Wolf Omega: Lykanos Chronicles 2

Another week’s flight brought us to a region of rich farmland, and more than ever, it reminded me of home. We passed through endless acres of grapevines I knew could serve only one purpose in such quantity. I thought of Dionisio’s face and wondered if he was still alive.

Over a ridge, I saw a tall structure that gleamed in the moonlight in the far distance. I stopped to stare at it for some time before Maximo realized and stopped running to attend to me.

“How many do you see?”

“None,” I answered quietly.

“Why have we stopped, then?”

Without answering, I took off toward the structure. In minutes, I was upon it and saw the pale-colored stone that had shone over such distance in the night. It was a tower, an old fortress jutting up a hundred feet above me. In the old style, it was surrounded by a moat—a wide lagoon that encircled the tower but for a single road that cut through the water to reach its front. At the end was a wooden bridge that could be raised to prevent invaders from breaching the tower during war. Tonight, the bridge laid flat and unraised.

There were only a handful of people inside the tower. I saw their dim, unmoving lights through the fortress walls—the house was asleep. Maximo saw all this through my mind.

You don’t mean to do it again, he said silently.

“I do,” I answered without hesitation. “We must stop. There is nowhere better to run. We are surrounded by fifty miles of farmland, far from any major town. All we can do now is protect ourselves the best we can. I suspect we will sleep far better in this old fortress than anywhere else we might stumble upon.”

“And the humans inside? You would have them suffer the same fate for our comforts?”

The question wounded me, and I turned away, unprepared for his callousness or the truth. I knew that Maximo was at once sorry, but he had precisely struck the blow. Without answering, I left him behind to approach the tower.

I slipped down the tight center road until I’d passed through the encircling moat and stood upon the lowered bridge. Standing before me were the structure’s tall doors, moulded to fit into the two-story stone entrance arch. Seeing the human lights through the walls, I picked the closest one to my position. With frustration, I found I couldn’t draw her to me—the woman was asleep.

The hindrance confounded me. I’d never imagined that sleep could make a difference, but I could not reach her. In her dreams, I saw only flashes of disconnected and chaotic imagery. Her mind was impregnable. Or rather, there was nothing to take hold of—the fragments of unconscious thought were well beyond my control.

Looking up into the sky, the tower seemed less tall than it had from a distance. Still, it was higher than anything I’d before attempted.

I leapt as Duccio had once shown me, moving from stone to stone up the tower walls, avoiding the window frames where I could. My ascension ended when I swung over the pinnacle ring of turrets and landed on the rooftop as quietly as my immense frame would allow.

I knew already that I’d woken a sleeping man on the floor beneath me. Dipping into his mind, I took the advantage to bring him to me, but his thoughts were still incoherent. He’d been deeply asleep and fell back toward unconsciousness second by second.

A resounding thud startled me as Maximo landed on the roof, only feet away.

The door, he said silently, looking to where the parapets rose to a single point, offering the only entrance from the wide circular roof.

I held up my hand to quiet him and stared down through the structure’s stone and wood at the movement beneath our feet. The sleeping man had arisen from bed, the second noise drawing him to his feet. He moved about the space and along the perimeter from window to window, stopping to stare out into the silent night.

I attempted to dip into his mind again, but the man moved toward us without suggestion. He moved to the stairs that rose around the tower’s perimeter, ascending right until he’d come to the rooftop. He’d already placed his hand on the door well before I managed to install the soothing image at the front of his mind.

Open the door, I told him in his native tongue when I was finally in control of his senses.

Standing before us was a stout man in a white dressing gown, holding a small lantern. He had shoulder-length silver hair and pale skin with several old scars that somehow made his once handsome face appear intimidating and distinguished.

Return to your room.

By my command, he retreated, taking each step down with slow measure until he’d led us to the space that was his quarters. The whole of the tower floor was filled with the man’s private life. Beside his tall four-poster bed were tables of various sizes, a plush reading chair and sofa, and an enormous desk covered in rolls of paper. The walls bore coats of arms; the floors held large rugs woven in deep shades of blue. Above was a broad chandelier that must’ve filled the room with ample light when lit. By the largest window sat a bronze retractor to magnify the distance he might see.

Without resistance, I instructed him to sit down on the sofa and place the lantern on the table beside him.

A tall fireplace stood against the farthest wall, its house crest carved into the stone: two lions holding up a cub between them. In the hearth, the fire had burned out more than an hour, but I still felt its delicious heat radiating from the stones. I reverted to my lycan form and kneeled there to add fresh wood and bring the flame back. When it had sufficiently grown, I turned around to see the room bathed in its light.

I took the lantern from beside the man and set it upon his enormous desk. Taking a seat, I set about reviewing every document I could. Maximo continued to move about the room while I searched, examining the room’s many details, though never reverting from his werewolf form.

For an hour, I scanned through correspondences of every nature. I studied bills of sale from local merchants and banknotes from accounts in Dijon and Paris. There were estate outlines from attorneys along with royal decrees outlining his lineage. I found several calls for military service from his king and demands for produce to stave off war-related famines. Then there were arguments with contemporaries and love letters from his youth, as well as birth announcements from cousins and a touching correspondence from his son. From each of these, a dossier of the man’s life came to life before my eyes.

I sat at the desk of Aoustin Henri de Roussade. He was a baron, the head of a noble house some seven generations old, and we were in his family home. He had outlived his wife, who died in childbirth five years earlier. In his journal, I found long passages of grief over her loss. She had been with child too late in life, and he blamed himself, having dreamed of one last child to fill their empty home.

Of their three sons who’d survived infancy, two had died from consumption. The last, Phillipe, had been called to war very young. Indeed, both Aoustin and his youngest son left this region, Burgundy, a decade earlier for different wars. Much of their correspondence had traveled between their assigned fronts of Namur and Alsace. In these letters between father and son, I learned of the young man’s life in the Royal Regiment and of Louis XIV’s push against England. There were short periods of peace where the boy fell in love and asked for his father’s leave to marry a German nobleman’s daughter.

And then I came to a letter from the Duke of Luxembourg announcing Phillipe’s death in battle. Bundled with it was an emotional eulogy to Aoustin from Wenzel von Borchardt, who described his love for the boy. He spoke eloquently of how he’d promised Phillipe his daughter’s hand, and how he already considered him a son long before the boy fell.

I stopped reading and rose with the two letters to find a place beside Aoustin. It didn’t take me long to find the well of suffering within the man. He’d fallen into such depression that even his duty to his house no longer motivated him. He was laden with thoughts of writing to friends and offering to take any suitable daughter into his hold to mend his broken line. But he’d never written a single word. He’d lived the past months in paralyzed sorrow, dismissing those unneeded servants he could stomach to be without. He pondered if he shouldn’t allow his estate to succeed to relatives now if no one could ever inherit his title.

Rising again, I walked to the fireplace and stared at the letters from the Duke of Luxembourg and Wenzel von Borchardt in my hand. Glancing across the room to Maximo, I dropped the source of Aoustin’s suffering into the flames.