Kitty's Mix-Tape Read online

  “I think I should take my leave, sirs. Do have a pleasant evening.”

  “Miss Weston, we should escort you home—”

  “No, it isn’t far, I’ll be fine, truly. Stay with Edward.”

  They bowed, and she curtseyed, which seemed ridiculous here under the moon by the shadow of the forest, but it also seemed proper.

  Taking her lantern, she hurried back to the house, shivering in her nightdress, to warm herself in her bed. Her maid never asked how her slippers had become so muddy and grass stained.

  Several days later she received a parcel wrapped in paper and tied with twine. She took it to her room to unwrap, because she was sure what the package contained: her coat, with a carefully written slip of paper that said, My thanks.

  This gave her such a warm feeling she was almost overwhelmed, and she held the note to her breast for a long time.

  Elizabeth gladly attended the next assembly in town, not for any expectation that the brothers Wilde would be present, but for the hope that they would. Hope, she discovered, was a powerful inducement to feats of bravery.

  She refused two dances, with Amy defending her by spreading about that she had a weak ankle, and was sitting in her usual wallflower role in a chair, happy to watch people enter and exit by the foyer.

  And there he was. The three brothers entered, much as they had at the Woodfair ball. Edward was in the middle, and his gaze fell on her directly, as a hound on the scent. Elizabeth stood in a bit of a panic. Vincent nodded to her and took a smirking Francis off to another part of the room.

  Edward came to stand before her. He bowed; she curtseyed. The emotions pouring from him were tangled, but the strongest thread she felt was happiness.

  He asked if she would like to sit; she did, clutching her hands together in her lap. He sat in the chair beside her. He was like the wolf, ears pricked forward, afraid to move lest he startle her.

  “May I speak freely with you, Miss Weston?” he asked finally.

  “Of course.” They sat a little apart from one another. The distance seemed a mile.

  “I could smell you, when I woke. Your coat—it smelled of you.” He blushed, trying to find the words. “I have never slept so well. I have never slept so soundly and comfortably, after returning from my other self. I fear I must ask you to run after me every full moon, to drape me with your coat.”

  “I would do it,” she said simply.

  He chuckled. “You should stay inside where it is safe. But perhaps I can learn to carry your handkerchief with me.”

  “I would give you a handkerchief right now, if I had one.”

  “Elizabeth. There is so much you don’t know about us.”

  She smiled. “You and the other Misters Wilde are not brothers—well, you are in spirit, if not by blood. It is most strange.”

  “Indeed. And yet no one but you questions it.”

  “Most people are eager to accept what they are told.”

  “But not you.”

  “This is my secret, Mr. Wilde: I can feel lies. And almost every word spoken in parlors like this is a lie. I wonder that you are so eager to leave your woods.”

  “As I said, there are some attractions here.”

  “I do like the music,” she said.

  “Miss Weston—will you trust me?” The meaning behind the words was more than what he spoke, and she understood him perfectly.

  “Yes, I will,” she said.

  Unternehmen Werwolf

  OCTOBER 31, 1944

  The boy, Fritz, had only a few hours to assassinate the collaborator.

  He had completed the first part of the mission the night before, crossing over enemy lines into occupied territory. This was the easy part; he’d done it a dozen times before. But this time, he carried a gun in his pack, not the messages and supplies he’d couriered previously.

  As usual on these journeys, he awoke in the morning, safe in a copse of autumn shrubs he’d found to hide in, shrouded by fallen leaves and tangled branches. He was naked, but he was used to that. After giving himself a moment to recall where he was, to reacquaint himself with his human limbs, his grasping fingers instead of ripping claws, he untangled himself from his pack, looped around his shoulders so it wouldn’t slip off when he was a wolf. Inside, he found a canteen of water, a day’s rations, and common workmen’s clothes and boots so he could travel unnoticed. And the gun.

  Dressed and armed, he set off. He’d memorized the maps and the description of his target. The village had been occupied by Allied forces for several weeks, and the woman, Maria Lang, a nurse, had not only surrendered to enemy forces, she had been assisting in administration of the village, supplying the American soldiers with aid and information. The village might or might not be recaptured in coming battles, that wasn’t his concern. Right now, the woman must be punished. Executed.

  Not murdered, they told him. Executed.

  He balked, when they told him his target was a woman. That did not matter, his superiors in his SS unit told him. She was a collaborator. A traitor, not worthy of mercy. And Fritz was seventeen now, ready for such an important mission. He ought to be more than a letter carrier. And so here he was, trekking across abandoned farmland toward the edge of a wooded stretch where the collaborator’s cabin was said to stand, using his preternatural sense of smell to detect the scent of treachery.

  A wolf could cross enemy lines when a man in a uniform could not. When even a man in disguise could not. A wolf traveling in a forest did not draw suspicions. And a wolf could be trained to follow a certain route, certain procedures. To return to a certain spot on schedule. A wolf was wild, but the man inside the werewolf could learn.

  Fritz had been a shepherd boy, like in one of the old fairy tales, tending sheep in pastures at the edge of a Bavarian forest. Still living the old ways, with the old fears. Then, he cried wolf, and no one heard him.

  He survived the attack, and the bite marks and gashes on his legs healed by morning, and everyone knew what that meant. He knew what to do, and on the next full moon he spent several nights in the woods alone. Howled to the sky for the first time. When he returned, friends and family said nothing about it, did not ask him what he felt or what he’d experienced. He learned to live with the monster, but he no longer looked after his family’s sheep.

  The war came, and he was too young to be recruited as a proper soldier, but a man from the SS found him. Said he was forming a special unit, and that he’d heard rumors about these forests. About the shepherd boy who no longer looked after sheep. Colonel Skorzeny had a job for him, and you did not tell men like that no, so Fritz went with him.

  His new home, a compound fenced in with razor wire—steel edged with silver, he was told—had normal barracks and storage buildings and such. There were also cages, for those who had not volunteered, or who had changed their minds. The soldiers carried knives and bayonets laced with silver. Silver bullets loaded their guns. A mere nick from one of those blades, a graze from one of those bullets, would kill him. Fritz did as he was told.

  Fritz had never met another werewolf before joining Skorzeny’s special unit. The SS colonel had found a dozen of them across Germany, and he made more, finding soldiers who volunteered to be bitten, and a few who didn’t. Fritz was the youngest, and his instinct was to cower, to imagine a tail folding tight between his legs, to lower his gaze and slouch before the older, fiercer werewolf soldiers. Skorzeny would yell at him for weakness because he didn’t understand, but the others recognized the gestures of a frightened puppy. Some looked after him, as an older wolf in a pack would. Some took advantage and bullied.

  Fritz was a monster from a fairy tale. He shouldn’t be afraid of anything. What, then, did that say about the SS soldiers he cowered before? Who were the greater monsters? He told himself he deferred to them because he was loyal to the Fatherland, because he fought for the Führer, because he believed. But when he returned from a mission in the pre-dawn gray, lying naked at a rendezvous point as soldiers waited to esc
ort him back to the barracks and the silver razor wire, he knew the truth: he was afraid. Even he, near invulnerable, a monstrous creature haunting dark stories, was afraid. This was the world he lived in.

  Tonight was the full moon. He had two choices: to stay human and shoot the woman before night fell, or to wait until the light of the moon transformed him, and let his wolf do the work with teeth and claws.

  In the forest some miles outside Aachen, he did not trust his wolf to do what needed to be done. The wolf worked on instinct, on gut feeling, and in the end Fritz could not tell his wolf what to do, especially on a full moon night. He had tried to argue with the colonel, who wasn’t a wolf and didn’t understand. But the colonel said this mission must happen now, and must be completed tonight. The Allies were gaining ground and a message needed to be sent to other would-be collaborators, that death awaited them.

  So Fritz went. He would have to complete the mission, not his wolf, because he suspected his wolf would follow his instinct and run to safety. Away from Germany. He and his wolf had been having this argument for months now.

  He found the house; it wasn’t hard. As the description said, it stood alone, isolated, and the woman lived by herself. She walked to the village several times a week, but she rarely had visitors. The place seemed oddly comforting: an old-fashioned white-washed cottage with a thatched roof, a garden plot that still had a few odd remnants left over from the fall harvest, a well lined with stones and a wooden bucket beside it. He circled the place, smelling carefully, and only smelled a woman, Maria Lang. And she was at home.

  He camouflaged himself behind a tree on a small rise some hundred yards away and watched for the next hour until she opened the front door. He had good vision, a wolf’s vision, and even from the hilltop he could see his target. Standing on the threshold of her doorway, she wrapped a woven shawl more tightly over her shoulders and looked out. Not searching for anything in particular, not bent toward any chore. Just looking.

  When her gaze crossed the hill, her eyes seemed to meet his, and he started.

  Smiling before she ducked her face, she went back inside and closed the door. She had seen him—or she had not. If she had, perhaps she believed he wasn’t a danger. Some hunter lost in the woods. A boy from the village.

  If she did not believe he was a danger, he could simply knock and shoot her when she opened the door. In loyal service to the Fatherland. Keeping low, moving quickly, he made his way toward the cottage.

  He could not explain the feeling of dread that overcame him as he left the shelter of the trees and approached the clearing where the garden plot and semi-tamed brambles spread out. The setting still appeared idyllic. A curl of smoke rose from the leaning stone chimney, indicating warmth and comfort inside. These were like the cottages at home. This should be easy. But he took a step, and he could not raise his foot again. As if the ground had frozen, and his boots had stuck to the ice. As if his bones had turned to iron, too heavy to shift. The cottage before him suddenly seemed miles away. The sky grew overcast, shrouded with clouds, and a wind began to murmur through the trees.

  His wolf scented magic and told him to run.

  The memory of Colonel Skorzeny and his silver bayonet urged him on, and Fritz forced another step. Forward, not away. Only a few steps, a knock on the door, and he could finish this. The gun was already in his hand.

  Next came the voices, a scratch-throated chattering descending over him like a fog and rattling his ribs. He put his hands over his ears to cut out the noise, and looked up to see ravens. Glinteyed, black, wings outstretched and blurred as they flapped over him, and their nearly human croaking seemed to call, away, away, away. They banked and swooped and tittered, brushing his hair with wingtips before dodging. He snapped at them, teeth clicking together, and swatted with fingers curled like claws. Wolf would make short work of them. But he had vowed to stay human. The gun sat coldly in his hand.

  He ignored the ravens, which settled in surrounding trees and cawed their commentary at him. They smelled like dust and spiders.

  He shifted a leg to take another impossible step, but again he could not move. Vines had come, thorny brambles reaching from the solid hedge to take hold of him, to dig into the fabric of his trousers, and under that his skin. The pain pricks of a thousand little needles. A growl caught in the back of his throat. A threat, a show of anger. Wolf, wanting to rise up. Wolf could escape this, if the human was too stupid to.

  Teeth bared, Fritz jerked his leg forward, then the next. His trousers ripped, as did his skin. Blood trickled down his legs. Still the brambles climbed, reaching for his middle, grasping for his arms, pulling him away from the cottage. He twisted, lunging one way and another, hoping to break away, and it worked. Vines ripped, he progressed another foot or two, and his momentum carried him full around—and when he faced away from the cottage, the brambles vanished.

  For a long time he stood and looked across the clearing to the straight pines of the forest, all quiet, all peaceful. He could move freely—as long as he moved away from the cottage. It was all illusion. His breath caught.

  He really had no choice about what path to choose. He could not fail in his mission. He could not take the coward’s route. But when he turned back to the cottage, the brambles returned, the battle resumed. His wolf’s strength let him fight on when a normal person would have been overwhelmed, succumbing to the blood and pain of the thorny wall. He wrenched, pushed, twisted, and growled, until the last strand of vine broke away, and he was through, close enough to the cottage to touch.

  His wolf’s agility meant he sensed the ground give way a moment before it did. A hole opened—no, a trench, or a moat even. A cleft in the earth, circling the cottage, splitting open and falling to darkness. Fritz sprang back, balanced as if on a wolf’s sure paws, to keep from falling backward into the vines, or forward into the pit. His toes pushed a stone and few bits of brown earth forward, and the pieces rattled down the sides to some unseen bottom.

  Colonel Skorzeny had not told him that Maria Lang was a witch. The cleft widened, the edge nearest him crumbling further, forcing him to inch away until the brambles with their reaching thorns threatened to claw into his back. This was impossible. This also made him furious. He wasn’t a boy, a feckless common soldier, he was a wolf. Hitler’s werewolves, the colonel called them, and they saluted with their heils and expected victory.

  Fritz dug his booted toes into the earth, called on wolf’s strength, imagined the light of the coming full moon filling him further, giving him power. He took a single running step and jumped. Crashed to the ground on the other side of the pit, rolled once, hit the cottage’s front door, and slumped to a rest. His ears were ringing, his muscles ached. He’d only traveled a few feet but felt as if he’d run for miles. For a moment, he couldn’t remember why he’d come here at all.

  The door opened, and the woman stood on the threshold, looking down on him. His information said she was in her thirties, but he couldn’t decide if she looked old or young. Her hair was black, tied under a blue kerchief. Her lips were full, but pale. Laugh lines creased her eyes. Her hands were thin, calloused.

  “Boy, would you like some tea?” she said. Her voice was clear, amiable. Something like an aunt, not so much like a grandmother, and nothing like a witch.

  “But I am a werewolf,” he blurted, perhaps the first time he had ever stated this aloud.

  “Yes, I know,” she answered.

  He looked over his shoulder at the way he’d come. The clearing, the garden, the forest and hill beyond—all were normal, utterly ordinary, the way they had been when he arrived. He looked at the gun in his hand, and the woman who didn’t seem at all afraid. Sighing, he climbed up off the ground and followed her inside.

  She showed him to a straight-backed, rough-hewn chair, and obediently he sat. She had an old-fashioned open hearth with a fire burning, and already had a kettle set to boiling water. He watched as she used a dish cloth to move the kettle from the fire, pour water into a
teapot, and scoop in herbs from an earthenware jar.

  He looked around. The place was filled with herbs, jars of them lined up on a shelf, bundles of them hanging from roof beams, mortars and pestles sitting on a work table in the center of the room, all dusted with herbs. The pungent smell, strong as a Christmas dinner, made him sneeze. Stairs led up, probably to an attic bedroom. The whole cottage was as cozy as one could wish for, insulated and warm, filled with signs of home. Fritz was surprised that his wolf wasn’t complaining about the closed space and the shut door. His wolf did not feel trapped, but instead had settled, like a puppy curled by a fire.

  He blinked up at the woman, confused. “They told me you were a nurse.”

  “Healer, not a nurse. They couldn’t tell the difference, I’m sure.”

  “You’re a witch.”

  She smirked at him. “You are very young. Here, have some tea.”

  And just like that she presented him with a teacup and set it in his hands as she slipped the gun away from him. He didn’t even notice until he’d taken a long sip. The tea warmed him, and the warmth settled over him. Citrus and cinnamon, and hope.

  Then he stared at his hands, his eyes widening. She set the gun on the worktable out of his reach and left it there as she poured herself a cup of tea.

  “What have you done to me?” he cried.

  “I haven’t done anything.” Her smile should have been beautiful, full lips on a porcelain face, but the expression held wickedness. Mischievousness. Tricks. “I have nine layers of protection around my home, knowing people like you would come to kill me. You should have dropped dead—even you, with your half-wolf soul—should have dropped dead before you reached my door. Do you know what that means?

  “You never truly meant to kill me. You thought you did, perhaps. You might have held the gun in your hands and pressed the barrel to my chest, but you could not have killed me. Everyone would call you a monster if they knew what you were. But you have a good heart, don’t you? What of that, boy?”