The Wolves of Paris

by Michael Wallace

  “They are howling around the building now, thirty, perhaps forty strong. I’ve lit a fire and barred the doors, but this doesn’t dissuade them. Some of them can change to and from the shape of a man at will, while others remain wolves at all times.”

  Lucrezia turned the page over.

  “The leader of the pack is a brute with black fur, the size of a small pony. He has marked me for death. When I led the villagers in an attack, I disrupted their wicked ceremony and killed three of their number, but he escaped with only the loss of an ear. I kept the severed appendage to show throughout the surrounding countryside, hoping that someone would spot a man with a missing ear and help us track him. But I now believe that carrying a bit of his fur and flesh will be my undoing. I have hid in castles, traveled a hundred miles by river, and ridden for three days and still they found me. If only I had realized earlier, I would have cast the thing away.

  “But the answer only came to me as the wolves surrounded this place, and so I still have it on my person. My stratagem is to flee from the stronghold, cast myself into the river, and hope the wolves follow me downstream long enough for Dorn to escape on horse with these writings. That your grace may know what has befallen me. As for my thoughts on how to defeat the wolves, I suggest . . . ”

  Lucrezia came to the end of the second side of the page. “This is all?”

  “Other pages survive,” Montguillon said. “But nothing that would shed fresh light on the matter.”

  “And you suggest,” Lorenzo began, “that Lucrezia is marked because her dog bit off the end of Courtaud’s tail?”

  “That sounds like pure speculation,” Marco said. “I don’t believe it.”

  The brothers looked to Lucrezia, but she didn’t answer. Her thoughts galloped in all directions.

  “There’s an easy way to be certain,” the prior said. “Does Lady d’Lisle carry it with her?”

  “Why would she—?” Lorenzo began. He tried to catch her eye, but she looked away. “Wait, you do, don’t you? Whatever for?”

  “It’s in my saddlebags,” she admitted, “in the wooden box with the tincture of poppy and monkshood, the other herbs. I thought it might help us, that I might figure some sort of concoction. To perhaps use—I don’t know—a single hair or a bit of flesh to track these things.”

  “The thing about witchcraft,” Montguillon said, steepling his hands in front of his nose, “is that its use often comes back to harm the user. That is one reason it is so dangerous. You attempted to use witchcraft to defeat these beasts and you only brought danger to yourself and others.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Lorenzo said. “Throw it out. Maybe the smell will fade.”

  “No,” Montguillon said.

  He collected the leaves, tucked them between the vellum, and returned the manuscript fragments to Simon, who looked like he wanted to linger and listen to the discussion, but at a glance from the prior disappeared with it held carefully in his hands.

  “First, it might be too late,” Montguillon continued. “This last bit of Atticus’s letter to his patron was written under duress. He was speculating. Getting rid of the ear might not have helped him. Once it was in his hand, it was too late.”

  “Now who is speculating?” Marco said.

  “The prior is right,” Lucrezia said. “I carried the scent with me on the road, then to Nemours’s chatelet. I even left it in Saint-Denis after I had departed. Two days later there was enough of it lingering at the abbey to draw Courtaud’s pack.”

  “You knew it, didn’t you?” Montguillon said. “That is why you insisted on returning to the abbey.”

  She hesitated. “I suspected, yes.”

  The prior’s face darkened. “The moment you left the highway to beg their help, you condemned those men to their deaths.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she protested. “Only after they tracked me to the chatelet did I begin to understand. If I had known—”

  “Let her be,” Lorenzo said. “Any one of us would have done the same.”

  “So we cast the tail into the fire,” Marco said. “Then we guard the lady in a tower until the scent leaves her, no matter how long that takes.”

  “But even if it did work,” Montguillon said, “don’t you see that this thing is our hope? That if Lucrezia carries it, we know where the wolves will attack. We can use her to—”

  “We will not!” Lorenzo said. “We won’t put the lady in danger again. We’ll take her home to Italy, where she can be safe.”

  “Is the entire country of Italy some holy ground where evil cannot tread?” Montguillon said with a sneer.

  “We don’t have to listen to this,” Marco said. He grabbed Lorenzo’s sleeve. “Let’s go home, both of you. If he doesn’t want our help, he can rot in his own offal.”

  “You can’t leave,” the prior said.

  “You can’t stop us.”

  “I know what I signed, and what I said. But I don’t have to accuse her of anything. One word from me, one whisper that she brought these wolves to this plague-troubled city, shivering with cold and fear, and the mob will do the Inquisition’s bidding without being asked.”

  Montguillon looked to Lorenzo.

  “Isn’t that right?”

  Lorenzo looked troubled. “It’s too much. The lady is brave enough, but those wolves . . . ”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t run away.”

  “My lady, are you sure?”

  Lorenzo had to know it wasn’t about fear. Yes, Lucrezia was terrified. But even if she thought fleeing France would save her, how could she do it? She was doubly responsible now. Not only had she taught Rigord how to complete his transformation, but she’d carried this bit of tail around with her. Wolves found them on the road, then surrounded Lord Nemours’s chatelet. If not for her presence, Fournier would be alive, and Giuseppe wouldn’t have changed, wouldn’t have died with a crossbow bolt through his ribs. The guard would be alive, and the one who fell on the road this afternoon as well.

  “I’m sure, Lorenzo.”

  He studied her face, then reached out as if wanting to take her hand. He refrained and drew back.

  “As you wish, my lady. You have our swords, and anything else you may need.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lucrezia made her decision.

  “Father, if we’re going to defeat Courtaud and his pack, we need the full strength of this city.”

  He smiled. “Such as it is.”

  “Yes, plague and all. But I mean the night watch, the church, the burghers, the nobles.”

  “Of course,” Montguillon said with a nod. “But where do we fight them?”

  “The most defensible part of Paris is the Cité,” Lorenzo said. “The river may be frozen, but if we can lure them onto the island, they’ll have a hard time escaping our attack.”

  “A strong plan,” the prior said. “We’ll put the lady at a central part of the Cité, let the wolves infiltrate, and fall upon them with the wrath of God.”

  Lucrezia thought about Courtaud’s tail. It answered so many questions. But not all of them.

  “There is only one thing,” she said with some reluctance. “There may be a second pack.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Was Rigord Ducy dead?

  That was the question Lucrezia asked herself as she thought about her husband’s blood that stained her dagger sheath. She’d done him damage, that was certain. It took little to summon the memory of his howl of pain as she chased him from the house.

  That first night, with his blood on her dagger and hands, she’d thought him defeated. She had waited outside the doors of the library, her dagger drawn. Martin stood next to her, ready to unleash Cicero and Tullia.

  This time there had been no woman, no friends. Only the pentagram in a circle of candles, Rigord alone with his wolf pelt over his sweating shoulders, and a chalice in hand. If there was any doubt about witches and succubi, this ended them. Instead, while Lucrezia watched through the keyhole,
he took a lancet and opened a vein in his arm. He dripped blood into the chalice, the same one she had corrupted with silver. He chanted the words of the incantation. The cup lifted to his mouth. A shudder worked through his body. The Vulgar Latin complete, he started again in the strange, Slavonic language.

  “It has begun,” she murmured, eye still at the keyhole.

  “Give the word, my lady.”

  Martin’s voice was tight. He stood behind her shoulder, gripping the mastiffs’ collars, one in each hand.

  “Don’t kill him, Martin.”

  “He deserves to die. He is unfaithful to his vows and a sorcerer. He puts your life at risk and threatens to turn your reputation to filth.”

  “I won’t have his blood on my hands,” she whispered back, firmly.

  “It will be on my hands, not yours. I would be honored to do it in your name, my lady.”

  She was touched by his loyalty, but she shook her head.

  “We’re only going to drive him from the house.” He didn’t answer and she looked up. “Is that understood? Martin?”

  “As you wish.”

  She turned back to the keyhole to watch. The chalice dropped from Rigord’s hand and clattered to the floor, spilling blood. He arched his back and lifted his hands to the ceiling. They bent and twisted like claws. His mouth opened and he tilted his head as if to scream, but no sound came out. She shuddered in revulsion.

  Now.

  Lucrezia threw open the door. Martin waited in the corridor as she strode into the room with her dagger in hand.

  Rigord turned with a startled expression. Sweat poured down his face. His eyes were yellow and there was something strange about his shoulders and his jaw. His lips pulled back in something that looked like both a grin and a snarl, much like the leering jaws of the wolf pelt that rested atop his back, shoulders, and head.

  “Lucrezia. My wife.” The words came out in a growl.

  That grin was hungry, the light in his eyes demonic in its intensity. He looked like he would either throw her down and ravish her or tear her apart and eat her—perhaps both at the same time. If not for Martin and the growling, straining dogs in his grip, that look would have sent her screaming for her rooms. As it was, the dagger trembled in her hand.

  He licked his lips. “So you know. So you’ve been spying on me. You are unfaithful, my dear.”

  I am unfaithful? You don’t know the meaning of the word.

  “In the name of God,” she said, “I command you to depart this place. Flee the city and never return.”

  He laughed. “Flee? I think not.”

  “You have seconds remaining, Rigord. Then you will be a beast now and forevermore. When that happens I’ll kill you.”

  “You know nothing. I have power over death. I’ll run as a wolf and walk as a man. None shall resist me.”

  “No, Rigord. I corrupted your evil magic. The chalice—I cut off the bottom and replaced it with silver.”

  His face contorted in rage. “You what?”

  He took a step toward her, then a shudder rippled through his body. The wolf pelt was dissolving, melting into his flesh. His muscles twisted like ropes and he fell to his knees, knocking into the candles and splashing hot wax over his skin. He didn’t seem to notice. Then he screamed and tore at his bare chest with his nails. Bloody gashes opened in his flesh.

  “Sweet virgin,” she whispered.

  Rigord writhed on the floor. He seemed to be in terrible agony as the transformation took him. His eyes bulged and his mouth opened. His teeth stretched, his nose elongated until it became a snout. His ears stretched into points. A tail emerged from his backside, twisting and curling like the naked tail of a rat before it suddenly sprouted thick black hairs. Moments later fur covered his body.

  Then it was over. A huge black wolf sat in the middle of the circle, with candles scattered around him. His mouth hung open, panting, his red tongue lolling.

  It was Rigord’s voice that came out of its gaping, tooth-filled mouth, but low and growling, a sound that sent a chill curling down her spine.

  “Now you die, my love.”

  Martin entered the room with the two straining dogs. Rigord leaped at her.

  “Release them!” she cried.

  At her cry Martin set the dogs free. Cicero and Tullia flew past her, roaring. They met the wolf in the air and all three animals crashed to the ground in a ball of snapping, snarling jaws. Rigord broke free, bleeding from his haunches.

  Lucrezia had left the door open, had left doors open all the way to the front entrance, in fact, and she expected him to flee. But he sprang for her, as if not caring whether he lived or died. All that mattered was that he take his revenge before he went. She had spoiled his plans, and so she must pay.

  But she had her dagger free and as he slammed into her, she slashed it across his chest. Rigord howled in pain. When the mastiffs came around and attacked him again, he tore himself free. This time he did run for the door.

  Cicero and Tullia roared after him down the hallway. Martin drew his sword and gave chase.

  “No!” she cried. “Let him go!”

  Martin stopped at the doorway. He put the fingers from his left hand to the corner of his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. Cicero and Tullia were far enough gone they might have ignored the call, their blood lust raised by the fight and the attack on their mistress. But, the obedient dogs they were, they returned at once. Uninjured. She let the dagger fall and embraced them, grateful and filled with love for their fierce defense. If only a man could be so loyal.

  Lucrezia and Martin ran to the front door. A dank, wolfish scent hung in the air. Standing at the undercroft, she peered into the darkness. Dogs barked up and down the street, a chain of frantic calls that spread across the island as if mapping the wolf’s flight through the city toward the river. Martin pulled her back and barred the door.

  “It’s over,” she said. Her knees were shaky and she needed to sit.

  “What about the other servants?”

  “You know who to trust. The others . . . we’ll tell them the same story we tell everyone else. We’ll declare Rigord dead—drowned in the Seine—and never think of this again.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  And as Lucrezia made her way to her quarters and filled a goblet with wine, her mind already turned to the significant task of managing the d’Lisle estates as a young widow. Perhaps Rigord’s grown children would help her. But she would never have to worry about Rigord himself again.

  And then, two weeks later, three wolves had broken down her door and attacked her in her own room.

  ✛

  By the wolf attack Lucrezia had already begun to hear troubling rumors of wolves on the road to Troyes. Two children went missing. A woodcutter drove off a wolf with an ax, and the man insisted the beast had spoken to him with a human voice. People started to talk of a loup-garou terrorizing the roads.

  And the Inquisition began to make inquiries. Parish priests in two separate villages had accused old women of witchcraft, and the prior of Saint-Jacques, Henri Montguillon, ventured out of Paris to investigate. It did not escape Lucrezia’s notice that this was the same monastery where she’d sent the passage from Rigord’s book for translation into Slavonic. She had put the idea in Montguillon’s head in the first place.

  The prior discovered Rigord’s first wife hiding on one of the d’Lisle estates near Troyes, and arrested her and her maidservant as witches when they found her in possession of strange books and potions. Nobody recognized her—she’d been so altered by Rigord’s incantations—and Lucrezia didn’t understand what was happening until they’d already staked her and were stoking the fires.

  Of course Lucrezia blamed herself. She’d been terrified that she would be discovered as the one behind the letter to Saint-Jacques, yet she would have confessed had she heard the news in time to save their lives. She hadn’t.

  Lucrezia poured through every book in Rigord’s library looking for an answer. She found tantal
izing hints—a tincture for curing bites and scratches left by the beasts, the suggestion that if untreated, these wounds turned victims into wolves themselves. But nothing about how to defeat the creatures.

  One night she woke to the sound of scratching in the hallways. Toenails on stone. Half-asleep, she first thought that one of the dogs was coming up the staircase to scratch at her door until she relented and let it in.

  “My lady, you must wake up,” a voice said outside the door. One of the servants, she thought through her sleep-muddled head. “There’s smoke in the kitchen. There might be a fire.”

  Few things brought more terror than the thought of a fire burning away in the bowels of the house while you slept above. Hesitate a moment and you might roast in your bed. And so she wasn’t thinking about the dimly-remembered toenails scratching as she leaped out of bed and grabbed her night robe. She slipped it on as she unlatched the door.

  There was no servant at the door. Only wolves. Two lean, gray animals, and one enormous beast with reddish brown fur. She guessed at once that it was Courtaud, the red-headed Occitanian. Rigord must have tracked the man down and changed him.

  They forced her back, snarling and snapping. She cried out, but her quarters were high in the manor, up where the air was cleaner, removed from the stench of the city and the river. She had her own hearths, wardrobes, even a private garderobe that emptied into the Seine.

  They backed her against the bed, then stopped as the big wolf stepped forward. Courtaud. Its lips bared and she felt its rage. It was almost a physical thing, pouring out from its thoughts.

  The urge to cower hit her like a blow. She wanted to throw herself to the ground, to roll over and expose her belly in submission. The wolf’s thoughts radiated outward.

  Fall. Bend. Cower.

  Lucrezia fought it off. “No, I’ll never submit.”

  Yes. You will. Lucrezia kept thinking. Her cries had done nothing, but could she break for the hallway? No? Then could she reach one of the iron pokers by the hearth? How would she fight off three wolves by herself?