Storm Wolf (34 page)

A tall, upright shadow stepped into the yard.

“Beatrycze?” Alexei spoke quietly, urgently.

“Yes, I’m back, Alexei,” the shadow answered as she walked up to him. “Did you contact Ferdynand and Gosia? What about the others? Where are they? Have you transformed them all back already?”

“No, no,” he answered her, shaking his head. “Ferdynand and Gosia answered my call, but I have not seen the others yet. Ferdynand and Gosia went back into the woods to look for the others and bring them all back here.”

Beatrycze nodded, biting her lower lip.

“Did you get the birch bark?” he asked her.

She held up the homespun sack full of strips of the white bark.

“What do we do with it, now that we have it?” they both asked each other, and then burst into quiet laughter.

“Place it along the thresholds of the house,” Alexei suggested. “Along the window sills. Across the gate into the yard.”

“Maybe keep some in our pockets as well,” Beatrycze added.

Alexei agreed. “Frau Berhta may not even come herself,” he said as he realized this. “She may simply send some evil magic to harm whoever took her strip of tanned skin and then come later to fetch the skin. The sooner we do this, the better.”

Beatrycze took a handful of the bark peelings and gave them to Alexei. “Put one in your pocket and use the rest to block the gate into the yard and along the fence. I will place the rest along the thresholds of the doors into the house and along the window sills and hearth.”

“Get some clothes ready for them as well,” Alexei suggested. “When they change back into people, they will need something to wear.”

Beatrycze looked at him with puzzlement in her eyes, but then nodded.

Alexei stood up and they each began to place the small chips and curling strips of bark where they hoped to block Frau Berhta’s access to the yard and house.

Frau Berhta paused in the middle of the lane and leaned on her cane. She was tired. Her club foot was dragging behind her and seemed heavier than it had in a long time. She was panting from the exertion. Looking around, she guessed that she was halfway to Sybilla’s family home on the edge of town.

The howl of a single wolf suddenly pierced the night sky. It went on and on, finally fading in the dark.

“Looking for someone, my friends?” the old woman chuckled quietly. “Do you think to find each other and then to save yourselves somehow?” She trudged forward again. “You will be very disappointed, I think, if that is your plan.”

A half-dozen wolf voices rose in the night, howling in response to the first. Each would pause, as if only to draw another lungful of air, and then continue.

“Howl as often and as long as you like,” Frau Berhta gloated. “It will do you no good. Your human forms are lost to you, and the quicker you lose yourself in the woods, the better. If the townsfolk hear you howling for very long, who knows? They might come hunting for wolves before the wolves come hunting for townsfolk.”

Alexei was stooped over, laying out the birch bark as carefully as he could in rows of overlapping pieces so as to leave no break in the fortifications against whatever Frau Berhta might send against them. He had put down the bark to block the gate into the yard and all along the fence that ran alongside the road. Beatrycze was inside the house, putting down the bark chips to stop anything Frau Berhta might send in through the doors or windows or down the chimney. Alexei had only a few bits of bark left. He stood up and surveyed the yard.

“Is there anyplace else that I should lay down these last few pieces?” he wondered.

He heard footsteps in the dark. He backed away from the gate and the fence.

The wolves he recognized as Ferdynand and Gosia stood outside the yard, on the road. He saw other eyes, glinting in the dark, behind them; they were followed by a half-dozen others he did not recognize.

“Zygmunt? Sybilla? Ctirad?” he breathed a sigh of relief. “Is that you?”

Some of the wolves in the back of the group seemed to nod. One or two whined quietly.

“Come in! Come in!” Alexei urged them, gesturing to the yard around him. “Come in and we can transform you back into your human shape.”

Ferdynand began to step through the gate and suddenly leaped back, yelping and whining. He landed in a tangle of wolf limbs, sucking a front paw as if it had been burned. He looked at Alexei reproachfully.

“Sorry. So sorry,” muttered Alexei. “We had no intention of hurting you. It was to protect us from Frau Berhta.” He scuffed the birch bark away from the gate with his boot.

Beatrycze came running from the house, a stack of neatly folded clothes in her hands.

“Ferdynand! Sybilla? Zygmunt?” she exclaimed quietly. “I am so glad to see you! All of you! Come, come!” She turned to Alexei. “Let’s get this done before Frau Berhta arrives!”

Alexei pulled the coiled length of skin from his pouch as the wolves all filed into the yard. Ferdynand and Gosia were the last ones in, Ferdynand limping on his three unharmed paws. Gosia whined quietly, nuzzling him behind his ear with her snout.

Unsure which wolf was which person, Alexei dropped down onto one knee beside one of the larger wolves. Taking the strip of skin, he wrapped it around the great wolf’s barrel-like chest.

Nothing.

“Why isn’t anything happening, Alexei?” hissed Beatrycze. “Why is the wolf still a wolf?”

“I… I am not sure,” stammered Alexei. “The transformation into wolf shape was almost instantaneous, but the transformation back…?” He had taken longer to begin the transformation into wolf form than the others and he had been jumping through the air when the skin strip changed him back into a man; he hadn’t been paying attention to how long it took. The time it took the skin to transform him was different than the time it had taken to affect the others.

“I… I don’t know,” he repeated.

The wolf shook its shoulders, as if uncomfortable. Then it shivered and then it began scratching at itself with its hind paws as if itching. It scratched more intensely, whining, and threw itself onto the ground, continuing to scratch.

The other wolves drew back, alarmed at what was overcoming their companion. One growled, as if in warning to whatever seemed to be attacking the first.

“Look!” Beatrycze, her arms still full of clothing, nudged Alexei’s arm with her elbow. “Look!”

Tufts of fur were drifting away from the wolf as it continued to scratch and paw at itself. Then larger tufts fell away, some bringing bloody chunks of wolf hide away with them. Then the limbs began to change form and the face was also becoming distorted, the length and shape of the snout fading back into the face as it became rounder and less beastlike.

Zygmunt lay on the ground before them, twitching and grunting, pulling and scratching at his skin, the wolf tail still wrapped around one leg.

“Zygmunt!” exclaimed Beatrycze. She dropped the clothes to the ground and pulled a shirt and pair of trousers from the pile.

Hearing his name, Zygmunt stopped tearing at himself and looked first at his hands and then sat up, looking at his whole self. The tail was gradually shrinking, curling up and withering between his legs. Beatrycze threw herself down beside him, hugging him excitedly.

He hugged her in return, the skin strip still wrapped around his chest caught between them.

“Beatrycze! Zygmunt! We still have to transform the others!” Alexei reminded them.

“Yes, yes, I know.” Beatrycze pulled herself away from her brother, wiping a tear of joy from her eyes with the back of one hand. The strip of skin fell loosely down around Zygmunt’s hips. She handed him the shirt and reached for the coil of skin but stopped herself.

“I cannot touch that disgusting thing,” she said, turning her face away. “Alexei, you take it.”

“Here, I will take it off myself,” Zygmunt answered, pulling the length of skin away from him as he stood. The last of the wolf tail vanished into the small of his back. He handed the skin to Alexei and reached for the trousers beside his feet.

“Thank you, Alexei,” Zygmunt reached out to embrace the Estonian even before he had finished fastening the trousers. “However you discovered what to do to bring us all back home and reverse that horrid transformation…”

“Plenty of time for thanks later!” Alexei briefly embraced Zygmunt and then dropped down beside the next wolf, one of the smaller ones, who was rubbing her shoulder against his leg. He wrapped the skin around this smaller wolf’s torso and they waited.

The transformation began slowly, again driving the wolf to scratch and tear at its own fur and skin, eventually beginning to rip away the wolf hide to reveal Sybilla writhing on the ground. Beatrycze embraced her sister and helped her dress; Sybilla gave the skin strip to Alexei as the wolf tail shrank back up into her backside, the last remnant of the wolf shape, just as it had been with Zygmunt.

One of the larger wolves prodded another to step forward to Alexei. He wrapped the skin around this wolf and eventually Otylia was exposed, the tail again the last aspect of her wolf shape to disappear. The same larger wolf prodded another to step forward; Renia was restored to her human form.

Dressing and crying with relief, the newly restored humans embraced one another. The larger wolf prodded the next to step up and Ctirad, the best man, became a man again.

Alexei gestured to the large wolf who had been insisting that the others all be transformed first. The wolf shook his head and trotted to Ferdynand, still nursing his injured paw. The large wolf whined and gestured from Ferdynand to Alexei.

Ferdynand stared at the large wolf, then attempted to stand but fell back down, unable to put any weight on the injured paw. He turned to the Gosia-wolf, who sat on her haunches beside her fiancé.

She nuzzled him with her snout, urging him to attempt standing again. Ferdynand struggled to his feet again, maintaining his balance by leaning against her. Alexei stepped toward them, but Ferdynand bared his teeth and growled at him, his lip curling back from the great fangs in his mouth. He gestured at the other remaining wolf and then to Alexei, clearly wanting the wolf that was apparently Benedikt, the last of the bridal party, to be transformed next.

Benedikt finally stepped up to Alexei. He reached a paw out and placed it on Alexei’s knee as Alexei knelt down beside him. The Benedikt-wolf’s lips curled away from his fangs in an apparent smile and then dragged his rough tongue across Alexei’s face. All the humans laughed.

Alexei wrapped the skin strip around Benedikt’s torso and stepped back to give the wolf room to scratch himself free from his imprisonment in the wolf shape.

One again, the transformation back into humanity began slowly. Benedikt tore and scratched at his fur, great clumps of it drifting around the yard. One foreleg began to look more like a human arm, and then the other. A wolf hock became a human thigh. The snout began to recede into the face.

“What have I found here?” a voice snarled in the road behind them. “A pack of wolves in town? Or a den of troublemakers and filthy Poles?”

Benedikt leaped to his feet in shock, the strip of skin falling away from him. The thick and bushy wolf tail still twitched behind him.

Frau Berhta stood just inside the gate, evidently having arrived unnoticed by everyone who was so preoccupied with the transformations of the wolves back into their human forms. She took another step closer, and Alexei realized he had not replaced the birch bark after scuffing it aside to let the wolves into the yard.

“One of you—you? Or you?” Frau Berhta shook her cane first at Beatrycze and then at Alexei. “One of you, I know it, stole my prize, and now I see that you have been using what was not yours to do what you ought not to have done! Thieves, the whole lot of you! Filthy Poles and Bohemians—who deserve no better than you received!”

She seemed to be fondling something with her other hand, inserted into the small purse hanging from her waist. Whispering something.

“What is it you want?” Sybilla demanded. “What other wickedness have you come to inflict, you old
suka
? You
hündin
!”

With a sickening grin, Fray Berhta removed her hand from the purse and held out her open palm. The strip of skin leaped from the ground towards her, and she grasped one end of it.

Ferdynand sprang through the air at the old woman, snarling, his massive jaws snapping. She lifted her cane and swatted him aside as easily as if he were a fly in midsummer. The wolf crashed head first into the ground. His body crumpled and lay still, dark blood seeping out into the dirt.

The Gosia-wolf jumped over to Ferdynand, whining with grief, prodding the wolf’s corpse with her nose. Then she scrambled over his body towards Frau Berhta and snapped up the other end of the skin strip in her sharp teeth.

Gosia leaned back, the belt of sailor’s skin firmly in her mouth, as Fray Berhta leaned away from the wolf, pulling the skin with all her strength as well. The wolf scrambled her paws against the earth, struggling to not lose her grip. Frau Berhta strained against the wolf, unwilling to lose her prize again.

The belt of skin snapped in two, the Gosia-wolf and Frau Berhta both falling backwards onto the ground. The two ends of the skin hung in the air and then fluttered to the ground.