The Wolf's Hour (Michael Gallatin, #1)

by Robert McCammon

Better to live than exist, she thought. Who had told her that? Oh, yes. He had.

She settled back like an autumn leaf, full of color and wilted at the edges.

He had dreamed he was a wolf who dreamed he was a man who dreamed he was a wolf who dreamed.

Shackleton went out the door of The Mutton Chop feeling like chopped mutton.

“What’s that racket?” Shackleton thought the music sounded like armies of demons clashing in hell. He walked to the Victrola and saw the record spinning around.

“If you make friends with pain, you have a friend for life.”

“Truth is like fire, Mikhail,” he said. “It either heals or it destroys. But it never—never—leaves what it touches unchanged.”

The cold water shocked first his ankles, then his knees, then … well, it was an experience he was not likely to forget. “Bracing,” Michael said, with gritted teeth.

And it came to him, something he pondered every day and every night since he was a child in the Russian forest: I’m not human. I’m not an animal. What am I?

Mikhail Gallatinov—six days and a world away from the boy he used to be—tore the flesh between his teeth and swallowed it with famished relish.

It’s the curse of man to have a mind and not have the sense to use it.”

What, as a man—or half man, half animal—was he prepared to lay down his life for? The human-woven net of politics? Some narrow vision of freedom? Love? Triumph? He explored the question, and found no easy answer.

“Oh, we’ve lived in the sewers since 1938, madam. We’ve been force-fed shit so long we began to enjoy the taste.

“Free,” he whispered in a thick Ukrainian accent. “Free. No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What’s fascinating to me about a train is that you can create your own world inside one. This train, for instance: anyone seeing it from the outside would see simply what appeared to be an ordinary freight hauler. They wouldn’t think twice about it. But inside … well, it’s my world, Baron. I love the sound of the wheels on the rails, the power of the locomotive. It’s like riding inside a great, beautiful beast. Don’t you agree?”

“This ‘damned reed,’ as you put it, is going home with me. I may gild it and have it mounted. One never knows one’s limits until life is put to the test. Isn’t that right?”