33
WAR COMES TO STALINGRAD
The major general gave each of them a careful once-over, expression unreadable. He outright stared at the wolves. “I was radioed about this,” he said, finally, “but I don’t guess I really believed it. I’ll be damned.” He turned a shrewd glance to Nikita. “Why are the secret police handling this?”
Nikita shrugged. “I’m following orders, sir. I expect my superiors have their reasons.”
“Hmm. I was told there’d be nine of you.”
“One of our men is under the weather this morning,” Nikita lied.
Feliks politely mimed vomiting.
They’d decided that morning that introducing Rasputin to any military officer would be a terrible idea. Once whoever it was recovered from the sheer impossibility of it, he would find it impossible to believe that the starets was cooperating with the Soviets. Among his numerous faults, Rasputin was also a terrible liar. Their pass into Leningrad had read they were retrieving an “artifact.” Technically true. Even Stalin had no idea Rasputin was involved in all this.
The major general looked unconvinced. “You expect me to put wolves on the battlefield?”
“I can assure you they’re very obedient to Sasha’s commands,” Philippe said, smiling, and the major general relaxed a fraction. Magicked, just as Nikita had asked. “Sasha, would you demonstrate?”
The wolves sat in a semi-circle behind Sasha. He turned to glance down at the alpha female, and after a moment of eye contact, she snorted and walked to the far side of the office, the others following her. They sat down in a perfect line, gazes pinned on their human alpha.
“So they’re trained,” the major general said. “What good will they do against a German panzer division?”
“Well,” Nikita said, “I don’t figure that’s for us to know. Like I said, we’re just following orders.”
~*~
There wasn’t a word of a precedent for what they were. A Specialized Unit, the major general said, and handed over a small pile of paperwork, patches to sew onto their sleeves, and an arsenal of weaponry. They were to report directly to him, and it was clear he had no idea what to do with them. “Maybe you can make yourselves useful,” he said, doubtfully, and sent them on their way.
It was a hot, cloudless day outside, the sun bright overhead, filtering through the fine layer of dust that hugged the ground so that the air around them seemed golden. The base perched on a hill, the city spread out before them, a sea of flat rooftops, the river a glittering snake at its edge.
“What now, fearless leader?” Ivan asked.
Nikita groaned. “I don’t–”
“Wait,” Sasha said. They’d been walking slowly along the side of the road, and he pulled up suddenly, his wolves doing the same. All of them cocked their heads. Sasha’s mouth was open, eyes on the sky above them.
Despite the heat, a chill moved down Nikita’s back. “What?”
Sasha’s pupils shrank down to pinpricks. “I hear something. It’s…”
“Sasha?” Katya asked.
And then Nikita heard it too.
Planes.
~*~
Sasha knew the sirens were coming, and clapped both hands over his ears in preparation. The noise was painful to human ears, intolerable to his wolf senses.
And here they came, that awful wailing…
Sasha stood up straight like he’d been electrocuted. With the ear-piercing siren had come something else: clarity. For the first time in over a week, his mind was his own, without a trace of Rasputin’s influence.
He could have laughed.
He threw back his head and howled up at the sky, the sun obscured by a two-winged silhouette.
“Come on!” Nikita shouted in his ear, tugging hard on his sleeve. “We have to get out of the street!”
Yes. The Germans had finally arrived in Stalingrad.
~*~
The first bomb fell when they were still sprinting down the hill. It seemed to drop in slow motion, small enough from this distance that Sasha could have shut one eye and covered it with his thumb. It landed on a street of small, single-family homes, where the factory workers lived. A flash white like sunlight. Fire. Smoke.
“Jesus,” someone said, probably Ivan. “Oh, Jesus.”
The thunder came after, a beat slower than the visual. The air vibrated, and the ground shook underfoot. Sasha smelled ash, and plaster, and smoke, and his steps faltered.
A big hand – Ivan – shoved him between the shoulder blades and he rebalanced and pressed on.
The sounds were overwhelming, because he could hear all of them. The siren. The drone of German plane engines. The confused shouts of people. Crackle of fire.
A second bomb landed: roar of thunder, plume of smoke, collapse of walls.
There was a ditch running along the side of the road, a deep one, and a drain pipe, the great big silver kind. Nikita dragged them to it, urged them all inside with sharp hand motions. Talking was impossible; you had to put your mouth to someone’s ear and shout above the din.
The wolves didn’t like the dark, or the brackish water smell of the pipe, but Sasha shooed them in, and they all huddled together. Sasha ended up with two wolves crowding him, his arm linked through Pyotr’s.
Nikita made sure they were all safely inside, and then sat just inside the pipe, blocking the entrance with his body.
The bombing went on for a long time.
In the gaps between explosions, Sasha heard someone praying.
And then just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.
The siren cut off.
The silence in the pipe was the thickness and texture of cotton batting. The muffled kind of quiet that comes after hearing damage.
Nikita made a stay motion with one hand and leaned out into the ditch. He walked a few paces away, his legs and boots a long shadow against the brown-green grass.
He came back and poked his head in, mouth set in a hard line. “It’s stopped.”
Outside, the sun was still high and bright, but the air was hazy with smoke. Sasha took a deep breath of it and started to cough. It burned his lungs, and worse, his sinuses.
Everyone looked poleaxed.
Katya wrapped her arms tight around her middle and stared down the hill to the city with watery eyes.
“We need to go find Rasputin,” Nikita said.
Sasha had seen the aftereffects of battle outside of Moscow. He’d seen the devastation in Leningrad. But those had been cold wounds – ugly scars that had stopped bleeding.
This devastation, though, was fresh.
They walked into a city on fire. Where once there had been houses and cafés now stood black craters full of rubble. Buildings had been reduced to gravel, scattered across the road. A tattered bit of fabric lifted on the updraft from a fire and floated back down like an autumn leaf. There were bodies. And bits of bodies. Greasy smudges on the tarmac that should have been bodies.
A woman sobbed brokenly somewhere.
The sun reflected off a thousand points of broken glass.
It stank of fire, and scorched rubber, and roasting flesh, and death.
People ran past them, barefoot, hair standing up, smoke-stained, eyes sightless and wild.
Sasha’s stomach ached so badly that he stumbled over to brace himself against a section of intact wall and dry-heaved, long trails of saliva gathering on his lip.
That was when he heard the baby crying.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and lifted his head, scenting the air, trying to get a read on the sound. His wolves crowded around him, nosing at his hips, whining a question.
The crying wasn’t far.
“Come,” he told his wolves, and vaulted over the wall, stomach settling. He couldn’t be sick if he thought he was needed.
He walked across the blackened threshold of what had once been a house, but was now only a jagged skeleton of a foundation. The walls had burned all the way down to the ground, but a few odd bits had remained. A half-discernable chair. A section of light blue fabric dotted with flowers…which turned out to be an unscathed patch of dress on a woman who was nothing but a network of shriveled black shapes like branches.
The cries were louder, now, and as he crouched beside the woman’s corpse, he caught his first sweet whiff of clean baby. He stuck his hands in the rubble and started to dig.
And dig.
His wolves helped him, paws turning black in the soot.
There was a hollowed-out space beneath the floorboards, a place to hide valuables. That’s where the woman had managed to stow the baby before her house was struck. Sasha pried off one last warped board and there it was, pink and red-faced and squalling, totally unharmed.
The wolves poked their noses into the hole, tails wagging.
“Here you are,” he murmured, lifting the child up into his arms. “Come on, it’s alright.”
When he sat back on his haunches, he saw that there was a girl of about twelve watching him, her dress scorched at the hem, her eyes wide and wild.
“Is this your little sister?” he asked.
The girl nodded, and came forward silently, arms outstretched.
Sasha handed over the precious bundle carefully.
The girl tucked her sister in tight to her chest, fussed over her blanket a moment. She looked at Sasha, stared at him, then nodded, turned, and walked off into the smoke.
~*~
They found Rasputin sitting on the front step of the house they were renting, a house that was, miraculously, unharmed. He had both hands in his hair, yanking at it, weeping openly, tears running down his face and into a beard that was already shiny with moisture.
Philippe went to sit beside him, patted his shoulder.
“Why?” he asked. “Who was this? Who? Oh, never did I think I should have to see war like this. It’s terrible. Terrible!”
Nikita stared at the man with open, but weary hatred. “It’s the Germans. And this is only the beginning. They’ll come for us overland now.”
The starets swiped messily at his face and tipped his head back to meet Nikita’s gaze. “No they won’t, captain. Not if we get to them first.”