Nadia's Children Read online

  Nadia’s Children

  The Werewolf Saga

  Book 4

  Steven E. Wedel

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental or used fictitiously.

  No part of this work may be reproduced in whole or part without the express written permission of the author.

  Copyright © 2013 Steven E. Wedel

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 0615814700

  ISBN-13: 978-0615814704

  Cover art and design © 2013 Alex Wedel

  DEDICATION

  Nadia’s Children is dedicated to the fans who waited so long to learn what happens next. I hope you won’t be disappointed.

  With special thanks to Gayleen Rabakukk, my faithful critique partner, Carrie Jones, my YA writing partner, and of course my wife Kim and our four wonderful kids.

  I would have given all this up a long time ago if not for you.

  also by steven e. wedel

  Darkscapes

  Little Graveyard on the Prairie

  Seven Days in Benevolence

  After Obsession (with Carrie Jones)

  Unholy Womb and Other Halloween Tales

  Amara’s Prayer

  THE WEREWOLF SAGA

  Call to the Hunt

  Murdered by Human Wolves

  Shara

  Ulrik

  AS EDITOR

  Tails of the Pack

  Skandar

  Skandar crashed to the ground. Something unexplainable was happening to him. He felt as though he was being stretched, torn apart from the inside. He tried to stand, but couldn’t. He fell again, his legs thrashing uncontrollably, snapping twigs and shredding leaves beside the game trail he’d been following.

  Above Skandar, birds left the trees and flew away. Around him, squirrels, rabbits and other small animals ran for cover from the noise. The forest became quiet, save for the sound of Skandar’s pain.

  He moaned. He thrashed. He tried again to stand but could not even get his legs under him. Instead, his legs moved on their own, as if he was running, but he wasn’t going anywhere. His head slammed into the ground again and again. His tongue hung from his mouth and he could taste the dirt sticking to it, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Then the real pain came. It started deep in his belly and seemed to rip through his body, filling every organ with fire, tearing his muscles, stretching his blood vessels, breaking his very bones.

  Skandar’s body tensed so that it was as stiff and hard as the trunk of the ancient trees surrounding him. A long, anguished sound came from his open jaws. Not a moan, not a scream and not a roar, but with elements of all three. A sound of agony, a sound of dying a torturous death.

  Metamorphosis came to his four legs first. They lengthened, thickened, bent in different ways at different places. Then his neck and spine exploded into a series of sharp pops, contorting and reshaping themselves to support his strange new limbs. Skandar’s long, hard nails shortened, withdrew, and the hair fell away from his body in great tufts. The tail that for so many generations had been proudly lifted over his back to show dominance over his pack shrank and pulled into his torso.

  Blinding, deafening agony bloomed in his skull as it pulled into itself, shrinking so that his muzzle vanished but his cranium expanded. His eyes bulged. His tongue shortened. Teeth reshaped themselves, hid inside his gums or moved to new formations in his stubby, inadequate jaw.

  Then it was over. Skandar lay still, weeping. His body ached from the change. He kept his face pressed into the dirt and leaves of the trail, his eyes closed, his hands – his hands – held claw-like and level with his head, his crooked fingers pressed into the earth.

  He raised his head, keeping his eyes closed, and screamed at the world, at the beasts of the forest, at the trees, the clouds, at the very goddess herself.

  When he opened his eyes, Skandar saw the world differently. Colors were brighter. His focus was different, directed more in front of him. He had less peripheral vision. He could hear virtually nothing. The forest was still, yes, but he should hear something. More alarming, though, he could hardly smell anything.

  Skandar finally looked down, down at the ground and saw his strange, alien, clawed hands against the dirt. He fell onto his side and held his forelegs – no, his arms – before his face. He studied them. They were strange. So pale and long and hairless. His paws were gone, replaced with wide, flat pads and long, waggly appendages. He brought one of the hands to his face and sniffed it, then used it to touch his face.

  Looking down, Skandar saw his own naked body and his long, gangly legs stretched out from his torso.

  Beyond his legs, hiding around a bend in the trail they’d been following, stood the five other members of his pack. They were motionless, watching him. Skandar sat up. As one, they growled and showed their fangs. In a gesture even Skandar didn’t understand, he reached for them with one of his new arms. Like mist, they faded from sight into the darkness of the old Russian forest.

  Skandar pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them and cried. He wiped at the tears and stared at the liquid smudging his dirty fingers. It had been so long since he’d seen tears. Or fingers.

  It had been a day of battle and a night of dancing. A night of feasting, of celebration, of wearing his wolf skin and dancing around a roaring fire. And then she had appeared, the oracle – Nadia. She brought down her curse upon the dancers.

  Nadia Nadia Nadia Nadia

  His mind called the name over and over again. She was dead. Long, long ago. He had seen her body for himself. She had been his lover. She had sacrificed their child to create the beast curse. Skandar remembered urinating on her dead, withered face.

  She had not lifted the curse.

  Skandar had no idea what had caused his body to change now, to take a shape it had not known since the world was young.

  He uncoiled his arms from around his legs and tried to rise, but fell over, unfamiliar with the method of using this human form. He drew himself into a crouch, then pushed up with his arms, lost his balance and fell again. After three more unsuccessful attempts, Skandar finally stood upright. He stood as a man, and lifted his arms toward the late morning sky high above the trees. Skandar trembled. He tried to speak the name of the goddess, but at first he made no sound other than animalistic grunts. Frustration finally made him scream. His first human sound startled him. He paused, listening to the dying noise, listening to the silence of the forest swallow up his sound. Licking his lips, he tried again.

  “Orsel be praised,” he croaked in broken human tones.

  He dropped his arms, and wondered what he should do next. There was a nagging sensation in the back of his mind. It told him to go west. Naked, with slow, unsteady steps, he walked away from the morning sun, toward the horizon where the sun would sink many hours later.

  Behind him, tufts of gray wolf hair that had formed the outline of a man fluttered and drifted away in a new breeze.

  Chris

  The sound of howling filled his ears. In a half-waking stage, less than sleep but somewhere short of really conscious, Chris Woodman listened to the howling. His mind drifted back eight years, to a time before Shara created her serum, when she would change shape and prowl their Montana ranch as a wolf, howling at night to let him know where she was, that she was okay. It had been a mournful, wild sound, but filled with love for her husband and the life they shared.

  This howling, however, carried no undertones of love. The howls were a warning now, and there were many of them. The wolves were looking for him, Chris knew. They were looking for him and his son, and their companion.

  His nearly asleep mind played a trick on him and for a mome
nt Chris couldn’t remember why the wolves were howling their warning. Then he remembered that the woman sleeping in the cabin with him and Joey was not his wife. His wife was … was somewhere else. Chris pushed himself toward consciousness, trying to remember. It had been a hot day. He’d pointed a gun and shot … a wolf, but not a normal wolf. It had been a wolf like the ones outside the east Texas state park cabin where he was now. But there was more. He remembered. It was Professor Ulrik, his old zoology instructor from North Central Oklahoma University.

  I shot Ulrik.

  Shara had stood opposite him, but she was standing with someone else. Someone Chris knew instinctively he didn’t like, though he couldn’t recall any details about the man. Shara had been …

  Pregnant.

  “Bitch!” Chris’s head snapped up and his eyes popped open. His heart was racing, his pulse pounding in his head. He was still sitting at the small, cheap kitchen table, a holdover from the late 1970s. Bleary-eyed, he groped for the black 9mm pistol that had been on the table before him. He’d been cleaning the gun, and had just put his head down to rest his eyes for a moment.

  “Were you talking to me, or thinking of her again?”

  Chris pulled his eyes from his trembling hands and looked at the woman sitting across from him. The long-haired American Indian woman stared back at him, not looking at her own hands as she deftly reassembled his weapon, slammed the clip of silver-tipped bullets back into the butt and pushed it across the table to him.

  “Her,” Chris said. “I still can’t believe she picked … she decided to stay with him instead of coming with us, with me and our son.”

  “Get over it,” Kiona Brokentooth said. “She made her choice. I’ve been alive for almost a century and a half. Things change. People change. Or die.”

  For just a moment Chris saw a flicker of sorrow in Kiona’s deep black eyes and he knew she was thinking of John Redleaf, her friend and lover, a werebear who had been torn apart by Ulrik’s minions while helping rescue Joey. “Yes,” Chris said. “They do. All I’ve thought about is Shara and what she did to me and Joey. I’m sorry about John. You’d known him for a long time?”

  Kiona nodded, and a single tear spilled from her right eye. It rolled down her cheek. Chris expected her to wipe it away, to hide the sign of weakness, but she didn’t move. “Over a hundred years,” she said. “I took him to Europe to receive his Gift from a hermit in the mountains. We got together when we needed each other, then separated when we were ready. He never really cared about the prophecy.”

  Chris wasn’t sure what to say. In the weeks he’d known the Indian woman, she’d never expressed such soft emotions. Before he could think of a way to respond, her mood changed. The tear seemed to evaporate on her chin.

  “Quit sleeping,” she demanded. “You’re on guard duty. They catch us asleep and we’re dead. Fenris doesn’t give a shit about us. If they get to Joey, we’ll just be in the way, unless we have some leverage.”

  “What leverage?” Chris asked. It had been a long, hard, non-stop drive from central Mexico to east Texas. Joey had been hysterical at first, screaming for his mother and fighting to get out of the pickup truck. It was all Chris could do to hold on to him as Kiona barreled through the forest surrounding Ulrik’s ranch in Mexico. They’d raced through the nearby village, hoping nobody at the house had alerted Ulrik’s human gatekeepers to stop the truck. From there it had been a trek north, as fast as they dared drive, taking turns sleeping and consoling the sulking eight-year-old boy. “We’ve been here for three days and they found us before we came up with a plan. What do we do now?”

  “We either go to Fenris, like we promised, and get his protection from those gathered around your wife, or we find a way to get away from them,” Kiona said.

  “And if we get away?”

  She shrugged. “I will serve as the Mother now. We hide and raise Joey until he’s old enough to fulfill his destiny.”

  “I’m his father,” Chris said. For a moment he saw Kiona in another light, in another role, and wondered what it would be like to be a part of that role.

  “You spent eight years trying to pretend he isn’t what he is, trying to ignore his destiny,” Kiona said. “You can’t deny it. Are you ready to be his father? The father of the Alpha?”

  “I am his father,” Chris said. “Whatever, or whoever, he decides to become. I’ll be there for him. What leverage do we have with Fenris?”

  Outside, the howling continued. It wasn’t closer, but it wasn’t any further away, either. Chris felt sure there were more voices in the chorus now, though.

  “The only leverage we have,” Kiona said. She turned her head and looked into the other room where Joey slept curled on the couch, watching Cartoon Network. The sound of exaggerated, animated voices was faint under the howling outside. “If we get to Fenris, and Joey wants us, we’ll live.”

  “If Joey wants us?”

  “Fenris will try to turn him against us. He wants to control Joey,” she explained. Usually, when she was forced to explain anything, her voice was as hard and cutting as sharpened bone. Now, though, it was softer, forgiving. “If he can convince Joey that he doesn’t need us, Fenris will have us killed. If they – ” she looked toward a kitchen window covered with a faded green curtain – “If they decide to attack, they’ll kill us and take Joey and tell Fenris we tried to run out on him.”

  “Could we do that?” Chris asked. “Could we get away from them?”

  Kiona shook her head. “I don’t know how they found us. John flew us to Mexico, we drove back. I don’t know how they found us. Fenris’s reach is longer than I expected. They’ve found us, and they’re gathering out there, waiting to see what we’ll do.”

  “The Pack is gathering,” Chris whispered, repeating the phrase Shara and Ulrik had said so often.

  “There’s always the possibility …” Kiona began, then trailed off, looking at the window.

  “What?” Chris asked. “What is it?”

  “That it isn’t Fenris’s people out there,” she said. “In fact, it would make a lot more sense the other way.”

  “What other way?”

  “There’s no real way for Fenris to have tracked us since we went to Mexico in a private airplane,” she said. “But we left Ulrik’s place in a truck. We left scent. It could be that those aren’t Fenris’s wolves out there.” She paused and listened. “I’m almost sure of it. They’re Ulrik’s. That’s why they haven’t attacked. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid!”

  “What do you mean? Why haven’t they attacked?”

  Kiona smiled a slow, wicked smile at him. “Because Ulrik – and your wife – lack the guts to do what they know is necessary. They’ve always been too sentimental.”

  Paul

  Paul Danvers lay naked in the tall, parched grass of a low hill, watching the mansion on the next rise through powerful binoculars. His clothes were rolled and stored in a plastic bag buried about six inches below where he lay. Once upon a time people believed a werewolf’s clothes turned into stones until the werewolf needed them again. Paul, a former British Special Forces member, thought that would be damn convenient.

  In his binoculars he could see Fenris pacing on a patio at the rear of the house. The man’s long white hair fluttered behind him like a banner. He was bare-chested and muscled, and obviously angry. As Paul watched, Fenris struck one of the two men he was talking to. The man fell over sideways and Paul could see a spray of blood come from his face.

  Sitting at a black wrought-iron patio table reading a book was a young girl, maybe eight years old, with blonde hair. She flinched when Fenris hit the other man and Paul got the impression she’d like to run away, or at least crawl under the table to hide.

  There was no sign of the Indian woman, the boy, or Shara’s previous mate. That fact, coupled with Fenris’s behavior, told Paul all he needed for the moment. He put his binoculars in another plastic bag and placed that in the second of the two holes he’d dug. He pushed dirt o
ver the hole, replaced some sod and patted it all down. It wasn’t perfect concealment, but someone would have to be studying the ground pretty bloody well to find it.

  Paul gave the sprawling white mansion one last look, then took a deep breath and prepared for the transformation to his wolf form.

  Something struck him in the neck, stinging like the bite of a dragonfly. He reached to swat it, but already knew he’d been caught. He pulled the dart out of his neck and looked at it for a moment before it dropped out of his weak hand.

  “Bloody hell,” he murmured, then sagged so that his face was again buried in the dry grass. He slept.

  * * *

  Electric light filled a spacious room. A werewolf who once served England’s queen squinted at one of the lamps beside the bed where he lay. The light hurt his eyes. He closed them and turned his face away from the source.

  Behind his closed lids he saw again a trio of Afghan soldiers in a machine gun pit as they peered over the edge of the pit and down a slope toward a silent encampment of British soldiers that had only recently realized they were caught between the machine gun nest and a Soviet tank battalion. The three soldiers never heard the wolf until the first man was dead. The last man standing drew his pistol, but lost it and the hand holding it before losing his bowels.

  Paul opened his eyes and stared at the white ceiling of the room. He lifted his hands and rubbed at his eyes, paused when he realized he wasn’t tied to the bed, then rubbed some more. He dropped his hands back to the mattress. His right hand landed on something puffy that made a crinkling noise. He grabbed the thing and held it above him. It was his bag of clothes.