FIFTEEN

KARL HAD NOT been turned into a vampire, but he still felt like something undead, or possibly, just dead, when sunlight streaming through the window of his tower room finally woke him. With the daylight came memories of the night before, of what Seraphina had done . . . had made him do . . . the things they had done together . . .

She was gone, had left even as, exhausted, he had slipped into sleep. He had seen her walk naked to the window, flow into bat-shape, leap into the sky.

Her glamor had vanished with her. She had intoxicated him the night before. He hadn’t been able to satiate his desire, no matter how many times he . . . and now, he hurt all over, and felt nothing but shame. She had used him, and humiliated him, and worst of all, she had made him enjoy it. It sickened him.

Yet, he knew if she came back to him and exerted her influence, he would helplessly and happily do it all again.

He felt anger then, anger such as he had seldom felt in a Shaped world. There were many he had passed through he had found unpleasant, but since none of them had had a Shaper with enough power to do what Ygrair had sent him to find a way to do, he had spent little time in them and interacted only enough to obtain food and drink and clothing and shelter as required.

But things had changed. Now, in each world, he had to find the Shaper and help Shawna get close enough to obtain the world’s hokhmah. Now, he had to engage with the world. The Jules Verne-inspired one he had come to late, after Shawna had already absorbed Robur’s hokhmah by being close to the Shaper when he died. Karl had passed through that world as little more than a tourist, observing Shawna’s attempts to make the world “better”—by her lights, at least—than it had been when they arrived. He still felt her efforts had likely been wasted. Without a Shaper to ride herd on it, the changes she had made would spiral out of control in unpredictable ways, so that everything she had tried to do to prevent bloodshed and misery might very well produce more of each. But she had done it, and they had come here.

Here, where there were two Shapers. Here, where he could not simply skate through the world, an almost-silent, almost-invisible presence, little more than a ghost, touching nothing and being touched by nothing.

Here, he had to touch . . . and, apparently, be touched. And here, because of the way the world had been Shaped, his status as a “real” human, born in the First World, would not protect him, because the Shapers had designed the world so that its magic would affect First Worlders, because that was what they were, and they wanted to be affected!

It left him more vulnerable than he had ever felt in a Shaped world before, even when the Adversary had been pursuing him, first across the Shakespearean world, and then across Shawna’s. He felt violated in a way he had never felt before. Unclean . . .

. . . and unfaithful. Unfaithful to the only woman he had ever loved and would ever love, the woman with whom he hoped someday to be reunited, if his quest succeeded and Ygrair kept her promise to him.

He forced himself to push all of that away. The events of the night had happened. He was not a powerful Shaper who could set back time, as Shawna had done in her world, thus convincing him she had strength enough to complete Ygrair’s task. He had to live with what had happened. And so he would. But he would not let it affect his duty. If Seraphina came to him again, he would try, again, to resist and, likely, would fail. But the attempt was what mattered. He would be true to himself and to his cause, no matter what this world or any other threw at him, no matter how these Shapers or any other tried to subvert him.

He got out of bed, groaning a little. He used the privy. His clothes were missing—taken to be cleaned, he hoped—but there was one of the ubiquitous robes in the wardrobe. He put it on and then padded barefoot to the table, where breakfast had been placed sometime while he slept. He ate.

And then he waited, for nightfall, and for the vampires who would escort him to the borders of Queen Stephanie’s werewolf kingdom, as close as possible to Shawna Keys . . .

. . . and, he hoped, as far as possible from Seraphina.

---

A scratching sound woke me, far too short a time after falling asleep.

The fire had burned down to coals. At least two or three hours must have passed. It was weird to think, here in this room lit only by dying embers, that outside, it was full daylight. I wasn’t a werewolf—yet—but I was already living werewolf hours.

I listened with bated breath for the sound to repeat itself. I heard nothing. I’d almost decided it had been the trailing edge of a fading dream when the sound came again . . . the sound of scratching claws, beyond a doubt. And not from the door, either, but somewhere closer to my head, to the right.

Rats in the walls? I thought, then realized how impossible that was in a lair carved out of solid rock.

And then there was the sound of a bolt being drawn, and a previously unsuspected door swung inward, letting in a flood of yellow light.

Silhouetted against that light was the unmistakable shape of a wolf, complete with glowing red eyes.

I rolled across the bed away from the door, wrapping myself in the blanket as I went, and was on my feet in an instant, heart pounding. There was nothing in the room I could use as a weapon—not against a werewolf.

Said werewolf came into the room. Its eyes turned away from me, and it nosed the door closed behind it, plunging the room into darkness again. The eyes turned toward me again, two red coals. I thought my heart would explode in my chest. I clutched the blanket closer.

The embers of the fire produced just enough light for me to see the wolf-shape soften, and flow, and extend upward into a human shape, though I could make out no features. “Who are you?” I demanded, my voice considerably squeakier than normal, as though I’d been sucking on helium.

“It’s okay, Shawna,” said a boyish voice. “It’s me, Piotr.”

“Piotr?”

Piotr moved, stood for a moment silhouetted against the embers. He seemed to be opening a drawer in the mantel. He walked away from the first. I heard the sound of flint and steel being struck, a spark flew, and a moment later, the lamp on the mantelpiece glowed to life.

Piotr turned toward me. He was, of course, stark naked. I looked away. “Um,” I said. “Would you mind getting another blanket off the bed and wrapping it around yourself?

“Why?” he said. He sounded genuinely puzzled.

“You’re naked,” I said.

“So?”

“It’s . . . just please, do it.”

“All right,” he said. I heard a rustle. “Done.”

I clutched my own blanket more securely and turned to face him. “What are you doing here?” I said. “And how did you get in?”

“Servants’ tunnel,” he said cheerfully. He held the blanket casually closed with one hand. “There’s nobody in them during the day.”

“But there’s a guard outside,” I said, nodding to the door. “What if he hears us?”

“I don’t plan to shout,” Piotr said. “And he’s stuck in human form. His hearing is dull, and that’s a very thick door.”

“Wait,” I said. “You came in as a wolf. But it’s day outside. How . . . ?”

He shrugged. The blanket slipped off one shoulder. “I’m special,” he explained. “Well, me and Mom. When she and Patricia Shaped the world, they decreed that the royal line of the two kingdoms would be able to change whenever they wanted, nighttime, daytime, whatever. All the other werewolves can only change after sunset, and they have to change back with sunrise—not when it clears the mountains, but when it comes up over the actual horizon. Not that I’ve ever seen the actual horizon,” he added, sounding strangely wistful.

I remembered the clock in Zarozje’s gatehouse, the one that announced real sunrise and real sunset. “Is that the same for vampires?”

“Not quite,” he said. “They can’t change until real sunset any more than we can, but they can hang onto their changes in the morning until sunlight actually touches wherever they are.”

I filed that information away, thinking it might come in useful later on. “Why did you come as a wolf at all, though?” I said then. “You could have come as yourself.” Wearing clothes, I added silently.

He laughed. “I did come as myself. I’m as much the wolf as I am the man.”

Boy, I thought, but didn’t correct him. He was just the age where he would be thinking of himself as a man, and I was just enough older that I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Boy egos are fragile things. I remembered that from high school . . . or thought I did.

“You still haven’t answered the first part of my question,” I said. “The important part. Why are you here?”

“Can we sit down?” he said.

“All right,” I said. I readjusted the blanket and crossed the room, sitting in the deerhide-covered armchair to the left of the fire. He took the one on the right. I kept hold of the blanket, but Piotr let it fall once he was seated, so that it puddled around his middle. “Now, why did you come?” I asked again.

“Two reasons. First, to apologize.”

“Apologize? You haven’t done anything to me.”

“Apologize for Mom,” he said.

Interesting. “You don’t agree with what she’s planning to do?”

He shook his blond head vigorously. “No! I mean, I love her, but . . . I can’t agree with this. With turning you into one of the pack. If it even works.” He hesitated. “Do you think it will?”

“I don’t know. I have some hope that it won’t, but I can’t be certain.”

“I hate this world,” Piotr said then, surprising me further. “I hate the way Mom and Patricia Shaped it. A single valley. No way out of it. Us at this end, the vampires at the other, Mother Church off to the west, a bunch of villages in between.”

“But . . . it’s the only world you’ve known,” I said.

“Exactly!” He twisted toward me. “But Mom used to tell me stories about the First World, the world she came from. She told me about huge cities named New York and Paris and London and Hong Kong. She told me about oceans so enormous it took hours to fly across them in magical vehicles called jets. She told me about wagons that run on their own, with no horses pulling them. She told me about something called movies—moving pictures on a screen that tell amazing stories! She told me all about the First World, but when I asked her, when I begged her to take me to it, she told me she couldn’t, that I can never leave this world.”

I could see where this was going, and my heart broke for him. He might be a werewolf prince, but he was also just a kid stuck in a small town, dreaming of life in the big city. The trouble was . . .

“She’s right,” I had to tell him. “The Shaped can’t leave their own world.”

But even as I said it, I realized that wasn’t one-hundred-percent true. The Adversary had somehow managed to Shape a handful of his followers into his “cadre,” a loyal group of fighters who most definitely had left their world, coming into mine and wreaking havoc—including killing my best friend, Aesha. So it wasn’t entirely impossible, but I didn’t know how to do it, and even if I did, it could presumably only work in a world I could Shape—and right now, and for the foreseeable future, I was powerless here.

“But I’m only half-Shaped,” Piotr said. “My mother is the Shaper. I’ll bet I could do it. I’ll bet I could enter another world!”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.” I wondered if Ygrair had covered such things in the schooling I had no memory of. But if she had, shouldn’t Stephanie have known?

Ygrair doesn’t seem to have suggested to anyone that it’s even possible to move from world to world, I reminded myself. And since, without the Shurak nanomites I and Karl carried within our blood, it apparently wasn’t possible to open Portals between the worlds, why should she?

“I’d like to try. Take me with you when you go!”

“I’m not going anywhere right now,” I pointed out. “And there is no ‘try.’” I resisted the urge to put on a Yoda voice. “If it doesn’t work . . . you’ll cease to exist.”

“It’ll work!”

“You don’t know that.”

“You don’t know that it won’t.”

Which was quite true. Maybe a compromise was in order. “Karl might know,” I said, and, indeed, he might. “But we’re separated. I need to rejoin him.” And then, though I hated myself for it, I leaned forward and said. “Can you help me do that?”

I knew I was asking him to betray Stephanie, who was not only his mother but his queen. I expected shock, wide eyes, an intake of breath. Instead, he laughed. “I told you I had two reasons for sneaking in here. That’s reason number two.”

My mouth fell open for a second. “You want to help me escape?”

“Of course, I want to help you escape! You can’t lead me to another world if you’re locked up in here or my mother turns you into her bitch.”

I blinked at that turn of phrase—but it was, literally, what Stephanie intended. “I admit I am not so confident of her inability to do so that I look forward to the experiment,” I said. When did I start to sound so much like Karl? Mostly to break that stuffy cadence, I added, “Dude, you’re on.”

“Dude?” he said, looking puzzled. Then he shrugged it off. “Terrific!’ he said. He jumped to his feet. Since this meant his blanket fell to the floor, I quickly looked away.

“What’s wrong?” he said behind me.

I kept my gaze on the fire. “In my world, we don’t . . . we have a . . .” How to explain it? “A nudity taboo.”

“What’s a taboo?”

“It’s a thing that . . . isn’t done. In my world, public nudity is frowned on. In fact, it’s illegal, most places.”

“We aren’t in public.”

“It’s still . . . unless you know someone really well . . .” and one of you isn’t twenty-seven and the other isn’t, like, fifteen . . . “you just don’t let other people see you naked.”

“But what’s the big deal? It’s just skin.”

“Just put on your blanket, okay?”

“All right.” I heard a rustle. “All covered up.”

I turned around. He was more-or-less decent again. “Thank you.”

“I guess my mother and Trish didn’t Shape that into this world,” he said thoughtfully. “This ‘nudity taboo’ thing. It would make it really hard to shift into wolf form in a hurry. And for the vampires, bat form.”

“I’m sure that’s why they did it,” I said. “I’m just . . . it makes me uncomfortable.”

“I’ll try to remember,” Piotr said. “Anyway, here’s the plan . . .”

The plan was everything you might expect a fifteen-year-old boy to come up with, if that boy were able to turn into a wolf. It didn’t fill me with confidence. But it was my best hope for not being turned into the first werewolf in the kingdom afflicted with modesty, which would clearly be a really unfortunate thing for a werewolf to have, so I agreed to it.

Piotr blew out the lamp and returned to the servants’ door. In silhouette, I saw him turn and toss the blanket onto the chair by the fire. Then he closed the door, plunging me into darkness. I heard him slide the bolt back into place, but I’d expected it: he’d told me it would look odd to a servant if the door weren’t bolted closed.

I climbed back into the bed. I really needed a good day’s sleep before night fell and Stephanie came for me.

I didn’t get it. I tossed and turned and worried for a long time before I finally dozed off.

Minutes after that, it seemed, I blinked my eyes open to discover the lamp burning again and flames beginning to crinkle around fresh logs in the fireplace. A servant girl, about Piotr’s age, was just uncovering a platter on the table. I smelled bacon, and sat up in bed, clutching the covers to my chest. “Good evening!” the girl said, turning to me. She wore a simple gray robe, belted with white. “The sun has just set.” She went to the foot of the bed, and I saw that a gray robe like her own had been laid there. “You are to put this on.”

I looked for my clothes. They had vanished. It was the robe, or nothing.

The girl watched me expectantly.

“Would you mind turning around?” I said.

She blinked. “Why?”

“Please?” I said.

She shrugged and did what I asked. I hurriedly pulled on the robe, tying the white rope snugly around my waist. Then I sat down to have . . . supper? Breakfast? Breakfast, I guess, since I was breaking my fast, but it seemed weird to call something you ate just after the sun went down by that name.

The girl watched me eat. “Don’t you have other duties?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Queen Stephanie ordered me to attend to you. I am attending. Is there anything else you require?”

“I’d like my clothes back.”

“I do not know where they went.”

I sighed. “All right. Then how about instructions on how to find the front gate, and help escaping the kingdom?”

She frowned. “Is that a joke? Why would you want to escape the kingdom?” Then her face cleared. “Oh, of course. You have not yet been honored.”

“Honored?”

“With the change-bite.”

“No,” I said. “No, I haven’t been ‘honored’ yet.”

“Once you have joined the pack, you will not want to escape the kingdom.”

I sighed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“It is nothing to fear,” she said.

“Were you born a werewolf?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Then how would you know? It may be very painful.” It certainly was in every werewolf movie I’d ever seen.

“Why should such a joyous thing be painful?” the girl asked, and I gave up. Unlike Piotr, she was every inch a Shaped denizen—literally the right word, in this lupine labyrinth—and could not imagine anything else. She was utterly loyal to her queen.

Like the close associates of Robur in the last world, I thought. And look at all the bloodshed that led to.

I finished my meal—which featured eggs, toast, and grape juice as well as bacon—and pushed the platter away, hoping it hadn’t been a hearty last meal. “Now what?”

“Now I clear away the dishes,” she said. She did. The door closed behind her. I heard the bolt slide shut. Just to be sure, I tried it after a moment to see if it was locked. It was.

After that, there was nothing to do but wait for Queen Stephanie to come for me, and for Piotr to either rescue me or fail miserably, which seemed the more likely outcome.

Within hours, I might be as unthinkingly loyal to the werewolf Shaper of this world as the serving girl.

I didn’t relish the prospect.