It all looked the same. Every side of the clearing faced him with a thick stand of trees. Under the canopy of their leaves it was still dark. He didn’t know what had happened to him.
And yet…
He stooped to swipe off some leaves and twigs and recoiled to see that his feet weren’t only wet with dew — there were splashes of dark red. Was it…?
Giovanni’s breath caught in his throat.
Blood?
He checked his calves, thighs, and ankles thoroughly, but no, he saw or felt no new wounds.
He scraped at the blood stains. Dry, mostly dry. He looked at his fingers. Flecks of dark matter was crusted under his nails.
“Gesu’ e Santa Maria,” he said softly and crossed himself, forgetting his nakedness for a moment.
He sniffed his fingertips.
It was blood. He had smelled enough of it.
He sidled toward the clearing’s edge. The approaching sunrise might well cause him to be seen by people who awakened for field work or farm chores, or to attend mass or one of the meager markets. He had to find his way home.
Home?
Not home, but the partisans’ secret shelter that had become his home.
With a deep breath he abandoned any modesty that might have crippled him and sprinted through the dew toward the thinnest face of the forest.
Giovanni was still shivering, now with fear as well as cold.
The blood, the naked romp outside, and the lack of memory.
There was no accounting for this, none at all.
Unless…
Giovanni looked at his arm, which itched unbearably as if he had a rash or had dragged it through a patch of poison ivy. Below his right shoulder, where that monstrous creature he had fought had torn and ripped the skin with grotesque fangs or claws was throbbing painfully and itching madly.
Both arms tingled, and he thought he felt the tingle reach his shoulder and spread across his back. He scratched at the edges of where the wound had been, but it wasn’t enough to slake his need. In fact, the itch seemed to be spreading to the other arm now. He would have given anything for some immediate relief.
He licked at the tingling arm absent-mindedly, his nakedness momentarily forgotten.
Then Giovanni stopped in mid-lap. What the hell was he doing, lapping at his arm like a dog?
Porca Madonna!
He shook his head and scraped the area around his mouth with one hand. Dried bits of red flesh flaked off his skin, leaving bloody smears on his palm. Some of the bits were sharp, bone-like. He sniffed at the debris. Smelled like… like slaughtered meat. He’d seen enough farm slaughters in his youth. The smell overtook his senses and the sudden urge to vomit rose. When he forced himself to swallow and breathe deeply, the taste of raw meat and bone and rancid blood came alive inside his mouth.
His throat gurgled and hitched and a stream of bloody vomit spewed onto the ground, splashing his feet before he could side-step.
It looks like pieces of my lungs, Giovanni thought as he wiped his mouth. The bloody taste still on his tongue.
What is wrong with me? A strangled sob escaped from his lips.
He gagged again, but this time it overwhelmed him and more pieces of bloody flesh and bone came gurgling up his throat and through his lips in a disgusting stream.
After the spasm passed, he opened his eyes and beheld the grotesque contents of his stomach, now splattered onto the grass. He turned away, dizzy, trying to keep his gorge from rising again.
The shivers he felt had nothing to do with the chill in the air, and the madness was just beginning.
Because not far from the clearing away from which he stumbled, Giovanni found a child’s shoe, tattered and blood-stained. And memories of the previous night, horrible memories that he had buried to protect his sanity, flooded back in one irreversible rush.
He screamed, and he was certain he would never stop screaming.
He was able to loot someone’s abandoned clothes from the debris of a ruined building. Then he stumbled back to the shelter.
9
In the coming days, Corrado’s men met German patrols made up of humans less frequently, while their encounters with the supernatural members of the Werwolf Division increased. The Werwolf members had been left as a rear-guard, and while Hitler’s regular ground forces retreated through Northern Italy and met up with those retreating from Normandy, the monstrous soldiers took over the last-ditch duty of harassing the partisans who paved the way for the Allied forces that advanced from the south.
And during those days, Giovanni Lupo became Corrado’s best werewolf fighter. In his hand, the Vatican blade became a scythe that mowed down every wolf who dared attack him.
Father Tranelli noted that Giovanni seemed to have become feverish and reckless in his encounters with the monsters. “He is on a mission,” the old priest said to Corrado. “A holy mission, perhaps. But he may not see the end of this accursed war if he doesn’t watch himself. What of his wife and son?”
Franco grieved for his friend Pietro, but worry about his father seeped into his grief. And Maria Lupo wondered at her husband’s newfound obsession with killing werewolves. Although the few wives who remained with their men told her how heroic her Giovanni was, she wondered what had made him so dedicated to killing at the constant risk of his own life.
For his part, Giovanni grew silent and, despite his great love for his family, distant to the point of being morose.
Corrado often looked at him with some vague suspicion on the tip of his tongue.
The fighting intensified, and Giovanni found himself celebrated as the unit’s best and most skillful wolf-killer.
It was cold at night, so no one questioned why he wore gloves on patrol. Only one person noticed that he wore them in daytime, too.
Franco.
10
Corrado’s partisan brigade was pinned down by rifle fire from a crow’s nest of granite boulders above the sloping mountain path.
They’d been climbing, their guard lowered because the territory had been recently cleared of Germans. But the first rifle rounds brought down two good men and Corrado shouted at the rest of his column to seek cover as best they could. One side of the path dropped off, forming a deadly steep cliff. The other side afforded little cover.
While the partisans were kept down by the accurate gunfire, a pair of Nazi werewolves pounced on those in the rear.
The snarling of werewolves and the screams of men being slaughtered behind them were punctuated by rifle fire that kept the rest of the partisans pinned and helpless.
Giovanni started snaking back down the path, retrieving one of the daggers from under his coat. The other dagger was with a second patrol.
“Get down!” Corrado hissed. “You can’t take them on yourself!”
Giovanni ignored him. The brigade had run out of silver bullets days before, so the wolves would be able to work their way back up the path and butcher each partisan one by one, unless someone counterattacked. And the holy weapon was the only way to win a clash with the shapeshifters.
He scrambled down the rocky incline, past the huddled partisans, avoiding their eyes. In a minute he had reached the slight turn in the path they had recently traversed. The snarling continued, but the screaming was silenced — the men were surely dead.