The Wolf Witch

by Kara Jorgensen

  She needed air.

  Emmeline scrambled out of bed as if the covers threatened to pull her under. Climbing on the chair left dutifully in the corner of the room, she tried to pry open the window’s latch, but it refused to budge. The window held firm despite her muffled curses and unladylike grunts. Sighing, Emmeline eyed the snow coating the ground beyond the mullioned glass. The glass threatened to break before the mechanism, but there was another way to escape the confines of the room. It was early enough that few would be awake after last night’s merriment and light enough that she didn’t fear getting too lost. At least she could take a walk in peace.

  Donning her simplest grey dress with little ceremony, Emmeline braided her hair and secured it into a knot at the base of her neck. Her “good behavior dress,” as she had come to call it, made her feel like a governess, but at least it was practical and she didn’t mind getting it wet. She slipped on her boots and gloves, cursing herself for not bringing pairs that were warmer but less fashionable. She would make it a brisk walk.

  As she opened the door and stepped into the hall, her body locked at the sight of Nadir Talbot waiting for her with his arms crossed and a sharp grin on his lips. He leaned against his door in his shirtsleeves and a gold and black waistcoat that was conservative by his standards, but without his jacket, he was all assured grace and languid sensuality. Emmeline gritted her teeth as he ran a hand through his artfully tousled hair and pushed off the door.

  Emmeline gave him a pointed once over. “Did you forget how to dress yourself, Mr. Talbot?”

  He released a laugh. “And good morning to you, too.” Cracking open his door, he retrieved his jacket, coat, and top hat. “I heard you and thought you might come out soon. You have quite a colorful vocabulary.”

  Heat flooded Emmeline’s cheeks. “My window won’t open.”

  “Neither will mine. I thought I might join you on your morning constitutional.”

  “Is it prudent for us to walk together without a chaperone?”

  “I can behave myself if you can,” he replied with a blithe grin.

  “Fine, just hurry up. I want to get this over with.”

  Glaring at him as he bundled up against the cold, Emmeline eyed his thick, wool scarf with envy. After shutting his door behind him, Nadir held out his arm for her to take. She resisted the urge to snort or scoff, but as they started down the stairs, the silence of the house needled at her mind.

  ***

  The cold air bit Emmeline’s cheeks and sent a pleasant shiver down her neck. After only a few minutes, she could already feel her body relaxing under the sun’s dim light. She had been to France and Germany and Italy, but the taste of English country air was different. The scent of pine and the musk of decomposing leaves lingered on her tongue. It reminded her of home after so many days spent in a haze of human bodies and steamer exhaust. Her boots crunched over the crisp grass and sank slightly into the frozen gravel of the path that cut from the house into the woods. For the first time, she was relieved to have Nadir Talbot at her side. The trees clustered close to the house in an impenetrable arc that threatened to swallow the manor beneath their naked boughs. In the grey morning light, stark shadows fell between the trees and coated the underbrush in darkness.

  At her side, Nadir watched her from the corner of his eye and smiled. “You know, I always took you for the type to take morning walks.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Everything you do feels… purposeful. I doubt you would walk without a good reason. Now the question is which park.”

  “You’re half right. In town, I don’t. There are too many people at the park by my flat, and everyone there is looking for attention. When I walk, I want to walk, not be seen. Sometimes I just need the silence to think.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yes, well, too late now to apologize, Mr. Talbot.”

  “I’m not.” He smiled. “You said I was half right?”

  She licked her lips and readjusted her arm. “When I lived in Oxford with my mother, we would take a walk around the grounds after breakfast. We would pick whatever medicinal herbs or pretty flowers were growing nearby. Sometimes we would gather mushrooms and give them to our cook.”

  “So you could tell me what not to eat?”

  “If I felt like it.”

  Mr. Talbot laughed, a high, clear sound that pulled Emmeline’s face out of its usual scowl against her will. At a sudden gust of wind cutting through the trees, she tightened her grip on his arm and clasped the edges of her jacket together. Her eyes stung and her neck flushed at the chafe of the wind on her skin, but as the wind settled, Nadir unwound the scarf from his neck with his free hand. It wasn’t until he wrapped and knotted the scarf at her throat with all the care he had given to his cravat that she realized he was giving it to her.

  When she gaped up at him, he shrugged and gave the knot a final tug. “It matches your coat better than mine.”

  She wanted to thank him, but her tongue sat uselessly in her mouth.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about your family problem. I did research on wards for a book a few years ago. Your aunt and uncle don’t have to be your guardians. You could always ask someone else, someone more liberal-minded.”

  “What if they won’t let me go?”

  “You could threaten to take them to court if they don’t agree. You do have the right to choose your guardian.”

  Questions and possibilities spun all around her. She had too many questions, but instead, she muttered, “Thank you, Mr. Talbot. I will think about it.”

  She hadn’t known her life wasn’t set in stone. She had endured this for years until she snapped and ran away, but things could have been different. Neither she nor her aunt had had to live with the constant tension and resentment. Perhaps her aunt had felt it was her duty to care for her, but a sense of duty didn’t replace love and respect. When Emmeline surfaced from her thoughts, they had walked deeper into the woods where it was so dense that in summer the brush must have been near impenetrable. A crow squawked somewhere ahead, but the rest of the forest remained oddly silent. Nadir must have felt her grip tighten because suddenly his gloved hand was gently warming hers.

  “Would you like to go back?”

  Looking back at the path they had come, the house stood grey and solid as a fortress. The woods promised less ghosts and people, so she shook her head and urged him onward.

  “Tell me more about your childhood picking mushrooms and flowers. It sounds so… primitive.”

  Emmeline glared at him and he raised his hands in defense.

  “I meant natural.”

  “For a writer, you aren’t very good with words.”

  “Most aren’t, but I really did mean natural. It sounds very earthy. It sounds nice, actually.”

  “It was,” she said softly, a small smile curling her lips. “My mother would have a hard time keeping me in the house. She gave up on governesses early on and decided to teach me herself. She tried her best to work the outside into my lessons. She seemed to understand how much I needed it.” Emmeline paused. Her mother must have known that the child of a werewolf would crave nature. A pang of sadness grew in her breast. Her mother easily could have forced her to stay inside. Others would have for propriety’s sake, but she knew why she needed it even if Emmeline didn’t. “On days when it was warm enough, we would sit on the grass and read or have French lessons beside the river. It was idyllic.”

  “It sounds it. Did you climb trees, too?”

  “No, I was far too short, and just like now, I didn’t want to ruin my clothes. And what about you, Mr. Talbot? What was your life like before you became a famous author?”

  He scoffed, but she could see his slight swell of pride. “Quite boring, really. I was born and raised in Dorset, in Folkesbury. My parents and I lived with my aunt and uncle and my cousin. Leona and I would hunt for shells and fossils in tide pools sometimes, but my family was pretty strict when we were children. Besides, t
he neighbors weren’t thrilled at having us there. I went off to boarding school, and my parents eventually moved to London. I briefly attended Cambridge, hated it, left, and disappointed my parents.”

  “I think we all disappoint our families in one way or another.”

  “Some more than others.”

  Sensing the tension in his features, Emmeline decided not to press the issue. “So do your parents still live in London?”

  “Thankfully, no. They had been going back and forth to tend to my grandfather’s vineyard most of my life, but when I was done with school, they moved back to Alexandria. My parents run it now.”

  “Alexandria in Egypt?”

  “That would be the one.”

  Black wings flapping stole Emmeline’s attention as another crow flew overhead. In the distance, she could hear several hoarse voices croaking through the stillness of the trees. When she looked back, Nadir stood so close she could touch him. Had he been so close?

  “Would you like to see it some day?”

  “See what?”

  A brittle laugh escaped his lips. “My family’s vineyard. Some of my fondest memories were there, and I thought you might want to see it, too. I don’t even know if you like wine.”

  Emmeline swallowed hard, her heart beating against her ribs. Her arm tightened on his at the look in his dravite eyes. Their breath rolled out, spooling together in a plume of white. Fear dug deep within her. She hoped he knew how hard this was for her. How hard it still was to feel anything but rage. Bracing herself, she hoped her voice wouldn’t shake.

  “I do. I like books and wine and traveling. I’d love to see it one day.”

  When Nadir leaned closer, another blackbird swooped low, nearly knocking the top hat from his head. Emmeline stumbled back, all at once relieved and infuriated.

  “Another bird?” she cried.

  “At least that one didn’t claw my hat. It’s silk. If it had scratched it… What’s wrong?”

  A pit of dread opened in Emmeline’s stomach at the sudden thought. Towing Nadir behind her, she hurried up the path until it was nearly choked with dried brush and brambles. Emmeline pulled up her skirts and scrambled over them toward the chorus of crows. Following the discordant sound, she turned at the fork in the path leading them away from the abbey, but as the trees faded away to reveal a clearing covered in half-melted snow, the breath hitched in her throat. Tracks littered the ground, and while most were booted smears, a line of dog tracks as big as her hand skirted the tree line. Wesley. She silently cursed her brother. If he was still up there, she was going to thrash him. For all she knew, the Interceptors had devices that could sense a werewolf shifting and they were already on their way to arrest him again.

  “Miss Jardine, where are you going?” Nadir jerked back as she released his hand and continued up the hill. He huffed and said in a harried hiss, “I don’t want to lose the trail and get lost.”

  At the top of the hill, the angry squawks of the crows were answered by mocking laughter. There had to be dozens of them hidden amongst the tree limbs and scattered across the ground. Their cries rose to an unbearable chatter, but what drew Emmeline’s attention was what they were clustered around. She couldn’t see it fully due to a snapped tree limb and a clump of naked brush coated in snow, yet her heart frantically beat at the sight of it as if she already knew. The wind cut through the trees, bringing with it the sweet, metallic tang of death. A loud gag sounded behind her. The nearest crows jolted at Nadir’s coughing as he waved away the smell and pulled his coat over his nose.

  “It’s probably just a dead deer, Em. Let’s go back.”

  Emmeline felt his hand on her arm, but she didn’t hear him. The tree branch swayed in the carrion breeze, and through it, she could make out a man’s face. Shaking off Nadir’s arm, she barreled through the crows, scattering them with a whoosh of wings. Mr. Doughty lay staring up at the sky, his mouth open in a silent scream and his left eye vacant while the other had been taken by one of the birds. Saliva pooled in Emmeline’s mouth as she struggled to control her breathing. She didn’t look lower. She didn’t want to believe that what she had seen was real. Swallowing hard, she was thankful she hadn’t eaten.

  Congealed blood had melted the snow around Mr. Doughty’s body with spatters staining icy footprints and where groping hands had tried to gain purchase to flee. His clothing had been shredded to tatters, leaving only his arms and trouser legs covered. His throat had been torn and the rest of his body hollowed out. As Emmeline stepped back with her mouth covered, her foot landed on something solid that slid in the snow.

  “Don’t look down,” Nadir said softly at her ear, his face startlingly warm against her cheek.

  Her voice sounded surprisingly thin. “What?”

  “Trust me on this. Don’t look down.”

  Emmeline swallowed again, but at the gentle pressure of his arm wrapped around her waist, she kept her eyes on the trees and carefully stepped back. Her gaze flickered to Doughty’s body against her will. Bodies shouldn’t look like that. She had seen plenty of corpses in the morgue beneath the Hawthornes’ home. There had been bodies covered in wounds or bloated beyond recognition by the Thames, but she had never seen one so desiccated it was more meat than person. Death could be monstrous. No one liked to say it, least of all the dead, but death didn’t bear clean corpses. Few were pale and statuesque, incorruptible like a saint’s. Death rarely came as a great sigh or a thief in the night. Pain and terror and longing were death’s companions, and Emmeline knew that firsthand. Those on both sides of the Veil did their best to forget the pain and fear. To rail against it or succumb didn’t matter because death was always coming.

  Nadir’s arm tightened around her until her side rested against his. “We should go back to the house and get help.”

  “Someone murdered him.”

  “Or something. Either way, we need to get the authorities.”

  As Nadir pivoted her back toward the trail, her mind still reeled at the afterimages and what they meant. There had been paw prints in the snow, and Mr. Doughty had been, for a lack of a better word, eaten. What had Wesley done? She had saved her brother from the gallows once, but no one could save him from this. He had betrayed her and their father’s trust. A knot formed in her gut at the thought of her father’s face if he knew what Wesley had done. He would be crushed.

  At the sound of a murder of crows taking flight in unison behind them, Emmeline stopped midstride. Nadir opened his mouth to protest, but she shook her head and listened. Two men’s voices carried on the wind, and they were coming closer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Nature of the Beast

  “Get off the trail!” Emmeline hissed, shaking Nadir’s arm off her. “Someone’s coming.”

  “Shouldn’t we warn them about…?”

  Emmeline’s jaw clenched as she whispered, “You of all people should understand the importance of not getting caught standing over a body.”

  Go! she mouthed. Nadir cast her a concerned glance over his shoulder before climbing into the brush. Twigs caught at the bottom of Emmeline’s skirts and in her scarf as she wove through the frozen vines and gnarled, naked foliage. The voices diverged into two young men as they sang a bawdy song Emmeline didn’t recognize, but from the words, they had probably learned it at a pub. Brittle twigs snapped under Emmeline and Nadir’s boots and the icy ground crunched with each step, but she hoped the men’s off-key singing would hide the noise. By the time she and Nadir stood on the far side of the hill, the men sounded close to reaching the clearing where the body lay. As their voices tapered off, Emmeline pulled Nadir between two bent trees where the men shouldn’t have been able to see them. She held her breath, not daring to look at her companion as they squeezed behind the band of bark and crouched low enough that they had to hold each other for balance. The crunching of feet stopped, and they waited.

  “Verdun did a number on this one, didn’t he?” The man whistled and clucked his tongue. “I wish I h
ad been here to see it.”

  Bourgot, Nadir mouthed, the outline of the word whispering across Emmeline’s cheek.

  “I— I don’t like this. There are too many crows. That has to mean something,” his companion said, his voice tremulous and high.

  It had to be Gernier. No one else would sound like an overgrown child.

  “It means you better get his body onto the sheet before they peck out our eyes, too. Now get moving.”

  “Why does it have to be me?” Gernier paused and then sighed. “Fine, give me your gloves.”

  Emmeline closed her eyes at the man’s grunts and the sluice of the body against the snow. The wet suck of flesh being pulled made the bile rise in her throat, but she focused on the slight sway of her body as she balanced against Nadir and the damp from the tree soaking through her glove.

  “Do we have to pick up all the pieces?”

  “He said no evidence. What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Nadir’s body tensed as Gernier stumbled into the trees and wretched. From their hiding place, Emmeline could see his chest heaving and the sweat glistening on his brow. If he turned to the side, he would see them. For a moment, neither Emmeline nor Nadir breathed.

  “Gernie, pull yourself together. How do you expect to do it next if you faint at a little blood.”