The Secrets of Blood and Bone

by Rebecca Alexander

  “I can see.” He hesitated, and she undid her jeans herself. Her pants were torn and came down with the jeans, but being naked in front of Felix was surprisingly comfortable—she felt more at ease in his presence without clothes on than she’d expected. She eased her socks off with her jeans, wincing with the pain in her ribs as she leaned forward, and gratefully accepted Felix’s arm to climb over the side of the bath and under the hot water.

  There was shower gel, some coconut-scented concoction that she poured into her hand again and again, covering her hair, her face, every inch of her body. She rubbed and rinsed, even into the torn skin, until it stung. She was vaguely aware Felix had shut the door, but carried on until every part of her was scoured, every molecule of Powell was gone. Flashes of memories, his hands on her body, his knees forcing hers apart—had she even got away? She leaned her forehead against the cool tiles for a moment, straining for gaps in her memory. Yes. But he had got too close. For a moment she couldn’t believe how she had behaved with Powell, it was completely out of character. Insane. She groped for the tap and turned the shower off.

  When she turned, she realized Felix had never left, was standing there holding a towel with a strange expression on his face, one she had never seen before. She took the towel and wrapped it around herself, favoring a finger that felt like it was broken, suddenly shy. He reached his arms out, and without a word, lifted her over the side of the bath like a child, and set her on a fluffy bath mat. She stared up at him.

  “Did he rape you?”

  “No.”

  The exchange was quiet, matter-of-fact. “Do you trust me, Jack?”

  Her reply was instant. “Yes.”

  This time there was a small pause, as if he hadn’t expected the answer.

  She asked, hugging the towel, “Can I stay?”

  “Yes, stay. Get into bed before you freeze. I’ll get a T-shirt and pajama bottoms for you.”

  She patted herself mostly dry, pulled the T-shirt over her head and pulled the trousers on. Holding them up with one hand, she crawled under the duvet. She sighed, some of the tension finally draining away. The shivering returned.

  He turned off all the lights except the bedside one, and stripped to his underwear before getting in the other side of the bed. They reached for each other at the same time, her head on his shoulder, his arms around her.

  It was strange to feel the warm elasticity of his skin, the warmth melting her shivers away. She carefully rested her injured hand over his chest, feeling the novelty of the texture of his skin under her hand.

  “I went there—” she started, cleared her throat and started again. “I went there because—”

  “I know why you went there.” His voice was a soft rumble in the dark.

  “I was angry with you.”

  He sighed, his chest rising and falling under her hand. “You’re always angry at me.”

  “Because you—make me feel things.” She stretched out her legs, touching the roughness of the hair on his shin with her foot. “When I was taken by Maggie—I was so confused, so upset. I cried to go home every night for months, years, really. I don’t think Maggie had expected me to live so long. I think I sort of switched my feelings off.” She could feel the warmth of his skin creeping in, and the shivering dying away inside her. “How’s Sadie?”

  He shifted awkwardly, leaning away from her. “She’s asleep, but she seemed better when I left. So, you were obviously very distressed by being separated from your parents?”

  “I think I just closed down. Maggie was kind, but she was adamant that I could never go back. Then we took Sadie and I met you. Suddenly, I was full of emotion. Anger with Maggie and guilt at putting Sadie through it. And then I saw you. I never understood that idea, ‘chemistry,’ but I think that’s what they mean.”

  She idly ran her hand across his chest, and he captured it. “Stop.”

  “What?” For a moment she was confused, then it dawned on her that she was sharing his bed. “Oh.”

  “I have a grown woman that I’m attracted to in my bed, so…I’m a man, Jack. But you’ve just been beaten and almost raped.” His words had a tremor in them. She heard rather than saw his head turn toward her. “If he wasn’t already dead…”

  She settled against him, and felt him relax. “I went there to see the wolves. I didn’t ask to be smacked around and have him…” The recollection of what Powell had tried to do seemed unrelated to being in Felix’s arms. “I just want to wipe out the bad memories with you.”

  “That’s probably a terrible plan, psychologically. You’ve been traumatized.”

  “I feel alive,” she said, wondering at her own words. “I came close to being raped, and maybe even killed, and now I feel comforted and warm. And really alive.”

  He was quiet, his slow breathing the only sound for a long time. “You are euphoric now, because you survived. I felt like that after the night in the church.”

  “I don’t remember much about that. I traveled chained up in the boot of the car, remember?” She smiled in the dark.

  “That was later. I thought, in the church, that we were all going to die.” His voice was warm into her hair.

  Jack could conjure up that feeling too, standing facing the revenant Elizabeth Báthory, unable to stop her slashing a knife into Sadie’s arms so she could drink her blood. “But we got out, we won.”

  “Just. I still can’t believe Sadie pulled through.” His voice was sleepy now. “I was furious with you when you walked out this evening.”

  She let her thoughts stray into her fingers, sliding them over his chest, draping a leg over his to ease the pain in her hip. “What Powell tried to do, that was nothing to do with…us.” The unfamiliar word rolled off her tongue awkwardly and she smiled in the darkness.

  “Go to sleep.” His hand captured hers, and he held it. “Turn over, go to sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  Sleep was one thing, dreams were another. She woke up gasping for breath more than once, the sensation of her face pressed into gritty, cold mud overwhelming her, terror making her heart clatter in her chest. Felix, his body curved against her back, didn’t wake, but when she moved, his arms tightened around her waist. It was a strange feeling, as if somehow she had her family back. Was this what people did, when they traded parents for partners? She felt as if she were in a bubble of happiness, even though the clouds were gathering around her.

  —

  Dawn broke and with it came confusion, pain and embarrassment. The light bleeding she had noticed the day before had returned, seeping into Felix’s pajamas. She slipped out to the bathroom in the early morning, and was confused as to what to do. She screwed them up and put them on the bathroom floor, suddenly shy to step out in just the T-shirt. She sidled out, trying to be quiet as she looked for her clothes. Felix had stuffed them into a plastic bag, where she realized they probably needed to stay.

  “Good morning.” Felix was looking at her under hair flopped into his eyes and the beginnings of stubble on his face. “How are you feeling?”

  The internal audit, so far distracted by embarrassment, switched to the sensation her body was feeding back. “Well, I ache,” she offered. “I also don’t have anything to wear and—”

  “And what?” He stretched out under the bedclothes.

  “I might have a period, I think.” The last time she had had to talk about periods she was in year six and Talullah Jamieson told all her friends about hers. “I’ve never had one before.”

  He frowned but didn’t say anything, making her suddenly self-conscious.

  “Here, have my dressing gown,” he said. “I’ll get dressed and see what I can get you from the lobby.”

  He pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt and ran his hand through his hair. When the door shut behind him, she reached for her phone, left out by Felix on the bedside table.

  “Maggie?” She couldn’t believe she hadn’t phoned last night, but she was so shocked…

  “Jack!”
Even through the tinny speaker, she could hear Maggie’s relief. “I’ve been so worried.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’m at Felix’s hotel. I just couldn’t come back last night.”

  “What happened?”

  Jack tried to tell the story calmly, without emotion, but the second she mentioned Powell hitting her, tears bubbled up and thickened her voice. There was no mistaking the distress in Maggie’s response.

  “You must have been terrified. Anyone would be.” She sniffed, and said something in an aside. “That’s Sadie, she’s better today. We’re going to have to take it a bit easier with her. Are you coming home?”

  “When Felix is ready. I—I’m a bit stressed, that’s all. And I have a few bruises. Well, a lot of bruises,” she admitted. “I’m really sorry I didn’t call last night. I was just so upset—”

  “And you turned to Felix. I thought you had.” A long silence. “Do you know what you’re doing? With him?”

  “I have no idea.” Jack smiled down at the crumpled oval where he had slept. “But I feel fine. Well, I feel like I’ve been run over, but I’m OK. We’ll be back soon.” Her finger twinged and she looked down at it. It wasn’t obviously displaced but was swollen into a stiff, black sausage. She ended the call, and was just inspecting the finger when Felix came back in.

  He handed her something in a packet that gave explicit instructions. “This would work better if I had underwear,” she mused, and he passed her a second package, containing three pairs of new—if rather large—pants and a new toothbrush.

  She gathered them up and went into the bathroom to get changed. Felix was six inches taller so she couldn’t reasonably wear his clothes, but she tried anyway. “They only have to get me to the car,” she said, as he grinned at her.

  “You look about twelve,” he said. “I told the landlady you’d been knocked over. I couldn’t see anything on the news downstairs.”

  “News?”

  “About Powell. You said the wolves got him. Are you sure he was dead?”

  “I think so.” She sorted through the items in his holdall, pulling out a jumper. “I called the castle to let them know.” She felt strange about just leaving him, but a flash of memory of his weight on her helped her shrug it off.

  “Jack—how did you feel last night, before he attacked you?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know. Reckless, partly, nervous as well.”

  “I’m just worried. You seem like two people at the moment.”

  She nearly snapped something defensive at him, then stopped to think about it. “I do feel strange sometimes, like I’m the old Jack one minute then the new Jack the next. I just put it down to the extra energy.”

  “Maybe that’s all it is.” He smiled but he didn’t look convinced.

  Chapter 30

  I went from England to find new customs and new knowledge, and indeed, my travels led to more ideas than I can record in my journals. Not all was easy to learn, and now there are some memories that still leave me shaking in my bed at night, so that I sleep on moondark nights with a lantern, and the door locked and barricaded.

  —EDWARD KELLEY, 1586, Venice

  Word came at dusk that after an early dinner we were to be treated to a night hunt by moonlight. I found this very peculiar but the company, brought inside by the chill of the clear air outside, seemed unsurprised. After a light meal of almond pastries and roasted fowls of all kinds, we ascended to our chambers to prepare for the hunt.

  I was dressed in a well-fitting suit of browns and blacks, and given a close cap for my head that also hooded my face. I wondered what chase takes place at night, yet could hear in other chambers and in the halls the excited chatter of the other hunters. I asked a servant about spurs, but he shrugged as if he did not understand. I resolved to ask the groom in the stable, for I knew I could not ride in my soft boots without them. When a chamberlain came in and indicated he should black my face with some concoction, I stood still, thinking we would perhaps stalk some prey in the moonlight. Somewhere, a wit raised his voice in a howl like an animal, and other voices joined, followed by laughter. High spirits, indeed. I glanced at the mirror, to see myself a dark figure, well disguised. I was escorted to the hall by the servant, where I saw the gathered hunters.

  There was not another black coat in sight. The hunters were dressed in simple robes of reds and greens.

  “Ah, Master Kelley!” Lord Contarini stepped forward, his form clothed entirely in scarlet and holding a glass. “Drink, make merry for a moment with us.”

  “My lord?” I sipped the cordial, but it was bitter and I could not drink it.

  He bent to address me alone. “It goes better if you drink it. It is a blend of certain herbs that help make the pain less and the forest more beautiful.”

  My lips were numb where they had touched the potion, and I shook my head. “Pain?”

  He smiled, and a servant took the glass from my hand. “My dear Kelley. You haven’t guessed, have you?”

  It was as if a wall came tumbling in my mind, and I realized this was a game I had not foreseen.

  “I am the prey?” I asked, swallowing hard, for my mouth was suddenly dry. “You think to hunt me like an animal?”

  “It is the finest sport, Master Kelley.”

  “What sport, sir, with you on horseback and myself on foot?” I stammered, seeing the looks on the faces of the hunters around me.

  “No horses, my friend. Just you on your two feet, and us on…ours.”

  The tablet’s confusing pictures flashed into my head. “You are—skin-turners.” My mouth filled with bile and my chest tightened.

  “No, no. Such is myth.”

  A growling and whining from an antechamber made him turn, and myself to stumble a few steps away from him, from his insane beliefs. Two servants held a creature—no, a man—though his face was contorted into a mask of teeth and red tongue, as he twisted at the end of sticks that had nooses about them. At first I thought his skin blackened like mine own, but I recognized his features as the moor Enrico, his face suffused with the blood of madness, his lips frothed about and his hands reaching like talons.

  “This is the man infused with the beast’s nature. Its strength, its power.”

  Enrico writhed in their captivity, diving at one of his captors then the next. His eyes stared at me without recognition. Here was my scholarly friend, transmuted by some vile alchemy into a mindless fiend.

  “This is the ritual your master Lord Dannick seeks,” Contarini said, his tone cool. “I shall regret your death, but you know too much. You have divined the ritual, and we cannot help you form a stronger pack in England. Let their puny cubs wither and die.”

  He turned to the crowd, addressing them in Latin, even as they leaned in to stroke the transformed Enrico, whose entire focus seemed to be upon me.

  “Fresh blood!” the count roared, raising his hands. Their voices fell, except the grunts and snarls of the tormented Enrico, fighting his confinement. “This man is the prey,” Contarini waved at me, as I backed toward the great doors to the villa. “Let him run, let Enrico hunt and fell him. Do not feed before Enrico, no matter how hungry you may become. I have a few orphan children to hunt later; you shall all have a chance to kill.” He turned to me, smiling, showing all his teeth. “You have until the moon is directly overhead. The farther you get, the better the hunt. And the longer you shall have hope of escape.”

  He may have said more, but I was out of the door like a rabbit before a fox.

  Chapter 31

  PRESENT DAY: BEE COTTAGE, LAKE DISTRICT

  The elders watch the clearing of the strangling ivy and bramble, the fleeing of the rats and beetles. As the raven cries its captivity and the rooks answer. And still the fragrant flesh yields from the bones, the body claimed by the earth.

  Felix was clearing the garden under Maggie’s instructions. From the caws and croaks coming from the back bedroom, Jack had her hands full with the half-wild bird. He wondered abou
t her reaction to the attack from Powell. She seemed strangely cheerful around Sadie, and brushed off Maggie’s attempts to comfort her.

  The reek from this part of the garden, going into the densest brambles, was foul. He slashed at the base of some thorns with shears. The blades clinked against something hard, and he pulled away the tangle of branches. He kicked the long grass and hit something solid. Kneeling down in the spring sunshine, he wiped the sweat off his forehead and tugged at the new growth of greenery.

  A wave of stench hit him at the same time as his mind processed long sticks, shreds of clothing—and the heavy boots he was seeing. He stumbled to his feet, and managed to shout for Maggie before nausea overwhelmed him.

  She stomped through the long grass and the stumps of the brambles. “Oh—is that—oh, God. Jack! Come here!”

  The decayed body of what looked like a man lay twisted on the ground, reduced largely to black flesh and brown bones. Maybe a dozen brambles as thick as Felix’s thumb had pierced the body, growing like spears through the abdomen, and threading between ribs. One had forced its way under the man’s chin to erupt out of his mouth. New growth dipped into the hollows of the skull, and explored the bones and clothing.

  Maggie prodded the body with the rake she was carrying. The man’s jacket, although frayed, still covered both upper arms and draped away from the chest. “There’s something in the pocket,” she said.

  “Leave it for the police.” He gagged again.

  “We’re not involving the police.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked back at the house, to see Jack looking from the window. He waved for her to come down.

  “Well, they will want to know what we’re all doing here. Jack looks like she’s been in a fight, then there’s the mysterious death at the wolf compound.” Maggie leaned on her spade, keen eyes looking at him from under white hair. “I’m surprised they haven’t been here already. It’s better if we don’t draw attention to ourselves. Especially Jack and Sadie.”