34
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Rain fell in soft, shifting curtains, breathtakingly cold, deceptively gentle. There were still enough leaves on the tree to provide a bit of shelter, but the rain leaked through in little trickles. The bark under her thighs and against her back was wet, soaking through her clothes. Her skin felt clammy, tight and prickly with goosebumps.
But this was the part she was good at. Best at. The waiting.
Katya stared down the rag-wrapped barrel of her Mosin-Nagant, breathing slowly through her nose so as not to create any steam. A green shadow in the still-green branches. She didn’t feel the cramping muscles in her legs, the crick in her neck, the empty growling of her stomach. She was only patience now, in this moment.
She heard the horse first: a quiet snort to expel the rain from its nostrils. Then the rustle of underbrush. The open-mouthed breathing of exhausted soldiers. Soldiers on their way to Stalingrad, to rape, and pillage, and plant their Nazi flag.
She heard the rumble of a German panzer next, and then the officer on the horse emerged at the head of the road, horse lathered, tongue hanging out of its mouth, high-stepping in the deep mud. Their uniforms were waterlogged and hanging off their bodies. They looked miserable, breath pluming like smoke.
Katya concentrated on the officer’s hat, the little eagle and swastika above the bill.
Inhale. Hold. Gentle pull of the trigger.
The officer toppled backward off his horse, dead instantly, his brains sprayed across his mount’s rump.
The horse screamed and whirled. The officer’s body fell off its back and landed in the mud. The soldiers shouted and brought their guns up, looking wildly up into the trees for the sniper.
The wolves melted out of the underbrush, low on their bellies, teeth bared.
None of the Germans got off a shot.
Sasha was the one, once the road was littered with bodies, who looked up at her and nodded. His mouth was red with other men’s blood.
~*~
The panzer – a Tiger – had broken down on the way to Stalingrad. It might have been the mud, or it might have been engine failure, but either way, it sat silent between two shaggy pines, a Nazi flagged draped across its front, its crew sitting on the mud-caked treads, smoking cigarettes.
Sasha gripped the bark of the tree he stood behind, and waited for the signal. He could smell them, the Germans, their sweat and body odor and the dirt caked into the creases behind elbows and knees. He could smell their desperation, that metallic tang of men who didn’t want to be here.
He’d become immune to that smell in the past weeks. Desperate men might fight harder – or they might flee faster. He would kill them no matter what.
He heard a faint hiss, and then a ball of flame arced through the air and landed square in the middle of the swastika flag, igniting it into a sheet of orange fire.
The men shouted and spun, grabbing for weapons, and that was when Sasha struck.
He was fast. So fast. His legs carried him across mud, faster than any human. He hit the first Nazi in the chest, punched him hard with both hands, and he crumpled with a wheeze, all the breath knocked from his lungs.
Sasha snarled, and spun, caught the next one in the throat with his hand, dug his fingers through flesh and pulled out his windpipe, tore his carotid.
A growl signaled his other wolves had joined. He heard snapping jaws. Screams. A gun cracked, its round whizzing up through the tree branches.
Sasha spun again, and all the Germans were down save one, who Rasputin cradled by the back of the head, his face tucked into the soldier’s throat as he drank.
Nikita’s rules about feeding didn’t apply to the enemy. Rasputin could feast all he liked.
Sasha let the body he held fall to the ground and spat blood.
His human pack stepped into view, guns held at the ready, just in case.
Nikita glanced over the carnage, dispassionate. He nodded.
Rasputin lifted his head with an obscene, satisfied sound. He licked the blood off his lips, and opened his hands; the dead German slumped to the ground at his feet.
Katya moved, suddenly, the Mosin-Nagant going off with a sharp crack.
Sasha whirled and saw there was one soldier they’d overlooked, now hanging dead from the open hatch of the Tiger.
“Nice shot,” Ivan said.
~*~
One of the children was screaming, still. It was the sound that had brought them running out of the woods and into the middle of a too-common tableau. A dozen German soldiers. A family fleeing their village for Stalingrad. The father lay dead, blood leaking from his ears. Four of the soldiers had their pants around their ankles; the mother and two older daughters were being raped. One of the children had been slapped to unconsciousness.
The crying child was a little boy, red-faced, dirty hair sticking up in tufts.
Kolya caught one of the rapists in the throat with his knife.
Nikita shot another soldier at point-blank range in the stomach. There was a lot of blood.
The wolves joined them.
It was over quickly.
Katya knelt with amazing tenderness to help the women right their clothes.
The child’s screams quieted to hiccupping sobs, and Pyotr pulled him into a hug.
It turned out that war was everything everyone had said it was. Blood, and mud, and shit, the stink of corpses, and forgetting that you were a person.
~*~
The major general was gray-faced with exhaustion. “We intercepted a German communication, and it was full of tales of a fanged white beast that eats men whole.” He gave Sasha a flat look. “I trust you’re not actually eating them?”
He twitched a smile beneath the cowl of his wolfskin cloak. “No, sir.”
~*~
The wind swept across the jagged steppe country in relentless gusts, bending the few scrubby trees almost double. It cut through their tents, through their blankets and coats, bit deep into bone. It would snow soon, and then, Nikita knew, the tide of war would turn. The Germans had superior equipment, but Mother Russia had winter on her side. She always had. Napoleon’s ghost could attest to that.
Katya murmured something wordless and rolled toward him, pressing her face into the scant warmth that had gathered in the hollow of his throat.
He shifted so he was curled around her, his arm snug around her waist. Her stomach was still mostly flat, but he thought he could feel the first curve against his own belly. The beginnings of a new life. A promise for After. And a vulnerability that scared him senseless.
She’d told him three days ago. Between one skirmish and the next, her rifle muzzle propped against her shoulder, face smudged with dirt, she’d taken his hand and pressed it to her stomach. “Be thinking about names you like,” she’d said with a tired smile. A smile that suggested she’d be happy about this one day, when the bloodshed had stopped and she didn’t have to spend every waking moment thinking about killing Nazis.
When he’d stared at her, stupidly, her small smile had collapsed. “You don’t want this.”
He’d come to his senses and grabbed her then, reeled her in close. “No, I do. I’m just…scared.”
She’d shut her eyes and leaned into him. “Me too.”
They hadn’t talked about it at any length, or let themselves make any sorts of plans. Life was too tenuous at the moment.
Rasputin was distracted for the most part now, but sometimes he still tried to stir something in her, and she turned to him in the dark, in their tent, seeking hands and mouth. Nikita always loved her like she wanted, and he nursed the bitterest of hatreds for the vampire.
Even if the creature – his insane troika of supernatural power – was fast-becoming a terrifying legend along the Eastern Front.
But it soothed Nikita a little to know that it wasn’t the vampire or the mage that stirred rumors. It was the wolf. The wolfman with the white pelt, and the pack at his heels. Russian vengeance and witchcraft.
The White Wolf, it said in the intercepted communications.
In the painful cold darkness, Nikita held his girl, their growing child between them, and he allowed himself to hope.