Neither Callie nor Sabine answered. They all knew the chances of seeing the wolves alive again.
Following the stream, it was not long before Jack began to recognize the shape of the landscape — how the hills sat around them, the weight of the land, the shadows of trees and the twinkling of the stream. He knew that they were very, very close.
Come to us, he thought, connecting with the wolf and hoping that the others would see it leaving. We're there, leave the fight and —
Callie shouted in surprise and fired three times. Sabine uttered a short, sharp cry. Jack turned to see a polar bear was bearing down on Callie, one giant paw already swinging around with wet claws promising a killing blow. Callie had stumbled onto her back and now held only one gun, and Jack could hear the click, click, click of its hammer on empty chambers like a death rattle in the night.
He fired the shotgun from his hip and a smudge of darkness opened across the bear's head and shoulder.
Callie rolled aside and the dying vampire fell where she had been lying. She quickly cast aside her empty gun and snapped up the one she had dropped. She broke it open, glancing up at Jack wide-eyed.
"Three," was all she said. Jack knew that "Thank you" could wait until later.
"This way!" Jack said. The three of them ran along the course of the stream, then Jack took them left across the shoulder of a low hill, heading for the dark shadows of what he knew to be the extremes of Lesya's forest. He had once run away from this place in fear for his life, and now the opposite was true.
He only hoped that Lesya's powers had not been drained too much.
"Oh, Jack," Sabine said. He glanced around, breath held in his throat as he expected to see the vampires bearing down upon them. So unfair, to be taken so close to potential safety.
But Sabine was smiling instead of frowning, her moonlit eyes reflecting wonder.
"What is it?" Callie asked, weariness smoothing her voice.
"She's home," Sabine said. "Lesya is home. Leshii breathes thanks, though I think he'll soon be too far gone even for that. And now . . . everything has started to change."
They entered the forest together, the darkness welcoming them in. Jack probed back and sensed his wolf running toward them, its body battered and torn but still filled with vigor. It was alone.
"What the hell . . . ?" Callie said, unable to complete her sentence because there were no words large enough.
The forest was alive.
Through that final, incredible onslaught, there was no sign of Ghost. But Lesya was everywhere. Jack could feel her life-spirit flooding through the forest, touching everything previously sickened and bringing it back to ebullient life. He knew that Sabine could feel it as well. At their time of direst peril, he had never seen her so filled with wonder.
In this final battle there was little place for humans. Even Sabine acknowledged the greater powers at play, and she allowed Jack to lead her deeper into the forest, until they found shelter beside a large rocky outcropping from where they could hear, and sometimes see. Callie knelt beside them, nursing the gun that contained her last three silver bullets. Jack knew that she craved to use them — that the killing of the monsters and releasing of their cursed souls was far from over for her. But the stakes were totally different now. The vampires had met their match.
Jack hugged Sabine to him as the forest and vampires clashed.
They heard the unnatural creatures entering the forest. They surged in, snapping branches, trampling undergrowth, and it was only moments before the first of them let out a hideous shriek. Jack saw a shadow being flung aloft by a flexing, creaking tree, and then the larger shadow became many smaller ones as other trees reached to join in. Objects pattered wetly across the forest floor.
Branches whipped at the air and sometimes met flesh. Boughs groaned as they moved. The roars of fury became growls of consternation as the vampires found their routes blocked, the forest shifting and transforming around them. Jack recalled his attempted flight through these woods, and how he had been steered and controlled by the landscape around him, and how to begin with he had not understood. These vampires might understand, because they had been attempting to bleed Lesya's power for some time. But understanding would not help them.
He had once thought of Lesya as something of a monster herself, but no more. He did not have to be like Sabine to sense how right this was, and sharing a glance with Callie, he knew that she understood as well. This was nature versus evil. This was what was allowed, fighting what should never have been. Lesya was the purest spirit of the wilderness, and she was stamping out the stain of the vampires.
More growls and screams and confused cries. More impacts as things were held aloft and torn apart.
Then Sabine said, "There she is," almost breathless with wonder. Jack and Callie looked in the direction she indicated and Lesya was there, glorious and exultant in her natural form at last. She had been taken and held against her will, tortured perhaps, and maybe damaged too much to truly find herself again. But now her anger gave her power, and she marched through her domain proud and amazing.
Moonlight bathed her in purity. The size of a tree, her arms were sweeping limbs sprouting with shiny green leaves, the very image of rebirth. Her body was bark-covered, yet malleable enough to twist and turn to her desires. Her legs stomped across the landscape with a surety born of ancient familiarity, and her face . . .
Her face was one that Jack London knew so well, and had seen in his dreams ever since he had first set eyes upon her. Though far from her human form, Lesya retained features that Jack would always recognize, and fear and respect in equal measure.
She glanced his way. Blinked. And her face cracked open into a wooden grin that Jack could not help but mimic. Sabine laughed beside him, and even Callie lifted her face to the sky and chuckled. LLL
"We're going to make it," Sabine said. Her voice was filled with relief. Jack knew that she was already thinking beyond this fight, to when she and Lesya might meet properly and sit to talk, and find their ways into each other's lives and histories.
Jack's wolf appeared from the shadows, limping toward them. It glanced at Sabine, paused, and tilted its head. Then it came close to Jack and lay by his side, allowing him to touch its head and feel his way across its wounds. Its pelt was wet with blood, but he could feel the strong beating of its heart. It panted, but proudly. And watched.
Lesya strode back and forth through her forest, snapping up vampire beasts and lifting them high. Some she tore to shreds, mangled human parts tumbling back down. Then Jack saw something that made him shiver, and gave the grin she had granted him a manic edge.
Some vampires she impaled high in the trees. Pinned there against the moonlit sky, their agonized silhouettes squirmed — bears, a cougar, and three men whose thin limbs looked pathetic against the infinite heavens.
"Glorious," a voice said, and Ghost jumped down from the rock behind them. He landed beside Jack's wolf and knelt there, big hand resting on its back, but he spared not a glance for Jack and the others. He only had eyes for Lesya.
"She's torturing them," Sabine said.
"Yes?" Ghost said, still not looking.
"Yes," Callie said. Jack was not sure how to read her voice. Satisfaction, or disapproval?
"We have no idea what they did to her," Jack said, surprised that he wanted to defend Lesya's actions.
"I do," Ghost said. "I know." His voice was low, heavy, filled with anger and something else that Jack could not place for a while. "They bled her and kept her trapped in their caves like an animal. They taunted her. They promised to keep her alive, and never let her go. So yes. She's torturing them."
He respects her, Jack thought. At last, the beast has found someone — something — that he considers on his own level. He glanced at Sabine, only to discover she was already looking at him, eyebrows raised.
Soon the violence died down, and within half an hour the only sound was Lesya's footsteps, light and delicate for something s
o huge. Then even they died down, and moments later she appeared to them as Jack had first seen her. Naked, beautiful, eyes still filled with the wild, the forest spirit came toward them and knelt on the damp ground.
"Dawn," she said, her voice like a hand across rough bark, "and it will be over."
Jack looked up at the tree canopy. He could see three shapes up there, struggles lessening but their silhouettes still moving against the constant sky. He knew there were more. When dawn came, the last of the vampires would meet their end.
"All of them?" Ghost asked.
"All but three cowards that fled north," Lesya said. She glanced at Callie then looked directly at Jack. "A polar bear, a cougar, and a hawk. Injured, but not dying."
"They'll never come back," Ghost said firmly.
"Not in a human's lifetime, perhaps."
"Lesya," Jack said. Her name felt strange on his lips.
"Jack London. You left me."
"I value my freedom."
"I would have given you such wonders." She glanced at Sabine, said to Jack, "And are you not still a prisoner?"
Sabine stood, proud, defiant. "At least I don't try to force Jack to stay with me."
"And who are . . . ?" Lesya began.
Jack saw Sabine's eyes go wide. She stiffened, and Lesya did the same.
He saw the glimmer of a tear on his loved one's cheek.
When Lesya stood again, her eyes also glittered.
Crying without a sound, the two women came close, reached out their hands, and almost touched.
When dawn arrived, the treetops erupted in flames and screams. Those vampires impaled up in the canopy by Lesya's wilder self first shook and cried out, then smoked, then burst afire as dawn's early light kissed their cursed skins and pelts. As they exploded into unnatural flame and writhed where they were pinned, Jack could see their bodies deforming back to their original states. The vampires died halfway back to human, and he supposed there was some comfort in that.
He would never know the pain of the vampire curse, and for that he would be forever grateful.
They watched together, apart from Sabine and Lesya. Those two had disappeared into the forest alone, and no one had sought to accompany them. Their need to connect with each other had been so obvious, and as they'd left Ghost had sat down beside Jack.
While they had waited for dawn Jack, Ghost, and Callie had all remained silent. The wolf lay sleeping. Jack had sensed something between him and Ghost that confused him through those hours of darkness, and he had spent some time thinking back to their time together on the Larsen. Those bad memories offered no clues.
As the last of the canopy fires guttered out as the charred remains fell to the forest floor, Jack realized what that feeling was. The tension was gone. The almost palpable barrier between him and Ghost had melted away into the darkness, and in its place was the open space of potential that existed between all human beings. Jack knew from experience that sometimes that space was filled with love, sometimes hatred, sometimes violence or indifference. The air between Jack and Ghost was empty, a blank slate waiting to be written upon.
Jack sensed that there was nothing left to write. Their story was almost over, and as he glanced sidelong at Ghost, he was almost sad.
"New day," Jack said.
"Aye, Mister London."
Jack smiled at Ghost's use of his first mate name. Then the smile slipped when he thought again of Louis and the Reverend, and the sacrifice they had made. Several times through the night he had heard movement and hoped it was them, but no one had materialized from the shadows. He suspected it was merely Lesya's forest shrugging itself back to life once more.
"They fought as wolves and died as men," Ghost said quietly, again appearing to read Jack's mind.
"And you find value in that?" Jack snapped. The captain he had known would have laughed at the sacrifice, scoffing at the idea that such glory might be worth more than a continued, wretched existence.
Ghost sighed softly, but did not reply. Jack supposed that was answer enough.
"And you," Jack said. He examined Ghost in the dawn light. Relaxed though the big man was, he had only half-reverted to his human form. Thick fur lined his arms, neck, and cheeks, clotted with dirt and mud. His large hands bore curved, deadly claws. His face was elongated, still recognizably human yet possessed of a wolf's unmistakable contours. Perhaps this was his new normal.
"I've reached the end of one journey," Ghost said.
"Killing your brother, Death Nilsson, wasn't the end?" Jack asked.
"No," Ghost said. But he did not elaborate.
The wolf suddenly growled, leaping to its feet and readying for a pounce. Callie stood up quickly, stepping forward and raising her gun.
Jack stood with her. He had one cartridge left. It's daylight, he thought, but he could not ignore his wolf's caution.
Movement ahead of them, through the trees.
Ghost took in a deep breath, then chuckled softly as he let it out. He sounded almost happy.
Louis emerged from around a burnt tree ahead of them, pausing when he saw them and then moving onward once again. He almost back to fully human, and nursing wounds that would have killed any lesser man. His left leg had been gored so badly that Jack could see bone. His chest was a mass of cuts, and his face was swollen and bruised from some terrible impact. Through it all his golden tooth caught the dawn and gleamed, his grimace turning into a pained grin when he saw them.
"Aren't you . . . going to . . . get breakfast, Jack?" he asked. Twenty steps from them he collapsed onto his front, and by the time Jack had dashed to him, Louis was moaning in delirium.
"The Reverend?" Jack asked.
"Gone," Louis said. He grew still. "But he took plenty with him. You should have seen him, Jack. He really found himself just before he . . . he . . ." Louis closed his eyes and slipped into unconsciousness. His breathing was ragged but his heart beat strong.
"A brave man," Callie said from behind Jack.
"Yes," Jack said, nodding. "A man."
"I can help him," a woman's voice said. As he turned around, Jack was unsure who he would see. There was something of both of them in that confident note, and the way the voice seemed to sing slightly out of synch with reality.
Both women stood up on the rock, but from her expression he could see that it was Lesya who had spoken.
"Then help," Jack said.
Lesya nodded, and both she and Sabine descended. Sabine came directly to Jack as Lesya tended the fallen man, and he saw a contentment in her that set a glow in his heart.
"It was all worth it," Jack said, a statement more than a question. Sabine's warm smile and grateful nod was the only answer any of them required.
Chapter Fourteen - New Journeys
Jack watched his wolf race off into the deeper forest and part of him felt as if he were running alongside. He knew he might well see the animal again, but even if he did not, it would always be there, just out of the corner of his eye, and in the thunder of his own heartbeat. The wolf would move from pack to pack, finding a mate here or there, tracking a meal or picking a fight. Forever restless, eternally a wanderer, it would search wild hollows and precarious peaks, until at last it had explored the last primal place in the world, or died in the trying.
I am with you, Jack thought, as the grey tail of the wolf vanished in the shadows of the pines. His heart was full.
"A courageous animal," a voice said.
Jack had sensed Ghost approaching but ignored him, not willing to allow his private farewell to his wolf to be interrupted. Now he turned and nodded, unable to prevent a smile from crossing his lips. Ghost had changed. Somehow, giving himself fully over to the beast within him had calmed his soul, and though his hair was shaggy and his chin covered in bristles, he looked more human.
"Not 'noble,' Ghost? You wouldn't allow him that dignity?" Jack asked.
Ghost stared into the forest where the wolf had gone. After a few seconds he nodded. "All right. 'Noble' i
t is."
"So you believe in nobility at last?"
As Ghost turned toward him, the old pirate's face was shaded by pines, making it difficult for Jack to tell whether the upturned edge of his mouth indicated a smile or a snarl.
"I'm not fit for the way the world is changing, Mister London," Ghost said quietly, gazing again into the trees. "I know what you want to hear from me. Louis and the Reverend proved your point. The curse of the werewolf made them monsters, but you were right; that didn't mean they had to choose to be beasts. The Reverend died with honor. And Louis . . ."
Ghost took a deep breath and let it out, finding it difficult to speak the next words. At last he nodded to himself, as if his heart had given him permission to go on. "He's a good man," Ghost said. "All the better in that he has crossed every civilized line and delved into the freedom of savagery, and he has chosen the more valiant path."
Jack stared at Ghost in shock. "I wouldn't have thought, even now, that you would admit such a path exists."
Ghost walked to him and put a hand on his arm, squeezing firmly, gaze locked with Jack's. The ferocity in his eyes was not cruel, but it held a certainty that could not be denied.
"You were right about some things, Jack . . . but not everything. Some men aren't meant for civilization. You wanted to show me that I could live as a man, to tame the beast in me, and I confess to you that I wondered if such a thing were possible, or even preferable. But now that I have met Lesya, that I see in her eyes another truly wild spirit, I know that even before my brother made me a monster, I was never meant to be a man."
Jack gave a small nod. "Lesya has been searching for a wild man."
"A beast," Ghost agreed, nostrils flaring with pleasure. "And now she has found me. But I will not allow you to pretend, Jack."
"I don't take your meaning," Jack replied.
"Of course you do. Why else would she have worked so hard to lure you here and to keep you?" Ghost said. "Lesya and her father — nearly vanished from the world though he may be — are ancient things. They are of nature, of the wilderness, in a way almost nothing is in these modern days. She wanted a wild man, and she thought it might be you, Jack. There's a reason for that."
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