Three soldiers appeared at the top, silhouetted against the sun. Chesna fired her weapon, knocked two of the men down, and the third fled. Another smoke grenade exploded on their right, the acrid white smoke flooding across the ravine. The hounds were closing in, Michael thought. He could sense them running from shadow to shadow, salivating as their gun sights trained in. Chesna ran along the bottom of the ravine, bruising her feet on stones but neither pausing nor registering pain. Michael was right behind her, the smoke swirling around them. Mouse was still breathing, but the back of Michael’s neck was damp with blood. The hollow crump of a third smoke grenade went off amid the trees to their left. Above the forest, dark banners of crows circled and screamed.
Figures were darting down the hillside and into the smoke. Chesna caught sight of them, and her quick spray of bullets drove them back. A rifle slug ricocheted off an edge of rock beside her, and stone splinters jabbed her arm. She looked around, her face glistening with sweat and her eyes wild; Michael saw in them the fear of a trapped animal. She ran on, crouched low, and he followed on cramping legs.
The ravine ended, and yielded to forest once more. Amid the trees a stream snaked between mossy banks. A bend of the road lay ahead, and beneath it was a stone culvert through which the steam rushed, its opening all but clogged by mud and vegetation. Michael glanced back and saw soldiers emerging from the smoky ravine. Other figures were coming down the hillside, taking cover behind the trees. Chesna was already on her knees, starting to push herself into the muddy culvert. “Come on!” she urged him. “Hurry!”
It was a tight squeeze. And, looking at it, Michael knew he could never get himself and Mouse through there before the soldiers reached them. His decision was made in an instant; as Chesna lay on her stomach and winnowed into the culvert, Michael turned away and ran out of the stream bed into the woods. Chesna kept going, through the slime, and the mud and underbrush closed behind her.
A rifle bullet sliced a pine branch over Michael’s head. He zigzagged between the trees, until a smoke grenade exploded almost in front of him and turned him aside. These hunters, he thought grimly, knew their work. His lungs were laboring, his strength sweating away. He tore through a green thicket, the sunlight lying around him in golden bars. He struggled up a hillside and down again-and then his feet slipped on a carpet of dead brown leaves and he and Mouse slid into a tangled nightmare of blue-black thorns that snagged their clothes and flesh.
Michael thrashed to get loose. He saw soldiers coming, from all sides. He looked at Mouse, and saw blood creeping from the little man’s mouth.
“Please… please,” Mouse was gasping. “Please… don’t let them torture me…”
Michael got his hands free and pulled the Luger from his waistband. He shot the first soldier he aimed at, and the others hit the ground. His next two shots went wild through the trees but the fourth clanged off a Nazi helmet. Michael took aim at a white face and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened; the Luger’s magazine was empty.
Submachine-gun fire kicked through the thorns, showering Michael and Mouse with dirt. A voice shouted, “Don’t kill them, you idiots!” It was Jerek Blok, crouched somewhere up on the hillside. Then: “Throw out your gun, Baron! We’re all around you! One word from me and you’ll be cut to pieces!”
Michael felt dazed, his body on the verge of collapse. He looked again at Mouse, and damned himself for pulling his friend into this deadly vortex. Mouse’s eyes were pleading, and Michael recognized the eyes of Nikita, as the injured wolf lay on the railroad tracks a long, long time ago.
“I’m waiting, Baron!” Blok called.
“Don’t… let them torture me,” Mouse whispered. “I couldn’t stand it. I’d tell them everything, and I… wouldn’t be able to help it.” His thorn-scarred hand clutched at Michael’s arm, and a faint smile played across his mouth. “You know… I just realized… you never told me your real name.”
“It’s Michael.”
“Michael,” Mouse repeated. “Like the angel, huh?”
Perhaps a dark angel, Michael thought. An angel to whom killing was second nature. It occurred to him, quite suddenly, that a werewolf never died of old age; and neither would the man Michael had known as Mouse.
“Baron! Five seconds and we start shooting!”
The Gestapo would find a way to keep Mouse alive, Michael knew. They’d pump him full of drugs, and then they’d torture him to death. It would be an ugly way to die. Michael knew the same fate awaited him; but he was no stranger to pain, and if there was one chance that he might be able to get away and continue his mission, he had to take it.
So be it. Michael tossed the Luger out, and it clattered to the ground.
He put his hands to the sides of Mouse’s head and took the little man’s weight on top of him. Tears sprang to his eyes, burning trails down his thorn-scratched cheeks. An angel, he thought bitterly. Oh yes. A damned angel.
“Will you… take care of me?” Mouse asked softly, beginning to fall into delirium.
“Yes,” Michael answered. “I will.”
A moment later Blok’s voice again: “Crawl out into the open! Both of you!”
One figure emerged from the thorns. Dusty, bleeding, and exhausted, Michael lay on his hands and knees as six soldiers with rifles and submachine guns circled him. Blok came striding up, with Boots following. “Where’s the other one?” He looked into the thorns, could see the motionless body lying in the coils. “Get him out!” he told two of the soldiers, and they waded into the tangle. “On your feet,” Blok said to Michael. “Baron, did you hear me?”
Michael slowly stood up, and stared defiantly into Jerek Blok’s eyes.
“Where did the bitch go?” the colonel asked.
Michael didn’t answer. He flinched, listening to the sound of Mouse’s clothes ripping on the thorns as the soldiers dragged him out.
“Where did the bitch go?” Blok placed the barrel of his Luger underneath Michael’s left eye.
“Stop the bullshit,” Michael replied, speaking in Russian. He saw the blood drain out of Blok’s face. “You won’t kill me.”
“What did he say?” The colonel looked around for an interpreter. “That was Russian, wasn’t it? What did he say?”
“I said,” Michael continued in his native tongue, “that you suck donkey cocks and whistle out your ass.”
“What the hell did he say?” Blok demanded. He glared at Boots. “You spent time on the Russian Front! What did he say?”
“I… uh… think he said… that he owns a donkey and a rooster that sings.”
“Is he trying to be funny, or is he insane?”
Michael released a guttural bark, and Blok stepped back two paces. And then Michael looked to his side, at Mouse’s corpse. One of the soldiers was trying to get Mouse’s closed right fist open. The fingers wouldn’t give. Suddenly Boots strode forward, lifted a foot, and smashed it down on the hand. Bones cracked like matchsticks, and Michael stood in shock as Boots crunched his weight down on the hand. When the huge man raised his foot again, the fingers were splayed and broken. There in the palm was a Cross of Iron.
Boots leaned over, started to reach for the medal.
Michael said, in German, “If you touch that, I’ll kill you.”
The man’s voice-sure and steady-made Boots pause. He blinked uncertainly, his hand outstretched to grasp a dead man’s last possession. Michael stared at him, smelling the heat of wildness burning in his veins. He was close to the change… very, very close. If he wanted it, it was right there within easy reach…