Panthera Spelaea
Palace Eagle

“The Palace Eagle? I’ve never heard that one,” I said.

“It’s a rather unfortunate legend because it is true, even though it sounds fantastic,” Art said. “I had my people discredit it as best they could, but it had spread too far by the time I was able to mount any response.”

“Perhaps I should just tell the story,” Ekatarina said.

“Please,” Svetlana said. “My Grandmother told me about it when I was a little girl.”

“I grew up in Petrograd, what we call St. Petersburg now. I was born in 1896; my father was a doctor, and my mother his nurse. We had a good life, a comfortable life, and I was their only child. They doted on me and made sure I had a proper education. I was helping in my Father’s practice before I was sixteen. Everything changed when the Tsar declared war on Germany in 1914.”

“You were sixteen?”

“Yes. Medical personnel in wartime are at a premium, and my father was conscripted into service and sent to the front lines in 1915. My mother followed six months later, conscripted into the Sisters of Mercy, the Russian Army’s nursing corps. I entered my nursing training, which at the time was a year long. By the time I graduated, my parents were both dead.”

“Oh, God,” Anna said.

“There was a constant flood of casualties back to Russia, and Petrograd got their share. I was lucky enough to serve in military hospitals and not on the front lines. The war didn’t go well for Russia, and protests against it grew. The Bolsheviks and others didn’t see the point in the war, and the Tsar’s power wasn’t enough. The second major Russian offensive of the war in 1916 had stalled out, and casualties were horrendous. By 1917, the anti-war movement was everywhere. Russian casualties in World War One were in the millions, with millions more injured. The economy was in shambles, and the revolutionaries kept gaining power. It got so bad that the Winter Palace turned into a large Army Hospital. Trainloads of injured soldiers would arrive, and I cared for thousands of them. That is where I met Rimma. She was one of five nurses assigned to my wing.”

“Your wing? You were what, twenty-one?”

“I’d been a nurse for several years by then, and I was in charge because I had the most training and experience. Nurses were dying from war and disease so quickly that they shortened nursing training to only two months.”

My girls, both nurses, were horrified. “You can’t learn this job in two months!”

“I know. My nurses could empty bedpans, change bandages, and do other tasks, but they had little medical knowledge. I did what I could, but we were overwhelmed by the numbers. The doctors had it even worse; I had to triage who even got to see them. My wing had almost three hundred soldiers in it with only six nurses. I didn’t pay much attention to the growing rebellion in the streets or politics because I had a job to do.“

Art picked it up so Ekatarina could get a few bites in. “Russia was falling apart by this point. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne in February of 1917. Political power shifted to a provisional government. For many, this was a chance to change from a monarchy to a Western-style representative government. Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks were gaining power among the poor and the returning soldiers. It also didn’t help that Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government was just as ineffective and heavy-handed. The Provisional Government was in an impossible position, with the military threatening a coup d’etat on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other. The revolutionaries spread rumors that the Provisional Government was going to abandon Petrograd and move to Moscow. That was the last straw for the troops in the area. On October 25th, 1917, Vladimir Lenin ordered the Bolsheviks to attack the Winter Palace. The garrisons threw in with the revolutionaries, opening the arsenal to them. A group of Reds took advantage of the confusion in what became known as the Storming of the Winter Palace. They entered the Winter Palace and took Provisional Government into custody.”

Ekatarina picked the story up. “The attack began with shelling from the cruiser Aurora, followed by artillery from across the river. There was no warning for us in the hospital wing; one moment, everything was quiet. The next, a shell crashed through the walls of our ward. Dozens of injured men were screaming for help, and there was so much dust in the air. The nurses and I ignored the shelling and ran for the wounded. I was checking them over when I touched a soldier’s neck, looking for a pulse. I felt something like an electric jolt before I blacked out.”

I knew that exact sensation. “The soldier was an eagle switcher.”

“Yes. I woke up three days later, naked and freezing, a hundred feet up in a dead tree in the hills outside Lake Pihkva. I’d moved over three hundred kilometers to the southwest without knowing how.”

I couldn’t imagine. At least I woke up in a hospital. “What did you do?” S~ᴇaʀᴄh the (F)indNƟvᴇl.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“I climbed down the tree and headed for the lake I saw in the distance. It was hell; my entire body ached, and I had no shoes or clothes. Just before dark, I came across a small house. I was hypothermic, scratched up, and my feet were cut and raw. I looked like hell but was lucky to be found by a fisherman’s wife and not soldiers. The couple took me in and cleaned me up. It took a week to heal up to the point I could get out of bed again.”

“Those aches were horrible,” I commiserated. “I don’t know how you walked out of there.”

“It was that or lay down and die,” Ekatarina said. “When I could travel, the couple brought me to the town of Pskov. I worked there for a few weeks, but it didn’t last. I blacked out again.”

“Your eagle wanted out.”

She nodded. “The next time I awoke, I was in the mountains west of Nodvirna, in modern-day Ukraine. That’s where I lived for the next month, learning to co-exist with my eagle. She was a good hunter, and I was able to get a job at the local clinic. I moved around Europe for the next forty years, learning seven languages while I worked at hospitals. I knew I was different, and I was scared.”

Art picked up the story. “She wasn’t easy to find. My people finally caught up with her in Finland, tracing her from a sighting in St. Petersburg in the late sixties.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You went back?”

“It was a mistake,” Ekatarina said. “I was sitting outside a café when I heard a woman scream. She was in her late sixties, her hair gone gray, and she hadn’t aged well. ‘Ekatarina?’ She was frozen, and when I looked up, I recognized her. It was Rimma. ‘How? I saw you become an eagle and fly away! You haven’t changed a bit!’ I had to do something, so I told her my Grandmother was Ekatarina. I ran out the back of the café and disappeared, leaving the country immediately.”

“When I brought Ekatarina into the fold, she told us about Rimma. We sent our people out, only to find she’d passed away of a heart attack. We thought that was the end of it,” Art told us.

“How did you know about her?”

“After the fall of the Palace, rumors spread about how a majestic Golden Eagle appeared in the Winter Palace, flying away through the hole in the ceiling. Some believed the eagle represented the Monarchy leaving the Russian people behind as the Bolsheviks took over. A half-dozen people witnessed the eagle inside the Palace, and maybe a dozen more watched it fly away outside. The story was too fantastic to be true. It became a legend of the time.”

“Except with Rimma,” I said. “She saw you switch, and then Rimma saw you again, looking the same as you looked during the Revolution. Not only does she know you have the power, she knows that you are potentially immortal.”

Ekatarina nodded. “No one believed her, though now I think we can say her family did. Mikhail Abrahmov would have heard about it from her. He knows Switchers are out there, and when one dies, the person who touches them gets the gift. He’s never been able to locate me, but he has tried.”

I nodded. “How does this translate to me?”

Edward answered this one. “A cave lion disappears in Siberia and reappears weeks later in Moscow. Mikhail is a scientist. He saw the photos, and he knew that it wasn’t an African lion with a haircut crossing the street. You are a nobody until something happens with a cave lion carcass lost for millennia, and now you’re a suspect in multiple murders involving a lion. If you truly believe a woman can become a Golden Eagle with a touch, is it a stretch to think a Cave Lion attached himself to a human the same way? Especially since Lions have been a symbol of royalty for centuries?”

“It gets worse,” Art said. “The man who Ekatarina touched was buried after that night. His remains were stolen five years ago from the cemetery. There is only one reason to do that.”

Shit. I use this technology all the time. “Carbon dating?”

“Exactly. Carbon-14 dating relies on the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 over time, starting when the organism stops growing. I obtained a copy of the lab report. They considered it contaminated because some samples were a hundred years old, while others were five hundred. To Mikhail, it was proof that of his grandmother’s claim that the eagle switcher never aged. He knows our secret, John, and he knows you have a Lion.”

Our dinner was interrupted by a piercing siren. “What is that?”

“Pirate alarm,” the Captain said as they ran out the door.

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