Kevin Hearne - Hammered

“You see?” Rannveig said to me. “He spouts pagan nonsense. He is damned, and now so are we.”

Úlfur threw his head back and laughed heartily. “You are blessed, not damned. You will come to know this in time. Run with me under the moon and hunt, taste hot blood on your tongue—”

“Gah!” Rannveig covered her ears and ran away. She did not want to hear about hot blood on her tongue. I grabbed my clothes and chased after her. Úlfur laughed again and called after us.

“Run now if you wish! But don’t be near any men when night falls, or the hot blood you taste will be human!”

Rannveig didn’t slow down for half a mile. She hurtled as fast as she could to where we had left the horses, and I couldn’t close the gap between us until we were nearly there. She was gasping and crying by the time we reached the spot where we’d staked them, and when we got there only one remained. The other was a mess of blood and bones and bits of skin and flesh.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” Rannveig cried. “He ate my horse! Gunnar, he ate my horse!”

“Well, if it kept him from eating us, I’m grateful to the horse,” I said.

She whirled upon me and started pounding my chest with her fists. They weren’t weak punches either. She was letting loose with everything she had, fury erupting from her like a volcano. “How! Can! You! Be! Grateful!” she yelled, landing a blow with each word. “We are fucked! Fucked , you hear me? We heal like demons! We are no longer human! Our salvation is gone! Gone!” She dissolved into sobs and sank to the ground, clutching me. I knelt to hold her, but I did not know what to say. I could not tell her everything would be all right. She was going to have a hard time explaining to the men at the farm what happened to the horse. And if she truly turned into a wolf that night, everyone there would be in mortal peril. Rather than expose them to such danger—and to give us more time to concoct a tale if we found we could return—we decided to continue on my westerly path to Kirkjubæjarklaustur. That proved enormously difficult, because the remaining horse would not suffer our touch. It neighed in fear and reared up defensively whenever either of us approached, and we finally had to cut it loose and let it run away. It ran back in the direction of the Hnappavellir farm.

Seeing no other choice, we began trudging after it. A day without food or water we figured we could survive, and then we would make the farm by early the next morning. We did not see or hear from Úlfur all that day.

Rannveig and I were exhausted. We had not slept at all through the previous night and had been traveling all day. By mutual agreement, we collapsed together underneath a tree as the sun set. We both feared what was to come but no longer had the energy to waste worrying about it. I actually managed to take a short nap.

My awakening was the rudest possible. My skeleton snapped in a hundred places and knitted together again in alien shapes, organs squished and remade themselves, and you know those headaches you get between your eyes? They are worse than excruciating when there’s a snout growing out of that spot. Being confined in human clothes didn’t help the process along either.

Rannveig was enduring a similar transformation. Her cries and snarls of pain were even louder than mine, and I wasn’t holding back. Our clothes eventually tore and the shifting stopped. The pain faded as we lay still under the tree, whimpering. I turned my head and saw much better than I ever had before. Where Rannveig had been, there was a light-gray wolf with white socks surrounded by shreds of Rannveig’s clothes.

I got to my feet—all four of them—and took a deep breath. Smells I’d never known or perceived before flooded my mind. There was a burrow of wood mice somewhere nearby; their droppings littered the small stand of timber in which we stood. I could smell the lingering traces of my horse’s fear on the trail back to Hnappavellir. Thinking of the horse made me realize how hungry I was. I needed to hunt.

Rannveig was up now, and she looked hungry too. She smelled the horse, and we set off after it together. I do not know how we communicated; there must have been something happening on an instinctive level, because as of yet we had no pack link.

Running felt good. It wasn’t an all-out run but rather an easy lope. Rannveig ran beside me, and she seemed to be enjoying herself as well. I could tell we were getting closer to the horse. It was either slowing down or had stopped altogether with nightfall, unsure of the path. But as we grew nearer, we smelled and heard other horses and another smell on top of them: humans. I began to drool, and what was left of my own human thought drifted away as the wolf took over not only my body but the remainder of my mind. The next thing I remember is coming back to awareness with someone else’s voice in my head.

I asked. I looked around and saw Rannveig nearby, her muzzle bloody. I could feel the blood on my own muzzle and smell the coppery scent of it. Another wolf sat calmly a short distance away. It was a wolf I recognized: Úlfur.

Rannveig came back to herself and processed what was going on. I didn’t recognize the body we’d torn apart, but she did. She leapt back from it and yipped in alarm. Through the pack link, she screamed. ate my brother!>

He must have come looking for her. I turned to survey the scene; there was another body back along the trail. I didn’t know who it was, because I’d never seen anyone at the farm besides Rannveig, but I suspected she would recognize him.

I asked. She wasn’t paying attention. She was hung up on eating her brother and trying to vomit. I felt sorry for the men but didn’t hate myself; I saw already that I had done nothing. These men were literally killed by wolves, not murdered.

Úlfur said, clearly able to hear my thoughts. I expected she would ignore him as she’d ignored me, but she calmed down right away. His influence as alpha was strong, and she tucked her tail between her legs and confined herself to soft whimpers.

Úlfur said,

Rannveig said.

I conceded. I wasn’t sure I’d spend much effort looking for that path. I could tell already I would like being a wolf, and I wasn’t feeling any of the horror she felt. I asked again, now that she’d settled down a bit.

She padded over and looked at what was left of the face. She threw her head back and howled.

I said.

Úlfur added. Rannveig whined and lay down, covering her eyes with her paws in a very human gesture. Her ears were flattened and her tail tucked underneath her.

I said, my mind grasping the possibilities before us.

Úlfur said. There was little else to hunt in Iceland at the time. The reindeer herds from Norway didn’t establish themselves until the mid-nineteenth century.

By the same token, there were no large land predators in Iceland. The most ferocious was the Arctic fox. No one would believe these men were taken down and savaged by Arctic foxes. When they were found, people would start hunting for whatever had killed them.

Úlfur said. Úlfur was far better prepared for the change to wolf. He had a cache of clothes waiting for him, along with a pack of valuables.

I was incredulous. The reason I was able to travel alone as a courier and trader across the island was precisely because brigands couldn’t make a living on the anemic commerce between settlements.

Looking miserable wasn’t difficult, since the transformation back to human was every bit as painful as it had been to wolf. The good people of Kirkjubæjarklaustur gave us clothes and food, and Úlfur bought us packs to carry supplies in for our long trek. We hiked cross-country between two glaciers to the north side of the island, sleeping in the open at night and fearing nothing. Rannveig spoke little to either of us and often wept at night. She did not want to be comforted.