Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [35]
My senses increased, and I found I could tell when another non-human was near. They were rare, very rare, but I met wolves, and witches, and bloodsuckers, and once a mountain sprite. Few humans suspected our existence; those who did were as rare as we were.
Then everything changed.
The word went out, whispers in our world. Non-humans had to register. If you did not register, you would be shot on sight - and I do not mean when in wolf form; as I have said, those of my kind can sense when another is near, and it was said that there were wolves loyal to the Party who would inform on us. At first, I thought little of it. I did not particularly like the idea of my name on a list, but it was not, to me, a big problem. And I could perhaps understand it from the other side. Humans cannot tell us apart from themselves, outside our wolfskins. And yet, for one night a month at least, we become pitiless killers. If I were a human, I would want to keep track of where we were. After all, the humans who did know of us had so for been happy to live and let live.
This was an official list, a government list They would not use it to harm us.
But it was shown soon - very soon - that this was not true.
They had a sinister purpose for wanting to know who we were. For on the night of the moon‟s apogee, the time when we are weakest of all, they came for us, one by one. The soldiers who came for us, they did not, I think, know what we were. But they did not question their orders. And we were detained in a camp, a camp to keep us far away from other Germans, far away from any humans but the ones who were there to guard us, the ones who thought of us as less than animals. The guards had silver bullets in their guns, and the fence around the camp was made of silver wire.
This was 1933. For months we were kept there. They starved us of meat, knowing our strength would weaken. On the nights of the full moon they stayed behind the fences, rifles at the ready, and placed bets on which of us would be ripped apart by his fellows.
We had been in the camp for twelve full moons, and there were less than half the number of us that had been there at first. Some had been killed by the guards, some had died in fights in wolf form. One girl had hanged herself with silver wire from the fence. I smelled her fear as she died. They showed us the body afterwards, and then put a silver bullet through her heart to make sure she was truly dead.
Then a man came to us.
„Who is that?‟ I whispered to Gunter, the nearest I had to a friend He shrugged. As I looked around, it seemed clear that none of us knew. But the man was in the uniform of the Schutzstaffel, and he had a pistol at his belt.
The guards all saluted him, and threatened us until we did the same. Heil. Heil. Heil. When you are weak and scared, you will do anything. If it is merely something painless, such as saluting, that you are forced to do, you praise God.
This man, he strode up and down in front of us, parading his well-fed belly before the starving. I believe every one of us wished for the moon to rise at that instant so we could rip out his guts and eat them in front of his still-living eyes. I cannot remember his exact words to us. He talked of „service to our country‟, and our „great opportunity‟. But all we thought about was his blood.
Eventually we filed away to the iron shacks that served as our homes and cells. Here we would be thrown a ration of raw turnips or potatoes, enough to keep us alive, just, but weak, so weak. But this night, the night the man of the Schutzstaffel came to our camp, when the guards opened the shack doors it was meat they threw inside. Fresh, raw meat, the blood still dripping, the flesh smooth and lean and red.
That night was the first night of the full moon, and all that could be heard throughout the camp was the sound of fangs ripping into meat, and howls of gratitude and bloodlust echoing round every hut.
The next morning, we were forced to listen to the visitor again. He asked if we had liked the meat, and