**Chapter 4**
I snapped out of deep sleep instantly, as if someone invisible had jerked a fishing line. No grogginess. No weakness.
I sat up in bed and threw off the blanket. Cool night air licked my bare torso, raising goosebumps, but I felt no cold. My gaze darted to the mantel. In pitch darkness, the clock hands glowed as clearly to me as they did by day.
One a.m.
"The Hour of the Ox." Or, in my case, the "Hour of the Wolf." That liminal moment when the boundary between worlds thins, civilization sleeps, and the true masters of the night step onto the trail to tear out the throats of careless herbivores.
"Well, aren't you a pompous bastard, James," I snorted into the silence, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "'Hour of the Wolf'… go on, say 'call of the ancestors' while you're at it."
The irony was just the mind's defense mechanism. The truth was, my body itched. Literally. As if high voltage ran beneath the skin. Muscles pumped by an unnatural metabolism demanded work, ligaments begged to stretch, and my lungs craved not the stale, dusty air of the bedroom but damp, forest freshness.
The Beast was clawing from inside. Four walls were too tight for it.
"Fine," I exhaled, rising from the bed. The floor creaked, but I shifted my weight at once, smothering the sound. "Night's not eternal. Time to walk the dog before it starts chewing the furniture."
I pulled on wide canvas trousers—the only thing that didn't restrict movement—and went to the window. Third floor. About twelve meters. For a normal person, a good way to break your legs or neck. For me, a light warm-up.
I silently swung the casement open.
The night smelled of wet earth, ozone, and rotting leaves. The scent hit my nostrils like ammonia, blowing my pupils wide.
I slipped onto the ledge. Stone was cold, damp, and rough beneath my bare feet. One second to judge the trajectory, calculate friction and angles.
Jump.
I didn't fall—I flowed downward. Fingers and toes bit into microscopic seams in the brickwork with the force of hydraulic clamps. I moved down the vertical wall headfirst, like a giant gecko or spider. Grab the drainpipe—the metal gave a thin, plaintive squeak under my weight but held—jerk, slide along the stiff vines of old ivy.
The landing was utterly silent. I sprang on my legs, killing inertia, and touched wet grass with my fingertips.
Silence.
I froze, turning to stone. Nostrils flared, drinking the air. My ears seemed to swivel like radar dishes.
The house slept. Only old Martha, the cook, snored thunderously on the second floor in the servants' wing, and somewhere deep in the cellar, in the grain sacks, a field mouse scratched.
No one noticed. Perfect. The last thing I needed was superstitious servants seeing the young master leaping from third-floor windows and running on walls. In these backwoods, rumors are worse than plague. They see a shadow and invent a demon. And it was far too early for a bonfire.
I streaked like a black shadow across the inner yard, cleared the two-meter stone wall in a single fluid motion—no hands, just a leg drive—and dissolved into the forest's darkness.
Pure bliss.
The moment the trees closed overhead, cutting off moonlight, it hit me.
I ran. First a jog, loosening the joints. Then faster. Branches lashed my face and bare chest, but I felt no pain—scratches closed before blood could bead.
I remembered how I'd ended up like this. It started three days ago. My "animal nature" stopped being satisfied with static push-ups in a room. Bouts of motiveless aggression demanded an outlet. The body wanted action. It needed to run, jump, hunt.
And here I was.
The forest at night wasn't some Grimm Brothers horror for me. It was my personal amusement park.
Moonlight, piercing the dense canopy in rare beams, flooded everything with ghostly silver. My vision switched to another, inhuman mode. I didn't just see in the dark—I saw differently. Rods and cones worked with insane efficiency. Contrast cranked to the max, shadows went translucent. The thermal trace of a rabbit that had run across the path glowed in a fading orange spectrum. I could make out every pine needle a hundred meters away, every crack in bark.
And the smells…
Oh, it was a whole world hidden from humans. A symphony.
Thousands of shades slammed into my olfactory cortex, painting a three-dimensional map. I smelled mycelium under thick moss—damp, mold, earth. The sharp reek of a fox den—urine ammonia and musk. The cloying sweetness of rotting deadwood and the sharp, menthol, eye-watering bite of pine resin. The world was layered, saturated, alive. I read the forest like an open book.
Hearing kept pace. I heard an owl spread its wings half a kilometer away—the softest whisper of feathers on air. I heard a bark beetle larva crunching through an old oak's trunk. I heard a field mouse's heart in tall grass. Thud-thud-thud-thud. Fast. Frightened.
"Ha!" I breathed, accelerating.
Sleep barely mattered to me. Three or four hours and I was fresh as a cucumber. My internal battery recharged instantly. I could go three days without sleep and lose nothing in efficiency.
Muscles warmed to working temperature. Blood, loaded with oxygen and adrenaline, boiled, demanding more.
"Time," I growled, feeling my gait change. "To hell with bipedalism. That's for the weak."
I dropped to all fours.
Strange? Insane? Maybe to an outside observer it would look like the start of a werewolf transformation. But for this body it was as natural as breathing. My center of gravity shifted, spine stretched into a flexible steel cable, arms became second legs. I lunged forward at a gallop, pushing off with all four limbs, vaulting fallen trunks, flying over ravines.
I felt like a living projectile. Freedom. Wild, intoxicating, primal freedom that made me want to laugh and howl at the moon. No stiff collars, no ledger numbers, no weeping widows or frock-coated hypocrites. Just speed, wind in my ears, and beastly power.
I skidded to a halt, claws ripping moss and gouging deep furrows in soil. Momentum dragged me another couple of meters.
A smell.
Sharp, heavy, sour. It hung like a dense invisible wall, drowning out pine. Rancid fat, unwashed fur, fermented berries, aggression.
I worked my nose, breaking it down.
Bear. Grizzly. Male. Big. Old. Confident.
I walked to a massive pine. The bark was shredded to ribbons. Deep, crude gouges oozed fresh amber sap.
"Well, well," I smirked, rising and tracing a finger along a torn edge. "Local boss marking turf, huh? Like, 'I'm the boss here and all the females are mine'?"
The Beast inside bristled instantly. The чужой scent wasn't just information. It was a challenge. A brazen insult. On my land—and I already considered this forest mine—another predator was staking a claim.
"Nope, shaggy," I whispered, lips stretching into a wide, mocking grin that bared teeth too sharp. "Democracy's over."
Heat in my forearms became unbearable.
SNIKT!
Bone blades slid out with a wet, carnivorous sound, dull-shining in moonlight.
I stepped close to the tree and swung.
My claws sank into frozen wood like warm butter, far deeper than the bear's pathetic marks. Chips exploded like shrapnel. I slashed the bark crosswise, erasing the rival's sign and leaving my own—deep, straight, lethal cuts.
"Like that," I nodded, flicking bark from the blades. "Know your place."
But it wasn't enough. Ancient animal instinct demanded total, unconditional dominance—on every sensory level.
I retracted the claws and, choking on hooligan laughter, unbuttoned my trousers.
"Sorry, pine," I snorted, pulling myself out. "Big politics demand sacrifices."
A hot stream splashed the shredded bark, washing away the bear's musk and replacing it with mine.
I laughed out loud, barefoot in the Canadian wilderness, pissing on a centuries-old tree. Alexander Petrovich, respected surgeon and department head, would have burned with shame at the sight. James Howlett was in feral ecstasy.
"Sniff it, fuzzy ass!" I shouted into the dark, fastening my pants. "You'll be surprised when you come check your borders. There's a new sheriff now. And he pisses higher than you."
Energy still churned, bursting my chest. The ground felt too small. I needed height. The stars.
I crouched, coiling like a steel spring.
Launch!
I shot three meters up, claws biting the trunk. The tree shuddered.
I climbed fast, aggressive, ignoring gravity. Claws punched in, holding my weight with ease. I felt like a steroid-fueled mutant squirrel. Branches slapped my face, dry needles poured down my collar, resin stuck to my hands, but I climbed higher, where the trunk thinned into a spire.
The top.
I perched on the very crown, balancing on a wind-swaying branch.
The view was insane.
Below stretched a sea of taiga—a boundless, rolling ocean of black crowns flooded with the ghostly, dead light of a full moon. Far off, five kilometers maybe, warm farm lights twinkled. The air was different up here—clean, icy, thin. It intoxicated better than any vintage whiskey.
I felt like king of the world. Small—but almighty—god of the night.
My chest swelled with excess feeling. I had to release it. Shout my existence in the universe's face.
I spread my arms wide, blades out to full length—thirty centimeters of bone death—threw my head back to the huge, yellow, indifferent moon.
"Well then, hunters," I whispered, a vibration building in my throat. "Time to turn your hair white."
And I howled.
Not some pathetic mutt's whine. A low, powerful, vibrating howl that rose from a guttural rumble in the diaphragm into piercing ultrasound. In it tangled longing for a past life, phantom grief for my father, and wild joy at newfound power.
"A-OO-OO-OO-OO!!!"
The sound rolled over the forest, echoing off trunks, scattering night birds, forcing all life within a mile to cower and freeze. The forest answered with absolute, respectful silence.
I howled and laughed myself sick inside. I imagined the faces of local poachers or late travelers.
I stood atop the world, king of the taiga. Wiping tears from wind and hysterical laughter after my solo concert, I decided it was time.
"All right, Mowgli, down we go," I ordered myself. "Show's over."
I took a confident, careless step onto a neighboring branch. Thick. Solid-looking.
CRACK.
Dry. Loud. Treacherous.
The world flipped. Gravity, forgotten in my euphoria, rudely asserted its rights. Newton was a merciless bitch.
"Mom!!!" I screamed like a terrified first-grader as I fell backward into blackness.
Instincts fired—crookedly. I flailed, trying to snag anything with my claws, slow the fall. Idiot.
Instead of stopping me, the blades turned me into a falling lawnmower. I mowed branches, thick limbs, dense boughs, meeting no resistance.
"Fuck! Shit! Goddamn—" I yelled, collecting every needle with my face.
I spun, slammed into the trunk, got hurled around like a rag doll in a centrifuge.
Undergrown superhero. Wolverine, my ass. Crippled flying squirrel.
BAM!
The ground met me brutally. Not an удар—a detonation of pain. Air whistled from my lungs like a popped ball.
But the worst wasn't that. I felt a sharp, hot, pinpoint strike in my chest. As if someone had driven a crowbar into my mediastinum with professional force.
"Kh-h…" I wheezed, trying to inhale, but my diaphragm seized.
From my mouth burst a hot wave of salty sludge. Blood. Lots of it.
With effort, fighting my neck muscles, I dropped my chin to my chest. Vision doubled, swam, but I saw enough.
From the center of my chest, through ribs and, by feel, dangerously close to the spine, jutted a broken branch. Wrist-thick. Sharp as a vampire stake. I'd impaled myself on a fallen tree like a beetle in a sadist's collection.
Hysteria washed over me. Pain was hellish, beyond measure, but my shock-soaked brain threw up a bizarre defense.
"H-he…" I gurgled, spitting a thick red clot onto the moss. "Well… at least it's not rubber…"
Pinned butterfly. Cause of death: impaled while playing Tarzan. Darwin Award, expedited.
"So… gotta… pull it out…" I rasped as my lungs filled with blood.
I planted my palms—claws reflexively retracted—into wet earth and tried to lift.
Pain blinded me. White supernovas burst in my eyes. The wood sat tight, prying broken ribs apart. Dry, rough grain grinding living meat and bone produced sensations that made me want to bite my own head off just to stop it.
"Come on… you fuck… come on…" I whispered, blacking out from shock but clinging stubbornly to consciousness.
I snarled, whimpered, swore in three languages. Millimeter by millimeter, I dragged myself off the spit.
Wet, sucking sounds. Air gulping into an open wound. Rib scraping wood.
"A-A-A-GHRR!"
Final yank. I fell onto my back in cold, wet moss. Free.
Above me, blotting out the indifferent moon, black pine crowns closed.
I lay there staring into that lattice of branches and listened as a biological miracle unfolded inside me.
The hole in my chest was through-and-through. I could have stuck fingers in and touched my heart. But the sluices were already closing. Inside, everything boiled. Not just metabolism—a blast furnace. Hot, viscous foam of stem cells, fibrin, and some goddamn magic flooded the wound like expanding foam. Broken ribs slid together with dry, wooden cracks, knitting flush. The lung, collapsed into a bloody rag, unfurled with wet, greedy slurps, filling with air.
Itch. Insane, electric itch, as if thousands of fire ants stitched nerves beneath my skin.
In a minute I drew a full breath—deep, to the diaphragm's bottom. In two, I jerked upright.
I ran a hand over my chest. Where a mortal wound had gaped seconds ago was smooth, pink, newborn skin. Only a pale thread of scar faded and vanished before my eyes.
"Holy shit…" I whispered, not recognizing my voice.
And then it came.
HUNGER.
Not appetite. Not a grumbling stomach. A black hole yawning inside, demanding sacrifice now. Regeneration had eaten everything. Every calorie. Every gram of glucose. Every glycogen store. I was empty as a scorched desert. I needed fuel. Protein. Carbs. Fat. Now. A lot.
Vision dimmed as if someone turned down the brightness.
Rational thought, moral imperatives, thirty years of civilized surgeon Alexander Petrovich dissolved like sugar in boiling water. Concepts like "I," "personality," "humanism" became irrelevant chaff.
Only base settings remained. Predator BIOS.
Find. Kill. Eat.
The world shifted. Colors dulled to monochrome gray, but smells and sounds gained shape, density, color.
I dropped to all fours. This wasn't play anymore. It was the only correct, aerodynamically perfect attack posture.
Scent.
Warm. Musky. Alive. Sweet.
Blood. Fear.
Deer. Male. Young but big—around a hundred kilos. Five hundred meters northwest. Standing behind a spreading juniper, grazing, unaware he was already dead. Heart beating: thud-thud… thud-thud… I heard it like hammer blows.
Saliva flooded my mouth, thick and caustic.
I didn't think. I acted.
I moved upwind, hugging the ground, utterly silent. Feet padded softly on dry moss. I was a shadow. I was death in a hungry adolescent body.
There.
I saw him through branches. Graceful, velvet antlers, breath steaming. He lifted his head, ears twitching. Felt something? No. Too late.
Leg muscles compressed, storing kinetic energy like catapult springs.
Jump.
I crossed ten meters like a cannonball, defying gravity. In his eyes I was a smear of darkness.
I crashed down, knocking him flat with mass and monstrous inertia.
Bellow. Bone crunch.
My claws stayed in. I didn't need knives. I needed teeth.
I clamped onto his throat. Jaws shut with hydraulic force. I tasted fur, then the dry crack of tracheal cartilage, muscle resistance—and then—
A fountain.
Hot, thick, unbearably salty liquid flooded my mouth, palate, tongue, throat.
He thrashed beneath me, hooves slashing, trying to rip my belly open, but I felt nothing. The blows were slaps. I pinned him, growling, tearing flesh with my teeth to reach life's source.
I drank. I tore. I swallowed steaming chunks of raw meat without chewing, choking on greed.
More. Again. Everything.
Pure energy poured in with чужая blood. The metabolic pit filled. The Beast purred, smacking and breaking vertebrae to get marrow.
---
Click.
Consciousness snapped back as abruptly as it had gone. Like a light switch.
I blinked away a red haze.
Before me was a brown, hairy, shapeless mass. In my mouth—a strange cloying taste. Iron. Damp. Copper.
"Motherfucker…" I whispered.
The scene was epic. I straddled a shredded deer carcass. Poor Bambi looked like he'd gone through an industrial grinder, then a steamroller. Throat gone, chest ripped open, pink innards steaming in the cold night.
And me…
I looked at my hands. Blood up to the elbows. Thick, already congealing. I licked my lips—dripping. A tendon stuck between my teeth.
I shuddered—but strangely, no nausea.
Instead, my stomach spread a heavy, blissful satiety. The body got what it wanted. Tank topped off with high-octane protein. Life was good.
"Well, colleague," I addressed the deer's glassy, reproachful eye, spitting a scrap of hide, "you're… not bad. Nutritious. Tartare's an acquired taste. I'd prefer rosemary, capers, berry sauce, medium. But who am I to argue with nature at three a.m.?"
That's what really hit me.
I'd just killed and eaten an animal with bare hands and teeth. And I wasn't ashamed. I was fine.
That terrified me more than regeneration. More than claws. The line between civilized man and beast was erasing. I was becoming a predator not just physically, but psychologically. Morality was fading.
"All right, banquet's over," I muttered, rising and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "Enough National Geographic for tonight."
I glanced east. Blackness there was thinning to gray. Dawn soon. Old Martha rises with the roosters. If the maids came in and found an empty bed—screams. If they saw me like this—holy inquisition.
"Time to head back," I ordered myself. "Preferably before the henhouse wakes."
I looked myself over and grimaced.
A horror show. Caked in drying blood mixed with dirt, needles, and deer bits. Chest, arms, face—red smears everywhere. Meat under nails.
"Butcher on shift," I spat, feeling the sticky crust pull my skin. "Just missing an apron."
I couldn't go home like this. I'd ruin Persian carpets, and the stench—horses would go mad in the stable. Fresh blood and animal musk carry for kilometers.
"Stream," I decided, shivering at the thought. "Five degrees, tops. No choice. Gotta play walrus. Run the channel, wash it off."
I eyed my trousers.
"Well…" I tugged the blood-soaked fabric.
They'd been wide, canvas, comfy. Now they looked like a mop used after an amputation. Soaked through, knee torn from the fall, guts stains at the waist. Impossible to wash, dangerous too—questions would follow.
"Trash," I sighed. "Pity. Good pants. Free. Didn't squeeze the boys."
Whatever. New ones cost a couple dollars. Explaining why the young lord smells like a slaughterhouse is harder.
I hitched the ruined pants so they wouldn't fall and trotted toward running water, planning how I'd bury the rags in the forest and climb the third-floor wall naked.
Hell of a night.