by T. C. Rypel
Screaming to ward the onset of madness, flushing with the wave of nausea that preceded her faint, she struck the beast full in the lower jaw, shattering half a row of darkly stained teeth.
The werewolf howled in ear-piercing agony, and the children screamed in chorus.
Hercule Cochieu’s hair bristled, and when Nadine crumpled to the floor between them, clearing his view, he discharged his musket at the beast’s head. The report was deafening in the tight quarters. Cochieu’s ears blocked, and the musket ball ripped fur and flesh from the werewolf’s neck.
Dark, slick blood gouted from the wound.
Cochieu gasped and hurled the musket into its ghastly face. He surged to the corner where Clarice lay quivering. He caught her up, kicked free of the claw that wildly shredded his boot. The werewolf suddenly went slack, seemingly dead. And Cochieu then dragged the other two small children along with him and Clarice.
The jackal met them at the base of the stairs, frothing and hissing. Cochieu tensely pressed it back with his drawn dagger, whose menace it respected. After what seemed an eternal standoff, the children mewling in utter panic, Cochieu warded the jackal back and locked the children into a larder.
When he returned for the slack Nadine, his scalp crackled to see the werewolf revived now, and clawing its way, with one bloody paw, through the hole in the wall that had late been a window. It barked and growled in animal fury, thrashing at the splintering wood of a shutter, its smoldering eyes on Nadine.
But then—
It lurched with an unseen impact. Then another.
Cochieu frenziedly dragged his daughter down the stairs, uncertain of the phenomenon’s meaning. Uncaring. Survival—the children’s survival alone occupied his scattershot thoughts.
Outside, horses whinnied and bucked in primal terror. The Wunderknechten under Moreau were not surprised to find that their guns would not fire in the rain. Undaunted, they unleashed deadly bowshot at the werewolf, spindling its hide with clothyard shafts. A mighty shot by Darcy Lavelle pinned the creature’s thigh to the wall. Its howls raised gooseflesh.
But it was still wedged half-inside the burst lattice window.
Two men beat at the still-barred rear door until Cochieu gratefully admitted them.
Wyatt Ault, an ex-mercenary who had seen his share of night-haunters in the forests of Prussia and Bavaria, quit his skittish mount to race past the farmhouse. With practiced ease he scaled the sodden wall of an adjacent outbuilding. From there, he executed a dangerous leap to a low edge of the farmhouse roof, shingles breaking free and splashing into the pools below as he scrabbled for purchase.
Two hawks, under some dark-powered direction, broke from under an eave and strafed him, describing ungainly arcs on rain-burdened wings. Ault fought them off with drawn sword until they retreated.
Unlimbering his longbow, Wyatt eased to the front of the treacherous roof. Drawing from an awkward position, he planted an arrow deep into the werewolf’s lower back, cursing with battle-glee to see it wrench like a speared fish.
Another shaft hissed from the bow, almost splitting the first, as gunshots vibrated the roof beneath his feet—
In the children’s bedchamber, the two men who had entered the house stilled the monster’s spasmodic frenzy with pistol shot. It lay motionless, draped over the sill, jerking with involuntary muscular reaction.
Outside, the remainder of the party dismounted and steadied their anxious horses.
The two men in the farmhouse who had shot the creature exhaled as one and appraised their kill. One urged caution, but his partner, convinced that the battle was won, moved forward to examine the awesome form.
The werewolf’s upper body snapped erect, its riven form charged anew with hellish life, one act of perverse defiance left to it. The man was dragged down and mangled under a maelstrom of razoring talons, his face gashed and flayed beyond recognition. It would be several minutes before his already stiffening corpse could be separated from that of the werewolf.
Dazed, their wrath spent and their fear of the supernatural dulled by fatigue, the armed party finally gazed about them in exasperation. They were drenched with rain and sweat, splashed with mud and blood, breathing hard with exertion and expectancy. But their eyes shone with a glimmer of hopeful realization.
This was indeed a significant accomplishment. It boded present change in Burgundy—whether for better or worse, no one seemed to care for the nonce.
Three men with polearms and staffs levered the werewolf’s ravaged body out into space. It crashed into a swirling pool of muddied hues beside the front door. They all gathered slowly to stare at it. Then, gradually, they began jostling and chattering the way men did after great achievements and brushes with death. Here they had experienced both.
Inside the house, Nadine worked at calming the sobbing children. Cochieu set a stew pot to boiling and broke out an ale cask. Darcy Lavelle and another man rolled the form of the dead jackal—dispatched by Darcy’s pike-point—onto a horse blanket for disposal.
The rest grouped around the rain-pelted, shaft-spindled bulk of the werewolf. It lay twisted in death, its tufted and matted fur obscuring its former outlines. But no one hurried to rearrange the monster for better viewing.
Lantern shields, their flames spared the rain by housings above the arm couplings, clustered like faery lights about the front of the farmhouse.
Jacques Moreau took note of the predatory eyes that rimmed the forest in growing numbers. He signaled for the Richard brothers to bring young Guy down from the road. As he watched his son approach, Moreau was assailed by worry and doubt. The men had taken to his new leadership well enough, that was sure. Intrepid warriors, one and all. But what had they done here? What price would they pay? Had anyone noticed how little he’d contributed once that familiar clutching feeling inside had paralyzed him? And in what light would young Guy see his father cast in the days to come?
Moreau watched his son’s expression as the doughty Richard brothers brought him near, swinging past the emptied animal pens. With Marie gone, who would care for the boy should anything ill befall Jacques? Wasn’t that a father’s first concern—the protection and raising of his son? Did anything else really matter?
He drew off his soaked hat and cast off the excess rainwater with a wrist snap. He smiled at his son.
“Hide your eyes,” he said to Guy, futilely and too late, for three men now brought out the partially wrapped remains of the man killed by the werewolf.
The optimistic banter of the Wonder Knights abruptly ceased.
* * * *
Little Guy Moreau was swept up by the import of it all. His father was a great leader now, engaged in the business of hunting down the monsters people whispered about when they thought no children heard. And here was one of them. It looked like a man rolled into an animal skin. All tangled and bloody. Its insides were oozing out like something the butcher-man had prepared for roasting. It didn’t look like a monster at all. Just a huge, dead forest animal.
Guy felt very brave now, seated there beside his father’s bay gelding, the only boy in Lamorisse who’d been allowed to see this. But he was frightened, too. He knew what the people said about the awful monsters in the forests. About how bad people lived in those forbidden woods, and in the mountains, too. And it must all be true. As they waited in the woods, Guy had seen something big, with wings, looking down at him from a high perch in the trees, the way a cat watched a bug before it pounced. He had told the Richards, and they had laughed, telling him it was a trick of the wind and the lightning.
But he noted how warily they had looked up into the trees, and suddenly he didn’t feel safe with them anymore. He didn’t feel safe because he knew they were out in the territory where the old broken Frankish castle stood like a bared skeleton on the rocky crags. It was haunted, so they said.
&nb
sp; Worse than that, they’d have to cross the bridge again on their way home. The bridge over the gully where he had once seen the man with the devil face, down below. The one who had strangely waved for him to come down. And when Guy didn’t because something told him not to, the man had done something terrible to a small animal, laughing all the while, and then pointed up at Guy and promised, without words, that he would get the boy someday and do the same thing to him.
That bridge was always a scary place now. So scary it made Guy’s belly hurt until he shut his eyes and prayed to Jesus to bring him safely to the other side. And even then he would not look back until the bridge was gone in case the devil-man was there. Pointing at him and laughing.
But now he wasn’t afraid. He was with his father. A great captain, once, in the king’s lancers, who was the most important soldier in the militia of Lamorisse now. Guy drew a deep breath and sat up tall in the saddle.
“Are you going out hunting more monsters now?” he asked his father.
Jacques Moreau cleared his throat and chuckled dryly. “Non, mon fils, we have our quota for tonight.”
* * * *
“Jacques—a moment here, s’il vous plait.”
Moreau instructed his son to remain mounted and rejoined his companions. “Oui?”
Darcy Lavelle stood in the doorway of the Cochieu farmhouse, alternately sipping ale and tending to the reloading of his pistols. He looked to the boy and then modulated his voice, affecting a casual air, to Jacques Moreau.
“Evidence, we have here, mon ami—hard evidence that evil things are about to unleash some new outrage in the province. This be no natural beast, I think we all agree—”
Moreau was nodding his head glumly, his benumbed mind trying to formulate their next action even as he hoped some other would suggest it. Why hadn’t Darcy Lavelle assumed leadership after the magistrate had died and the council leader had been arrested? Decorated cavalry trooper…veteran of numerous bloody campaigns. Lavelle had spurned the position, flatly declaring himself a better follower than a leader. Now he held Moreau’s old job as craft guild spokesman. What was the difference?
A fool’s question…
“So what do you think?” Moreau asked, gratefully accepting a mug of ale from a red-eyed Hercule Cochieu.
“Take this thing back with us, of course,” Lavelle replied. “The more who see it the better.”
Moreau found himself nodding numbly again.
They loaded the dead vigilante onto his horse, wrapping him cap-a-pie against prying eyes until his family could be approached. Then they nervously lashed the mangled werewolf’s grisly hands and feet and carried it by pole to a wagon, similarly obscuring it from view with a coarse shroud.
They took a late, bracing meal of stew and hard bread, outfitted the Cochieu family for travel, and departed the way they had come, through the forest and back to Lamorisse.
“A victory,” Wyatt Ault, the one-time mercenary, told Moreau as he cantered up beside him. “Victory over evil—that’s how you view this, Jacques. To be followed by many more, one hopes, until this Farouche filth is scoured from French soil. Don’t worry about responsibility. We share that.”
Moreau cast him an uneasy smile.
Nadine Cochieu swung her horse over to join them, a somber set to her pretty face, making her look years older. “I suppose you know what you’re doing, gentils, but you can’t just ride back into Lamorisse with that…thing.”
“What are you saying, Nadine?”
“Monsieur Moreau,” she said in a conspiratorial voice, “you have a dead monster in that wagon now but—God forgive us all, the Devil will make us pay. Have you given no thought to what will happen when the sun rises? Tarry here until morn, and then make your plan.”
“You’re saying you know who that creature will become?” Moreau asked her gravely, slowing the entourage.
Nadine Cochieu blinked at him through the rain, which had by now diminished to a thick mist. “You mean not one of you will admit to knowing who that is, or what he came for?” Her eyes disengaged from their uneasy faces, and she pulled away.
Consulting a while, they decided to see what did indeed transpire when the sun’s rays broke the horizon, though there was both little doubt and a reluctance to believe.
A few anxious hours later, the gray haze lifted by stages over the white-capped peaks to the east. And the Wunderknechten band witnessed for the first time the transformation of a lycanthrope, as it resolved to its human form.
The children were kept at a distance as the phenomenon transpired with diabolical languor. A new appreciation for things beyond human ken dawned with the breaking day.
Nadine Cochieu had not watched, knowing what it was that caused them to gasp and turn away in revulsion and private prayer, buttressing themselves against the new higher order of fear to be faced in the near future. She pushed her snorting mare past them to peer down into the wagon, an ugly scowl twisting her lips.
“He came for me…”
Her father, Hercule, uttered a gasp of revulsion. But no one spoke for a time. They shuffled about the area aimlessly, two men at last replacing the rough-textured mantas over the mangled corpse of Rene Farouche, the late minister of commerce in the province.
Wyatt Ault sat astride his big destrier, snicking his rapier in and out of its sheath. “Well…what now?”
“Can’t take him back to town,” one man advanced. “Mon Dieu—a Farouche!”
“Oui—a dead Farouche!” Darcy Lavelle blurted. “And don’t forget it. They die like anything else, whatever shapes their black magic lets them assume.” He turned to Jacques Moreau. “We can’t just toss him out onto the road…”
Moreau stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw working inside his cheek. He projected pensiveness, but inside his thoughts were a-boil, and he prayed it didn’t show. He felt like fleeing again. That familiar call to flight—to save himself first and foremost—framed itself in his mind. He felt trapped, strangled, pressed into a tight corner. Recalled the stricture of that tiny mountain adit again. Little Guy…calling to him for help. Crying.
Cold sweat formed on his brow, and his chest constricted.
But then Guy was at his side. He looked down at his son, saw that expression of absorption he knew would lock this moment into memory, to be recalled in some latter day when such moments would be measured for value and truth and fondness. He placed his arm around the boy’s shoulders and squared his own, drawing himself up tall, as befit a newly appointed leader.
“All right, Wunderknechten,” he said, sighing heavily, “get the shovels. We choose a discreet spot, bury him sans ceremonie, and mark the place well with holy warding symbols.”
“What?”
“Bury him—why?”
“For safekeeping,” Moreau answered, “until we can substantiate our claim about him. Until we have the proper support for what we must do next.”
“That’s crazy, n’est-ce pas?”
“Crazy, perhaps. But am I or am I not the magistrate?”
The troop demurred a moment, then Wyatt Ault shrugged and nodded, beckoning for two men to help him with the task.
CHAPTER THREE
Claude Aucoin rose customarily early, brushed the cheek of his sleeping wife, Anne, and dressed, foregoing a morning meal for the peace and solitude of his shop, where he would spend an hour on the obsession that had of late given his life its sole meaning.
He passed the bedchamber of his daughter, unable to control the urge to scowl, though there was no one about to appreciate his boorishness in the pre-dawn gloom.
Aucoin, a gaffer—Lamorisse’s most celebrated craftsman at the art of glassblowing—entered his ground-floor shop and prepared a gather of molten glass in the furnace. Taking up his four-foot-long pipe, he began shaping the del
icate spigot of the cristallo wine fountain he was determined to replicate.
The fountain had been his greatest achievement, the hallmark of his artistry. His wife had broken it in a careless accident years before. Now, amidst the debris of his shattered dreams and injured pride, he had taken to restoring some small, symbolic paean to the happiness of yesterday.
There came a gentle knock at the rear door. Francoise’s hand. There was no mistaking it. He ignored her. A second knock, more insistent. Still he paid it no heed.
His daughter poked her head through the crack, her dark hair tousled, her large, eloquent brown eyes still strained from disturbed sleep.
“What do you want? I’m busy here,” Aucoin said gruffly, intently eyeing the delicate shape he had formed at the far end of the pipe.
“A visitor, mon pere,” she whispered urgently. “A rider has come from Mme. Ault. She says there will be a meeting this morning at the auberge. Is it the Wunderknechten?”
“Never mind. What time?”
“Nine bells—papa, I wish to go along with you.”
“Forget it.”
“But I—this business is mine, as well—”
“I said to forget it,” he growled, slamming down the pipe and gripping the table edge tensely. He glanced at the bubbling mess he’d made of the nascent spigot-form. “Now see what I’ve done—you—” He stilled the grinding of his jaw. “Tell the messenger to tell Mme. Ault I’ll be there. Then rouse your mother and be about your chores.”
Francoise stood trembling at the doorjamb a moment, seeming on the edge of words or tears. Perhaps both.
Aucoin looked at her, his eyes flickering ever so slightly.
“Au revoir,” he said with quiet finality.
* * * *
Gabrielle Chabot bounded down the stairs of the inn, passed her father as he made his way back toward the kitchen, and gave him a quick, playful brush on a stubbled cheek with her lips.