“Come, my darling,” Mihai taunted. “Come here to me!”
He was standing behind a large urn in the palace gardens. Dacia had tracked him there after he’d jumped out the window of the king’s bedchamber. She knew that he had a pistol in one hand, and a knife in the other. She could smell the steel of them both, along with the reek of fear and something else coming from the would-be king. It wasn’t a bad thing, that other emotion he was feeling, and that’s why it worried her. It was fear, mixed with . . . elation? Could that possibly be? Was he completely mad?
She slunk closer and got ready to pounce. And then she smelled the other scent, the one that was pure terror, and coming from a source far more familiar than Mihai.
The prince stepped out from behind the urn, holding Will Carver by that fashionable young man’s shirt collar. The prince’s smile was white and charming in the moonlight. Will Carver’s teeth were just as white, but they were bared in a grimace of fear. Mihai pushed Will to his knees and placed his pistol to Will’s temple.
“Your dashing suitor came to my home to scold me,” Mihai said. “Came into my very parlor to tell me that I—I—was an abomination! He said that he knew my secret and that I must leave Romania or he would call down the authorities on my head.” Mihai laughed. “What a handsome fool! My uncle had him tied up and tossed in the back of a coach before he could straighten his tie!”
Will, for his part, seemed more frightened of Dacia than he was of the gun at his head.
“Call off your dog,” he gasped to Prince Mihai as Dacia slowly advanced, her hackles raised.
“It isn’t my dog, but it soon will be,” Mihai said silkily. “Won’t you, my love? You will be mine, and you will kill King Carol for me.”
Dacia growled.
“Tell your dog to get back!” Will Carver cowered against Mihai’s legs. “My father will pay whatever ransom you ask!”
If she hadn’t been concentrating so fully on Mihai, trying to guess his next move, Dacia would have taken a moment to be utterly disgusted by her former beau’s behavior.
“Don’t worry about my dog,” Mihai said, his eyes on Dacia and his voice still rich with self-satisfaction. “She won’t hurt you, will you, my pet? You wouldn’t do something like that; not to your beloved American dandy! No, it’s the king you’re going to tear with your fangs . . . or you’ll watch Carver and everyone else you care about die.”
The trouble with being a wolf was that Dacia could not tell Mihai that she would do no such thing, and that the only person in danger of being torn by her fangs was himself. She could not tell Will Carver to be a man and stop huddling there, staring at her with that horrified expression, either. But if she transformed so that she could speak with them, her nudity would probably shock Will into insensibility.
“You’re a barbarian,” Will Carver shrieked. “I’ll have you arrested!”
Dacia and Mihai ignored him.
“Make your decision, Dacia,” Mihai ordered. “Life with me, as my queen—my very biddable queen—or the deaths of everyone you love.”
“Dacia? You named your dog Dacia?” Will Carver straightened in indignation
The wind had changed, bringing with it a potpourri of odors that lifted her spirits as they filtered through her nose. She knew these scents, and knew that they would change the tide of this battle. Dacia tensed and got ready to pounce, a surge of savage joy running through her. When she felt that all was ready, Dacia yipped.
At Dacia’s signal, Radu leaped from one side, Aunt Kate from the other. Radu knocked Mihai down with the weight of his body, and his teeth fastened on the forearm that had held the pistol, forcing it down and away from Will and Dacia. Aunt Kate hit Will from the other side, bearing him to the ground and relative safety. The garden was filled with wolves, her wolves, but Dacia did not have time to revel in her power.
She ran for Mihai and Radu, struggling at the base of the urn. Radu move back, releasing the prince’s arm so that Dacia could put her front paws on Mihai’s chest. The prince looked around for his pistol, which Radu’s teeth had convinced him to drop. It was almost within reach, but a little snarl from Dacia sent one of her cousins padding over to sweep it aside with a paw. Dacia looked at the little gray-and-black wolf—her cousin Stefan, she thought it was—and he lowered his head with a whine of subservience.
As he should, Dacia thought severely. She would have to think of a suitable punishment for them all, once this mess was over. The Florescus would be led from the darkness into the light by force if need be.
But first there was Mihai to deal with.
She looked down at the prince, and he stared up at her. He reeked of something Dacia could not place, some noxious scent that mingled with the blood seeping from the bite Radu had given him, but his face showed only triumph. He was clearly not going to surrender.
“You see?” he shouted. “You see what a great queen you will be? Together, we will expand Romania’s borders across Europe! We will crush Hungary, take Paris as our new capital, build an empire the envy of Rome!”
The noxious odor oozing from Mihai had grown stronger, and Dacia knew it now. It was the stench of madness. And if she had any doubt as to her nose’s abilities, it was swept away by his eyes. They were ablaze in the moonlight with the utter conviction that he would one day rule the world.
I am already a queen, Dacia told herself. And it’s time that I selected a new role for my people. They will be the protectors of the royal family, yes, but the real royal family.
And as such, they must get rid of Mihai. His madness and his ambition would only continue to create strife. No, Mihai could not be suffered to live.
She looked at Radu, and expressed her conviction with a few low noises. Radu yipped, offering to do the job for her, but she curled her lip in refusal. A good queen would not hesitate to perform any duty she might ask of her people, she thought. She had read that somewhere, perhaps in a speech by Queen Elizabeth of England. One of her governesses had been quite obsessed with the ancient monarch.
Dacia realized that she was stalling, and that Mihai was starting to laugh, thinking that her continued hesitation meant that she was considering his words. She looked down at him, and whatever he saw in her eyes convinced him that she had rejected his suit once and for all. Mihai began to curse, but Dacia’s teeth came down and silenced him. Forever.
And then the battle began.
Soldiers in nondescript coats—mercenaries, most likely—ran forward, shouting, and opened fire on Dacia and Radu. She leaped for cover, while Radu set up a howl that Aunt Kate joined, summoning the Claw to the fight.
Dacia, crouched behind an urn, waited for her cousins to take up the call, but the rest of the Claw were silent. Dacia knew that they waited for her, their queen. She leaped to the top of the urn, straddling it with her four strong legs, and howled to shatter the moon. From the gardens and within the palace the answer came immediately: howls, and the sound of gunfire.
A mercenary rose up in front of the urn and took aim at Dacia. She leaped off the urn, knocking him to the ground, and bit deep into his throat as wolves and men boiled out of the palace and into the gardens. The green coats of the royal guard mingled with the darker clothing of Mihai’s hirelings. The Claw turned on the mercenaries at Dacia’s order, but the royal guards, confused and frightened, fired on them all the same.
At last Dacia heard Radu shouting with his human throat, “Stop it, you fools! We fight for King Carol now!” She looked up from the man she had just killed to see her cousin standing naked in the moonlight, and then he shifted into wolf form once more.
Bullets sang in the night air, and Dacia twisted and danced, trying to avoid them. Around her were the bodies of wolves and men, some dead, some merely injured, and she was filled with rage at the losses her pack was suffering, and that rage allowed her to keep killing Mihai’s men.
Their leader gone, surrounded by royal guards and wolves with blood-flecked muzzles, the mercenaries had finally broken and were fleeing into the forest when the Wing at last descended on the battle. Dacia hated Lady Ioana all the more for holding back.
Was she waiting to see if they were even needed, before she dirtied her claws? Dacia wondered. Or did she always prefer to hover above the fight and merely watch, like a voyeur? And the rest of the Wing . . . Would none of them defy Lady Ioana and join the Claw?
“Cowards!” Dacia howled at the bats that darted now among the Claw and the royal guards, gouging at their eyes with the sharpened claws at the top of their wings, squealing their nearly inaudible cries and biting at ears and noses with their needlelike teeth.
Dacia gave the order for her people to hide themselves. Mihai’s men were gone, the royal guard was rounding up those left standing, and Radu led a pair of their cousins into the woods to herd those who had fled back to the garden. There was no sense in any of the wolves losing an eye to Lady Ioana. Dacia crouched under a stone bench, and watched as the Wing swirled overheard, looking for more victims.
“An excellent battle,” yipped Aunt Kate, slipping beneath the bench as well. “You have proven yourself to be a powerful warrior.”
“We shall not speak of it again,” Dacia snarled.
Aunt Kate bowed her head in deference to her queen.
THE DIARY OF MISS MARIA LOUISA NEULANDER
18 June 1897
From darkness, into light.