Then he stared at his hands, his eyes widening. She set the gun on the worktable out of his reach and left it there as she poured herself a cup of tea.
“What have you done to me?” he cried.
“I haven’t done anything.” Her smile should have been beautiful, full lips on a porcelain face, but the expression held wickedness. Mischievousness. Tricks. “I have nine layers of protection around my home, knowing people like you would come to kill me. You should have dropped dead—even you, with your half-wolf soul—should have dropped dead before you reached my door. Do you know what that means?
“You never truly meant to kill me. You thought you did, perhaps. You might have held the gun in your hands and pressed the barrel to my chest, but you could not have killed me. Everyone would call you a monster if they knew what you were. But you have a good heart, don’t you? What of that, boy?”
He didn’t know. He took another sip of tea and kept his gaze on the amber surface of the liquid. She wasn’t even wolf, and he was showing her signs of submission. He was useless.
“Then what am I to do?” he said. He knew what happened to those the SS no longer had use for. Skorzeny knew how to kill werewolves.
“It’s the night of the full moon,” she said.
A window in the front of the cottage still showed daylight. The ghosts of his wolf’s ears pricked forward. No, it wasn’t quite time, not yet.
She said, “They wanted you to come tonight, on the full moon, because they thought your wolf would make you a killer. Make murdering easier.”
“I tried to explain to them, it doesn’t work like that—”
“Especially when they have made us a world where men are the monsters, and the wolves are just themselves. Would you like one?” She offered him a plate piled with sugar cookies, wonderful, buttery disks sparkling with sugar, and where had she found butter and sugar in the middle of the war? He recalled the story of the witch who fattened children up to eat them.
“No, thank you,” he said. Smiling, she set the plate aside.
“Do you know what tonight is, boy? Besides a full moon night?”
He thought for a moment and said, blankly, “Tuesday?”
“All-Hallows Eve. The night when doors between worlds open. And a full moon on All-Hallows Eve? The doors will open very wide indeed. Where would you like to go? This is a night when you might be able to get there.”
I want to go home. That was a child’s wish, and he was ashamed for thinking it.
She might have read his mind.
“The home you knew, you will never see it again. Even if I could transport you there this moment, home will never mean what it did. Germany will never be the same. We might as well all have landed on another planet, these last years.” She went to the table, wiped her hands on her apron, and began to work, chopping up a sprig of some sweet-smelling plant, scooping pieces into a mortar, grinding away, adding another herb, then oil to make a paste. The movements seemed offhand, unconscious. She’d probably done them a thousand times before. She spoke through it all. “They, your masters, are intent on harnessing the powers of darkness, but they do not remember the old stories, do they? The price to be paid. They have forgotten the lessons. They put werewolves in cages and think because they have a bit of silver, they are safe.”
He leaned back in the chair, sipping his tea as worry fell away from him. He was a child again, listening to the stories of his grandmother, the old ones, about dark woods and evil times, bramble forests and wicked tyrants. He was sure he didn’t close his eyes—he remembered the fire in the hearth dancing, he watched her hands move as she chopped, mixed, ground, and sealed her potions up in jars. He saw his gun sitting at the corner of the table and remembered he had come for a reason. But he no longer cared, because for the first time in ages, the wolf inside him was still.
“Some of us still have power, and some of us can fight them,” she said. “We do what we can. Your masters, for example. Just seeing you, here, I’ve learned so much about them. They think their werewolves will save them. Even without the true wolves like you, they think that they can act like wolves to strike at their enemies. They think that they can control the monsters they’ve created. But I will curse them, and they will fail. Keep this in mind when you decide what to do, and which way to run.”
He saw an image in his mind’s eye of endless forest, and the strength to run forever, on four legs, wind whispering through his fur. His voice tickled inside him, not a snarl this time, but a howl, a song to reach the heavens.
“Boy.” He started at her voice, suddenly close. She stood before him, arms crossed. “The moon’s up. It’s time for you to fly.”
The world through the window was dark, black night. The trees beyond the clearing glowed with the mercury sheen of the rising moon. Both he and his wolf awoke. Marie took the teacup from him before he dropped it.
He could change to wolf anytime he liked, but on this night, this one time each month, he had no choice. The light called, and the monster clawed to get out, ribs and guts feeling as if they might split open, the pinpricks of fur sprouting from his skin, over his whole body. His clothing felt like fire, he had to rip free of it. His breathing quickened, he turned to the door.
She opened it for him. “Goodbye,” she said cheerfully as he raced past her.
He ripped off all the clothes before he crossed the clearing, left his satchel behind, never thought again about the gun. By the time he reached the trees he had a hitch in his stride, as his back hunched and his bones slipped and cracked to new shapes. His vision became sharp and clear, and the scents filling his nose made the world rich and glorious. Tail, ears, teeth, a coat of beautiful thick fur, and nothing but open country before him.
The doors of All-Hallows Eve had opened, and the boy’s wolf knew where to go, even if he didn’t. West. Just west, as far and as fast as he could. Armies and soldiers and checkpoints and spies didn’t stop him. No one fired on him. All any of them saw was a wolf, a bit scrawny and the worse for wear perhaps, racing through the night, a gray shadow under a silver moon.
Later, Fritz would remember flashes of the journey, woods and fields, a small stream that he splashed through, the feel of moonlight rising over him. For decades after, the smell of fireworks would remind him of the stink of exploded artillery shells that filled his head as he crossed the site of a recent battle. The memories made him think of a hero in a fairy tale, the boy who had to fight through many hardships to reach the castle and rescue the princess. The knight with his sword, slaying the dragon. Never mind that he was a monster, like the monsters in the stories. Perhaps he didn’t have to be a monster anymore. Not like that, at least.
He ran all night, collapsed an hour or so before dawn, not knowing where on the map of Europe’s battlefields he’d ended up, not caring. He’d run as far as he could, then he slept, and the wolf crept away again.
He’d run all the way to France.
The American soldiers found him naked, satchel and gun and clothing long gone. Hugging himself, he hid behind a tree trunk, torn between fleeing again or begging for help. When they leveled rifles at him, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t imagine the Amis had brought silver bullets with them. They could not kill him, but they didn’t know that. He waited; they waited.