Wolfbreed (55 page)

They passed through a room of boxes and the other men started doing soldierly things by the walls, lighting the torches. The fat man spoke with one of the soldiers, and pointed to a ladder leading to a small hole in the ceiling. He gave Hilde to the soldier and climbed up the ladder.

When the soldier pushed her up the ladder after the fat man, she was too tired to resist. She climbed up, the soldier’s rough hands pushing on her backside, until she tumbled out under the sky on top of the tower.

Once she was clear of the trapdoor, the fat man slammed a wooden door in place. He barred it, sighed, and smiled. Hilde hated that expression and, anger surging, ran up to pound on the fat man’s back.

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

The man reached up and placed a hand on her chest, pushing her away from him. He said something she didn’t understand. She sobbed, swinging and kicking, but he easily held her out of reach.

“Child. Stop,” he finally said in real words.

She shook her head violently and managed to bite his thumb.

He shouted and pushed her away. She tumbled down on the roof and lay there sobbing. What was the use? There was nothing left of her family. “Mama,” she wheezed. “Papa. Ulfie. Lilly …”

The man walked up to her and placed a hand gently on her head. She shrunk away, but he spoke softly. “Keep. Safe,” he said.

She shook her head. The fat man was an awful creature. Why would he care about her?

He pulled a chain from around his neck, made a gesture across his chest, and kissed it. Then he dropped it around her neck. The chain was gold and heavy, and long enough that the cross on it fell onto her lap.

“Keep. Safe,” he repeated, and then he took her hands and held them together in his. “Save. You.”

Then he began muttering in a language she didn’t understand.

She tried to back away, but the man held her too tightly. He wasn’t even speaking to her anymore, he was almost chanting. His hands were clammy on hers, and sweat dripped from his brow.

He was afraid, and that scared Hilde.

She began hearing things from below. People talking, people yelling, and then people screaming. The fat man stopped chanting, scooped her up, and dragged her away from the trapdoor. She screamed, but he clamped a fat, smelly hand over her mouth. His rings bit into her lips.

She heard shouts in German, clanging, wood breaking. After a few moments someone screamed in agony. Then the screaming abruptly stopped.

Under the smell of sweat from the fat man’s hand, she could smell smoke. Nasty, sticky, burning meat mixed with something evil.

She watched, wide-eyed, as wisps of smoke trailed up from the trapdoor.

They were going to burn her, too.

She renewed struggling, trying to get away from the fat man.

Then, below her, she heard someone yelling, “Hilde?”

It was Lilly’s voice, but different—harsher, deeper. In her mind, Hilde could picture Lilly walking from the pyre, following her, still burning.

“Hilde?”

Hilde screamed against the fat man’s hand, but all that came out were muffled sobs. She tried to bite him, but his hand was too big and he was able to hold her jaw shut.

She didn’t hear Lilly’s voice again and, for a few moments, Hilde thought that she had left. Then something slammed into the trapdoor.

The fat man scrambled back, all the way to the wall marking the edge of the roof.

The trapdoor vibrated with another impact, and Hilde saw splinters break from the top of the thin wooden bar holding the door shut. The fat man was chanting again.

Then the bar splintered, and the trapdoor flew open, releasing a rolling cloud of smoke.

The fat man sucked in a breath and Hilde stared, terrified, as a monster climbed out of the smoke. It had matted fur covered with blood and soot. It walked on wolf legs thicker than a man’s. It had a sunken belly and a broad chest. Hilde could almost count its ribs. Its forelimbs ended in long-clawed hands, and it had the head of a starved she-wolf.

But it had Lilly’s green eyes.

Lilly pulled herself out of the hole. She had nothing left; she could barely hold her cadaverous wolf form upright. The only thing that kept her pulling forward was the sight of Hilde in the bishop’s arms.

The man shouted something at her.

“Give her to me,” she snarled at him in German.

“No!” The bishop held up a golden cross that dangled from Hilde’s neck. “You can’t have this child’s soul.”

Hilde stared at her with terrified eyes, and in her face Lilly saw Uldolf, eight years ago. She looked down at Hilde and said in Prûsan, “Don’t be afraid.”

Hilde shook her head violently.

“Your mother, your father, Uldolf. They’re alive, waiting for you.”

Lilly continued walking while the bishop shouted things in Latin, backing up until he was on top of the wall itself. When she was within reach, she took both his wrists and slowly, painfully, peeled his hands off of Hilde.

When Hilde fell from his grasp, she screamed at Lilly, jumped off the wall, and ran away across the tower roof.

The bishop spat at Lilly. “The child sees you for what you are, fiend!”

Lilly snarled.

The bishop stiffened. “I am not afraid to see God.”

“Are you sure that’s who’s waiting for you?” She turned toward Hilde, and the bishop grabbed for her uninjured arm. She pushed him away from her, and he stumbled, falling backward over the wall.

He screamed something unintelligible on the way down.

A column of flame erupted from the trapdoor. She could feel the floor warming under her feet. It was only a matter of time before the heat from the fire cracked the stone supports and the roof caved in.

If it was only her up here, that wouldn’t matter …

“Hilde.”

“No,” Hilde sobbed. “Go away.”

“Please, I won’t hurt you.” Lilly heard a crack, and something shifted enough to make the floor vibrate. She limped around to where Hilde huddled against the wall. She reached down and stroked her back.

“No.” Hilde shook. “I’m frightened.”

“Shh,” Lilly said as gently as the wolf could manage. “Close your eyes and listen to my voice.”

“Lilly?”

“Yes.”

Hilde curled into a tight little ball under Lilly’s clawed half-human hand. “W-why are you so scary now?”

Another cracking and a few stones by the trapdoor caved in, blowing out sparks and flame.

“It’s the only way I could save you.” Lilly reached down and picked Hilde up, firing severe pain in her shoulder. She hugged the child to her chest.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Don’t worry.”

Lilly stepped up on the wall, above the bailey. Wind whipped by her, and trails of smoke bit at her eyes and nose. Hilde curled tighter as Lilly turned her back toward the drop. “I’m frightened,” Hilde sobbed.

So am I
.

Lilly bent her legs, tucking her chin down over Hilde’s body. She started singing softly.

Slowly, under her arms, she felt Hilde’s body relax as the fear drained away.

When the roof started collapsing in front of her, she wrapped herself tightly around Hilde’s body and pushed back, falling backward into the night.

irst Günter saw Sir Johann take seven men up the stairs toward the armory. Then he heard the screams, and Erhard took the last four knights of the Order upstairs.

Twelve men were left to guard the door against a breach, however improbable—four Prûsans and seven Germans. Günter stood by his countrymen, because he could feel the situation crumbling.

The collapse began sooner than he expected. The knights had barely vanished up the stairwell when one of the Germans walked up to Günter and the three men with him.

“Why didn’t you come to defend the bishop?” He was one of the men who had run to the stairs as the screaming started. Blood ran down his face from a cut above his eye, and crusted the left side of his beard and mustache.

“This is the Order’s castle. I follow
their
commands.”

“How convenient.” The knight placed a hand on the pommel of his sword.

You bastards have no idea what that thing is. What it can do
.

“Nothing to say, Sergeant?”

“I don’t answer to you,” Günter said.

The man looked back at the mass of men behind him. The others started stepping up to face the quartet of Prûsans.

“From what I’ve seen here, the Prûsans don’t answer to anyone.”

Günter shook his head. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Was that a threat?” The man slid his weapon out of its sheath. Suddenly the air rang with the sound of liberated steel as everyone, German and Prûsan, drew his weapon.

The man smiled at the four Prûsans who faced him. “Sergeant, you should back down. We outnumber you two to one.”

“That’s almost even,” Günter said.

The air resonated with a crash as their blades met.

moke!” someone yelled. Uldolf looked up from his father. Wisps were trailing from the arrow slits at the top of the tower, the smoke gray-black against a deep purple sky, underlit by the diminishing pyre. Under the walls, where the murder holes were still open, the light was different—redder, fiercer, more unstable.

Lankut muttered, “The stores are burning.”

Uldolf nodded.

“What’s happening up there?” Lankut asked.

Uldolf suspected what was happening. He had seen it before. Lilly, or the monstrous thing Lilly became, was loose in the keep with the Germans. She was doing to them what she had done to the stronghold of Mejdân, rending her former masters the way she had destroyed the pagans.

The way she had destroyed his family.

Uldolf felt his shoulder and stared at the keep. It was too easy for him to picture what was happening in there. He had seen it, and the freshly returned memory festered in his mind’s eye as if it had just happened.

She had killed everything he had ever loved.

But now …

Suddenly, a pillar of smoke curled up from the roof of the tower. The base of the column was bright, as if the fire had found its way out. Then a shadow moved on top of the wall, in front of the column of smoke.

“The bishop!” Lankut whispered.

The shadow tipped over the wall and tumbled out into space. Uldolf watched the long fur-lined robes flap in the wind like ineffective wings. The man slammed solidly into the ground.

Back above the tower, the smoke column was now rooted in a plainly visible tongue of flame. The whole keep now had the appearance of a gigantic candle.

On the edge of the roof, a figure climbed onto the top of the wall.

Lilly
.

The
thing
that was Lilly.

Even from this distance, the silhouette was obviously inhuman, with wolf legs, a tail, and a lupine profile. In its semihuman arms it carried a small bundle …

Oh, no …

“Hilde!” his mother shouted before he could think it.
“It has Hilde!”
His mother’s voice sliced through him. Uldolf was running for the tower before it became clear what Lilly was doing.