Wolf in Shadow-eARC

by John Lambshead

  Cold rain lashed Rhian’s face, falling from a dark and overcast sky. She was human again, but she was dressed. Her clothes were wet but otherwise unharmed. There was no pain, no real pain, that is. Her left arm hurt but that was nothing compared to the usual agony of transformation.

  Rhian looked around in bewilderment. Lightning lit up her surroundings, and she saw she was back on the building site. Thunder crashed immediately after the flash, and she smelt ozone. The storm must be right overhead. The air was alive with static charge, causing fine hairs on her arms to ripple.

  “Come on,” Frankie said.

  Rhian jumped. The woman was right behind her, clutching the cardboard box, which was already bedraggled and starting to collapse.

  “Come on.”

  Frankie grabbed Rhian’s arm, the wrong one. Rhian gave a little cry.

  “So the wolf was actually you and not an avatar,” Frankie. “We need to talk, but not here.”

  They raced back to the car, Frankie tossing her box into the back. She was intercepted by one of the workers as she slid behind the old-fashioned oversized steering wheel.

  “Wise-lady, it’s fixed? The duch is gone?”

  “It will be,” Frankie replied. “Tomorrow, the ghost will be gone tomorrow.”

  The Pole nodded, crossing himself in the Catholic tradition.

  Frankie’s ancient car mercifully started first time. They drove in silence for some time until Rhian spoke.

  “Where were we exactly and how did we get there?”

  “That was the Otherworld. As to how we got there, I suspect it was my fault. I accidentally triggered a gate, but I don’t understand why it took that form. If I’m right about the source, then the Otherworld should have looked like some version of nineteenth-century London. Do you have an explanation?” Frankie asked.

  She darted a quick look at Rhian.

  “I’ve seen it before,” Rhian admitted, “in my dreams of Roman and Celtic warriors.”

  “I see. I suppose that was the Otherworld shadow of the Thames Estuary in Roman Britain. Celtic warriors suggest the time of the conquest in the first century ad,” Frankie said. “And are you a wolf in your dreams, Rhian?”

  “Sometimes,” Rhian said. “And sometimes a Celtic Queen who turns into a wolf.”

  “How do you know she’s Celtic?” Frankie asked.

  “Because she speaks Welsh,” Rhian said, simply.

  “Of course,” Frankie said, softly to herself. “The Queen is Celtic and speaks Welsh, just like you, Rhian.”

  “English is my first language,” Rhian said, defensively. “We spoke Welsh at school.”

  “And have you turned into a wolf before?” Frankie asked.

  Rhian had been expecting, and dreading, the question. She decided to tell the truth, or so much of it that was relevant. She was so tired of running and hiding, and surely Frankie would understand. The woman was a bloody witch, after all.

  “Yes,” Rhian said, tightly.

  “In the real world?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Why did the monster call you sister?” Rhian asked, more to fill the gap in the conversation than because she cared about the answer.

  “Witches often call each other sister,” Frankie replied. “The monster was a poltergeist, but a rather special one. Did you know some poltergeists can take over human beings?”

  “Really?” Rhian replied.

  “Really!” Frankie said. “There is a rather nasty type called a litesch. A witch can extend her life way beyond the normal span by stealing bodies. The magic suppresses the victim’s spirit and overlays it with the witch’s. It’s like reprograming the chip on a credit card with a new identity, so I’m told.”

  “That’s . . .” Rhian said

  “Bloody wicked, yes, but all professions have their black sheep.”

  The Morris car jerked. Frankie let the revs fall too low while climbing a ramp onto a flyover. She changed down into third far too late and lost more speed until that gear was also too high. She finally got it into second with a grinding screech of protest from the gearbox. A crash of metal from behind added to the cacophony. Rhian twisted her head to see. A white van was welded to the back of a hatchback that must have braked sharply on the wet road to avoid hitting the Morris. Frankie drove on, oblivious of the carnage.

  “Of course the new body also dies, and the witch has to take over another. Each time, it gets a little more difficult as the witch’s spirit weakens with each transfer. It’s a bit like making photocopies of photocopies with the quality decaying every time.

  “So spirits are analog, not digital,” Rhian said.

  “What?” Frankie asked, turning around to look at Rhian. Mildred drifted towards the crash barrier.

  “Nothing,” Rhian replied, gripping her seat belt.

  Frankie turned back in time to correct the drift before they hit.

  “Eventually the transfer fails and the witch is trapped in a decaying corpse.”

  “There was nothing weak about that lightswitch,” Rhian said, struggling over the unfamiliar word.

  “Litesch,” Frankie said. “But you’re right. Something is very wrong in East London. Magic is getting stronger and the Otherworld is intruding.”

  The women sat in silence.

  “How long have you been able to turn into a wolf?” Frankie asked.

  “Not long,” Rhian replied.

  “Could you do it before you came to East London?”

  “Yes,” Rhian replied.

  “That scotches one theory. Your—issues—can’t be connected to current events,” Frankie said, carefully choosing her words. “Come on, honey, open up. I don’t know what questions to ask. You are not a witch and you would have set off all sorts of alarms at my flat if you were a werewolf. Why don’t you just tell me your story?”

  Rhian’s head was awhirl. Where to start? The brooch was the start.

  She pulled out her pendant.

  “You see this?”

  Frankie took one hand off the thin spoked steering wheel of the Morris and leaned over to look. The car drifted towards the right hand side of the road until a blare of horn from an oncoming car alerted Frankie and she swerved back into the correct lane.

  “That looks like a Celtic brooch. Is it real?” Frankie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You got it in Wales?”

  Rhian shook her head.

  “West London. I found it on an archaeological site near the Thames. Something made me conceal it. I suppose you could say that I stole it. James put it on a chain for me to wear as a pendant.”

  “James is the boyfriend who left you.”

  “Yes,” Rhian said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Sorry, honey, I started asking questions again, and you don’t like questions. Why don’t you just tell me in your own words?”

  “James left me because he’s dead and I was responsible for his death.” Tears welled up.

  “There’s a box of tissues in the glove compartment,” Frankie said, gently.

  Rhian dried her eyes and blew her nose.

  “A speculator wanted to build on the location. He bribed the archaeologist in charge of the preconstruction check to downplay evidence of ancient artifacts. James and I were part of a protest group occupying the site. We did the night shift on our own, and the speculator sent in a gang of thugs to burn us out. James would have run if I hadn’t been there, but I was, and he tried to protect me. After they killed him, they hit me. My blood splashed on the brooch. I remember it glittering in the moonlight.”

  Rhian stopped.

  “I begin to see,” Frankie said. “Is the brooch dedicated to Morgana?”

  Rhian nodded.

  “The Celtic goddess of the Moon and of shapeshifters,” Frankie said, mostly to herself. “Your blood, your Welsh Celtic blood, and moonlight together on the brooch. And you were in a state of high emotion. You transformed into a wolf, rig
ht?”

  Rhian nodded again.

  “And the wolf attacked the thugs?” Frankie asked.

  “Ripped them to pieces. The police thought they had been attacked by a pack of feral dogs,” Rhian said, unemotionally. “I had the power to protect James but all I did was stand there and watch him die.”

  “Not your fault, Rhian. How were you to know? And it would have created complications for you if you had deliberately used the wolf—magic—as a weapon to kill. But it was all an accident, and intent is everything in magic.”

  There was a pause.

  “What aren’t you telling me, honey?” Frankie finally asked.

  “The property speculator,” Rhian replied. “He, um, died.”

  “I see,” Frankie said, quietly. “You used the wolf.”

  Rhian remembered. She stood naked in the car park in the moonlight. The speculator called her a mad bitch. She cut herself and let the blood drip on Morgana’s brooch. He ran for his car, but who can outrun a wolf? She pushed down the thought.

  “So my soul is stained, I suppose,” Rhian said.

  “Something like that,” Frankie said, vaguely.

  “Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfil, an ye harm none do what ye will,” Rhian said.

  “I see you’ve been reading my books,” Frankie said. “Doreen Valiente, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” Rhian said.

  “Don’t worry about it, Rhian. The Wiccan Rede is less a rule than a set of guidelines.”

  “And you’ve been watching Johnny Depp,” Rhian accused.

  “He is rather cute,” Frankie cooed.

  Rhian opened her mouth but Frankie talked over her.

  “It does make it more difficult to cure your problem,” Frankie said. “You bonded with the wolf spirit with that killing. I would guess that you do not need blood or moonlight, or even the pendant to transform now.”

  “No, I wear the pendant to remember James, but the wolf is always with me.”

  “I am amazed that you weren’t ripped apart, or stuck as a wolf. Body transformation in the real world is tricky, especially if you’ve no control over the magic.”

  “It hurts like hell,” Rhian admitted.

  “Does that Celtic warrior queen you dream about have a name?” Frankie asked.

  “Her warriors call her Buddug,” Rhian replied.

  It was dark by the time they reached Tower Hamlets Cemetery because they had to go via Frankie’s lockup to pick up some things. She was being mysterious and refused to answer Rhian’s questions. She parked Mildred illegally on a double yellow line.

  “You’ll get clamped,” Rhian said.

  “No, I won’t,” Frankie said.

  She pulled a card out of the door pocket on the driver’s side and put it on the dashboard.

  “Some sort of magic device?” Rhian asked.

  “Of the most powerful type,” Frankie replied. “It’s a Disabled Driver Parking Permit, letting me park anywhere. I sort of forgot to return it when I left The Commission.”

  “Your employer forged disabled parking permits?” Rhian asked, feeling a little shocked.

  “That was the least of their sins,” Frankie replied with a snort.

  Frankie walked swiftly into the cemetery. She flicked an electric torch from tree to tree until she found one that suited. Taking a knife shaped like a small dagger, she cut down the end of a branch.

  “Yew, the witching tree,” Frankie said, answering Rhian’s unspoken question.

  She brushed aside all further questions from Rhian, saying nothing until she stopped at a gravestone. Rhian noticed it was aligned at right angles to the other graves. Frankie indicated that Rhian should keep back.

  “So, sister, the vicar who buried you had good reason to fear you leaving your grave,” Frankie said, pulling boxes and her little paraffin stove out of a rucksack.

  She placed the stove on the grave and lit it. Rhian noticed that she was careful not to touch the grave itself.

  “I probably woke you when I touched your gravestone. I created a link between us that you could use. I wonder what happened on that building site to make that the contact point. Was that where you took your last body before the transfer failed? I don’t suppose you will satisfy my curiosity, and it probably doesn’t matter. Maybe it was simply that the wall was thin there.”

  “The corpse thing was Ethel the witch?” Rhian asked.

  “Oh yes,” Frankie replied. “Who else could it be?”

  “But she’s dead now, surely? The wolf killed her.”

  “The wolf—you—stopped her taking over my body, but you can’t kill a spirit. You can, however, banish her from the world.”

  Rhian shut up and let Frankie get on with it. Her understanding of reality was undergoing another transformation. Witches, spirits, spells, the Otherworld, all seemed utterly unreal but she had seen them all. And she was possessed, never forget the wolf.

  “It must have been a shock when the transfer failed and you found yourself in a rotting corpse, Ethel,” Frankie said, conversationally, as she worked. “Must have driven you quite out of your mind. Not that a litesch is exactly sane in the first place. It was always going to happen eventually. You must have known that?”

  Frankie sprinkled herbal mixes into the stove. They burnt with a hiss, sparking and popping with sharp cracks. Vapor rolled off, not like smoke but more like a mist, spilling and pooling around the grave.

  “The magic flowing around London brought you back and I woke you. That makes you my responsibility, my problem. There are enough black marks on my soul without adding to them by leaving you awake.”

  Frankie raised her arms and chanted in a language Rhian did not recognise. She added more herbs to the stove, all the time talking to the grave.

  “You found a hole and tried to possess the Polish worker’s body. Still didn’t work, did it? He was able to kill himself, just to keep you out. You must have despaired, but then I arrived. You already had a link to me, and I started an exorcism spell that let you yank me right into the Otherworld. There you could draw on unlimited power to make the transition into my body. You did not expect Rhian, though, did you, sister? Got more than you bargained for, hmmm?”

  Frankie began to chant again. Her face looked daemonic, red light from the stove under her casting shadows in all the wrong places. The air was still with the static charge that Rhian was beginning to associate with magic. The mist swirled around the grave, illuminated by the flickering red flames. It spun faster and faster and began to rise into the air in a column not unlike a twister.

  “So there you are, sister,” Frankie said. “Nice of you to join us.”

  Rhian had expected the acrid wet-bonfire smell of burning herbs, but the vapor smelt more like a decaying corpse. The stench thickened until Rhian had to fight down the urge to gag. Frankie gripped the yew branch.

  “Combustio frigus,” she shouted.

  The yew branch caught fire, burning with strong green flames. Frankie thrust it into the column of mist. The grave writhed.

  “Abire,” Frankie shouted, “abire.”

  The branch fizzed and crackled, lighting the mist in green. There was a hollow scream that faded up into the night sky, and the column collapsed. A cloud occluded the Moon and the green flames died. The gravestone shattered in a sharp explosion, into shards that exploded in their turn. And so on until there was nothing but gravel and dust. Rhian held her hands in front of her face to protect her eyes.

  Gravestones split and fell around them in a ripple that spread out in a circle from the grave. Deep in the bushes, a mausoleum collapsed in on itself.

  Eventually there was silence.

  “Whoops,” Frankie said.

  The next morning Rhian took a bus ride up to the Tesco Express to get in the shopping. They were out of bread, milk, and almost everything required for a civilized life. Frankie would be in a foul mood all day if she missed breakfast. The woman had been still asleep when Rhian let herself quietly out of their flat.<
br />
  The spells had exhausted Frankie, so the trip home from the cemetery in Mildred had been even scarier than usual. Magic seemed to drain the woman of something vital, and yesterday she had cast some amazing spells. Rhian smiled to herself. It took something very special these days for her to class it as amazing.

  She walked around the supermarket, selecting items. It was surreal but calming to be occupied in so ordinary a task in a mundane world. She bypassed the queues for the tills by going to the autocheckouts. Putting her basket on the balance, she tapped the touch-sensitive screen to activate the barcode reader.

  The first item worked all right, and she dropped it in the plastic carrier bag that measured the weight transfer. The computerized till beeped to itself in a self-satisfied sort of way as it ran up the sale. However, the second item took a few goes before the reader acknowledged its existence, despite Rhian turning her purchase at different angles. When she tried to put the third item through, the machine went into a sulk. A sales assistant responded to the computers frantic complaints by putting her security key in the slot to shut it up.

  “I need to verify your age if you want to buy alcohol,” said the assistant.

  “I am trying to buy milk,” Rhian said, showing the assistant the plastic container.

  “It says alcohol here,” the assistant said, pointing to the screen.

  “It’s milk,” Rhian said firmly.

  The assistant peered at it and in her carrier bag, reluctant to believe that the holy of holies, the computer, could be in error. She punched a few keys on the touch-sensitive screen to reset the system and passed the milk through herself. It registered perfectly.

  “You must have done something wrong,” the assistant said, accusingly. “I will watch while you put the next item through.”

  Rhian gritted her teeth and put the next item over the barcode reader. It beeped, paused, and all hell broke out. The screen flickered, flashing through menu options faster and faster while emitting a string of noises like a toy robot. Rhian stepped back in alarm when she saw a thin trickle of smoke curl out of the back. There was a loud bang and all the automatic tills shut down, followed by the manned checkouts and lights.