Kitty's Mix-Tape (Kitty Norville 16)

“Yes, I will,” she said.

Unternehmen Werwolf

OCTOBER 31, 1944

The boy, Fritz, had only a few hours to assassinate the collaborator.

He had completed the first part of the mission the night before, crossing over enemy lines into occupied territory. This was the easy part; he’d done it a dozen times before. But this time, he carried a gun in his pack, not the messages and supplies he’d couriered previously.

As usual on these journeys, he awoke in the morning, safe in a copse of autumn shrubs he’d found to hide in, shrouded by fallen leaves and tangled branches. He was naked, but he was used to that. After giving himself a moment to recall where he was, to reacquaint himself with his human limbs, his grasping fingers instead of ripping claws, he untangled himself from his pack, looped around his shoulders so it wouldn’t slip off when he was a wolf. Inside, he found a canteen of water, a day’s rations, and common workmen’s clothes and boots so he could travel unnoticed. And the gun.

Dressed and armed, he set off. He’d memorized the maps and the description of his target. The village had been occupied by Allied forces for several weeks, and the woman, Maria Lang, a nurse, had not only surrendered to enemy forces, she had been assisting in administration of the village, supplying the American soldiers with aid and information. The village might or might not be recaptured in coming battles, that wasn’t his concern. Right now, the woman must be punished. Executed.

Not murdered, they told him. Executed.

He balked, when they told him his target was a woman. That did not matter, his superiors in his SS unit told him. She was a collaborator. A traitor, not worthy of mercy. And Fritz was seventeen now, ready for such an important mission. He ought to be more than a letter carrier. And so here he was, trekking across abandoned farmland toward the edge of a wooded stretch where the collaborator’s cabin was said to stand, using his preternatural sense of smell to detect the scent of treachery.

A wolf could cross enemy lines when a man in a uniform could not. When even a man in disguise could not. A wolf traveling in a forest did not draw suspicions. And a wolf could be trained to follow a certain route, certain procedures. To return to a certain spot on schedule. A wolf was wild, but the man inside the werewolf could learn.

Fritz had been a shepherd boy, like in one of the old fairy tales, tending sheep in pastures at the edge of a Bavarian forest. Still living the old ways, with the old fears. Then, he cried wolf, and no one heard him.

He survived the attack, and the bite marks and gashes on his legs healed by morning, and everyone knew what that meant. He knew what to do, and on the next full moon he spent several nights in the woods alone. Howled to the sky for the first time. When he returned, friends and family said nothing about it, did not ask him what he felt or what he’d experienced. He learned to live with the monster, but he no longer looked after his family’s sheep.

The war came, and he was too young to be recruited as a proper soldier, but a man from the SS found him. Said he was forming a special unit, and that he’d heard rumors about these forests. About the shepherd boy who no longer looked after sheep. Colonel Skorzeny had a job for him, and you did not tell men like that no, so Fritz went with him.

His new home, a compound fenced in with razor wire—steel edged with silver, he was told—had normal barracks and storage buildings and such. There were also cages, for those who had not volunteered, or who had changed their minds. The soldiers carried knives and bayonets laced with silver. Silver bullets loaded their guns. A mere nick from one of those blades, a graze from one of those bullets, would kill him. Fritz did as he was told.

Fritz had never met another werewolf before joining Skorzeny’s special unit. The SS colonel had found a dozen of them across Germany, and he made more, finding soldiers who volunteered to be bitten, and a few who didn’t. Fritz was the youngest, and his instinct was to cower, to imagine a tail folding tight between his legs, to lower his gaze and slouch before the older, fiercer werewolf soldiers. Skorzeny would yell at him for weakness because he didn’t understand, but the others recognized the gestures of a frightened puppy. Some looked after him, as an older wolf in a pack would. Some took advantage and bullied.

Fritz was a monster from a fairy tale. He shouldn’t be afraid of anything. What, then, did that say about the SS soldiers he cowered before? Who were the greater monsters? He told himself he deferred to them because he was loyal to the Fatherland, because he fought for the Führer, because he believed. But when he returned from a mission in the pre-dawn gray, lying naked at a rendezvous point as soldiers waited to esc

ort him back to the barracks and the silver razor wire, he knew the truth: he was afraid. Even he, near invulnerable, a monstrous creature haunting dark stories, was afraid. This was the world he lived in.

Tonight was the full moon. He had two choices: to stay human and shoot the woman before night fell, or to wait until the light of the moon transformed him, and let his wolf do the work with teeth and claws.

In the forest some miles outside Aachen, he did not trust his wolf to do what needed to be done. The wolf worked on instinct, on gut feeling, and in the end Fritz could not tell his wolf what to do, especially on a full moon night. He had tried to argue with the colonel, who wasn’t a wolf and didn’t understand. But the colonel said this mission must happen now, and must be completed tonight. The Allies were gaining ground and a message needed to be sent to other would-be collaborators, that death awaited them.

So Fritz went. He would have to complete the mission, not his wolf, because he suspected his wolf would follow his instinct and run to safety. Away from Germany. He and his wolf had been having this argument for months now.

He found the house; it wasn’t hard. As the description said, it stood alone, isolated, and the woman lived by herself. She walked to the village several times a week, but she rarely had visitors. The place seemed oddly comforting: an old-fashioned white-washed cottage with a thatched roof, a garden plot that still had a few odd remnants left over from the fall harvest, a well lined with stones and a wooden bucket beside it. He circled the place, smelling carefully, and only smelled a woman, Maria Lang. And she was at home.

He camouflaged himself behind a tree on a small rise some hundred yards away and watched for the next hour until she opened the front door. He had good vision, a wolf’s vision, and even from the hilltop he could see his target. Standing on the threshold of her doorway, she wrapped a woven shawl more tightly over her shoulders and looked out. Not searching for anything in particular, not bent toward any chore. Just looking.

When her gaze crossed the hill, her eyes seemed to meet his, and he started.

Smiling before she ducked her face, she went back inside and closed the door. She had seen him—or she had not. If she had, perhaps she believed he wasn’t a danger. Some hunter lost in the woods. A boy from the village.

If she did not believe he was a danger, he could simply knock and shoot her when she opened the door. In loyal service to the Fatherland. Keeping low, moving quickly, he made his way toward the cottage.

He could not explain the feeling of dread that overcame him as he left the shelter of the trees and approached the clearing where the garden plot and semi-tamed brambles spread out. The setting still appeared idyllic. A curl of smoke rose from the leaning stone chimney, indicating warmth and comfort inside. These were like the cottages at home. This should be easy. But he took a step, and he could not raise his foot again. As if the ground had frozen, and his boots had stuck to the ice. As if his bones had turned to iron, too heavy to shift. The cottage before him suddenly seemed miles away. The sky grew overcast, shrouded with clouds, and a wind began to murmur through the trees.

His wolf scented magic and told him to run.

The memory of Colonel Skorzeny and his silver bayonet urged him on, and Fritz forced another step. Forward, not away. Only a few steps, a knock on the door, and he could finish this. The gun was already in his hand.

Next came the voices, a scratch-throated chattering descending over him like a fog and rattling his ribs. He put his hands over his ears to cut out the noise, and looked up to see ravens. Glinteyed, black, wings outstretched and blurred as they flapped over him, and their nearly human croaking seemed to call, away, away, away. They banked and swooped and tittered, brushing his hair with wingtips before dodging. He snapped at them, teeth clicking together, and swatted with fingers curled like claws. Wolf would make short work of them. But he had vowed to stay human. The gun sat coldly in his hand.

He ignored the ravens, which settled in surrounding trees and cawed their commentary at him. They smelled like dust and spiders.