That was a loose interpretation of what we’d found, indeed, but neither Max nor I argued with it.
“They were playing with the corpse?” Madame Rousseau breathed, one hand pressed to her chest. Murmurs from the crowd echoed her shock.
“Romy was likely delirious from her fever,” my mother said. “I doubt she knew what she was doing.”
“And the boy?” Grainger’s mother demanded from the edge of the gathered crowd.
Before my mother could reply, Madame Paget pushed her way to the front of the small gathering, Jeanne’s hand clasped in hers. “Celeste!” she cried. “What’s happened?”
“Romy’s still sick.” My mother’s determined stride cut a path through the crowd as she led Madame Paget away from the barn, and Max and I followed in their wake. “Let’s get her cleaned up and back in bed.”
The crowd dispersed as we took the children back to the thatcher’s cottage, whispered questions and suppositions following in our wake.
Madame Paget led Max and my mother to the back room of her home, where she asked Max to lay Romy on the low straw mattress. While Madame Paget began washing the sick child with rags and water from a bucket, my mother sent Jeanne and Sofia to play at our cottage, then she pulled Max and me aside.
“Adele, take Tom outside and get him cleaned up,” she whispered. “He’s no danger to you, but don’t let anyone else near him. Especially his mouth. Do you understand?”
“No!” I shook my head with a glance at Romy, through the open curtain into the back room. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“I’ll explain once I’ve seen to Romy,” she insisted as she motioned us toward the door. “Just keep him out back and away from everyone else, including Max. I mean it, Adele. Don’t let anyone else near that boy!”
Fifteen
I took Tom behind the thatcher’s cottage and Max drew a bucket of water from the rain barrel for me. But as my mother had instructed, he stayed several feet away from the child, whom he’d begun to watch warily.
“You don’t think he found the dead hen and just . . . played with it. Do you?” I whispered as I wiped blood from Tom’s chubby little cheeks. I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but my mother’s strange and unsettling instructions told me that though she’d blamed Romy’s fevered delirium, my mother believed Tom was really the source of all the trouble.
“I can’t imagine why he’d do that.” Max stood back, studying the child’s face as I uncovered it with my rag, bit by bloody bit. “You really found him in the dark wood?”
I nodded. I couldn’t remember telling him that, but Tom was a frequent topic of speculation in the village. “Naked and alone, near his parents’ wagon. They were killed by a whitewulf, but there wasn’t a scratch on the boy. Yet my mother’s treating him as if he’s dangerous to more than just chickens.” Tom blinked up at me as I wiped his forehead clean, but despite the fact that we were talking about him—about his parents’ deaths—he made no attempt to communicate. “What am I missing?” I asked Max as I rinsed my cloth in the bucket.
“I’m not sure, yet. He doesn’t speak?”
“Not so far. I found him shortly before before you arrived, and I don’t think he’s said a word since then, though he nods on occasion.”
“So he understands, then?”
“He seems to.” I rinsed my rag, and as I began on the child’s shoulder, I looked right into his eyes. “Tom? Do you understand what we’re saying? Did you eat that chicken raw?”
But he only blinked at me.
Max frowned at the child but maintained his distance. “Open your mouth, please.”
To my surprise, the boy obeyed, evidently more willing to follow directions than answer questions.
“Is that . . . ?” I squinted into his mouth. “There’s a feather wedged between two of his teeth.” And I decided to leave it there, considering his history of biting. “Why would you eat a raw chicken? I know Madame Paget feeds you.”
But, of course, Tom gave me no reply.
“Sofia and I found blood and feathers in our cowshed a while back,” I told Max as I stood. “We’d assumed a fox ate our missing hen.” But now we had bizarre and gruesome evidence to the contrary. Romy and Tom, it seemed, had had the run of the village overnight, unbeknownst to either the watch or to Max and me.
“What’s wrong with the little girl?” Max asked. “Her name is Romy?”
I nodded. “She has some kind of fever. It began as swelling and warmth where Tom bit her, but it’s spread and lingered.”
“He bit her?” Max’s frown deepened. Then he pulled me gently but insistently away from little Tom, who still stared at me mutely. “Does your mother know about the bite?”
“I’m not sure. Why? What does this mean?”
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” he hedged. But those conclusions were suddenly crystal clear.
“No.” I shook my head. “That isn’t possible. Tom wasn’t scratched or bitten. He never developed a fever. He can’t have been infected.”
And yet . . .
“Mama!” I called from the back door to the Pagets’ cottage. Over her shoulder, I could see that Romy had been washed and dressed in a clean tunic, and that her mother was applying a wet cloth to her forehead. The child’s cheeks glowed scarlet with fever in the dim light.
My mother stood and looked past me into the yard, where Tom still stood near the barrel, Max several feet from him. Then she followed me out the door, pushing it closed on the way.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“That’s what I want to know. What’s going on?” I stopped her in the middle of the yard with one hand on her arm. “You know there was no fox, don’t you? You know they ate Madame Gosse’s hen? And probably ours?”
She sighed. “I am aware. But if I’d said that, the village would have come after the boy with a pitchfork.” Because small boys didn’t generally slaughter hens with their bare hands and eat the flesh raw. Naked. “They might have come for Romy too.”
“You knew it was chicken blood, didn’t you? Before you even saw what was left of the bird?” I asked. My mother nodded. “How?”
“I could smell it. Take a good whiff of the blood on your rag,” she suggested. “And remember that scent the next time you cut yourself, slicing bread. The next time you slaughter a chicken. Blood from different sources has different scents. You should be able to tell that now.” Now that I had ascended. “If you pay attention.”
My mind spun with that knowledge as I followed my mother the rest of the way across the yard.
“What is happening?” I whispered as she studied Tom, still splattered in grisly blood from the neck down. “Did you know he’d bitten Romy?”
“I figured that out when I realized the children were the ones hunting our chickens, and Madame Paget just confirmed my suspicion. Though I should have realized it earlier. I should have come to see Tom the day you found him.” Guilt twisted her features. “I was just so distracted by your trial and Elena’s betrothal ceremony, and I assumed that since he had no bite marks or scratches, he was no danger to the village. But if I’d made time to see him that day, or any day since, I would have known. I could have prevented all of this.”
“Should we be discussing this in front of Tom?”
My mother gave me an odd look. “He already knows everything we’re saying, Adele.”
“And what exactly are we saying?”
“Should I assume . . . ?” Max left the rest of his question unspoken as his gaze fell pointedly onto Tom.
“Considering that Adele found him in the woods? That he doesn’t seem to speak, he does bite, and he evidently can catch and eat a raw chicken, in the middle of the night? I’m afraid so.”
“You’re saying he’s a wolf? But there wasn’t a scratch on him when I found him, and as a little boy, he can’t be a redwulf. So how is that possible?” I demanded.
She knelt and pressed her nose into the boy’s hair, as if sh
e were kissing the top of his head the way she kissed Sofia several times a day. But her deep inhalation gave away her intent.
She cursed softly again as she stood. “Smell him.”
I knelt and sniffed the child’s head, surprised that he still seemed content to simply stand there. He smelled faintly of sweat—clean, pre-pubescent sweat—and not-so-faintly of blood. But beneath that, there was something else. Something oddly distinctive, and . . . wrong. Different, anyway. Yet familiar.
“He smells like a whitewulf,” I whispered, staring at my mother with my brow knit low in confusion. “But how, if he wasn’t bitten?”
“There’s more to it. Close your eyes,” my mother whispered. “Inhale his scent again, and let it roll through your mind. Let it sink in.”
Again, I did as she asked, and sudden understanding crashed over me with the force of a frigid northern wind stealing my breath. Shocking my senses. “Tom wasn’t infected by a whitewulf,” I whispered. “He was already a whitewulf.”
“Yes.” My mother tugged me several feet away from the boy, and Max followed, while Tom sank into the dirt to draw with his finger.
“So, he isn’t the son of the merchants killed in the dark wood?”
Mama shook her head slowly and lowered her voice to little more than a whisper. “I suspect he’s the son of the wolf who killed them. The wolf you killed during your trial.”
I sucked in a deep breath as I thought that through, watching the boy trace shapes in the dirt. He looked so young. And oddly innocent, despite the fact that he was covered in blood.
Chicken blood. Not human blood.
“Okay. So, he’s a werewolf,” I said at last. Then I lowered my voice even further. “But he’s also just a kid. Yes, he’s snuck out and killed a couple of hens, but if that’s the worst of it—”
“That’s not the worst of it.” Max’s grim declaration matched the somber look in his hazel eyes.
“And I know he seems to prefer to be out at night, but he’s perfectly fine in the daylight,” I continued. “So maybe he’s different than the other whitewulfs. Maybe he’s more like us . . .”
“Adele, he’s no different from the others of his species,” my mother said. “That’s why we keep torches lit. Because unlike the other monsters in the forest, it isn’t light that drives off a whitewulf—it’s fire. And they are not like us. In fact, their species is the inverse of ours.”
“What does that mean?”
“Whitewulfs are wolves able to take on human form, but even then, they never stop thinking like a wolf. Redwulfs are people able to take on a wolf’s form, but even then, we never stop thinking like a human. Which means that, despite our similarities—despite the fact that we’re both loup garou, our differences are profound. Whitewulfs devour human flesh. That’s why they can’t live in human villages, like we can. They would quickly be discovered and killed. Though not without taking half the village with them.”
“Mon dieu,” I whispered, as the distinction she was drawing began to sink in. “And now I’ve brought a little whitewulf into the village? To prey on our chickens, and”—my gaze found the back door of the Pagets’ cottage—“on our children? Will he try to eat Romy? Was that why he bit her?”
My mother exchanged another look with Max, and in one devastating instant, I finally understood what I’d unleashed upon the village. “He bit her.” And she had a fever, just like my papa had, when they’d pulled him from the dark wood. “She’s infected?”
Mama gave me a grave nod. “Yes. If she survives the fever, little Romy Paget will become a whitewulf, and a terrible danger to all of Oakvale.”
Despite the questions rolling around like marbles in my head, my mother insisted that we continue our discussion from the privacy of our own cottage. After the state in which we’d found the children, it wasn’t difficult to talk Madame Paget into letting us bring Tom with us, so Max and I walked him back to the bakery while my mother stayed to help with Romy.
While we waited for her, I finished washing chicken blood off of Tom, then I lent the boy my spare tunic and sat him at the table with a hunk of bread and a bit of pickled herring. But before I could start questioning Max about what he knew about whitewulfs, someone knocked on the front door frame.
I looked up to find Grainger standing in the open doorway. His gaze hardened when he saw Max sitting at the table.
“Adele. I heard you’ve had some excitement. Is everything okay?”
“Yes.” I took a deep breath, struggling to hide my frustration with the interruption. He had no way of knowing that his kind impulse to check on me was standing in the way of information I desperately needed. Or that his jealousy was compounding an anxiety that already seemed to be squeezing the air from my lungs. “Elena found Romy Paget and little Tom, here, in Monsieur Martel’s barn, covered in the blood of Madame Gosse’s missing hen. Evidently they found the remains.”
“And played with it? That’s an odd choice of toy.”
“We’re not entirely sure what happened, but Max was kind enough to help me get Tom cleaned up and fed.” Though it was clear from the way the boy was picking at his food that his belly was still plenty full of raw chicken.
“How is Romy?” Grainger turned back to me without a word for Max. “Still feverish?”
“It doesn’t look good, I’m afraid,” Max said.
Grainger’s gaze snapped back to him. “You are acquainted with the Pagets?”
“We’ve met in passing.”
“Here a month, and the entire village loves him,” Grainger muttered, clearly waiting for me to insist that I was the exception to that statement.
I frowned at him. My feelings for Grainger hadn’t changed, but I did like Max. I wasn’t sure yet what that “like” meant, or how deeply rooted it was, but I was sure that I didn’t like Grainger’s newfound willingness to openly take jabs at Max. Even if I understood why he felt provoked.
Before I could figure out how to reply, my mother stepped into the cottage.
“Good afternoon, Madame Duval,” Grainger said. “Adele tells me Romy Paget is still ill?”
“Yes, unfortunately her fever has proved quite persistent.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I should be getting back. Adele, will you walk with me?”
I swallowed my frustration—an odd feeling, when I’d never been less than excited to spend time with Grainger before—and summoned some manners, even though I really wanted to speak to my mother and Max. “Of course. Part of the way, at least.”
“Monsieur Bernard has made himself at home with your family,” Grainger said, as we started down the muddy path.
“He’s—”
“I know. He’s a friend of the family.”
“Yes. And he was helping me with Tom,” I said, with a glance back at the bakery, which made Grainger frown. But as conflicted as I still was about my nights in the dark wood with Max and the effect they were having on my relationship with Grainger, the whitewulf pup revelation had put things into a stark new perspective.
My personal dilemma felt much less important, now that I knew the entire town was at risk from a threat I had brought into our midst. I found I suddenly had little patience for Grainger’s jealousy, even though he had no way of knowing about the larger issue.
“You have care of the boy now?”
“For the moment, at least. Madame Paget has her hands full. And I should get back. I have a lot of baking to do, and we’re trying to figure out why, exactly, two small children were playing with a dead chicken. Which won’t be easy, with Romy passed out from her fever and Tom not speaking.”
I was babbling, evidently trying to compensate for what I couldn’t tell Grainger with an outpouring of everything I could. And as frustrated as I was in that moment, keeping secrets from him still felt . . . wrong.
“The boy still hasn’t said anything?”
“Not one word.”
“That is odd.” Grainger exhaled heavily. “Fine, then. I’ll let you get b
ack. But I do hope to see you tomorrow?”
“Of course,” I said, fighting impatience as he leaned down to kiss my cheek.
The feel of his lips lingered, a warm reminder of our connection that made me feel guilty and conflicted as I rushed back down the path and into my home.
Inside, I found Tom curled up on the floor, fast asleep, as far as he could get from the fire. I closed the front door, in spite of the heat from the oven, to keep us from being overheard.
“Okay, will someone please explain to me what’s happening to Romy Paget? She’s had a fever for weeks—how much longer will it last?”
“I don’t know,” my mother admitted. “If she were an adult, she’d have already succumbed to the fever or become a whitewulf, but I have no experience with infected children. In fact, this is a tragedy I’d hoped never to be faced with.”
“Would this happen if I were to bite someone? If Sofia were?” She was old enough to know better now, of course, but most small children bite, especially when they’re teething. Were redwulf children a danger to humans?
“No.” My mother used a rag to wipe off her work surface, then she pulled her largest bowl from a shelf and scooped flour into it. “A redwulf can only be born, and she can only be female. That’s not the case with whitewulfs. Their nature passes through infection—in the womb or through a bite, like Romy’s. And whitewulfs can be men or women.”
“Or boys and girls. Tiny, innocent little boys and girls . . .” I murmured with a glance at Tom, who still lay asleep on the floor.
“Unfortunately,” my mother began, and I looked up to find both her and Max watching me. “They may be even more dangerous to this community than an infected adult would be, because they pose no obvious threat. If a grown man or woman were found covered in the blood of a slaughtered hen, our neighbors would assume him or her to be mad, at best, a practitioner of some dark art, at worst. But Madame Paget will not hesitate to care for her sick child. And she has no idea that anything that upsets Romy—hunger, pain, the fever itself—could cause her to lash out from an instinct she can’t possibly understand or control.”
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