The Hunter From the Woods (44 page)
They fell upon him from the dark.
There were two. One whirled a chain around Michael’s throat and tightened it so hard the blood thundered in his head. The second had a baton in one hand and a net in the other, and Michael realized they meant not to kill him but to trap him. To take him on a drugged journey and place him before the Family of the Silver Thread, whose scientists would like to know what little boys who became wolves were made of.
Michael turned toward his attackers. With a snarl and show of fangs that would have dropped any ordinary man to his knees, Michael first lunged toward the ninja who chained him. He got a kick to the muzzle from a man who was as quick as a cobra, but Michael was not stopped nor was he slowed. He hit the ninja with all the power he had and slammed the man’s back against a tree. Then lifting up on his hind legs and pinning the ninja with his forepaws he tore into the masked face as one would scoop the flesh from an exotic fruit. He saw the wet terror in the man’s eyes as fangs tore meat and muscle away from bone, and in a frenzy of killing Michael shivered to his animal core.
He
enjoyed
it.
The chain loosened. Michael pulled it free from the ninja’s hand. The thing in front of him had no lower jaw but it was trying to scream. Something stabbed him on the left side. In the next instant he was lifted off his hind legs and thrown to the ground and he smelled the ozone of the electric shock after the searing pain had ripped through him. He struggled up to his knees, his muzzle dripping blood and his eyes full of red fire. He realized he was connected on the right side by a pair of wires to the baton in the remaining ninja’s grip.
A finger moved, a spark jumped, and the current delivered agony to Michael Gallatin.
As the shock tortured him, he changed back and forth. From wolf to man and back again, an involuntary reaction to the electricity. He fell again to his side, in wolf form, and tried to get up again but once more the finger moved and the current obeyed and the electrical shock coursed through his body in waves that took him from wolf to man and man to wolf in a matter of seconds. His mind felt blasted; he had no sense of abrupt change, but rather that he had always been both wolf and man at the same time all his life and he had never known it.
He told himself to get up. To keep fighting. He reached for the wires to yank their hooks out of his flesh.
But the next long and terrible shock told him to stay down, and to give up.
He lay as a man, weak and naked and bleeding. His strength was gone. He watched as the ninja came forward to throw the net, and then maybe there would be another gas grenade or a blow to the head and Michael Gallatin knew his freedom would be over.
The death of a hunter, he thought in his suffering and near-delirium. He tried to change back to his more powerful form. He couldn’t open the soul cage. Not this time.
The wolf was paralyzed by shock, and the door of the soul cage was sealed shut.
The ninja came forward, a graceful evil.
He never reached his destination.
For in the next instant a coal black wolf sprang at him from the side, and bearing him down to the earth it planted its paws upon his chest and took his throat between its jaws and with an explosion of power nearly ripped the head from the neck. Then it cracked the ninja’s breastbone like an eggshell and winnowed its muzzle in and plucked out the still-beating heart. It turned its head to show Michael Gallatin the prize, and Michael saw that the black wolf’s eyes were ice-blue. The wolf ate the ninja’s heart.
It licked the last of the blood from around its mouth.
Then it stood up on its hind legs, and with a shiver of anticipation it began to change.
As the black hair disappeared into white flesh, as the bones remade themselves and the spine drew its tail inward, as the ears became human and the face began to compose itself, the man walked toward Michael. He stood about two inches over six feet and he had a narrow-waisted body with wide strong shoulders. He moved with confidence, and Michael thought there was some arrogance in there as well. Fully revealed, the man was maybe in his mid-thirties, with thick black hair that tumbled over his forehead. He had a handsome, intelligent face with high cheekbones and the elegant nose of a lost aristocrat. A Russian face, Michael thought. The man’s intense blue eyes remained fixed on Michael, even as he knelt down and pulled the hooks out from Michael’s phosphorescent-streaked side.
Michael just stared in amazement at this walking miracle. But he realized he recognized the eyes. With a start, he remembered whose they were.
The younger man spoke with a distinctive Russian accent. A warmth came up in his eyes that melted all the ice away.
“My name is Peter,” he said.
And he added, “I think you are my father.”
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