The Wolf Esprit: Lykanos Chronicles 3

I couldn’t believe Duccio’s legs moved as they did, to say nothing of the wolves that pursued us. Nothing else but desperation could explain how they never fell behind.

They can’t let me escape, Duccio said. They can’t return home without me, or at least proof of my death if they want to live.

I won’t last much longer, I said, feeling a loss of control in my legs. How much further?

A dozen leagues, at least.

At his answer, I knew I wouldn’t survive this. My legs felt like iron weights. One misplaced step and I would stumble to the ground, from which I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to rise.

As if in concert, more than a dozen minds lit up in the distance ahead. I saw the pulse of their light echo in Duccio’s mind, and he stopped running to turn and brace against the impact as I crashed head-on into him.

I released a roar of anger, confusion, and release as my body lost all balance and tumbled to the floor. But he was upon me before I could get my wits about me, covering my mouth with his massive taloned hand to stop my cry.

From his mind, I saw them coming. Not Sforza’s wolves, who’d pursued us halfway across the peninsula, but the lights ahead. They moved independently from several points but mostly from the hilltop city a league in the distance, converging toward our position.

Duccio rose silently and tried to draw me to my feet, but my legs failed with trembling spasms.

Quiet your wolf, he whispered with his mind.

With little effort, my body reverted to my lycan form. Duccio lifted me into his arms and turned ninety degrees right to walk away at an unhurried pace.

I looked up to see his eyes shut closed. All around us, the sounds of the night disappeared, muffling as if some dense fog had fallen upon us.

He was doing this, I realized. Duccio shut us off from the world. And without hurry, he moved us away from the point of convergence. He kept his eyes closed to hide their refracted light from the approaching wolves. They would arrive just in time to come upon Sforza’s soldiers, who had yet to stop their advance toward our last known position.

It was a razor-thin margin, but Duccio never picked up his pace. Instead, he moved without hurry, now invisible to both opposing sides. Fifty paces, then a hundred, then two hundred. And when he seemed satisfied, he stopped and knelt in a field of grapevines.

Duccio’s stillness in the dark of night hid his black fur from all eyes. His mind shielded our light, and there in the field, we waited. We didn’t speak, but only listened to the muffled sounds of angry battle in the short distance behind us.

It was the first true quiet I’d heard in weeks.

It had been more than an hour since we’d heard the last, but Duccio remained still with his eyes shut. By first light from the east, my lycan eyes could see we were alone.

They’re gone, I said as quietly as my mind could.

Duccio’s immense wolf’s eyes opened to stare at me. In moments, his body reverted. I watched it all with fascination, as I never had in the past. The follicles of fur receding, drawn into the white skin beneath, leaving only the hair on his scalp, face, and chest—leaving his genitals exposed under the short tuft of hair above his legs. All the while, his hulking mass reduced. The angles of his head sharpened back to the chiseled masculine beauty of his lycan face. And at last, his golden amber eyes changed, first into shades of green, then grey, and finally to their deep cobalt blue.

He looked toward the advancing dawn light and its brightening assurance, then back at me.

“Alive still,” he whispered, his mischievous smile returning to its full bloom.

“Barely,” I answered.

I’d struggled for days without food on our flight, grabbing whatever fruits or vegetables might be nearby when we paused. But it was hardly enough to sustain me. And even after my rest in his arms as we waited in silence, I felt a terrifying sense of emptiness.

Sensing this, Duccio reached up to pick some grapes hanging from the vine beside us as if it were the simplest answer. They were the vine’s first to reach the bluish-purple their green siblings would all achieve over the next two months. He pulled them apart and fed the first one to me. The grape hadn’t yet achieved the sweetness I craved, still filled with the bitterness of youth, but it was large, and I was ravenous. One by one, I devoured them, spitting out the seeds until all the grapes were gone.

I realized the chill, the luxurious heat of Duccio’s wolf now gone, and of just how exposed we both were.

Hearing the vein of my thoughts, he stood up and reached to pull me to my feet.

“What now?” I asked, looking about the field in the coming daylight.

“Now we begin again,” he answered.

“Two naked men standing in a field of grapes, filthy and penniless?”

“But still alive with our limbs intact.”

“No, be serious,” I said impatiently. “What do we do?”

Without reply, Duccio set upon a farmhouse in the distance.

“There,” he said. “We begin there.”

With a gentle push at my shoulder, we set out for the farmhouse. I still had trouble with my legs, the muscles stiff, promising to be filled with sore agony in the coming days.

“People are inside,” I said, seeing a thin line of smoke rise from the chimney.

“We’ll be fine,” Duccio answered, never slowing his pace.

“What do you mean to do?” I stopped. “Will you kill them?”

“No,” he said without looking back.

“Then how?”

“Follow and learn.”

When we arrived within a hundred paces of the farmhouse, Duccio stopped and closed his eyes. Through his mind, I saw the family inside.

A mother prepared a pourage of oats at the hearth fire. Her husband had risen, but their children had not. Two boys in their early teens slumbered in a loft overhead. The man pounded on a ladder to wake them, calling it morning.

It astonished me that Duccio could see all this with such clarity, as if he looked the man’s own eyes. He’d linked to their minds and could hear many of their human thoughts.

With an indescribable tension in Duccio’s mind, the farmer stopped and sat back down on his mattress. In a moment, he laid back down and stared slack-eyed at the wall.

Switching back to the wife, Duccio tensed again and made her stop what she was doing. She rose from the hearth, approached the front door, swung it open with a gentle creak, and stood beside it as if to invite a caller inside. Her eyes also went lifeless, like her husband’s.

Duccio reached for my wrist and drew me behind him as he advanced across the remaining distance to the farmhouse. He was as calm as I’d ever seen him, seeming to fear neither our exposure nor revealing himself to the woman.

“She cannot see or hear us,” he said. “None of them can now.”

As we approached the door, I saw it was true. Her eyes didn’t shift to see two naked men approaching her door, but hung loose instead to stare at the floor.

“Inside,” he bid me, and we passed through the threshold.

Once in her home, the woman closed her front door and returned to her work at the hearth.

Duccio walked through the small farmhouse, taking stock of our surroundings while I could only stare at the people with wonder. The man lay on the mattress in the single bedroom as if asleep; the boys remained unstirred in the loft overhead. And their mother continued to prepare their breakfast at the hearth as if nothing had happened.

Duccio and I were transparent in this house.

Duccio poured water into a small basin and took a clean rag from above the hearth. Submerging it and wringing out the excess water, he drew me to stand beside him and bathed me. I’d thought about something akin to this moment for leagues after we’d fled the lake where he kissed me. But now, with this strange comatose audience present, if not watching, I couldn’t wait for Duccio to finish. When his turn came, I scrubbed him down hastily, my eyes shifting all the while at the others in the room.

By a silent command, the woman rose from the hearth and stepped aside. With a rag to hold the kettle handle, Duccio poured a small cup of the pourage for us to share. It was still thin, needing another ten minutes of cooking, but the woman had added milk and bits of bacon, and I devoured it.

What now? I whispered, not wanting to disturb the house with my voice.

“Now we dress and walk to town,” Duccio answered without concern.

“We’ll steal clothes from them?” I couldn’t mask my distaste for taking things from working people with so little.

“We’ll compensate them once we establish ourselves,” he answered with a nod to temper me.

“But you don’t mean for us to go into the town on the hill where the wolves are, do you?”

“Only for a short while,” he said. “Enough time to get what we need to continue our journey south.”

I gave an incredulous stare back at his lack of concern for the pack that had raced to destroy us last night.

Duccio selected the only other shirt and breeches the man owned and dressed, then selected clothes from the eldest teenage boy, which fit too snugly for comfort.

“Temporary,” his only remark to my concern.

“The Tuscan wolves from last night—you’re sure they won’t recognize us? Won’t they be looking for us?”

“In peasant rags?” Duccio smirked as if I’d asked something ridiculous. “How many lycan have you met by now? Did any of them dress this way?”

Bishop Toussaint had dressed in the humble robes of a monk. Father had dressed as an ironsmith when I met him, but that was a disguise.

“Besides, those wolves weren’t Tuscan. They were Roman.”