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Red Moon: Revolution Chapter 14

Guests were what Sergei needed. He hadn't realized how far removed he was from the world until he began to talk with Peter and Brennan. There was so much that had gone on without his knowledge. He didn't know that Dmitri had gone to America to get Trevor back. He barely knew Trevor, but he had spent decades with Dmitri. He had grown so used to simply knowing where the wolf was at all times that it was a bit of a shock to be told he was somewhere other than where he thought he was.

The three exchanged stories over a light breakfast, courtesy of Erika who excused herself to go to the market. She knew that these were Sergei's friends and was going to give him the time he needed without her interference.

"See you soon." She said, slinging her favorite leather purse over her shoulder. She wrapped and arm around Sergei's muscular neck and kissed him on the cheek.

"Alright." He said and squeezed that arm. She ruffled his hair and went out the door, leaving the three to themselves.

"Does she know?" Peter asked, sipping from a cup of coffee, straight black, just how he liked it.

Sergei shook his head. "No." He said and pushed back on the chair so that it was balancing on its back two legs. "I don't want that life to be part of this one." He had done so successfully so far, but he worried that something was bound to show up. He could be crossing the street and a careless driver may take just long enough to stop that, with his fake leg and arm, he wouldn't be able to move out of the way. Maybe he'd get in a fight and get pissed off enough. It was hard to tell what would set off a change and even though there were very few times that a werewolf changed into their feral form in public, it did happen no matter how careful they were.

"That is your choice." Peter set down his cup. "Though it's going to be hard."

"That brings up a question I've had for some time." Brennan broke her silence, not really used to being part of a conversation between wolves. She encountered on a near daily basis now and even talked to them once in a while, but she often let herself be removed from their more social lived. The Inquisition taught one-hundred-an-one ways to kill a wolf, but not one way to talk to them. That took on the job training.

The two stopped and looked at her patiently.

"How have you managed to stay out of the public eye?" She asked. "The Inquisition has people in the government, money, a world wide network to keep our operations secret, but wolves..." She scratched her head and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. "I've never heard of you having anything remotely close to what the Inquisition does."

"How many of us do you think there are?" Peter asked Brennan.

"I don't really know." She shrugged. "Intel has never been that good and there hasn't exactly been any sort of official census."

"Give it a guess." He urged her.

Brennan thought back to all of the records that she had read over, both before and after she rose up against her old allies. There were always estimates, annual reports on what each director thought, none were ever taken seriously though. Reports were based on sightings, encounters, kills, but recent years had been slow and numbers became unreliable. She took a random guess. "One million."

Peter raised and eyebrow. Sergei didn't do anything, he didn't know either. He never kept track of that sort of thing.

"One hundred thousand?" Brennan guessed again when Peter didn't say anything. "Throw me a bone here. I'm pulling numbers out of my ass."

Peter was a little surprised at the language she used. She had always been well mannered and professional around the workplace. She had been opening up more recently, but she never said or did anything out of place. She really did just need to get out of her bunker and get some light that wasn't coming from some old light bulb. "Ten thousand, maybe a little less." He said.

"Ten thousand." Brennan repeated after him slowly. It was much smaller than what she had expected for something that had been called a threat that was going to consume the planet and some of the reports from the other directors had estimated that many in their own regions. They were way off. "I thought there would be more."

"Most people do." He chuckled.

"I don't understand." She rubbed her chin and shifted on her chair, her leg was falling asleep. "That's really low, why is that."

"We're a dying race." He sighed, not sadly, but more reminiscing about the past. "Our numbers have been in decline for some time now. It's going down slow, but it is going down." He and other pack leaders knew about this and it was often a discussion of concern between the different European packs whenever, on the rare occasion that they convened.

"Ten thousand should be enough for a breeding population." Brennan said. "There was a time tens of thousands of years ago when there were only a few thousand humans and now there are over seven billion."

"It should be." Peter agreed with a nod. "But ten thousand isn't the breeding population, that number is closer to five thousand."

"Why are you telling us this?" Sergei interjected. The conversation had started about how the werewolves managed to keep themselves a secret, which was fairly easy to answer. They had just been very careful, Peter could have answered it like that, but he had driven this conversation like this for a reason.

Peter looked over at Sergei, he held onto his cup and Sergei then saw, not the leader of a strong pack, but an old man. He looked like some of the men who he had fought with in Stalingrad, on those days when the outcome was in doubt. They were tired, worn out and were worried about their futures.

"I'm an old wolf." Peter pushed his cup away. "I've lived a long and fruitful life. I witnessed the rise and fall of Ivan the Terrible in person. I once ran across Shakespeare in the streets of London." He gave a long list of astounding things that he had done and witnessed that included a little bit of everything from European history. "I remember joining the ranks to go fight Napoleon with my son Dmitri who was but a young lad." He chuckled at that. "He was so full of sprite back then, still is." His smile faded as quickly as it came. "What I'm saying is I'm old and I think that my time will be coming soon."

"So you're worried that you're going to die, seeing our kind slowly fade away?" Sergei asked Peter and he looked up.

"Werewolves always find a way." He said with vigor, it was something that he believed in. "No, what I fear is dying with no clear line after me. Dmitri has taken a human, a male human as his mate and he is my only child."

"I see." Brennan said uncomfortably. She wasn't too knowledgeable about this subject so she looked towards Sergei to take charge.

"You haven't voiced any concern until now." Sergei said, wondering if Peter was about to take a firm stance on the situation. Two years was a long time for the to be apart and maybe he had been hoping that Dmitri would have found someone else by then.

"No." Peter replied. "I haven't and I won't. He is fully grown and is capable of making his own choices." There wasn't much conviction in his voice and Sergei knew that deep down, Peter was disappointed in his son. He wanted a grandchild, someone to carry on the genes. He wanted security in the future of the family, but it wasn't possible with Trevor as Dmitri's mate.

It was silent after that. No one was willing to go into such a touchy topic, not here. This was something that needed to be discussed between father and son now that it was apparent that there was an issue. It was going to be a few weeks until Dmitri came back home, with Trevor, that would be the time.

The three sipped at their drinks. Sergei listened to the morning traffic and looked out his window. It was Berlin. Walks around the city brought back memories. Many places were still there, an old grocery store that he used to go to as a child. He would save his lunch money each day and waste it on candy with friends. His mother used the paddle on his when she learned and he couldn't sit for a week without feeling the sting of the board. He could still feel it if he thought hard enough.

Other places were gone, destroyed in the war, torn down during the Cold War, demolished and rebuilt anew, all in all, it was a new city, but still Berlin at heart.

"I think we've used up enough of your time." Brennan finally said. She was antsy to get back to work. It was going to be midday by the time they got back and she was sure that there was a load of new reports that would require her attention. It wasn't that she didn't enjoy her time outside, she loved it and would have stayed out all day, but duty didn't permit it.

She got up and Peter did as well after a moment. He had a lot on his mind, he always did, it was just closer to home now as his body became slower. Each day, he could feel it, he was dying. His reflexes were growing slower, he was noticing less, everything was slowly grinding to a halt. He didn't know exactly how long he had, but secret visits to an old friend who knew about werewolves and had served the pack for many long years had revealed that he may have as little as the end of they year, ten months.

A few knew it, his trusted friend Vasili was the first he told. He told a few others that he knew he could trust to be ready for when the day came. They had instructions on what to do if he were to die unexpectedly. Dmitri would take control of the pack, regardless of his mate, he was still family by blood and had that right, but plans were in place to look for a more secure line to take charge after his son since it seemed unlikely there would be another heir after Dmitri.

That day was still many years away, Dmitri still had decades left before his health would even begin to fail in the slightest. That was a lot of time for change.

Brennan and Peter left Sergei's home quietly. They both felt guilty for turning what was supposed to be a cheerful sort of reunion into a family matter, though no hard feelings were left behind.

As Peter walked out of the apartment back into the fresh air, he actually felt refreshed. It was taking a pile of bricks off of his chest.

"You said that only about half of werewolves are capable of breeding?" Brennan said as they turned onto the sidewalk that would go straight the outskirts of the city where the hidden entrance to the bunker was.

"Yes." Peter nodded. "It's tricky business when there are two ways to make more werewolves. Mating and infecting. Infecting is through fluid, such as saliva or blood." He didn't say the other one, the way that Trevor was infected. After Trevor had left to go back to America, he had asked Dmitri how Trevor had been infected and Dmitri had shared almost too willingly. "But, infecting had many issues. It can kill the person, or it may not even take hold if the body is healthy enough to fight it off."

Brennan listened carefully. This was coming straight from the source. There were plenty of people she knew, still stuck in Inquisition facilities, who would die to get the chance to interview a living werewolf like this.

"Plus, those that were infected cannot procreate. They can have human children with other human's or former human's but only pure werewolves can have pups." They chatted as they walked down the street, passing plenty of people, but only momentarily. No one that they passed caught anything other than a few words that could have been about anything, a book, a movie, just a whimsical conversation between two friends.

"So, Sergei and his wife?" Brennan said, asking about the first, and only werewolf-human, couple she knew of.

"They could have a child, it's not likely, but not that difficult either. It would be completely human, though." Peter thought about that. Sergei had settled down nicely with his wife and he seemed happy to be with her. He was sure that Sergei would make a good father. That drove his thoughts back to Dmitri. He wondered how good of a parent he would be, he was full of energy and hated to stay still. Always on the move and never taking a moment to stop, it was not ideal.

Brennan could see that Peter's thoughts had gone off somewhere and she kept to herself as they walked slowly. A small boy was on the corner trying to sell newspapers. A few stopped by and payed for a paper, more to help the child than to actually see what was going on. Traffic was picking up as lunch time was coming close, people would just be leaving work for a few hours to run to their favorite eateries to grab a bite before going back to work.

Brennan was starting to get hungry and was looking around for a place to eat. There were plenty of small cafe's and even some street carts that people had recently wheeled out, selling sausages and beer. The lines were long at all of them. She then spied a small restaurant that sat nestled between two tall office like buildings. It had pictures of the food it served taped to the inside of the window, they had pastries and Eintopf, a traditional stew that varied in ingredients, depending on the cook.

"Feel like grabbing a bite?" She nudged the still pondering wolf who snapped out of his daze. He looked at her and then the restaurant that had about a third of its seats filled, mostly by older residents than the younger business population.

He was feeling a little empty in the midsection and a strudel sounded good. " Sounds goo---"

---

The ground shook and like a train or a heavy machinery that was heading to the construction site, it was another kind of explosion that brought a frightening flashback to Sergei as he read the newspaper.

"Take cover!" An unnamed sergeant yelled out. "Into the trenches." The man stood on top of a burnt out truck and waved down from the top of it. "Move!"

Sergei obeyed immediately, hugging his prized scoped Kar-98 to his chest as he did so. He ran past other soldiers, all in the same gray uniform as his, but in varying forms of decay from months of war without stop. Covered in dirt, blood, shit, they were a mess, but still a unified and disciplined force as they all moved in unison out of the open and into the trenches that had been carved straight into the roads by both Russians and Germans alike.

It wasn't a moment after Sergei leapt into the trench that the truck that the sergeant had turned into his post exploded, erupting in flames. The sergeant all but evaporated. Another explosion, artillery zeroed onto their position from across the Volga where the Russian army had been building up their forces, began firing rapidly.

A shell hit just above Sergei, outside of the trench, knocking him onto his back into the mud.

Sergei blinked. He was no longer in Stalingrad, he was back in his home, the fan swishing, spinning above him silently. He was on the floor as if he had just been knocked back by an explosion.

He listened. There were sirens, car alarms, screaming.

The wolf got onto his feet and ran to the window. He could see the billowing smoke in the distance.