Snow drifted down upon a small cabin. It seemed a quiet and an unexceptional place, but the appearance was misleading. Beneath the surface appearance there were terrible things. Wolves in human form patrolled the woods around it with AK-74 assault rifles. Observation posts, themselves equipped with Pechenegs, were cleverly located so that they could see and not be seen. For miles not a rabbit, not a bird, not a mouse stirred without notice.
The uproar, consternation, and panic was therefore all the greater when a knock came at the door and, when opened, it revealed Giles Scott himself standing as patiently as if he were a neighbor in need of a cup of sugar. Not a single alarm had been raised, not the slightest sign of him seen.
"Dobry den," he said with a sort of quiet cheerfulness. "I wish to see Ivan."
He was seized, dragged into the cabin, and put in a cage which had, no doubt, been prepared for him when it had been assumed that he would arrive under different conditions. There was only one room in the cabin, and it was sparsely furnished. The cage was in the center of the room and contained only a chair; outside the cage there was nothing but a bare desk and another chair. Giles simply looked around with mild curiosity and waited.
It was not long before a large man with a black beard entered and scowled at him. Several others entered after him, so that the room was quite crowded.
"You seem somewhat familiar," Giles said in Russian, "although I have not met you before. Somewhere I've known the Wolf who gave you the Bite."
The bearded man sat down behind the desk. "You have courage, I'll grant you that," he said. "Even I would not have expected you to walk right up to the front door."
Giles shrugged. "It is full moon." A cold smile played around his mouth. "And as it happens, my dear Ivan, I am the only Wolf here who knows how to kill a Prime Wolf at full moon."
"Full moon becomes new moon soon enough."
"Where I am, the moon is always full."
"You are outnumbered."
Giles shrugged again. "Your numbers are insignificant. You would all be dead by now, but I am in a less savage mood than usual, and constrained by a mild curiosity. I have an offer for you all. If any Wolf surrenders now, I will spare his life."
Ivan laughed, although it was a humorless laugh. He swept his hand at the room. "You are in a cage and we can wait you out."
"Any Wolf who does not surrender now will be dead by sunset tomorrow."
"I would like to see you try," Ivan said in English.
"You will not live to see me try," replied Giles in the same language. Then he smiled coldly and continued in Russian. "I think I know the lineage now. You were given the Bite by Dmitry."
"Yes," said Ivan. "And he by Lykaios. I, too, am a Scion of Lykaios."
"Dmitry was a fool."
"He evaded you long enough."
"True," said Giles. "He was the last of the old court of Lykaios we destroyed. He had an extraordinary talent for running away. The most slippery coward I have ever met. He begged for his life at the end, but Aveline tore him apart with hardly a fight."
"You lie."
"Lykaios kept him around for amusement, nothing more. No one could lick a Wolf's paws better than Dmitry. The perfect court jester."
Ivan rose suddenly. "You will have no food and no water. And you will die as soon as the moon wanes. I will tear your heart out myself and devour it as they say you did with Lykaios."
Giles merely smiled. Ivan walked out, with a string of Wolves in train, leaving only a few guards.
Nothing happened until late that night. Ivan came into the room and began looking for something in the drawers of the desk. Giles watched him, coldly smiling, the dark eyes more unfathomable than ever.
"You have made a mistake," he said finally. Ivan ignored him, but he continued to talk. "It is a mistake most people make. It has destroyed more impressive Wolves than you. Everyone thinks that a Wolf is part animal, but this is not true. A Wolf is madness. A Wolf is nightmare. A Wolf is where reality ends and becomes something else. An intimation of death, an intimation of Hell, a touch of that terrible thing in your worst dreams, the thing you cannot bear to look at but cannot ignore. The difference between a would-be Wolf-King like you and a true Wolf-King like me is that I understand this and you do not. We are not playing the game you think we are. How did I find you? How did I get here without you knowing it beforehand? Why would I walk right into a Pack of enemy Wolves without the slightest worry? Why am I certain you will be dead by morning? You have made a fatal assumption."
Finally Ivan said, angrily, but almost as if the words were drawn out of him. "And what is this fatal assumption? Merely capturing you?"
The cold smile grew wider and colder, and the dark eyes above began almost to glitter. "That goes without saying. No, I mean an assumption you are making right now, the one that will lead to your death. It is the assumption that is fatal whenever you deal with a nightmare monster. You think you are awake."
The last sentence seemed to come from everywhere at once, making Ivan jump suddenly and look around him. When he looked back at the cage, it was empty.
"Dreams are strange things," said Giles. He was leaning against the wall. "Anything can become real in dreams. And if you are a Wolf who understands what it is to be a Wolf, anything in dreams can become real."
Ivan became Wolf, a big, fierce, black beast, leaping at Giles. But Giles was no longer there.
"You should be more calm," said Giles mockingly from the other side of the room. "This is all in your head. You are just dreaming. What harm can come from a dream?"
Ivan leaped again, but Giles caught him by the throat and threw him against the wall. Ivan yelped in pain.
"It seems real enough, though." The room, which had before seemed lit by electric light, began to take on a different color and tone, black and white, like moonlight pouring into a dark room. Giles was no longer visible, but his voice could be heard.
"Once Lykaios knew that he could not beat me, he fled, the first time he had ever fled another Wolf. He was a savage and ferocious creature. But he too did not understand that a Wolf's life is just madness and that you cannot flee an enemy who knows how to hunt you in your nightmares. I chased him over fields lit by an impossible Moon, through forests where dark things are, through marshes where nothing but despair can live, out upon an infinite plain of uncaring snow and ice, and there he turned to fight again. But my madness was stronger than his madness. My nightmare, in which I was the most terrible monster, overpowered and overwhelmed his nightmare. Since it was my dream, I stripped him of his Wolfishness, he who had been Wolf so long he could not even remember being human, and beneath the full moon I tore out his heart and devoured it. It was all just a nightmare he had one night." The voice took on a sharper, colder edge. "But it was a nightmare so dark that he was dead in the morning with his heart torn out of his chest, and I was the new Lykaios.
"You have been very foolish, Ivan, going about your business as if you were some man with special powers. You are as stupid as Dmitry. You do not know what you are. But I do. You are Death in the shape of a Wolf. A cold, silver Hell burns inside you. You are damned, and part of the punishment of your damnation is that you will continue to deserve it. Damnation never ends, but tonight is your last night of being damned in the form of a Wolf."
Ivan searched around in the shadows for his enemy, but found himself thrown against the wall again by an unseen hand. At that he fled, breaking through the door and rushing out into the snow.
It was a dark night, and yet the Moon was shining with impossible brightness, rising too swiftly and too vastly above the horizon, charging the snow with a glow somewhere between brilliantly silver and sickly pale. It hit the eye with a million diamond-like sparks, but it hit the stomach with something like nausea. The entire world seemed too vivid, too real, like something that you could only see in a fever. Ivan, still in Wolf form, sped out of the cabin, fleeing through the snow like a beast gone mad, scattering diamond powder with every leap. His speed would have suggested that he would soon reach the trees, but instead they never seemed to get any closer, as if the snow stretched out as swiftly as he raced through it.
The wind began to blow -- it formed into words -- all the world blinked -- and in mid-leap Ivan was no longer Wolf but man, sprawling face-down into the snow. As he struggled up, he glanced back. Framed against the impossibly large moon was Aegidius -- 'Giles' seems here too small a name -- the features of his pale face even at this distance somehow sharp and crystal-clear. There was something very wrong about him, though, and it was in the eyes, which were no longer dark but shining with silver light like that of the Moon. He gestured -- the world blinked again -- down Ivan went again. He felt himself seized by some irresistible force and dragged backwards. He could see nothing except moonlight-bright snow and dark furrows where his fingers were digging into the ground. The furrows grew longer and longer.
The Moon continued to rise, growing more and more vast until it filled the entire sky. In a silver voice and a strange language it began to sing.
Two weeks later some hikers stumbled across a pair of dead bodies in the snow. Upon investigating, the police found dozens more, and came upon a quiet cabin. Inside they found an empty cage and a man dead from severe trauma to the chest, his heart missing. In the door and across the floor were grooves, such as might be made by a human hand, yet impossibly deep. The gruesome murder was attributed to internecine conflict between two rival factions of the Russian mafia.
