Yet here she was now, splashing through the dirt and grime along the forest path to reach her son, the last remaining member of her family, and the reason she had done it all in the first place.
“Thomas,” she called in a high, shrill voice. “Thomas, if you’re in there, answer me!”
She passed beyond the outer gate. There was a candle burning beyond the third-floor balcony. Nothing seemed to be amiss.
Then a great gust of wind blew across the field, and the lights in the upper balcony went out. She climbed the steps to the front door and rushed into the grand foyer. There was no sign of Fredrick the butler, nor Rosila, nor any of her servants. Most importantly, no sign of Thomas.
She called his name again, spinning round the room as if he might appear at one of the doors. There was a crunching sound at her feet, and she looked down to discover a cockroach smeared upon the bottom of one boot like a small, brown omen. Four or five others skittered up the staircase.
“Are you there?” she called.
An answer came in the form of a womanly scream from somewhere high above. Marianne rushed up the stairs, thinking he might be at one of his games with the cook or the serving maid. Then the scream came again, and this time, it did not sound like a woman at all.
As she reached the second-floor landing, the entrance doors opened below, and two figures rushed into the foyer. One was the boy from the trial. The other was a six-foot savage with a ring in his nose and a cutting ax in his hands.
“Madam Huxley,” Jacob called. “Madam Huxley, stop!”
But she did not stop, would not stop until her boy was safe.
“Thomas,” she called. “Thomas, I’m coming!”
She rounded the stairs to the third floor, following the open hall until she came to the door to the study. God, how she told him to stay downstairs and out of trouble! Why on earth was he so stubborn?
“Please, Madam Huxley,” Jacob yelled.
She tried to open the door and found it stuck. There was a spare key on the frame above. She retrieved it at once and turned it in the lock. She tried and tried, and still, the door did not open. Then came another howling shriek, and the key slipped from her fingers. She knelt to grab it, but a hand took her by the wrist. The giant Indian was suddenly there beside her, pulling her to her feet.
“Get your hands off me.” Her voice had lost its temperance but none of its authority. “Unhand me at once, or I shall have you hanged.” An empty threat, but she refused to be so handled in her own house, no matter the circumstance.
Then, from down the hall, came the boy. He was soaking wet and carrying a flintlock longer than he was. His wooden leg scuffed the hardwood floor with each step.
Marianne straightened herself. “You are ruining my house.”
“Madam Huxley, step away.”
“I’m trying to open the door,” she said as calmly as she could.
Then there came a long, ear-piercing howl of such terrible agony, it caused her to shrink back against the wall.
Jacob nodded to the Indian, and the man kicked the door. There was an incredible bang, but the door didn’t budge. He then took the ax and swung it forward in a whistling arc, slamming the blade into the panel above the handle. He continued swinging, chopping through the oak and some kind of barrier that lay on the other side.
“I shall see you pay for that,” Marianne said breathlessly.
And then he was through. The remains of the door fell away, and the Indian jumped into the abyss that lay beyond.
Chapter 30
Jacob stepped through the opening just in time to see Hunter fly across the room. His body smashed into a shelf and scattered a dozen tomes. As Jacob raised his flintlock, an invisible hand snatched the end and jerked it down. His arms twisted sideways, and he toppled over his bad leg, twisting his good ankle and flying onto his back. He tried to get to his knees and found himself slipping in a puddle of blood.
Thomas lay face up on the couch next to him, his eyes staring sightlessly into the ceiling above. A dozen kitchen knives lay buried in his belly. His severed manhood lay on the floor beside him, oozing fluid like a squashed slug.
Marianne stepped through the opening behind him and screamed.
“All for you,” said a voice, “though it was not I who did the deed. Those who did are beyond your grasp. You will never see them again.”
“You murderer!” Marianne shrieked.
Then the same force which had dropped the two men flung her into the wall. She tried to get back up and fell again, her eyes rolling dazedly in her head.
“Isabella, stop,” Jacob yelled.
His beloved stood before the balcony doors, a vision haunting in its beauty. Terrible in its power.
Jacob advanced to the center of the room. “We were going away together. We were to have a farm and a stable. Remember?”
The figure paused. “A stable?”
“Just a simple life, away from this place. We were going to be happy.”
And then he spoke the words he could not find in Moberrey’s cottage, the truth which had been burning a hole in him since the day of her capture. “I was a fool, Isabella. I was a fool for not seeing what was right in front of me. Everything I wanted—the house, the farm, the horses—they would have meant nothing without you. You are all I ever wanted.”
Her features contorted, and for a moment, there were two sets of eyes staring at him through her face. It was as if she were two women fighting for the same, tortured soul.
“No,” she said. “You weren’t there.”
Jacob extended his hand. “Come back to me. Whoever this person is, it is not you. You don’t belong here, Elly. You don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“You left me,” she insisted, but she looked scared now. The color was returning to her cheeks. The amber eyes were fading to gray.
He took another step toward her. “Take my hand.”
Just as his fingers closed through hers, she recoiled in sudden, red fury. Her skin became as ice. Her eyes became as cinders.
“WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME?”
A hand was suddenly at his throat, squeezing the life from him. Her flesh had become as stiff as tree bark, her fingers wrapping round his neck like ancient roots. Most terrible of all, she was grinning, her lips stretched back to reveal a monster’s mouth of wolf-like teeth. The tongue behind them was a severed, black stump.
“No,” he choked.
Then Hunter was there, leaping across the room and plunging his knife into the round of her shoulder. She howled with two voices, her body twisting in pain and fury. The Indian jerked her hand away from Jacob’s throat, and there was a sound like snapping wood.
As Jacob collapsed, she turned her rage upon her attacker, flinging herself into his chest. She was half Hunter’s size, and yet the force carried both of them across the room, raking more books from the shelves and sending the couch onto the floor. Thomas’s body toppled into a puddle of its own fluids.
Hunter pushed with the force of a giant, but the girl held him easily. The hand which had strangled Jacob hovered over his stomach, and suddenly, the fingers began to change. Stake-like appendages grew from their tips, sinking through the Indian’s ragged shirt and into his gut. He grunted as they pierced his flesh.
Another shape darted through the room, blinding Jacob in a flurry of cloth. Then he gained his bearings and snatched his flintlock from the floor. It was already primed and loaded. “Elly, stop!”
Her fingers grew longer, snaking and twisting through Hunter’s abdomen. The Indian reached for his second knife, then dropped it, his strength finally giving way to agony.
“Isabella,” Jacob yelled.
She turned to him with a hideous smile. Her fingers dripped blood. Her face sparkled madness.
Jacob closed his eyes and fired. The ball struck her in the side, flinging her over the furniture and into the far wall. This time, the cry that escaped her lips was not just of two wom
en, but many, as if a gathering of dark voices were shrieking in mortal terror.
“Elly!”
Jacob opened his eyes and crawled to reach her, but when he looked beyond the overturned couch, her body was gone. There was a puddle where she had been, a trail of blood stretching from the floor to the balcony and out into the night. Several large insects flitted round its outline, then buzzed off into the dark.
On the floor, Hunter was breathing heavily, one hand over his belly in a futile attempt to staunch the bleeding. He looked at Jacob. “You are terrible at saving people.”
Jacob found the second knife on the floor and began cutting strips of his own shirt. There was no water to be had, but he dabbed the man’s wounds anyhow. They were very deep.
He managed to hold it together until he ran out of shirt. Then Jacob stopped, sitting back upon his knees and clutching his mouth as if he might hold the sorrow in.
Hunter took a deep breath. “When I was a boy, my father would leave the village to hunt. Sometimes he would stalk a deer for days, chasing it through the woods until the animal could run no more. One winter day while he was gone, a shadow came to our village. It stole a boy child and took him into the forest.” He paused, sucking in a great lungful of air. “The next year it came back and took another. Then the next year, and the next. Always while the men were gone, and always the youngest of our tribe. When I came of age, I vowed it would never happen again. For as long as I have been able to wield a bow, I have stalked these creatures. I have tracked them to their homes and killed them in their caves. I have seen their kettles, their…” He paused, searching for the word. “Potions. They are not man, Jacob. Whatever your mate was, she is no longer.”
“You have a strong name,” Jacob said.
“I am of the Shawnee. I am true to my name and true to my vows.” He smiled when he saw the growing dread in Jacob’s eyes. “Fear not for me, Jacob of Blackfriar. I am still of this world. With your physician, I may even see another day.”
Jacob took one of his hands and held it.
“It is the end,” Hunter said. “Go to her. Find her.”
“But…will she… Can’t she…”
Slowly, Hunter shook his head.
Jacob stood and wiped his eyes. As his senses returned, he was suddenly aware he had lost track of Madam Huxley. She was nowhere in the room. Jacob felt an ominous pull toward the open balcony, the hint of a memory just beneath the surface of his mind. The memory of a fleeting shape during the heart of the attack.
He walked through the exterior doors and looked over the rails. There upon the rocks was the broken form of Marianne Huxley, some three stories below. With her son dead and her legacy ruined, Jacob was quite certain she had thrown herself off. Though her body lay still, her lips continued moving up and down, her mouth forming the words of some final, unknowable prayer. He supposed he should feel pity.
But he did not.
“Go now, before it’s too late,” Hunter said.
Jacob found one of Thomas’s coats in the corner and put it on. Then he bent to pick up his flintlock.
The Indian shook his head again. “You won’t need that.”
Jacob picked it up anyway. “You said it yourself. It is the end, one way or another.”
Chapter 31
Her trail began in the field of violets and ran crosswise into the trees, an assortment of broken twigs, muddy footprints, and bloody leavings. It was not difficult to follow.
All round him came the sounds of the forest. Insects which should have been long dead in the cold. Frogs which should have been absent ’til spring. Birds which now sang to the moon instead of the sun. They had all come to sing her goodbye.
The ones nearest him scattered as he made his way through the wood, fleeing both from the boy himself and from the torch which he carried before him. Deeper and deeper he went, tracing Isabella’s path into the vast and unknowable wilderness. Then, abruptly, her trail disappeared. All signs of her presence evaporated. He searched the area, and quite by accident, stumbled over a thin piece of thread strung between the trees.
He held the light to it. The thread continued on into the forest, a low, red line trailing off into the night. He began to walk alongside it.
The thread became two threads. Then three, then ten, all of them woven together as they bent and curved into the darkness. He stayed with them until the stump of his leg began to ache, and the fire of his torch began to burn low. What would happen when it went out, he did not know.
There came a light ahead. A place where the trees broke and the moon shone down upon a small clearing. In its center was a crumpled figure, draped upon a log which lay felled upon the mossy floor. He swallowed once and stepped into the light.
It was the Isabella he remembered. Long, golden hair, frost-colored eyes, lips both pouty and stubborn. But the other Isabella was there too. The dark, dangerous creature he had first seen outside of The Fisherman’s Fancy. She was there within her skin, an apparition of light and smoke.
They were dying together, the two of them, their life blood draining upon the log. Strangest of all were the threads. They curved round the trees and over the moss, entering her body through the hole in her side, the place she had been pierced by musket fire.
She lifted her head and regarded him weakly from upon the log. At the same instant, the wind whispered through the trees, three words he knew all too well.
“My…servant…boy…”
Jacob dropped the torch and ran to her, kneeling at the log and taking her delicate body within his hands. He kissed her and kissed her, but no matter how much he wished it, his lips did not make her strong again.
“Please,” he said, looking to the heavens. “If anyone can hear me, please spare her this pain.”
“Believed you not in such things when you first brought her to the wood,” said a voice.
Jacob spun to find a dark-haired woman in a wine-colored gown at his back, watching them from behind the log. His mouth formed a single, bitter word. “You.”
“You did not expect to find me that first night. Otherwise, you would never have taken her. I suppose you brought her to make her happy,” the Lady said, moving round the log. “She told me much of you when she first arrived. More after I helped dispense of her betrothed. Glad to be rid of that one, she was. Still, I do not think she knew she loved you then.”
Jacob pulled Isabella closer, speaking to the woman without looking up. “What do you want?”
“I think you know.”
“I’m not interested in your games, woman.”
“I play no games. I offer only truth.”
“Truth?” Jacob spat. He laid Isabella down and snatched his flintlock from the ground. “Do not speak to me of truth.”
She began to pace a small circle, oblivious to his sudden change in temperament. “Is it not true that you could have taken her from this place long before she met me? Is it not true that it was you who brought the priest to her very door, when her father lay poisoned? Is it not true,” she added with some relish, “that it is your wound she now harbors within her body?”
He leveled the flintlock at her.
“Oh, my lovely,” she said. “What I could do with a soul that burns like yours.”
There was a time when Jacob would have never harmed another person for the greater good. When he would never have dispensed his own justice at the point of a flintlock. That time was past.
The woman spread her arms. “Do you not first wish to hear my proposal?”
Jacob pulled the trigger. There was a hollow click as the hammer fell upon an empty chamber. He stared at the barrel. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember if he had reloaded the weapon, and if he had…
The Lady chuckled, doing a small pirouette near the fallen torch. As her features passed before the flames, it appeared—for the briefest moment—as the face of a man.
Jacob flung the weapon away as if it were a living snake
.
“This is what I offer.” The Lady withdrew from her gown a hollow vial full of dark liquid and set it upon the log. “Consider this a gift amongst friends, my dear Jacob. You may yet consider me a friend before the night is done.”
It took him a moment to find his tongue. “What does it do?”
“Two drops upon her tongue, and she shall be returned to you.”
“Impossible.”
She smiled. “I think you know better than that, my dear boy.”
It was true he had not believed in such things once upon a time. Now, the efficacy of the Lady’s wares were the least of his doubts.
He sat down heavily upon the log. Isabella was fading now, her breath as quiet as it was shallow. He grabbed the vial and held it before his eyes. ’Twas an odd thing. A single, black thread lay suspended in its center, floating amidst the swamp-colored muck.
“Save her,” the Lady offered.
The question was, which Isabella would be saved? Would it be the innocent, blonde-haired girl or the dark creature he had seen upon the pier? And if it was his Isabella, what toll would the Lady exact in return?
The woman smiled again, seeming to know his very thoughts. “Consider it well, Jacob of Blackfriar. We shall speak again.” And with a twirl of cloth, she began walking back into the forest.
Jacob barely noticed. He was still staring at the vial, contemplating its terrible purpose.
He lifted his head and screamed into the night, a cry born of rage, and sorrow, and helplessness. As his voice quieted, so too, did the song of the wood. The frogs, the birds, the insects had all but ceased. Time was almost up.
A hand touched his cheek. His Isabella, staring at him from her place upon the log. She opened her mouth to speak. This time, there was no sound in his head, no voice upon the wind. Only the final words of a tongueless girl, rasped through her soft and delicate lips.
“Leave…me…be…”
The vial slipped from Jacob’s hand. It fell to the forest floor and disappeared amongst the stones.
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