Hearing wulfen howl is… well, it’s horrible. The sound is glassy, hovering at the upper ranges of hearing, and it’s full of paws on snow and running with the icy wind hitting the back of your throat like stars. Underneath that glassy edge is the song of flesh ripped apart, the sweetness of hot blood, and the savagery of crunching bones with sharp white teeth.
The worst part is how it climbs into your brain, pressing itself like a hard sharpness into the soft folds, and drags open the doors socialization slams shut to keep the howling ravening thing deep inside down and tame.
The thing on four clawed legs that lives in all of us.
A civilized person flinches away from that thing. At the Schola, they called it the Other.
Werwulfen use it to violate the laws of thermodynamics and physics, to set the inner beast free. And Graves, a loup-garou, uses it in a different way, for mental dominance instead of physical change. I wondered how, and why, and wished they would actually train me instead of dumping me in kindergarten classes.
It didn’t matter. I was leaving soon anyway.
Graves’ fingers slid through mine, hot and hard. He squeezed my hand, and I flinched. My initial panicked reaction was to curl up more tightly inside my head, squeezing out the little stroking fingers and paws gently tapping at that door in my brain. But the place at the back of my throat where the hunger had blazed through was still raw-sensitive, and the wulfen’s cry rasped against it like a cat’s tongue.
The cry modulated, ending on a low lonely sound, and the wulfen moved. Graves leapt forward, and I had to go along or get my arm torn off. My feet slipped in leaves and dirt, and the fear arrived, smashing through me and laying copper against my tongue.
Graves dragged me. I had enough to do keeping my feet on the ground. The other wulfen were leaping fluid forms, and I began to get a very, very bad feeling about all this.
We crested a high wooded hill, sloping down a pile of rocks and tree roots, leafless oaks and maples standing wet and secretive, clutching at the ground so they wouldn’t slide. Graves yanked me forward, and as we went over the side his fingers loosened and slipped free of mine.
I was falling. My foot hit a rock, the sneakers slipped, and I knew I was going to end up in a heap on the bottom. My heart leapt; I gave a short, blurting scream, and the world snapped again, hard. My other foot landed squarely on the top of a boulder I hadn’t even known was there, and my body woke up, tingling all over. The aspect flooded me like the heat of alcohol on an empty stomach, the Beam and Cokes I used to drink while waiting for Dad to come home and collect me. The heat burst through me, my teeth turned crackling-sensitive, and even my hair tingled as the aspect slid through it. Mom’s locket dilated into a point of heat, as if it were melting against my chest.
Have you ever run so hard you thought your heart would burst? There’s just you and your legs and the sound of wind in your ears mixing with the pounding of your pulse. The endorphins kick in if you can do it long enough, and all of a sudden you’re not thinking. Your body’s doing all the thinking for you. It leaps like a gazelle, it dances like a star, and the only thought on your mind is God, keep going, don’t let this slow down, don’t let it ever stop.
Running. With werwulfen. Their shapes blurred around me, the high unearthly howls distorted because of the speed, splashes of sunlight on fur and bright eyes as we moved in a mass. They spread out around me like a cat’s cradle, and if I’d had time I might’ve wondered who was picking the direction. But it was enough to just run. If I just ran, nothing else mattered, and I didn’t have to think about Mom or Dad or Gran or Christophe or any other hundred things crawling through my cluttered head. I could just be. It was like that place in the middle of tai chi where the world faded and there was just the movement, force and reaction spilling through arms and legs, hands like birds and feet like horse’s hooves.
We crested another hill. The world was spinning underneath me, I didn’t even have to move forward, just put my feet down every now and again to touch it. I heard the muffled wingbeats of Gran’s owl, and a fierce joy flushed through me, a cleaner feeling than the rage of the bloodhunger. I was clear. I was see-through, I was a girl made of crystal, and this was the best thing in the world.
I don’t know how long it lasted, but the force bled away. It got harder and harder to keep up with the world, but I was doing my best when someone grabbed my arm and everything came to a tumbling, spinning halt.
I landed hard on my knees, jarring, and retched. Someone dropped down beside me and patted my back. A couple other kids were coughing too.
“Jesus Christ,” someone gasped, a high boyish voice. Someone else laughed, a high, unsteady sound, and the hilarity spilled through the rest of them. It bubbled up in my own mouth between the retches, my stomach informing me that oh holy God, you should not have done that.
My legs were on fire. All of me was burning and my back was a solid bar of pain. But it didn’t matter.
What mattered was Graves next to me, also rubbing my back and laughing like he’d just found Christmas in his pants. Dibs was on my other side, on his knees and leaning against me, coughing.
His eyes were bright with the tears that trickled down his cheeks, but he didn’t look sad in the least.
Then Shanks squatted easily in front of me, flushed and wind-swept, leaves caught in his thick dark hair. “Well. You kept up.” For once, he didn’t sound supercilious. “Never had that happen before.”
“Told you.” Graves was breathless. A hiccupping laugh interrupted the words. “It’s in the books. Svetocha can keep up.”
“Huh.” The taller boy eyed me. I tried not to puke on him. No wonder Graves had told me not to eat anything beforehand.
But God. I managed to get some breath back. “When… can we… do that… again?”
At that, everyone burst into laughter. Some of us were still retching, but the merriment kind of canceled that out. It didn’t matter how much I hurt or how my heart felt like it was trying to climb out my windpipe. It didn’t matter that everything was fucked up beyond repair and I was stumbling blindly around in the middle of a game that was way too big for me.
All that mattered was the sun on my shoulders, the wulfen gathered around me, and the way every one of them suddenly looked like… yes. Like a friend. And Graves right beside me, his hand making little circles on my back, his face all alight. It was like standing on the Schola’s roof and seeing the world spread out underneath me, but not nearly so lonely.
It was the best I’d felt since my world fell apart and a zombie smashed through my kitchen door.
Hey, you take what you can get.
CHAPTER 17
The disused classroom was in the bowels of the Schola, and it had an empty chalkboard on the curved wall. When filled with wulfen, the entire room had a nervous, fidgeting feel to it.
“So they’re not teaching you anything.” Shanks nodded. “Yeah, we wondered about that.”
What else had they wondered about me? “I, uh, just don’t go. It’s all remedial shit I could get in normal high school.”
Graves shook his head. “Skipping isn’t allowed for anyone else. It’s a trip to detention, and who wants that? So why let you do it? I mean, you’re special and all,” he ignored Shanks’ snicker, “but it don’t make sense, and putting you in remedial classes doesn’t make sense either. Especially with the chance of you-know-who finding out you’re here, they should want you trained and trained hard, so you have a better chance of surviving.”
“And then there’s Christophe.” Shanks was settled on a dusty brown couch, taking up most of it with his long legs. A ripple ran through the rest of the wulfen at the name. “He hasn’t been around for years, but they’re scared of him.”