Page 120 of White Wolf

Mama’s scream.

Her sister Sofia’s pleas.

Dead, all of them dead, all of…

The wolf at her side growled, and then lunged –

And then she was tackled to the ground.

She landed flat on her back and all the breath was knocked out of her. Her lungs clenched and she couldn’t take a breath, gasping for air as a man with a face like a skull drove his knees into her stomach and clawed at her throat with bony fingers.

In that first horrible moment of stunned paralysis, dizzy from lack of oxygen, she noted the way the man’s hair was lank and patchy; the open sores around his mouth from malnutrition; the wild, hungry gleam in his eyes.

He made a low, moaning, hissing sort of sound.

No longer a man at all anymore, but a creature that ate men’s flesh. A cannibal.

Her lungs open and she sucked in a huge, pained breath, and it gave her the strength to twist hard and buck the man off to the side.

He gave an outraged bellow, hand flashing for her throat again…and the beta wolf’s jaws clamped down on the join between his neck and shoulder. The bellow turned into a pained scream, just audible above the cry of the air raid siren, and then it was pandemonium.

The cannibals were a whole pack, at least a dozen, melting out of the fog, falling on their well-fed and healthy group like the starving animals they were. They swarmed over the fence, grabbing the iron rail with skeletal hands covered in sores. All their eyes had the same rabid, inhuman look in them. These were no longer beings that lived: if they survived the war, when the blockade was lifted…there was no going back to before for someone who’deatentheir neighbors. There just wasn’t.

That was what Katya told herself, rather than think about the fact that it was a Russian citizen – a compatriot – that she shot to save herself and her friends.

Her rifle cracked, and another gun echoed it: Nikita on the other side of the grave, a cannibal crumpling at his feet.

“Keep digging!” he shouted. Ivan and Feliks worked furiously, pitching shovels full of dirt over their shoulders.

Three hours. Or was it two now?

She snugged the butt of her rifle into her shoulder and took aim again. Fired.Crack.

Behind her:crack.

Click-clackto eject the cartridge. Another shot.Crack. Three more shots, and then she’d have to reload, or, since there wasn’t time, switch to her pistol instead. The knife at her hip felt terribly heavy, suddenly, weighty in its expectation of use.

“Jesus,” she whispered, lining up her next shot. It was so easy. She could hit a target across a field, and they were coming right at her, spilling over the fence, rifle rounds taking them at almost point blank range. “Oh, Jesus.”

Overhead a low flash, like lightning embedded in the clouds. And then the ground shook, and it wasn’t thunder all around them, but the rumble of a German bomb exploding a few streets over.

Katya had her finger on the trigger, ready to pull it, when Sasha leapt into her sightline. She gasped and let her hand go slack, heart hammering wildly. He ran at the cannibals with his head down, hands held out like claws, snarling like the devil, his cloak the vivid white of snow against the gray-on-gray landscape of the foggy street. He led his four-legged pack at the cannibals, and Katya turned away, not wanting to watch.

~*~

In his former life of university studies, and hunting with Papa, cozy evenings around the fire and laughing with his friends at the market, Sasha had never thought he would ever kill a man. Soft boys like him couldn’t have stomached it – that’s what he’d thought. But he was killing one now, and he was glad to do it.

A small part of him wondered if his aggression was a direct reaction to the threat to his pack – or if, somehow, under his sweet and smiling exterior, he’d always had the capacity for violence.

Now, though, this moment, these kills, were because of his pack. His pack versus theirs, and he was the alpha, and he would dirty his fangs and claws before he let his vulnerable humans bloody theirs. And the humans he fought weren’t much in the way of humans anymore. He could smell the abomination on their skin, taste it in their blood. They’d eaten the flesh of their own kind, and so he felt no remorse as he clawed open a throat, bit through a tendon.

His wolfpack surged around him, snarling, snapping, working together.

The man in Sasha’s arms died with a strangled, choking gasp, and he let him fall to the ground, limp like a broken toy.

The siren hurt his ears, and he cringed from it now, shrinking down into the hood of his cloak, fighting the urge to clap his bloody hands over his ears.

“Sasha,” a hesitant voice said behind him. Katya.

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