WARSAW
Warsaw, Poland. January, 1943.
Chester Dogskjei, dubbed Dog, called Chet, was now only sadly mistaken. He was mistaken in the steps he took, wrong in the breaths he drew, and false in each beat his heart took. Chet's twenty-three years of life had all been one huge mistake, a sin for which he would shortly serve penance.
Chet knew he shouldn't have been surprised that his arrival in Warsaw was less than welcoming. Poland had forever been a superstitious nation, next door to Count Dracula and a hairsbreadth away from every wraith and monster to haunt medieval Europe. But he had never expected this.
Chet was the unwanted product of an affair between a British witch and an elusive Polish werewolf. The Pole had disappeared a few months before Chet's birth, leaving his unborn son with only a surname and the inheritance that Chet's bitter mother referred to as a curse: lycanthropy.
Twenty-three years later, Chet was still haunted by his father's shadow. He had entered Poland two hours earlier, blithely ignoring the muggle war tearing the country apart. Chet still harbored the naïve fantasy of finding his father in some back alley, waiting, ready to welcome his foreign son with open arms.
He didn't know how wrong he was. When Chet was entering wizarding Warsaw, the Polish customs officer inspecting his luggage had noticed the mandatory Office of Magical Creatures Werewolf Identification Tags hanging around his neck. The official had started screaming. In a matter of mere moments, all hell had broken loose.
An angry mob hundreds deep tailed Chet's every move, their flaming torches and pitchforks an eerie oxymoron in the modern streets of wizarding Warsaw. Chet had no idea where he was going. The icy rain and blinding darkness disoriented him. He was hopelessly lost in a city of 1000 shadows.
Rounding a corner, Chet took a furtive glance backwards and almost slipped on the icy cobblestones. Behind him, the mob swelled like an angry tidal wave, calling out scathing slurs in obscure Slavic dialects he could not even begin to comprehend. However, their meaning was clear enough. Chet didn't need a translation to be able to tell that the mob's angry cries were directed at him. Heart in his throat, Chet whipped around the next corner into a dank side street, trying in vain to throw the bloodthirsty mob off of his trail.
All the while his Ministry ID tags flapped against his chest, a painful reminder of the man who had brought him to this godforsaken city. The man who had left him with nothing but his "curse", a gift that made Chet an animal fleeing for its life in through the darkened streets of Warsaw, as lost as hell, running through shadow.
Chet stopped dead in his tracks as the street he had been running down opened into a well-lit riverside promenade. He could not turn around straight into the hands of the mob. There was no where to hide, nowhere to run.
Dashing madly across the boardwalk, Chet was hopelessly aware of how visible he was to the angry crowd. A loud whipping crack sounded behind him and Chet instinctively hit the icy cement. Seconds later, a curse screeched through the air where he had just been standing. Chet gaped in absolute shock as the curse flew through the night sky and hit the river with a loud fizzing noise, as if it was burning the water itself. Chet knew the mob hated him, feared him as a monster, but his heart had never let him believe they truly wanted to kill him. Sheer shock wore off as his adrenaline kicked in. Scrambling through the light dusting of snow, Chet felt his numb fingers grope madly at the edge of the promenade, but they found nothing but thin air. Chet overbalanced and tumbled headfirst into the icy black river as the air above him was lit up with hundreds of flying curses from enraged Polish wizards.
He surfaced after what seemed an eternity of flailing through water, half-crazed dreams fleeing through his brain, his life passing before his eyes on a sadistic reverse. Gulping madly, Chet automatically forced air into his burning lungs, his mind still reeling from sudden submergment. His body trembling uncontrollably from the cold water, Chet opened his eyes. He was drifting a few yards away from the promenade. The angry mob crowded onto its edge, still searching for any sign of him. Curses fell into the river all around Chet like fireworks, fizzing slightly as they hit the surface and disappeared, spiraling deep into the water's womb.
Chet ducked under the water once more, this time to remain hidden from his pursuers. Wolf or not, he had never been much of a swimmer. With every stroke, the water cloyed at his senses and threatened to fill and choke his heaving lungs. Later, Chet would say that the only way he kept afloat was sheer panic, his only motivation: raw fear of what waited for him on the promenade.
It was impossible to tell how long he swum. To Chet, it was as if time itself dissolved, his arms moving mechanically to keep him afloat as the ice-cold water twisted daggers into his spine, chilling him all the way through and out the other end. When he knew he couldn't move any longer, Chet turned dockside once more. Exhausted, he was resigned to his fate, ready to die in the face of the angry mob. As Chet's fingers gripped the dock, a single thought crossed his mind. Let go. At once, Chet wanted to give into his exhaustion and let himself sink under the water, spiral downward and forever until its icy blackness swallowed him whole and never let him go.
What did he honestly have to live for? A faithless father? A cursed existence? An angry mob that would tear him to pieces? Every so slowly, Chet let his fingers loosen, watching apathetically as his hands began to slip down the wet dock. He took his last breath, preparing to plunge under for the last time, and then the last thing he expected touched his shoulders. He was too tired to be amazed as a pair of strong hands pulled him from the river.
He collapsed into his savior's arms, burying his head in their shoulders, shaking with cold and fear. He couldn't find his voice, frozen somewhere in his throat, halfway between his heart and his head, both numb with terror. So instead, he just gripped the stranger's shoulders and cried, tears lost in the despair of that winter night, halfway between fantasy and reality, fire and ice, life and death-- an eternal uncertainty, a paradigm so unbelievable it could only be life. "Thank you," he finally mumbled in Polish, pulling out of the stranger's grasp, somewhat ashamed and yet, eternally grateful. The stranger said nothing, reaching down and gripping Chet's hand in a comforting sort of way. Reaching upwards, he caught Chet's ID tags in his burly hands. Almost immediately, Chet felt a fresh wave of panic rush over him. "Please don't say anything, I'm not dangerous, I'll leave--"
The stranger raised his hand to Chet's lips, silencing him immediately. Letting go of the Ministry tags, he bent down and puled up the sleeve of his ratty wool overcoat to reveal a white armband, emblazoned with the Star of David. "I know what it feels like," he said gruffly in Polish. Chet didn't say a word, staring from the armband to the old man and back again, a set of half-remembered news broadcasts flickering across his mind: tales and images of cattle cars, barbed wire, and men so painfully thin they looked as if they could break into a thousand pieces with a single push. "If you stay here they will find you." The Jew said, breaking the silence as he pointed down the riverbank to where the mob still hovered in the distance, their torches tiny pinpricks of light.
"I don't know how I can thank you--" Chet began dumbly.
The old Jew cut him off, the urgency on his face illuminated by the first rays of dawn. "Just go."
Chet's face broke into a tiny smile.
Sometimes wolf, sometimes man, always human, Chester Dogskjei started off down the docks and into the rising sun.