Bram Stoker's HANNIBAL

Chapter 64: Woefully Watching All the Long Day Through

Success. I've gotten Will to smile.

Such a prize only came after significant coaxing. He's been dragging himself around the zoo all afternoon as if his mind is elsewhere, impervious to good humor. We stand before the ape cage, watching them as they play at being human, sitting on tree stumps and sharing a banana with fine manners indeed. I suggest we should invite them home for dinner. "Do you think they've already made plans for the evening?"

Will chuckles, leaning on the railing at the edge of the walkway. "I'm sure they have. Probably having dinner with the, ah, Prime Minister."

I fold his arm through mine and we continue along the path. Many of the animals are hiding in the backs of their cages; if Will is disappointed he doesn't say. My doing, unfortunately; some creatures are particularly sensitive to my presence. The reptiles are glad to see me, and the wolves – they all come racing to the edge of their cage, whining and begging, pacing, howling, a strange symphony for daylight.

"Alana thinks they should release the pack," Will tells me. "That some beasts shouldn't be caged."

I hadn't anticipated agreeing with Alana Bloom on anything during the short, excruciating stretch of days she has left to live, but the world is full of miracles.

He pauses, hand on my arm. "Wolf puppies. We found pups in a den, didn't we? Under a fallen tree."

He's doubting his memory, but this is one I'll happily cultivate. "We did," I confirm. "The white wolf's litter."

"They were so tame," Will muses, barely audible over the barks and yips and pleading whines coming from the wolf cage.

"You have a particular effect on dangerous creatures." I can't help myself.

Will sighs, but it's through a smile, one that I've come to recognize as just for me. Then, "I think you have that particular effect. Don't you?" There's a glint in his eyes like a knife in the dark, though the weapon is far away and hidden in shadows. I do wonder what he remembers from the night he fled the castle and I lay at his side with my pack to keep him warm in the rain, even as he was in the process of breaking my heart. Risking his life and leaving me. Falling into her arms again in Budapest.

"I am linked forever to my homeland," I say. "My connection with the birds and beasts that have lived there for centuries is deeply rooted. I have no such connection with the animals here."

A deep and abiding loyalty, a merging of bloodlines, no. But I could speak to them. Ask to join their pack. Even now they can sense it, sense me and my potential as an ally, doing whatever they can to get my attention in their own way. They have suffered long in captivity and my skin prickles as I imagine what it would be like to run with them.

Free us. I don't hear their words. I can only sense their intentions and instincts. I wonder if they would obey me with the same precision as the pack raised in the mountains of my homeland, born generation after generation in the woods outside Castle Lecter.

Free us.

Obey me. Silence.

The wolves freeze in place, looking at me with five sets of yellow eyes.

Alpha, comes the collective thought, their own alpha more than willing to pass off his crown to me. It is he who addresses me next.

Free us. Hunt. Kill. Tear the throat of the keeper.

He must mean the zookeeper. Vengeance is in order for all of us, it seems. A torrent of images drains through my mind, there and then gone. They have suffered at the hands of the keeper, his most egregious crime the theft of a litter of pups born to his favored mate.