Only the Moon Howls

by Connie Senior

  Mihail turned his liquid dark eyes on Caleb, his face full of fear and rage. “Do you think the castle grounds were planted with garlic to season legs of lamb?” he inquired with sarcasm born of helpless terror.

  Caleb shivered as he realized Mihail’s hostility was not directed at him personally, but that he was just as afraid of whatever Alexandru sought as the old wizard himself…if not more afraid. The days of uncertainty, of Alexandru’s fraying temper and occasionally irrational demands, had taken their toll.

  “No, I supposed it was to keep the vampires from moving into the castle again,” he began, thinking.

  He was cut off by Mihail’s harsh cackle. “Ah, no, they did not move in to the castle before, Mr. O’Connor,” laughed the old man. “Rotten from within, it was.”

  Caleb thought of the missing portraits in the gallery, and he began to understand. “So then…”

  But Mihail was returning to his duty, and the potion reminded him to be wary of his partner in this conversation. He wasn’t quite ready to discuss his fear of one Dark creature with another.

  “Here you go,” he said, his expression closing as he handed Caleb a stoppered flask. “Why you need it for a mere scratch, I do not know, but…” He leered. Clearly he thought Caleb was lying about a bite.

  “It was a student, with a group from a university,” Caleb explained. “They’re doing some kind of experiment in the Petrosna caves.”

  Mihail snatched the flask with an intake of breath, then reconsidered and handed it back. “Adults don’t survive werewolf bites, you know,” he said darkly.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I thought you would,” muttered the old man, watching Caleb stroll insouciantly from the room with the flask tucked into his pocket.

  18. Calypso’s Cave

  When Caleb returned to the Petrosna caves the next day, he found yet another student in the pavilion. The area consisted of a large tent with its sides rolled up and mesh netting hanging all around; the interior contained several tables with computers and piles of books and papers. The student, an Indian by his looks, stared fixedly at a computer screen watching bright squiggly lines dance.

  “Er, excuse me,” Caleb began as he stood nearby, just outside the netting.

  “What is it?” the other began in a crisp British accent, without taking his eyes from the squiggles. When he finally looked up, he seemed startled to see a stranger.

  “Oh. Sorry,” he said, still lost in whatever he had been working on. “You’re that fellow Mike told us about, eh?”

  “Yes. I’m looking for Mike, in fact. I brought something for him. Is he here?”

  “He’s on shift,” replied the student, as if that explained everything. Responding to Caleb’s puzzled expression, he jumped off his stool and pushed aside the mesh curtain. “Sorry. He’s up at the caves taking data. I’m Vijay.”

  Vijay offered his hand and Caleb shook it, musing that he had gotten out of practice shaking hands. Sniffing noses was more his style, but he didn’t think these students would understand or appreciate that greeting.

  “I’ll just go and get him, shall I?” Without waiting for a reply, the student disappeared up the path, leaving Caleb to stare at the computer screen. He wondered if the wiggles were tracking particle decays, with some vague memory of why this should be done in a cave. Protection from solar neutrinos, maybe? He stepped into the pavilion and surveyed some of the piles lying about, thinking that he could at least understand books.

  That was wrong, of course, since most of the books turned out to have incomprehensible titles filled with words that Caleb didn’t even know existed. Particle physics had not been a particular interest of his, and the time he’d spent as a science student seemed as if it had happened to someone else decades ago.

  One corner of the tent was piled with books of another sort, books about history and literature in a surprising number of languages. Most he didn’t know, but Greek and Latin he had studied with Fintonclyde, simply because he’d had a voracious desire to learn anything he could find.

  He picked up a copy of The Iliad, turning to the beginning to see how well he could do with the Greek. Words and phrases leapt out at him as he stumbled out loud through the opening lines:

  “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

  murderous, doomed, that cost the Acheans countless losses,

  hurtling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls…”

  He broke off, thinking sharply of Toby, not wanting to hear more about the doom of one of the greatest of tragic heroes.

  “Well, the hippie knows Homer,” said a dry voice from behind him. He turned to find Lamia, her face shaded by the enormous hat, but without her dark glasses today. A pair of intense violet eyes bored into him as if he were an odd specimen in a zoo. There was something about her eyes, something at once familiar and alien.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said, hastily putting the book down. “I wasn’t sure if I could still…”

  “I don’t care for The Iliad, myself,” she said slyly, as she entered the pavilion and appraised Caleb carefully. “Not enough interesting female characters. Pleading Thetis and dreary, tortured Helen are about it.”

  “Ah,” he smiled at her, “perhaps you prefer The Odyssey and the clever wife, Penelope?”

  She shook her head, but smiled back at him.

  “Circe, enchantress of men, then,” he said, feeling oddly buoyant as his brain worked in ways long forgotten. “Or the nymph Calypso, who wants to make Odysseus immortal so he will stay with her forever?”

  She approached and he smelled her perfume, musky, sweet and unsettling, and as familiar as her eyes in some odd way. “Calypso, I fancy,” she said softly, perching on a stool and looking up at him with a newfound interest. “She lives on a lovely island far out to sea.”

  “Isolation is what you crave?” Caleb asked, surprised at himself for wanting to continue the conversation. She laughed in response with a trace of bitterness.

  “I’m here, aren’t I? But I suppose that you must like isolation as well.” She didn’t give him time to reply, but stood abruptly, saying, “Mike and Vijay have gotten into an argument—they usually do. I’ll take you up to the caves.”

  He followed her along a path that wound through the trees for about five hundred yards. A wall of granite loomed suddenly, proclaiming their arrival at the flank of the mountain. Caleb could see thick black cables on the ground, snaking into the entrance to the cave. An unnatural glow issued from the dark opening, indicating that this wasn’t the lair of a dragon or a chimera or any other creature in Caleb’s experience.

  An argument was indeed in progress; he’d heard similar ones in the halls of MIT. The cosmic irony of finding himself once again among physics students was almost too much. For a brief moment he considered that they all might be leptothrixes playing an elaborate trick on him—then he decided they were all too dorky to be soul-sucking Dark creatures.

  “The whole idea of proton decay is based on the simplest possible Unified Field Theory, SU(3) cross SU(3) cross U(1). There’s no reason nature has to make everything the simplest way.” That was Mike, playing the devil’s advocate in what sounded like his usual manner.

  “But would it be any surprise that the vector boson mediating baryon number non-conservation would have finite mass?” Vijay replied in a tone of calm reason. “We have already seen the unification of the electrical and weak forces. Why not the strong force?”

  Hundreds of steel boxes, three feet across and taller than a tall man, were stacked two-deep throughout the cave. Metal tubes of every description were scattered around the stack in chaotic disarray. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to pile them up, and there were two people right now engaged in layering them around the stack. Other metal boxes were arranged so that the conical holes in their centers faced the ceiling. Bits and pieces of hardware dangled from every surface, most of it wrapped in tape and plastic so that Caleb could not even begin t
o guess what it might be. Dozens of computer screens scrolled constant streams of numbers, and occasionally the streams would stop, causing Mike or Vijay to hammer at the keyboards and curse.

  “Hey, you two,” Lamia said with practiced tones, “you’re not going to construct a Grand Unified Theory just yet.” Both men stopped reluctantly.

  Mike noticed Caleb and broke into a broad grin. “Hey, I didn’t think you’d be back,” he said, the argument having been forgotten. “Did you really bring some Transylvanian potion?”

  Caleb smiled. That was exactly what he had brought, although a few years previous he would have been as scientifically skeptical of it as they were. He flashed back to his drive to Boston the day of Toby’s trial, and the “magical courtroom” that had had no magical ways of finding the truth. Had any of that actually happened?

  “Let’s see your arm,” he said, stepping toward Mike and shaking his head to banish the memories. Treating wounds was something he had grown familiar with. The Fives got themselves into plenty of scrapes, both in human and in wolf form, although Caleb wasn’t as certain about the healing powers of humans.

  Mike rolled up his sleeve to reveal the scratched landscape on his arm. Caleb got the flask from the canvas bag on his shoulder along with some bandages.

  “Can you, er, give me a hand?” he asked, turning to Lamia. He realized all of a sudden that the Poultice Potion, containing wolfsbane as it did, was not something he cared to touch. He handed her the flask as he took Mike’s outstretched arm. “Unstopper it, and pour a bit on,” he directed her.

  The potion smoked slightly as the flask was opened, and even more as Lamia dribbled it along the scars on Mike’s arm. He winced, clearly trying to be brave, saying, “Whoa. What is this stuff?”

  “Mmmm. Herbs mostly,” Caleb replied as he inspected the wound. The redness was starting to decrease. Mihail had never failed him on a potion, perhaps making it worth the cold stares and harsh words he usually encountered from the Romanian servant.

  “Apply it twice a day for five days,” he said brusquely as he wrapped a bandage around the wounded arm. “I’ll come back and check on it next week. It should be healed by then.”

  “Think I’ll have a scar?” Mike grinned at him. “Souvenir of Transylvania? Hey, at least I didn’t turn into a werewolf.”

  Both Lamia and Caleb shuddered at his words. Caleb wondered once again at her seeming familiarity with the subject. He put the remainder of the bandages back in his bag and wished to be gone from the cave. He detected no vampires today, although his human senses were far inferior to those of the wolf. Perhaps it was the lurking presence of leptothrixes somewhere in the labyrinth of caves that made him uncomfortable.

  “We should let Mike get back to work,” Lamia said suddenly. “I’ll walk you back to the camp. I’m not due on shift until after dark.”

  As they left the caves, Mike and Vijay resumed their argument. This was as much a part of being a physicist as all the dancing squiggles. Caleb was quite sure he preferred the werewolves.

  As if reading his mind, Lamia said, “The argumentation gets wearisome, but physics is beautiful, really. The problems are so hard—a lifetime could be spent just in preparing to understand—and your mind has to stretch, to reach out to grasp them…” She broke off, embarrassed, and looked at her feet once again. “I’m sorry. I don’t expect I can explain what it’s like for me.”

  Caleb remembered what had originally drawn him to science, and realized there were some things he hadn’t left behind. When he learned a complicated enchantment like the moonwards, he had to seek out just the right balance in his mind and in the external world, and it all had to come together as a conceptual whole.

  “Your mind creates something from nothing,” he mused as he walked. “No, that’s not right. You take from the chaos around you and build something that didn’t exist before. It is beautiful.”

  She stopped walking and Caleb, lost in thought, didn’t notice for a moment. He turned back to see her staring at him with an expression rendered unreadable by the dark glasses.

  “Yes,” she said softly, “perhaps you do understand.”

  Lamia walked quickly up the path, eager to be gone from the lights and the noise of the camp. Not that it was all that noisy tonight, especially with Mike up in the caves. He could carry on enough conversation for all four of them if need be.

  She held a flashlight in one hand, although she didn’t need it. She was perfectly familiar with the path now, even in the dark of early evening. As she walked, she thought about Lupeni, the alleged botanist. He was no more a botanist than she, probably less of one since she had almost taken a degree in botany at one point. She had her suspicions about what he really was, leading her to wonder once again about the wisdom of coming here.

  Why had she come? Working for Professor Gamberi at the University of Bologna was definitely an opportunity she could not pass up. All she had to do was to collect enough data this summer and she could spend the next five years analyzing it back at the university; that would be enough to earn her a degree. Four months in Transylvania wouldn’t be so bad, or so she thought initially.

  But the wolves. She had forgotten about the wolves. And there were other things, too.

  “Mike?” she called as she entered the cave, bathed in the green light of the oscilloscopes. He wasn’t hunched over the console as usual. Maybe he was further back tending to a piece of equipment.

  Lamia wove her way through the tall racks of instruments, skillfully stepping over cables. He wasn’t behind any of the racks either. It wasn’t like him to leave an experiment in progress. She turned on the flashlight as she emerged back into the center of the chamber, playing the light into the darker corners.

  There. On the cave floor behind a packing crate, the light picked up something white. Lamia switched off the light and moved cautiously to investigate. As she came near, she saw the body of a man stretched out, the head and shoulders bathed in darkness. Those were Mike’s shoes. She knelt down, shaking him roughly.

  “Mike? Are you all right?” But, of course, Mike wasn’t going to answer any time soon. That much was obvious from the first touch. More than that, she knew what had happened, something that frightened her even more than werewolves. She stood, conscious that someone or something had come up behind her.

  Why did I come back?

  Taking a deep breath, she turned, coming face to face with a pale man whose dark eyes leered at her hungrily. Recognition flooded his face, mirroring her own.

  “Emil,” she said crisply to the vampire, not pleased at all to see him. “It has been a long, long time.”

  19. The Sheep Look Up

  Caleb and Grigore herded a ewe and her two lambs up the narrow mountain track. The sheep bleated as they were forced to thread the narrow rocky clefts, and the men worked hard to keep the sheep from tumbling off the rocky ledges. A thick fog wrapped itself around the top of the mountain, cutting off the warm midsummer sun of the pass.

  “Grigore!” exclaimed Caleb. “Watch that ewe! She’s too close to the edge.”

  The ewe stumbled and disappeared, her angry bleats echoing through the mist, calling out to the remaining animals. Both men moved cautiously toward the cries, but halted when it became obvious that the ewe had slipped off the edge of the track and tumbled down to a nearby ledge. In spite of their mother’s insistent calls, the remaining sheep—all this spring’s lambs—huddled behind the men.

  “I am sorry, Lupeni Alpha,” Grigore replied timidly.

  “She’s not very smart and this mist is getting thick,” Caleb reassured Grigore, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. He alwayss winced when Grigore addressed him as Alpha; he had hoped that oldest friend in the mountains could dispense with it when they traveled without the pack.

  “Grigore,” he said after a thoughtful pause, “this might be a good time for you to try to summon Wind.”

  “Oh, no,” replied the other nervously, “I’ve only practiced on small things
and—”

  “Nonsense. What good is it learning spells if you don’t practice them?”

  The lost ewe continued her loud cries as they talked, and the lambs nudged the two wizards nervously. In ten months of practice Grigore had learned a few simple spells. With the exception of the boy, Bela, none of the other Fives was remotely interested in learning magic—but Caleb was pleased with even that much progress. Unlike Fintonclyde, Caleb was not driven to teach all of the packmates under his care.

  “Close your eyes and focus, just as we practiced,” Caleb prompted gently.

  The wizard-in-training nodded, raised his arms and muttered the words of the spell under his breath, his eyes closed tightly in concentration. The bleats of the lost ewe grew closer and Caleb could just make out her fuzzy head appearing out of the mist. Grigore opened his eyes and gasped, startled that he had actually done it. Unfortunately, this revelation broke his concentration and the sheep disappeared from sight, baaing bitterly. They could hear her hooves scrambling over the stones below.

  “Son of a rabid dog,” cursed Grigore, stamping his feet. Caleb ignored him while he called to the ewe. She soon reappeared, frantically struggling but otherwise unharmed, and tumbled to the ground at their feet. She would have gone off the edge again if Caleb had not grabbed her, kneeling and throwing his arms around the large woolly neck.

  “That was very good, Grigore,” he said as calmly as he could over the ewe’s bleats. He tried to sound encouraging, despite the mouthful of wool and sharp kicks from the sheep’s hooves.

  “Stupid sheep,” muttered Grigore. “We were better off stealing them.”

  “You cannot mean that,” Caleb said sharply, rising to meet the younger wizard’s eyes.

  “No, Lupeni Alpha.” he murmured, ducking his head to avoid the other’s glaring disappointment. “But…” Grigore spoke haltingly, but with an edge of determination in his voice. “Wolves aren’t—aren’t sheepdogs. In the old days, we—”