by Mav Skye
Werewolves
3 Tales to Chill Your Bones, Volume Eight
Mav Skye
Jason Michel
Contents
Copyright
Untitled
Epigraph
Reynardina
Lobos
The Wait
Afterword
The Death of Three Colours
About Jason Michel
About Mav Skye
Also by Mav Skye
Bibliography
Werewolves: 3 Tales to Chill Your Bones, Volume Eight is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Mav Skye
Copyright © 2015 by Jason Michel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please contact the author(s) at the following email address: [email protected]
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When the wolves came down the mountain, we rang the bells and took turns throwing rocks at the damned wild hounds. All teeth and eyes. There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to it all, ‘cept they wanted our blood spilt from open wounds onto the female’s earths holy gash.
And we damn well wanted theirs.
Jason Michel, When the Wolves Came Down the Mountain
Reynardina
by Jason Michel
Be sure you quit night walking, and shun bad company, For if you don’t you are sure to rue until the day you die. Beware of meeting Rynadine all on the mountains high.
The Mountains High, 1814
They were coming for her.
The young woman could sense them in the far distance, across the valley, moving closer and closer with every hard breath. Through the chill night air that exhaled thick mist to cover her tracks. She could sense them, still far from her. The baying of hounds and squawking shrill off-key horn blows. The soft thunder of their horse’s hooves as they crashed through the undergrowth, trampling daisies, worms and moss underfoot. Their ever-so-spoilt horses that never lacked for food while those people in the towns and villages surrounding the woods lost their underpaid factory jobs to cheaper foreign lands.
She dragged herself up the wooded hill, touching the hard scratchy bark of an oak and slipping on damp leaves. She was following a path that the moon desperately lit for her, as the great mild orb peered down through the mist, wishing protection on her kin and knowing that blood was already streaming from between the young woman’s legs. The moon hoped it would be the only blood to flow that night.
They were coming for her.
* * *
Rey’s job at the hairdressers had been getting her down. Right down. That old tart, Betty, who ran the gaff, was driving her mad. The old bitch was jealous of all the younger workers; jealous of their youth; of their non-nicotine stained smile; of their firm bodies and tits that didn’t need help to stay horizontal. Of their way of drawing out the smiles from the male clients, the way she used to do, once, without even saying a word.
When she saw those aging photos of Betty in the sixties, at the time when she had still had the legs to pull off a miniskirt on Carnaby Street, Rey felt no pity for her. She had looked good, Rey had to admit. But now she was some kind of travesty, clinging to trophies of her past: the fake tan, the stretched skin, the varicose veins hiding under the white leather skirt and pink tights. Her sharply fading glory must have been killing her for years. Rey could feel the old madam’s cells dying. Each death became a compounded cruelty. The constant stream of barbed comments flooded in after each late night on the town. They pricked Rey’s fragile emotions like thorns, tearing and ripping and pushing her towards confrontation. She knew what she was capable of and the problems that had followed her throughout her life, from her insignificant small village to the big city. She was determined not to let herself be overcome by them again.
That Thursday morning as Rey had pushed open the door, late as usual, the withered pink-frilly crow had glared at her and screeched over the banal pop music on the hi-fi, life destroying gossip and blasting hairdryers—
“Here she is! The urban fox! That’s what you are, ain’t it?”
The banshee turned to see all the upward glances, some filled with spiteful glee, others with sympathetic embarrassment.
But nothing could stop the old lady’s bile once she had started on a humiliation spree.
“Comin’ in at this hour. A scavenger, lookin’ for some juicy bit of action between yer legs. Well, I hope he’s good in bed, darlin’, cos trust me that’s all he’ll be good for!”
Rey lifted her head as she hung up her coat. Her silent defiance made everyone stare for a moment, hoping for some sort of reaction, then they all looked down as the customers came in. Rey told herself that it was only a job and that at least she had one in this recession, not like others on the street, going through bins for their breakfast.
* * *
She had met Julian in South London that Thursday night.
She had needed to get out again. To laugh. To joke. To flirt. To bitch. To drink. To be the sociable part of herself. Friday was her day off so she was out and about in Lambeth with the girls from work, Gemma and Trudy, and for this she was grateful as they were the only friends she had in the metropolis. They had watched Betty insult and bully her, day after day, and had rallied around her like mother hens protecting their young, even to the point of calling Betty “a dried up womb” to her wrinkled raging face.
Both Trudy and Gemma knew that it was Rey’s beauty and her seeming innocence that so enraged their employer. The way her straight red hair glimmered as it fell on her porcelain shoulders. The way her green eyes sparkled with youthful hopes when she smiled. Yet, her beauty was only outward. You could buy that. It was her innocence that so affronted Betty. As far as she was concerned, Rey hadn’t come from the Whitechapel back streets that Betty had, where the ghost of Jack The Ripper still ritualistically disemboweled prostitutes outside of the thriving curry houses. She hadn’t lost her virginity down some red bricked cul-de-sac at the age of fourteen to a friend of her dad’s. She hadn’t struggled to put food on the table for a screaming kid that the father had abandoned years earlier.
As far as Betty was concerned, the little Cornish fishing village where Rey had come from had been an idyllic and bountiful place. Secretly, it was a place that Betty had dreamed of as a little girl while her drunken father hit her mother one more time.
The pub was in one of the better streets of South London, close to Vauxhall tube station. Old whitewashed Victorian houses lined the road and what stray litter there was, was picked up as soon as it had been spotted. They didn’t want their night out spoiled by the ways and strays of the City. They wanted to treat themselves and feel safe in a fantasy that the world could scarcely provide.
The girls were sat in a corner of the pub, knee deep in a conversation about their previous jobs and clients and nursing their second bottle of Merlot, when Rey first saw Julian come in. He seemed elegant, unlike his friends, who could’ve been part of the local rugby team. Well to do but brutish. There was something in the way h
e moved that drew her to him. The wine had begun to go to Rey’s head. She saw him standing by the bar laughing as he glanced over and smiled. The girls saw it too and the three of them cackled and cooed and finally he came over and asked Rey if she wanted a drink.
Yes, she replied. Yes, that would nice.
* * *
Rey had awoken in bed in his family’s palatial flat in Pimlico. She was hungry and still a little dizzy from the mixture of wine and cider that she had imbibed as they had seduced each other. She heard Julian’s heavy breathing next to her and touched the spots where he had kissed her. The slight soreness was pleasant and she realised that his gentleness had fallen away along with his clothes. He had taken her with some degree of callousness, like an eager sailor on shore leave. She preferred it that way. The natural way.
She caressed his hand, gently stroking the large gold ring on his index finger. She had asked him about it as they drank together. It was a striking piece of vanity, with a large crest in the middle of it depicting a griffin and a dog of some kind. He had merely brushed it off, saying that it was “just an heirloom” as they continued flirting quietly with each other.
Julian seemed to be far down deep in some dream or other, as his eyes twitched in the web of REM and she kissed his forehead, then slipped out of the scarlet silk sheets and padded silently into the next room to find her clothes.
Closing the door as quietly as she could, Rey switched on the light. She soon found her mobile phone and looked at the time. It was two A.M., still early enough to get home and then go out to find something fresh to eat. She dallied with the idea of getting something from the fridge and staying until morning, but she was sick of all the cooked food that she had that day, and, in the end, chose only to wash the wine taste out of her mouth with a glass of water. She went back into the living room and sat down on the plush velvet chaise lounge and began dressing and tying her laces. She finally looked around at the grand living room with the expensive gaudy knick knacks and portraits of sullen looking ancestors. Even the air smelt of old money.
The little girl that lived deep inside her was trying to call out to her to let her dream a dream of the life of a princess. But that little girl had been silenced a long time ago. The institutions where she had stayed after her parents had been burnt to death in their own house by the other frightened villagers, from one destitute home to another, had seen to that. There was a discreet move to a mental home after she had been caught with a yet another dead rodent in her bed and blood upon her lips and sheets. Voles, mice, weasels, rabbits. The drugs and the therapy and the ever-so-understanding nurses and doctors had shut the little girl right up. They had taught her to keep quiet about her true nature. They had told her to move to the big city where she could be herself, where she could feel normal and anonymous.
The door swished behind her and she heard Julian make his way towards her, his bare feet gliding over the shag pile carpet. She felt him gently stroking her right shoulder. She heard his breath form words.
“My pretty creature, I'm glad to have met you here.”
She rose and turned and met his lips, feeling his hard member against her jeans, losing herself in the moment.
“I’m not so sure” she said playfully. “It is my opinion, I fear, you are some kind of rake.”
“I am no rake!” he laughed. “Actually, I’m seeking concealment,” he whispered.
“Oh, what have you done?” she asked as his hand stroked the back of her neck.
“Hunting,” he said.
Her senses screamed as his hand suddenly and violently grabbed her neck. She felt the shift in weight as his other hand came up and she smelt the chemicals being thrust into her face on a satin handkerchief. Then, as she growled and spluttered and spasmed and bit, all went black.
* * *
The floor was hard and the first thing Rey smelt was cognac. It was a pungent sweet smell combined with the after taste of cigar smoke. The light was an intrusive bare bulb that physically hurt when she forced her eyes open. Her head pounded behind the network of optical nerves that opened the door and let the light flood in. She lifted her head off the cement floor and lightly licked at the saliva that had drooled down her cheek.
She was facing a porridge grey wall, yet she felt the people’s eyes darting over her nude body before she saw them and instinctively curled herself into a foetal ball. The same way she had many times before in the homes and hospitals where they had sent her. Then she heard the voice.
“Finally awake are you?”
The voice was pale and shrill, yet it was a man’s voice. It dripped with indolent years of culture, pampered itself in the knowledge of its superior education and thin blooded breeding. Rey slowly squeezed and contorted using the wall as leverage to guide herself into a position where she could see her interlocutor. The first person Rey saw was Julian at the back of the group of four people. He was chuckling in his eyes. His arm around a young woman whose face was hidden by the small crowd.
“I must say, Julian, you do have impeccable taste when it comes to choosing a specimen from the common herd, my dear boy.”
It was the same insipid voice coming from a man stood at the front of the group. The man did not so much stand as hang in mid air as if his skinny feeble legs could not support his great gait, liver spots and jowls. It was a face to shame an octopus in white breeches and scarlet hunting attire. Yet, there was a grotesque boyish hint of the refinement of Julian in the man’s eyes. Straggly white-rooted dyed black hair poked out from under his hunt cap. In his left hand, he swirled his cognac in circles, sniffing daintily from time to time. In his right hand, he bore a weathered riding crop. Rey stared at his right hand.
Julian nodded gracefully in response and licked at the young woman’s face, while she giggled and pushed his away. It was then that Rey saw the face of the woman and realised that Julian had a twin sister.
The only other person in the cell was a severe looking midget blonde woman of innumerable years whose watery blue eyes glared at her through thick glasses with all the hatred of a virgin librarian.
They all wore the same gold rings, the same hunting attire as if going on a family outing. Daddy. Mummy. Son. Daughter.
“Where am I? Why… Julian?” croaked Rey as she forced air into meaning. The man effetely waved away her plea as he would an extra slice of Battenberg and crouched down on his scrawny haunches, spilling one or two drops of the fine cognac onto the floor as he did. Rey saw herself mirrored in his black riding boots.
“What was that, my dear? Why? you ask… Why indeed.”
He took a sip of his beverage then continued as if all the world revolved around his words.
“You see, my dear creature, there once was a time when we and people like us ruled this fair island of Albion. It was a time when people knew their place in life. A time before reality TV and the Nouveau Riche and this nonsense of equality. It was a time when breeding was important, my petal. One could do all that they wanted if they had the right blood …”
“The right blood? I don’t understand,” murmured Rey. She had begun to see the doctors and nurses in the asylum around her again. She once more felt their injections.
“Of course, you don’t!” spat the father, obviously flustered at her intrusion into his speech. “You have been brought up on a diet of McDonalds and Mocha Frappucinos! What can you possibly know of taste? Yet, you and your kind deem it well to mock and ridicule us! You make your jokes about “posh” folk while you fester in your plastic Dickensian hovels!”
Spit flew from his purple lips, flecking Rey’s eyelashes. He pressed his hands to his knees and forced himself back up to his standing position, stretching his arms out wide, playing to his audience, building up for the crescendo.
“Well, no more, I say! No more! You and your ungrateful rabble have now taken the joy of the hunt away from us. This is the last straw. The hunt is returning, mark you well. It is coming back into high fashion! No more shall we hunt just mere ani
mals, my dear. Our hunt will not be wild like those of past barbarians, our hunt shall be a civilised hunt!”
His eyes flashed with the electricity of madness as he pointed directly at the bare boned girl in front of him and his family clasped their hands to their chests as he squeaked his final words. “You, my dear creature. We are hunting you this night. As we will come for all your kind! Now run, little vermin. Run!”
Rey sprang to life and dived out of the door as the family parted to let her pass. She banged into the door frame and they barked and clapped at her. She took off through the stables, seeing dozens more people there all dressed for the hunt, Peers of the Realm, Cabinet Members and American Pop Starlets, everyone barking and clapping as she flew into the murdering night.
* * *
Scrambling naked up the hillside, Rey looked over her silver shoulder to regard her pursuers. She didn’t have much time left, but the great hourglass didn’t care about her. Her feet were all cut and bleeding with thorns and the slashes from stones, but she could not feel the pain through the cold and her anger. She had vowed once not to ever be trapped again, and if that vow was to mean anything to her, then that moment was surely now, now, now, now, NOW.
Her teeth felt sharper once more, taking on a life of their own. Joints doubled and sinew curled. The shedding of the skin always hurt her and she screeched and cried to Holy Nature itself as her human form slipped away from her. She hadn’t the time to eat her discarded skin like her city routine dictated, but she crouched down and pissed over her human mask to show respect and ownership, then her padded feet moved swiftly on up the path to the top of the hill.