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The sound of a clock ticking down the hours fills the room and echoes the steady beat of his heart. A sliver of the night sky is framed between thick iron bars. Distant stars that shine hard, unforgiving light.
The moon is absent, but Steve can feel it waiting to slip past the horizon’s hold. The hair on the back of his neck and arms raises and the wolf part of himself shifts behind his eyes.
Anger boils beneath the surface and he fails to stop himself from lashing out. A growl rumbles in the back of his throat, slipping free from the cage of his teeth. White knuckled fist colliding with stone and mortar. Skin splits open and blood welling up. Crimson drips onto the flagstones.
A sharp gasp of air catches Steve’s attention and he turns from the wall to face the other occupant of the cell. The girl sitting on the pallet across the cell, folds into herself a little more. Face pale, eyes wide behind the glass and wire of her spectacles. She’s a tiny little thing, all dark hair and curves hidden by a layer of dirt.
“Sorry, kid,” Steve says. And he means it, even if he can’t change fate, hers or his own.
“Doubtful,” the girl says, unfurling her body and getting up on her bare feet. Darlene or Doris, he can’t quite remember what she said when the Baron tossed her into the cell. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I wouldn’t be. It’s not your fault I got kidnapped from Dr Foster’s research trip and thrown into a cell into whatever this place is.
“I think it was a hospital once.” The girl tugs on the hem of her sweater, small hands twisting in the thick fabric. Steve catches the girl’s scent in the air, beneath the heavy taste of damp stone, metal, wool, is the girl’s warm skin and faded roses. Her name comes to him then, drifting out of the depth of his memory. “Miss Lewis.”
“Professor Rogers,” Darcy says. “I didn’t think you would remember.”
“Dr Foster’s assistant. You were at the library in Tønsberg researching his next book.”
“Her next book, on the local variant of Norse Mythology. While you were mucking about in the church,” Darcy says, tapping the silver ring on her pinky against the iron bars of their prison.
He feels it then, the slow drag of the moon cresting the horizon. A ripple of pain moves through his body, and he jerks his face towards the small barred window. Ribbons of fog thread through the trees and between the black lace of branches hangs the moon. The moon hangs heavy and full, bathed in crimson.
Steve curls his hands into fists. Thick nails cutting into the skin. He can feel the change setting in. His teeth ache in his jaw, and another cramp twists painfully in his belly and up along his spine. “I’m sorry,” Steve says, the syllables slurring together.
“It’s not your….Professor? Uh, Steven,” Darcy says. She flattens her back against the cell wall. “Right? Steve. Oh god….”
Steve collapses on the stone floor, as the shift sets into his bones. Her words ramble on but the meaning is lost.
There is only the moon and pain. There is only the wolf. Only prey.
All the color fades from the world, until all the wolf can see is black and white, the blood red glow of the moon and the girl.
Words spill from the girl’s lips, a discordant noise that makes his ears twitch. There is meaning there but the wolf is not the man, and the meaning unravels. A growl rattles the cage of the wolf’s ribs, and he stalks toward the only living thing in the strange stone den, the girl.
The wolf breathes in the scent of the girl. Drinks in the salt scent of fear and sorrow, the bitter taste of anger that echoes the man. The girl moves slowly, taking the metal wire from her face, and the wolf catches the scent of something old. Something that itches the back of his brain and raises the fur along his spine.
The girl tilts her head to the side and her eyes open wide. The wolf cannot look away, cannot twist and jump and sink his teeth in. The girl’s eyes are all wrong. The pupils, vertical slits, that hold the wolf still as winter ice. He cannot move, cannot breathe, his body growing weak, like the starving time, until all is darkness. Not even the moon can call the wolf from his stone slumber.