Page 157 of White Wolf

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 hearallof 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 astaymotion 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.

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