Page 47 of White Wolf
Sasha took a deep breath and nodded. Curled his hands into fists and tested the soreness of his knuckles. “I’m ready to learn more.”
Ivan laughed again, low and delighted.
Nikita sent him another flicker of a smile. “You heard the man, Feliks. Show him some more.”
~*~
Every day, Nikita would take one of the others and go off to “work,” reporting to the major general, or Commander Beria, or any number of higher-ups, always returning back for supper gray-faced but determined. They were preparing for the trip, they said, getting everything ready.
Sasha learned that prior to being sent to Tomsk to retrieve him, Nikita and his men had been running reconnaissance missions to the villages outside of Moscow, searching for what the major general had described as “artifacts valuable to the war effort.”
“Black magic shit,” Nikita muttered under his breath.
In a voice that managed to be softly scolding and informative, Monsieur Philippe corrected, “Russia has always been a wellspring of the mystical. Stalin is a practical man, but no doubt he’s heard the old stories. He’s manufacturing his guns, and bullets, and tanks, yes, but it never hurts to turn over every stone. You never know when you might find something useful.”
“Like me?” Sasha asked.
“Yes, dear boy. Like you.”
Whoever wasn’t in Nikita’s company would take Sasha with them on errands to buy food, and clothes, showing him the sights of the city – as soot-blackened and war-ready as it was.
He and Pyotr stood for long moments on the bank of the Volga one afternoon, the sun directly overhead, glinting off the icy surface of the water. It had a certain wet shine to it.
“Soon,” Pyotr said, “it’ll break up enough for a ship to get through.”
And then they would leave for Stalingrad.
~*~
Monsieur Philippe decided that Sasha should learn a bit about magic.
Sasha was still trying to wrap his head around the idea ofmagic. He found he’d never dismissed it, no. When you lived on the very edge of the wilderness, it was impossible not to take the folk tales seriously. He knew well the magic of the forest, its rhythms and its wisdom.
But it was another thing to watch a man light fire from thin air and talk about power in the way that Philippe did.
“Magic is not a gun,” he told Sasha late one afternoon as they sipped tea mixed with a few precious dollops of strawberry jam in Nikita’s loft office. Ivan was working over the punching bag and Feliks lifted weights, their regular breaths an unobtrusive white noise. “It isn’t a matter of having the necessary pieces, arranging them the right way, and pulling the trigger. It requires a spiritual contribution as well. You have to feel it – it has to fill you up, and you have to trust it.”
Sasha stared at him over the rim of his mug.
“You don’t understand?”
“Where does it come from? Before it ‘fills you up,’ where is it?”
Philippe gestured to the room around them. “Everywhere. It exists constantly. It takes great concentration and practice to be able to feel it, and then even more to harness it.”
“Will I be able to start fire like you?”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “Your magic will be of a very different sort.”
But later that night, lying on his bed and staring at the water-marked ceiling, Sasha closed his eyes and breathed out carefully, tried to empty his mind of all distracting thoughts. He smelled damp socks on the radiator, the tang of grease and onions from their dinner of fried-up pickled mackerel. His stomach clenched unhappily on the food as he thought of it, and he pushed the thought of sickness away too. He had to be receptive, had to concentrate, had to be calm and let the magic fill him.
But all he felt was the musty air against his skin, the strain of waiting and wondering.
If magic existed in this tiny room, it wasn’t the kind that Sasha could reach out and touch.
~*~
Sasha was helping Pyotr wash the supper dishes one night when he felt a soft touch at his elbow and turned to find Nikita standing beside him at the sink, a hardbound book and a few sheets of loose-leaf paper in one hand, a pencil in the other. “Come on, Sasha, I want to show you something.”
