When Night Came Calling Read Free

remained of spring and summer. In the fall, I built a fine shelter against the coming cold in deep woods far from any village. It meant a run of several leagues each night to steal. I welcomed the long runs and the night started to become my friend.
      “I carried my father’s sword and shield, wore my father’s armor. I no longer feared the howls of creatures I could not see. I no longer feared the wrath of Romans or Anglians.
      “At times, I dared myself to get caught so that I could fight them at last but whenever a moment of such truth came I heard my father’s voice in my ears. ‘When sword and shield and arms are one, it will be time,’ he said and so I waited. I waited for the day when my father’s sword and shield were like my hands and the weight of them were as feathers to wind.
      “Living on my own, I became increasingly like a wild thing, though I, as yet, did not see this. I answered to no one and no one answered to me. Winter’s biting chill had no power over me. I ran through the cold dark nights, took what I needed from this village or that.
      “When the thaw came, I returned to shelters by the shore and started watching for the arrival of my kin. The first sails I recognized arrived some weeks later, but I wasn’t the only one to see the sails. Roman guards lit warnings fires, ensuring an army was there to greet my kin on the shores.
      “No matter, I waited and came to blows against Romans and Anglians alike as my kin came ashore. I battled until the last of us had fallen or been taken and only just managed my escape. I tried to spirit some few away, but even though I’d fought beside them they did not trust me.
      “Perhaps it was because I looked like such a wild thing by then. Perhaps… Or perhaps it was because I was no longer a man by then.”
      “No longer a man?” The girl said.
      “Not in the way you are thinking. It was the wildness. It was inside me, but I was still of flesh and blood. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been things would have been much different, but I was what I was then. A man, or at least as much of one as I could be at fourteen.
      “That spring, I fought beside kin two more times, never managing to spirit any away. I saw no sails that summer and moved back to my deep shelter well before the first snow. That winter I lost much of what remained of my humanity and became increasingly like the things that howled at the moon in the dark of the night.
      “I stole. I killed. It was the killing that nearly was my undoing. After villages set men and dogs against me, I was unable to return for there were guards everywhere. Soon only the wilds were left to me, and I lived off the meat of whatever I could find, take with sword or snare.
      “My fear of discovery was such that I stopped building fires and ate my kills much as I’d seen the wolves that also hounded me do. I wore the skins of my kills, becoming more animal, less man, and it was liberating.
      “Out in the deep woods one night under a full moon I encountered an alpha, the leader of the pack that stalked my steps. When he came at me, I threw down my sword and shield and fought him hands to paws. As he lunged, I held him and wrestled against his claws ripping into my back while I worked at the fur and flesh of his neck with my teeth.
      “I don’t recall what happened afterward. Waking with the dawn, I found I was not alone. The alpha was splayed across my body, frozen in death, with a dark red pool marking a great circle around me and the pack waiting at the edge of the trees.”
      The zombie stopped.
      The girl waited for him to continue. “But how?” she asked finally.
      “I’d ripped out the alpha’s throat with my teeth. Exhausted I must have collapsed on my back in the snow, for that’s where I was when the dawn came.”
      “The wolves?” the girl asked. “Why didn’t the pack attack you? Or did they?”
      “They didn’t attack. They watched as I