Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [37]
Finally, we were set free. We did not know where we were, although I found out later that it was a town near Munich.
We changed. We were herded like sheep to a human building - a hotel. And there we were ordered to kill. Again, I did not know as a wolf whom we were slaughtering, it was only afterwards I heard that they were men of the brownshirts, Ernst Roehm‟s Sturmabteilung. Although many who died were innocent bystanders, mauled by us or shot by the humans.
I was sent to a room, to kill its occupant. The doors were opened for us. Inside, my target was in bed with a young man - if they had companions, we were to kill them too. I do not think he knew what I was - I think that none of them knew, perhaps they guessed in the seconds before their deaths, perhaps they thought us true wolves.
So I think this was luck - luck for him, and as I later saw it, luck for myself - that he wore a silver chain around his neck.
My mouth met it as I went to rip out his throat. It hurt me greatly. Have you ever bitten into boiling hot acid? No? Then you will not know how it felt. And worse than that - we were in a hotel room, a luxurious hotel room, and on the table there was a candlestick made of silver. Then, I think, he knew, and he seized it and hit me and hit me as I huddled on the floor in pain. I was saved by his companion, who screamed and sobbed and begged him to leave, and my tormentor, perhaps thinking me already dead, ran to him and away. I do not know if they survived the massacre, but in a strange way I hope that they did.
I crawled under the bed, craving peace and darkness, but I could not escape from the sounds of running footsteps, and shouts, and screams, and gunshots. Then there were cries and howls as the wolves were rounded up again, and finally, silence - except for sobbing.
And somehow, I was overlooked. The noise, the carnage, the confusion, I can only think that they were so much that no one noticed there was one less wolf leaving than arriving, or perhaps they too thought me dead. After all, they had no need to fear wolf carcasses being discovered: they knew that we change back when we die. And the buildings had been surrounded, they knew that none of us could have escaped during the slaughter. Or perhaps they simply did not care.
Their wolf spies would round me up soon enough.
I slept, underneath the bed. When I awoke, I was a woman again.
I did not know what to do. I was naked, alone, in a city I did not know, and in a place where there had been many murders. For a time I could not bring myself to leave the security of this room, but finally I took all my courage in my hands and peered out into the corridor. There was no one -
no one alive, just bodies. Even in human form, the smell of the blood crowded my senses. I searched the rooms, forcing myself to ignore the death that surrounded me. I found the body of a maid - no brownshirt, she! - and I took her clothing. It was bloodstained and torn, but it fitted me; I could not walk out of the hotel naked.
I dared not take the elevator, and crept down the back stairs, flight after flight. I had almost made it to the exit when a man stepped out in front of me, a man with a swastika on his armband. I was close to panic, almost gave myself up there and then, but he addressed me as if I were a maid, and I replied in kind. I acted scared - ha! acted! - and told him I had run from the violence in the early hours of the morning and hidden, and had only now thought it safe to emerge. He was suspicious, but I fluttered my eyelashes and ran my hand down his arm, and in the end he let me go.
1 hitched a lift until I was out of town, with a man who did not care that I was battered and bleeding - German citizens are growing used to not asking questions - and then I walked and walked and walked until I was far away. I went deep into the far forests, where I felt almost safe and almost happy.
The land fed me, bringing forth fruit and nuts for my human form, and helping me to trap meat as a wolf. It was