by Frank Tuttle
But only for an instant. The effort cost me my shirt. Gertriss’ already brief night-gown was ripped from one shoulder. I felt Buttercup tense, felt her start one of her magical banshee side-steps. I managed to grab her left forearm and go with her, slowing her down and preventing her from traveling more than a few steps toward the door.
“Buttercup! It’s me. Corn bread man. Slayer of wand-wavers. Calm down. We’re not here to hurt you.”
She turned toward me, one hand still rubbing her eyes. I thought perhaps she recognized my voice, thought she was calming down. She even stopped trying to twist her arm away from my grasp.
So when she stepped close to my waist and then head-butted me right below my belt-buckle, I wasn’t prepared to dodge.
I didn’t. I sank to my knees. Gertriss made a grab, but the banshee made a faster little dancing step and she was gone.
Gone. Out of the room. Gertriss went wide-eyed.
“Where—?” she began.
“Other. Side. Of door.”
We both heard crashings and thuds and footfalls from my front room. Gertriss snatched up the blanket and charged through the door.
I followed with somewhat less energy and verve.
Buttercup was frantic. She was running into walls, knocking over furniture, tearing cushions off the couch, looking anywhere, everywhere, for a way out. She wasn’t howling anymore. It took me a moment to realize that mewling sound she was making was crying.
I struggled to stand upright. I forced my voice to some semblance of normalcy.
“You know me,” I said. The banshee hurled a lamp at the wall, started clawing at the wood. “Buttercup. Listen to me. I am not going to let anyone hurt you.”
She began to strike the oak panels with her fists. Her back was to me. I walked slowly toward her, and when I was close enough I laid a hand on her shoulder.
“You know me,” I said. “Remember? Corn bread? The woods?”
She whirled.
I tried to smile. I managed not to step back.
I reached forward, pushed her hair out of her face. She managed to open her eyes. It was only then I realized they been stinging from the soapy water. “See? It’s me. You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
Gertriss wisely stood very still, and remained very quiet. Buttercup’s eyes darted toward her, and her mouth turned down in a tiny pout.
“That’s Aunt Gertriss,” I said. “She’s nice too. She was just giving you a bath. She has clothes for you too. Pretty clothes.”
Buttercups’ gaze turned back toward me, and she smiled, and took my hand.
“Good,” I said. “Now then—let’s put this gown on you. Gertriss? Very slowly?”
Gertriss took a small, slow step.
Buttercup snatched my left shoe off the floor and managed to fling it right toward Gertriss’s face. Gertriss deflected the shoe with the blanket, which she then flung at Buttercup, and Buttercup managed to move herself and me right behind Gertriss, where the banshee grabbed Gertriss’s dressing gown at the neck and gave it a good furious banshee yank.
Gertriss shrieked, and her dressing gown fell. Buttercup giggled, and at that very moment Fate arranged for my door to fly open and for Darla, my Darla, to walk in.
For a moment, all was stillness and silence.
There was Gertriss, mostly naked. There was Buttercup the freshly bathed banshee, completely naked and hanging onto a Markhat who was naked from the waist up. The floor was covered in cast-off clothing of both male and female varieties. Obeying some capricious law of garment behavior, a pair of Gertriss’s bloomers was hanging from a lamp.
Darla merely nodded at me, raised her right eyebrow and put her left hand on her left hip.
“I see you’re keeping busy, darling. I didn’t knock because I was told you were mortally wounded. I’m pleased to see you’re not. Yet.”
Momma Hog stepped into my room, joined by Evis, who was swathed from head to toe in yards of pure black silk.
Mama gobbled something incomprehensible at Gertriss, who wrapped herself in the blanket and fled for my bathroom.
Evis broke into hissing vampire laughter. He doubled over. He did manage to hide his mouthful of fangs behind a black-gloved hand.
And then Darla marched past Gertriss, pushed Buttercup gently aside and kissed me on the lips.
“So dear, tell me all about your day.”
I seated Darla on my right and Momma on my left. Gertriss wound up beside Mama, who was still clearly not in a mood to forgive Gertriss’s earlier state of dishabille. Buttercup tried to sit in my lap, but hopped up on the huge empty dining table after Darla fixed the banshee with her trademark icy stare.
Evis fidgeted in his chair right across the table from me. Even buried beneath a tent’s worth of silk and wearing tinted spectacles, the light was obviously causing him great discomfort.
Lady Werewilk herself had shooed her idling household staff out of the kitchen, which had taken on the role of gathering place for all of her displaced servants. She hadn’t had to ask twice after word got around that the funny man dressed all in black was a halfdead from town.
“I’m sure you’d all enjoy a bit of privacy,” said Lady Werewilk, before she opened the door to the hall. She’d impressed me by not treating Evis as anything but another guest in her home. She’d even inquired as to any special accommodations she could make on behalf of Evis.
Evis had politely declined.
Once we were alone, we all swapped stories.
Darla and Mama, it turned out, had both received messages that claimed to be from Lady Werewilk. The message was the same to both, short and simple—Markhat is dying. Come at once.
No details. Nothing but that. Mama had been determined to set out, on foot, at that very moment, but Darla had convinced her to head to Avalante before leaving Rannit.
Which brought Evis, genteel halfdead, aboard. Upstairs, Evis had told me in a hushed voice that he’d also brought Victor and Sara, the married halfdead couple I’d met some months back. Victor and Sara were lurking somewhere shaded, out in the forest, waiting for night to fall before coming to the House themselves.
He never stated it, but I knew they’d have a good look around on their way. They’d spot the army of watchers. Vampires would be able to sneak right up to campfires and have a good listen without raising an alarm. Maybe we’d get lucky and someone out there would mention a name or two.
Once Darla and Mama had demanded to see Evis at Avalante, they’d relayed the message they’d received. I was touched to learn that Evis had simply ordered a carriage brought around. No delays, no consulting with his superiors at the House.
I’d need to get him an extra nice pair of mittens for Yule.
Darla, Mama and Evis had then made their way from Rannit to House Werewilk in a carriage emblazoned with Avalante’s crest. I wasn’t even sure if Momma and Darla knew they were being flanked by two more halfdead. And I wondered if the Avalante crest on the carriage left the men in the woods leery of carrying out an ambush.
Evis and Mama and Darla denied ever seeing any hint of the secret forest army.
That didn’t sit well with me. Marlo had seen them. I’d seen them. They were as thick as briars out there, and weren’t taking great pains to conceal that fact—so why hadn’t Evis or his vampire shadows detected even a hint of snacks on the hoof?
There was only one answer to that, and it raised the hair on the back of my neck.
Sorcery.
Sorcery cast by someone who knew me and my associations well enough to bring us together at Lady Werewilk’s big oak table with just six short words.
Mama and Darla saw it too. Evis took a moment, maybe because his own lexicon of mortal enemies is much longer than any of ours.
“Hisvin. The Corpsemaster.”
I just nodded, unwilling to speak the creature’s name aloud.
Darla’s face went dark. “Has to be,” she whispered. She squeezed my hand. She’d had her own brush with Hisvin, the same ni
ght I walked with the huldra. We’d neither of us ever forget, ever be able to forget.
It’s a hell of a bond to share.
Mama made growling sounds in the back of her throat.
“I should have seen the lie in them words,” she muttered. “I knowed good and well you wasn’t dead.”
Darla managed a smile. “I didn’t think so either. Not in my heart.”
Buttercup scowled at Darla and tried to slide off the table and wiggle between us. Darla pulled her into her own lap instead. Amazingly, the banshee not only tolerated the act, but smiled and settled against Darla.
Evis’s chair legs made a loud shrieking on the floor. He pushed it back into a shadowed corner and propped his hands against his chest, gloved fingertips together. “What a fascinating creature,” he said, quietly. His dark spectacles were fixed upon Buttercup. “She seems to be quite taken with you, Finder.”
His grin was wide and toothy.
“He’s been sneaking around feeding her corn bread since we got here,” added Gertriss, without the least hint of accusation.
Darla smiled at me. “Now that’s enough, both of you,” she said. “Markhat can’t help it if women find him charming. I myself do, at times.”
Mama snorted. She was clutching a dead bird in either hand, and she was careful to keep them both between her and Buttercup.
“That there ain’t no normal livin’ creature,” she said, putting a lot of rasp into it. “There’s old magic in its veins. Old dark magic.”
Buttercup responded by turning up her nose at Mama and resting her head on my chest. Darla laughed, and stroked the banshee’s hair.
“Poor dear. He’ll only break your heart.”
I sat Buttercup upright and shoved a biscuit in her hands. She took it and began to nibble, watching us from beneath that mane of clean but wild yellow hair.
“All right. It seems fairly obvious who brought you here. What escapes me is the why.”
“If—he—wanted us dead, there’d be no need to call us together first.” Darla made vague wand-waving motions with her hands. “He could just say poof, and we’d be gone.”
Mama nodded grudging assent, still keeping her suspicious Hog eyes fixed on the biscuit-gobbling banshee perched happily in Darla’s lap.
I nodded. “Well. Let’s assume for the moment that you-know-who lured you out of Rannit. I’m sure the Corpsemaster has his reasons. Unfortunately, there’s only one way to find out what they are.”
“You don’t mean that.” Darla’s hand closed on mine.
“I’m afraid I do,” I said. “I’ll wait ’til dark. Perhaps Mr. Prestley will step out with me. If that’s acceptable to Avalante, of course,” I added.
Evis waved a gloved hand dismissively. “I’m not here on behalf of Avalante,” he said. “I just happened to be visiting in the neighborhood and decided to drop in when I heard music. But I will be only too happy to accompany you later this evening.”
Mama made a snorting sound. “How you plan to find that devil, boy? You know where he is?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea, Mama. But that won’t matter. He knows exactly where to find me.”
“I don’t like it. We all ought to pile back into that fancy wagon and head for home, right now.”
“We wouldn’t make it a mile.”
“Boy, I told you I didn’t see nobody in them woods. Not a soul.”
“You’ll just have to trust me on this, Mama. They’re out there. None of us are going anywhere until this mess gets sorted out.”
Mama cussed. “What’s all this about things buried in the woods, boy? And what’s that there critter got to do with it?”
“Her name is Buttercup.” When I spoke her name, she looked up at me and smiled. Maybe she did understand speech, or was learning. “And I told you all I know. There’s a couple of hundred men out there, digging a big hole not three miles from here. Something came out of it and ruined a lot of timber. We were too busy running to see much more than that.”
Darla shivered. Buttercup gave her a quick hug.
At least the scratching and clawing had stopped.
“She’s really a banshee, isn’t she?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. She can howl loud enough to wake the dead. She can move without moving. And the people around here have been seeing her for at least thirty years, more or less.”
Darla produced a comb from somewhere, and began to gently pull it through Buttercup’s hair. Buttercup started when the comb first pulled, but after Darla let the tiny creature see and sniff the comb, she closed her eyes and let Darla begin to work out the tangles.
I ogled. “How do you do that?”
“She knows I don’t mean her any harm. Maybe she didn’t always live in the wild, either. Did you, Buttercup, honey? Did you ever live in a house, ever comb your hair and wear pretty gowns?”
Buttercup smiled, but didn’t open her eyes or reply.
“You ought not to make a pet out of that there thing,” said Mama.
Darla ignored her. Mama fumed.
“If the boss hadn’t brought her inside they’d have put her in a sack by now.” It was Gertriss who spoke, and her words only worsened Mama’s funk. “Banshee or not, it doesn’t deserve that.”
Before Mama could reply I asked Darla again about the message that had brought them all to Werewilk.
Delivered by a courier, one of the outfits downtown. She’d signed for it and even tipped the runner, who was the usual fleet-footed teenager with the pointed red messenger’s hat and traditional yellow shirt. Ditto for Mama.
Neither of them had thought it odd that two messengers had been dispatched, with their runs timed so that they would reach Mama and Darla at precisely the same time.
Next, I quizzed Evis about Toadsticker. He calmly but flatly denied it had any ability whatsoever to throw lightning around or yank full-grown wand-wavers out of their saddles.
I mentally chalked that small bit of arcane theatrics up to Hisvin as well. He’d find it amusing, no doubt, to saddle me with a reputation for wielding some fearsome magic sword.
Evis began to snore softly. Mama excused herself, claiming the need for a nap, but I suspect she intended to bully the nearest bunch of artists out of their beer. Gertriss and Darla remained. Gertriss because she dared not face the wrath of Mama alone, and Darla because she was hoping to talk me out of seeking Hisvin later.
I’d spent the night fleeing monsters in a midnight-dark forest. I’d crawled through tunnels, squeezed through stinking mud. I’d slain one wand-waver and saved one banshee and ruined one new brown shirt.
So I put Darla’s hand in mine, and I leaned back in the big old chair. I joined Evis in slumber land, just as the band started up somewhere in the House.
Chapter Sixteen
Neither Evis nor I got more than a couple of hours of sleep.
Lady Werewilk came back in well before lunch. Darla woke me by waving coffee under my nose.
I eyed the room. Buttercup was gone. Evis and Gertriss were gone. Mama was poking at something in a skillet on the stove while the cooks huddled in a corner and glared.
“Your assistant has the banshee upstairs,” said Lady Werewilk. “I believe she is trying to introduce it to shoes.”
“I wish her luck.” I took the coffee from Darla and had a sip. She’d put sugar and milk in it. I don’t normally take sugar and milk, but she knows just how much to add.
She’d also changed clothes. Gone were her brown pants and white blouse. Now she was all in sensible black, from her leather boots to her high-necked, long-sleeved black shirt top.
I pushed aside the realization that she’d dressed for a stroll in the yard, right after dark. I meant to go alone to seek out the Corpsemaster and Darla meant to go with me. One of us wasn’t going to get her way.
I managed a smile. “Morning,” I said. My back hurt, so I rose and stretched. “No invasions while I slept?”
“Not yet.” Lady Werewilk permitted herself a small f
rown. “But they’re not even bothering to hide anymore, Mr. Markhat. You can see them milling about just inside the tree line.”
I grunted. That wasn’t good. Darla nodded as though I’d spoken my thoughts aloud.
“I counted sixty-two about an hour ago,” she said. “And what’s this about you nearly getting choked by a skeletal hand? Something you forgot to mention?”
I shook my head to clear it. “I might have. I beg your pardon for the omission. But really, it was only a cursed skeletal hand. These days, that’s hardly worth mentioning.”
Darla frowned, crossed her arms over her chest.
“We’re going to have a long talk at the first opportunity, aren’t we, sugar lips?”
“Oh yes we are,” said Darla. “But right now you and the Lady need to speak. I’ll go upstairs and help Gertriss with Buttercup. Mama, care to join me?”
Mama grunted a negative. She was rummaging through cabinets now, muttering and grabbing, obviously in charge of Lady Werewilk’s spacious kitchen.
Darla rolled her eyes, flashed me a grin, and left. The scent of her perfume lingered.
“Let’s take a walk,” I said, to Lady Werewilk. Mama obviously wasn’t taking any hints this morning.
“Certainly. I need to make my rounds.” She smiled and brandished her short but lethal looking sword. “Have to keep up morale, you know.”
We left the kitchen. The hall was deserted. Music piped and tootled just ahead. Another party was in full swing.
“You are a remarkable woman, Lady Werewilk.”
She seemed pleased. “Why yes I am. But others so seldom realize this. What gave me away?”
“You’ve got a sinister army at your door. There’s a banshee upstairs trying on shoes. There’s a vampire somewhere taking a nap. And you take it all in stride. By the way, Evis is a friend of mine. I thank you for being so hospitable to him.”
She laughed. “Your friend from Avalante is the most gracious, well-spoken man I’ve met in years. He is always welcome here. Tell him so.”
“I will.” We left the hall, entered the common area at the bottom of the stairs. The band was playing, but no one was dancing.
“I’ve called a halt to the dances and the drinking. But I’ve ordered the music to continue. It keeps the soldiers outside confused.”
