Page 116 of White Wolf

She turned back to him, openly curious now. “What’s it feel like?”

“Like…” He’d never had to put it into words before, and for a moment he worried he couldn’t, but then they came, settling in his mind as the right ones. “Every smell, and sound, and everything you see? It’s that times ten. Maybe times a thousand. Before – it was existing inside the world. But now, it’s like the world’s gotten inside ofme.”

“That sounds…intense.”

“Yeah. But it isn’t strange. It’s…like this is how I was always supposed to be. If that makes sense.”

“It does.” When he glanced at her face, he saw understanding there. And nervousness. She wet her lips. “When I think about before, when I was with my family. God, I’d do anything to have them back. But…”

He nudged her shoulder gently with his, encouraging.

She flicked him a smile. “But I don’t know, now that I know what I am, if they’d have me back. I’m not their sweet little girl. I’m a killer.”

Sasha snorted and she looked surprised. “She kills,” he said, nodding to the wolf currently licking at Katya’s fingers. “To feed her pack. You killed to protect yours. Killing for fun might be evil, but killing for your family isn’t.”

“There are probably some in the church who’d disagree with you.”

He shrugged. “I don’t care what other people think.”

Her eyes fell to her hand, the gentle, steady movement of the wolf’s nose as she snuffled her fingertips. “Killing changes you, though.”

“So does loving.” He smiled when she glanced up at him through her lashes. “But I think you already know that.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to use you as a sounding board.”

“That’s alright. That’s what pack’s for.”

She sighed, and then laughed a little. “You’re very strange, and that’s a very good thing.”

“Thank you.”

She leaned against him, and the water slapped quietly at the hull of the ship, taking them toward new dangers…and undoubtedly more death.

26

A WARM BODY

Monsieur Philippe had known it as Petersburg, in his time as advisor to the royal couple. Nikita and the boys called it Petrograd, the more Slavic name that Tsar Nicholas had given it as the Revolution loomed, and the citizenry grew more resentful of its Western-seeming monarch. Its name now, in the year 1942, was Leningrad.

In Katya’s eyes, it was hell on earth.

Moscow had been bleak and soot-smudged, eerily empty of civilians, its streets ringing with the throb of tank and truck engines. But there had been a certain sense of accomplishment: the Germans had been beaten back. The capital was secure.

But in Leningrad, the blockade was still in effect. The Germans still bombed. According to their boat captain, a grim-faced man of forty, a citizen brave enough to risk the bombers, the citizens unable to evacuate the city had eaten first the zoo animals, then their pets…and then each other. The police had established a unit specifically dedicated to combatting cannibalism.

Katya shivered hard and ducked down into the collar of her coat. If it boiled down to only two choices, she’d take a bomb over being eaten by starving refugees any day. Jesus.

Nikita appeared beside her at the rail, a comforting hand settling at the small of her back, his gaze fixed on Leningrad across the wind-chopped waters of Lake Ladoga. The once-dazzling pinnacle of the empire loomed dark and jagged on the skyline, the vast Asiatic sky blurry with smoke.

She was so afraid her teeth were chattering.

“The captain says we have three hours,” Nikita said, speaking quietly despite the whine of the breeze across their ears. “He’s nervous as a cat. Philippe managed to magic him into taking us aboard” – before the mage had stepped in, the captain had been adamant that he wasn’t taking any “fat police” across, and especially not any with eight live wolves in their company; Philippe’s powers were the only reason they were aboard now; Katya thought the purse Nikita had tossed him might have had something to do with it too – “but we won’t be able to get him to stay. Three hours to dig up a body and get back to port, or else we’ll be stuck here.”

Stuck. With the starving masses, and cannibals, and air raids.

“We’re gonna go at a run,” he said.

“I’ll be ready.” She hitched the strap of her rifle a little higher up her shoulder.

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