The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy

by Taylor, Theodora

  “If you’d taken him out of that posh boarding school like I’d told ye to, he wouldn’t be poncing around with all his airs. Like he’s the king of bleeding England. Christ, how do you expect me to put up with the likes of ‘im all summer then?”

  Eyeing the cracked plaster walls in his dingy childhood bedroom, Colby had to agree with the man. He did think he was better than the man who had held forth on Indians being the worst thing to ever happened to Britain all through a tea, consisting of sausages, fried eggs, and tinned baked beans. He himself could hardly believe he’d only been home for twelve hours. Or that this would be his home now that he was eighteen and the boarding school education his mysterious father had paid for was done.

  Here he was stuck in a fishing village after twelve years at a boarding school that served afternoon teas. These teas had been actual teas, not early working-class dinners, and they’d cost more than his mother’s entire grocery bill for the month. Colby could almost taste the scones he’d eaten at his last Abernathy tea. His house’s cook had made them by hand from a near century-old recipe. They’d been decadent and buttery and served with clotted cream and fresh strawberry jam. That very opposite of the store-bought Arctic Roll his mother had offered him after tonight’s boiled and fried affair.

  He shouldn’t have turned it down, though. Shouldn’t have lied about not being all that hungry, especially since he’d barely touched his dinner.

  “Not all that hungry,” his stepfather had mocked. “More like your mother’s food ain’t posh enough for you, iddn’t that right?”

  Guilt had flashed across Colby’s soul at that moment because that was precisely why he’d turned his mother’s offer of Arctic Roll down.

  He knew that, and his mother most likely knew it, too. Yet she had defended him as she always did. Fervently, as if he’d spoken ill of an angel who’d somehow alighted inside their little wattle and daub cottage.

  The problem lay in that she’d genuinely loved Colby’s father. Had thought him kind and a laugh and right handsome until he left her with only a note, saying that he’d arranged for Colby’s schooling at the prestigious Abernathy School in London, starting the very next autumn.

  He had not warned her before he left or been in contact afterward. But the five years they’d spent together had been wine and roses, as far as his mother was concerned. Colby’s studied way of speaking seemed to grate on her second husband’s every nerve, but his mother had encouraged him not to let it go during the holidays when he returned home. His father also had a posh accent, she’d told him, and Colby reminded her of the dear man. Even more so now that Colby was nearly full-grown.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Colby had once asked her when his stepfather was out on the boat, and she’d had a few too many warm cups of Pimms and apple juice in front of Top of the Pops.

  She’d sighed and turned her eyes away from the old console floor television, where Mike Flowers was singing his kitschy, easy-listening version of “Wonderwall.”

  “I’d think he has to be then,” she answered quietly. “Otherwise I can’t think of why else he would have left and never returned. I know it’s hard to believe seeing as how we finished, but we were happy. We really were….”

  He suspected his mother was telling the truth, but his birth father was gone now. And starting the very next day, he would no longer be slathering clotted cream on scones but going out on the fishing boat with his stepfather, and “makin’ a use of 'imself.”

  He’d come home to a beige hand-knitted fisherman’s sweater, a startling contrast to the only other item his mother had ever knitted for him, a scarf of blue and yellow, his school's colors.

  Colby’s heart darkened at the thought of spending more than a tea hour with the man. Last summer’s “learning” holiday had been bad enough. Miserable and mostly silent. Colby could barely comprehend doing this for the rest of his life.

  It might be his stepfather was right. Perhaps his mother never should have followed his father’s instructions to send Colby to boarding school from the age of six.

  “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” so said the great Bard. But perhaps it was better to have never learned to quote Shakespeare at all.

  His father was most likely dead, but that night Colby found himself missing the man more than he ever had before.

  He fell asleep early on that chilly summer night to the sound of his mother pleading with her husband not to be so hard on Colby, to give him some time to adjust. “He’s not used to this kind of life, Rodney. You must understand...”

  But he woke up to a different voice.

  It’s time.

  Colby sat up in bed, his skin cold and clammy for reasons that had nothing to do with the crisp sea air.

  Come meet your father, Colby. It is time.

  The voice was dark and resonant, and it somehow seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

  Colby expelled a big panting breath, not understanding what was happening…even as he found himself climbing out of bed and pulling the small steamer trunk he’d just unpacked a few hours ago from his closet. He packed again. Not with school memorabilia and texts this time, but pants and a few shirts. Also, the fisherman’s sweater. He’d hung a brass-framed grainy wedding picture of his parents on the wall, after discovering it abandoned in the attic. That had been the summer he’d come home to find his mother living with and married to a man who looked nothing at all like his father. He took the picture, too.

  He also stopped in the kitchen and pulled everything that would not spoil out of the cupboards, jars of Marmite, tins of peas and beets. The beans he’d turned his nose up at earlier—he packed those, too, along with a few packages of the cheap butter biscuits his mother liked to dip in her morning tea. He then filled several closed-top Tupperware containers with water and put those into the trunk as well.

  As he closed the latch, there was stirring in the rooms beyond. “Do you hear that?” his mother’s voice asked. “I think somebody’s in the house. Moving around the kitchen.”

  “Probably your son rootin’ ‘round for caviar,” his stepfather grumbled back, his voice mutinous with the desire not to get up.

  Colby closed the front door behind him on any further speculation.

  The steamer trunk, filled as it was with water, jars, and all manner of tinned food weighed a bloody ton. Colby had to drag it down the steep cobbled roads towards the docks, which caused quite a bit of clang.

  Lights came on, and a few voices he recognized as friends of his mother’s called out to him, “Colby Kreft, is that you?

  “Whatever are you up to at this time of night?”

  “Why are you creating all that clatter?”

  “Crikey, is that a steamer trunk you’ve got?”

  “Where are you off too, then?”

  “Agnes never mentioned to me about you having any holiday plans…”

  So many voices asking him so many questions. But Colby answered none of them. One foot trudged in front of the other as he dragged the heavy steamer trunk behind him down to the docks. He’d only just learned his stepfather’s trade at the previous summer break, and the entire time he’d been happy to let the angry and often hungover man handle all the navigational work.

  But tonight, under the light of a full moon hanging low in the sky, he launched the boat expertly, before guiding it into the Celtic Sea. With no fear. No hesitation. Just an all-consuming need to go…where? He did not rightly know.

  For the next three weeks he sailed toward the voice. South, then East, with no compass needed. The food lasted him for two of those weeks. After that, he used his stepfather’s nets to procure fish.

  He might have eaten the fish raw. He knew there were certain varieties one could do that with, but he wasn’t yet so good of a fisherman that he could tell the difference between the kind that was safe and the kind that would fill him with worms. And though the voice had not appeared in his head again, he had the notion that
it would be awfully bad to contract a parasite. Or catch a cold. Or even so much as smell badly.

  So, he cooked his fish with the small cook stove his stepfather kept on the boat. He also wore the sweater at night to stay warm, and he took care with his hygiene. He bathed with cold seawater every other day and even went so far as to clip his nails and pomade his hair, just as if he were still under the dress code at his boarding school.

  Eventually he reached Greece. But instead of stopping at Mykonos or Santorini, or any of the other favorite island destinations where the families of his moneyed schoolmates liked to spend their holidays, he instinctively steered the boat toward a smaller island, one not listed on the map he’d found in a small teak rack above the boat’s chart table.

  There Colby came upon a single dock.

  This island, as it turned out, wasn’t covered in houses, like all the others he’d passed. In fact, he could only see one structure other than the dock. However, that one structure elicited more awe from Colby’s confused mind than any other he’d seen so far on this trip.

  Crikey! Is that a bloody castle? He wondered, looking over what could only be described as a rampart wall.

  Yes…yes…it was. However, it wasn’t one of those crumbling stone ruins all Abernathy boys had to trudge through at least once or thrice during their tenure at the historical school. It had a neo-classical feel to it with tall Greek columns and a curved front. As if it had been commissioned by someone who appreciated the security of ancient castles with rampart walls, but also wanted a place that looked like a temple where people could come in robes to worship their gods.

  Or god. Hadn’t he read in his classical history course that the Greeks used to build separate temples for each of their gods, who apparently couldn’t share a chapel, like the Abernathy boy’s own Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  And somehow Colby knew…

  This was where the voice lived. The one that had called him here to meet his father.

  He turned the boat off, not caring if it was stolen. No, that wasn’t quite right. More like he was unable to care about the craft he left unsecured. It had served its purpose, and now as the sun set in the distance, Colby walked forward through the rampart walls arched entrance, dragging the steamer trunk behind him, and utterly focused on reaching that voice.

  When he entered the castle through the unlocked front door, he took a moment or two to drop the steamer trunk and closed the door behind him. But after that, he kept walking forward, not even pausing to take in the grand entrance hall which was filled with ivory columns and statues with a ceiling that looked like it could have been painted by Michelangelo himself.

  The need to go to the voice was more urgent now, yet he bypassed the grand staircase, to walk up a much narrower and darker set of wooden ones just beyond a kitchen. Servant stairs, he guessed, remembering all the dark stairways at Abernathy that had been roped off throughout his stay there. They'd become too dangerous to employ but had been in regular use by all the Abernathy staff all the way up until the current mid-century.

  These stairs groaned under his footsteps but seemed sturdy enough. He wondered if he would have turned around even if they were as dangerous as the ones at Abernathy and had the stomach-churning feeling he would not. The voice, it was…

  He searched for the word…compelling him somehow. Guiding him as surely as a chain, even though it had only said a few words to Colby.

  Come meet your father, Colby. It is time.

  A strange hissing and screeching greeted him as soon as he stepped on to the second floor’s landing. It sounded like some sort of reptile. But much, much bigger. And the terrible sound was coming from up above…

  But even then, Colby could not stop walking. Like a Dr. Who Cyberman with instructions to keep moving forward, no matter what the human inside desired him to do.

  He finally came to a stop outside a door. It was much larger than the ones in the castles he’d toured on school trips. Those doors had been tiny. Some little more than five feet tall. But this one was twice that, with a steel knocker. The knocker looked antique to Colby, the kind of thing commissioned by medieval kings. It was shaped like a dragon’s head, with two large yellow jeweled eyes, and a golden ring hung from its mouth.

  The door was intimidating, to say the least, and Colby had the sense that the voice was behind it. But for some odd reason, instead of walking right in, he lifted his hand to the golden ring and moved it, knocking it against the heavy wood door once, then twice.

  “Come in,” a voice on the other side of the door said.

  And, yes, it was the same. Dark and resonant. Could this be? Could this be his father?

  With a racing heart, Colby reached down and turned the gold-encrusted knob.

  He entered an office even more significant than the pictures he’d seen of the queen’s at Buckingham Palace. In fact, it more resembled the black and white ones he’d seen in his history books of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace. Except this room was even more impressive in color, with red velvet furniture and vaulted baroque ceilings, covered in gold.

  At this point, Colby might have wondered if he really had stepped inside an episode of Dr. Who. But that show had been canceled back in ‘89, and of course, the BBC could never have afforded so grand a set.

  Also, none of the doctors had even come close to looking quite as intimidating as the man standing behind the office’s carved oak desk. He was easily the most massive man Colby had ever seen outside that Andre the Giant fellow from the American wrestling. Yet, he wasn’t bulky like that fellow or ugly. He was handsome enough to steal any fellow’s bird, and so muscular, Colby doubted that most of those bird-cheated fellows would be brave enough to fight back if he did.

  “You’re here. Finally,” the man said in the same dark and resonant voice that had woken him up in his little fishing village. He gave Colby a testy look as if the boy had kept him waiting a preposterous amount of time. “Fetch me a cup of the Thessaly Tsipouro. We’re down to our last bottle from this year’s shipment and, I have no idea where your father left it.”

  Colby’s eyes widened. “My father…is he here?”

  The enormous man blinked, his eyelids setting down for a beat too long over his dark brown eyes before coming back up. “Yes, he’s in the garden. He shall be your second order of business after the tsipouro. Third, you will clean yourself up and see to my prisoner upstairs. He is to receive one plate of meat per day. And nothing more.”

  Colby startled at the unexpected volley of commands, so many protests rising up inside his head. First of all, Colby wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the “prisoner,” something or someone he suspected might be the source of the strange screeches and hisses still echoing throughout the house. And of course, he wanted to see the father, who left when he was five. First off. Not after he fetched this mysterious stranger’s sip-oh-ro—whatever that was. Some sort of liquor, perhaps, but really, who knew. The request was just baffling.

  However, none of these protests seemed to be able to make the short trip from his head to his lips. And for some odd reason, instead of asking any of the many questions that had piled up during his three-week journey to get here, he turned and left the room right away.

  For reasons he could not explain to himself, he felt oddly compelled to search this estate until he found exactly what the man wanted. It took the better part of the night. He scoured the kitchen, munching on a few rolls of stale sourdough country bread he’d found in an ancient tin breadbox to sate his hunger. Then he turned around every bottle in the drawing room’s wall-to-wall heavy oak built-in liquor cabinet. There were plenty of ouzos, also scotches, brandy, tequilas, vodkas, wines, and quite a few bottles with Chinese writing on the labels. But no tsipouro.

  Not finding it anywhere downstairs, he proceeded back up to the second floor, and opened every door there, save the one with the crystal knob. He found a library full of books. There was even one lying open inside a low light glass case that looked exactly li
ke the original pressing of the Gutenberg Bible, Colby once saw on a school trip to the British Library. Though of course, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Could it?

  He also found bedrooms, baroque and covered in gold with other priceless gems embedded in both the furniture and the walls. It might have struck Colby as tacky but not for the certainty that every single sparkling gem didn’t have even a hint of costume or zirconia in it.

  However, he could not find the liquor the man behind the desk had requested. Finally, he took a deep breath and ascended another set of back stairs to the top floor.

  This floor was much narrower than the first two, with only a couple of doors on either side of the stairs he’d taken up here. To the left side of the servant stairs, behind the door furthest from where he stood, Colby could hear the strange hissing and screeching, even louder than before.

  Colby quickly chose to open the very first door to the right of the stairs. Inside, he found a humble bedroom. There was a cot, and one of those standing TV trays, his stepfather used to eat his tea whenever the footie was on along the back wall. And in front of the wall to his right, sat a rack, upon which hung at least ten double-breasted waistcoats, and their accompanying trousers. Not so much suits, he sensed, but some kind of uniform. A servant uniform, much like the ones in the black-and-white photos hanging on the walls of the common room in his Abernathy house—the pictures that hearkened back to a time before scholarships, when each Abernathy boy came to the school with his own personal attendant.

  On the left side of the room, a small television sat on top of a pinewood clothing dresser. And next to it, an ironing board was leaned against the wall. The thinnest coat of dust lay on top of the small television, but other than that, all the room’s items seemed to be waiting for someone to return and make use of them.

  Colby walked further into the room to perform another tsipouro search but stopped when he saw the picture sitting next to the television on top of the drawer. For it was a photo of his father and his mother and Colby himself when he was only five. It was one of those cheesy studio portrait numbers from the 80s, the three of them gathered close on a green velvet couch. But nonetheless, they looked just as happy as his mother had claimed them to be…