“We do?”
“Yes. We have to promise we won’t let each other kill him, whoever he is.”
“Okay. But what if we both want to kill him?”
As one, they turned to Richard, whose mouth dropped open. He held his hands up. “Hey, if you turn murderous, who am I to stop you? I don’t agree with violence, you know that, but I’m not about to put myself between two werewolves and a man who… well, a man who has done something unforgiveable.”
Matthew raised his eyebrows. He couldn’t argue with his friend’s words. “You got them tranquiliser guns handy?”
The vicar nodded. “I can get them.”
“Do it. Soon as we go in there, go and get a couple. Make sure they’re loaded. Give one to someone you trust. Keep the other one. Just in case. We can’t take any risks. The last thing we need is Isaac and me getting into trouble. It would kind of defeat the object of what we’ve done here, wouldn’t it?”
Another nod. “Yes. I don’t want to see you boys in trouble. Okay, ready?” He pulled in a shaky breath.
Matthew shook his head. “We’ll never be ready, Richard. Just open the bloody door.”
The vicar did just that, then walked quickly into the building without looking at or talking to anyone. He seemed to be going somewhere specific—to get the guns, probably.
It was only when he stepped over the threshold, cast his eyes over the assembled group, then saw the person tied to a chair in their midst that he realised his mistake. He needed a tranquiliser gun trained on him now.
The only thing that stopped him from crossing the room and ripping the bastard’s head off was his brother. As he still stood in the doorway, Isaac hadn’t yet entered the church and laid eyes on the man who had betrayed them so badly.
Matthew spun on his heel and shoved his brother backwards, almost putting him on his arse. “Don’t come in.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?” Isaac quickly regained his footing and attempted to push past Matthew and into the church.
“Seriously, brother, don’t. You do not want to know who’s in there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I want to know. I need to fucking know! How the hell would you keep it from me even if I didn’t go in there? Every person in that room knows. You gonna ask them to keep it a secret? Lock me in the house while the police take him away and hope I don’t figure out who’s missing from the village? Hope that people don’t gossip?” He growled. “Get out of my way, Matthew. You can’t protect me forever.”
Isaac forged onwards, resisting Matthew’s attempts to grab him, and walked into the church. Matthew watched, helpless and horror-struck as his brother’s gaze took the same journey his own had, alighting milliseconds later on the person who had been trying to destroy them.
Matthew stepped forward, having no idea what to say, what to do. He just needed to be near Isaac, ready to react to whatever happened next. Standing close behind him, he waited. There was a silence that seemed to stretch on for days. Isaac stared at their enemy, at the man who had masterminded a plot to expose them by slaughtering sheep on a full moon for the last few months, skilfully hiding evidence—or not leaving any—and going about his daily business in the village. Going to work, eating and drinking in the pub, visiting the shops.
Having a relationship with Isaac.
Richard stepped out of the vestry with two tranquiliser guns, then hurried to the assembled group and handed one to Alexander Kennedy. Each man cocked his weapon and aimed at a brother, fingers hovering over the triggers, ready to pull them if necessary.
The action startled Isaac out of his daze. He looked over his shoulder at Matthew, and the expression Matthew saw on his brother’s face was like nothing he’d ever laid eyes on before. It looked almost alien. His eyes were full of pain, betrayal, disbelief. Moisture gathered in the corners.
In that moment, Matthew wanted nothing more than to act on his instincts. To walk up to Nathaniel and rip his pretty head off his shoulders. Or even better, to torture him first. Pull his fingernails out, chop his fingers off, his ears, his tongue. Feed them to him. Dark thoughts raced through his mind at a rate of knots and every muscle in his body was so tense it hurt.
He felt sick. Anger, betrayal. He’d thought the fucking man was his friend. But that, of course, paled completely in comparison with what Isaac must be feeling. Isaac and Nathaniel were a couple, for fuck’s sake. They were in love!
Matthew looked from Nathaniel to his brother and back again. The silence in the room was deathly. Nobody broke it. Not so much as a sniff. He stayed on guard, ready for anything. Ready for his brother to scream, to shout, to roar, to rush his boyfriend and do God knew what.
He wouldn’t want to stop him if he wanted to murder Nathaniel, but he would, if only to protect him. If anyone was going to prison, it was Matthew. He’d looked after his little brother for over four hundred years and he wasn’t about to quit now. Not for a lying, deceitful scumbag who had betrayed them so deeply that even his heightened intelligence couldn’t get a handle on it.
Chapter Thirty-four
Isaac took a single step forward, his fists clenched, his entire body tense. Matthew followed, but his brother didn’t move again. Not for a minute; two.
When the explosion came, it was immense. Isaac streaked across the room at what felt like the speed of light, even to Matthew. His arms outstretched, fingers curved into claws, Isaac lunged at Nathaniel, tears pouring down his cheeks.
Matthew leapt and grabbed his brother around the waist, tackling him to the stone floor just before he managed to get his hands around Nathaniel’s throat. Isaac fought like a demon, kicking and punching and shoving, uncaring of where his blows landed or how hard they were. Matthew rolled with every punch, continuing to strive for control.
The humans surrounding Nathaniel had sensibly stepped away, knowing they could do nothing to stop Isaac, nothing to help. They probably didn’t want to either, knowing what Nathaniel had done.
After several minutes of rolling around on the floor, scrabbling for the upper hand, Matthew finally achieved it. His slightly larger physique and extra weight had given him the advantage. That and his unwavering determination that his brother was not going to prison. Not for that piece of shit.
As he pinned his brother to the floor, Matthew cast around for something to say. There were truly no words he could speak that would make the situation any better. Finally, he just opened his mouth and let something, anything, tumble out.
“Brother, please. I know it’s impossible, but try to calm down. I want to fuck him up so badly he’ll wish he was dead, then fuck him up some more. But we can’t do that. We’ll go to prison and he’ll have won. He’ll get what he wanted all along. Plus, if we make a move on him, those two men over there, our friends, will shoot us with tranquiliser darts. And that will achieve nothing.”
“It’ll make me feel better,” Isaac spat, wriggling furiously, shooting a look so hate-filled at Nathaniel that Matthew was surprised he didn’t burst into flames.
The weird thing was, Nathaniel recoiled. He didn’t seem afraid, strangely, but he did appear hurt by the look his lover had aimed at him. It made no sense—but then nor did any of this. Questions crowded into Matthew’s mind, questions he knew would be filling his brother’s brain, too.
Ceasing his struggle, Isaac strained his neck to look up at Nathaniel, then stayed perfectly still. He opened his mouth and a single word came out, so choked with agony, with emotion, that Matthew felt as though someone had driven a knife into his back and twisted it.
“Why?”
Something hot and wet rolled down Matthew’s cheek, his chin, gravity pulling it through the air and onto the back of Isaac’s shirt. Realising what it was, Matthew ignored the hate-filled tears, letting them fall as he continued to hold his brother in place.
Nathaniel’s expression remained hurt, confused even. But he didn’t speak.
“Tell me why!” Isaac’s roar filled the church, hi
s anguish bouncing off every tile, every brick, every pew. “I trusted you. Cared about you. I fucking loved you!” The last sentence was more of a sob than words, but its meaning was clear.
Matthew gulped, swallowing down his own emotion, hatred instead seeping from his pores, heat building up in every cell until he felt as though he would be incinerated by it. He’d been angry in the past—hell, he was the angriest man he knew—but he’d never felt anything like this before. White-hot rage was barely contained inside him, and it wouldn’t take much more for him to lose that control. The tears dried up.
“Tell him! Tell him now, or so help me God…”
Finally, Nathaniel reacted, but not in a way anyone could have anticipated. He laughed, a cold, humourless chuckle that pushed Matthew even closer to the edge, so close he was teetering.
“God? God can’t fucking help you!” he spat, his gaze moving from Isaac to Matthew. What Matthew saw there now, in that face he’d grown so fond of for making his brother deliriously happy, was hatred. Pure, unadulterated hatred. “You’re a fucking abomination. You’re not even human, for Christ’s sake. You’re an animal. A freak.”
Suddenly, Isaac seemed to deflate beneath him, like a balloon losing air. Every ounce of tension went from his muscles, and Matthew quickly recognised it for what it was. Defeat. Isaac couldn’t see a way to work this out, to understand it, cope with it, and so he was giving in to his emotions. Sure enough, the form that had grown so pliant, so malleable beneath him, started to shudder and shake, racked with sobs that grew more powerful with every passing second.
“Come on now, Nathaniel,” Matthew said, his voice oddly calm. He had no idea where the control was coming from, but as long as he could hold on to it, and his brother, until the scumbag was taken away, then everything would be all right. Eventually. “You can do better than that, surely? You’re a bright guy—you must have a more compelling reason for this than hatred. Than bigotry. And how do you even know about us? We deserve to know.”
A smirk flirted with the corners of Nathaniel’s lips. “I suppose you do. Well, here it is in a nutshell. About a year ago, my grandmother died, and I was the one who ended up taking care of everything—her funeral, the sale of her house, clearing out her belongings. I was up in her attic when I came across a box of stuff that looked ancient. Seriously fucking old. Naturally, I started looking through it. What I found, some of it was just stuff, but the rest… well, it was the mother lode. A bunch of diaries that sounded like the writer was a lunatic. Completely off his rocker. Only the more I read, the more I realised he wasn’t. Over four hundred years ago, my ancestor lived and worked in Eyam.”
Isaac made a strangled sound. Matthew gripped his brother tighter, but didn’t speak.
“Some of the entries were uneventful, about daily life, his home, his family. He was a learned man, an accomplished man, as I’m sure you’ve already worked out. But then he began to write the strangest things. About a couple of villagers who disappeared up onto the moor every full moon, changed into wolves, and roamed until the moon set. The morning after, they’d come back into the village and carry on with their lives. My ancestor seemed oddly okay with this, seeming to accept it as a matter of course, which I found out later was because he’d always known about it, ever since he was a child. It was a village secret that was passed down through generations.
“These werewolves, as they were called, were the guardians of the village. Everyone feared the change, but knew as long as they kept away from the moor on full moons, everything would be okay. The wolves would protect the village, the livestock, from other predators. They were heroes. My ancestor accepted this. Everyone did. But then something changed.”
The fire in Matthew’s body turned to ice. He knew what was coming next and, in spite of his still-shuddering body, he suspected Isaac did, too.
“People started getting ill. Weird blue-black boils covered their bodies, pus-infected, disgusting. They suffered great agony, then they died. Just a few people at first, then more. It was an epidemic and it was spreading. There was panic. People didn’t know what to do. They feared for their lives, feared that God was somehow punishing them for their sins. Those God-fearing folk, fools that they were, truly believed this plague was the work of a celestial being. But my ancestor knew better. He investigated, asked questions—the right questions—and discovered the disease had come into the village at around the same time that a couple of villagers had returned from a trip to London.”
Matthew lost control of his body. He slumped to one side and fell hard onto the unforgiving surface, barely noticing the pain that sliced through him as he landed. Vaguely, he was aware that Isaac hadn’t moved either. The fight had left them both, seeped into the floor and away into nothing.
People had thought that he, he and his brother, had been responsible for the outbreak of the plague. It couldn’t be.
Nathaniel continued, seemingly unaware of Matthew and Isaac’s reactions. “Two villagers who had walked amongst a vicious outbreak of the disease and had not succumbed to it. Instead, they carried it on their persons and delivered it upon an unsuspecting village, full of people who loved them. A brutal death sentence for so many. And what did they do? Were they sorry? No. They clubbed together with that… that vicar and forced everyone to resign themselves to their fate, to stay inside the boundaries of the village and wait to die, watching their friends and relatives do the same. Sure, they tended the sick, they buried the dead, they cared, they helped. But what else could they do when they knew they were responsible? That they’d sentenced Eyam to die?”
Matthew watched as if from afar as his brother got his feet underneath him and stumbled upright. He pushed his hair out of his face, wiped the tears and snot away, then advanced on Nathaniel.
“Hey,” Alex said from across the room, “watch yourself.”
Isaac shot the tooled-up men a glance. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna touch him. You,” he said, leaning down and putting his face inches from Nathaniel’s, “are unhinged. Totally fucking insane. I don’t know who your ancestor was and I don’t fucking care. I just hope he was one of the ones to die. I hope I buried him in an unmarked grave. Clearly, he’d already reproduced, which is why you are here. More’s the pity. He was crazy, and it obviously runs in the family.”
Matthew watched as his brother pushed a finger into the centre of Nathaniel’s chest. He crawled forward, willing his limbs to cooperate. He needed to be closer, to do something, anything, to help his brother. To ease his pain.
“I don’t know where your mental fucking relative got that bullshit story from. Yes, Matthew and I had been to London, both of us on business. But it was only when we got to the edges of the city that we realised how bad the situation was, and we weren’t allowed in anyway. So we turned around and came back. We didn’t come into contact with anyone who had been in London. So tell me, how the hell could we have carried the Black Death into Eyam? And do you seriously think we could have lived with ourselves for over four hundred years if we had? I’d have happily given my life for any one of those villagers, and would have found a way to kill myself had I been responsible for their fate. But I wasn’t, and nor was my brother. It was a terrible, catastrophic thing that happened, and it haunts me every single day. But it was just a freak of nature, an accident. Nobody was responsible for it.”
Nathaniel’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “You would say that, wouldn’t you?”
“No!” Isaac roared, gripping Nathaniel’s shoulders and shaking him like a rag doll. No one moved to intervene. “I wouldn’t! There’s nothing you can say here that can make this right. What happened four centuries ago has no bearing on what you’ve done, other than some thin motive you’ve concocted. You’ve broken the law, you’ve butchered, you’ve tried to frame us, you’ve betrayed us. And now you’re trying to make out that this is somehow all our fault? You’re not even on this fucking planet, are you?”
Nathaniel tried to speak, but Isaac wouldn’t allow it. “D
on’t,” he snapped. “Just don’t. There’s nothing you can do, nothing you can say to quantify or excuse your behaviour, so keep your mouth shut before I ram my fist down your throat. And even that’s too good for you. Tell me,” he continued coldly, “did you cook all of this up from the beginning? That fucking tattoo? Moving to Eyam, befriending me and my brother? Seducing me, making me fall in love with you? Toying with me, stringing me along, just so you could force the knife that much deeper then give it a damn good twist?”
Nathaniel shook his head. “N-no. Well, yes, sort of. I moved to Eyam to get my revenge on you two for what you did. I got the tattoo after finding the diaries, as I started planning what I was going to do. That was all. I never intended to befriend you and I certainly never intended to fall in love with you, Isaac. That was something that just… happened. I couldn’t help it, but I also couldn’t deviate from my plan.”
Isaac let out a maniacal laugh. “You never intended to fall in love with me? What the hell are you talking about? You don’t love me—didn’t love me! How in God’s name can you be in love with someone and also try to frame them for something they didn’t do, try to bring their entire lives crashing down around them, completely destroying them? Tell me, how is that possible?”
Nathaniel shrugged. Matthew watched as Isaac’s hands curled into fists. He stood up and edged closer.
“I don’t know,” Nathaniel said. “It just is. I loved you. I still do, and want to be with you for the rest of my life, but I did what had to be done and I wouldn’t change any of it. I’m sorry I lied to you, but I’m not sorry I did it. You both need to be punished.”
Isaac spun around and took two paces away from Nathaniel, shaking his head. “You’re mentally ill. It’s the only explanation. You have a problem. It’s not jail you should be going to, but a medical facility. Out of respect for what we had, I’ll make sure you go to the best place to care for you. But I won’t visit, and I’ll never, ever forgive you. Ever.”
The Persecution of the Wolves Page 26