Page 118 of White Wolf

The one who’d spoken before, the leader of their little band, did an impressive job of gathering his composure, though his authoritative frown was wobbly. “If you’ve come raiding from the capital, there’s not shit for you to take,” he said with a snarl. “I suggest you go back the way you came.”

The other two glanced at Katya, her uniform, the hefty Mosin-Nagant in her hands, much more sinister than the others’ carbines.

Sasha slid in beside her, and the officers went goggle-eyed at the sight of his white wolf pelt, the snarling upper jaw with its teeth poised above his face.

“We’re not a raiding party,” Nikita said smoothly, producing their paperwork from inside his coat. “We’ve come to retrieve a particular artifact on Stalin’s direct order. We’ll be gone in three hours.”

The man stared at the papers a long moment before he took them. “What sort of artifact? Shit and rubble? That’s all we’ve got here.” Except for the art they’d hidden from the Nazis, which they were now no doubt fearful the Cheka might take, too.

Katya wanted to reassure them, but this mission was too dangerous and important, so she kept quiet, squirming inside.

Nikita was the picture of cold, unfeeling impatience. “You won’t miss it, I assure you. Some sentimental trinket for one of the generals; we’re just his errand boys and we don’t have time for this.” He gave amove asidegesture with one hand.

The officer’s frown deepened.

“But if you’d like, I can report back that you stood in our way.”

The man gave way with an angry sigh, knowing there was no way to refuse, but unhappy to have done so.

“Thank you,” Nikita said, tucking the papers away with a curt nod.

They started off down the street again.

“There’s cannibals,” the officer called after them. “You’d better watch yourselves.” Because no citizen or police officer would come to the aid of the Cheka.

The wolves melted out of the fog, joining their ranks once more, and Katya had never been so glad of their company. If there were cannibals, the wolves would scent them well before they appeared.

Still.

The army was present, T-34 tanks and troop transport trucks rumbling through the streets. But not the street where they walked, the echoes low and deep, coming up through the soles of their boots. But otherwise silent, the fog blanketing everything.

“You’ve been awful quiet,” Kolya said to Monsieur Philippe, a threat evident in his voice.

“Yeah,” Ivan grumbled. “You couldn’t do a little magic intervention back there?”

The old man was puffing a little, thanks to their quick pace. “I rather thought…it would be beneficial…to save my strength…as it were.”

“Well, unless your magic can dig a fucking hole–”

“Quiet,” Nikita said. “Listen.”

They all froze. Katya heard her pulse throbbing in her ears, loud as a kettle drum.

“What?” Pyotr said, voice wavering.

But there was nothing save the grinding of truck gears a few streets over, and the relentless cadence of her heart beating.

“Nothing,” Nikita said. “Keep moving.”

They walked in a tight bunch along one side of the street, up against the curb, but not so close to the broken-out first floor windows that someone could leap out and onto them. Their heads swiveled, scanning the desolate streets. Katya saw a few curtains twitch in upstairs windows; tattered bits of cloth on the street, an unwearable and abandoned shoe. She heard the others breathing through open mouths around her, quiet little anxious gasps. They were brave men, all of them, but there were so few of them, walking deeper and deeper into the maze of a ruined and desperate city.

She itched for a sniper’s nest, some high perch from which she could watch their progress and guard their backs, but she didn’t have the luxury. She’d chosen this band of rebels over the Red Army, and thus become a foot soldier in an even more impossible war.

The body the Bolsheviks had burned years before had not, Philippe had assured them, been Rasputin, but an unfortunate lookalike that Philippe’s ilk had planted on the (valid) fear that the corpse would be disturbed. The real Rasputin lay – sleeping, and not dead, according to the mage – in the grave whose stone proclaimed it belonged to a long-dead minor noble in a churchyard just off the Nevsky Prospekt. That was where the they headed now, Nikita consulting a map as they jogged.

They moved quickly, but the fog seemed to tighten. The evening came on quicker, and quicker, almost exponential. It seemed too good to be true that they didn’t encounter anyone, skirting around the army and keeping to the quiet streets.

The church loomed, old-fashioned, the top of its pointed stone façade sheared off, a pile of rubble blocking the entrance to the front door.

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