“They’re coming out of the ground!” one of the men cried. “It’s a doorway to hell!”
Wolves boiled up from a hole in the floor. Lorenzo’s heart froze in his chest. More and more—sweet virgin, they kept coming, as if a gateway had opened from the infernal lands in the center of the earth, with no end to them. They emerged snarling and snapping and killing. And still they kept coming. Was there no end to them?
No, he realized, they were emerging from the crypts. The gate lay open, shaking and clanging as wolves rushed past. There were a dozen more now, tearing through the priests and monks as if they were lambs. Most fled for their lives, running down the nave and into the middle of the battle between Lord Nemours’s men and the other half of the pack.
The wolves savaged any who fell behind. Three of them surrounded Bishop de Moray and drove him to one side like an old deer, culled from the herd. De Moray swung his crosier in desperation and smacked one on the head. It flew to the side. The bishop turned to run. One of the other two clamped its jaws on his calf and the man went down with a cry. The three wolves buried their muzzles. The bishop’s cries turned to screams of pain and terror as they tore him apart.
“Brother!” Marco yelled. “Help me!”
Lorenzo turned to see Marco fighting for his life. Two dead men-at-arms lay at his feet. A pair of wolves circled him, snarling and snapping while he thrust and jabbed wildly to drive them off. He stumbled and dropped to one knee. The wolves crouched to spring.
Lorenzo yelled with a sudden, savage fury. He leaped into the fray with his sword flying. One of the wolves spun around and snapped a defense. The other leaped at his brother. It slammed into Marco’s chest and knocked him to the ground.
Caught in his own fight for his life, Lorenzo couldn’t reach his brother. He jabbed and ducked and feinted and slashed. He dodged a leap and a snap of jaws that caught and tore his cloak, but fell short of his throat. At last he landed a blow with the sword across his enemy’s ribs. The wolf fell back with a yelp, then turned to join one of the others in harrying a pair of wounded guards. Lorenzo rushed to Marco’s side.
His brother lay on his back, with the wolf pinning him to the ground. Lorenzo roared as he thrust his sword. The wolf, already wounded by a jagged gash across its belly, shuddered and tried to pull free. Lorenzo shoved his blade in. The wolf convulsed and died. Lorenzo pushed it away with his boot.
Marco lay in a puddle of blood. But as Lorenzo dropped to one knee, crying out in fear and grief, his brother coughed and tried to sit up. Lorenzo let out a gasp of relief. Marco was alive, and most of the blood was the wolf’s.
“I’m all right,” Marco gasped.
He tucked his left arm against his body. The wolf had torn the sleeve to ribbons and opened an ugly gash on his forearm. He looked down and winced.
“I hope Lucrezia has some balm left. Rather not join those brutes.” He struggled to get his legs beneath him. “Help me up.”
By the time they rejoined the battle, the lines were changing. Men had fought in knots, two or three for every wolf and had been gradually winning the battle. Two wolves were down already, three more wounded and trying to flee. Several men-at-arms lay dead as well, but their numbers were greater.
Then the fleeing priests and monks broke through their ranks, running for the door. The wolves regrouped in the confusion. Courtaud leaped among them, snarling and biting the haunches of the weaker members of the pack. Soon they had regrouped into a force ten or twelve strong. They formed a vicious wedge and drove their way down the nave toward the choir. Shortly they would meet the second group savaging the men of the cloth still alive by the crypts.
“Form ranks!” Nemours shouted.
He stood about ten feet away from Marco and Lorenzo with his sword raised in the air. A gash opened on his leg, with an angry, bleeding wound from his knee halfway to his crotch.
Men gathered around him.
“We’ve got those devils trapped,” he said, his eyes gleaming with reflected torchlight. “Hunt them down, kill them all.”
The wolves were halfway to the choir and to the stairs that led down into the crypt. The only thing stopping them was a desperate mass of monks with staves, together with two men in the boiled leather armor of the city watch. Lorenzo recognized at once what was happening, and what Nemours did not seem to realize.
The wolves were driving for the crypt. The battle hadn’t gone as they’d intended, and they meant to flee. But to where? The crypt? There must be another way out of Notre Dame.
It was the only thing that made sense. The crypt must lead to ancient catacombs beneath the building, then to tunnels leading into the cathedral close or beyond. It was how the second pack of wolves had entered unseen.
But how had they navigated the catacombs to spring into the heart of the cathedral at just the right moment? If there were doors down there, wouldn’t they be barred? And Lorenzo had spotted the entrance to the crypt itself earlier, blocked with a metal grating. Someone had opened it. A wolf? Not likely.
The important thing was to keep them from chewing through the last few defenders and pouring back into the ground as quickly as they’d emerged. Only a handful of wolves had fallen—the rest could regain the streets and flee Paris. Retreat to the countryside and the woods to kill, to rebuild their pack. How long before they attacked again in even greater numbers?
“Stop them!” Lorenzo shouted. “They’re escaping into the crypts!”
Chapter Thirty
“Lucrezia. My wife.”
Rigord pushed past the injured wolf. He had changed into something monstrous. Lucrezia recognized his voice, but this thing, this hideous creature stepping out of the shadows, was neither man nor wolf.
Her husband stood upright like a man, only stooped, like a giant trying to fit through a passageway too short for his height. His hands—if they could still be called hands—dangled below his knees. They had long, grasping fingers, like a person’s, but sharpened with claws. Black hair covered every inch of his naked body, thick as a wolf pelt. His feet were like a wolf’s hind paws, and his back legs bent at a strange angle, like something that was meant to run on all fours and not stand upright.
But the most terrible thing was what had become of his face. His ears stood high and pointed, like a wolf’s, and his face had elongated into a snout, huge and powerful. His mouth gaped open, filled with teeth longer and sharper than any wolf’s.
Only his eyes remained unchanged. Not lupine at all, but a man’s eyes—
Rigord’s
eyes—dark brown and intelligent. Somehow, that made everything else about this thing all the more terrible. The human eyes.
The injured wolf by his side, so terrible moments earlier, was now a timid, frightened thing next to its master. It cowered behind Rigord, snarling, tail between its legs in submission.
Her husband must have seen the horror in her eyes, because he chuckled without mirth.
“Now you see what you did to me, woman,” he said. “Not a wolf. Not a man. Something else entirely.”
“But you changed,” she managed through a mouth as dry as carded wool, and with a tongue that seemed to be made of lead. “I saw you with my own eyes. You turned into a wolf and you fled.”
“Yes, after you stabbed me.”
“I didn’t want to,” she said. “I only wanted to—Rigord, it was an abomination! The way you were using that woman. Drinking blood. And look what you’ve done since you changed. Murdered people in the city, eaten children. And terrorized the roads. Attacked people in their sleep. Turned men to wolves.”
Rigord pulled back his lips in something that was meant to be a smile but only looked like a snarled leer. “You give me too much credit, my dear. Most of that was Courtaud.”
“But you did that, didn’t you? You changed him.”
In the back of her mind, she could only think of stalling. The fighting continued in the rooms behind the corridor at a furious pace. Men shouted, wolves snarled. Rigord was a fool, consumed by some sort of desire to kill her instead of going back to spread terror along with his pack. But if she could hold him for a few seconds longer Tullia or Martin might rush to her defense.
“I did, yes. Alas, we had a falling out. He leads his pack and I lead mine.”
She guessed what had caused this falling out. Never mind these two men, already strong in real life, now powerful and corrupted by their transformation. No pack could have two wolves at its head.
“And this? This half form, what is it?”
“I tried to turn back. When the moon changed phases, I spoke the incantation to bring me back into the form of a man. But you corrupted it, damn you. Halfway, that’s all I managed.”
He stepped toward her, his steps lurching in a way like no man would ever walk.
“This form suits me,” he said. “A true
loup-garou,
man and wolf entwined. Both natures at once. There’s no one like me, there never has been and never will be again. And I have powers. I wrap myself in shadows, enter where I will. When I’m challenged, I show my face and men weep for mercy.”
“Why, Rigord? Why would you kill these people? Not only men, but women and children, too.”
He moved so swiftly she couldn’t react. One clawed hand seized her wrist in an iron grip. The dagger stood immobile in her fist. The other hand closed around her neck. His heavy scent filled her nostrils, wolf and man and blood that came together in a stomach-churning mix. She trembled, unable to move. Terrified.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he growled in her ear. “The hunger. It’s all consuming. When you haven’t fed, you can think of nothing else. You’re only happy among your pack, spreading terror, killing. When you feast on human flesh—there’s no greater desire nor joy.”
“You’re a monster.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s too late now. You unleashed me on the world. It’s your fault.”
“No,” she whispered.
“Now,” he said, but not to her, rather to the wolf behind him. “We feast on this woman’s blood.”
“You turned all of your friends?” she said quickly, desperate to gain a few seconds. “The ones I saw that night with the woman?”
“Only Courtaud and Bayezid. The others came to me later, those who survived. Mostly men, a few women.”
“None of them can change back?”
Rigord shook his huge, shaggy head. “None. Your corruption was complete, woman.”
“Then how did Courtaud gain entrance to Lord Nemours’s chatelet?”
He drew his snout back a few inches. “What do you mean?”
“They’d raised the drawbridge. We were behind stone walls. A man was turning to a wolf in the basement. Courtaud and another wolf came to claim him for the pack. He broke free when they came. Courtaud must have changed into a man and tricked his way into the castle.”
“No. Impossible.”
But she could see the confusion working in his eyes. And doubt. Rigord was wondering if he was wrong, if Courtaud and the others had something he could never reclaim—the ability to turn back into a man and walk among humans when he chose.
He roared and flung her down. She landed hard, her head smacking painfully against the flagstones. The dagger clattered across the floor. He pulled back his powerful arm with its claws outstretched, to slash her open.
The door flew open at the far end of the corridor. Martin stood there, his sword dripping with blood and gore. Lorenzo’s servant Demetrius, too, the left side of his face a ruin, one eyeball destroyed. Two wounded guards with spears backed them, and Tullia came in after. The mastiff bled from several wounds, but seemed untroubled by the injuries as she roared her challenge. The sound of battle continued to their rear with surprising ferocity.
Rigord and the wolf whirled to face this new threat. Even against four armed men and a mastiff they presented a formidable front. Her husband, if he raised himself to his full height instead of hunching in that lupine fashion, would scrape the ceiling, two full heads taller than any of the men. The wolf was smaller, but at least as big as Tullia. And there were still wolves in the house, ready to join the battle.
“Mercy,” Martin said as he caught sight of Rigord. His eyes opened wide.
Rigord snarled and drew back to spring forward. Still lying on the stone floor, Lucrezia grabbed for her dagger. Before he could leap, she buried the blade in his calf. He howled in pain. His jaws snapped down to tear off her head. Before he could reach her, Tullia slammed into him and knocked him back. The others joined the battle.
Lucrezia yanked back her knife, slick with her husband’s blood. She ducked to the side, then got to her feet. More men and wolves spilled into the corridor as the battle came toward the tower. They were evenly matched in numbers, some half dozen of each. Every man and wolf among them suffered injuries, but the men were in worse shape. Some had lost weapons and fought with mailed fists or spear shafts with broken-off points. One man carried a dagger no bigger than a kitchen knife. He snatched a torch from the wall and waved it madly in the air.
All of them bled from cuts in their arms, legs, or faces. Even as he gained the corridor, the man with the small knife and torch fell. A wolf went for his throat and finished him off. Tullia rolled end over end with the injured wolf that had stood behind Rigord. The two animals bit savagely at each others’ haunches.
Demetrius stabbed at Rigord with the sword, but her husband slashed with his claws and raked the man across the cheek. Still fighting, the Greek came around again with the sword, but Rigord seized his arm with one of those powerful hands. He slammed the man’s sword hand against the wall. The weapon fell. Huge jaws darted in and snapped shut. Rigord came away with half of the man’s face.
The sight was so awful that Lucrezia almost fainted. But she was in a fight for her own life. A wolf came at her, biting and snarling, and she slashed with her dagger. Her other arm swept her cloak forward and wrapped it around the beast’s muzzle. She stabbed before it could pull away, and drew blood.
Then Martin was by her side, slashing and hacking. The injured wolf died under their joint attack.