I am Wolf (The Wolfboy Chronicles) (19 page)

“Thank you.”

Caspian rose to his feet. Once again he looked like
the proud Alpha male that I knew him to be. Always in control, always knowing
what to do. But for once I spotted something more in his eyes. A sort of humble
embarrassment. Like he was ashamed that he had lost control in front of me. It
took a few seconds before he finally spoke in my thoughts:
 

“Now let’s go and get your mate.”

We ran up the stairs and managed to open the door then leaped inside
the big hall. I sniffed the air, trying to catch Catalina’s scent but found it
to be very faint. I followed its trail and soon we were downstairs in a basement.
Desperately and frantically we searched the many rooms one by one, running in
and out, sniffing, trying to catch a fresh scent, but all we found was old.
Finally I tracked her scent to a small dark room. The door was open and I ran
inside. Her scent was strong here but unfortunately old.

She has been here, I thought. Her smell is very
strong. But she is not here anymore.

Caspian looked at me. Could she be somewhere else?
Maybe she was in this room, but they have moved her to another room since?

I sniffed the floors, the walls, and the small thin
mattress on the floor. Yes she had been here, she had been in this room, but it
was some time ago. Caspian sniffed the mattress.

The scent is at least a few days old, he said. Let’s
keep looking. Maybe she is somewhere upstairs now.

We ran up the stairs into the hall then continued to
the second floor. A corridor with many doors met us.

This place is huge, I thought. It’ll take all night to
find her.

Caspian came up close to me. Then we’ll spend all
night looking for her if necessary.

The search soon became desperate and frantic. Especially for me. After
every room we found empty I became more disillusioned and hope slowly oozed out
of me. I couldn’t find her, not even a trace of her or a scent. Her smell was
nowhere on the top floor or elsewhere in the castle. In one of the first rooms
we found sleeping soldiers. I immediately went forward with the intention of
killing them right there in their sleep, but Caspian stopped me. He blocked my
way, then told me how important it was to restrain from killing humans if
possible, not only because of the desire for the human flesh that would always
try and pull us, but also because giving in to anger was a very dangerous thing
for a wolf.

It ends up taking control, yes, you already told me
that, I thought slightly bitter. I wanted to do something, I wanted them to
suffer and die for what they had done. I was angry and sad at the same time
because I didn’t find Catalina here. I wanted them to pay for that, but Caspian
told me to stop, to hold myself back.

Killing can be like poison to you as well as anger.
You’ll end up numb to the fact that you are taking human lives. It’ll be too
easy and killing is not supposed to be easy.

I growled and backed up out of the room. I wasn’t
satisfied, I was unhappy and angry.

We ran through room after room in the castle, but
Catalina’s scent was gone. I could only track her to the room in the basement
and in there the scent was old. Soon I was so desperate in my search I hardly
noticed that Caspian had stopped and was staring out the window.

“The sun is about to rise, Sami. We need to get out
before we change back.”

No!

Caspian turned and looked at me. “It’s over, Sami. She
is not here. They must have moved her to some other place.”

“No! I’m not leaving till I find her!”

Despair and distress struck me. I was anxious,
confused. I had to find her. She had to be there somewhere. Caspian looked at
me very seriously.

“We need to go.”

Everything inside of me screamed while we ran back out
the entrance and continued into the dense forest.

I need to go back in, I kept thinking. I need to find
her.

“She is not there. They have moved her, Sami.”

Caspian found our clothes in a small clearing where we
stopped. I cried while the change came upon me and that fragile, feeble human
body was back again. I didn’t want to be human, I didn’t want to be me. I
wanted to remain the wolf. Most of all I wanted to find Catalina.

H
er scent was gone.
All I could
find was the old smell of her. But I couldn’t catch a new one, a fresh one or
one of her leaving the castle. It almost drove me mad with anger and fury. We
walked back through the forest and climbed the fence. When we got to the other
side we ran across a field while I tried desperately to track down what
direction those bastards had brought her when they transported her out of the
castle.

“Your anger blurs your senses,” Caspian said. “The
frustration you are feeling on the inside makes it impossible for your wolf to
work outside. You need to calm down to be able to catch her scent again.”

My wolf growled from inside of me as I turned and
looked at Caspian. I sensed how my exasperation showed in my eyes. I felt
nothing but wrath and it was eating me up. I was afraid that Catalina had died
in that castle since her smell stopped there and seemed to not go any further.

“Why don’t you do it?” I snarled. “Why don’t you find
her track?”

He annoyed me. I had wanted to kill those soldiers.
They deserved it. But he had stopped me. I resented him for that. My wolf was
growling inside of me as anger rose. With it grew resentment towards Caspian
for holding me back. I wondered if I could have found Catalina a long time ago
had I been by myself, not letting him stop me.

“I already have,” he replied nonchalantly.

“You have found it?” I asked.

“Yes,” Caspian said and moved closer. He put his hand
on my shoulder. Then he pointed into the air. “It’s coming from the
north-east.”

We walked for hours without a break towards the north-east but I still
couldn’t catch Catalina’s scent. Caspian was the only one who could find it,
but he admitted it was very weak.

My anger grew stronger and stronger as the hours
passed. Slowly I felt more and more stirred up on the inside. I felt we were
all wrong in the way we were going about all this. At one point we heard a
truck and hid behind an old shack. I watched as the truck drove by. It was
packed with people. Men, women and children. Their faces were distressed. Fear
was eating them up. I had seen faces like these before, I had seen a truck just
like that one once before and I knew where they were going, what was going to
happen to those people. I snorted and stepped forward as it passed us. For a
second I entered the mind of all those people and was struck by the despair and
hopelessness that lingered inside of them.

Caspian saw it in my eyes.

“Let it go. You can’t do anything,” he said in my
thoughts.

I turned and looked at him with anger. I shook my head
slowly thinking, “Yes, I can. Yes we can. If anyone can do anything it is us.”

“Don’t Sami. Don’t let the anger control you. You need
to stay focused on your task. You have made a promise to someone and that’s
your priority right now. You can’t save the entire world. This is no longer
your world. Humans have always been at war, there is always someone killing
each other somewhere. You can’t change that. It’s just the way things are.”

I was furious and didn’t want to let it go. I didn’t
want to just look at all this injustice happening. He could say what he wanted
but this was still my world. These people were my people.

“Sami. You need to stop this. Block your anger. Your
wolf will show...”

 
We heard
shots in the distance as he spoke. Then screams before the worst sound of all
arrived. Silence.

“They’re all dead,” I said. I looked at Caspian with
great resentment. “Are you happy? I could have saved them. There were children
for God’s sake. Children!”

“Sami you have got to stay calm, you have got to keep
your peace.”

“Peace?” I yelled. “How can you talk about peace when
people ... when people die in front of your very eyes. You’re talking about me
letting go. Why? So I can be a coward like you? So I can stand and watch while
people are being killed, while Catalina is being tortured somewhere? For all I
know they have sent her to one of those camps like they did me after they
interrogated me. Do you know what they do at these camps? They kill people.
Elderly women and young children are being put in chambers where they kill them
with gas. The rest they work till they die from starvation. And you’re talking
about keeping my calm? This could be my parents! This could be me!”

My heart was pounding forcefully in my chest and I was
breathing heavily as I my fingers began to hurt. I looked at my hands and
noticed grey hairs growing out everywhere. I stared at Caspian with spite. I no
longer wanted to live like this, I no longer wanted to be a coward. I didn’t
try and stop the change from coming upon me, I didn’t fight it, but welcomed
it. The fury inside of me grew and grew as the wolf returned and was now
standing in front of Caspian. He shook his head in disbelief, then tried one
last time to speak sense to my mind.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Sami. It will end badly.”

“I don’t care,” I thought.

I took one last glance at Caspian before I took off
running across the field. I never looked back.

I
ran for hours,
staying
away from main roads and people. I kept the anger alive in me, the rage intact
in order to not lose my wolf and become human again. I kept thinking of the
faces of the people on the truck minutes before they faced certain death. I
kept imagining the terror in their minds that I sensed when they passed me, the
horror on their faces as the soldiers pulled out their guns and began shooting.

As I ran I became more and more convinced that
Catalina had in fact been sent to one of the camps in Transnistria where I was
supposed to go as well. It fit well with the direction of northeast. I became
almost obsessed with the thought of her in one of those camps, obsessed with the
thought of getting her out of there.

 
I searched
for railway tracks and found one to follow across the country. I ran like I
have never run before, growling, snarling in fury.

To my luck it didn’t take long before I spotted a
train in the distance. I hid behind trees and as it passed I realized it was
packed with people. They were screaming inside the freight cars, crying,
whimpering, their voices shattered in fear. It struck my heart and increased my
anger. As the last car passed me I leaped from a branch in a tree and landed on
top of the train.

I had done the trip once before and knew it would take many hours for
the train to reach Transnistria but I never once rested. Not for a moment. I
kept my anger intact, I even managed to make it grow further by thinking about
all these innocent people inside of the train under me. I smelled their fear
and read their minds to feel their distress until it became almost unbearable.
I did it just enough to make me even angrier and enraged. The wind was icy cold
but I hardly felt it under my thick fur. Tears streamed down my face as we came
closer to a camp in the distance. Thick smoke billowed from the chimneys and
made the sky dark, almost black above it. People in the wagons were panicking,
shrieking and screaming with pure fear.

Right before the train drove into the train station I
climbed down and hid between two wagons barely holding on with my claws to the
side.

I heard the soldiers shouting and dogs barking, then
bone-piercing screams from the people being separated. I closed my eyes and
felt fury rise while thinking about how they had separated the little girl from
her mother the last time. I was stirred up on the inside, ready to explode in
rage.

A woman screamed and a soldier yelled back at her.
Then he pulled his gun and held it to her head. A small boy screamed for his
mother while another soldier held him. The soldier with the gun was about to
pull the trigger when a sound made him look up. The sound of a wolf growling.
At that second I jumped from the train on top of the soldier. His gun went off
into the air as he fell to the ground. People screamed and yelled and turmoil
erupted as the soldiers tried to shoot me, but soon realized that their bullets
were no good. They were absorbed in my fur and I hardly felt them. I ripped the
soldier open with my claws, then went on to the next. In a rampage of killings
I took them down one by one and when they were all dead, I had just begun.
People were running around on the train station screaming, trying to escape,
and running away from the camp and into the surrounding forest and mountains.