Master Wolf

by Joanna Chambers

  Bainbridge gave a short laugh. “Prepare yourself, Niven. You’re about to see this creature’s true form.”

  Pushing her head forward, Bainbridge drew out a key and undid a mechanism at the back of the branks, then lifted the rear band, which was on a lever. The bottom band loosened first, then the whole contraption sagged, listing to one side, the metal plate over Alys’s mouth sliding down to reveal a livid red welt of the same rectangular shape. The tongue plate stayed where it was though, and Alys made a distressed sound—she seemed to be trying to spit out the plate without success.

  “Come now,” Bainbridge said, inserting his fingers into her mouth. “You know you can’t do that with your tongue all burned away. Let me pull it out.”

  Drew retched then, unable to conceal his horror any longer, but Bainbridge didn’t seem notice, or perhaps he just didn’t care. He was too busy working the tongue plate out of Alys’s mouth while she drooled blood and gagged and made heartbreakingly inhuman noises with her ruined mouth.

  Then Bainbridge began the business of pulling the branks off her head roughly. It was a tight fit on her—it must have been made to measure—and the metal was stuck in places to the welts and sores the silver had made, but he tugged it free without any care for Alys’s comfort. And perhaps that was the best way because the instant Bainbridge lifted it off her—just as he had said would happen—she began to transform, slumping to her hands and knees, spine arching as her body began to crack and remake itself. Watching her, Drew realised that in her weakness, Alys’s change would be slow and painful.

  “It is changing now,” Bainbridge said, his voice ripe with satisfaction. He pointed at her sobbing, twitching body. “You will see it in the limbs first. Look, here in the forearm.”

  Drew became aware of a new and subtly powerful scent in the cellar. Alys’s scent. It was complex and unfamiliar and he felt a familiar desire to pull it into his lungs and hold it there, to learn it and to know it in a deep, wolfish way.

  Instead he forced himself to keep talking.

  “How long does this change take?” he asked. He was acutely aware of how vulnerable Alys was just now, and that Bainbridge was equally aware of it. If Drew moved on him, knowing he had to keep him alive, Bainbridge might be able to take advantage of that. It was best to keep him talking for now.

  “Quarter an hour or so,” Bainbridge said, his tone clinical. “Though sometimes as long as half an hour when the creature is very weak, as it is now.”

  “My God,” Drew said faintly. He considered his own shift slow, but quarter an hour? Longer even? Alys’s face contorted into a pained rictus and he ached to take her pain from her.

  “I know,” Bainbridge said, misunderstanding him. “It’s an extraordinary sight, is it not? I remember the first time I witnessed this—it must be all of seventeen years ago. Back then, I never imagined that one day I would become the creature’s master myself.”

  Seventeen years. Christ above.

  “How long—” Drew began. He paused, swallowing back another wave of nausea to pass. “That is, how long have the Order had her—it.”

  “The creature was captured by a witchfinder named William Cargill in fifteen hundred and ninety-three with the aid of an accused witch”—Bainbridge paused meaningfully—“so you see why the Order considers the creature so important. It is at least two and a half centuries old, and perhaps far older than that. I am the creature’s nineteenth master and each master has made a careful study of it in hopes of discovering the secrets of its seeming immortality and ability to heal itself.”

  Over two hundred years in captivity—would Alys even be sane now? Drew glanced at her. She was still on her hands and knees, though she looked ready to drop to her belly with exhaustion as another whole-body contraction racked her frail form. Inside him, his wolf whined and paced. He closed his eyes briefly, gathering himself, forcing himself to be patient.

  “You say the capture was achieved with the aid of a witch?”

  Bainbridge nodded. “In return for her freedom, the witch imparted secrets to Cargill regarding the binding of werewolves with silver. Cargill had a silver yoke made before the ambush took place. Over time, her bonds have been adapted according to the preferred method of her various masters. The present arrangements were my predecessor’s invention. I may revisit them in time.”

  Alys’s scent intensified, swirling so powerfully that Drew wondered that even a human like Bainbridge could not seem to detect it. And then, above their heads, came a crash and a muffled scream. With his enhanced hearing, Drew had heard it distinctly, but he could see from Bainbridge’s uncertain expression that he had only heard a faint echo.

  “Did you hear something?” Bainbridge asked, brows furrowed.

  “No,” Drew said. “Did you?”

  “I thought—perhaps not.”

  Another thud came then—but this one was softer and Bainbridge didn’t notice. He began to talk about his work with the creature, but Drew wasn’t listening now. He was tuned into the sounds from upstairs—and the scents. Scents of blood and panic and fear, and of deadly Marguerite getting closer as she moved down through the house, floor by floor, in a sweet haze of violets.

  He saw the moment that Alys scented her. Her head, which had been hanging low, came sharply up. Her jaw had begun to lengthen and to human eyes she would appear truly terrifying, a misshapen monster. But to Drew she was one of them—one of their pack—and all he could see was her pain and her need. And briefly, for a moment as Marguerite’s scent reached her—her joy.

  She threw her head back, throat arching, and howled. Brokenly, painfully, but still she howled and Drew saw from Bainbridge’s reaction—falling silent and staring at her, eyes wide—that this was not something she usually did.

  And then Marguerite answered her.

  Marguerite’s howl was angry and vengeful.

  “What was that?” Bainbridge cried. “Who—what—?”

  A man screamed—the second servant, Drew surmised—a bloodcurdling sound that abruptly ended. Bainbridge certainly heard that—since that slaying had taken place much closer to the cellar.

  “I think,” Drew said gently, “that is my wife.”

  A figure began to descend the cellar steps.

  Drew stepped back, putting himself between Bainbridge and Alys, deciding that he would make protecting the injured wolf his priority and leave the rest to Marguerite.

  It was not, however, Marguerite, who appeared at the bottom of the steps. At least not immediately. Wynne preceded her, his face set in a grave, faraway expression.

  He raised his arm and pointed at Bainbridge. “Witch killer,” he said softly. “I would slay you myself if my mistress did not wish to do it.”

  Bainbridge stared at him in horror. “How do you know I-I—” He stuttered to a halt as Wynne moved aside and a new figure descended.

  Drew had thought she might arrive in her wolf form but she had shifted back after slaying Bainbridge’s servants. Her clothes were gone though. She descended the stairs, naked and bloody as a maenad. Her mouth was covered in blood, her chest and shoulders spattered with it. She was terrible and beautiful at once.

  Her eyes were wolf eyes.

  Alys made a guttural noise and Marguerite’s face softened briefly, then hardened again when she returned her gaze to Bainbridge.

  She said, “I told you that I am my husband’s right hand, did I not?”

  Bainbridge’s eyes were wide. “Yes,” he whispered.

  She cocked her head to one side. “I lied.” A quick, mirthless smile. “He is not my husband. And I am not his right hand. He is mine. But some things I like to do myself.”

  Drew saw the intention harden in her eyes.

  “Mim, wait,” he said quickly, breaking the unsaid rule that he did not use that name. “You said—”

  “That does not matter now,” Marguerite said. “For what he has done he will die. Now. No mercy. No time. No reprieve.”

  She moved towards Bainbridge and
he stepped back, stumbling over the tattered blanket he’d thrown so carelessly to the floor earlier

  “Wait—” he stammered. “P-please!”

  “You like to watch wolves change?” Marguerite asked, her voice dangerously pleasant. “Watch this. One last time.”

  And with that, she shifted, leaping forwards in the same instant, one moment a woman, the next a wolf, roaring into her beast as she knocked Bainbridge to the stone floor and tore into his throat.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Bainbridge’s body sprawled on the floor, like a puppet with its strings cut. His colourless eyes stared unseeingly at the damp stone ceiling. His red throat gaped.

  Marguerite had already lost interest in him—she was padding across the cellar floor to Alys, who was now fully transformed and lying on her side, panting with exhaustion. Even as a wolf she was a poor-looking thing, a small, thin creature with bald patches and sores on her grey-brown coat. Marguerite was not a large wolf, but beside Alys she appeared big and sleek and dangerous, her white coat splattered with Bainbridge’s scarlet blood.

  Settling down beside the smaller wolf, Marguerite gave a soft rumbling growl and Drew glanced away, feeling like an intruder. He glanced at Wynne, who was watching the two wolves with a strange expression, part wonder, part sadness.

  “She found her,” he said softly. “She finally found Alys.”

  The enormity of what had just happened began to dawn on Drew then. He had known about Alys, in an abstract sort of way, for a long time. Known that Marguerite was searching for her. But somehow he had never really considered what her circumstances might be. And Christ, they’d been wretched. In captivity for over two centuries, tormented and horribly abused. When he thought of how he’d have felt if it was Lindsay…

  Christ.

  “She’s in a terrible state,” Wynne said, interrupting his thoughts and Drew glanced at the two wolves again.

  “Will she recover?” he asked softly.

  “I have no idea,” Wynne said. “Though I could scry I supp—” He broke off, frowning and shook his head, as though trying to dislodge something.

  “What is it?”

  Wynne closed his eyes tightly, then opened them again. “I need—” He stopped, taking a deep breath and began again. “I feel a vision coming—you must find me a looking glass, Drew. Can you do that?”

  Was Wynne about to have a vision about Alys?

  Drew cast his mind back to when they first entered the house—he could not remember seeing a mirror, but surely there would be one somewhere. “Come upstairs,” he said. “I will find one and bring it to you.”

  They mounted the cellar stairs together, leaving Marguerite and Alys—neither of whom spared them a glance—alone. When they reached the kitchen, Drew pressed Wynne into a chair at the big oak table. “Wait here.”

  Wynne complied, nodding. His expression remained oddly distant as though his attention was fixed elsewhere.

  Drew hurried back out into the hall where the corpse of a man lay sprawled. It wasn’t the manservant he’d seen earlier—he was presumably lying in a similar state somewhere upstairs—so it must be the second man Bainbridge had mentioned.

  Ignoring the dead man, Drew began searching the house, going from room to room until he finally found a mirror hanging above the fireplace in a dusty, unused-looking dining room. Snatching it from the wall, he returned to the kitchen and set the glass down on the table in front of Wynne.

  Wynne already seemed to be in a trancelike state, his gaze fixed on something that Drew could not see.

  “Here,” Drew said, nudging at the glass. “I’ve brought you a looking glass. Do you need anything else?”

  Wynne said nothing, only lowered his head and stared into the mirror. It was dark now, and the candles in the sconces on the wall gave out only a little feeble light. The kitchen was so gloomy, there was nothing to see in the glass—it reflected only shadows and darkness.

  Yet Drew could have sworn, Wynne saw something there—the way his eyes shifted, as though he was reading something…

  “Give me your hand,” Wynne said suddenly, grasping blindly for Drew’s fingers where they rested on the wooden table. A shiver ran through Drew at the touch of Wynne’s suddenly icy flesh, but he did not resist, letting Wynne pull his hand over the mirror.

  “I need—to cut—” Wynne gritted out.

  “What?”

  “Need blood,” Wynne said, digging in his pocket, before pulling out a small pocketknife, which he deftly opened with one hand.

  “Wait—” Drew said, pulling back, but it was too late, Wynne had already nicked his thumb with the blade and now he was kneading the fleshy pad, making fat red drops splat on the black, shining surface of the mirror.

  “What are you doing?” Drew croaked.

  “Need a conductor,” Wynne muttered. “A connection to Lindsay.”

  Drew’s heart thudded. “Lindsay?” he said sharply, “I thought this was about Alys.”

  Wynne shook his head and, dropping Drew’s hand, began to smear the blood over the surface of the mirror before placing his own two hands flat on the glass, palm down.

  “Three wolves,” he whispered to his own smeared reflection. “Master of his body, master of his will, master of his heart.” He closed his eyes and lifted his head, as though listening to some faraway sound.

  Drew watched him, his heart racing, for what felt like long minutes. And then, quite suddenly, Wynne’s eyes flew open.

  Drew jerked back. Wynne’s eyes were black, and not because his pupils were enlarged—the whole of each iris was fully black and the blackness was bleeding into the whites, through tiny threads like blood vessels. His eyes were a hard, obsidian black, as reflective as the mirror his palms were pressed against through the sticky film of Drew’s blood.

  “He is coming,” Wynne said. “He is very close.”

  “Who?” Drew demanded, though he very much feared he already knew.

  “Lindsay’s master,” Wynne said. “Duncan MacCormaic.”

  “What? He is on his way to Edinburgh?” Drew demanded.

  Wynne’s black-silver eyes glittered. “He is there now,” he said. “He is in the New Town, walking towards Albany Street. I see him, in his shiny boots and tall black hat.” He shook his head, eyes squeezed tight shut. “He is carrying a case. In the case is a box. In the box is a collar. It is silver. It is for Lindsay’s neck. He has gloves to wear when he touches it.”

  “Christ,” Drew hissed, scrambling to his feet. “God damn it all.” He began to tear off his coat.

  Just then, Marguerite appeared in the kitchen, sleek and white. She stopped beside Wynne for moment, watching him with intelligent canine eyes, then turned to observe Drew undressing. She regarded his industrious movements for a moment, then lay down to shift. She was tired now and consequently her transformation was rather slower than the dramatic mid-leap shift she had performed earlier. However, by the time Drew was down to his drawers, she was done, rising smoothly to her feet as a naked woman again.

  She went to Wynne first. His head was still bent over the mirror, his hands still flat on the glass. Carefully she moved each hand aside and pushed the mirror away, out of arm’s reach, breaking the connection. Urging his chin up, she smacked his left cheek lightly.

  “Wake up,” she urged. “Wynne my love, you must wake.”

  Wynne made a vague protesting sound and she smacked him lightly again, sparing an angry glance for Drew. “You should not have let him scry—it is dangerous. Look at the state of him!”

  “I didn’t know,” Drew replied shortly. “Anyway, he gave me no choice in matter.”

  “Drew, you—”

  “Listen,” he interrupted, “I must go to Lindsay now. You will have to deal with Wynne and Alys alone.”

  Marguerite paled. “Why? What did Wynne see?”

  “Duncan,” Drew said tightly. “Wynne said he is very close to Lindsay. I am going to shift and run back to town now. There is no time to wast
e.”

  Marguerite’s sudden, sharp anxiety flooded the air. “Yes, you must go,” she said grimly. “I will follow with Wynne and Alys in the carriage.” She glanced at Wynne, who was grey with fatigue and appeared quite dazed.

  Drew nodded. “Try to come as soon as you can. I can’t imagine what we will find when we get there, I—” He broke off, then added. “Whatever Lindsay says, he needs us.”

  Marguerite nodded gravely.

  Leaving his clothes where they lay, and without another word, Drew stalked out of the kitchen, quite naked, and made his way out of the house, stepping out into a cold, dark world. The waning moon lingered behind a veil of clouds. There were no stars to be seen. It was a profoundly dark night.

  Drew walked down the steps to the driveway and dropped to his hands and knees. That was all he needed to do to summon forth his anxious wolf. The frantic beast rushed to the surface, overtaking his human self.

  And then he was running.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Drew picked up Duncan’s scent before he even reached Albany Street, and the closer he got, the stronger it became. He had no doubt as he raced towards the townhouse, heart pounding painfully, that Duncan had got there before him. The question was, how long before? And was he still there?

  He decided to go in through the back of the house to evade detection, disdaining the front door in favour of careering around the corner onto the lane that led to the rear gardens. After pausing for a few moments to regain his breath, he ran and leapt at the six-foot wall that took him over into one of the neighbouring gardens, scrabbling his way over the top and landing hard on the other side. There were two more walls to scale after that, each one seeming a foot higher than the last. Finally though, he dropped down into Lindsay’s garden, landing in a heap in the middle of the herb garden. He lay there for a few moments, the scents of rosemary and lavender and thyme teasing his nostrils, making him lift his head and shake his dazedness away.

  Time to shift back.

  Once again, the shift came amazingly easily. Drew’s wolf surrendered Drew’s body back to him without its usual grudging resistance. For once, they were aligned, of one mind and intention.