They listened, but couldn’t hear any sound from outside. Best to give it a few minutes, they decided.
“So how did this Crystal Room make them change into their true form?” Peter wondered.
“I guess the crystal somehow captures and retains the moonlight. Forces the human to change into a wolf.”
“Ludmilla said the room made monsters show their true form, or something,” Peter agreed. “Maybe that’s how the stones in the circle were used.”
“Moonlight on the wolf,” Carys said. “So a werewolf brought into this chamber in human form would be forced to change, to reveal it’s true nature. Unless it was powerful enough to resist somehow.”
“Then the count killed them with his crystal sword.”
“The silver is the key,” Carys said.
“You mean like silver bullets?”
“Silver is a magical defence,” Carys told him. She was glad to be on a subject she knew at least something about. “It has healing properties too, you know.”
“Yeah, I read about that somewhere. Do you think it’s safe to head back and see if the minibus is there yet?” Peter wondered. “We should be okay, if it’s just those guards looking for us. You think they know we found the body?”
“I don’t see how they could.” But another thought had occurred to her – one she didn’t like. “We were on the list of visitors. What if Einzel or someone recognised our names? I mean – you recognised him, after all.”
“It would explain why Einzel bothered to talk to a bunch of tourists. He was checking us out. But in that case, we can’t risk rejoining the tour. Everyone will be hunting for us.”
“They’ll be expecting us to head back to the main entrance,” Carys pointed out. “Maybe we can find another way out, and get back to the station.”
“This place is huge, we’ll be lost in no time,” Peter said.
“Let’s just keep going in a straight line until we get to an outside wall, then find a door.” She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt, but she couldn’t see another option. “How hard can it be?”
It was late and the building was almost deserted. There was no sign of the security guards. With luck they were hunting elsewhere. The whole place was quiet, but that just made them even more cautious, creeping along deserted corridors, holding their breath. All the time expecting a wolf to snarl out of the next doorway, or drop from the ceiling above them…
Soon they found themselves in the newer part at the back of the palace that had been updated by Einzel Industries. The whole interior style changed. They moved from panelled walls and marble floors to functional paintwork and industrial carpet. There was a clinical feel and smell to the place.
Carys wondered who had ever thought it would be cost-effective to adapt the old palace to become hi-tech laboratories and sterile facilities. But there was something else here that Einzel wanted – the circle and the Crystal Room – what little was left of them.
“We must be close to the back of the palace by now,” Peter said quietly.
Carys hoped he was right. Her nerves were stretched so tight she felt she might snap at any moment and scream the place down.
There was a noise from nearby – someone coughed. Carys looked back, but the corridor behind them was empty.
Now there were voices, someone laughing. It came from ahead of them.
“Quick – in here!” Peter hissed, heading for the nearest door.
He pulled it open, and they darted inside.
The voices were still audible, though muffled. Whoever it was had stopped outside the door.
“They might come in here,” Carys whispered. “We need to move.”
They were in a reception area, with a raised desk beside another door. Through the next door was a much larger room. It looked like a hospital ward. Carys just stared.
“Oh my God,” Peter breathed.
There were half a dozen metal-framed beds. Bags of dark fluid fed down plastic tubes to the wrists of the patients – if they were patients. Electronic heart monitors traced peaked lines across screens. More screens noted temperatures and other data.
“Is this… blood?” Carys wondered, nervously touching one of the plastic tubes. She felt sick, wanted to get away as fast as she could.
“We should keep moving,” Peter said.
The next room was almost identical. “How many of them are there?” Carys wondered. All the “patients” seemed young – no older than she was. Male and female.
“I don’t think Einzel is just experimenting on wolves,” Peter said.
Carys couldn’t help but remember reading the description in the journal of the experiments at Schloss Wolfenburg. Her grandfather had taken several pages after describing their escape on the submarine to explain what the Nazis were doing. Men into werewolves…. Genetic experiments of a horrific nature – all those years ago… She looked down at the young man lying in the nearest bed. He looked so peaceful.
“That woman…” she said slowly.
“Said they’d taken her son.” Peter finished the thought for her. “We can’t know if he’s in here, though.”
“We don’t know anything for certain,” Carys had to agree. “Maybe this is just some clinical trial. For a new drug or whatever.” She didn’t believe it for a moment, but was it possible?
“Yeah, right.” Peter gently lifted the unconscious boy’s hand, angling it so Carys could see his forearm. So she could see the perfect square grafted onto the skin. A grey-brown patch of fur, like a wolf’s.
A door banged shut in the distance.
“Come on,” Carys urged. “We don’t want to get caught. And certainly not here!”
Peter hesitated, still holding the sleeping boy’s hand. Maybe he was thinking about Annabelle Forrest. Again. What was it about the girl that had got to him so badly? Carys gently lifted the boy’s hand from Peter’s grasp and let it flop back onto the bed.
“We can’t help him now. We have to get away if we’re to put a stop to this.”
If they had any lingering doubt that what they had seen was to do with the experiments, what they found in the next room dispelled it.
The figures in the beds were humanoid wolves.
Carys stared in horror at the nearest. Its hirsute face was incongruous against the starched white pillow. Saliva dribbled from the jutting snout. As she watched, the creature’s eyes snapped open, and it stared up at her. She jumped back. The wolf tried to sit up, snarling angrily. But it was strapped down with thick plastic bands across its arms and legs and chest. It strained desperately against them.
“Let’s get out of here.”
But they only got as far as the last bed.
The figure that lay there was not a wolf hybrid. It was human – a boy of about their age. Tubes connected to the back of one hand, feeding into a system of valves and more tubes that ran to the beds where the wolves were strapped down. The other hand was wrapped in a blood-stained bandage.
“Oh my God,” Carys breathed.
The boy on the bed was David Forrest.
“What’s he doing here?” Peter said, aghast.
“Never mind that – we have to help him!” She didn’t know what she was doing, but she pulled out all the tubes she could see.
David’s eyes snapped open and he stared up at them in disbelief. “What the hell?” He sounded weak and confused.
“It’s all right. We’ll get you out of here. But we have to hurry, there are guards looking for us.”
Carys was more careful with the tube into the back of David’s hand. He winced as she pulled it out.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“You tell us!” Peter said.
But before David could say anything, the figure on the next bed let out a howl. It was a mournful sound. More a cry of pain and distress than of anger, Carys thought.
The wolf was struggling to sit up. It stared at Carys, its eyes boring into hers. She stared back, transfixed, surprised at how human
it seemed. Was there something still there, some vestige of the person the creature had once been? It tilted its head, and a tear spilled from one of the eyes and caught in the fur of its cheek. Then it slumped back on the bed.
“You help David,” Carys said to Peter.
“What are you doing? Are you mad?”
Maybe she was. But she couldn’t just let these creatures lie here, strapped down while Einzel’s scientists did God knows what to them.
“Leave them,” David said weakly. “They’re just animals.”
She rounded on him, surprised by her own anger. “They’re not animals. They’re just like you would have been. You want to get away from here? Fine – so do they.”
“They’ll kill you!”
She hesitated, looking again into the creature’s eyes. They were wide with fear, but also just the faintest trace of something else. Hope.
“No,” she said. “But they might kill whoever did this.”
She fumbled with the straps, feeling under the edge of the bed for a buckle, found it, and snapped it open. The single buckle released all the straps, and the creature threw them off, rising up with a roar.
It stood facing Carys – much taller than she was. It could kill her with a single blow. But instead, it gave a grunt and a nod, and lumbered away to the next bed. It didn’t bother looking for the buckle, but ripped at the straps with its claws, shredding them.
David sat on the edge of his bed, watching – pale and weak.
“Please, just leave them,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Peter hurried to help Carys as she moved to another bed.
“You’re right,” he said. “And maybe we’re in time. Maybe they can change back. We might be giving them a chance.”
Carys wiped her eyes. “That’s more than Grandad ever had.”
Some of the creatures were so weak they couldn’t move even with the straps undone. Others roared and howled, pacing the room. Carys could feel their pent-up anger and fear. She was not surprised when the first of the creatures – the one she had freed – smashed its huge hairy fist into the monitoring equipment beside its bed. The screen exploded in a shower of sparks.
In moments, the others were smashing everything in sight.
“Can you manage?” Carys asked, hurrying back to David.
She helped him up from the bed, and David swayed unsteadily on his feet. He was shaking with emotion – fear and anger. “We have to stop them!”
“You kidding?” Peter said. “Even if we could, why should we? They’ll trash the place. Put an end to all this.”
He was having to shout to be heard. Carys flinched as an explosion behind them sent more equipment flying. Liquid from drips and broken bottles pooled on the floor.
“We have to leave,” she shouted.
There were sudden cries from the next room – a rattle of gunfire, then a scream. Glass smashing, and then the flickering light of flames cast shadows of the creatures across the walls.
They ran, Peter and Carys supporting David as best they could. Whether by luck or good judgement, they managed to find a way through the maze of rooms back to the main corridor. Peter led them on in the direction they’d been going before. David shook off their help and ran with them. His face was slick with sweat, but he seemed to be recovering.
A group of armed guards ran towards them. Carys braced herself, ready to fight for her life.
But the guards ran right past – heading for the sounds of destruction coming from behind them.
More guards raced towards them.
Peter called out, “He’s hurt – they got him! What’s the quickest way out?”
If they didn’t speak English, they understood what he was asking. One of the guards paused long enough to point down a side corridor.
Here, they soon found a fire exit. Without pausing, Carys crashed through the exit door and out into the cool of the night. A klaxon sounded behind them – an alarm triggered by opening the door. But it was swallowed up by the mayhem inside. An explosion, then more gunfire. Flames licked out of a window further along the building…
“Keep running,” Peter shouted.
“Where to?” Carys demanded. “They won’t let us get away now. They’ll be watching the station!”
“Just keep running.”
“He’s right,” David said. “Maybe we should give ourselves up. Do a deal with Einzel.”
“Is that what you did?” Carys said. Was that why he was here? “If so, look how it turned out.”
“We’d end up in that laboratory,” Peter agreed. “If they ever manage to put it back together again.”
“They won’t,” Carys said. The place was trashed – it had to be. And the fire was taking hold. Soon Einzel would be looking for a new headquarters. “But if they catch us, they’ll kill us.” She was surprised how casually she said it. She was elated now, not frightened. If just one of the creatures they had freed got away from here and returned to human form when the effects of the experiments wore off, then it was worth the journey.
“So what are we going to do?” David said.
“Find another way out of here,” Carys told him.
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know.”
“There is one way we could get away without being found,” Peter said. “Just so long as we’re not too late.”
She was too breathless to ask what he meant. They stumbled onwards, away from the burning palace. An inhuman roar split the air, and Carys looked back over her shoulder.
She saw a huge, misshapen form struggling out from one of the palace windows. Wreathed in smoke, backlit by flames, it stumbled forward, head back, roaring at the sky. At first, the figure seemed to be a huge, upright wolf, but then he assumed the shape and size of a teenage boy. For a moment, perhaps, he was human.
Then smoke drifted across, blotting out Carys’s view.
“You have to be joking,” Carys said. “We don’t even know exactly where it’s heading.”
“Poland,” David told them. “They ship consignments to Einzel’s subsidiaries there… But Carys is right – this is crazy.”
“You got a better suggestion?” Peter asked. “Any suggestion at all?”
They lay on the cold, hard ground watching as the last crates were loaded onto the train. The engine was wreathed in steam. Men were running along the length of the train. One of them checked a clipboard at each wagon while others climbed inside. There was an urgency to it all – prompted, Peter guessed, by events at the palace. The fire cast a red glow over the landscape, and the air tasted of smoke. Sirens wailed in the distance, but getting closer. A helicopter almost deafened them as it flew low overhead.
“Searching for us, do you think?” Carys asked.
“Getting the hell out,” Peter said. “I think that’s Einzel’s helicopter.”
As soon as the men were out of sight, Peter, Carys and David ran for the nearest wagon.
The door slid open easily, and they hauled themselves inside. Peter heaved the door closed behind them, praying no one had heard. Moonlight filtered in-between the wooden boards that made the sides and roof. A door at each end gave access to the adjacent wagons. The air was heavy with a rank, feral smell that cloyed at the back of the throat. It was so intense that Peter almost opened the door again.
“We’ll get used to it,” Carys said. “I hope. Once we’re moving we can open the door and let the smell out.”
“They probably transport cattle or something in here,” David said.
“Not cattle at the moment,” Carys said.
The cargo was packed in wooden crates. They were stacked several deep, but there was still plenty of room to move around. It was too dark to make out details of the crates or read what was printed on the sides.
“Pharmaceuticals, probably,” David said.
Moments later, there was a clanking jolt and the train began to move.
“We were just in time,” Carys said. “Too late to change
our minds now.”
Peter hauled open the door again, grateful for the cold breeze on his face. He gulped it in, then slumped down on the hard wooden floor beside the others, exhausted.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” David Forrest asked. “I mean – I’m grateful, obviously.”
“Never mind that, how did you get here?” Carys asked.
“I came to see Einzel. God I was stupid. I had no idea how much danger I was in.”
“So why would you think he could help you?” Peter asked. “He’s the Old One, isn’t he?”
David looked up sharply. “You know about the Old One?”
“I was at the Wolfstone Circle when he arrived in that helicopter. When they… well, when they did whatever they did to your sister.”
“That’s why I came,” David said grimly. “I thought maybe Einzel could help me – could help Annabelle. Instead…”
Carys was looking intently at David, her eyes narrowed. “We know your father is a du Bois,” she said. “And we know what that means. So tell us about the wolves.”
David gave an exhausted sigh that could have been from frustration or relief. “When I was five years old, my father killed the thing he loved most in the world. That was when I first found out about the wolves.
“The full moon had passed, but we were still on the cusp. He thought he could control it, just like his father had. Just as, until that night, he had controlled it. I don’t know what happened, what went wrong. Maybe he lost concentration for a moment. But he changed – right in front of me and Annabelle, he changed.
“Mother knew about the wolf in him. She must have known the risk. But by then she felt she was safe, and that we were safe too.
“She was wrong. So when I was five years old, I watched my father change into a wolf. I watched him tear my mother to pieces as she stood between us and him. And Annabelle and I watched him change back, and see what he had done.
“From that moment, I think, he decided that controlling the wolf was not enough. He had to destroy it. He could have killed himself, and maybe he tried. But that wouldn’t save Annabelle and me. That was what he really craved – a cure that he could pass on to his children, just like he passed on the curse that afflicts us.
The Wolfstone Curse Page 16