Wolfbreed (46 page)

Ulfie …

The bishop’s words, from beyond the cell door, burned into Lilly like acid dripping on her skin. They were going to kill Ulfie and his family for the crime of helping her. Because of her, Ulfie was going to be hurt again.

She closed her eyes and wished she had the ability to simply will her heart to stop beating. She curled into a shaking ball, the stone floor cold against her skin.

“Stop it.”

She surprised herself by speaking. She froze a few moments waiting for the other one to take over. It took a few seconds to realize that there wasn’t another, not anymore. She sucked in a deep breath and thought back, remembering herself.

Rarely did she try to think back on what she did. The killer was someone else, some
thing
else.

But it wasn’t.

She
was that bloodthirsty thing that killed without thought or remorse. And worse, the thing was here with her now—Lilly could
tell because the thought of the guards she had beaten earlier made her smile.

Why was she so frightened of herself? The single greatest regret of her life, what she had done to Uldolf and his family, didn’t happen because she was a monster. No, she might be a bloodthirsty animal, but she had hurt Uldolf because she had been weak. She had been too weak to say no to her master. If she had been stronger …

She realized that she was being weak now.

She had given up.

Uldolf deserved more.

She
deserved more.

And dear master Erhard certainly deserved more.

She wiggled and brought herself up into a sitting position. Uldolf had done a very good job of restraining her, enough that the Order hadn’t elaborated upon it. Thick leather straps wrapped her legs from the knees down, painfully tight. With a little leverage, she might have been able to pull apart one or two thicknesses of it, but not a dozen.

So she wouldn’t force it.

She rolled on her back, lifting her legs up and folding them over. With her arms bound behind her back, it was difficult, and she had to rock back and forth several times, almost falling over twice. But eventually she got the top of her feet to touch her forehead, and she grabbed a length of the horse-flavored leather in her teeth.

Even her human jaws regularly chewed through bone, so gnawing through the leather was not terribly difficult. It was more difficult contorting herself to reach the straps with her mouth. But by the third one, the binds loosened, and she was able to scissor her legs apart, leaving the greater part of the leather to spiral off of her legs.

She panted from the exertion and lowered her legs to the
ground. Sweat covered her legs and torso, and she tasted blood and shreds of leather in her mouth.

Her arms were still tightly wrapped, bound behind her back, the leather tied too high up her forearms to allow her to pull her arms around in front of her.

Time was leaking away and she had committed herself. She couldn’t be half free when the guards came for her.

She sat up, felt around, and found the massive staple in the floor that had once held the chains binding her leg. She backed up to it and grabbed the ring with both hands and thought of her options.

With a grip on the ring, she could force her arms the wrong way over her head. It would be painful, but she would heal from the damage. Only she didn’t know how quickly. Losing a foot wasn’t too critical, but severely dislocating both arms? Thinking of her foot made her aware of another option. If she lost one hand, wedging it in the ring and pulling her wrist free, that would give her some slack to pull her arms loose. But that had the same problem; her hand might not grow back before they came.

If she could only change. As strong as she was now, as the wolf she was stronger. It was the silver wrapping her neck that truly bound her. She could remember vainly stabbing at this torc with the dagger. The cuts the silver blade had made in her neck still stung with her sweat. It had taken Uldolf prying at the hinge to get it off.

But this was the same torc, wasn’t it? It must have been weakened.

She felt the iron staple anchored into the stone floor of her cell. It was hard—harder than the silver she wore. She slid down, the grit on the floor digging into the skin of her legs and her backside. She stopped when she was on her back, the back of her neck resting on the staple as if it was some torturer’s pillow.

The hinge was on the back of the torc, and she did her best to center it on the staple. She sucked in a breath and slowly sat up, stomach tensing as she pulled her torso up and bent forward as far as she could.

It would be bad to miss
.

“But,” she whispered to herself, “I am not going to miss.”

She sucked in a deep breath, tucked her chin to her chest, tensed her muscles, and threw her torso back as hard and as fast as she could manage. The back of the torc slammed into the iron staple with a force that cracked her neck like a whip. The impact reverberated through her skull, throwing dancing lights across her vision.

She lay there, stunned, every muscle and tendon between her jaw and her shoulder blades locked in a blinding spasm of pain. Then the tension slowly released, allowing her head to sag backward. Several moments passed before she could manage to unclench her jaw, and several more before she could sit upright.

When she did, the torc slid off her neck and down across her chest, into her lap. It was too dark to see if the trail it left was sweat or blood.

Even though it hurt, she managed a small smile.

She tried to stand, but was still dizzy from the pain induced by the impact and fell over on her side, the torc rolling off into the darkness.

It’s fine, as long as the metal is no longer touching me—

She closed her eyes and willed the wolf into her body.

In response to her desire, her heart hammered, every beat forcing more and more blood through her body, the pulse a pressure against tightening flesh. Her muscles tensed, pulling against lengthening and twisting bone, and began to slide under her flesh with an instinct of their own. Her skin itched as every hair on her body became alive, lengthening, thickening, rippling across her flesh. She felt her teeth grow and sharpen as her jaws pressed outward.

Her breath quickened, and she groaned even though she was trying to be quiet.

There was pain as her body tore at itself and knit itself back together—pain that vibrated through her skin and every fiber of every muscle. Pain that she felt deep in the core of her body. Pain that she welcomed. It tore her apart, but with it also came a blinding ecstasy that could only compare to the climax she’d felt with Uldolf.

The binding of her forearms heightened the pain. She could feel her growing bone, muscle, and flesh pushing against the straps. The leather held her arms against the movement of her joints, trying to tear her arms out of her broadening shoulders. She felt her skin begin to tear, and blood drip onto the fur of her wrists. She heard an anguished creaking sound, and didn’t know if it was the leather holding her arms or her own body.

Lilly roughly exhaled as the transformation completed. She rested her muzzle against the floor of her cell, panting. Her forearms were still bound behind her, even more painfully now. She could smell her own blood. And her limbs were so tightly twisted that she had no motion in them at all. Her hands had gone numb.

It felt as if even the wolf in her didn’t have the strength to break these bonds.

Lilly entertained a brief thought: attacking the guards as they entered, just as she was. She could do a lot of damage just with her teeth.

But as much as she despised her master now, he had trained her better than that. They would have a choke point at the door, and have five or six men, armed with silver. These men would be prepared, aware of what she was and what she could do. They would look in the cell before opening the door, and if she wasn’t docile and bound as they’d left her, they would probably just shoot bolts at her through the door until she stopped moving.

If this was going to work, she couldn’t just be stronger than they were. She had to be smarter.

She still heard faint creaking, and now she was sure it was the leather.

Maybe this was enough
.

She pulled the wolf back inside herself. It was hard, firing a desperate hunger inside her. Even as her skin pulled back into its human shape, it felt as if she could keep deflating, falling into the burning cavity in her stomach. She realized that she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. And now she had changed twice since …

Even in the dark, she could tell that she was thinner. She could feel the nubs of her spine against her wrists. It was inevitable. Her body had only so many resources. The next time she changed, she was going to be weakened by hunger.

She closed her eyes and told herself that it was just another thing she was going to take into account. It wouldn’t matter if she couldn’t free herself.

She sucked in a breath and tried to move her arms.

Her transformation didn’t break the bonds, but the leather had stretched just enough to allow her now slightly thinner arms to worry themselves free.

She flexed them in front of her, then hugged herself. She only spared a few seconds to allow the freedom of motion. She didn’t know how long it would be before they came for their monster, and when they did, she had to be ready.

She felt around the cell floor until she retrieved all the leather straps, and after a few uncomfortable minutes, the silver torc. As she did, she formed the basis of a plan …

rhard silently prayed as he led seven men back down into the dark halls underneath the keep. Despite a decade believing
otherwise, he now knew that as Bishop Cecilio had said, they were about to retrieve an agent of Hell itself. The fact that Lilly had shredded Christian flesh as readily as she had pagan should be enough to show the devil’s hand. Erhard knew that now.

“You are the only God I have …”
she had said.

No, she wasn’t an animal. An animal cannot blaspheme.

In his heart, Erhard wanted to finish this all now. One quick stroke separating head from shoulders would be enough to end this threat to body and soul. However, God and the bishop had decided to multiply his trials. He could not end things so simply now.

It was punishment for his pride. In his hubris, he had held some hope that if he could just talk to Lilly, she could give him an explanation. She could give him a reason that might acquit him of his role in raising her.

Not until she started uttering such evils did he realize how grave a sin he had been committing. Not simply ten years of nurturing her kind. For that sin, at least, he had the mitigation of his own deception—a deception that extended all the way to the pope. No, his sin, and what he now paid for, was the fact that he sought absolution, and forgiveness, in the eyes of Satan. Instead of looking to God, he had turned to Lilly.

Instead of praying for guidance, he had placed his faith in the words of a demon. He had wanted her to say something that would let him believe that the bishop was wrong, something that would let him believe that he hadn’t spent the last decade in the service of the devil.

That arrogance, placing his own will before that of God, weighed now on his soul. A weight that might not be lifted even when he bore Lilly to the pyre, demonstrating the ultimate triumph of God to the Prûsans confined to the bailey.

Erhard was sick at the thought. Not for Lilly’s sake, who in Erhard’s mind was already consigned to the Lake of Fire, but because
Erhard believed the bishop was erring for the sake of spectacle. God commanded that praise and glory be given unto Him, and making such a public display smacked more of giving praise and glory unto Bishop Cecilio.

Perhaps there would be a point in forcefully correcting any errors of the Prûsan natives. However, the bishop wasn’t confronting some unrepentant pagan village, recently conquered. These people had all pledged their fealty to the Lord and the Order.

But in the end, what grounds did he have to critique the righteousness of Bishop Cecilio? If they were on a road to Hell now, was Erhard not the one who laid it?