Only the Moon Howls

by Connie Senior

  Lamia roused from her hazy thoughts to stare at the man glowering up at Cuza, hatred and fear at war on his face. This pitiful creature obviously had something to do with getting into the castle, although she couldn’t understand what. Then she recognized him and saw the joke.

  “A werewolf?” She couldn’t contain herself any longer and started laughing hysterically. How dare he lecture her about associating with werewolves? “You’re consorting with a werewolf, you bloodless bastard!”

  “Keep your voice down,” hissed the vampire with a cold glare. “This one is merely a tool and not a pet.” He obviously failed to see the humor in all this.

  “He was the one at the caves,” she said as she hopped off her stone perch and walked around the heap of a werewolf. “He tried to kill me last month, and at your orders, I take it.”

  “Not kill you, no,” Cuza retorted. “His job was killing the other. You were merely the bait, my dear. But he wasn’t very good at that little job. I have a simpler one for him tonight, however, one which I am certain he can carry out.”

  “What—?” the werewolf started to ask, but Cuza kicked him sharply in the knees, causing him to cry out in pain.

  “You will speak only if I require it,” he said contemptuously, directing another kick at the huddled man on the ground. “We have only a few minutes before moonrise. Take off your clothes.”

  After the werewolf had complied, Cuza reached down and pulled the man up by his hair, forcing him to stand, naked and cowering before them.

  “Have you prepared the vial?” Cuza asked her. In response she gave him the innocent-looking little flask, its delicate glass stopper attached to a thick gold chain. He held up the chain, swinging the vial gently, almost hypnotically.

  “When the time is right, our little wolf will carry this into the castle for us.” He gave the werewolf a shove to indicate that he should start down the path that terminated in the stable gate. “There will be a few surprises inside that should shake things up a bit. And then we shall fly into the castle as I promised.”

  35. Harvest Moon

  The previous month had turned the hills above Stilpescu from deep summer green to an autumn patchwork of scarlet, orange, and gold. In the red rays of the disappearing sun, these colors and the lengthening shadows that devoured them seemed not beautiful but ominous, as if fingers of blood were leaking between the alpine peaks and spreading through the forests and meadows.

  Whether this was an animal thought or one of an increasingly worried human, Caleb wasn’t sure, but he decided on the latter after a look towards the opposite horizon still showed no sign of the Harvest Moon.

  He sighed and sat down on a rock, pulling his cloak around him to dispel the autumn chill. The equinox had passed, and for the next six months his nights as a wolf would be longer than his days as a human. Alexandru had let him out of the castle early tonight, perhaps because they were both nervous: The old wizard wanted to make sure the wards were secure before any werewolves appeared. Uncharacteristically, Caleb looked forward to meeting Vlad as a wolf. Talking would be useless, he was now convinced, and he did not have any weapons to protect himself if Vlad should show up early and challenge him in human form.

  Caleb had told the old wizard nearly everything, recounting Liszka’s warnings and the events at the caves last month. Neither took Vlad’s boasts seriously, but Alexandru was certain that only one vampire would hunt at the full moon accompanied by a werewolf: Cuza.

  It was already early afternoon when Caleb began his story. Alexandru had been out late the previous night and had taken his breakfast in bed. There remained only a few hours to strengthen the defenses on the castle. First they went over all of the outer wards again, Alexandru lecturing with resignation about the pull of Jupiter that Caleb had never been able to master.

  Then they moved inside, and Caleb saw for the first time how every room had been designed to bar vampires, even should they manage to breach the gates.

  An Allios spell stopped only the Undead from passing through the doors and windows. It was a pity that this complex and difficult spell couldn’t be performed on the entire castle. The spring in the greenhouse ran all around the perimeter of the castle to stop vampires, who couldn’t cross running water. The mirrors in the Great Hall could be lowered to cover all four walls, so that a creature with no reflection trapped between any pair of them would see into infinity and be killed. They hung garlic from every corner and promontory, and scattered mustard seeds around on the floor.

  “It is a myth that vampires don’t like mustard,” Alexandru explained distractedly, falling into the role of teacher despite the situation. “But the seeds will stop them for some time, as they cannot pass them without stopping to count each one. They count quickly, however,” he added bitterly, and after that would say no more.

  When these preparations were complete, Alexandru went into the silent stone room at the base of the tower and pulled a series of iron levers that creaked in rusty protest. Caleb considered the room a “prison” because of its heavy door and grilled windows.

  Then Alexandru took hold of a three-foot handle, tugging futilely for a few minutes before he enlisted the other’s help. Together they managed to turn it in a full circle, and Caleb could see metal cables disappearing through the walls.

  “The Undead can be cut, crushed, and mangled as much as you or I,” Alexandru explained unnecessarily, as though Caleb hadn’t fought and killed his share of vampires by now. “It doesn’t kill them, of course, but it stops them in their tracks, and sometimes the simplest methods are the most effective. I developed these traps while hunting werebears, and I got the idea from a hunter who killed bears of the more ordinary variety.”

  The man is a common murderer, Caleb thought, amazed at his own fury at this monster-hunter who did not draw the line at victims who were outside life. Caleb was very glad he had disposed of the silver bullets. He didn’t trust Alexandru to spare the lives of any werewolves who might enter the castle, and even less to be able to recognize them individually, despite detailed descriptions. Liszka was easy, as she was pure white with blue eyes, but Bela looked a good deal like Vlad—not surprisingly, as it was Vlad who had bitten him. Caleb would never forgive Alexandru if he killed his foster son.

  It was several minutes before he could contain his anger enough to ask what the handle did, or where these traps were located.

  Alexandru smiled grimly. “They are everywhere. Outside the greenhouse, in the floors of the Great Hall, one in the entrance hall. I would advise you to tread lightly, though the stones under which the traps lie will give off a faint violet glow. Vampires are creatures of the night, you know,” he added with some pride, “and so they cannot perceive blue or violet.”

  This interested Caleb, though he wondered how a wolf would see it. As light, certainly, which should be enough of a warning—perhaps even as bluish light. Over the years, he had learned a lot about his half-remembered perceptions of how the wolf saw motion and color and detail. Wolves could see color, but mostly washed-out versions of blue and yellow. He would check the traps, marking them with something they could see if he didn’t think the violet light was enough.

  He was worrying for nothing, he scolded himself. No werewolves were going to get into the castle. The planetary wards would operate as they always had. Although the primary ward was weakest at the full moon, because it was intended for vampires, its residual strength along with the Jupiter ward would be more than enough to keep out any wizard.

  There was still something that nagged at his mind, though. Perhaps Lamia, for he had told his mentor none of that story.

  Guilt preyed on him now, as he sat outside waiting for the moon to rise and nibbled half-heartedly on a bar of chocolate. It tasted vile, either because of his nerves or because—as Toby used to say when he raided Caleb’s bedside table—chocolate wasn’t good for dogs. He folded it up again and stuck it back into his pocket, taking out a small autumn apple. It also tasted mealy and unpleasa
nt, but he finished it anyway.

  Certainly it wasn’t a fatal mistake to neglect telling Alexandru about the vampire graduate student? A Romanian woman from an unknown century, Undead for an indeterminate number of years, she would have no reason to be interested in the castle. Unless there was a vast vampire society of which he knew nothing, all working in concert. From what she’d told him of flighty, gossipy bloodsuckers, this seemed unlikely.

  He turned towards the eastern sky, waiting patiently for that eternal celestial event that seemed delayed tonight, as though Selene’s chariot had broken a spoke. The sky was darkening, and a very bright star was visible in the southeast, slightly yellow as it rose above the horizon. No, not a star, he realized, this was Jupiter—which he’d given up on, its magic unreachable to him. The planet called forth memories of the graduate students, though he wasn’t sure why.

  Why had Lamia disappeared without telling Caleb, or her fellow students, or her employer?

  Would he ever know? he wondered, still looking at the bright planet but unaware that a special astronomical event was due that night. Even in its path across the sky, Caleb had never seen the full moon as a sentient creature, and so as its reddish crest appeared it didn’t occur to him that its orbit would carry its upper edge across Jupiter in the southeast. The occultation was in his notes, he had even been the one to point it out to Alexandru, but all the idea gave him now was a lingering sense of doubt.

  His thoughts were cut short by moonrise. As the transformation began, he was sure that he heard screams not far away.

  As always when there were humans to be smelled, the wolf pawed at the gates of the castle, trying to find some purchase for tooth or paw. At the sound of a lupine cry, he dropped back on all fours and turned. He heard it again, a growl from beyond the jumbled rocks surrounding the castle walls. He trotted cautiously up the path leading away from the castle. By the smell, Vlad was nearby. Something slammed into him with a growl as he rounded a large pile of rocks, knocking him to the ground.

  No longer able to wonder if an orchestrated plot was at work, all he could do was fight. He twisted his flank out of the black wolf’s jaws and backed away, snarling. There was no time to pounce before he found a shining cord draped around his neck.

  The cord was silver, and Caleb howled in pain and rage. Since his first few transformations in his parents’ home he had not been confined, and he had never been forced to walk on a leash like a domesticated cur. Even through the thick ruff of fur on his neck, the metal burned and he backed around in circles in a vain attempt to escape it.

  His howls grew as the end of the cord flew into the hand of a corpse, which jerked him roughly towards itself. The stench of decay filled his nostrils, nauseating him, his instincts screaming to plant his rear feet in the abomination’s stomach and scatter its dead guts.

  Another set of footsteps came up the stone path. Caleb had to rely on his hearing since his nose was so contaminated by the smell of vampire. The wolf heard a human voice, a female voice, but was confused as his overloaded senses told him she, too, was dead. He laid his ears back, whining with frustration. She seemed not to fear him, and as she grew closer he sniffed again to confirm his first impression.

  Whimpering like a puppy, he scarcely noticed he was tethered to Vlad, or where the vampires were dragging them.

  “You’re not going to—?” wondered the now-worried female voice. Then another voice, a male voice. One so full of the uniquely human enjoyment of cruelty that the fur on Caleb’s back stood up as though he had been a scared beagle, rather than a two-hundred pound werewolf who spent most of his days as a fully qualified wizard.

  “Kill them?” Cuza laughed. “Certainly not. They will come in useful, just not yet.” As he spoke these words, the vampire looked up towards the bright planet that meant nothing to the wolf, and at the sphere of the moon inching in its direction. “And we don’t wish the old fool at the castle to hear our little pets playing, do we?”

  With a snap of his fingers the vampire created a pit in the rocky soil, into which he hurled the wolves with a jerk of the silver cord. The leash then undid itself from their necks and coiled around the neck of the pit, forming a low fence that threw the animals back as they attempted to leap it.

  Trapped, with nothing to do but fight, fight is what the two wolves did. They knew each other so well by now that they did little damage, each coming in for a quick snap of jaws before he was forced to back off again, as choreographed as a boxing match.

  Lamia backed away from the snarling pair in revulsion, while Cuza lingered to watch, his satisfaction a dark inversion of her disgust. She, who had not felt cold for fifty years, shivered and wrapped her arms around her thin chest. Wolves howling around the castle had unnerved her then and did so now. Why had she come back?

  “The lunar ward is weakest when the moon is full,” Cuza was explaining, having tired of the dogfight. “The Jupiter ward will fail for one hour tonight, as the moon covers the planet in a spectacular occultation that I’m sure your physicist friends will enjoy. With those wards out of the way, living magical creatures will be able to get in. That’s why we need Rover and Speckles here.” He indicated the snarling and bleeding wolves with cold amusement. “But this isn’t why I brought you tonight.

  “With the aid of a raven and the appearance of Saturn, a wizard can disable the Jupiter ward with a Kronos curse. A wizard more powerful than myself, unfortunately. The two of us together should be able overcome the ward. And that, my drunken darling, is why I need you with all your wits about you. Just one night, and then you can feast as you have never feasted, forever. I promise you,” he paused as Lamia quivered in anticipation, “I promise you the blood of Alexandru Arghezi himself!”

  Firelight dances before her eyes, bathing them all in yellow and orange hues. Her husband tells a joke, laughing, and she must laugh, too. The boy smiles; he is so beautiful, his delicate features unlike the hard angular ones of his older brother. The boy—he is my brother now, she corrects herself—looks at her with dark, uncertain eyes.

  Lamia’s mind was just clear enough that she wondered if she were thinking straight. Coming down off her blood high, what she wanted most was more blood to help her forget the pain, and she had wasted most of the evening pleading with Cuza to let her go hunting. She looked between her two lovers: the ancient one, with his threats and promises, and the new one, reduced to savagery in a bloody pit.

  “What do you think of your American wizard now?” sneered Cuza as if reading her mind.

  Was it only her fantasy that had imagined intelligence on the face of the gray wolf last month? Face crusted with blood and foam and slobber, he was nothing more than a beast. How could he do this to her?

  “Your dogs won’t be much use to you soon,” she said with a laugh as cruel as Cuza’s—or perhaps more so, as it was calculated. The wolves were tiring. Their tongues hung out and their tails drooped.

  “They will revive when they get the scent of human blood.” Cuza smiled. “They prefer human blood, as we do.”

  Lamia looked up hopefully, thinking there might be the chance to get some—just a little—somewhere, to ease the longing, the emptiness.

  But he shook his head. “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” he repeated “…and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.”

  “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” Lamia snapped. Cuza had never been intelligent or educated: just smooth and full of pithy quotes. Unlike Lupeni—but no.

  The veiled insult only served to make Cuza smile. “Of course, the Kronos curse will not suffice to get us safely into the castle,” the vampire continued, with another look towards the rising moon. “Arghezi has put an Allios Spell on the gates, which I have detected from outside the castle, and will certainly have done the same on all the doors and windows. You should remember that spell will not allow us to pass. Thus, even after the major wards surrounding the castle are breached, t
hese dogs will be able to enter, but we will not.”

  “Arghezi will doubtless have minor traps inside as well that we will want to disarm,” he continued as he pulled objects from his pockets and arranged them on the ground in front of them, lit by the full moon as if it were day. “A simple Desiccation Demon will take care of the running water nicely.” The creature was encased in a small glass box, kicking and punching the walls in a frenzy. “The garlic will provide nesting material.” Here he produced an egg, the shell off-white and papery like the root vegetable itself. He then indicated the gold chain around her neck, where she held the vial of dark blue glass, and gestured for her to remove the stopper.

  The spell he had performed would allow all these things and more to be stored inside the vial, but if the glass broke or the stopper came off, all would be released. She held out the container and he transferred the struggling demon into its new prison, then tapped each of the objects on the ground, causing them to rise up and float inside.

  “But, even if all these things work,” she said slowly, her mind still not functioning properly, “we will not be able to pass through any door or window in the castle, right?”

  A secretive smile formed on his lips as he produced a leather bag from the folds of his robe. He pointed his finger at the bag and opened it deftly with one hand. A swarm of small brown insect-like creatures flew out, hundreds of them, each no bigger than a thumbnail and flying so fast that she could barely make them out. A green haze emanating from Cuza’s fingertip enveloped the cloud and he coaxed the large glowing haze into the vial. Lamia quickly stoppered it.

  “What are those and how do they help us get into the castle?” she puzzled.

  “Those are cedar beetles, somewhat magically enhanced so that they should be capable of eating through a good sized tree in about eight hours.”