Free Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman Page B

her trouble.
    “Do you know what language that was?” she asked the silent room. “What story I was telling?” A few mouths gaped; she had their attention. She walked the room and began to speak of it, a kingdom under siege, the nightly terror in the mead-hall. The class went on and they opened their books and dived into the text itself, but it was the stories and songs and legends they wanted. The words and mysteries and how inside the words they spoke every day they carried the memory of this lost world. How it was said that Hitler’s troops fought so hard at the end of World War II because deep in their icy German hearts they remembered Ragnarok, and the end of the world. The gods at war with frost giants, men at war with the gods, even the women as Valkyries riding in on shrieking clouds topick out the heroic dead. And after class that first day, Seth paused at the door and showed his teeth when he smiled. “Neat trick,” he said before ducking under the door into the churn of bodies in the hallway.
    He was the key to the class, the one they feared. Hold his attention and the rest would follow. Clara had the feeling she had been tested in some crucial way, and she had passed. The moment gave her a strange confidence, and the students responded to this confidence, even if it was all bluff and bravado.
    Fifth period became her favorite time of the day. She made the room dark for them by drawing the heavy felt curtains along one wall of windows and then lighting a couple of candles along the lip of the chalkboard. They loved riddles and mysteries, so she put up a riddle each day on the chalkboard from the Anglo-Saxon Book of Exeter for them to puzzle over. They drew maps of England, studied the Danish sagas that had inspired Beowulf , histories featuring men with names like Ivar the Boneless and Ragnar Shaggy-pants, who was executed by being lowered into a pit of vipers. It was all a little corny maybe, but she had found a way to make this ancient story come alive. They needed her, a PhD washout who hadn’t been able to finish her dissertation, a pregnant woman with all sorts of fears and hang-ups of her own, but someone who knew the world and could talk to them about it on their own level. She learned how desperate many of them were to get out of this town, how eager for news of life in theoutside world, for what awaited them—a few of them—at college.
    Even so, she made plenty of mistakes, pried when she shouldn’t have. During a classroom discussion about Grendel descending from Cain, about original sin and monsters, Kelan Gunderson had raised his hand. His black hair was trimmed in a neat crew cut around his square face, and he wore a letterman’s jacket in the school colors, scarlet and gold. Kelan, Seth, and Leah had been an inseparable trio in the hallways.
    “Mrs. Warren,” Kelan asked, “do you believe in the devil?”
    Caught off guard, Clara laughed nervously at first, thinking of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady impressions on Saturday Night Live . But Kelan wasn’t smiling, and the rest of the class seemed to await an honest answer. Did she? Was it necessary to believe in the devil if you believed in God? Clara had always considered the devil just an ancient bogeyman, as mythic as Grendel, an excuse for the darker aspects of humanity, but she couldn’t say that here, not as the pastor’s wife. She was not used to being in a position of authority.
    “You heard what happened over in Amroy?” Kelan went on when she hesitated. “Some Satanists killed a farmer’s pig for one of their rituals. Cut off its head; gutted the body.” This announcement sparked a host of side discussions throughout the class, rumors of rituals back in the woods or on isolated farms that involved molested children, animal dismemberment, secret graves.
    “Did any of you see this with your own eyes?” Clara said, trying to get control of the conversation once more.
    “My dad’s the sheriff,” Kelan continued. “He could