Werewolf: Impossible Love by Emily Neily Read Free Book Online

to think of something to say. Nothing came to her. The smell of blood made her look to the corner, where Marshall’s carcass still lay in a pool of blood. Numb and silent, Serenity picked up the arm and threw it out the front door. She tried her best to drag the rest of his body out, but the pain in her leg wouldn’t let her. It wasn’t long before she gave up and sat down by the corpse, her head in her hands.
                  She looked up at the sound of Yandel picking up the body by a leg and dragging it across the floor toward the door.
                  “I got pigs,” he said. “They’ll grind his bones. Buckets and bleach are under the sink.”
                  Serenity nodded and got on it. She rinsed the blood down the shower drain as best she could, and then proceeded scrubbing the floor with a brush.
                  Naked as he was, Yandel didn’t return for several minutes. He stood there for a moment or two in silence, watching her scrub the floor.
                  “My mother said that medicine was for better families than ours,” he said, eventually. “But Hitler said that if I had that good German aptitude, I could get the training.”
                  Serenity looked up at him, her hands still clutching the rag soaked in blood and bleach water.
                  “It didn’t take long, where I was,” Yandel went on, pulling a drawer out from under the bed. “You hear about those defecting SS officers being academics, coming to this—this educated realization that this was not for Germany. Their Germany.” He put on a T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxers. “Academics,” he laughed. “Mengele was an academic. Really.” He looked Serenity in the eye. “Loved what he did with every nerve in his body.”
                  Her stomach churned, realizing what he was trying to explain to her. “Mengele,” she said. “Josef Mengele?”
                  “He was very, very particular about being addressed as Herr Doktor,” Yandel said. A warning seventy years old echoed in his voice. “Except with the children.”
                  Serenity’s eyes went wide; she’d heard the stories, muttered under sanitized history lectures, of the original mad scientist. The experiments. The tortures. The kindergarten where he introduced the children to Uncle Josef, who would inject dye in their eyes and sew them together and give the others sweets to keep them quiet.              
                  “Like I said,” Yandel said, “it didn’t take long. That’s what happens when you round up all the poets and all the philosophers and all the mathematicians and lock them in a slaughterhouse—they start making plans.” He was sitting at the kitchen table, grey eyes distant. “A coded message scratched in the dirt here, a note hidden under a tongue there, and soon enough you’ve got fifty shackled Jews and a dumb-assed medic conspiring to bust out of Auschwitz and kill everyone who’d kept us there.”
                  He swallowed, staring at the opposite wall. “We got caught,” he said. “When they talked about the Boxenwulf Project, I thought it was a code name for something they were doing to the Jews.” A sigh shuddered into his chest through his throat. “Instead of executing me, they decided that I would be the first SS officer to volunteer for the—for the improvement program.”
    Yandel stared at his hands and shook his head. “I was five-foot-ten when they gave me the first series of injections,” he said. “I weighed one hundred sixty pounds —” his voice broke off.  “I was supposed to finish out bigger, I think, but Heinrich never fucking learned his lesson about cutting corners on security checks.”
    A smile crawled out of the depths of despair on his face. “I don’t have the best memory of when I change, but I know I ate a few