Loch Nessa

by Clare Kauter

  Every wolf present joined him in his song. I pressed my hands to my ears as we were engulfed by the deafening chorus. Henry threw his head back in a mime, but he made no noise. I guess he couldn’t bring himself to do something so… werewolf. A bridge too far.

  After what seemed like an age, the wolf with the special necklace (presumably the alpha) stopped howling and the noise gradually died down until the only sound was the water lapping at the shore and rocking the boats down at the dock.

  “Good evening,” boomed the wolf, startling me so much with his volume that I jumped. “It’s good to see so many of you here tonight. I could give you a lengthy preamble, but I’m sure there’s no need. You all know why you’re here.”

  “I don’t,” I called out. “I’d sure appreciate the preamble if you have the time.”

  The wolf turned to face me slowly, snarling, while every other wolf in the place stared at me and growled. Gulp.

  “I wasn’t asking you, scum.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “Come on, there’s no need for that language.”

  There was a blur and then within a millisecond the wolf was right in front of me, his face millimetres from mine, rotten breath warm on my face. “You’re going to die tonight either way,” he said quietly, teeth bared, “but if you don’t shut up this second, I can make your death much – much – more painful.”

  “Understood,” I squeaked.

  As he stalked back to his place by the altar, I wondered if this was how Ed and Henry had felt when I snapped earlier. If so, then it was no wonder they’d agreed to go along with my plans. Come to think of it, where had Ed gone? I glanced around and spotted a ghostly outline hiding behind a tree on the edge of the graveyard, out of sight of the majority of the congregation. So he hadn’t bailed. Yet.

  “Glaistig,” said the Alpha wolf, “join me up on stage.”

  Gladys stood from her seat and made her way up to the front. I glanced at my witchy companions and saw their faces looking pale and shocked. I guess they’d heard of her by her other name. As she made her way up to the altar, her pleasant facade seemed to flicker. Judging by the looks on the witches’ faces, they’d seen it too this time. The toothy demon creature that lurked below the surface was showing itself.

  “As you know,” the wolf continued, “tonight marks the anniversary of the slaughter of our ancestors.”

  The crowd booed and hissed.

  “We’ve tried for many years to call them back from beyond the grave, but now that the full moon has aligned with the date of their death, I believe that this time we shall succeed. Glaistig?”

  Gladys grinned, showing her shark-like teeth, and walked over to the crumbling tomb that stood behind us. The alpha joined her and together they rolled the stone away from the entrance. Once it was open, Gladys used a piece of white chalk to scribble something on the stone floor inside. I didn’t have the best seat in the house, but I was pretty sure I knew what she was doing. They were summoning a ghost. Or two.

  The alpha turned to the assembly. “Now,” he said.

  As one, the congregation lit the black candles I hadn’t known they’d each been holding. Black smoke rose from the perimeter of the cemetery as first Gladys and then everyone else began to chant a spell I didn’t recognise. The clouds above us moved, swirling like a tornado, until the moon poked through the middle and shone a beam of light inside the tomb onto the chalk drawing Gladys had sketched on the floor.

  It didn’t take long for the ghostly wolves to start appearing. They bounded out of the tomb one by one – there must have been twenty in total. I frowned in confusion as I studied them.

  “What is it?” Daisy whispered.

  “They don’t have auras,” I whispered back.

  She nodded. I’d learned when I’d first met Henry that seeing ghosts’ auras, much like being able to sense a clouding spell, was not in your average medium’s skill set. In fact, I was yet to meet anyone else with those abilities. Different coloured auras indicated to me what kind of ghost I was dealing with, and not being able to see these guys’ auras made me even less comfortable than I already was, which when you’re lining up to be sacrificed in a graveyard by a werewolf death cult, is really saying something.

  I continued to study the ghosts. Could it be because they were wolves? Unlikely – they were still ghosts, after all. Then I looked a little closer and realised that wasn’t all that was odd about them. They were weirdly shimmery – even more see-through than your average ghost. I glanced over at Ed for a margin of comparison. Yep, these guys definitely looked different. Like they weren’t really there.

  “Wolves and guests,” said the alpha, “I am excited to announce that we have succeeded!”

  The crowd cheered and another howl began. I crossed my fingers, hoping that this somehow meant the whole ordeal was over and they weren’t going to sacrifice us. Please. Please please –

  “And now for the sacrifices!”

  I groaned.

  CHAPTER 25

  “TO BIND these wolves’ souls to earth we need to call upon the king. He has not been seen for many years, but in this chest,” – the wolf indicated the dragon’s chest, still floating in the middle of a bright blue ward – “we have something that I believe will bring him back to us. We have remained loyal to him all these years, and I’m sure he will reward us by returning our ancestors to their earthly bodies.”

  Wait, what? The king this wolf was talking about was me; I was at least ninety percent sure of that. I could do that? Give a ghost back his human body? I gave Ed a sideways glance.

  He rolled his eyes, and popped up behind me to whisper, “I’m perfectly happy being a ghost. The afterlife isn’t so bad if you escape eternal damnation.”

  Ed, despite being a backstabbing murderer, had managed to escape Satan’s wrath by praying to the guy upstairs (who was, apparently, a sucker for flattery). He was welcomed into Heaven with open arms, and promptly left to move to Hell. Now he had his own place there – in the residential area, not in the dungeons where Satan tortured the truly evil souls. His soul didn’t belong to Satan, and therefore it wasn’t hers to touch, so unlike these wolves, Ed was free. Thinking about it, there weren’t that many advantages to being alive if you were a poltergeist, so Ed probably hadn’t befriended me to use my powers to be resurrected.

  These wolves must have been waiting in Satan’s dungeons out the back of Hell to be called back to earth and bound here by me. Good grief. Did these idiots really think I’d be dumb enough to steal souls from Satan? As royal subjects go, mine seemed to be particularly shit.

  I turned to talk to Ed, but he had already disappeared. I scanned the crowd, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. Gritting my teeth, I tried to tell myself that he hadn’t bailed on us, but I wasn’t convinced by my own story.

  “We’ll start with the old one,” said the alpha, indicating for one of his henchmen to bring Hecate up to the altar. “Start with mutton and move on to the lamb.”

  “I want a slice of the old hag’s innards,” called Fach from the audience. “Ha – haggis! Do you get it, Johnny? Haggis!”

  “Very good, Fach,” said the alpha, not doing a great job of hiding his annoyance, in my opinion. I was pretty sure he was only putting up with Fach because of Gladys’s special abilities. “Let’s get started. I’m starving.”

  My stomach churned. Great. This wasn’t just a human sacrifice party – it was dinner. Was everyone just here to have a little slice of roast witch? What kind of place was this?

  One of the wolves took Hecate’s arm in his teeth and jerked her forward, knocking her off balance and dragging her along the ground in the dirt to the altar. I felt anger rise in my chest. OK, so I was pissed off at Hecate, and yes, she’d tricked me into joining her coven, but these pieces of shit had no right to treat her like that. I balled my hand into a fist and felt the Doomstone and companion items begin to heat up. How likely was it that Hecate would arrest me for having the stone if I used it to save he
r from being devoured by a pack of wolves?

  Henry trod on my foot again. The wolves in the crowd were still howling and growling and cheering and jeering so Henry risked speaking to me. “Don’t do anything dumb.”

  Gladys and the wolves dragged Hecate up onto the altar and pinned her down while the alpha walked over to the dragon’s chest, encountering no resistance as he stepped through the ward. He took the metal handle on the edge of the chest in his teeth and dragged it over to the altar. I looked around again for Ed, hoping maybe he was planning to swoop in and steal the chest now, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  The alpha dropped the chest’s handle from his teeth and left the box sitting on the ground by the altar inside what I now saw was a circle marked with stones, encompassing the entire slab on which Hecate was laid out.

  Sometime while I’d been watching the alpha, Gladys had procured a silver dagger. While the wolves held Hecate’s wrists and ankles in their jaws, biting down hard enough that I could see blood pooling on the stone slab under the wolves’ mouths, Gladys tested the edge of the blade by running her finger along it, not quite hard enough to break the skin.

  “It’s time,” said the alpha and Gladys smiled maliciously as the dagger glinted in the moonlight. I shot Daisy a panicked look, but she and Alora looked just as helpless as I felt. Ed was still out of sight and Henry didn’t appear to have any bright ideas either.

  Just as I was about to call out to Gladys (what exactly I was going to say I didn’t know), she took Hecate’s arm from the wolf. In one swift movement, she placed Hecate’s hand directly over the chest that was sitting on the ground beside the altar and sliced her palm deeply with the dagger. A single drop of blood fell from the blade, seemingly in slow motion, and splattered on the chest.

  The second the first drop of blood hit the wood, the spell began to take effect. Black smoke rose from the stone circle that encompassed the slab Hecate was lying on as the magic began to work. Gladys dropped Hecate’s hand and her arm fell limply, yet more of her blood oozing from her wounds and falling onto the chest below while Gladys raised the blade to her mouth and licked it slowly, savouring the taste of the witch’s blood.

  There wasn’t time to be too grossed out by Gladys’s actions, however. When the blood hit the chest, it had immediately begun to move, rattling around on the ground as if there was something inside trying to get out. A purple light shone out the keyhole and through the crack where the lid met the box.

  The stone in my pocket and the Key to the Damnation pressed against my chest grew hot – burning hot – the second the blood splattered on the wood. I wondered if the key would fit into the lock on the chest. No, I decided. My key was too big. That box didn’t contain ‘the Damnation’ – whatever that was. Good. I may not have had any idea what it was, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t something I wanted to unleash upon the world.

  The box started to jump, a violent banging noise coming from inside of it. While the wolves simply stood by looking at it, Gladys walked to a nearby grave and picked up a shovel. She left the circle, so I guessed she wasn’t too worried about unleashing whatever magic she’d conjured up upon the world. She used the shovel to break the lock on the chest and the lid flew open without anyone even touching it. The purple light emanating from within was so bright it was blinding and we weren’t able to see what the source of the light was.

  The crowd stood dumbfounded for a moment, fascinated by the strange contents of the chest, whatever they were. A howl from the ghost wolves brought everyone out of their stupor.

  “Kill the witch,” hissed the ghost wolves as one. “Kill the witch. Bring us back. Kill the witch.”

  I didn’t really hear what they were saying, though – I was slightly preoccupied by the waves of purple energy making their way to me, filling my veins with magic, so full I felt like I would burst.

  Something was about to give.

  CHAPTER 26

  WE WERE STANDING NEAR ENOUGH the chest that the others didn’t seem to realise the energy was flying directly at me. They were bound to notice eventually, though. Probably around about the time I killed them all.

  “Henry,” I hissed, panicking as the energy filled me up. The stone in my pocket and the key around my neck were humming, burning with energy. There was something in that chest – something they wanted me to take. And they were giving me the necessary power to get it.

  “What?” Henry asked. Then his eyes widened as he stared into my face. In a strangled voice he said, “Your eyes have turned purple.”

  “They’re trying to summon me with this ritual.”

  Henry frowned, still seeming kind of disconcerted about the purple eyes thing. “And?”

  “They’ve called up all the ghosts, and now they’re trying to summon me with sacrifices. I don’t know how to get out of here without it turning into a blood bath.”

  “Have you tried, uh, not killing people?”

  I glared at him. “Really, Henry? Was that supposed to be helpful?”

  “Sorry,” he said quickly. “I just meant that maybe you need to practise controlling your magic.”

  “Thanks. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Kill the witch,” chanted the ghost wolves.

  “Alpha?” said Gladys, turning to the alpha wolf. “Would you like to do the honours?”

  He grinned, showing off his fangs. “I’d be delighted.”

  “Whatever you do, you’d better do it quickly,” said Henry under his breath.

  “Great, no pressure.”

  “Perhaps you could try to focus on just stunning them rather than killing them,” he suggested.

  “I don’t have enough control over my powers for that,” I said. “They control me, not vice versa.”

  “Try.”

  “Henry,” I whined.

  “Don’t whine. If you can’t control yourself, you’re going to have a mass murder on your hands every time someone tries to summon you. Just try.”

  “I don’t know how.” By now I was in full-blown panic mode.

  “Deep breaths,” he said. “You can do it. With a little practice, not murdering people will become second nature to you.”

  “Now’s not the time for jokes, Henry.”

  “Who says I was joking?”

  “Henry!”

  “Just focus. Think about the amount of energy it would take to stun, say, an ant. Then just let out that much. Preferably send it out in front of us so it gets the evil people and not us.”

  “What are we going to do to the wolves up here with us who don’t get hit?”

  “After they see how strong you are, I’m sure they’ll just roll over.”

  I rolled my eyes. “A dog pun, Henry? Really?”

  “Fine, fine. They’ll sit down and beg.”

  “Stop,” I grunted. “Making me angry is going to do the opposite of helping me keep control over my powers.”

  “Kill the witch,” chanted the ghost wolves.

  Alora’s magic was barely working (she’d taken the Dora a few days ago, after all, and hadn’t had a chance to heal properly yet), and Daisy’s wasn’t much better. Even if Hecate had been on her game, she was injured and only semi-conscious. Ed The Coward was nowhere to be seen. (Had he really just ditched us here? Was I really surprised? Next time I saw him, I was going to make him pay.) No one else was going to help. I had to act.

  “Do something!” Henry growled. “She’s about to die!”

  The alpha threw back his head to howl at the moon once more. Some wolves joined him and other members of the audience called out to him.

  “Stop playing with your food!”

  “Rip her throat out!”

  “Come on, I’m getting hungry.”

  The wolf bared his teeth and opened his jaw, ready to go for the jugular. Just as his teeth were about to make contact with Hecate’s neck, I blasted him backwards with a jet of purple magic. The spell passed over Hecate without so much as ruffling her hair, but sent the wolves who had been
pinning her to the stone dissection table tumbling. Two of them yelped as they hit the wall of the stone tomb and another two kept flying so far that I didn’t see them land. I heard them cry out as they hit the ground though, so I knew they weren’t dead.

  Oh my goodness. I hadn’t killed them! That was cause for celebration!

  Later, though, because right now not killing them seemed more like a burden than a gift. The minion wolves I’d hit were still recovering, but the alpha was back on his feet and thundering towards me, ready for blood. Gladys looked similarly furious as she waved her hands in the air, gathering power ready to cast at me.

  I shot at the alpha with a lasso of energy, wrapping it around his neck and using it to fling him in the air as high as I could manage. Even in the dim moonlight I could see him fly across the sky and over the top of the castle. He fell out of sight for a few moments before we heard a loud splash and it became apparent that the alpha had taken an involuntary swim.

  As you can imagine, the other wolves were not particularly happy about that. They rushed me en masse, which would have been a lot scarier had Henry not transformed into a gorilla in that moment and drawn the fire away from me. Wolves were not the most intelligent of creatures (all that inbreeding) and it didn’t take a whole heap to distract them. Finding a shifter in their midst was more than enough to take their minds off murdering the witch who’d thrown their leader so far through the air that he’d disappeared from sight.

  Now that Henry had caught the wolves’ attention and was punching and casting at every one who came his way, I could focus on Gladys. Her pleasant facade had disappeared completely by now and before me stood a half-goat demon lady who looked more like the devil than Satan did. She’d balled up an orb of poison green energy in front of her, and as we made eye contact, she pulled back her arm and flung it at me. As the orb moved through the air towards me, bits of magic fell off, charring the grass when they hit the ground. The ball moved with impossible speed and I didn’t even have time to flinch, much less set up a counter spell.