Wolf in Shadow-eARC

by John Lambshead

  Max’s eyes narrowed.

  “Is that true, Sefrina?” he asked quietly.

  Sefrina laughed, her voice tinkling as pleasantly as a tuning fork falling through a forest of icicles.

  “Perhaps, just a little,” she said. “Still, no harm done.”

  Rhian remembered struggling in the river, her panic as the water entered her mouth and her terror. Rage hit her like a thunderbolt and she snarled. All her life people like Sefrina had bullied and frightened her, but she wasn’t just meek little Rhian anymore.

  The wolf cleared the table without knocking over a single glass. Sefrina was fast, with reactions like a cheetah, but the wolf hit her before she had more than half risen from her seat. The vampire went over backwards, her chair splintering under their combined weight. The wolf rode Sefrina into the floor like a surfboard, ignoring the clawed hands digging at the iron-hard muscles in her shoulders.

  Sefrina opened her mouth wider than any human being could to extend fangs like a velociraptor, but the wolf clamped her jaws across the vampire’s throat. She bit, razor-sharp teeth sinking a few millimeters into Sefrina’s flesh, just tight enough to hold her, just loose enough to threaten without delivering instant death.

  The sucker froze, face expressionless. The wolf could smell her fear and exulted in her terror. How do you like it bitch? Rhian thought. How do you like being helpless in the face of a terrible death? Not laughing now, are you? She closed her jaws another millimeter and Sefrina’s eyes flickered.

  “We need her, Rhian, to program the phones,” Frankie said, her quiet voice filling the silence.

  Everyone was frozen into place like actors at the end of a soap episode.

  “Of course we do, Frankie,” Rhian said, turning her back contemptuously on the vampire, walking casually away on two legs.

  She leaned against the bar and smiled at Gary. He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Rhian liked the human gesture and patted his hand. Sefrina found a chair and sat down again at the table, massaging the punctures in her throat. She glared venomously at Rhian, eyes like bottomless pits of evil.

  Max moved too fast for Rhian the human to see. He had Sefrina by the hair, head down on the table, her face turned up.

  “I warned you to leave Snow White alone, that she belongs to me,” Max said. “If you ever do that again, I will destroy you, even if she doesn’t. Have I made myself clear?”

  “I belong to no one but myself,” Rhian said softly.

  No one heard, but that didn’t matter. It only mattered that she knew it to be true. Once she had belonged to someone else, but that was then. Now she was mistress of her life.

  “Yes, Max,” Sefrina said.

  “Good,” Max released her and turned his attention to Frankie. “She has the next phone ready. Time is not on our side, so if you are recovered . . .”

  He left the sentence unfinished.

  “Oh, super,” Frankie said. “I am charging a new outfit to you on expenses.”

  “Fair enough,” Max said, with a grin.

  He snapped his fingers and Sefrina retrieved her bag from under the table. Extracting a mobile, she tossed it over to Frankie with every sign of bad grace. Frankie turned it on to check it was working and a daemon’s face appeared on the screen. It opened its mouth to say something obnoxious but took one look at the expression on Frankie’s face and turned itself off.

  “The last one led us on a song and dance halfway across the city before we reached the deposition point. Couldn’t it take us into the Otherworld nearer the critical point?” Frankie asked.

  “Sefrina?” Max asked, looking at her carefully.

  “Not always possible,” Sefrina said, shaking her head. “It will guide you in as close as possible, but the entry point and the best surveillance position have different properties.”

  “Is that true?” Max asked, showing his teeth.

  “Yes,” Sefrina said sulkily, breaking eye contact first.

  Max rose from his chair. “We’ll eat together, Snow White, when you get back,” Max said.

  “My name’s Rhian, and we don’t eat the same things.”

  “Nevertheless.” Max bowed and left, taking his pet monster with him.

  Frankie also rose, albeit more gingerly than Max.

  “Why didn’t you destroy Sefrina?” Frankie asked Rhian. “Was it because of my warning that we still needed her help?”

  “Not really,” Rhian shook her head. “It’s not that she hadn’t asked for it, and it would have been so easy. Just one little snap, like biting the head off a jelly baby, but I’d have enjoyed it. That’s why I didn’t kill her, because I’d have enjoyed it.”

  Frankie hugged Rhian.

  “I am so pleased, so very pleased.”

  “I passed some sort of test, did I?” Rhian said, catching on.

  “Power can be corrosive, particularly when granted to someone who has never had it before. And you were such a little mouse when I first met you, Rhian,” Frankie said, somewhat elliptically.

  “If I had started killing because I could, for pleasure, would you have handed me to The Commission for elimination?”

  “No, I couldn’t bring myself to do that, not after what we’ve been through together,” Frankie said. “I’d have killed you myself, before taking my own life in atonement to try to balance the karma in my soul.”

  CHAPTER 25

  BLITZ

  The Sun was dipping when Rhian and Frankie set off to plant the second daemonic mobile. They motored up the Mile End road in queues of traffic heading out of the city. Past Bow Church, the phone guided them off the Bow Road to the northern approach of the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames. They left the main road before reaching the river by turning left into a dimly lit housing estate.

  Frankie turned on Mildred’s lights. The antique motor had barely adequate headlights at the best of times, but tonight they seemed as useful as an iPod in torch mode. Frankie peered through the windscreen, and it seemed to Rhian that they were driving through mist.

  She relayed directions to Frankie from the daemonic face on the mobile’s screen, ignoring the leers, suggestive remarks, and various lecherous noises. Sefrina had insisted that the lewdness was an unavoidable side effect, but Rhian was unconvinced.

  Mildred was never exactly a smooth runner at the best of times. Tonight her engine sounded increasingly rough as they drove further into the estate. Frankie slowed and changed down, leaning on the lever with all her weight to get the car in gear. She forced the cogs to mesh with a noise like an iron bar dragged across railings.

  “I never learnt to double declutch,” Frankie said. “Crash gearboxes were well before my time, although my grandmother talked about them.”

  Rhian wondered what the hell she was talking about. It came to Rhian that Mildred was strange, her proportions not quite right. Everything about the car was very vertical and boxy. She smelled of old leather and engine oil. When had that happened?

  The lights of the estate houses faded away, and they drove down a one-track lane with trees and bushes on each side. After two or three hundred meters, the lane ended abruptly at a canal. Rhian climbed out, noting that the door opened the wrong way with the hinges at the rear. Mildred’s rounded wings over the front tires had become independent mudguards, like you find on a bicycle. Although mist swirled around their feet, the sky was clear and starlight provided some light. You couldn’t normally see stars in the London sky.

  “Now what?” Frankie asked.

  The phone was uncharacteristically silent.

  “There’s a boat parked down there,” Rhian replied, pointing to the canal.

  “Docked,” Frankie said, automatically. “You park cars but dock boats.”

  “Whatever,” Rhian said.

  A footpath took them to a narrow boat alongside the towpath. The daemonic mobile was strangely subdued, like a small-town hoodlum who finally runs into the real thing after arriving in the big city.

  They stepped straight int
o the shadowy well at the rear of the barge. Rhian stumbled when the deck turned out to be further down than she anticipated. Frankie caught her.

  “Careful, honey, the counter is deeper than you think.”

  “Counter, right,” Rhian replied, not surprised that Frankie was familiar with the intimate anatomy of a canal narrow boat. That was just like the woman. No doubt she had lived on one at some time while going through a hippie phase.

  A dark figure in robes and cowl, like a cross between a monk and a hoody, stood silent and unmoving at the rear. He rested one hand on the tiller but stretched out the other arm, the sleeve falling back to reveal a gnarled hand, palm upraised.

  Frankie ransacked her bag. “I can’t find my purse. Have you got a silver coin?”

  Rhian checked. “Will a pound coin do? It’s shiny, albeit gold rather than silver.”

  “Fine!”

  Frankie took the coin and placed it in the gnarled hand without making flesh contact. The bony fingers closed slowly over the coin. Rhian tried to see the boatman’s face, but it was too deep within the cowl. The boat started to move away from the bank. It quickly picked up speed until it moved at what felt like a fast walk or jog-trot.

  What Rhian found spooky was the complete lack of engine noise, but she could hear a rhythmic clip-clop from the bow. She stuck her head out to have a look. A dapple grey carthorse walked along the towpath, pulling the barge. She was sure it had not been there when they boarded. How could you miss something the size of a carthorse? And shouldn’t there be a driver or rider or something? How did the horse know where they were going? Come to that, how did the boatman know where they were going? Nobody had given him directions, or spoken to him at all, come to that. Frankie and Rhian hadn’t even exchanged a word between themselves after the first whispered exchange about the coin.

  Rhian kept remembering a song about a ferryman. She tugged Frankie’s arm and whispered in her ear.

  “I thought you shouldn’t pay the ferryman before he gets you to the other side?”

  “That’s Chris de Burgh,” Frankie replied. “You paid Charon a coin in advance to ferry you over the River Styx.”

  “Where to?” Rhian asked.

  “The land of the dead. Charon was a psychopomp in Egyptian and Classical religions, you see.”

  Rhian didn’t see, but she had not been reassured by any of the answers that she had got so far, so she elected to stay in blissful ignorance. She could always look up Charon, River Styx, and psychopomp later on her phone, preferably over a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

  “We’re heading north,” Frankie said. “Back up the canal system to the Bow Road.”

  The narrow boat pulled into the bank and came to a halt so that the women could alight. The boatman turned his head to watch them leave. Rhian half expected the whine of electric motors or the sound of grinding stone, but there was nothing. The psych-whatsit didn’t even tell them to have a nice day. Rhian got the phone out and checked with the daemon, who seemed as pleased as her to be off the boat. It pointed down the towpath, where they found some steps up to the streets.

  The houses looked much the same as in modern London except that most of the rooms were in darkness. Others were dimly lit in red or yellow flickering lights. Street lamps were only found on corners, and they were dim. Only the edges of the street were paved, the road being hard-packed dirt. They passed very few people, mostly men in suits with beards and whiskers. The few women wore bonnets and high-waisted dresses that fell to just above the ankle. Rhian and Frankie were similarly garbed. Frankie even had a small folded parasol. They saw no vehicles but heard a motor passing nearby. The daemon guided them through side street after side street. Rhian wondered where they were but decided that the key issue was not “where” but “when.”

  “When are we?” Rhian asked, suppressing a giggle when she realized that she sounded like a Doctor Who assistant.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I suppose. This isn’t really my period. Why are you laughing?”

  “We must be careful not to fall and sprain an ankle,” Rhian said solemnly. “Overused plot devices for girlies, sprained ankles.”

  “Right,” Frankie replied, clearly wondering whether Rhian had all her circuits connected.

  Beams of light speared the sky, tracking backwards and forwards.

  “They look almost like lasers,” Rhian said. “Do you think there is a festival on tonight?”

  “I don’t think so,” Frankie replied. “I’d have said that they were searchlights but this can’t be the blitz. It can’t be 1940s London, so where in hell are we? I don’t like this, Rhian, come on.”

  Frankie increased speed from her usual comfortable ramble, occasionally darting a glance up at the night sky.

  They had no warning. The first blast was less than a hundred meters away. More exploded around them. A house at the end of the street disintegrated. The front façade and part of the roof fell into the garden. Somewhere a woman screamed, her voice full of terror. More explosions erupted further away. Rhian was covered in dust, and her ears sang as if she had spent all evening at a Quo concert.

  Frankie pulled her up and pointed at the sky. She was saying something, but Rhian’s ears were still singing. High up, the searchlights had converged on a silvery cigar-shaped object. Rhian had seen artists’ impressions of UFO motherships that looked similar. Her hearing began to recover and she caught Frankie’s words.

  “It’s a bloody zeppelin. We’re in the middle of the first blitz of London, in the Great War.”

  The thump of anti-aircraft cannon sounded, and a few seconds later, explosions racked the sky. The zeppelin sailed serenely on, as untroubled as a swan threatened by midges. Another batch of explosions far away indicated that it had dropped more bombs.

  Down a side road they found an antiaircraft gun mounted on an old-fashioned lorry with a square cab and mudguards over the wheels. The gun was short-barreled and fixed on top of a high iron pedestal. Four or five men worked it, passing up shells while a gunner aimed by squinting down the barrel. Rhian found it hard to believe that they could shoot down an airship with such a ridiculously primitive device.

  As it turned out, they couldn’t. The gun fired, creating a blast of hot air that made Rhian’s chest thump and her ears ache but had no effect on the zeppelin.

  “Look,” Frankie said, pointing at the sky.

  A stream of glowing balls bathed the rear of the zeppelin. They came from somewhere underneath the airship. Rhian couldn’t see anything, but a small plane must be attacking. Glowing sparks showed that the airship crew were returning fire, but the little fighter would be an impossible target in the dark. Another hose of fiery balls vanished into the zepplin’s rear until it began to glow red inside, like a Chinese lantern. Slowly it folded into a “V” shape and dropped. Naked flames spewed from the hull.

  Rhian wondered how many crew it carried, a dozen, two dozen. And she didn’t think they had parachutes in The Great War. But how many men, women, and children were in the bombed houses, and they weren’t even soldiers.

  “This is the place,” the phone daemon said. “Attach me to a wall.”

  A corner pub had taken a direct hit and imploded. Men were pulling at the wreckage looking for survivors, and someone was screaming that his grandpa was missing. They infiltrated the wreckage, pretending to be rescuers. Frankie slapped the mobile phone on a wall and it stuck, becoming just another gable. She muttered the activation spell.

  “What are you doing?” asked a voice.

  “She had a torch! She was signalling to the Hun, telling them where to drop their bombs.”

  “Spies! Babykillers! Get them!”

  The rescue party turned into a vengeful mob at the drop of an accusation.

  “Oh, Goddess. Leg it!” Frankie said.

  Their pursuers started at the far side of the ruin, giving Frankie and Rhian a head start. Frankie was not built for speed, especially in a r
idiculously long Great War dress. They could not shake off the hue and cry, and Frankie was soon exhausted. Rhian looked over her shoulder to find three men only meters behind. Their faces twisted in exertion and hate. One held a piece of broken floorboard like a club, another a razor.

  “Keep going, I’ll meet you at the boat,” Rhian said.

  Fortunately Frankie was too tired to argue, which would normally have been her first reaction. Rhian summoned the wolf and spun around. She gained momentum in three long strides and smashed through the men like a speeding car. She used her weight to bowl them over. Turning so fast her claws dug up the hard-packed dirt, she reengaged. The one with the club got to his feet, but she knocked him right back down. The razor man took a panic-stricken slash at her. She caught his wrist in her jaws. Exerting just a modicum of pressure, she swung him round until something cracked in his arm. His eyes turned up in his head and he dropped in a faint from the pain.

  The other two began to run back up the street and the wolf harried them, nipping at their heels like a sheepdog. The trio rounded a bend and ran straight into the main party of vigilante spy-catchers. The wolf snarled, bit, and shoulder-charged, creating chaos. Shots rang out and a man fell with a little cry. The wolf smelled gun smoke, so she ducked among the crowd for cover.

  There, on the other side of the street, a soldier, an officer by his peaked cap, stood holding a pistol like a target shooter. He aimed down the length of his arm. The wolf gathered her hind legs beneath her body, ready to explode out of cover and bring the soldier down before he could take an aimed shot.

  Rhian exerted all the willpower she had to check the wolf and persuade her to flee. This man is not our prey, she emoted, not our problem. He only seeks to protect his territory and his cubs. The wolf took off after Frankie, keeping the mass of people between her and the soldier as long as possible. She jinked from side to side to put him off his aim. A couple of shots followed her but whined harmlessly into the night. She lost the pursuers at the next junction.