Where Wolves Run: A Novella of Horror by Jason Parent Page B

obscurity by the vivid memory of his mother’s final moments. Tears filled his eyes.
    “Finally awake?”
    The room came into focus. Konrad’s father sat beside him. Shadows danced upon his father’s face, the flickering light of the lantern casting mischievous black flames. Father looked old and worn, his skin like leather feuding with time. Chiseled troughs on his forehead and beside his deep-set eyes revealed the labors of his years. His ragged, unkempt beard, more gray than brown, looked like it had not been washed since the beginning of the long war. The man owning it, scarred and empty, looked as embattled as the war itself, all thirty years of it. Tissue hung upon his frame as if it had tired of shielding the skeleton beneath it.
    Life had stopped favoring him years ago. He was not the man Konrad remembered, a feeble likeness, no longer worthy of Konrad’s fear or reverence, if ever he had been.
    “I had feared the worst,” he said solemnly, fiddling with what appeared to be a cross tied around his neck. He tucked it beneath his shirt. “I checked your body, but found no bite or scratch.”
    His shoulders drooped, and he sagged forward on his stool, his gaze cast upon the floor. “Your mother did well, God bless her.”
    “Mother?”
    Father shook his head. “She is at rest now.”
    Konrad had guessed as much, but his father’s words still stung. “What were they, Father?”
    “Werewolves.” He spat the word. “Foul creatures . . . the Devil’s answer to wicked men who serve him and the blight of the innocent to whom they spread their vile curse.”
    Werewolves? The word bore Konrad no meaning. The Bavarian forests had their share of wolves. Konrad had lost a piglet to one last spring. But wolves did not hunt humans in their homes. Wolves did not have paws like that he had seen.
    A deep sigh passed Father’s lips. “It is time you learned God’s plan for us. It is time you learned your father’s true purpose and, God willing, your own.”
    Over the next hour, Konrad listened with disdain as his father wove a tale so incredible that had Konrad not heard his mother’s evisceration, he would not have believed it. His father explained that he had come from a small village north of Rattenberg, a place where good people had lived good lives, purposefully cut off from the land’s politics and warfare. Their isolation, however, had led to their demise.
    When the beasts came, monsters as big as those that dwelled in nightmares, they were too few to fight them off. One by one, the villagers had disappeared, dragged into the forests under the pitiless round eye of the moon. Sometimes, torn scraps of clothing were found, but more often, the only evidence of abduction was the loud cries for help across an otherwise silent night.
    “Wolves!” those who were not there would later place blame. Those who had seen the beasts and had lived to tell tales never spoke them, their dread sealing their mouths shut. Neighbor had turned his back to neighbor. They huddled behind doors of false security . . . until their time came.
    Father had seen them. He had seen them pluck the limbs from his sister as easily as feathers from a bird. He had seen their primeval claws shred through his own father like a finely whetted axe through soft pine. He had seen their monstrous fangs, drooling gleaming sickles, tear out his mother’s throat and their long, winding tongues lap up her blood.
    Father had seen them for what they were: not quite man, not quite beast, but comprising the worst of both. They had been led by one, bigger and more sinister than the rest, the alpha among alphas, with pale yellow eyes burned into Father’s memories. It was those eyes that haunted his sleep.
    After the werewolves had devoured his family, Father had to learn to fend for himself. A boy not much younger than Konrad, he had fled then, but never since. Under the pretext of righteousness and duty, sometimes believing it true, he had spent the greater