Wolfbreed (25 page)

t the base of the tree, Karl scrambled, clutching his ribs, searching for the dagger.

He found it, sticking upright out of a tree root. He grabbed the hilt—

And a naked foot stomped down on his wrist, grinding it into the ground. He rolled onto his back and she loomed above him, naked, blood trailing ribbons down her chin, her neck, curving across her breasts, her thighs. She looked down on him with those empty green eyes and spoke in perfect German. “Maybe a little scar to remember me by?”

“Bitch!” he spat at her.

She reached down and pulled the dagger free from the tree root. “They’ll—” Karl sputtered, trying to pull his arm free. “Kill you.”

She stood, holding the silver dagger. Karl noticed that she still had a hairline cut down the side of her cheek.

“Do you like virgins?”

Karl stared at her.

“My first master, Brother Semyon, liked virgins.”

He grabbed for her ankle, but she dropped to one knee on his chest. Pain shot through him from ribs that were cracked or bruised or broken.

“He liked us because we heal.”

She reached down and grabbed his penis, shrunken and still covered in her maidenhead’s blood.

“You see, these are not made of silver.”

She slashed with the dagger, and Karl screamed.

ain soaked Uldolf to the skin, and chilled him with an ache that hurt worst in his absent arm. The gray clouds above didn’t let him know if the sun had set or not.

“Lilly,”
he called out.

His only answer was a peal of thunder.

The wind tore through the tops of the trees, and the rain pounded his exposed skin as if someone was pelting him with wet gravel. He barely heard his own voice above it all.

“Lilly!”
he called again. His voice was hoarse. It was getting too dark to see properly, and he knew that continuing at this point was more than foolhardy, but he kept going. He knew these woods better than anyone, even in darkness.

He couldn’t go back without her. He didn’t understand it, but she was out here because of him, because of something he had done. And that was something he couldn’t bear.

Did I insult her? With her language as broken as it was, what did she think I was saying?

He had just wanted her to stop crying.

His foot caught something in the underbrush, and he fell to his
knees before he could grab anything for support. His hand sank into the soggy floor of pine needles and rotting leaves, brown water squeezing up through his fingers.

He had to turn and sit down at the foot of the pine next to him to get his foot untangled. At first, he thought the thing stuck on his boot was a discarded bucket. But it was lighter, metallic …

A helmet?

Free from his boot, Uldolf held up the offending article. No question. It was a German helmet. Not some relic from an overgrown battlefield, either. The metal still glinted, despite the soil and pine needles adhering to the smooth surface.

A flash of lightning illuminated the woods, and Uldolf saw movement through the trees, little more than twenty yards from where he sat—a pair of soldiers. And while he was still dazzled from the lightning, Uldolf thought they might have had their weapons drawn.

He set the helmet down quietly, even though the volume of the storm and the pounding rain was more than enough to cover the sound of anything short of a scream. He scrambled around to the other side of the tree before another lightning flash lit the woods.

It didn’t seem as if they’d seen him.

“Now what?” he whispered to himself, the words nonexistent under the sound of pounding rain.

He glanced around the tree and saw another three soldiers approaching at a dead run through the woods. Uldolf grimaced. The road was that way, and who knew how many more soldiers. He’d have to retrace his steps to avoid all of them.

Then, in a flash of lightning, he saw something that froze him down to his soul. One of the soldiers, who was shouting inaudibly to the other men, held up the remains of a surcoat. It had been torn down the front.

It was the one Lilly had been wearing.

No! I’ll kill all you German bastards
.

Hand gripping his hunting knife, he crouched low and began creeping up on the soldiers. He was less than a dozen yards away, barely hidden by trees and underbrush, when another lightning flash showed him the scene around the Germans. The sight was chaos in his mind for a few moments, and he froze.

What am I doing?
he thought as the thunder shook the ground under his knees. His knuckles were white on the handle of the knife, and tears of rage burned his eyes.

He couldn’t do this. It was worse than suicidal. It was brutal and selfish. He was about to salve his own pain by throwing himself on the swords of these men, and in that he would be guilty of those men’s cruelty three times over. What right had he to take himself away from his parents and Hilde?

Slowly he sheathed his knife.

Lightning showed him again the scene by the guardsmen. Now it made sense. Two men were sprawled on the ground. From the brief glimpse, the one farther away looked as if he’d been savaged by an animal. The skin was gone from the lower part of his face, and he was drenched in blood from the waist down.

Uldolf backed away.

He saw no sign of Lilly other than her clothes. What if they had found her, and some animal had attacked? Uldolf’s gorge rose at the thought of some wild beast dragging away Lilly’s body.

He crawled backward through the underbrush, out of sight from the soldiers. He spared them a couple of glances as he retreated. They were slowly moving deeper into the woods, keeping a tight formation.

Were they looking for a wild animal, or Lilly?

Or Lilly’s body?

He backed over a rise that put him fully out of sight of the soldiers. At that point he should have stood up and run home. Instead, he put his back to a blasted stump and stared up at the
forest canopy. Rain beat his face so intensely that he could pretend he really wasn’t crying.

Chasing after her, Uldolf had realized how quickly and how deeply Lilly had become part of his family. Even though he knew that her presence was temporary, until they knew where she really belonged, the thought of her absence left a hole in his family—in
him
. It was an absence that ached worse than his missing arm.

He could endure that if she was going home, to
her
parents,
her
family. But, losing her like this?

I have to go home. I’m doing no good here
.

He stood, and it occurred to him that the soldiers were moving slowly in one direction. That suggested that they knew what direction the animal went.

Uldolf might not be a soldier, but he was a hunter. He slid his knife out again. He would have the blood of Lilly’s murderer, human or not. And if it
was
too large for him to take alone, he would bring the soldiers to it and see that they finished it off.

Uldolf quickly moved around in a large circle that would take him in front of the soldiers.

ldolf was able to keep ahead of the Germans, weaving a zigzag pattern in front of them, looking for signs of Lilly or that animal the soldiers were following. It wasn’t long before he found one …

On the banks of a muddy creek that was overflowing with rainwater, Uldolf saw fresh human footprints. Bare feet, about half the size of his own.

She’s alive
.

Uldolf couldn’t imagine what had happened, but that was of very little importance to him now. He ran along the swelling creek, boots slogging in the mud, chasing her trail.

Branches whipped across his face, and the mud tried to suck his feet under. His cloak dragged on him, the wet material pulling down on his shoulders. His breath burned in his throat, and pain dug into his side, cutting up toward his empty arm socket. When the trail turned to cross the stream, he followed, the knee-deep icy storm water trying to pull his legs under.

On the other side, he stumbled away from the muddy edge of the creek into the woods, where the tracks were lost in the dark, the underbrush, and the springy mulch that formed the forest floor.

“No.” The word burned his throat.

Darkness had come fully to the woods around him. The sun had set, and what moon there was wasn’t enough to penetrate the clouds. The only illumination came from the intermittent lightning tearing through the trees. He didn’t know exactly where he was anymore. He had run after her without fully getting his bearings. The creek snaked through these woods with dozens of branches. He didn’t know where the road was from here, where the soldiers were, and with the storm-covered sky, he couldn’t even figure north from south.

He felt very cold.

“Where are you?” Uldolf whispered into the storm.

He leaned against a tree and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Now that he had lost his bearings, going back was no longer an option. He was lost until the storm broke or morning gave him the light to discover where he was, or at least where north was.

Lightning arced above him, close enough that the thunder was immediate, resonating down into his bones, even in his phantom right arm. In the flash, he saw something through the trees—a flash of white against the brown, black, and gray of the starkly lit tree trunks.

Uldolf walked toward it, wondering if the flash had dazzled him into seeing a mirage. The thunder still echoed as another flash lit up the woods around him with an apocalyptic blast.

“Lilly!” Uldolf called out.

The white-skinned figure turned toward him. She was naked, hair drenched and plastered to her skin, hiding most of her face. Enough of the black had washed out that Uldolf could see the white streak in her hair that had grown from the scar in her temple. She breathed hard, and trails of blood mixed with the rain rolling down her breasts.

She raised a shaking hand between them, and Uldolf saw the flash of a dagger. The blade was bloody, and her hand was streaked with diluted blood as well.

“What happened?”

She took a step toward him, raising the blade. Uldolf took a step back, when another lightning flash showed him her neck streaked with blood, slashed with multiple cuts—