Page 78 of White Wolf
Four sips of vodka brought her back to herself completely – that and the cold wet nose that nudged her hand.
She was sitting with her back against a tree, on a rare dry patch of ground, and one of Sasha’s wolves was licking her knuckles. It was the omega, the rangy one with the sweet eyes.
“Hello,” she murmured, turning her hand over so his tongue slid against her palm. It was oddly comforting.
Over top of the wolf’s worried face she saw Sasha’s, head cocked to the side, his hood and the brightness of his eyes making him look less human by the moment.
“Katya, are you alright?” he asked, earnest and kind.
She flicked her tongue across her dry lips, chasing a drop of vodka. On an empty stomach, she already felt the heat of it spreading through her, going right to her head, fuzzing the sharp edges of everything – especially her fear. “I am.” Her voice came out rough and she cleared her throat. When Sasha frowned, she offered him a bare smile. “Promise. But thank you.”
She scanned her surroundings for the first time. Ivan sat a few feet away, stripped to the waist with his jacket draped across his shoulders, Feliks fussing with a length of bandage that had been wrapped around his midsection and which was darkening with blood.
“How–” she started to say.
“The bullet only grazed him,” Monsieur Philippe answered, appearing at her side with a swirl of fur. “He’ll be just fine, though you wouldn’t know it to listen to his griping. How are you, my dear? Do you need something for the nausea?”
“No, I…”
But he was crouching down in front of her, taking her chin delicately between gloved fingertips. Looking into her eyes. “Hmm. How’s your head? Seeing double?”
“No.” She wanted to flinch away from him, but found she couldn’t, too wrung-out to care.
“Good. Your pupils look fine.” He peered into them, his own gaze cheerful and inscrutable as ever. “I think it was maybe just the shock that made you sick, and not the fall.”
She released a deep breath when he let go of her. Looked around for Nikita and found him standing with his arms folded, white-faced and grim.
“I want to see the bodies,” she said, raising her voice to be heard.
His brows lifted, and she expected some sort of reprimand. But he said, “You sure?”
“Yeah. I need to.”
He nodded.
~*~
First was the man who’d pulled her out of the tree. She made herself look at his face, the pulpy mess of bone, and blood, and brain matter. Memorized the shape of it becausethiswas war. It was so easy to think of it in terms of ideals and speeches and flags, but it wasthis: the breaking-open of living things.
Next were the two she’d killed with her rifle; tidy shots that had dropped them where they stood.
Another had been shot at close-range, in the back, as he fled.
The last had beenburned. A black husk, still smoking.
“Who did this?” she asked, covering her nose and mouth with a hand to block out the smell.
Nikita gave her a surprised look. “You haven’t seen the old man’s fire trick?” He made a circular motion with one hand.
“No.” She thought of his fingers against her face, tried to remember if they’d felt warmer than they should.
“You should ask him to show you. He likes that,” Nikita said, bitter. “I tracked ahead about half a mile.” He nodded toward the snow-veined mud that lay ahead of them, disturbed by only one set of footprints. “These were the only ones. Must have been scouts. Or deserters.”
“Deserters would have hidden. They wouldn’t have fired on us.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Just probably?”
