An even bigger crowd stuffed the pub, and it took me a moment to sort out the sounds and smells. The live music continued, this time with a different, louder band. Sunscreen and sweat predominated the smells along with the golden brown scents of an obscene amount of fried fish and potatoes. My stomach growled, and the man in front of me stepped aside with a startled, almost frightened expression.
“Sorry, mate,” I said. “Long day.”
He put his arm around a dark-haired woman, and pushed through the crowd away from me. The pub mirrors were too far away for me to check my reflection, but something felt…off. I pushed through the crowd to the bar, and as luck would have it, David sat there with a pint in front of him.
Chapter Nineteen
“Go on, then,” David said to the woman next to him. “My friend’s here. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I raised my eyebrows and watched her sashay off through the masses, which was impressive considering there wasn’t room enough between people to sashay.
“New friend?” I asked and slid onto her just-vacated stool.
“I couldn’t just wait here forever without company,” he told me with a wink.
Troy placed a pint of something dark in front of me. I gave him a skeptical look. “You know I don’t do stouts,” I told him.
“Try it. It’s a dark brown someone brought me from the States. Called Drafty Kilt.”
I sniffed it and took a sip—malty, yes, but with a nice sweet/bitter balance. “Okay, not bad.”
With a satisfied grunt, he walked to the other side to take someone’s order.
“Find her?” asked David. He spoke in a low voice so only I could hear him, and I had to really narrow my auditory focus to pick out his words.
“I did, and I got a few more answers, but not much. Also, did you know our Fey girl is the moon in one of Veronica’s Tarot decks?”
He coughed. “Doesn’t surprise me. Veronica gets most of her stuff from dreams, she told me. The silver one has been hanging around long enough it would be hard for her to avoid being spotted by someone like V. Where did you see the card?”
“At Selene’s.”
He smirked. “Ah, the old Tarot reading to get them into bed trick. Nicely played, lad.”
“What? No, nothing like that happened. Well, maybe a little something like that, but Selene’s virtue is intact, at least where I’m concerned.”
“A good woman needs to be cultivated.” He nodded at his beer, which he sipped more slowly than the previous night. “Like the ingredients for good ale.”
“Are you going to wax philosophical again? If so, I might go get in a run and meet you back here to pick up my car keys and clothes.”
“I have them in my vehicle. If you really need to run, come to my place. The grounds are secure. It’ll do you good.”
I put down my beer, which had tasted good until we started talking about running. Now I wanted refreshment of a different sort. David signaled to Troy that we were ready to pay, but the brawny bartender waved us off.
“The system that runs the till is down. I’ll get it from you lads next time.”
“That’s not good for them,” I said to David once we got outside the press of sound and bodies. I took my first full breath in what felt like ages. “No one carries cash anymore.”
“Hopefully the tourists do.”
I followed him in my car to his place, and he showed me to an upstairs bedroom to change. Although the sun had set, its reflection on the almost full moon carried its Solstice energy of light and hope tempered with the sense of the turning of the year and the days getting darker from here. Life and death, death and rebirth…
And through it all, we stand guard over those whose lives are shorter than ours, saving them from themselves and dangers they can’t even imagine. The Lycanthrope Creed, an ancient document only known to the Council members and which is read at the Winter Solstice meeting, hinted at such dangers. I supposed there might be a different piece of paper or parchment that full but not junior Council members had access to.
I trotted down the hall, my claws clicking on the wooden floors. David showed me how to get out through the kitchen and where to ring to come back in. He didn’t reveal his own private exit and entrance to the castle, and I hadn’t expected him to. Although we were becoming friendlier, we respected each other’s secrets.
“While you’re gallivanting about, I’ll go to my Archives and find those documents I mentioned to you.”
A breeze stirred the grass on the lawn and the leaves of the trees beyond into a beckoning whisper, and I followed it. A hint of chill rode the wind, promising that winter and snow and ice never lurked too far away in this part of the world. I wondered if Selene had ever had a white Christmas and if I could convince her to stay here in Scotland for the holidays.
Don’t be an idiot. The girl’s secrets make her dangerous, not cuddly. But she’d looked so sweet and confused after her shower, although her kiss hadn’t conveyed innocence. Her complexity, how she simultaneously asserted her independence but obviously needed help, intrigued me. I’d told her I cared for her, which was true. I feared I was falling beyond “caring” to something deeper, and it frightened me.
My head will be clearer after a run.
David’s property had once been a hunting estate, and the forest had remained mostly untouched. Spicy, earthy smells emerged from the ground as I ran over it, and large rocks radiated the heat of the day. Once I looked at their silver-edged shape, I noticed the boulders seemed of regular dimensions and appeared to have been laid out in a sort of line, although too few of them remained to tell what their purpose had originally been. An old Roman road, perhaps? A wall?
Intrigued, I followed them. Nocturnal creatures beckoned me to hunt them with their scurryings and squeaks followed by freezing or darting when I drew near, but the human part of me had found a mystery, and I wanted to solve at least one today.
The forest gave way to grass and shrubs, an old sheep pasture judging from the smell. David’s wards ended, but I was too intrigued to stop. The rocks continued their march across the landscape, soldiers frozen in time. Wisps of fog wreathed through the long grass and curled around the scrubby bushes, and the thick silence that accompanies power descended on the field.
I stood, ears swiveling to catch some sound, any little noise to indicate danger. The unnatural silence blanketed everything like thick snow, and moonlight made the fog glow, furthering the illusion of a winter field. The whiteness highlighted the dark stones, and I discerned a pattern to them. What had seemed random scattering now filled in as the remains of walls and corners, perhaps the decrepit ruins of a castle of some sort. Why the stone hadn’t been plundered for other things, I could only guess—the sense of foreboding and Stay Away they emanated. Who could put a spell that powerful on them that it would last even when the castle crumbled? The only wizard I’d heard of who was that powerful in the area had been Wolfsheim, but he was dead, wasn’t he?
The creature that had put the spell on Selene, the one that had confused her into pursuing me—and who’s to say that wasn’t the aim all along?—had been powerful. Only a few wizards could manipulate intention like that. How had she described him? Like a person, but more like a skeleton. And Wolfsheim had been the leader of the Order of the Silver Arrow. Perhaps he still was.
Now what few hairs hadn’t been standing up did, and I bared my teeth toward the center of the field—“Whoever or whatever you are, I will figure you out, and you will not take that girl away from me.”
A weak threat, to be sure, but I suspected he hadn’t been challenged in recent memory. A cloud covered the moon, the fog disappeared, and the noises of the night returned. Whether the illusion had been a warning or a revelation on this the shortest night of the year remained to be seen. Reine’s words popped into my head, and I promised myself I would return when I could stand on t
wo legs with my human judge of perspective and see if this could be the ruins of Wolfsheim’s castle. Reine had mentioned it had the same layout as the Institute, so I could use that as my guide.
I backed out of the field, turned, and loped through the forest back to David’s manor.
Once I had changed and showered, I met David in his dining room. He handed me a glass of Scotch.
“Trust me, you’ll need it,” he said.
David opened a small trunk that looked like it had spent some time underground judging from the dirt and damp stains on it. When he lifted the latch on the front, my ears felt stuffed and then cleared like they had when Reine had disappeared earlier.
“What was that?” I asked. “Did you just release some sort of spell?”
“Not something the Council Investigator needs to know.” He grinned at me over his shoulder. “In spite of commerce between wizards and lycanthropes being forbidden for hundreds of years, it might have happened a few times, probably more than the Council would be comfortable with. They sometimes needed our protection; we occasionally needed their spells.”
“You had to do something before security systems were invented, I suppose.” I looked around the room and smoothed the hairs that stood on the back of my neck. “There’s more than one in this house, isn’t there? That explains how your lands are warded.”
“There might be a general sort of compulsion ward to make sure no one but me wants to stay down in the dungeon looking through the Archives too long.”
“You have friends in low places.”
“And you’ve been to too many pubs where they play American music. Aha!” He pulled a folder from a stack of them.
“Is there something that keeps the documents from rotting?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s called acid-free storage folders. Try not to touch the pages too much when you read them.”
“Right.”
I reminded myself that David was over two hundred years older than I was and likely had more secrets than I would ever know. The knowledge made me happy he was on my side.
He had me wash my hands and put on cotton gloves before we opened the envelope. While I cleaned up, he placed a cloth over half his dining room table and, with gloves on, spread out the faded letters, some of which had obviously traveled quite a distance judging from the stains on them. Other splotches made me wonder if they’d been removed from corpses after battles, but I squashed that queasy train of thought.
“Where did you get these?” I felt compelled to speak in hushed tones out of respect for the history in front of me.
“Some were passed down to me. Some were given to me. The rest I hunted down or found.” He said the words like a prayer of gratitude. “Like this one.” He pointed to one on the bottom right of the table. “It’s from a soldier who died at Culloden. Not many of the lads could read or write, but this one had sailed abroad and had learned along the way. He sent it to the village priest with instruction to read it to his wife.”
The narrow black scrawls flowed into the wrinkles of the letter, and I could barely make out the words.
“He’s warning of a demon he saw in the night?” I asked after squinting at it for what felt like hours, making out the uneven lettering. Perhaps the soldier had been using a rock or some other non-flat surface as his makeshift desk.
“Yes.” David nodded at me like I was the student and had just said something clever. “Read what else it says.”
I got back to work and leaned in, but not so close I would damage the fragile paper with a stray breath. As I read, I translated the old, stilted phrasing into modern language. “Tell me if I’m getting this right. ‘When the demon appears, madness grips the men, and they lose the ability to think for themselves. I fear that should the Hanoverians not kill us, the demon will cause us to lose our minds. Hide yourselves, my dear ones. Darkness falls upon the land if man has commerce with such creatures, and all hope may already be lost.’”
“Very good.”
A chill breeze passed through the room, and the lights flickered. “Tell me you don’t have ghosts,” I said, but then a familiar shadow of a man in a helmet and a long jacket faded in against the fireplace. My jaw clenched. Of all the times for the stupid thing to appear!
“I don’t, but it appears you do,” David said. He backed toward the door, his eyes wide and face pale.
“As far as I can tell, he’s mostly harmless.”
“It’s the mostly that concerns me, lad.”
The ghost shadow lifted an arm such that the dark column of his sleeve grew across the floor, table, and letters until a finger pointed at one of the newer-looking ones.
“That one’s from your father,” David whispered. “Quick, read it.”
I didn’t want to take my eyes off the shadow, and I resisted the urge to back away toward David. “It looks like a fairytale. ‘Once upon a time two boys ran toward the woods to hunt wild boar. One stayed behind to guard the entrance to the path, and the other proceeded with much caution but with haste because he knew he would become the hunted in the blink of an eye and the wink of a tear. Once in the forest, he came upon a grotto with a beautiful waterfall…’”
The shadow lengthened to the last paragraph, so I skipped to it.
“‘Why do you hunt me?’ The boar king’s voice held the cries of the children he had eaten, and the boy trembled, his arms and legs tied to his body by fear and something else he could not name. The demon towered over the child and looked at him with flaming red eyes and gnashing pointed teeth that dripped with the black blood of those he had eaten.’” The words stopped there, and I picked up the paper to look on the back, but there was nothing.
I looked up at the shadow, and a childhood memory floated to the surface of us in our flat before the war started. I sat on his knee and smelled his pipe smoke in his sweater even though he wasn’t smoking at the time. Pipe smoke and wool, that was his smell, and after he’d died, I would go in the closet and lie down among his clothes because just smelling them would make me forget he was gone for a little while. But that night, I’d asked for a scary story, and he’d told it to me, and then again on the following night and every night after that. It seemed he felt it was as important for me to know it as it was for me to hear him tell it. He stopped after I developed nightmares of being chased and my mother scolded him that I wasn’t old enough for such dark tales.
I continued with the story. “So then the boy looks at the boar king and tells him that he doesn’t feel appetizing, and please could he just send the boy on his way? He would never eat pig again, not even a little slice of bacon. But the creature only laughs at him and tells him he doesn’t let his food go for free, he has to pay a price, and perhaps he would allow the king to eat his friend and his sister instead, two lives for one.”
It reminded me of Reine bargaining for Max’s life with his wife’s and daughter’s. Damn fairy folk.
“The boy, of course, refuses. The boar king tears him to pieces and finds him so delicious he vows to hunt the rest of his family down, but while he’s eating him, the friend sneaks up and beheads the boar king. His blood mingles with that of the slain boy and brings him back to life, and his family is happy to have him back even though he’s never the same again. Because—”
“You cannot be touched by the boar king whose name is Death and return to your family the way you were.” The ghostly voice filled the room.
“Simon?” David stood up straight from where he’d been leaning against the doorframe. “Simon McCord? Is that you, lad? I’d know that voice anywhere.”
Chapter Twenty
The shadow disappeared, and the letters scattered in a blast of chill wind. We gathered them back up without saying anything. The delicate process of moving the ancient paper only aggravated my already foul mood.
“Why not just tell me what they say? Why show them to me?” I asked once we
had them arranged again.
“Why not tell me the ghost was your father?” David countered.
“It’s not exactly a comfortable thing to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I think my father and your best friend is haunting me. He says hello and might pop by later.’”
David shook his head, but he smiled. “Words have power, Gabriel. You were named for the messenger archangel—that’s significant.”
I had always wondered. My name had always made me stand out among the Anguses and Ferguses and Charlies of my school. “What happened to my father, David? Was he torn apart by the boar king or the demon the Culloden soldier mentioned or some other kind of supernatural creature? My mother always told me a German shell had gotten him, and he hadn’t felt anything.”
“You’ve seen the pictures.” It wasn’t a question. He stacked the letters in preparation for putting them away. One caught my eye.
“Yes, I’ve seen the bloody, awful pictures of what was left of him. Stop—what is that one?”
He paused, and I picked up the paper by the corner and held it to the light. This one looked like it had been crumpled, thrown away, and then fished out of the dustbin. In penciled letters so faint as to almost fade into the wrinkles, I read a single word. “Wolfsheim? The vargamore who started the Order?”
“Yes, Wolfsheim. That one was retrieved during the first Great War from a street urchin who had lifted it off a gentleman I’d been following.”
“Who was the gentleman?”
“Someone I never had the fortune of knowing. He turned up dead. All these letters are pieces of a puzzle, and when put together, they show how the Order of the Silver Arrow never died but rather continued to play a part in the misunderstandings that occur between the human world and ours.”
“I heard the name ‘Wolfsheim’ again. Ah, right, from Reine.”
“Yes, she shows up every so often. Not sure how she fits in with all this, but she does seem to appear whenever the Order gets active.”
Blood's Shadow: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 3 Page 17