The Wolf's Hour Part 17

It was over.

"You little b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Franco said, but most of the steam had gone out of him. He looked deflated. "Couldn't do it, could you?" He touched his furrowed cheek and stared at his red-smeared palm. "I ought to kill you," he said. "You marked me. I ought to tear you to pieces, you little s.h.i.+t."

Mikhail struggled to rise. His legs were weak, and wouldn't allow it.

"You're not even worth killing," Franco decided. "You're still too much of a human. I ought to leave you out here, and you'd never even find your way back, would you?" He wiped blood from his oozing wounds and looked at his palm again. "s.h.i.+t!" he said, disgusted.

"Why... do you hate me so much?" Mikhail managed to ask. "I've never done anything to you."

Franco didn't reply for a moment, and Mikhail thought he wasn't going to. Then Franco said, his voice acidic, "Wiktor thinks you're special." He slurred the word, as if it were something nasty. "He says he's never seen anyone fight to live as much as you did. Oh, he has high hopes for you." He snorted bitterly. "I say you're a weak whelp, but I'll give you this: you're lucky. Wiktor never hunted for anyone else before. He does it for you, because he says you're not ready for the change. I say either you become one of the pack, all the way, or we eat you. And I'll be the one who cracks open your skull and chews your brains. What do you think about that?"

"I... think..." Mikhail tried to stand again. Sweat was on his face. He started up, on willpower and bruised muscles. His legs almost went out from under him again, but then he was up, breathing raggedly, and he faced Franco. "I think... someday... I'll have to kill you," he said.

Franco gaped at him. The silence stretched; distant crows called to each other. And then Franco laughed-more of a grunt, actually-and the laugh made him wince and press his fingers against his slashed cheek. "You? Kill me?" He laughed again, winced again. His eyes were cold, and they promised cruelty. "I'm going to let you live today," he said, as if from the grace of his heart; Mikhail guessed that it was because he feared Wiktor. "Like I said, you're lucky." He looked around, his eyes narrowed and his senses questing. There was no sign of the berserker except the uncovered graves and the broken bones: the scarred dirt and ma.s.ses of leaves showed no tracks, there were no hanks of hair caught in the underbrush, and the berserker had rolled in the rotting flesh to mask his scent. This sacrilege against the pack had been done perhaps six or seven hours ago, Franco thought. The berserker was long gone. Franco walked away a few feet, bent down, and brushed flies away. He picked up a small, ripped arm, the hand still attached, and rose to his full height. He gently touched the fingers, exploring them like the petals of a strange flower. "This was mine," Mikhail heard him say in a quiet voice.

Franco bent down again, scooped away a handful of earth, put the chewed arm into it, and carefully replaced the dirt. He patted it down and covered it over with brown leaves. He sat on his haunches for a long time as flies buzzed around his head in search of the lost flesh. Several of them landed on Franco's bleeding cheek and feasted there, but he didn't move. He stared, motionlessly, at the patchwork of earth and leaves before him.

And then, abruptly, he stood up. He turned his back on the ruined Garden, and quickly strode away into the forest without glancing at Mikhail.

Mikhail let him go; he knew the way home. Anyway, if he lost his bearings he could follow the smell of Franco's blood. His strength was coming back, and his skull and heart had stopped pounding. He looked at the garden of scattered skeletons, wondering exactly where his own bones would lie, and who would cover them. He turned away, shunting those thoughts aside, and trailed Franco by following his tracks on the bruised earth.

3.

Three more springs came and pa.s.sed, and the summer of Mikhail's twelfth year scorched the forest. During that time, Renati had almost died with worms from an infected boar. Wiktor himself had nursed her to health and hunted for her, showing that granite could be tender. Pauli had given birth to a girl baby that Franco had sired; the baby had died in the night, her body contorting and rippling with light brown hair, when she was two months old. Nikita had seeded a child in Alekza's belly, but the growth pa.s.sed away in a rush of blood and tissue when it was less than four months along.

Mikhail wore a deerskin robe and sandals that Renati had made for him, his old clothes much too small and tattered. He was growing, getting gangly, his thick black hair hanging around his shoulders and down his back. His mind was growing, too, from the food of Wiktor's books: mathematics, Russian history, the languages, cla.s.sical literature-all were the feast that Wiktor offered. Sometimes it went down easily, other times Mikhail all but choked on it, but Wiktor's thundering voice in the fire-lit chamber commanded his attention. Mikhail even enjoyed Shakespeare, particularly the gruesomeness and ghosts of Hamlet.

His senses grew as well. There was no longer any true darkness for him; the deepest night was a gray twilight, with flesh-and-blood forms outlined in an eerie pale blue. When he truly concentrated, cutting off all distractions, he could find any of the pack in the white palace by trailing the distinctive rhythm of their heartbeats: Alekza's, for instance, always beat fast, like a little snare drum, while Wiktor's beat with slow and stately precision, a finely tuned instrument. Colors, sounds, aromas intensifed. In daylight he could see a deer running through the dense forest at a distance of a hundred yards. Mikhail learned the importance of speed: he caught rats, squirrels, and hares with ease, and added to the pack's food supply in a small way, but larger game eluded him. He often awakened from sleep to find an arm or leg covered with black hair and contorting into wolfish form, but the totality of the change still terrified him. Though his body may have been ready for it, his mind certainly was not. He marveled at how the others could slip back and forth between worlds, almost as if by wis.h.i.+ng it. The fastest of them was Wiktor, of course; it took him less than forty seconds to complete the change from human flesh to gray wolf hide. The next quickest was Nikita, who made the transformation in a little over forty-five seconds. Alekza had the prettiest pelt, and Franco the loudest wail. Pauli was the shyest, and Renati the most merciful; she often let the smallest, most defenseless prey escape even when she'd run it to exhaustion. Wiktor scolded her for this frivolity, and Franco scowled at her, but she did as she pleased.

After the destruction of the Garden, a coldly furious Wiktor had taken Nikita and Franco out on a long, fruitless hunt for the berserker's den. In the three years since, the berserker had made himself known by leaving little piles of excrement around the white palace, and once the pack had heard him wailing in the night: a deep, hoa.r.s.e taunt that changed direction as the berserker deftly s.h.i.+fted his position. It was a challenge to battle, but Wiktor declined; he chose not to run into the berserker's trap. Pauli had sworn she'd seen the berserker on a snowy night in early November, when she'd been running at Nikita's side on the trail of caribou. The red beast had come out of the snow at her, close enough for her to smell his rank madness, and his eyes had been cold black pits of hatred. He had opened slavering jaws to crush her throat-but then Nikita had swerved toward her, and the berserker disappeared into the snowfall. Pauli swore this, but Pauli sometimes mixed nightmares with reality, and Nikita didn't remember seeing anything but night and whirling flakes.

On a night in mid-July, there were no snowflakes, only the whirl of golden fireflies rising from the forest floor as Mikhail and Nikita, in human form, ran silently through the woods. The herds had been thinned by the drought weather, and hunting had been poor for the last month. Wiktor had ordered Mikhail and Nikita to bring back something-anything-and now Mikhail followed the older man as best he could, Nikita running about twenty feet ahead and breaking a trail. They were heading south at a steady pace, and in a short while Nikita slowed to a brisk walk.

"Where are we going?" Mikhail asked in a whisper. He glanced around through the night's twilight, looking for anything alive. Not even a squirrel's eyes glinted with starlight.

"The railroad tracks," Nikita answered. "We'll see if we can't make this an easy hunt." Often the pack was able to find a dead deer, caribou, or smaller animal that had been hit by the train, which pa.s.sed through the forest twice a day between May and August, going east in daylight and west at night.

Where the forest was stubbled with large boulders and cliffs fell off to the south, the tracks emerged from a rough-hewn tunnel, curved downhill along the bottom of a wooded gulley for at least six hundred yards, and then entered another tunnel to the west. Mikhail followed Nikita down the embankment, and they walked along the tracks, their eyes searching for the dark shape of a carca.s.s and their nostrils sniffing the warm air for fresh blood. Tonight, no kills lay on the rails. They continued to the eastern tunnel-and then Nikita suddenly said, "Listen."

Mikhail did, and he heard it, too: a soft rumble of thunder. Except the sky was clear, the stars sparkling behind a gauze of hazy heat. The train was coming.

Nikita bent down, placing his hand against the iron. He could feel it vibrate as the train gathered power, heading into its long downhill run. In another moment it would burst out of the tunnel only a few yards distant.

"We'd better go," Mikhail told him.

Nikita stayed where he was, his hand on the rail. He stared at the tunnel's rocky opening, and then Mikhail saw him look toward the western tunnel's entrance, far away. "I used to come here alone," Nikita said quietly. "I used to watch the train roar past. That was before the berserker, d.a.m.n him to h.e.l.l. But I've seen the train go past many times. On its way to Minsk, I think. It comes out of that tunnel"-he nodded toward it-"and goes into that one there. Some nights, if the engineer's in a hurry to get home, it takes less than thirty seconds to make the distance. If he's drunk and riding the brake, it takes around thirty-five seconds from one tunnel to the next. I know; I've counted them off."

"Why?" Mikhail asked. The train's thunder-a traveling storm-was getting closer.

"Because someday I'm going to beat it." Nikita stood up. "Do you know what, for me, the grandest thing in the world would be?" His almond-shaped, Mongol eyes stared through the darkness at Mikhail. The boy shook his head. "To be fast," Nikita went on, excitement mounting in his voice. "The fastest of all the pack. The fastest who ever lived. To will the change between the time the train comes out of the first tunnel and reaches the second. Do you see?"

Mikhail shook his head.

"Then watch," Nikita told him. The western tunnel had begun to lighten, and the rails were throbbing with a steam engine's mighty pulse. Nikita threw off his robe and stood naked to the world. And then, quite suddenly, the train burst from the tunnel like a snorting, black-mawed behemoth with a single yellow, cyclopean eyeball. Mikhail leaped backward as its hot breath enfolded him. Nikita, standing right at the edge of the tracks, didn't move a muscle. Freight cars rumbled past, red cinders spinning in the turbulence. Mikhail saw Nikita's body tense, saw his flesh ripple and begin to grow its sheen of fine black hair-and then Nikita started running along the tracks, his back and legs banded with wolf hair. He ran toward the eastern tunnel, his spine contorting in an instant, his legs and arms s.h.i.+vering and beginning to draw themselves upward into the torso. Mikhail saw the black hair cover Nikita's b.u.t.tocks, a dark wartlike thing grew and burst at the base of the spine and the wolf's tail uncurled, twitching like a rudder. Nikita's backbone ratcheted down, and he ran low to the ground, his forearms thickening and his hands starting to twist into claws. He caught up with the engine, racing alongside it toward the mouth of the eastern tunnel. The engineer was riding the brake, but the furnace was still spouting sparks. Grinding wheels thundered two feet away from Nikita's legs. As he ran, his heart hammering, his feet contorted and threw him off balance, and he lost precious seconds as he struggled to right himself. The train's engine left him behind, black smoke and sparks swirling around him. He breathed the corruption of man, and his lungs felt poisoned. Mikhail lost sight of Nikita in the black maelstrom.

The train roared into the eastern tunnel, and continued its journey to Minsk. A single red lamp swung back and forth on the railing of its last freight car.

The smoke that had settled along the gulley had the sour tang of burned green timber. Mikhail walked into it, following the tracks, and he could feel the heat of the train's pa.s.sage. Cinders still spun to earth, a night of dying stars. "Nikita!" he called. "Where are-"

A dark, powerful form leaped at him.

The black wolf planted its paws on Mikhail's shoulders and drove him down to the earth. Then the wolf stood astride his chest, its slanted eyes staring fixedly into his face, and its jaws opened to show clean white fangs.

"Stop it," Mikhail said. He grasped Nikita's muzzle and pushed the wolf's head astride. The wolf snarled, snapping at his face. "Will you stop it?" Mikhail demanded. "You're about to squash me!"

The wolf showed its fangs again, right in front of Mikhail's nose, and then a wet pink tongue came out and licked across Mikhail's face. Mikhail yelped and tried to shove the beast off, but Nikita's weight was solid. Finally, Nikita stepped off Mikhail's chest, and the boy sat up knowing he would find paw bruises on his flesh the next morning. Nikita ran in a circle, snapping at his tall just for the fun of it, and then he leaped into the high weeds on the gulley's side and rolled in them. "You're crazy!" Mikhail said, getting to his feet.

As Nikita rolled in the weeds, his body began to change again. There was a cracking sound of sinews lengthening, of bones being rejointed. Nikita gave a small mutter of pain, and Mikhail walked away a few yards to give him privacy. In another thirty seconds or so, Mikhail heard Nikita say quietly, "d.a.m.n."

The Mongol walked past Mikhail, on his way uphill toward his cast-off robe. "I tripped over my own d.a.m.ned feet," he said. "They always get in the way."

Mikhail got in pace beside him. The black smoke was rising out of the gulley now, and the scorched iron smell of civilization was going with it. "I don't understand," he said. "What were you trying to do?"

"I told you. To be fast." He glanced back, in the direction the train had gone. "It'll be back, tomorrow night. And the night after that. I'll try again." He reached his robe, picked it up, and put it around his shoulders. Mikhail was watching him blankly, still not fully comprehending. "Wiktor will tell you a story, if you ask," Nikita said. "He says the old man who led the pack when Wiktor came in remembered someone who could will the change in twenty-four seconds. Can you imagine that? From human to wolf in twenty-four seconds? Wiktor himself can't beat half a minute! And I-well, I'm pathetic."

"No, you're not. You're fast."

"Not fast enough," Nikita said forcefully. "I'm not the quickest, I'm not the strongest, I'm not the smartest. And all my life, even when I was a boy your age breaking my a.s.s in a coal mine, I wanted to be something special. You work at the bottom of a mine shaft long enough, you dream of being a bird. Maybe I still have that dream-only I want my legs to be wings."

"What does it matter, whether you're the quickest or-"

"It matters to me," he interrupted. "It gives me a purpose. Do you see?" He went on without waiting for the boy to respond. "I come here during the summer, but only at night. I don't want the engineer to see me. I am getting faster; it's just that my legs haven't figured out how to fly yet." He motioned down the tracks toward the distant eastern tunnel. "Some night I'm going to beat the train. I'm going to start right here, as a man, and before the train reaches the other tunnel I'm going to cross the tracks in front of the engine as a wolf."

"Cross the tracks?"

"Yes. On all fours," Nikita said. "Now we'd better find something for the pack to eat, or we'll be looking all night." He started walking away, downhill toward the east, and Mikhail followed him. A little more than a half mile from where Nikita had chased the train, they found a crushed rabbit lying on the tracks. It was a fresh kill, its eyes bulging as if still mesmerized by the glowing yellow orb of the monster that had pa.s.sed over it. The rabbit was a small find, but it was a beginning. Nikita picked it up by the ears and carried it at his side, swinging it like a broken toy as they continued their search.

The smell of the rabbit's blood made Mikhail's mouth water. He could almost feel a b.e.s.t.i.a.l growl strain to leave his throat. He was becoming more like the pack every pa.s.sing day. The change was waiting for him, like a dark friend. All he had to do was reach out for it, and embrace it; it was that close, and it was eager. But he didn't know how to control it. He had no idea how to "will the change," as the others seemed to. Was it like a command, or a dream? He feared losing the last of being a human; the full change would take him to a place where he dared not go. Not yet; not just yet.

He was salivating. There was a growl; not his throat, but his stomach. He was still more boy than wolf, after all.

On many nights during that long, drought-plagued summer, Mikhail hunted with Nikita along the railroad tracks. Once, in early August, they found a small deer suffering, two of its legs severed by the train's wheels. Nikita had bent down and looked into that deer's shock-silvered eyes, and Mikhail had watched him reach gentle hands out to stroke the animal's flanks. Nikita had spoken quietly to the deer, trying to calm it-and then he placed his hands on the deer's skull and gave it a sharp, violent twist. The deer had slumped, its neck broken, all suffering ended. And that, Nikita told him, was the meaning of mercy.

The train kept to its schedule. Some nights it roared down the hill, from tunnel to tunnel; other nights its brakes screamed and hurled sparks. Mikhail sat on the embankment, in the shelter of the pines, and watched as Nikita raced it along the rails, his body twisting, fighting for balance as the change swept over him. It always seemed to be his legs, the earth-rooted wings, that refused to let him fly. Nikita was getting faster, but never fast enough; the train invariably outpaced him, and left him in its smoke as it thundered into the eastern tunnel.

August ended, and the summer's final train rumbled away toward Minsk, its red lantern swinging on the last car like a scarlet grin. Nikita, his shoulders slumped, trotted back to where he'd left his robe, and Mikhail watched his body shed its glossy black hair. Nikita, man-shaped again, put on his robe and breathed the smoke's bitter odor as if breathing the sweat of a fierce and respected enemy. "Well," he said at last, "summer will come again."

They went home, walking toward autumn.

4.

Winter, the cruel white lady, closed her fist around the forest, and sealed it in ice. Cold cracked trees, ponds were white slabs, and the sky glowered with low clouds and mist. For day upon day, the sun remained a stranger, and the whole world was a sea of snow and black, leafless trees. Even the crows, those ebony-gowned diplomats, froze where they perched, or fought to reach the sun on freezing wings. Only the snow hares scurried in the blank silence of the forest, and as the winds swept down from Siberia even the hares s.h.i.+vered in their burrows.

So, too, the pack s.h.i.+vered in the depths of the white palace. They crowded together, ghost-breathed, around the pine-knot flames. Mikhail's education, however, went on; Wiktor was a hard taskmaster, and he and the boy huddled close as Mikhail recited Shakespeare, the works of Dante, mathematics problems, and European history.

On a day in January, Pauli and Nikita went outside to find more firewood. Wiktor told them to stay close to the white palace and within sight of each other. The mist had descended, making visibility difficult, but the fire had to be tended. And not half an hour had pa.s.sed before Nikita came back into the den, moving like a numb sleepwalker, his eyebrows and hair silvered with ice. He carried an armload of sticks, which fell to his feet as he continued on into the circle of the fire. His eyes were dazed. Wiktor stood up and said, "Where's Pauli?"

She had been within twenty feet of him, Nikita said. Twenty feet. They had been talking, trying to warm each other with words. And then, quite suddenly, Pauli simply hadn't answered. There had been no cry for help, no sounds of a struggle in the mist. One moment Pauli had been there, the next...

Nikita took Wiktor and Franco up to show them. They found bright gouts of blood on the snow, less than forty yards from the ice-domed palace. Pauli's robe was nearby, also splattered with gore. On the ground lay a few sticks, like bleached bones. Pauli's footprints ended where the paw prints of the berserker came out of a thicket of thorns. In the snow was the furrow of a body being dragged, over a hillock and down into dense woods. They found some of Pauli's insides, purple as bruises on the snow. The berserker's tracks and the furrow of Pauli's dragged body went on, through the forest. Wiktor, Franco, and Nikita threw aside their robes and, s.h.i.+vering, changed shapes in the clinging mist. Three wolves-one gray, one pale brown, one black-loped through the drifts on the berserker's trail. A mile to the east they found one of Pauli's arms, blue as marble, wedged between two rocks. It had been ripped loose from the shoulder. They came to a place of cliffs, where the wind had swept the jagged rocks clean of snow, and the berserker's tracks ended as did all traces of Pauli's corpse.

For the next few hours, the trio of wolves searched in widening circles that took them farther and farther away from the white palace. Once Franco thought he saw a huge red shape standing on an outcropping of rock above them, but the blowing snow obscured his sight for a few seconds and when he could see clearly again the shape was gone. Nikita picked up Pauli's scent-a musky summer-gra.s.s smell-in the crosscurrent of wind, and they tracked it another half mile to the north before they found her head lying at the bottom of a ravine, her skull gnawed open and her brains gone.

The berserker's tracks led them to the edge of a rocky chasm, then they vanished on the stones. Caves pocked the chasm's sides; it would be a treacherous climb down, but it could be done. Any of those caves might be the berserker's den. But if not, Wiktor, Nikita, and Franco might break their necks for naught. It was snowing harder; the iron smell of a blizzard grayed the air. Wiktor signaled with a snort and toss of his head, and they turned back for the long journey home.

All this Wiktor related as the pack crouched around the fire. When he finished he moved away, sitting in a corner by himself. He chewed on a warthog's bones and stared at the empty pallet where Pauli used to lie, his eyes burning in the cold gloom.

"I say we go out and hunt the b.a.s.t.a.r.d down!" Franco shouted as the blizzard roared beyond the walls. "We can't just sit here, like... like..."

"Like human beings?" Wiktor asked quietly. He picked up a small twig from the fire and watched it burn.

"Like cowards!" Franco said. "First Belyi, then the Garden ransacked, now Pauli gone! It won't stop until it kills all of us!"

"We can't go out in this storm," Nikita observed, sitting on his haunches. "The berserker can't either."

"We've got to find it and kill it!" Franco paced in front of the fire, almost stepping on Mikhail. "If I could just get my claws in its d.a.m.ned throat, I'd-"

Renati snorted derisively. "You'd be its breakfast."

"You shut up, you old hag! Who asked you to speak?"

Renati was on her feet in an instant. She stepped toward him, and he whirled toward her. Russet hair rose and rippled on the backs of Renati's hands, her fingers starting to curve into claws.

"Stop it," Wiktor said. Renati glanced at him, her facial bones already beginning to warp. "Renati, please stop it," he repeated.

"Let her kill him," Alekza said, her ice-blue eyes cold in her beautiful face. "He deserves to die."

"Renati?" Wiktor stood up. Renati's spine had begun to bow over.

"Come on, come on!" Franco sneered. He held up his right hand, which was covered with light brown hair and had already grown talons. "I'm ready for you!"

"Stop it!" Wiktor shouted, and the sound of his voice made Mikhail jump; it was his schoolmaster's thunder. The voice echoed between the walls. "If we kill each other, the berserker wins. He can come right in here and take our den if we're lying dead. So stop it, both of you. We've got to think like humans, not act like beasts."

Renati blinked, her mouth and jaw misshapen. A little ooze of saliva trickled over her lower lip, down her russet-haired chin, and hung for a second before it dripped off. And then her face began to return to its human side again, the muscles writhing under the flesh, the fangs retreating with wet clicking sounds. The wolf hair dissolved to a stubble and went away. Renati scratched the backs of her hands as the last of the hair irritated her flesh. "You little b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said, her stare still directed at Franco. "You show me respect, do you understand?"

Franco grunted and gave her a chilly smile. He motioned disdainfully at her with his right hand, now human and pale once more, and he walked away from the fire's heat. The musky smell of enraged animals lingered in the chamber.

Wiktor stood between Renati and Franco; he waited until their tempers had cooled, and then he said, "We're a family, not enemies. The berserker would like for us to turn on each other; it would make his task so much easier." He tossed the burning twig into the fire. "But Franco's right. We've got to find the berserker and kill it. If we don't, it'll kill us, one by one."

"You see?" Franco said to Renati. "He agrees with me!"

"I agree with the law of logic," Wiktor corrected. "Which, unfortunately, you don't always obey." He paused for a moment, listening to the high wail of the storm through the broken windows on the level above. "I think the berserker lives in one of those caves we found," he went on. "Nikita's right: the berserker won't go out in this storm. But we could."

"You can't see your hand in front of your face out there!" Renati said. "Listen to that wind!"

"I hear it." Wiktor circled the fire, rubbing his hands together. "When the storm breaks, the berserker will go out on the hunt again. We don't know his patterns, and once he smells us in his cave he'll find another den. But... what if we found his cave, and him in it, while the storm's still blowing?"

"It can't be done!" Nikita shook his head. "You saw that chasm. We'd kill ourselves trying to get down in there."

"The berserker can do it. If he can, so can we." Wiktor paused to let that point sink in. "The greatest problem would be finding his cave. If I were he, I would've marked every one of them with my scent. But maybe he hasn't; maybe, once we get down into that chasm, we can pick up his scent and follow it right to him. He might be sleeping; that's what I'd do, if I had a full belly and I thought I was safe."

"Yes, that's it!" Franco said excitedly. "Kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in his sleep!"

"No. The berserker's big and very strong, and none of us would do so well against it claw to claw. First we find the berserker's cave, and then we seal him in with rocks. We make it good and tight, so he can't dig himself out. If we're fast, we can get the cave sealed before he knows what's happening."

"And provided he doesn't have a back way out," Renati said.

"I didn't say the plan was foolproof. No plan ever is. But the berserker's insane; he doesn't think like an ordinary wolf. Why should he worry about running when he thinks he can destroy anything on four legs or two? I'd say he's found a nice warm cave with no back door, where he can curl up, chew on bones, and brood about how to kill the next one of us. I believe it's worth the risk."

"I don't," Renati told him. Her brow furrowed. "The storm's too strong. It would be hard enough getting from here to there, much less finding the right cave. No. The risk is too high."

"And what's the alternative, then?" Wiktor asked. "Walt for the storm to pa.s.s and the berserker to hunt us again? We should take advantage of the fact that he's just had a feast; he'll be sluggish, with all that meat in his belly. I say we go now, or we risk the destruction of the pack."

"Yes!" Franco agreed. "Hunt him now, while he thinks he's safe!"

"I've decided. I'm going." Wiktor looked around at the others. His gaze lingered for a few seconds on Mikhail, then moved away. "Franco, will you go with me?"

"Me?" His eyes had widened. "Yes. Of course I will." His voice was unsteady. "I just hope I... don't hold you up."

"Hold me up? How?"

"Well... I didn't mention it before. It's nothing, of course, but... I have a stone bruise on my foot. You see?" He slipped off his deerskin sandal and showed the blue bruise. "My ankle's a little swollen, too. I'm not sure when it happened, exactly." He pressed the bruise, and winced a fraction too much. "But I can still go," he said. "I won't be as fast as usual, but you can count on me."

"To be an utter a.s.s," Renati finished for him. "Forget Franco and his poor feet. I'll go with you."

"I need you to stay here. To take care of Mikhail and Alekza."