Page 26 of White Wolf

He’d never known his father – a factory worker turned soldier who’d been killed by a brick to the head in a street riot. But his mother was a loving, endlessly patient presence in his youth. She kissed his forehead every night before bed, her lips velvet-soft, her breath faintly sour from a rotting back tooth. “Sleep well, my little prince,” she would murmur, with love in her eyes.

He was eleven the night she gave him the bell. Small enough to fold it into his little hand; it was warm from her skin. “Do you know who this belonged to?” she asked, voice strangely urgent. And she told him.

His mother was beautiful. Everyone said so. And no one suspected what she really was underneath.

He had that in common with her.

Sasha tried not to fall asleep, fighting his increasingly-heavy eyelids for long moments. But exhaustion finally won out and his head tipped sideways against the window. His breathing settled into something deep and regular, a rhythm that soothed some of the anxiety racing under Nikita’s skin.

He could seek out the company of his men, but he stayed, content for the moment in the quiet. The train swayed gently and he felt his own eyelids growing weighty, his blinks irregular and farther apart.

The problem, he reflected – well, one of them, anyway – was that Dmitri had been long-legged and blond, too. He’d been broader – he’d had a soldier’s physique – and his eyes had been brown instead of pale blue. His jaw had been squarer and his nose crooked from two different breaks. But Nikita saw hints of his dead best friend in Sasha, and it was unsettling. Seeing the fear in the boy’s eyes while he jutted his chin and tried to be brave sent him spinning back in time, when he and Dima had been reckless, stupid, and feigning bravery to get by. Whatever Philippe had planned for the boy, it was likely to end in death – Nikita didn’t want to care by the time that happened. He didn’t want to feel sick inside.

Sicker than he already did.

He touched the utility pouch on his pants leg where he kept the bell, thinking of the promise he’d made his mother. If he didn’t keep it soon, then all the terrible things he’d done couldn’t be justified as a means to an end – they would just belong to the endless list of Soviet atrocities.

“Nik,” Kolya called, soft, and he stood, grateful for the distraction. “Come and look at this.”

He was at the rear of the car, sitting sideways in a seat on the other side of the aisle, breath fogging the window.

“What?”

“Oh.” Distractedly, without looking, he shoved a satchel across the seat toward him. “I nicked this off the old man. Thought you’d like a look.”

Nikita sat down with an agitated huff and pulled the bag into his lap. Inside was a collection of innocuous things: clean shirts, socks, and shorts; scissors; a bag of jerky that smelled of salt and meat; and a book.

He pulled the book out into the light and turned it over in his hands. The cover was leather, worn smooth and shiny from handle, marred with scrapes and scratches. It was closed with a clasp and a latch that required a key to open. The edges of the pages were yellow, tattered. Old. They smelled of dust when Nikita sniffed at them. He couldn’t find any script, not even along the cracked spine.

“Hmm,” he said, and put it back in the satchel. “What would I want with an old man’s diary?”

Again without looking, Kolya pulled a lockpick from his pocket. “You could open it.”

There was that.

The lockpick wouldn’t work, though.

“Here, let me do it,” Kolya said, impatient in a way that left Nikita biting back a grin. Kolya was loyal and deferential…up to a point. When he knew better than someone, he wasn’t shy about shouldering his way into the situation.

He twisted the pick a dozen different ways, though, tongue pressed into his cheek, and couldn’t spring the lock. “Damn,” he said, giving up. “That should have worked.”

“Maybe he cast a spell on it,” Nikita said, only half-joking.

“Maybe so.”

“What are you looking at out the window?”

Kolya shook himself and handed the book back. “Oh. It was wolves.”

A shiver moved like the drag of a fingertip down Nikita’s spine. “Wolves?”

“Yeah. There.” Kolya pointed.

Belly filling with dread, Nikita sat up and leaned over his friend toward the window, squinting against the brightness of sunlight on snow. There were indeed wolves, an entire pack of them, racing along, keeping pace with the train. Gray, and brown, and white, and black, sleek and elongated, tongues lolling, flying across the snow seemingly without effort.

“Jesus,” he breathed, not sure if it was a curse, or a prayer.

“They must smell the blood on the train,” Kolya reasoned. “From when it ran over those people.”

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