Page 160 of White Wolf

Katya moved, suddenly, the Mosin-Nagant going off with a sharp crack.

Sasha whirled and saw there was one soldier they’d overlooked, now hanging dead from the open hatch of the Tiger.

“Nice shot,” Ivan said.

~*~

One of the children was screaming, still. It was the sound that had brought them running out of the woods and into the middle of a too-common tableau. A dozen German soldiers. A family fleeing their village for Stalingrad. The father lay dead, blood leaking from his ears. Four of the soldiers had their pants around their ankles; the mother and two older daughters were being raped. One of the children had been slapped to unconsciousness.

The crying child was a little boy, red-faced, dirty hair sticking up in tufts.

Kolya caught one of the rapists in the throat with his knife.

Nikita shot another soldier at point-blank range in the stomach. There was a lot of blood.

The wolves joined them.

It was over quickly.

Katya knelt with amazing tenderness to help the women right their clothes.

The child’s screams quieted to hiccupping sobs, and Pyotr pulled him into a hug.

It turned out that war was everything everyone had said it was. Blood, and mud, and shit, the stink of corpses, and forgetting that you were a person.

~*~

The major general was gray-faced with exhaustion. “We intercepted a German communication, and it was full of tales of a fanged white beast that eats men whole.” He gave Sasha a flat look. “I trust you’re not actually eating them?”

He twitched a smile beneath the cowl of his wolfskin cloak. “No, sir.”

~*~

The wind swept across the jagged steppe country in relentless gusts, bending the few scrubby trees almost double. It cut through their tents, through their blankets and coats, bit deep into bone. It would snow soon, and then, Nikita knew, the tide of war would turn. The Germans had superior equipment, but Mother Russia had winter on her side. She always had. Napoleon’s ghost could attest to that.

Katya murmured something wordless and rolled toward him, pressing her face into the scant warmth that had gathered in the hollow of his throat.

He shifted so he was curled around her, his arm snug around her waist. Her stomach was still mostly flat, but he thought he could feel the first curve against his own belly. The beginnings of a new life. A promise for After. And a vulnerability that scared him senseless.

She’d told him three days ago. Between one skirmish and the next, her rifle muzzle propped against her shoulder, face smudged with dirt, she’d taken his hand and pressed it to her stomach. “Be thinking about names you like,” she’d said with a tired smile. A smile that suggested she’d be happy about this one day, when the bloodshed had stopped and she didn’t have to spend every waking moment thinking about killing Nazis.

When he’d stared at her, stupidly, her small smile had collapsed. “You don’t want this.”

He’d come to his senses and grabbed her then, reeled her in close. “No, I do. I’m just…scared.”

She’d shut her eyes and leaned into him. “Me too.”

They hadn’t talked about it at any length, or let themselves make any sorts of plans. Life was too tenuous at the moment.

Rasputin was distracted for the most part now, but sometimes he still tried to stir something in her, and she turned to him in the dark, in their tent, seeking hands and mouth. Nikita always loved her like she wanted, and he nursed the bitterest of hatreds for the vampire.

Even if the creature – his insane troika of supernatural power – was fast-becoming a terrifying legend along the Eastern Front.

But it soothed Nikita a little to know that it wasn’t the vampire or the mage that stirred rumors. It was the wolf. The wolfman with the white pelt, and the pack at his heels. Russian vengeance and witchcraft.

The White Wolf, it said in the intercepted communications.

In the painful cold darkness, Nikita held his girl, their growing child between them, and he allowed himself to hope.

---