The Silver Wolf by Alice Borchardt Read Free Book Online Page B

herself shouting. “You were mad with pride.” She remembered the woman and the child in the church. “They had wanted to live,” she yelled at the damned and damnable thing around her. “They wanted to live! You killed them and you paid the forfeit.”
    The air around her stank of putrescence. “They hanged me in chains!”
    Regeane saw and smelled it. The rotting body swaying at the gallows. Leg only, bones trailing rags of flesh, dancing almost as if alive in the night wind. Falling and scattering in the grass. The torso coming apart at the belly; the hips falling to splatter against the earth dragging the lungs and the skin from the ribs. Last of all, the head and shoulders coming down; the fleshless skull striking the cobbles and bursting with an appalling stench.The almost-liquid brain mass that had once been the man running off in puddles, congealing to be trampled in the road.
    The wasps struck, sinking their stingers into her face through the mantle into her cheeks and tongue, through her dress into her arms and breast, and, worst of all, through her eyelids into her eyeballs.
    She didn’t hear the wolf roar. Her own screams deafened her. She only knew she had four legs, not two. Her jaws opened with a shout of outrage and fire filled the air around her.
    When she woke, she was lying on her side. One shoulder rested in a clean rain puddle. She opened her eyes and slowly got to her feet. One side of her dress was soaked. She explored her face and neck with trembling fingers. No swelling. No pain. Had the whole thing all been a dream?
    She glanced down. Near the puddle a big patch of mud showed canine footprints. She remembered the wolf coming to her aid. Had she really been here? Somehow fought off the terror? Regeane was too stupefied by shock to consider the implications of this.
    She looked around. Silve was gone. She had evidently found somewhere to run. Then she realized the tomb where they stopped to eat had vanished. It simply didn’t exist any longer.
    Regeane picked up her skirts and ran.
    She stopped running near the city. Not because she was winded. Her stamina was usually greater than most humans’. But because she passed some laborers working near the city. And was frightened by their stares. Respectable women alone were an uncommon sight. Prostitutes advertised their wares. So she wouldn’t be taken for one of them, but she might be mistaken for a married woman sneaking out to see her lover. As such, she left herself open to being accosted by some lecherous opportunist. She stopped, wrapped herself tightly in her mantle, pulled the veil down over her face, bowed her head, and walked on.
    She didn’t dare pass through the ruined Forum so late. She started home through the narrow streets surrounding the Pantheon. These alleys were impassable except on foot. Flights of stone stairs surrounded the terra-cotta brick walls. Among them, it might as well have been night.
    The sky above was a dim blue-gray pall. What little light remained showed only rain misting past high shuttered windows.
    She was making her way home as quickly as possible when she met the funeral cortege. It was a poor one—the corpse wrapped in a winding sheet carried on an open bier. Torches flared in the hands of a few relatives and friends following the dead man. The flames sputtered in the wind, funnelled down the street, and burned blue from the damp.
    Regeane flattened herself against the wall to let them pass.
    Silve appeared from the darkness like a bat flying out of the mouth of a cave. “Witch!” she screamed as she pointed at Regeane. “Demoness! She is here to steal his soul. Kill her! Kill her! She will drag his soul to hell and sell it to the devil in place of her own!”
    Regeane stood for a few seconds transfixed by both fear and sheer astonishment. Then she saw the dead man’s relatives believed Silve. The pain and sheer terror in her voice carried a dreadful certainty with them. Even Regeane could tell that