Wendy watched his long, lean back until he was out of sight.
“Well, now. That was quite unexpected, wasn’t it, Nana?”
The dog, who had ceased her snarling as soon as John had barred the window, now stared at the door without comment.
“Oh, I agree,” Wendy assured her. “Of course we have to follow him.”
Nana glanced up, her eyes uncertain. She had been hoping only that John might come back, not that her mistress might charge headlong into the night after him. Especially not with such strange and disturbing smells lingering in the darkness.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Wendy scolded her gently. “We’re only attached to the regiment, Nana. We don’t report to John directly. He can’t just order us about. Besides, how are they to know where the danger is coming from without our noses to guide them? It’s our duty.”
Nana sat a little straighter and turned back to the door, growling this time. She was, after all, an exceedingly honorable dog. Nothing tugged more directly at her heartstrings than the call of faithful responsibility.
“That’s my girl! Come on, then. But be quiet now. They mustn’t hear us unless we need them to.”
Nana fell silent at once and padded stealthily behind her mistress, following her through the barracks and out into the night.
t is a strange feeling indeed to hide not only from one’s enemies (which is a perfectly natural thing to do from time to time), but from one’s own friends and comrades as well. It makes the entire world seem that much larger and more frightening than it already is, and it makes one feel very small and alone within it. Nevertheless, that was precisely what Wendy knew she had to do.
If John and the others had caught sight of her, they would have felt it their moral obligation, out of unbridled chivalry, to squirrel her back away inside the castle for safekeeping. But no one in the history of the world has ever proven their mettle without taking a risk or two along the way, and Wendy was no exception. Her platoon needed her, whether they realized it or not, and so she would come to their rescue. Whether they wanted her to or not.
At least she had Nana, who held no prejudgments whatsoever about her gender, and who was as grateful to have Wendy by her side as Wendy was to have Nana—it being the very nature of a dog to possess a profound understanding of friendship and camaraderie.
Now, the church of Saint Mary in Castro (which is just a fancy way of saying “Saint Mary in the Castle”) stood ironically a good bit away from the castle proper, next to the old lighthouse, affording Wendy and Nana very little opportunity to hide while dashing between the two. John had mustered the men there because reports from London indicated that the everlost had begun raiding supply houses, and the church was being used as a storage facility after having fallen into disrepair.
What the blood drinkers could possibly want with flour and sugar and salt and turnips was anyone’s guess, but they weren’t going to get England’s turnips without a fight, by heaven, or so the Home Office had boldly proclaimed. (They weren’t going to get England’s blood either, if anyone could help it, but that much seemed to go without saying.)
Blood drinkers. Wendy shuddered. She waited until she and Nana were utterly alone before racing across the grass, carefully skirting the graveyard—with another shudder for that—and trotting around the far corner of the church. Opposite the direction the men had gone, just to be on the safe side. She finally poked her head around the front and caught a glimpse of John and Michael and the rest, twelve of them in all, standing in a line, muskets at the ready, their eyes fixed on the storm-blackened skies.
Wendy felt oddly relieved to see them there, as though a part of her had been afraid they might be spirited away by magic in the dead of night without a trace. But even the everlost couldn’t do that, could they?
Wendy followed John’s gaze to see a strange sort of movement in the clouds, as though the storm itself were growing tendrils and dispatching them toward the earth, seeking fertile soil in which to take root. First one and then another and then yet another writhing funnel materialized in the air, until the thunderhead had produced more than a dozen twisting extensions full of dark gray mist, all plummeting toward the walls of Saint Mary.
“Demons!” a man shouted. Wendy thought this might have been Reginald, an exceptionally pious man from Yorkshire who had always been polite to her, but she could not be certain.
“Hold your ground!” That was John—she would know his voice anywhere—and his men did as he commanded, holding their ranks, their muskets tracing the progress of their enemies as they descended from the skies.
Between the darkness and the swirling mist, the rippling coils were almost impenetrable, but it seemed to Wendy as though there were a hint of a figure cloaked within each narrow vortex. More than a dozen men falling to earth like stones, their arms crossed blithely across their chests. But then, when they were no more than a hundred yards up, the twisters dissipated all at once, the mist flying suddenly away, as tremendous wings burst outward, extending from each man’s shoulders to catch his fall.
They slowed as one, pausing no more than fifty yards above the ground to hover impossibly in the air, and it was all Wendy could do not to gasp in wonder. They were men, young men to be sure, but men as truly as any she had ever seen, clad in an array of green and brown leathers, with swords dangling from their hips and wings extending from their backs.
“Fire!” John shouted, and the night exploded with a dozen gunshots. But not one of the flying men fell.
Wendy began to wonder if they were demons after all, even though their pinions were feathered like a hawk’s wings, rather than solid like a bat’s, and their faces appeared utterly human—nothing like any demons she had ever seen in all the texts of supernatural phenomena she had studied. The nearest of the creatures dropped twenty yards closer as the men on the ground struggled to reload, and Wendy finally got a clear look at him.
He was brown-haired and blue-eyed, and his features were the finest Wendy had ever seen. Like a statue, she thought, sculpted by the hands of angels. For a moment, she felt inexorably drawn to him, as a compass is drawn toward the north, and she had the strangest notion, quite without meaning to, that as long as he was near, she could never be lost, no matter where she might find herself.
But then he smiled. His teeth gleamed in the darkness, with canines that looked more like a wolf’s than a man’s, and his eyes possessed a hardness that shattered any illusion she might have been under. These were the everlost, and he was her enemy.
“You want to play?” he growled. “Excellent. Let’s play!”
With that, his brethren howled with glee, and the winged horde fell upon the humans before the men could fire another round.
Wendy almost expected the strange creatures to grow claws to match their teeth, but they drew their swords instead, some of them dropping to the earth and fighting on two legs, while others flew in and out of reach, striking from above. They swung at their adversaries with wild abandon, like swashbuckling pirates scattered improbably about the manicured lawn, but the Nineteenth Light Dragoons fought back with well-trained discipline, parrying and striking with purpose.
Without another thought, Wendy and Nana raced to join them.
In the heat of battle, no one was likely to notice one more person in the mix, but a dress was a different matter altogether. The Nineteenth Light Dragoons no longer existed, officially speaking, so they did not wear the proud red uniforms of the British army. Instead, they wore civilian clothing in various shades of blues and browns, their government-issued weapons the only common element among them. Not one of them, however, wore a chemise dress.
Fortunately, Wendy had considered this problem ahead of time. At the very edge of the battle, she sloughed off her riding coat, and then her dress as well, beneath which she wore a man’s dark blue breeches, brown leather boots, and a simple white shirt. Utterly certain that no one would recognize her now (expectations in 1790 being rather intractable r
egarding one’s attire), she threw herself into the fray, stabbing the nearest of the winged men in his side while Nana sank her teeth triumphantly into his ankle.
Wendy had expected, rather reasonably, that the creature would fall to his knees at the very least, having been mortally wounded. She was already withdrawing her weapon from his body when she realized, quite all of a sudden, that he wasn’t falling down at all. Instead, he allowed her to remove the sword from his flank and then twisted casually in her direction, raised his own weapon for a decapitating blow … and then halted mid-swing when he caught sight of her face.
It was the angel-wrought statue of brown hair and blue eyes, and Wendy would never be certain, for all the rest of her days, which of them was more surprised in that moment: she, to see him utterly nonchalant after having been skewered through the right lung, or he, to be staring into the eyes of a woman.
f the two, it was Wendy who recovered first, and she thrust her sword at the belly of the everlost, intending to gut him like a fish.
This time, however, he saw it coming.
In the blink of an eye, he flipped his saber upside down. Catching her blade with his own, he pushed hers off to the side with the metallic screech of steel sliding along steel and then leaped back, his wings bursting outward to catch the air in a rippling explosion of feathers.
He fell to earth lightly, landing easily on the balls of his feet, and began to circle her, watching her with interest, as though she were some sort of exotic creature, the likes of which he had never seen before.
He moved more like a panther than a man, Wendy thought. His reflexes in defending himself had been fast and fierce, but now he moved slowly, his steps graceful and calculated, his eyes fixed indelibly upon her, stalking his prey.
Nana, having fallen back when their initial attack failed, now rushed toward him again in earnest. But a dog’s teeth were no match for the sword of an everlost, and Wendy feared for her life.
“Off, Nana! Off!” she hissed, not wanting the men of the platoon to hear her voice and realize she had left the keep to join them in battle.
Wendy urged the animal behind her, very much against Nana’s better instincts, who did not like the idea of Wendy fighting without her. Not one bit. She backed up reluctantly, growling all the while, hoping for some opportunity to arise in which she might be permitted to rip out the man’s throat.
“What?” Wendy demanded, for the everlost was now staring at her with a mocking sort of smile that tugged at the left corner of his mouth.
“I find it interesting that you would order your guard dog not to protect you,” he replied. “It seems … counterintuitive. What’s the point of the dog then, I wonder?” (Which, as it happens, was precisely what Nana was thinking.)
He looked at her so smugly that Wendy was sorely tempted to tell him her plan—which was to wait until she had distracted him sufficiently and then order the dog to attack while his guard was down—but telling him so would have made the plan far less clever, of course.
She also wanted to tell him that she and Nana were both a proud part of the Nineteenth Light Dragoons of the British Home Office, thank you very much, and who was he to question their methods? But that was the trouble with impressive covert missions: you weren’t allowed to use them to impress anybody.
“Perhaps I promised her fresh meat for dinner, and she’s here to collect when I’m through with you,” Wendy shot back instead, which she regretted almost immediately, as it was rather a gruesome thought. But it only made his smile grow wider.
“Well, then. We’d best get to it, I suppose,” he said. “I wouldn’t want her to go hungry.” His face grew solemn when he said it, but Wendy had the feeling he was still only playacting, enjoying a private game of his own design to which no one else had been invited. She raised her sword before her, acknowledging her enemy with a nod, but her eyes never left his.
“Good form,” he said, nodding back, and all of a sudden he was grinning wickedly again, his canines obvious even in the dark.
With a thunderous clap, his wings disappeared from his back, and Wendy couldn’t help but gasp in surprise. The everlost pounced forward in the blink of an eye and touched the flat of his blade lightly to her left shoulder, moving back out of range as quickly as he had attacked, clearly toying with her.
“Never let your guard down,” he advised. “In battle, surprise is either your best friend or your worst enemy. You don’t want it to be the latter.”
Wendy’s eyes narrowed. You’re not the only one who can play games, she thought. Just keep thinking I’m a foolish little girl. It will be the last mistake you ever make.
Seeing that he was not trying to kill her, or at least not yet anyway, she slowed her attacks, careful to seem hesitant and even a bit clumsy, letting him believe in the untested woman he clearly expected. But all the while, she watched him, studying his moves. When she thrust like this, he would counter with a parry to the left. If she swung in just so, he would spin away to the right.
After all her painstaking hours of training—six years with Olaudah Equiano and another year with the men of the Fourteenth Platoon—mishandling her sword and trying to appear off-balance was more of a challenge than she would have thought. It even proved to be somewhat humiliating, much to Wendy’s annoyance. When she pretended to misstep to her right, overextending a thrust that sailed past his left side, he swatted her rump with the flat of his blade for her trouble and danced away gleefully.
Wendy merely gritted her teeth against the indecency and kept up the charade, biding her time.
“So tell me,” he asked, clearly enjoying the diversion, “when did the army finally decide to allow women to join its ranks?”
“Why would you think me a soldier?” she retorted, chopping clumsily at his left shoulder without any chance of actually hitting him.
“Forgive me,” he responded smoothly, dodging the blow and watching her stumble (or at least pretend to stumble) as her blade passed through the empty air. “I only assumed, due to your considerable skill. You have been highly trained, that much is obvious.” He said it with a straight face, but Wendy knew better.
Liar, she thought to herself. No British soldier worth their weight would ever fight this badly, male or female. Clearly, he was trying to flatter her, but to what end, she couldn’t guess.
“Perhaps I am but a lowly serving girl with a patriotic heart,” she replied, to which he laughed out loud.
“Perhaps. But I believe there is more to you than meets the eye, Miss …?” He bowed deeply in mock introduction, ducking beneath a poorly aimed thrust to his chest.
“If you wish to learn my name, you’ll have to earn it,” she replied, pretending to work harder than was truly necessary not to stumble into him.
“As you wish,” he said, reaching out his free hand to steady her, but she only glared at him for his trouble.
She pretended to be even weaker on the left than on the right, slowly moving their encounter away from the rest of the fray, all the while knowing she was doing her part just by keeping one of them occupied. But she couldn’t wait much longer. The false nature of her skirmish allowed her to see what the others could not, each of them too caught up in the deadly fight before him to grasp a sense of the battle as a whole.
The everlost were gaining the advantage.
They were faster and stronger than the human men; that much was clear. Even with their brazenly piratical style, using twice as much energy with every swing and thrust as the well-disciplined Nineteenth Light Dragoons, they exhibited the same level of enthusiasm now as they had from the beginning. They danced about the lawn and darted through the sky, hooting and shouting into the night like wild children, while the human men were beginning to falter.
Here and there across the field a voice rang out in pain when a man was wounded. The Fourteenth Platoon was already outnumbered. If the wounded began to fall, the tide would turn quickly. Whatever Wendy was going to do, she had to do it now.
&
nbsp; With a burst of determination, she fell upon her enemy with everything she had.
Her first deliberate thrust pierced the everlost through the left thigh all the way to the bone, and the shock that registered upon his face in that moment satisfied her more deeply than any other thing in all her days.
His surreptitiously mocking grin—whether he had intended it or not—had reflected a thousand equally condescending smiles, each of which had been inflicted upon her throughout all of her seventeen years for no better reason than that she belonged to “the weaker sex.” To see that grin wiped away by the work of her own hand was such a triumph as to feel almost intoxicating.
He winced in pain as she withdrew her weapon from his leg, but he barely evidenced so much as a limp once it was free of his body. Nonetheless, this time she was prepared, pressing her attack without hesitation.
She feinted at him twice, once toward the chest and once in a half-swing toward his left side. When he spun away from the latter, having realized by now that she was in earnest, he discovered too late that her sword was waiting for him. He came to a brutal halt at the end of the turn when her blade pierced his gut, cutting deep into his abdomen and slicing through several inches of entrails.
It was a blow that would have left a human man on the ground in agony, dying in a bloody pile of his own innards.
But what the everlost man did instead was this: He grimaced at the initial pain and then slowly grinned at her once again, his lips parting into a wicked smile as he gripped her blade with both hands and removed it forcefully from his belly.
Wendy shivered, and these words passed through her mind: the soulless, the undead, the everlost. They’re going to kill us all.
“I applaud you, my lady. I truly do,” he told her, each word piercing her heart, another nail in her coffin. “You are an excellent actress. Worthy of the royal stage, I dare say! It was my own folly to think you would join such a fight unprepared, and I have paid a worthy price for it. Surprise was my enemy, after all. But it is not quite so easy as that to kill my kind, I’m afraid.”
The Wendy Page 4