SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

1

Giovanni Lupo walked fast, hands in his pockets, one wrapped around the tubular lead weight he carried in case he needed a little more oomph behind his considerable right hook.

It wouldn’t help against a German patrol, but a single adversary would pay the price if his jaw got between Giovanni and his escape route. It might be all the advantage he needed. He walked fast, hoping to beat the rapidly approaching darkness as well as the random patrols.

For as dusk arrived, so would the Allied bombers.

They came every night, almost as soon as the sirens went off and the spotlights went on, trying to catch their silhouettes like bugs on a glass.

Giovanni Lupo lived with his family on the outskirts of Genova, the huge port city whose importance to the German war machine was incalculable. Its factories had turned to slave labor to churn out goods for the war effort, but it was Germany’s war effort — no longer Italy’s. In September 1943, the Italian monarchy and its political backers signed a secret armistice with the Allies. As soon as it became known that Italy had surrendered, the German ally’s resident forces had become an outright occupation. Everyone knew the war was lost except the mad German leadership, and few Italians saw the benefit of that, but the die was cast.

But those factories were a fat prize for the Allied bombardiers. As was the German high command, located somewhere near the harbor.

Now heading home on foot from his meager employment in a local foundry that had miraculously avoided nationalization by the Germans, Giovanni Lupo kept a cautious watch for German patrols, his greatest fear. They would sometimes sweep up able-bodied Italian men to fill gaps in factory assembly lines.

A typical tactic was for a covered truck to drive to a public square or market, pull up, and disperse a platoon of Wehrmacht infantrymen who would then round up bystanders and passersby and hold them at gunpoint until a cattle van could cart away the victims.

Giovanni watched for the rumbling covered trucks.

He was convinced his ears were sensitive. The moment he heard the unforgettable gear-grinding sound of one of those vehicles, he would melt into one of the narrow lanes that lined the street. He had mapped numerous routes home to avoid this very danger. He walked briskly, avoiding the glances of strangers, hoping he could make it home without trouble. His fellow pedestrians surely thought the same and went their way, avoiding him.

He looked straight ahead, ears attuned to the infrequent roar of a motor vehicle or the grinding of trucks.

Maria, I’m coming home. Don’t worry too much.

He hoped his son had found his way home from school by now. A month ago, a teacher had disappeared — presumably in a street sweep. The children had been dismissed until a substitute could be coaxed from another school farther away. Hardly anyone wanted to work so close to a German high command, for it was an Allied high-priority target.

Giovanni had worked a full day for the first time in months, eagerly accepting the opportunity to earn a few extra lire. Maybe there would be eggs and some lard in the kitchen tomorrow because of it.

Again Giovanni thought of his son’s long walk home from school. Some of it was through rural lanes and secondary streets, but he should be safe if he walked straight home without any distractions. Unfortunately, Franco was the kind of boy for whom everything was a distraction. If not for this damnable, senseless war — and its resulting occupation by the goddamned Germans — his son would have been at the top of his class in studies. But the school slowdown had stunted the book learning, and Giovanni was beginning to fear his boy was getting too much of a street education. He spent half his days running in the streets.

But it was the thought of extra food, especially eggs and meat and oil, all of which he could almost taste — though he suspected that soon the Germans would begin to run out of oil as well, if the rumors of their losses in the South were true — that distracted Giovanni from his single-minded route home.

And distracted him from two very important things.

One was the approaching command car, which was crawling along scouting the streets ahead of its “collection” squad.

The other was the exact moment at which dusk would become evening.

Giovanni turned the corner and found himself facing the command car, which swerved toward him with a squeal of tires. Two burly German soldiers leapt from the rear before the vehicle had even come to a full stop.

Taken by surprise, Giovanni shrank back against the wall behind him, having forgotten it was there. He lost precious time trying to decide whether he should pull his lead-heavy hand from his pocket and fight, or flee the way he’d come. Unfortunately, the momentary indecision tied up both options, for his weighted hand caught in his clothes and at the same time he couldn’t reorient his legs and feet in order to allow for a sprint away from the uniformed thugs who were upon him.

Merda!

His fist was trapped.

His feet tripped over themselves and he went down sideways even as the two Germans caught him and yanked him off the sidewalk as if he were a child, their guttural orders and commands just a jagged jumble of sounds in his ears.

Oh no, Maria! This wasn’t what I wanted!

He struggled in their grasp. The two were larger than average, two bruisers who knew the ropes. They suspected his hand held a weapon and made sure it couldn’t clear his damned pocket, and by keeping his feet off the ground he was off-balance as well and found it impossible to gather enough leverage for a kick.

“Nooooo!” he shouted in frustration. Tears wet the corners of his eyes.

The two uniformed goons manhandled him, their faces grim with determination and single-minded purpose. Perhaps their well-being in the barracks depended on how they performed their duty.

He struggled in their iron grip even as they dragged him, sweating and screaming, past the waiting command car to where a covered truck was just now pulling up.

His legs swinging empty kicks at his attackers’ shins, his mouth keeping up a steady stream of curses that would have made his wife blush, he found himself being tossed face-first like a sack of spongy rotten potatoes over the rear gate and into the back of the truck.

His face stopped its painful slide on the rough planks by smashing into the muddy boots of another German soldier who thrust the muzzle of his submachine gun into Giovanni’s skull.

He couldn’t look up, but what was in his range of vision deflated his spirit and took the fight out of him. Boots all around him, and at the front of the truck bed, scuffed shoes and even bare feet — other conscripted unfortunates.

A stream of guttural syllables followed him onto the truck bed. One of the two burly thugs telling the other troopers he was probably armed.

Hands reached out for his arms on both sides and dug his fist out of his pocket as the gun muzzle threatened to burrow straight through his skull and into his brain. Rivulets of blood seeped down his forehead and into his eyes as he felt the gun metal scraping his cranium like a crowbar. His fist was forcibly removed from his pocket, the fabric tearing loudly, and the lead weight was pried from his fingers with inexorable strength.

My Maria! My son!

Beyond the pain in his head, the only thought he had was of his family and the fact that he would never see them again.

And almost exactly the next moment, the Allied bombers came.

Grinding up to a screaming wail, the nearest air-raid sirens signaled the arrival of the first wave of the night’s bombers. Not every night, not yet, but often enough to keep the German occupiers — and the innocent populace — guessing. Tonight the raid was slightly early, with a tendril of daylight left across the darkening sky, but there it was. The rumble of airplane engines slowly crawled over the land, and in seconds the crump-crump-crump of anti-aircraft fire joined in the cacophony as gunners began to lay down a barrage that would knock a percentage of the Liberators and Fortresses out of the sky before the raid was over.

Waves of American and English long-distance bombers targeted the harbor, the suspected high command, and the factories arrayed in long blocks between them. Typically, the first strings of ordnance fell short and landed in civilian neighborhoods.

Like this one.

The truck’s driver gunned the motor and squealed away from the cobbled curb.

The thugs who had thrown Giovanni onto the back of the truck leapt for the command car in their haste to escape the open street. They were in the crosshairs for a direct hit, or burial under rubble if the Allied bomb strings found a nearby building.

The soldiers who’d been frisking Giovanni and driving the gun muzzle into his cranium were thrown clear to the side as the driver swerved.

Giovanni took his opportunity, ignoring the pain in his head and face, he leapt up to dive off the rear of the truck. The soldier with the submachine gun regained his balance and managed to partially block Giovanni’s access to the open gate. Behind them, the cobblestones fled past as the vehicle gained speed. A series of explosions rocked the ground and the truck careened to the right-hand side.

Without even thinking, Giovanni’s hands wrapped around the barrel of the German’s submachine gun as if of their own volition and he snatched it away. Once in his grasp, he turned it around.

The short burst cut the soldier in half and threw him against his fellows in a heap.

As completely instinctively as the shooting had been, Giovanni made his split-second decision and dove from the rear of the vehicle. He hit the cobblestones hard, knocking the air from his lungs even as he rolled toward the gutter.

He still held the gun.

Down the street, a building collapsed after an Allied bomb struck its roof and ripped out its guts. The cloud of dust and debris obscured the street and pelted Giovanni’s back as he lay on the cobblestones trying to draw a breath.

He glanced over the debris and saw the truck teeter momentarily on two wheels, strike the opposite curb and overturn, spilling its human cargo like sacks of trash.

Giovanni struggled to his feet, submachine gun still in his hands.

Three soldiers spilled from the truck and one pointed at him.

Giovanni’s hands were bruised, his arms ached. But his right index finger twitched on the trigger as if he’d lost control, causing the Schmeisser MP40 to stutter in his grip. The breech ejected a stream of hot brass casings as the gun spoke in its own guttural dialect.

The soldiers flopped around in a gruesome dance as the 9mm slugs tore through them in ragged, bloody lines. The muzzle went silent when the magazine was empty, the bolt stuck in the open position.

Giovanni’s hands opened and the smoking gun dropped to the bricks.

He stared at the carnage he had wrought.

More soldiers were crawling from the truck’s sideways cab, one reaching for a sidearm. Yet another emerged from the covered rear, struggling to bring a Mauser rifle to bear.

Giovanni closed his eyes, waiting for the feel of the slugs tearing out his chest.

Instead, gunfire erupted all around him.

The Germans’ bodies fell twitching to the gore-slick road. Masked gunmen, sprinting from the cover of dark doorways and narrow lanes, ran to the wounded or dead Germans and shot them repeatedly in the head. Several motioned other civilian men from the rear of the truck, one of whom had been wounded in the gunfire and had to be carried. When the gunmen had made sure all the German soldiers were dead, they stripped the bodies of weapons and ammunition.

A gangly young man in a rakish beret walked up to Giovanni, who stood still stunned by what he had done, grasped his hand and pumped it enthusiastically.

“Grazie, signore. Lei e` un eroe!”

You are a hero!

“No!” Giovanni spat at him, breaking into a racking cough as the dust swirled around them. “No,” he repeated softly in disgust at what he had done.

“Si, certamente.” The young man was clearly in command of the rag-tag group of gunmen. He wore a tweed coat crossed by bandoliers — shotgun shells — and in his hands he held a fine Beretta hunting shotgun. He had a German Luger pistol holstered on his hip. He smiled broadly under a thin moustache. “I am Corrado Garzanti, field commander of the local brigade.”

“Partigiani?” Partisans?

“Of course.” He gestured at his men. “We were about to ambush the collection patrol when you took matters into your own hands, eh? Very nicely done.” He pointed at the bleeding bodies.

“How? How did you know? To be here, right now?”

Corrado waved the question away. “We have sources. People who listen and report. We expected them. We did not expect you, however.”

Giovanni’s head spun a little and he stumbled sideways, almost losing his footing. Ragged bursts of gunfire and screams came from farther down the street and he whirled, apprehensive.

“It’s just my men taking care of the command car. Those dirty German bastards are never going home.” Corrado reached out and steadied Giovanni before he could collapse.

“I think you had better come with us. It won’t be safe here very soon. We survived the bombing, but the bastards will be out looking for revenge. Damned bad idea to be out on the street then.” He waved at one of his men. “Dario, come here. I want you to escort our hero home to pack his things.”

“No, no, it’s not necessary.”

“Oh, it is. If they find you, they will hang you with metal wire from a lamppost. It’s what they’re doing these days. Among other things. Come with us. We have a safe haven. It’s not a palace, but it’s a good home. And they don’t know where it is.”

“No, you don’t understand, I have a wife and a child. I have a family! I can’t go away with you. What happens to them?” Giovanni swayed and the partisan leader steadied him again.

“Clearly, you cannot just go home. Va bene, we take you there and you take your family with you. We have enough space. Most of us have lost our families, but there are a few.”

“Corrado,” said Dario, pointing at his watch. “It’s almost time for the lupi.”

“I know—”

The air raid siren ground to life again, its insistent wail gathering strength as the rumbling of invisible aircraft reached them.

“Arrivano ancora!” Corrado shouted. Second wave! His men knew what to do. And suddenly Corrado’s fist jabbed out and caught Giovanni’s jaw, snapping his head back and dropping him like a broken doll.

“You and you,” Corrado pointed at the strapping Dario and another man. “Take him between you. He’s coming to the sanctuary. He has no choice now.”

Giovanni moaned as hands grabbed him.

Maria.

He lost the light at the same moment the first string of bombs stitched their way toward the harbor, taking down a block of tenements and shops in a cluster of explosions, jetting gas fires, and a spreading cloud of dust and debris.

Giovanni welcomed the darkness.

2

He opened his eyes and immediately closed them. His vision was a blur of indistinct shapes — darkness broken only by flickering blobs of light. A church? He smelled candles. He tried to move his head and stopped when it seemed his jaw would break.

Somebody had hit him. There had been an air raid. There were guns and a shooting.

Santa Maria, he thought, I was doing the shooting.

Bit by bit the memory came nosing back and he started to put the pieces together. He realized he was shivering.

Where was he?

His moan brought one of the blobs suddenly closer. A cool touch on his forehead triggered memories and thoughts, but blinking brought forth only tears and pain.

“Sono io, Giovanni,” a calm but shaky voice spoke in his ear. “Sono io. Stai tranquillo.”

Maria! Thank God!

His hand gripped hers and brought it to his chest. He still couldn’t see very well, but the simple gesture slowed his heart from its onrushing pace and brought the tranquility she’d wished upon him. He started to rise but she pushed him back firmly.

“No, you might be hurt. And we have to stay silent.”

“What?”

“Shhhhhh.” Her hand caressed his face. “Trust me.”

He noticed movement behind her, more blurs making jagged little gestures. He smelled sweat and bodies. “What— Where are we? Where is—?”

Suddenly he was seized by the thought of what he hadn’t heard or yet felt. His son.

“Where is Franco?” he groaned, his voice rough.

“I don’t know,” she said, crying. “He was—”

Somebody stepped closer and whispered in a clipped voice, “Be silent or you’ll get us all killed!”

Giovanni felt Maria’s hand caress his face and softly cover his lips. He kissed her cool skin, but his mind reeled. His son wasn’t here, wherever here was. Maria was here, and these others, but not Franco.

His memory slotted into place and he remembered the firefight in the street. How he had ended up with a machine gun, and turned it on the hated German.

The bombing raid. The partisans.

Corrado Garzanti was the rogue’s name.

Corrado had hit him.

The bastard.

Giovanni’s legs trembled as he tried to stand. He reached for Maria.

Sounds — crashing, smashing sounds — from above and nearby reached them and his heart started to race again.

Corrado materialized beside him — a blob with glasses pinching his nose. “Listen to me,” he hissed into Giovanni’s ear, “they’re close to finding one of our secret entrances, and if they do we are all fucked in the ass. You understand? We have to slip out and fight them, kill them all before they can report. Are you up to it?”

“Up to it?”

Killing people?

Who was this idiot, asking him to kill…

Corrado’s band of partisans was gathering just behind, preparing by checking guns and knives, facing a wall that until now Giovanni had thought solid. But there was a vertical slit, a sort of narrow sloping passage, and the men were slipping through one by one.

“We’ll need you. Here.” Corrado handed Giovanni an old revolver, which he took but loosely. Corrado plucked it from his hand and tucked into Giovanni’s belt for him, where it felt alien. Then someone else handed him a Beretta submachine gun on a sling. He took it, reluctantly. It also felt strange in his hands, heavy and awkward, but not very different from the German gun he’d used to good effect earlier. This one was heavier, the stock wood and the barrel shrouded with extra metal. He looked back at Maria — but a tall man behind him was crowding him toward the passage.

It appeared he would have to pay his way.

The tall man and another fell in behind him, and all he could do was nod and try to smile at Maria before she disappeared behind them, but he had lost sight of her. And then he was stumbling into the passage. It was a ruined staircase, brick and mortar debris underfoot. Boots and shoes scraped in front of him, climbing, so he followed instinctively even though he could barely see.

They climbed single-file, seemingly endlessly until they reached a collapsed corridor. Then Giovanni smelled the evening air. They were outside, emerging from a hidden fissure between leaning stone walls. The short column of men snaked around the corner and he realized they were attempting to flank the German patrol before the shelter was sniffed out.

He gripped the Beretta’s stock tightly, his mind a jumble of fears.

They were nearly around the ruined building’s front corner when someone’s shoe kicked over a pile of debris, which groaned and came tumbling to the ground in a clatter of stone and wood, raising a cloud of dust.

An angry shout in German, and then another, and then there was a submachine gun burst and Giovanni realized the partisans, not yet in position, had been forced to open fire without cover. They were outlined against the wall.

“All’attacco, ragazzi!” Corrado shouted, urging his men on the attack, their intended surprise flanking shattered by the shouting and the gunfire. “Per la patria!” For the homeland!

The enemy was a series of indistinct shapes, like ghosts shimmering in the dark.

A man went down on Giovanni’s left, his chest split open by a fusillade of slugs.

Giovanni screamed in fear and anger and squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, letting loose a burst. Recoil tugged the barrel upward and to the left and he saw his rounds shatter a window too high up to catch any of the enemy. Another man went down on his right, a bullet in the head silencing him forever. Giovanni held the Beretta barrel down and sprayed lead until his breech locked open, the magazine empty. Someone shoved another magazine at him and he reloaded, somehow catching on instinctively. He shot at the ghosts again, and this time one of the shapes threw up his arms and collapsed, broken, against the bricks.

Gunfire raged around him and for a moment he thought the partisans were holding the enemy back, their bursts exacting a terrible toll.

A series of loud snarls broke through the gunfire, followed immediately by an unearthly howling. Giovanni stopped short, a shiver shooting down his spine. Despite the gun battle, this sound was viscerally more terrifying.

“Lupi!” someone shouted. Then the man’s voice turned to a gurgle as a dark, muscular shape lunged from the shadows and ripped out his throat.

Whatever it was, it snarled and shook its long snout and Giovanni heard a slaughterhouse ripping of bone and flesh and the dead man’s head came rolling to a stop at his feet.

Dio mio!

Giovanni couldn’t help staring for a split-second down into the dead man’s terrified eyes, already glazing, and then he stumbled aside until he couldn’t see the head and the jagged piece of spine protruding from its torn neck.

All around him he heard men screaming as more four-footed shapes materialized. For the first time he saw that they were giant dogs—

No, they were wolves.

And they were large… very large…

They lunged at men who shot at them over and over without any effect, their jaws snapping and tearing necks and limbs. Here was a partisan going down under a slashing, biting jaw full of fangs. There was a man with a wolf’s snarling snout buried in his belly, tearing out loops of bloody intestines as he screamed his last.

Out of the corner of his eye Giovanni saw one man shoot a wolf and the animal went down, screaming in rage, trying to reach around its back and bite the smoking wound. The tall man who had been behind him on the staircase leaped onto the wolf’s back, a silver blade flashing, and stabbed it twice in the neck before slitting the animal’s throat.

It all happened in mere seconds, but Giovanni swore he saw the wolf catch fire and squeal in agony as its blood seemed to boil. And then its body blurred, and impossibly, became a naked man, a human, whose greasy hair the tall partisan grabbed with a fist and pulled up, using the glowing blade to sever the head. The partisan tossed it aside with a shout of fury and victory.

Giovanni opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. What he had seen, it was not possible…

The battle had degenerated into single shots and snarls, screams of terror and pain, and gurgling sounds of bloody death.

And he heard the tearing of bone and tissue, the howling of victorious wolves.

How many are there?

He turned in time to see a giant wolf leaping for his throat. With no time to sidestep, he brought up the Beretta’s barrel and let loose a burst.

The bullets stitched across the wolf’s body and head and should have cut him to pieces, but Giovanni was horrified to see that the deadly lead barely knocked the animal off its stride. Its weight smashed into him and slammed him to the ground, jaws snapping at his neck.

The Beretta flew out of his grasp, and he threw up his hands to avert the wolf’s continuous attacks. Giovanni risked one hand and scrabbled for the revolver tucked in his belt, the other hand desperately fending off the wolf’s fangs. Its raging eyes seemed red in the near-darkness.

He brought up the pistol by feel and shoved the barrel under the wolf’s jaws. Those red blazing eyes seemed to roll crazily, and held his as the wolf gathered for a final push. Giovanni pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. The bullets ripped through the fur, bone, and skull.

Giovanni sucked in air and started to throw off the dead animal’s weight.

In the moonlight, the wounds caused by his bullets began to close up and disappear. The wolf’s red eyes found his and it seemed to smile at his shock and terror.

Then he was awash in a gush of gore as an anonymous hand bearing a flashing silver blade slit the wolf’s throat just before it could press its advantage and bite off Giovanni’s face.

It was the tall man from the tunnel who’d done it, a grim smile on his face as he nodded and then jumped to the aid of another partisan locked in a struggle for his life with yet another impossible animal. The tall man’s blade slashed, opening the wolf’s throat. The animal’s shriek of pain and rage as the blade burned through its flesh and tendons would haunt Giovanni to the moment of his death. And so would the sight of this dead wolf blurring into a dead human. To his right, where his lupine attacker had been, now sprawled a dead man. The tall partisan severed both heads with grim efficiency.

“Must make sure, eh?” he said gruffly.

Giovanni got to his knees unsteadily. The battle was over, won apparently, by Corrado and his men, but at a terrible cost. A half-dozen partisans lay dead, their bodies scattered near the side of the building, grotesquely disemboweled. Five naked, decapitated men marked where the wolves had died. Several uniformed German soldiers also lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets.

Corrado was alive, his coat covered with splattered blood.

“Thank you, Turco,” he said, clapping a hand on the tall man’s shoulder. “Without you, I don’t know—” He stopped, his haunted eyes finding Giovanni’s. “You fought well. You’re one of us now. We saved the shelter, this time. But now you must not watch. Turco, I don’t envy you this job.”

The tall man shrugged. He moved to each of the dead partisans and stabbed them in the heart before sawing off their heads.

Giovanni thought he had been horrified by everything up to now. But this was too much!

He was too hoarse to shout, but almost did. “What sacrilege are you—?”

“It’s necessary, believe me,” Corrado said, making a half-hearted sign of the cross. “We must be sure they are dead, and that they were killed with that blade. Otherwise there’s a possibility…”

Turco was finished with his task. The two rallied the surviving partisans around them. Wounds were inspected. Most were minor, and Giovanni noticed that Turco remained nearby, the unsheathed silver blade touching every survivor — including himself.

Corrado noticed Giovanni’s questioning look. “We have learned to look after ourselves,” he explained, but it was no real explanation as far as Giovanni was concerned.

Exhausted, his body aching and his mind still reeling at all he had seen, all he wanted to do was climb down those stairs and see his wife.

And then he would go find his son.

Se Dio vuole, he thought. God willing.

3

Corrado had shucked his bloody coat and now wore a thin, once-white dress shirt. He shivered in the night’s chill, present even here in the shelter.

“Now you know what we are up against,” he told Giovanni. “Since late last year, the Germans have sent those things against us, night after night.”

“But… what are they?”

“Do you not remember the stories your parents told you when you were young? They are wolf-men, just like the legends.”

“It’s just too… It’s impossible.”

“You saw it with your own eyes. But for Turco, one would have torn you apart. We know what they are, but they are almost impossible to kill. The Germans are retreating, but they have deployed a rear guard made up, partly, of this Werwolf Division of theirs. The monsters have done their worst in the hills and used to stay out of the cities, mostly, but now they are being used against us here as well.”

“You said you can’t kill them? But they did die.”

Corrado snorted quietly. “Sure, but at what cost. They can be killed, but it takes special…” He leaned over and whispered even more quietly. “That man there, hunched in the corner?”

Giovanni saw a man whose look was haunted. His eyes seemed feverish, his skin pale. He hadn’t been part of the gun battle.

“He’s a priest. He has fought with us. He is a Jesuit. You know what that means?”

Giovanni shrugged. He knew who Jesuits were, of course, but…

“He has done exorcisms. He has faced evil before and survived. And he has brought us more than just his own fighting spirit. From Rome, he has brought us a weapon.”

“Rome?”

“From the Vatican.” Corrado scratched his stubble. “You want to talk with him? Will it make you feel better about what you have seen?”

Giovanni’s eyes unfocused as he stared at the priest. Then he nodded.

“Hey, Babbo, this guy wants to talk to you,” Corrado called out across the room.

The priest stood and moved as if uncertain of his footing. As if his feet were submerged. He looked to have been muscular and then run to fat, but now the fat had dissipated and his skin was sallow and bag-like.

He came to a stop near Giovanni and Corrado. His priest’s collar was long gone. His eyes were glazed by lack of sleep or war-weariness. Both.

“You’re that new one,” he said. “You have a pretty wife.”

Giovanni nodded. “Yes, and a son. But I don’t know what happened to him. I wanted him here with me, but he’s missing. And now I’m not sure I want him here. I don’t know what I want. Except… I want to know that what I saw out there cannot exist.”

The priest sighed and sat stiffly near them.

He pointed at Corrado and said: “He calls me Babbo, dad, because he’s not very religious.” His expression was more sympathetic now. “I see how much you fear for your son. What happened?”

Corrado moved away, checking on his men.

“I was out working when the Germans picked me up for one of their damned slave-labor details. I didn’t intend— I… found myself fighting even though it was the last thing I wanted. My son was out with his friend Pietro, playing, as he does every day since their school was closed. That was when Corrado’s men grabbed my wife too, but my son wasn’t home. I’m grateful, they may have saved her, but now I want to find Franco and they won’t let me go.”

“My name is Father Tranelli. I will have a word with Corrado. He’s a good man, but he feels responsible for his fighters, and he cannot separate his hate for Germans from his responsibilities. But you saw what the Germans use against us…”

“What are they, Father?” The tremble in Giovanni’s voice betrayed how haunted he was by the horror.

“They are men who have the ability to turn into wolves. You must remember the legends? The Middle Ages were full of sightings, convictions, and executions of so-called wolf-men. Mothers still terrify their unruly children with tales of the uomo-lupo, the wolf-man, or the lupo mannaro — the werewolf. We have always had the legends, especially in the hill villages. But after the Germans became our occupiers and the war seemed already lost, they brought in the Werwolf Division as a rear guard. You know the damned Nazis, they like all that occult stuff. Nobody paid any more attention than to anything else they do. They have already a reputation for shooting civilians and imprisoning anyone they deem dangerous. But as Corrado will tell you, partisan units began coming into contact with groups of these wolves. First our fighters found their sentries killed, torn apart and disemboweled. Men on lonely outposts were killed by mysterious animals. But then the attacks became brazen, and now sometimes several werewolves will attack a patrol or even a safehouse.”

“But why can’t you kill them?” Giovanni slapped his hand on the table. “I saw your men shoot them at point-blank range and yet the wolves survived and still reached them.”

“Werewolves are magical beings, young man. I have no other explanation. They are of the devil, perhaps. They cannot be killed by normal means.”

“Then if there are many of them, we’ll all die…”

“These monsters are vulnerable to one thing. You saw yourself. They are averse to silver. Any weapon made of silver will have an effect on them, and bullets cast from pure silver can kill them. It acts like liquid fire inside their bodies. We have dispatched quite a few, recently. And tonight. But we are still susceptible to their attacks.”

“Why not make silver bullets by the thousands then?”

“My friend, because there is not so much silver to go around. The people used it for money in the early days of the war, when they needed to buy food for their families. Whatever they hoarded is not nearly enough. We use whatever we can get, but we have to make it count. Whenever new people join us, we ask for their silver. It is still not enough.”

“How can you still have your faith after seeing… after seeing that?”

“Who says I still have faith?” The priest rubbed his tired features with a claw-like hand. “Well, I do, even if it’s not like before. I know things have changed in my mind. But I’m a Jesuit, and I can persevere through anything, as Jesus himself was able to do.”

Corrado had returned and heard the last part. “Have you told him yet? The worst part?”

“No, but I will now.” He sighed a long sigh and Giovanni thought he heard the rasp of disease coming from him. “We learned that it’s much better to be killed by the beasts than merely bitten. A man bitten but not killed will inevitably turn into a monster on the next full moon.”

Father Tranelli shook his head. His brown eyes were watery.

“Dio mio.” Giovanni crossed himself. Startled, he realized he hadn’t done so in years. “This is why even the corpses were… stabbed and…”

“God forgive us, yes. Beheaded. We believe it’s the only way to make sure.”

Giovanni was reminded of what Corrado had said. “You spoke of the weapon. It was the blade? Something about the Vatican?”

Tranelli glared at Corrado for a second. “I was in Rome a year ago,” he said, finally nodding and rubbing his thinning hair, “but originally I’m from a small village about fifty kilometers from here. It… it was a village. Now it’s a butcher shop that has been closed a long time. The people there, they were my family and my flock, and this damned Werwolf Division went there and slaughtered all of them because of one shot a boy took at a German soldier. These hellish things, they were let loose in the town square and by the time they were finished, there were thirty-eight butchered corpses. It was worse than what they usually do, line people up and shoot them. This time they… they hunted them down and tore them to pieces, all for the sake of vengeance. When I heard, it was too late to save anyone from my family. The people I grew up with. Everyone was gone. All I could do was pray over what was left of their corpses, and hire men from the next town to dig a long line of graves. It was all I could do, you see?” His skin seemed feverish. The priest clawed through his thinning hair again, a habit by now. “But it wasn’t all I could do. I made a visit to the Vatican library. The Prefect is a friend of mine, and he has the keys to the secret archives which almost no one is allowed to see.”

He paused again. “Corrado, do you have wine?”

“No more for you, Babbo,” said the wiry partisan leader. “I need you almost sober.”

Tranelli licked his dry lips. The priest seemed used up, dried out.

“Va` bene, figlio mio.”

“You were saying,” Giovanni prodded. “About the materials stored in the secret archives.”

Father Tranelli hunched over the rough table. “Yes, there are many secrets in the catacombs below the Vatican,” he whispered, perhaps afraid the Germans would hear. Perhaps afraid something else would hear. “You see, the archives are located beneath a modern building, but there is an area at the rear of the newer section where walls were breached and the archives now include a long portion of the maze that makes up the fabled Roman catacombs. This area is under lock and key and watched over by armed guards, for the Vatican has acquired many books and other items in its history about which the world would be amazed and surprised to learn.”

Like an omen, air raid sirens started their frightening wail. Tranelli closed his mouth. Moments later the rumble of Allied engines reached them just before the rattle of anti-aircraft batteries and the rolling thunder of bomb drops.

Tranelli shrugged. “And so it continues. Where was I? Ah yes, the silver weapons. When I spoke to my friend, the Prefect of the Archives, and we discussed these cursed wolves and their aversion to silver, he showed me an old book — medieval, at the least — in which a mystic theorized that silver was a symbol of purity from time immemorial. And, as we all know, thirty silver coins were the payment Judas received for his betrayal of Christ.

“But the Prefect went even further than that, my young friend. You see, he told me that another book on his secret shelves contained the description of a pair of weapons fashioned from relics of the crucifixion. Someone was charged with smelting the thirty coins and using the silver to plate two daggers fashioned from a metal spear-point. It was no simple spear, however, but the spear of Longinus, the centurion who inflicted the fatal wound on Christ while he languished on the cross. Normally death comes to the crucified by asphyxiation. The Roman soldier later realized his spear had been blessed by its contact with the holy flesh and repented, even though his act had been merciful.”

The priest paused here, wiped his dry mouth, and clearly wished for wine. “I don’t know exactly how it came about, but the silver-plated blades were specially intended to kill werewolves, which up to that point had been invulnerable to any weapon. Since then, it is said, all silver is abhorrent to wolves. The silver-plated weapons were matched with wood from either the Longinus spear, or from the true cross — or from both, the book was imprecise, as old tomes often are — which was fashioned into scabbards for the daggers.”

“What’s the value of that?” Giovanni asked, interested despite his meager belief. In the distance, Allied planes pounded the harbor. He hoped this time, at least, they had found their target. Giovanni also hoped the German warships anchored there were taking a beating.

The priest explained: “One thing, the sanctified wood seems to veil the silver’s presence, so a werewolf cannot quickly sense the imminent danger of a formidable opponent, making it easier to take one by surprise. The mystic I spoke of further theorized that the holy weapon might be used by one man afflicted with the werewolf disease to fight and vanquish another, because he would be able to keep the blade close to his body without himself suffering the excruciating burns the silver would have caused him otherwise. The mystic called the dagger the werewolf’s werewolf killer.”

“Well, all this knowledge is fine and good, and your friend was certainly helpful, but what good has it done here?”

“After showing me the book, the Prefect went to a locked cabinet in this most secret of places and from it he removed a wooden case which held both daggers. He gave them to me, my friend, and I have brought them to Corrado.”

“My God.”

“Yes, perhaps it is God giving us an advantage. Perhaps it is something older than God. I am certain I do not know.”

“What does your friend think is the origin of these monsters?”

“My friend recounted the famous legend of Romulus and Remus, the babes who founded Rome — but more importantly, who were abandoned and later suckled by a she-wolf. Every schoolchild has heard this one, but there is an older, lesser-known legend in which the two male babes were not rescued, but were the offspring of the she-wolf, the result of copulation with a human. In this version, the babes Romulus and Remus were the first shapeshifters, and they passed on the gene to their own offspring. Perhaps the full moon’s influence on the night of conception has something to do with it. No one knows. But nothing could kill the cursed wolf-men until the Christ’s death led to the fashioning of the daggers.”

Giovanni digested the priest’s words.

“Now I want wine, Corrado, damn you.”

Outside, the all-clear sounded and the city came crawling out of its holes.

4

Giovanni blinked as they led him out of the air raid shelter they called Sanctuary.

It was dark, but even so it was brighter than the candle-lit cavern below.

After the all-clear, Corrado had assigned two men to accompany Giovanni to his apartment, where he hoped to find Franco.

Giovanni followed the tall, strangely nicknamed werewolf-killer Turco (who didn’t appear in the least Turkish) and a taciturn hulking giant of a man named Manfredo. They had given him a newer German P38 pistol he had again tucked into his belt, a commando-style knife, and in his hands he carried another Beretta submachine gun.

Just like that, it seemed, Giovanni had become a partisan.

Porca fortuna!

He was content to know Maria was as safe as she could be in the shelter, which was extensive and well-stocked, but his son’s safety was on his mind. And, if he were honest with himself, his own safety was as well — now, if he were stopped by the Germans, he would be summarily executed.

They crept through the ruined street, hoping that when they reached Giovanni’s there would be buildings left standing. No bombing could be completely accurate, but the amount of civilian devastation ringing the port was incredible. Parts of buildings spilled out debris and belongings, some still smoldering from this last Allied bombing run, which had mostly missed the harbor after all.

Here and there Giovanni saw a bloody arm or leg protruding from piles of brick and cement rubble. Confused survivors stumbled over the broken remainders of their lives, searching for loved ones, or memories to salvage.

Dazed, Giovanni followed Turco and Manfredo as they led him in redundant zig-zags down the street.

Turco held up a hand and they stopped, crouching low behind the remains of a brick wall. The thin, bearded academic didn’t look like a seasoned partisan, but Corrado had called him one of the best.

Giovanni couldn’t see what had caused Turco to stop them so suddenly.

Then a match flared only a couple meters away on the other side of the broken wall, and Giovanni made out a reflection on a German coal-shuttle helmet and the glint of a long bayonet fitted to the muzzle of a Mauser rifle.

Posted to catch us, Giovanni thought, his throat seizing and his heart racing.

Turco pressed his index finger on his lips, then waved Manfredo closer. His hand told Giovanni to wait there, under cover.

The two partisans crawled silently along their side of the wall until they reached a demolished corner. Shattered bricks lay all about. Giovanni could barely see, but these men had lived as outlaws for so long he assumed they’d developed night vision. They were now positioned immediately behind the unsuspecting sentry, as far as he could tell.

Suddenly there was a rattle of equipment, clothes, and debris as Turco went in high and dragged the German backward, his hand clasped tightly over the unfortunate’s face to keep him from shouting.

Manfredo lunged in from the side with the silver-bladed knife, ruthlessly plunging its length into the German’s side a half-dozen times. While Turco pulled the dying soldier back over the wall, Manfredo finished the job by slitting his throat with one savage motion.

They laid the bleeding, dying soldier on a bed of shattered bricks and raided his pockets and belt pouches for ammunition and food. A few moments later, a spasm took him and he sighed his last. Manfredo spat on him.

Turco nodded at Giovanni and they were on their way.

Giovanni gritted his teeth.

The whole encounter had taken less than a minute.

They continued, carefully avoiding the flickering light of fires that marked where gas lines had erupted, and any movement by crossing from shadow to shadow, occasionally hearing screams of pain and fear from people trapped in the ruins of their buildings. Giovanni’s heart cried, but Turco motioned them on, indicating they had to ignore the victims or they would themselves be sacrificed.

“We stop, we die,” he whispered.

Soon they left the devastated section behind with only a glow from the fires to mark what they had seen. As they approached Giovanni’s neighborhood, he was grateful to see that his building still stood — a seven-storey stucco-sided tenement with solid marble floors and heavy clay tile roof. It looked unharmed and his heart swelled at the thought of finding Franco at home.

“Watch out!” Turco cried, and lunged past.

Giovanni saw the glint of silver.

And heard snarling behind him.

5

By the time Giovanni managed to whirl around, the wolf was on him.

But Turco had also lunged at the attacking beast and intercepted the muscular body in mid-air. They both crashed into Giovanni and the three went down in a tangle of arms, claws, and fangs.

Giovanni dropped the Beretta and tried to wrestle the wolf with his bare hands, while Turco attempted to bring his magical blade to bear and still avoid the slashing teeth and claws. The wolf was damnably quick, out-maneuvering both men and making the three a blur that the giant Manfredo could do nothing about.

Giovanni kept the jaws away from his throat by pushing the red-eyed head away. Turco struggled with the sheathed dagger. If the Jesuit had been right, then the wood scabbard was shielding the wolf from the silver blade. Giovanni tried to shift the balance of the three squirming bodies to give Turco a chance to draw the blade.

But the wolf seemed to predict each attempt. Giovanni could either avoid the snapping jaws or help Turco. And the wolf knew it. He could read the monster’s intelligence in its demon eyes, which were neither animal nor human.

Turco grunted when the wolf clawed his face, but his grunt turned to a tortured scream — his cheek had been torn open and his jaw dislocated. Still barely managing to deflect the beast’s fangs, Giovanni realized with horror that the monster’s swipe had ripped Turco’s left eye from its socket and it hung from its optic nerve leaving behind a black hole in which he swore he could glimpse hell itself.

“Shoot him!” he shouted at Manfredo, who was frozen in place with his pistol extended, trying to draw a bead on the monster without striking either human. “Damn you, shoot him!”

Turco opened his mouth and screamed incoherently as the wolf suddenly gained the advantage and its snapping jaws tore the partisan’s clothing to shreds and dug savagely into his belly.

Giovanni felt the gush of hot blood and intestines wash over his chest and pried himself out from under the dying partisan and the savage monster. As he rolled out from under the two, it was clear Turco was dead.

“Bastard, shoot him now!”

Manfredo snapped out of his trance and placed the pistol mere centimeters from the back of the wolf’s head. The crash of the gunshot deafened Giovanni. Manfredo fired again and again, hot brass splattering from the breech. The slugs tore through the wolf’s skull and exploded through Turco’s head.

The wolf snarled and turned its blood-spattered muzzle toward Manfredo. It lunged and clamped its jaws on his gun-hand. Manfredo screamed as the wolf shook its head and tossed the severed hand and the pistol into the darkness.

Manfredo scrambled away, trying uselessly to stem the bleeding from the jagged stump. But before he could get clear, the wolf leaped off Turco’s body and its jaws closed on the giant’s unprotected groin. The demonic monster began shaking the shrieking partisan violently, blood gushing into its mouth and scattering like scarlet raindrops.

Operating now on instinct tinged with fear and rage, Giovanni scooped the dagger from the ground near Turco’s body and slid it out of its wooden sheath.

In the darkness, the blade seemed to glow with a moonlit sheen.

He drew the wolf’s attention from Manfredo, but before pulling away, the beast ripped into the wounded giant’s groin once more. Giovanni knew enough anatomy to figure the jetting blood meant an artery has been torn.

Manfredo would bleed out if Giovanni didn’t kill the wolf.

6

The monstrous wolf’s eyes burned with supernatural intelligence.

What did Giovanni have?

A damned dagger from the Vatican and a drunken Jesuit’s crazy story…

And a mission: he had a son to find.

The wolf advanced, snarling. Its bloody muzzle seemed to smile as Giovanni backed up slowly. Before he could refine his plan the monster was in the air.

Giovanni had feinted left and sold it well enough that the wolf went for him. While the wolf was committed to its attack, Giovanni sidestepped to the right. At the last second, while their bodies were in brushing contact, he brought the silver blade up and jabbed it deep into the monster’s side before sawing with heart-clenching fury.

The wolf shrieked in pain; an unholy sound that hurt Giovanni’s ears.

The blade furrowed the beast’s fur and skin with ease, parting its flesh as if he were made of dough.

The stench of burning flesh and fur rose in a plume of disgusting smoke.

The wolf fell in a heap and flipped, attempting to lick his blackening wound closed, but its side was split and its organs and intestines were spilling out in a bloody jumble. The smoke continued to pour from the widening gash as if its innards had caught fire.

Holy fire?

Could it be true?

Pressing his advantage, Giovanni plunged the blade through the beast’s right eye, into its brain. It died as soon as he slid the blade out, collapsing in a heap that now appeared to be burning from the inside out.

Body quivering, the wolf seemed to blur and Giovanni fell back and watched in wonder as it changed from animal to human and back again until it finally took the form of a naked man.

Gasping and wheezing, Giovanni stumbled as he tried to get farther away from the horror.

He checked Manfredo, but the partisan had died in a pool of his own blood. He stood for a moment, crying dry tears for the two heroic partisans who had given their lives to help him find his son, then he did as they had done with others’ bodies.

Giovanni found the scabbard he had dropped and bent to retrieve it.

He gasped. Suddenly his right upper chest felt as if it had been split open and he straightened and bent over again so quickly he almost fainted. Slowly, he patted his destroyed blood-drenched clothing and realized that some of the blood had to be his own. He scrabbled through the ruined shirt and hissed in pain as he found the source, a series of deep gashes and a ragged wound.

Gesu’ e Maria, he mumbled, I’m wounded.

Fangs or claws?

Did it matter?

His skin was bruised and rippled around the wounds, the flesh beneath blackening into a series of plum-colored circles. The bleeding appeared to have stopped — a blackened crust of blood was already hardening around each laceration.

He hastily rearranged the torn clothing to cover the hideous wound, hissing at the excruciating pain he felt as the fabric dragged across his flayed skin.

Gently he bent again, wincing, and retrieved the scabbard. Then he sheathed the dagger.

Did it hum in his grip?

He gathered his wits, found his bearings, and realized he was only a couple buildings away from his own. He retrieved the Beretta submachine gun and slung it painfully over his shoulder. One of his comrades’ pistols went into a pocket. The dagger remained in his hand, comforting.

Hunched over in pain, and fearful of being spotted by another German patrol, he hugged the shadows and found his way home.

The building seemed unfamiliar and he had to check the address plate twice to make sure he had indeed reached his own home. His family’s airy apartment was one of four located on the fifth floor. The lights in the lobby were out, but there was moonlight filtering through the skylight above him.

He shuffled up the stairs, the preternatural quiet frightening. Soon he was on his own floor. In the near-darkness, he saw that his apartment door was ajar.

Inside, the foyer was dark. His heart beat rapidly and his wound throbbed. He resisted the urge to touch it.

“Franco?” he whispered hoarsely. “Franco, are you here? It’s your father.”

After checking the small bedroom off the foyer, he advanced down the corridor. Franco’s room was empty. The next room was the bedroom Giovanni shared with his wife, but it, too, was empty.

The last two rooms were a long narrow bath — empty — and the kitchen. Standing in the kitchen, he swore he could hear a small heart beating.

“Franco?” he called out in a whisper that threatened to become weeping. His heart throbbed in time with his wound.

A tiny whisper came from a cabinet below the sink.

“Papá?”

“Franco! Dio mio, is it you?” He ignored the pain in his chest and sank to his knees, crawling toward the sink.

A boy’s face peeked from behind Maria’s frilly curtain, Franco’s face. But his eyes had aged since Giovanni had last looked into them. It was still the same day, but a lifetime had passed. Apparently for Franco, too.

“Are you all right, my son?” He didn’t let him answer, but instead gathered the boy in his arms and they rocked together, tears flowing for a long time.

“I’m all right,” Franco said. “And Mamma?” His voice trembled.

“She’s fine, she’s fine! We’re in a shelter.”

“I thought you were dead! Killed by those… things.” Franco sighed, laying his head on his father’s shoulder. “I’ve seen— Hey, there’s a lot of blood! Papá, are you—”

“I’m fine! It’s the blood of some brave men who helped me, God rest their souls.” He slowly shifted Franco’s face so he could see him better. “What about your friend Pietro?”

The boy suddenly started to weep. “We were great, we took them on, we saw them turn to wolves, we saw them kill, and then we ran and ran, but — oh, it was terrible! It caught us by surprise and it took Pietro, then it did terrible things to him. I ran away, Papá. When I could have helped him, I ran away, I ran all the way home and I hid like a baby.”

“No, Franco,” he soothed, “you couldn’t have helped him. If you saw the wolves, you know you couldn’t have fought them.”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

“I had help,” he said. “I had lots of help.” He touched the dagger in his pocket.

His son’s eyes were wide with fear from the memory.

“Let’s go,” said Giovanni, and they stood. “We can be with your mother in a short while, if we’re careful.”

He retrieved his submachine gun from the floor, checked to make sure it was cocked, and then took Franco’s hand.

As they walked out of the building and into the dangerous night, Giovanni wondered why his wound hadn’t bothered him in a while.

After a tense but eventless trek back to the shelter, the family reunion was joyful, though tempered by the loss of two good men who had given their lives to bring it about.

The partisan brigade leader, Corrado, had flown into a rage when informed the mission had cost two of his best, most experienced men, but a sober look at the condition of Giovanni’s blood-splattered clothes caused him to pause. Plus, the fact that he had not lost the Vatican dagger redeemed the situation in a small way.

“I have seen the dagger’s power,” he told Corrado, as he held hands with his son and wife. “And I’d like to be its guardian.”

He didn’t tell anyone he had been wounded in his life and death struggle with the wolf. He didn’t have to. The wound had disappeared by the time he’d changed into a borrowed shirt and jacket.

He was afraid of what that meant.

7

Giovanni awoke and sat bolt upright. It was dark in their sanctuary, though in some distant corner he could see the flickering glow of burning lamps or candles. And he could hear the disembodied voices of partisans talking quietly.

He felt strange. Dizzy and hot and itchy, like he was lost in a fever dream.

Maybe the past few days had been a dream, or more precisely an incubo, a nightmare. All of it. That certainly seemed more likely than the existence of savage German wolf-men. But he’d seen the truth of it with his own eyes, hadn’t he?

Giovanni wondered what day it was. How long had he slept? He remembered finding Franco hiding in their apartment and bringing him to their new home. They had returned just before dawn, and now — though it was nearly always dark where the partisans hid underground, a tiny bit of daylight trickled down through their many secret routes to the streets — it was clearly after nightfall. Had he slept all day, or even longer? Two days? Three?

Giovanni’s skin tingled where the wolf had wounded him. He reached up and touched it. The injury had somehow miraculously healed before he and his son had returned to the Sanctuary. He wondered if he had been mistaken, and what he had at first thought a wound was in fact Turco and Manfredo’s blood. Or if he had seen anything at all.

He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. More flowed from his pores.

Behind him, on a mattress tossed on the ground that had become their new bed, Maria and Franco lay sleeping peacefully.

Giovanni rose and swayed unsteadily. His head swam, from nausea or hunger, he couldn’t tell. More like starvation. And he was so damned hot. Without thinking of anything but relief from the sudden oppressive heat and itchiness of his clothes Giovanni stripped down, leaving every stitch in a pile beside the mattress. Then he moved quietly, shambling to the nearest exit — a set of uneven stone stairs that led to a hidden exit that opened onto the ruins of the city above. He needed some fresh air.

The stairs felt cool and damp under his bare feet, and the chilly night air felt good on his burning skin. In fact, it felt invigorating. It was the air and something else… the moonlight.

He could see it shining in through the cracks at the top of the stairwell, cool white light. It seemed to be calling to him much as it pulled the ocean tides. It drew him in, tugging at the small hairs on his naked arms and legs. It felt like it was causing his hairs to grow, pulling them as it summoned him to bask beneath its mesmerizing glow. As it did, he thought he saw a forest whipping past his vision as if he were running, running, ducking the shadows of trees in order to playfully catch the silvery moonbeams. These images playing across his mind’s eye suddenly seemed frightening, but he couldn’t deny them.

When he reached the top step he looked out over the decimated neighborhood’s crumbling walls. The piles of debris from the bombed out building looked oddly beautiful bathed in the full moon’s light. Nearby, a young partisan sat guarding the hidden stairway entrance. Giovanni recognized him. His name was Vincent. Rags that were once his Sunday clothes served as his uniform. He had a Beretta submachine gun resting on his knee and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked out at the street’s ruined structures, unaware of Giovanni approaching him from behind.

Giovanni opened his mouth to whisper a greeting, but what emanated from his throat startled him and young Vincent both.

Instead of whispering or even speaking, Giovanni growled.

The young guard whirled, abject horror engulfing his features. The cigarette dropped from his mouth as he leveled his submachine gun at a confused Giovanni.

Suddenly having no control of his own actions, Giovanni leaped forward — an incredibly far, impossible distance — and pounced on the terrified guard. And to his panic and amazement what he thought were his hands had somehow become a massive set of lupine paws.

Horrified at what he was doing, he sank his teeth — but they were fangs, weren’t they? — into poor Vincent’s neck and tore away a huge chuck of warm flesh. He swallowed and went back for more.

Vincent fell backwards. All that was left of his throat was the vertebrae of his neck surrounded by a few thin strips of grisly meat. His life jetted from the ruined artery in a fountain-like gush.

The beast that Giovanni had become stood in the growing pool of hot blood, which he lapped up greedily.

He fought to control himself, to stop the horror of what he tasted, but despite every bit of his will he couldn’t even bring himself to step back from the slaughter. It was as if he were a passive observer — watching through a window, or a mirror, as a monster fed on the still-jerking remains of a human being — but it was obvious he was the monster, even though he wasn’t controlling the muscles or the claws, or the jaws.

Something else had taken control.

The Devil.

It had to be the Devil, taking him for the evil he had done.

And as punishment, he couldn’t even look away or close his eyes to the horror before him. He had to live through every moment of it, watching through the window that was a mirror to his actions.

Showing its incredible intelligence, the beast Giovanni had become dragged the partisan’s warm corpse away from his sentry position and — once hidden in the shelter of a crumbling building — tore into Vincent’s belly and feasted on the soft, bloody innards. Within the body of the wolf-monster, what was left of Giovanni-the-human prayed to wake from this terrible nightmare as he tasted the flesh, chewing and swallowing like a machine. The fresh meat invigorated his body even as his mind screamed in revulsion and disgust.

But the beast wasn’t sated.

No, there was a deep-belly hunger the likes of which Giovanni had never experienced, and he knew the monster in front of his eyes wasn’t finished, not yet.

After finishing the choicest parts of the sentry (his name had been Vincent, and hadn’t he offered Giovanni’s family his mattress?), the beast he’d become began to prowl, looking for more food.

The creature moved effortlessly and without a sound through the rubble, the new and expanded palette of scents and sounds suddenly exploding in Giovanni’s brain. Even though he couldn’t make sense of the jumble of olfactory and auditory sensations, the beast took it all in and used it to hunt new prey while avoiding potential adversaries.

Ahead there was movement and the beast closed in as stealthy as a shadow in the dark.

Within the skull of the wolf-monster, Giovanni screamed when the creature spotted its newest quarry — a woman escorting two young children through the ghost of the city.

Straining with everything he had, Giovanni fought to stop the beast, or at least distract it. But it was futile. He knew now he was inside the monster — part of him at least was completely aware of it — but it didn’t seem as though he could influence its behavior.

The beast trailed behind the woman and her children, stalking them through the desolate, detritus-strewn streets.

Was it toying with them?

The woman glanced over her shoulder repeatedly while herding her babies, seeming to intuitively sense the presence of danger. And through the creature’s senses, Giovanni smelled the woman’s fear, her nervous sweat, and heard the heart pounding in her chest, her quickened breaths.

And despite his horror, Giovanni felt excited.

Sexually excited.

When the woman spotted the monster, her eyes grew wide with fear. She turned on her heel and pushed her young ones ahead of her. “Correte!” she said with a hiss. Run!

But the wolf was in no hurry. The prey couldn’t outrun it. He loped behind them, gathering speed, easily avoiding the scattered bricks and broken glass that littered the street, which the humans had no choice but to navigate carefully.

They were too frightened by now.

The woman stumbled over a mound of broken bricks and Giovanni could only look on in horror through the wolf’s eyes as it decided to end the game.

“Presto! Correte piu’ presto!” the woman yelled. Faster, run faster! She shoved her children even as the wolf pounced on her back, knocking her violently to the ground.

What was left of Giovanni cried out in torment as the wolf’s jaws — his jaws — sank into the back of the woman’s neck, snapping the bone as if it were a pencil.

The younger of the two boys stopped and turned back, his eyes and mouth gaping as he watched his mother’s terrifying fate. The child’s older brother grabbed his hand and jerked him away. “Vieni! Corri!”

The monster didn’t care. They would be easy enough to track. He gave a powerful twist of his neck and tore the woman’s head from her shoulders, enjoying the crimson gout that poured out of her and puddled on the paving stones. He licked at it, enjoying the freshness and the unknown element that made the blood of a frightened human so much tastier.

He then rose to pursue the two smaller male humans.

He could smell them — the sweat oozing from their pores, the urine staining their undergarments… and their sweet, salty blood.

He could hear them, too, softly weeping in heightened fear and grief.

He found them a few ruined buildings away from their mother’s cooling, headless corpse. They were huddled together in the space between two collapsed walls. The smaller of the two clutched some kind of plush figurine that smelled of sawdust.

As the wolf approached them, growling, strings of drool escaping from its jaws, Giovanni’s conscious mind could no longer accept the bottomless well of suffering he was causing. Mercifully, he blacked out, and the wolf went on without him.

8

At dawn, he awoke shivering from a nightmare, bathed in cold sweat. Faint echoes of the dream lingered like the previous night’s moonlight, and he shrank at the images of blood and fury. God knew he had experienced enough of both recently. Where was he? Why was he shivering?

He was curled in a tight ball, trying to keep skin on skin so he could stay warmer. Had Maria opened the window again? She tended to feel too hot, whereas he craved warmth in the night.

He shivered more intensely now. His head ached, throbbing with a hammer-like cadence that threatened to overwhelm him. Slowly he became aware of the cold wetness covering every part of his skin. The tiny, hard points prickling his side puzzled him. The scratchy wool blankets piled on his side of the bed didn’t usually feel like pine needles.

Pine needles?

Suddenly his throat screamed for water, as if he had swallowed a bucketful of desert sand.

He remembered then that the shelter they had been forced to inhabit was below ground. He wasn’t in his own comfortable bedroom, where the creamy stucco walls bore only a crucifix and a portrait of Mary. He almost smiled at the memory, but his head hurt too much. And he remembered the shelter was windowless.

He opened his eyes and leaped up, shocked to see that he had slept on a gently sloping hillside — in a clearing, trees cluttering his view all around. Over him the drooping branches of a weeping willow seemed to cascade like tears. The long, narrow leaves dotted his naked arms and chest. Where was his nightshirt? Giovanni always wore a thick layer of clothing to bed, but now he was naked and the leaves tickled his skin.

He hugged himself, trembling uncontrollably. Cold, wet dew numbed his toes. His penis had shrunk and sought shelter between his thighs, and small twigs made sticky knots in his pubic hair.

“Ma che cosa—?” What was going on?

He tore his right hand from under his left armpit, where he felt a semblance of warmth, and cupped his genitals to preserve some body heat.

It was dawn, the sky dappled with patches of light. A cool wind swept across the overgrown grass of the clearing. The slope meant he was back in the hills, but where? How far? And how had he gotten here? And why had he shed all his clothing? His feet squished in the wet grass as he started in one direction, stopped, then tried another.

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.

The first of two werewolves materialized as if magically on the path just below him, its eyes widening with glee and gluttony at the sight of prey, but he was ready, the dagger held close to his body until he could smell the beast’s breath.

When the wolf’s muscular legs propelled it into an uphill lunge for his throat, Giovanni judged the timing perfectly, unsheathing the dagger just as the animal reached him, sidestepping it and throwing it off-balance long enough to drive the dagger’s point through its neck.

The wolf’s scream of tortured pain effectively hid Giovanni’s. His hand smoked where the silver scorched his skin and flesh, turning it black. The pain was excruciating, but he still managed to stab the wolf once in the heart as it collapsed at his feet, its wounds flaming and its blood boiling in the veins.

Giovanni whirled to face the second wolf, but this time he’d misjudged the angle of attack and the red-eyed demon knocked him painfully to his knees. He tried to bring the dagger around, but it was still buried in the dead wolf, which was flickering like a candle back and forth from monster to human.

By the time he ripped the dagger out of the corpse, the second frenzied wolf snatched his hand with its jaws and he dropped the dagger with a scream of pain and frustration.

Holding his burned and wounded hand, Giovanni backed up against the rocky slope, knowing the nearest partisans watched helplessly a few meters away, their guns useless and their heads still pinned down by the sniper fire from above. The wolf’s jaws trailed bloody drool as it approached, its eyes staring intensely at this new enemy. Its scrabbling paws avoided the toxic dagger, but its body prevented Giovanni from retrieving it.

Before he knew what he was doing, Giovanni felt the rage take him.

He had secretly learned a little about his new condition in recent days, but he barely understood how the beast inside his bloodstream could take over.

He tried desperately to reverse the feeling, but he felt the changes inside his body and the terrible itch of his fur suddenly sprouting along his arms and back, and then—

— then he was Over-over-Over, lost inside the instincts and defensive rage of the Beast he barely understood.

The last his human ears heard was the shouting of his partisan companions, horrified by what they saw: one of their own now taking the form of the wolf — the dreaded enemy.

His ruined clothes dropped beneath him as his wolf’s body took the enemy wolf by surprise.

Jaws snapping at each other, the two werewolves closed and fought, biting and retreating, their claws slashing.

Growling, shrieking, they attacked and feinted, bit and retreated, rolling over and over, the advantage constantly switching.

Lead bullets struck them both, but did no damage. Their fangs drew blood from wounds that hurt excruciatingly, but which began healing and closing up almost immediately.

Suddenly the beast that had been Giovanni was backed up against the hillside, his paws losing their purchase on the rocky path, and the other wolf seemed about to go in for the kill.

But instead the German regained his human form and, while Giovanni tried to make sense of it, reached down and snatched up the dagger and its scabbard. Naked, he sheathed the dagger and inserted it into his mouth, then — before Giovanni could act — returned to his wolf form and bounded away down the hill and around the curve.

The wolf that had been Giovanni regained its footing and scrambled down the hill, human screams following him until he was gone.

The other wolf had too much an advantage, and even though Giovanni had the other’s scent in his nostrils, he couldn’t see and was forced to run blindly. In his brain, where Giovanni and a terrible monster both jostled for control, all he could think was that he had lost one of the special daggers.

And that he could never go home, for now he was unmasked as one of the enemy. A monster.

I am banished.

11

They’d long since told him his father had died, but he knew they still whispered about him and his mother when they thought he was asleep.

His father was a hero. He was a monster.

He could never return.

Franco understood then that his father was still alive, but that he was dead to them. Because he had become a monster. He had become one of them.

There was no consolation in anyone’s eyes, and Franco felt the hate that begun to bloom against his mother and himself. As if they had helped his father fool the partisan brigade! As if Giovanni Lupo had intentionally put one over on them.

“We should have never allowed someone named Lupo to join us!” one shouted in a drunken rage. “Never again!”

There was muttered agreement.

Then they turned and stared at his mother. And at Franco.

Their days with the partisan brigade were numbered.

And early one morning, after the new year had come, he and his mother took their few belongings and stepped into the hidden staircase exit, the staring eyes of Corrado and the Jesuit Tranelli and the few remaining men and women of the brigade boring into their backs, refusing to stop them or send them off with a wish of luck or farewell.

And they had headed for his uncle’s farm in the hills, neither of them knowing whether the older man still lived. Their trek took two weeks of arduous climbing along narrow paths, always on the lookout for desperate German soldiers left behind to die.

At the end of 1944, the partisan resistance had risen up against the weakened German occupiers and formed provisional governments which sought and received foreign recognition as sovereign states, but the Germans and the remainder of the Italian forces still loyal to Mussolini were successful in quelling the rebellion and executing its leaders.

Now, all the disparate partisan units could do was await the Allies, whose painstaking advance had been mired by the vicious rear-guard action of suicide patrols who would fight to the last man, and elements of the Nazis’ Werwolf Division.

They didn’t know it wasn’t merely a code name.

When the Allies finally arrived, their field guns audible in the distance, the withdrawal of the few surviving Wehrmacht and ragged Werwolf units left an almost tangible vacuum.

Franco and his mother had been safe on the desolate farm, but the boy could not forget what they’d said happened to his father. The nightmares kept him awake, and his mother worried for his health and sanity. In his sleep, he saw the wolves come for him and his family, but instead of being a German werewolf who battered in their door it was his father, jaws slavering and red eyes glaring with hate. And hunger.

One morning, when Maria went to wake the boy, he was gone.

Franco had grown rapidly, and in a few weeks he already appeared years older than his actual age. What he had witnessed, suffered, and lived through had toughened him, but those things had also changed him in ways he could only suspect. Frequently he found himself awash in a rage, yet unable to understand or explain why. Until one day, when he realized that he needed to face his father — the partisan who had become a monster and shattered their small family.

But where could he find Giovanni Lupo? Where would his father have sought refuge?

Instinct and keen insight into his father’s mind brought him back to their old neighborhood. Franco sensed his father would have hidden in their old apartment if he could, perhaps to await their return. Not knowing what he would find, the boy — now just barely a teenager — made his way along the street on which he had grown up. Several buildings had been demolished since the last night he had spent here, and others had been damaged, some walls sheared away to expose their insides like grotesque layer cakes. Mountains of rubble lay at the bases of their surviving structures.

Franco looked at all the places he had played during more innocent times. Everything that had happened since then was a nightmare from which he could not wake.

He pushed open the door of their old apartment and was overwhelmed by the stench of rotted meat and dried blood. Franco stood in the doorway, breathing through his mouth to avoid being sick.

“Papá?” His voice was soft and tentative and echoed in the high-ceilinged space. “Sono io, Franco.”

He heard a shuffling from the kitchen, and stepped into the long corridor that led there. He was reminded of that night, when his father had found him hiding here. A strange reversal. He pushed the memory aside.

“Papá, I’ve come to bring you back home with me. Our new home.”

He held his nostrils. He remembered this same smell in butcher shops down the street. He entered the kitchen. The lights didn’t work, but there was enough light from the balcony door to see the form in the shadows at the far end of the massive room.

It was his father, his clothes ragged and his hair growing wild.

“Papá!” he said, startled by his father’s appearance.

“Hello, my son,” Giovanni said and then his voice broke and he was sobbing. “I knew you would come back to me. I felt it. And your mother…?”

“She’s safe on Uncle Vittorio’s farm, but she sends her love.”

“Dio mio, what a terrible time it has been.”

“Yes, Papá, it has been.”

Giovanni stepped farther out of the shadows. Franco gasped when he saw the bloody smears around his father’s mouth, crusted in the stubble. Giovanni blinked rapidly, as if this was too much light for him.

“I’ve been hiding here for weeks, hoping you would return. I–I’ve changed, Franco, I’m not the way I was. I get these urges; I become hungry as you’ve never known hunger. I become another person altogether, a creature. I try to control this hunger, this cursed hunger, but the moon brings it out in me. Sometimes I think I can control it, but then I cannot, and I do terrible things.” He put his head down and wept.

“Papá,” Franco whispered. “It’s all right.”

“I prayed, you know. I prayed that it would go away and leave me alone. I prayed that I could go back to that day when you were playing with your friend and I was trying to earn some money for food, and if we had both just… just come home. If we hadn’t… But it’s the past now and we can’t change it, can we?”

“No, Papá.” Tears squeezed from Franco’s eyes.

Giovanni came closer to his son. He reached out and touched Franco’s face.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “Things will be better now.”

“Yes,” Franco whispered.

“I hear the Germans are finally on their way out of the city. The Allies are only a few days’ march away. The war is almost over for us.” He spread his arms. “We can be together again, a family. We’ll go and fetch your mother.”

Franco stepped into his father’s embrace. It felt good for a few moments, like it always had. He laid his head on his father’s chest. Felt his father’s heartbeat.

Giovanni kissed his son’s cheek and caressed his face with rough hands.

“My son—” Giovanni’s body stiffened and he began to pull away. “What…? Franco, I feel… Franco?” His voice rose as the fear took him. “My son, what have you done?”

The heat must have become suddenly obvious. Franco held his father close, his strength surprising the older man, while his hand had reached behind his back where he’d tucked the dagger stolen from the priest. As soon as the blade was free of the wooden scabbard, Giovanni had sensed the heat of the silver dagger.

Franco brought it around quickly, before his father could free himself of the embrace and flee.

But Giovanni didn’t attempt to flee.

Franco buried the dagger in his father’s chest, hitting the heart on the first try.

Giovanni screamed and the wound caught fire, as did his clothing around it, and the boy plunged the blade in and out several times, the reek of scorched flesh and blood enveloping them as they embraced one last time.

The creature within Giovanni began to manifest, the hair lengthening and his face beginning to change, his mouth becoming a snout, and Franco thought his father would take him along to hell. He twisted the knife cruelly within each new wound, each twist and each stab piercing vital organs and liquefying them in a flash of silvery heat.

Franco watched as his father’s form flickered from human to wolf and back again, his eyes bulging and finally exploding in a shower of blood and gore, and his hands — which were now claws and could still have raked Franco’s face and head — spreading in helpless surrender.

The boy stepped back and his father collapsed in a burning, smoking heap onto the marble floor.

“My son,” he cried in a sickly whisper through charred lips. “Grazie…” Thank you.

And then Giovanni Lupo’s body once again resembled that of a human, no breath left in him.

Franco left him in the ruins of their old home. He walked out with a new need in the pit of his stomach, his hand gripping the dagger with a renewed sense of purpose.

He had wolves to hunt.