The Darkly Stewart Mysteries: Light and Darkly

by DG Wood

  THE DARKLY STEWART MYSTERIES

  Light and Darkly

  DG Wood

  Copyright © 2017 DG Wood

  All rights reserved.

  www.darklystewart.com

  ISBN: 154135821X

  ISBN 13: 9781541358218

  THE DARKLY STEWART MYSTERIES Novels

  THE WOMAN WHO TASTED DEATH (No. 1)

  LIGHT AND DARKLY (No. 2)

  PRAISE FOR THE WORLD OF DARKLY STEWART

  “As someone who grew up with the classic gothics, I resent the way my beloved horror legends are being reinterpreted to make them romantic for today’s teenage audiences, so I was drawn to D.G. Wood’s new, yet respectful, take on werewolves. He has set up a plot with characters who can populate a series and who have enough of a past to keep the present interesting. This is both a cinematic and literary work, revealing details as they are needed and supplying a mature richness of character. It’s also creepy as hell.”

  —Nat Segaloff, Film Producer & Author of MR. HUSTON/MR. NORTH: LIFE, DEATH, AND MAKING JOHN HUSTON’S LAST FILM.

  “Sexy, fun and moves quickly. A very well written debut by D.G. Wood. Great new take on werewolfism, which in this book [‘The Woman Who Tasted Death’] is a sexually transmitted disease. After spending time with Darkly you’ll never look at a ‘Mountie’ the same.”

  —Jordan Rawlins, Author of MONSTERS OF THE APOCALYPSE.

  “Wood’s masterful command of the English language transports you into an apparent netherworld among us and hooks in its claws. ‘Darkly Stewart: The Woman Who Tasted Death’ elicited feelings I remember being uncovered upon first reading ‘Interview with the Vampire.’ Darkly Stewart is a fresh take on the end of civilization as we know it.”

  —Jeremy Pack, Screenwriter/Director.

  “I love storytelling, and I love police work, and so I found this story to be perfect. I am grateful that in my almost 20 years in law enforcement as a Philadelphia PD Detective, I have not had any such investigation that Darkly had in this story. I applaud DG Wood for somehow making me actually want to become a werewolf. In the world that DG Wood created, it’s sexy to be a werewolf. It’s exhilarating, there is so much life, so much inner power and peace. There was much talk about it being a curse to be a werewolf. But in the world Wood created, I found it to be a curse to be human. As a Detective, I wish I had the instincts Darkly had, I wish I could smell death.”

  —Domenic O’Neill, Philadelphia PD.

  “For all of you who have had strange experiences in small towns, reading The Darkly Stewart Mysteries will either make you want to go back and visit, or hope you never run out of gas on the highway.... Either way, you won’t be able to put it down!”

  —Todd Witham, Director/Screenwriter.

  “I have a crush on Darkly Stewart. She’s a strong heroine created by the unique mind of author D.G. Wood in an exciting and original, fast-paced story that I couldn’t put down. Mystery/Adventure lovers, I think you won’t be able to either!”

  —Lieutenant Commander Daniel McShane, U.S. Navy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank Lorraine Berglund of Carousel B Productions for her unwavering support as my producing partner for the last several years. It has been among the most productive times of my life. Much gratitude goes to Graham Ludlow, who saw clearly that the potential of Darkly must not be limited to print, but that it must also find a home in the form of television adaptation. Without Jennifer Goldhar of The Characters Talent Agency, who has been my agent and friend since the turn of the Millennium, I would not have access to world-class talent to populate the world of Darkly Stewart. And to my brilliant agent in the UK, Frances Phillips, I appreciate your guidance in sending me off on a North American adventure almost twenty years ago now. We’re all in for one howl of an adventure.

  To the two cities my wife and I love so dearly, London and Los Angeles, I ask that you pardon small liberties taken with walls, trails, and toilets for the sake of story.

  To my wife, who waits patiently for a return to the romance that is life in London, I say it is coming. All the long hours in development and the writing room are spent to that end.

  To my colleagues at The Camera House, I say that to come to Hollywood and find a professional home with all of you in the industry I love, is the stuff less fortunate others dream about. I do not take it for granted.

  And special thanks to all those who took the time to sing Darkly’s praises!

  For Audrey, Maria, Fiona, Blake, and Simon.

  Together, you define friendship…

  …and for Jamie and Tanja. Welcome to the club.

  “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb…”

  — Isaiah 11:6

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Nebuchadnezzar clawed his way through the red dirt with hands he had not used in more years than he could recall. This was a man dragging himself back from the wilderness. A man reborn. He reached the stream’s edge and looked down at the moving reflection, startling himself. Nebuchadnezzar vomited. The haze in his mind was clearing, but his natural visage was alien and unnatural to behold.

  The young wolves had followed him to the stream, whimpering from a lack of comprehension at the transformation that was taking place. Their fear surpassed their curiosity when the Angel of the Lord descended upon Nebuchadnezzar, and the wolves retreated into the cover of brush.

  The Angel’s feet slipped through the water, and ripples washed over Nebuchadnezzar. He waited for death.

  But, the Angel of the Lord lifted Nebuchadnezzar to his feet and said, “You are a beast no more. Stand as a man stands.”

  Nebuchadnezzar’s naked body shook from the cold. So, the Angel commanded him to sit and called the wolves to the man’s side. They came, unafraid, for the Angel of the Lord wished them to be so. The beasts wrapped themselves around the man and warmed him.

  “You are redeemed, Nebuchadnezzar,” proclaimed the Angel. “Let your children of the wilderness be a constant reminder to you and your descendants of past sins.”

  Then, the Angel of the Lord became like the water he stood in, maintaining his shape for a split second, before collapsing into the stream.

  Eluned crossed the Royal Mile and disappeared once again down a snicket that eventually deposited the queen onto an Edinburgh road much less traveled by the citizens of Scotland’s fairest city.

  Eluned was Welsh herself, but had married a Scots doctor and embraced her husband’s native city. Sadly, he lost his life in the great Darien scheme, succumbing to the disease he had been hired to treat. It had been the greatest feat of business ever devised by the mind of men. Scotland set up a colony, whose chief purpose was to transport the goods from one ship across the narrow isthmus that separates North and South America and load them onto a ship on the other side, so that the goods may complete their journey to Asia. Ship captains were saved the perilous journey around Cape Horn, and months were shaved off delivery times. A masterful scheme, if not for unforgiving fate. The tiny mos
quito wiped out the colony.

  Now, with Scotland’s coffers emptied by the failed scheme, the union with England could not be stopped. It’s 1700 A.D., and Eluned had just been proclaimed Queen of Wolves. She saw her duty clearly. Great changes were on the horizon. Hiding the true nature of her people was a daunting task during the ever forward march of progress. An exodus of wolves from the British Isles, and a relocation to the vast, virgin forests of the Americas, would be her legacy. She would travel much farther north than her husband ever did.

  Since the time of Boudicca, the descendants of Nebuchadnezzar had chosen a woman to determine the way forward every hundred years. The alphas of a pack must always be men. Eluned knew it would be centuries, if ever, that a woman would hold such a rank. There was more chance of women being admitted to the priesthood. But, for the next hundred years, even after her passing, the werewolves of Europe would live their lives per the tenets she laid down during her reign. At the turning of the next century, a new queen would be chosen, and all Eluned’s work would be upheld or undone.

  The queen was forty-six. She may not live but another decade or two. It did not matter. Her commands would be obeyed until 1800 A.D. This awesome responsibility was at the forefront of her thoughts when she pushed open the door to The Hanging Tree pub.

  Eluned nodded at the landlord, who stood watch over two chronic drunks snoozing at a table in the corner of the small room. She walked past the bar and through another door that opened onto a circular stairwell. The steps, several hundred of them, led deep underground. The flash of light at the top of the well gave way to flickers of light below, and Eluned walked forward on flat ground, moving through a tunnel lined with torches. The walls were damp and carved with the figures of wolves. Wolves hunting, wolves mating, wolves transforming back into the human.

  Twenty-five yards on, the tunnel opened into a natural cavern that was two feet lower than the lip of the tunnel. The cavern was illuminated with enough torches to make the space almost as bright as day. The floor of the cavern was covered in tapestries. On the walls, where the tapestries should have been hanging, were specks of starlight imbedded in the rock. With but one torch lit, the cavern must have resembled the galaxy in the night sky.

  Eluned stood above the room and smiled kindly at the men below, her most important subjects, who would implement her mandate. The irony of undertaking a mission similar to the one that got her husband killed was not lost on the queen. One of the men, Colonel David Black, placed wooden steps below the wolf queen’s position and held out his hand to help her down.

  The colonel was the linchpin of Eluned’s designs. He had served in the English Army in the New World. He had successfully navigated the politics of tribal alliances in the colonies. Rumor had it that Colonel Black had married an Indian maid in the ceremony common to the savages. In England, his legal marriage was to the youngest daughter of a peer of the realm. It was a step up the establishment ladder that had handed him his present commission. No wolf had achieved such a seamless assimilation before. But it must now come to an end. With his wife converted, and his children born wolves, it was only a matter of time before sheer numbers resulted in eventual discovery, persecution, and massacre.

  So it was now that Black, representing the English packs, and those representing the packs of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and France stood before her, ready to swear absolute allegiance to her. There were wolves in the farthest reaches of Europe and beyond. Those of the steppes of Asia had been hunted to virtual annihilation by the Mongol horde. They fled west to the vast, tangled forests of eastern Europe. There, the wolves of Romania, the Ottoman Empire, the German-speaking duchies, and the Danube lands eked out an unconstructed, lawless existence. It was several queens before Eluned who had consigned them to eventual extinction.

  The men accepted the duty that lay before them. The ships were bought and sailors seduced to man those vessels of exodus. They would be the first new wolves for a new life in a new world. A place where there would eventually be no need for a queen. By the end of the century, North America would belong to the wolves, and Great Britain would be a memory of only the very old.

  Of course, the best laid plans can and do perish in conflagrations fueled by naivete and set aflame by intolerance and fear. It was Colonel Black who would forge a secret confederation between the wolves and the British Army, which would serve the United Kingdom well, as it pushed ever westward and northward against the frontier and the French. That alliance was on the way out, when the wolves were betrayed after victory on the Plains of Abraham.

  With General Wolfe, protector of the wolves, dead, younger men who saw no future need for a deal with such devils, ended the confederacy in brutal and bloody fashion. And so, as the followers of Boudicca fled west to the mountains of Wales almost two millennia before, after their defeat at the hands of Roman legions, so too did the wolves of the New World fly further west and north for the impenetrable barrier of the boreal forest.

  It had been a shortsighted decision on the part of the British Army. For, a generation beyond Wolfe, they would needlessly lose the colonies to a rabble of farmers with antiquated weapons. If the old alliance with wolves had stood, the outcome of the American War of Independence may have looked very different.

  There remained werewolves in Britain, roaming the moors and collected by the ruling class, who then put the wolves down with silver swords when they grew bored with the responsibility or the cost of replacing a field of slaughtered sheep.

  In North America, as Eluned had foreseen, the idea of kingship was forgotten. Sheriff became the preferred term for Alpha Wolf. Frontier towns prospered and engaged in commerce with the outside world, with few incidents that couldn’t be explained away with scapegoats from the dark and dangerous wilderness all around. The last Queen of Wolves was proclaimed in 1800. Her great commandment was to stick to one’s own kind, not foreseeing the problems that would mean for the gene pool.

  By the turn of the Millennium, with werewolves consigned to legend, and due to their self-imposed seclusion and embrace of puritanism, about to become myth, there were those who began to think that a queen may be just what the doctor ordered.

  In the outside world, the institutions of democracy were showing wear and tear, and the gap between those who have and those who have not reached a point not seen for centuries. So, when the leaders of a small town descended from Eluned’s colonists devised a plan to bring freedom to all, wolf and human, by making every human wolf…there was a woman among them who saw herself as Eluned’s inheritor. If the plan was to succeed, the monarchy must be restored.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was that taste. It reminded Darkly of pressing the tip of her tongue to a battery. The man appeared benign enough. Middle-aged, he wore an immaculate suit, and his expression revealed neither impatience nor a carefree nature. Darkly thought he looked like a CEO. Where was it that she read four percent of all CEOs were sociopaths?

  Threat to society or not, this man standing in front of her at the post office had killed someone not that long ago. Was it a relative’s suffering he brought to an end with an overdose of morphine? Or had this man recently fulfilled a taboo desire?

  Darkly took a swig of the diet coke in her hand and shook it off. She looked down at the postcard of a vineyard in the Okanagan Valley and turned it over. The ends of her hair dripped due to the rain outside from which she had just escaped, and the ink was a little smudged as a result. But the message was still legible. I’m safe. Don’t worry. You’ll see me again. Love, Darkly.

  Darkly thanked the trucker and climbed down from the cab. She’d found him in a diner on the outskirts of Vancouver, where she binged on complex carbs and proteins after flashing her RCMP badge and joining him in his booth. She had to get herself as far away as possible from any populated area, and Darkly didn’t know when she would next eat a full meal. Would she feed when she turned? Would the need to hunt take hold instinctually?

  At this moment, she listened
to the eighteen-wheeler shift gears as it disappeared in a bend of the road up ahead. She was alone and as ready as she’d ever be.

  Darkly estimated she was thirty miles from Wolf Woods. Maybe a little closer. The rain had not stopped pouring on the drive north, and Darkly pulled her water-proof hood tightly around her head as she left the road for the cover of the pine woods. Tonight, she would camp a few yards from the road, and then follow the highway for most of the next day. She knew how much ground an animal the size of a wolf could cover in a night. But she would not confront Wyatt until she knew the facts about herself. She would face those facts alone in the woods, and then she would kill the man responsible for the death of her family.

  The night did not go as Darkly hoped. Or was that feared? She was as certain about how she felt on tapping into her true self as she was about confronting Wyatt. She would kill him. There was no doubt there. But, how? She didn’t question that Buck had already dealt with the threat to his town. But, Wyatt is Buck’s blood. He’d be banished again, to remain the constant and monitored threat. As a wolf, Darkly would be able to track him even easier than with her RCMP skills. And Buck would follow her, intent on rescuing her from nurturing a taste for murder.

  There was something more. Darkly was beginning to understand why Wyatt was still alive. He was the bad example, the bogeyman, held up as the example to others of how it could all go terribly wrong – if they gave in to their baser instincts, if they adopted, too rashly, ideas of integrating with the outside world, if they chose to follow wolves other than Buck and Geraldine.

  There wasn’t even a moon on Darkly’s first night. She knew it was there from the patch of bluish glow in the cloud bank above her tent, but she had imagined something different: Moonlight Sonata giving way to the heavy metal pulse of rushing blood. A pumping heart beating as fast as Darkly’s feet – paws – carried her to her destiny.