The Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon Page A

Gallatinov looked at the guns and the eyes of the men who aimed them. There was no way out. “You’ll let my family go,” he demanded.
    “No Gallatinov will leave this place alive,” Schedrin replied. “We understand the importance of a task well done, Comrade. Consider this… your private Kowel.” He unstrapped his rifle and pulled back the bolt to chamber a shell.
    “You goddamned dogs!” General Gallatinov said, and stepped forward to strike the man’s face with his cane.
    Anton shot him in the chest before the cane was swung. The pistol’s crack made Elana and her daughter jump, and the noise echoed across the meadow like strange thunder. A brooding of ravens leaped from a treetop and winged for safety.
    Gallatinov was hurled backward by the force of the bullet, and fell to his knees in the grass. Crimson was spreading across the front of his uniform. He gasped, could not find the strength to stand. Elana screamed and fell down beside her husband, her arms around him as if she could protect him from the next bullet. Alizia turned, began to run toward the lake, and Danalov shot her twice in the back before she’d gotten ten feet away. She tumbled, a sack of bloody flesh and broken bones.
    “No!” Gallatinov said, and got his good leg under him. Blood was creeping from his mouth, and his eyes glinted with terror. He started to rise, Elana still clinging to him.
    Schedrin pulled the rifle’s trigger, and the bullet hit Gallatinov in the face. Bits of bone and brain splattered over Elana’s dress. The jittering body fell backward, carrying Elana with it, and they fell over the picnic baskets, bottles of wine and crumb-flecked platters. Danalov shot Gallatinov in the stomach, and Anton fired two more bullets into the man’s head as Elana continued to shriek.
    “Oh dear God,” Dimitri said, choking, and he ran down to the lake’s edge to be violently sick.
    Mikhail heard a series of high cracking noises, followed by a scream. He stopped, and the beasts that were tracking him also halted. His mother’s voice, he realized. His face tightened with fear, and he began to run through the forest heedless of the danger at his back.
    Vines gripped his shirt and tried to trip him. He followed the trail of stones through the underbrush, his boots slipping on moss-covered rocks and sinking into ankle-deep pools of dead leaves. And then he burst out of the forest into the meadow and saw three men on horseback and bodies lying sprawled. Red gleamed on green grass. His stomach knotted, his knees seized up, and he saw one of the men pull back the bolt of his rifle and aim at his…
    “Mother!” he shouted, his voice echoing horror across the meadow.
    Anton and Danalov looked toward the boy. Elana Gallatinov, on her knees with her white dress dripping blood, saw him standing there, and she screamed, “Run, Mikhail! Ru-”
    The rifle bullet hit her below the hairline. Mikhail saw his mother’s head explode.
    “Get the boy!” Schedrin commanded, and Anton lifted his smoking pistol.
    He stared, transfixed, at the black eye of the gun barrel. A Gallatinov never runs, he thought. He saw the man’s finger twitch on the trigger. A gout of fire leaped from the black-eyed barrel, and he heard a waspish whine and felt heat on his left cheek. A branch snapped beyond his shoulder.
    “Kill him, damn it!” Schedrin yelled as he chambered another bullet into his rifle and wheeled his horse around. Danalov was taking aim at Mikhail, and Anton was about to squeeze off a second shot.
    A Gallatinov ran.
    He twisted around, his mother’s scream ringing in his mind, and fled into the forest as a bullet thunked into a tree to his right and showered his hair with splinters. He tripped over a vine, staggered, and almost fell. There was the hoarser crack of a rifle shot, and the bullet passed over Mikhail’s skull as he struggled for balance.
    Then he was picking up speed, tearing into the underbrush, sliding on dead leaves, and fighting