that little touch) came pouring out of the back seat. With a startled cry, the car’s owner yanked open the door and began throwing dirt onto the “fire.”
The smoke quickly vanished, leaving the man surprised and angry. Before he could resume the argument, Caleb said to him quietly but forcefully, “I think that you should leave these people alone, otherwise something else might happen to your car.” He wasn’t really very good at human threats, but this sort of thing had always worked for Toby, he remembered.
“You going to curse my car or something?” accused the man. Even non-wizards understood about hexes and curses in the mountains of Transylvania.
“Something like that,” replied Caleb mildly.
The man glared back, but got into the car without saying another word. With a great shudder and a cloud of blue smoke, which came from underneath the car this time, the sedan lurched out of camp and down the track.
The student turned to stare at Caleb, not saying anything at first. Incredibly, Caleb noticed that another student, an Asian, had been sitting in the large pavilion the entire time. His attention seemed to be glued to a computer of some sort, but he would occasionally move his hands furiously. Otherwise, he paid no attention to anything else.
“Jeez, first a sleazeball and now a damned hippie,” muttered the Italian-looking man in English.
Do I look like a hippie? Caleb mused to himself. He remembered seeing clusters of them in Harvard Square when he was a student, with their long hair and frayed blue jeans. He never dreamed that he’d be adopting their dress one day. But his life hadn’t turned out as expected in most other ways, either.
“I am, er, a botanist, actually,” Caleb said in English, feeling the words emerge slowly, like bears waking from hibernation.
“Oh, you speak English.” The other man looked startled and perhaps slightly embarrassed. “Hey, thanks for chasing that guy away. I couldn’t figure out what he wanted and Italian was the only language we had in common…Oh, hey, my name’s Mike Ferraro.” He stuck out his hand brusquely in a way that would have proclaimed that he was an American, even without the distinctive accent.
“Lupeni,” Caleb replied, shaking Mike’s hand. “That fellow wanted you to give him money, although I don’t think he had any good reason for it.”
“Too bad Lamia wasn’t around,” Mike said brightly. “She’s Italian, the only Italian in the bunch, but she speaks Romanian and about ten other languages. She would have chased him away.” He stopped and looked over Caleb’s shoulder. “There she is…Hey, Lamia! We’ve got company!”
Mike waved, and Caleb turned to see a woman walking unhurriedly toward them. She was thin with long, dark hair pulled back behind her head. In spite of the overcast morning, she wore a large floppy straw hat and dark sunglasses, looking as if she had just stepped from some Mediterranean beach rather than out of an alpine forest in Transylvania. Only her clothes proclaimed her to be a student: the ubiquitous blue jeans and shapeless black T-shirt.
“I speak nine languages, actually, and my hearing is very good,” she said as she approached the two. Her full mouth curved into a mischievous smile. She spoke English with a lyrical accent that was as beautiful as Mike’s was flat and uninteresting. “I understand we have a hippie visiting us, or perhaps a botanist?”
“This is Lubin—I didn’t quite catch your name,” Mike blustered with the proud air of someone who can’t be bothered with such trivial details.
“Lupeni,” finished Caleb and extended his hand to the woman.
“Lamia Borgheza,” she replied, taking his hand. Hers was cold, but she smiled up at him warmly. He found it impossible to guess what she might be thinking behind those dark glasses, but was intrigued. The handshake took long enough for Mike to start making small coughing noises. Caleb dropped her hand, amused, and wondered about the relationship between the two.
“So, what brings you to our little side of the mountain?” Mike inquired roughly, trying to win back center stage. “You collecting plants? You said you were a botanist, right?” He clearly did not believe Caleb, who silently agreed that his cover story was a bit farfetched.
“I’m collecting some rare specimens of Dianthus callizonus that grow close to cave entrances.” Caleb wasn’t quite sure that it grew anywhere near caves, but it was the best he could do. It was one of the ingredients in the fever-banishing potion he fed to his packmates when they had colds or the flu.
“Ah,” Lamia said in round, knowledgeable tones, “perhaps you mean Dianthus spiculifolius? Callizonus, with the beautiful pink flowers, only grows in Piatra Craiului, but I have seen a few spiculifolius growing around here.”
“Yes, of course,” Caleb replied quickly. It would be just his luck that these students would turn out to be botanists. He wondered how he was going to turn the conversation around to wolves. Why hadn’t he said he was a zoologist?
But Mike, eager to claim the conversation back, did it for him. “Aw, Lamia, you’re not an expert on flowers, too? You’re going to make Mr. Lubenny think we’re here to study nature or something. We’re just humble physicists, y’know.” Mike eyed his fellow student slyly and addressed Caleb. “You don’t know anything about wolves, do you? We seem to have lots of those.”
Lamia shuddered slightly and Caleb guessed that this was the desired effect of Mike’s question. “You have seen wolves?” he inquired levelly. “There aren’t too many left up here, from what people tell me. There are quite a few dogs, though.”
“Seen ‘em!” Mike snorted. “I was attacked by them, right Lamia? And they weren’t dogs!”
An attack would almost certainly mean a werewolf. This month or last month? He didn’t see any of the Sixes last week when he visited the cave, but he had spent much of the night inside.
“How long ago?”
“End of last month, right after we got here. I went chasing after Miss Nature here, and as we were coming through the woods back to camp, two of them jumped out of the cave at me.” Lamia seemed calm during this recital, but Caleb would have liked to have seen her eyes. Her body seemed to grow more tense and more still with each syllable of Mike’s story, even though her face was impassive. “Lamia scared them off, yelled something in Romanian. Not before one of them scratched me, though.”
“Oh?” Caleb asked cautiously. The timing was about right for the full moon before the most recent one. “Just a scratch? No bite?” Lamia looked up at him with a sudden, startled motion and then turned away quickly. “Sometimes those scratches can turn nasty. I have…had them myself. Did it heal?”
“Stupid thing keeps hurting,” Mike said as he shoved up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal three long scratches on his forearm. The traces were black, an unnatural shade of black, with red puckering around the edges. Werewolf scratches were not deadly, but they could fester if left untreated. Caleb put out his hand, wondering if this was Vlad’s work, causing Mike to wince even before contact with the scab.
“I know of an herbal remedy that will help that heal,” Caleb promised. “Something I’ve picked up since I’ve been here. If you like, I could make some and bring it back for you.”
The wound should heal with a simple Canine Poultice Potion, provided a b
it of wolfsbane was mixed in. Perhaps he could get Mihail to help out. That would give him an excuse to come back and learn more about the wolves and the caves.
“Well,” drawled Mike, “I don’t know. It’ll probably heal on its own.”
Surprisingly, Lamia spoke up, saying, “Go on, Mike. I’m sure our botanist can mix the right things together. He probably won’t make it any worse than it already is.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Mike grinned with a nod.
Relieved, Caleb sprinted back to the castle and prodded Mihail out of his afternoon nap to help with yet another potion. It must have been Caleb’s imagination that the old servant had grown used to him over the years, because his immediate response upon being asked for wolfsbane was, “So, cleaning up after your friends again?”
Not only that, but he went into his bedroom to collect the plant. He probably draped the stuff around himself as he slept.
Caleb tried to be brave as Mihail returned with a flowery sprig, but it went beyond ordinary disgust: the plant just made him back off. It was all he could do not to flee from the room.
Mihail watched with malicious delight as he completed the poultice. “Works well, doesn’t it?” he wondered rhetorically. “Like vampires and garlic.”
“Something like that,” Caleb said with forced cheerfulness, thinking he should be grateful that these tricks really worked. Garlic had saved him and Alexandru more than once, for it held Romanian vampires at bay indefinitely. It was better than sunlight, which only made them feeble and to which some of the old-timers seemed entirely resistant. Alexandru had explained that these rules were not universal, though. As close by as Slovenia, vampires only came out at night. In Russia, allegedly, they emerged at noon. “And luckily, wolfsbane isn’t a critical ingredient in the local cuisine,” he added.
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