Wolf Omega: Lykanos Chronicles 2

The sun was low in the sky when we arrived on the quiet street where Apollonia’s house stood. Pompeia had helped me locate several items I knew a new mother would appreciate. At least, I knew they would have meant a great deal to me if my children had lived.

I hadn’t thought of presenting the gifts in person, but Pompeia convinced me that I should try. Part of me wanted to see the house in daylight, at least from just outside the front door. I asked Pompeia to stay in the carriage as I set out to finish my task.

Ringing the bell, I stood on the front porch for a while before my anxiety gave way to notice no one was home. I didn’t understand how that could be true, and I reached for the handle instinctively to find the door unlocked.

“Hello?” I called several times before entering.

When no answer came, I placed the packages onto a small table in the entryway. I looked around the first floor to appraise it before I called out again, but only silence answered.

And then I smelled it.

From somewhere above me came the scent of death. Without thinking, I took to the stairs, climbing to the second floor and then the third. When I arrived at the top hallway, I knew exactly where my senses were leading me.

The owner’s bedroom door was wide open. They were signs of a struggle: a turned chair; a potted plant spilled onto the ground; linens pulled sharply from the bed. Insects swarmed all about, producing a buzzing that chilled me to the bone. I then saw something I would never forget.

Nailed to the wall was Apolonia. Nude and covered in dark congealed blood, her arms rose outstretched like the crucified Christ. The weight of her limp body pulled down against the nails. They cut crudely along the length of her wrists. At her feet was her dead child, still attached to Apolonia’s womb by the birth cord.

I screamed with such panic that I fell back onto the ground.

“Pompeia!!” I repeatedly called in vain, unable to take my eyes from the horrific sight.

Then I noticed above Apolonia’s head, where her murderer had scrawled the word ‘TRAITOR’ on the wall with her blood.

I somehow made it to my feet and bolted from the room, barreling down the stairs, unable to account for how my legs supported me. Running through the front door and out onto the street, I stopped precisely where I had left the carriage. I called Pompeia’s name over and over at the top of my lungs, but she was no longer there.

I had drawn the notice of several people, and they approached me curiously to question why I screamed. Involuntarily, I pointed at Apollonia’s house, to the front door I’d left wide open. Two men moved into the house to search for the cause of my panic while a group of women tried to settle my hysteria. I must tell them what I had seen, they all insisted. But I could only manage to search up and down the street in vain for Pompeia and our carriage.

When one man emerged from the house, we all turned to see the terrified and dull gaze of his eyes. He then became sick and wretched on the cobblestone pavement, drawing everyone’s attention from me. This woke me to my situation, and I moved away as quickly as I could. My shoes clacked loudly on the stones of the Como streets. There were still many pedestrians at this hour, and they moved in every direction. The vanished sun’s last light had darkened just enough to give way to the recently lit street torches.

I didn’t know where I was going. I knew only that I needed to get as far away as possible from what I’d seen.

At the end of the block, I saw the tall doors of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. One was slightly open, and I proceeded toward them as calmly as I could, my hands squeezed into anxious fists until I was past the threshold. I found myself alone in the massive cathedral, except for three people near the altar, each knelt in silent prayer.

Sitting in a rear pew, I realized that I trembled from the terrible shock. I saw the ghost image of Apolonia and her child on every surface my eyes wandered over. Emotion overwhelmed me, and my memory of their corpses prevented any rational thought from assembling. The word ‘Traitor,’ scrawled crudely on the plaster above her crucified body, had seared into my every thought. Someone had taken my most deeply buried and suppressed feelings of shame and displayed them for all to see.

I thought of the child, dead and attached to his mother. The memories of my son’s still-birth mingled cruelly with the child’s darkened face, and I gripped the wood of my seat for support. Nothing could have injured me more, I now realized, than to witness the cruelty of my vengeful fantasies made real.

In an alcove on my right, I saw a statue of the Madonna seated above a basin of slender candles, lit by souls in want of Her divine help. I rose with a start, escaping the visions of terror that haunted me, and made my way to the small altar. I pulled an unlit candle from the little basket below and ignited the wick. Holding the taper in my hand, I said a prayer for Apolonia and her child.

I had never prayed in my life. Even while seven men raped me, or after when I trembled in the small garden shed where Father Piero had hidden me, I had not prayed. But tonight I wanted to be heard, and so I stared at the Virgin, pleading for her mercy.

I remembered Cecco’s other children: the first who did not grow inside of me longer than a month, the second who arrived dead at seven months, and the third who left me when I attempted to drown myself. I had stopped trembling by the time I finished my prayer. I lowered the lit taper into the basin of sand at her feet and exhaled at the feel of its calming warmth.

And then the fragments swirling in my mind came together.

I thought of Pompeia’s assurance that she’d seen to Apolonia’s care. Her apology and promise of a surprise for me. Her disappearance when I emerged in screaming panic from the townhouse. All the obvious evidence that my stunned mind hadn’t seen until this moment. It formed the lucid narrative that my shock had occluded.

The author of ‘TRAITOR’ had not scrawled the word in blood to describe Apolonia or my darkest feelings about her. The word, and the murder itself, was a message meant for me.

I turned from the Virgin’s altar and ran from the Cathedral, stomping my shoes so loudly on the hard marble floor that even the statues might’ve noticed my departure.

Back on the Como pavement, I found the nearest alleyway and summoned my wolf form. I thought nothing of how the growing bulk of my body ripped open the seams of my corset and dress. My confused sorrow became a violent rage.

I crawled my way up the backside of a townhouse and leapt through the early night across countless roofs back toward Castello Palatino. When I’d made it through the town proper, I set up into the eastern foothills, climbing up terrain that no mortal could have conquered.

Unexpectedly, I stopped dead in my tracks when I looked up the steep hillside. Half a mile ahead toward the castle, burning flames seared through the dark. I saw the light of mortal terror. People were being harmed, and the flame grew exponentially, almost occluding my field of vision.

I leapt forward, racing up the slopes to Palatino. To my wonderment, Sempronio’s voice echoed in my mind. His unexpected call filled me completely, burning under my flesh, reverberating within my very bones.

Fly away, he said. Flee to the west and never return.

Looking up, I then saw a flash of blinding white light that paralyzed me, and I tumbled to the earth and crashed into a tree.

Black silence.

My head was pounding when consciousness finally returned. I couldn’t have said how long I’d blacked out for, but I was in my lycan form when I awoke under the trees, naked and shivering in the dark of night. Sempronio had called to me, but I didn’t understand his purpose.

From somewhere upon the sharp slope of the hillside, I sensed someone approaching. They moved at a terrible speed, and I saw the light of fear from their mind growing in strength as they came closer. When they were thirty paces near me, I sensed it was Maximo, and I screamed out to him with both my mind and voice.

He stopped his descent and raced over, almost barreling past me until I called him again. He was in his werewolf form, and seeing me lying naked, scooped me up into his massive arms, threw me over his back, and took off without a word.

The speed at which he moved was enough to silence me, but I knew we were in danger by what shot from his mind. It was more than a simple determination that drove him; Maximo was in shock, just the same. Underlying it all was a harrowing fear that I’d never sensed in him. He was fleeing for his very life, and I was too disoriented to ask him to explain why he ran.

On his shoulder, I stared behind us at the moving landscape and caught my first glimpse of three lights following us. Their fires burned very low; they were neither in danger nor sure of our exact location. I sensed they too were lycan, but I was sure they were strangers. How I knew this, I couldn’t have then told you for sure. Regardless, I made certain that Maximo knew of their location, sending him their coordinates as if my mind were a second set of eyes at his back.

He at once turned to change course, which soon increased the distance between us significantly. When they were far enough away and headed thirty degrees in another direction, my attention fell from them. I realized that blood covered my hands and arms. Searching where I could, I soon realized that Maximo was the blood’s source. Holding onto his fur had drenched my hands with his blood.

Stop, I said. You’re hurt.

No answer came from him as he flew through the trees, up and down the swells of the dense hillside.

I called out again and tapped his shoulder.

Silence! he answered.

I couldn’t account for any of it, and as my limp body shook up and down over his shoulder, the movement soon returned my focus.

Who are they? Why do we run from them?

He would not answer.

Growing more alarmed as my senses returned, I thought again of Sempronio—of his voice and the order he sent before I fell unconscious.

Fly away, he had said.

From Maximo, I sensed an image that seized every muscle in my body.

Sempronio’s bloodied face; his slacked head fallen forward. Two werewolves held him by his arms in the grand entrance hall under the oculus. From behind him, a black taloned hand grabbed hold of Sempronio’s silver-white hair. With one clean pull, a sword sliced the master’s head from his body at the neck. Then the image stopped, blackened when Maximo’s eyes had shut and turned away in horror.

I stopped breathing for a dozen strides of Maximo’s run, but when I finally drew air into my lungs, I screamed in horror.

At once, my naked body transformed, and I jerked wildly from Maximo’s grasp until I forced him to stop. The second my feet touched the earth, I started to run back.

Maximo lunged to grab hold of me by the waste, but I thrashed at him with angry determination to be free. Again he took hold of me and wrestled me to the ground.

“No!” he stifled a shout.

I swiped at him to be free, but he held on and transferred his weight to immobilize my arms.

“It’s done! They’re waiting for you to return. They mean to destroy you too!”

“Let go of me!”

Focused on something other than the fear that had driven his feet forward, Maximo sent me the rest of his memories. They came clean and vibrant in their cruel freshness.

There were dozens of them, all in werewolf form. They’d seized the castle. They’d found a way to take Sempronio, to stop his inestimable power. Somehow, they had finished him. Sempronio’s voice had rung out at the last moment before they bludgeon him unconscious.

Flashes of anger and despair flooded through my mind as I experienced Maximo’s break. He had moved to retaliate, taking down the wolf next to him. But he stopped at the sight of a sword cleaving the master in two. Seized by terror, Maximo turned to run, flying from the compound as Sempronio had ordered him.

I stopped fighting, again stunned by the truth.

“Who are they?”

“Sforza’s pack,” Maximo answered unevenly, the first signs of his injured fatigue slowing the intensity of his breath.

“But how? How is it possible?”

He rolled off of me and onto his back, wincing from the stinging pain of the many places they’d sliced him into submission.

“Duccio,” he answered. “I don’t know how he accomplished it—how he was able to help them subdue him—but it was Duccio who took Father’s head.”