The Wolf Witch Read online

  Emmeline nodded, stiffening internally at the thought of the Interceptors coming to take away her book or drag her brother back to that horrid cell after all they had done to keep him out. “Thank you, Mr. Talbot. Do you have any idea what for?”

  He released her arm and shrugged, his momentary gravity replaced with his usual nonchalance. “Could be a tête-à-tête for all I know. I just thought you would want to know what he’s up to. By the by, our rooms are directly across the hall from each other. I’ll walk you up.”

  ***

  Emmeline. Emmeline sat up so fast her head swam. For a long moment, she couldn’t recall where she was, but upon seeing the heavy canopy bed and the mullioned windows whistling in the night breeze, she remembered the trip to St. Herve. She had told herself she would read to pass the time until she could sneak down to see what Wesley was up to, but apparently she was more tired than she thought. Rubbing her sheet-creased cheek, Emmeline searched her wardrobe for her dressing gown.

  A voice lingered at the edge of her mind. It had sounded so close she could have felt the speaker’s breath on her neck, but her room was empty save for the inhuman wail of the wind outside the panes. She shivered despite herself as she reached for the pocket watch resting on the night table. Twenty minutes past two. She might be able to intercept Wesley before he reached the study. She needed to know why he was at the party. He hadn’t been on English soil long enough to make friends. Perhaps the colonel just wanted to show him war memorabilia or more swords. She rolled her eyes at the thought.

  The cold seeped through the soles of her slippers as she carefully opened her door and listened for anyone in the hall. She had half expected to find Nadir Talbot watching her with a sultry grin, but his door remained shut. All she could hear were the normal sounds of sleep and the wind rattling the windows, and even with them, it was far quieter than London had ever been at night. Keeping to the edge of the boards, Emmeline made her way down the hall, pausing at each creak or hushed sound. While living with her aunt and uncle, she had spent many a night sneaking about. There was really no reason for it. They didn’t mind if she prowled through the house at all hours as long as she didn’t wake her bone-tired uncle or make a mess. She enjoyed the thrill of not being discovered and secretly speaking to the dead. If she sat in the parlor, sometimes she would catch the newly deceased lingering by their bodies. Much like the living, they loved to talk, and working with the queen, her uncle ended up with some rather interesting people in his basement laboratory. Some knew they had died, others had to be told, but either way, she enjoyed their stories and company. But she had forced herself to stop when the ghosts grew more assertive and refused to acknowledge that it was her gift on her terms. She needed those boundaries, but her life got a lot more lonely without them.

  Carefully feeling her way down the stairs, Emmeline cursed herself for not asking Mr. Talbot where the study was. Now she would have to slink around the first floor and hope she didn’t run into anyone in the process. As she reached the base of the stairs, hushed voices carried from the parlor. Mouthing a curse, Emmeline eyed the sparse furnishings of the entrance before settling on the tight space under the stairs. Emmeline shoved her body back as far as it would go and released a long, slow breath to silence her racing heart. She kept her head low as the two men walked past, but when she raised her gaze, her eyes met the back of Wesley’s grey jacket. If her brother had smelled or sensed her, he didn’t let on as he spoke to the colonel. When they reached the next room, Emmeline shook the dust from her hair and padded after them, keeping a room between them.

  As she lingered in the dining room, she heard the study door slide and click shut. Creeping closer, Emmeline paused at the creak of boards in the hall outside the study. Was someone else trying to listen in? Even in the dark, she thought she could make out a shadow outlined in candlelight at the end of the hallway, and it was getting closer. Emmeline flattened against the wall. She had no reason to be out of bed skulking about, and the last thing she needed was someone thinking she was a thief. A faint breath of cold whispered against her fingers as she ran them across the stone. Sliding her hand along the mortar, she felt the rough edge of a door. In her mind’s eye, she could sense its outline and the hall behind it. She shoved the tapestry atop it out of the way to find a ringed handle. With the clipped steps growing closer, Emmeline pulled the iron ring with a stifled grunt and slipped inside. Biting back a screech at the tangle of webs coating her face and neck, Emmeline yanked the stone in place and closed her eyes.

  Please let the spiders be dead, she prayed as she furiously wiped at her face and hair with her sleeve. She had expected it to be a servant’s corridor, but from the cobwebs and the dank stench of stale air, she realized she was wrong. Only a scant amount of light made it through the cracks under the threshold and she couldn’t tell if the other person had left. Stepping back from the doorway, Emmeline focused on the heat in her breast, following it down until it bloomed at the end of her fingertips. The flames danced, illuminating a narrow passage barely wide enough to fit Emmeline’s shoulders. At the faint lilt of voices, Emmeline walked further into the gloom, hoping to find a spy-hole or passage but instead found the sudden drop of a staircase. Emmeline, the voice from her dreams called again. Her pulse echoed in her throat. Drumming her toes in her slippers, she closed her eyes. She needed to go down. Something called to her, and it wasn’t the insistent call of her book or the desperate grasp of the dead. Emmeline straightened her back and hugged her dressing gown closer. She had to trust that whatever it was wanted her alive.

  Carefully scaling the uneven, slippery steps, Emmeline emerged in a vast, low-ceilinged room. Columns and arches held up the ceiling, reminding her of the catacombs. Save for the rough stone work and what looked like a dusty altar, the room was empty. Silence hung heavily over the space as if an audience waited in anticipation. Emmeline knew that feeling and did her best to bolster walls before they could be breeched. As she walked deeper into the room, her gaze trailed to the carvings littering the floor. Every few feet, a slab had been inserted between the cobbles. Each had a different carving, but out of the twenty she could make out from the center aisle, most were pictures of curling, snarling wolves standing beside stalwart men. At the end of each stone, a name had been carved in sharp letters, but when Emmeline squinted at the spindly text, she noted some had heoruwearg or mearcweard beneath the names but most read wulf.

  Reaching the end of the row, a slab set apart from the others caught her eye. Emmeline fed the flame as she knelt down until it formed a palm-sized ball. A woman stared back at her from the stone. Her eyes were overly large and her body dipped in exaggerated curves, but instead of standing beside the wolf like the others, it wound around her legs. Below the name Ceolwin, it read wulf wicce. A pang of recognition rang through Emmeline’s chest. She didn’t need to read Old English to understand.

  Wolf Witch.

  The air in the crypt had grown heavier with each grave Emmeline passed, but she tried to ignore it. Something waited at her back. She hoped it was Wesley but knew it wouldn’t be. She knew the cold pull of ghosts. Slowly rising, she turned to find a crowd waiting for her. The ghosts were old. They were more suggestion than form, but she could still make out their faces. Men and women waited in tunics and long, layered dresses. They stared back at her like hollow-eyed saints. Fear pulsed a steady tattoo in her breast. She hadn’t dropped her walls; she had done nothing to encourage them, yet they had been able to manifest. How powerful were they?

  “Who are you?” Emmeline asked, her voice abrupt and loud in the empty space.

  “Do you not recognize your kin?” a deep male voice said, echoing all around her.

  As he spoke, wolves appeared in outline over their faces, disappearing as quickly as a flash of lightning. Emmeline swallowed hard and the flame guttered in her hand. She was cornered by a pack of wolves. The man who she thought had spoken drew closer. Out of all of the people she could see, he was dressed most sumptuously. H
e wore a fur-lined cloak with an elaborate gold brooch at his collar, but everything below his chest faded to shadow.

  “Don’t be afraid of us, little witch,” he said, but she could hear the guttural growl of the older words beneath her power’s translation. She had experienced it first in Italy on her trip. She had thought an English ghost had followed her until she listened closely and noticed the bounce of Italian beneath it. This language was harsher, and though she could pick out a few words, most were beyond her understanding. “We are the wolves who ruled, lived, and died on this land. Some of us were the last of those wolves.”

  “And I’m one of you?”

  He gestured behind her with his chin. “Did you not recognize yourself?”

  Following his gaze, Emmeline trailed to the carving of the dancing woman. “The wolf witch?”

  No one spoke or moved, but images poured forth of bonfires and beds. Wolves running through the thick forests as a woman stood among them. When she spoke, the air rang with energy and smelled of berries and rain. The wolves surrounded a stag, snapping and baring their teeth, but when she called, they left the creature to return to her side. In seconds the wolf was a man, wrapping his arms around her and catching her in a kiss. The scents of the forest filled Emmeline’s nose and caught in a knot of emotion in her breast. Freedom, joy, and ferocity tumbled together with her visions of the woods surrounding her home. The woman danced and sang, small shoots of holly growing at her feet with each verse. When Emmeline shifted her focus to the crypt, she found one of the women watching her with a small smile.

  “Are you related to my father?”

  He nodded.

  Emmeline watched them, wishing she knew their names. Visitations from ancestors were rare and powerful. She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “Why have you come to me?”

  “You must stop them. What they are doing is not what they think.”

  Suppressing a huff of frustration, Emmeline closed her mouth. Spirits had a way of being obnoxiously obtuse even if they could no longer lie. “Who? Do you mean the Interceptors?”

  The leader’s eyes went wide and pupil-less. His features locking into an unnatural rigor. “The heoruwearh are coming. They’ll bleed the country dry and feast upon its corpse. Beware.”

  Emmeline’s ears popped painfully at the sudden suck of energy as the crypt fell dark. Blinking, she slowed her heart to feed the dying flame cradled in her palm, but her ancestors were gone. The heoruwearh? It sounded a little too much like werewolf. Emmeline shivered against far more than the cold. Something was coming, something bent on destruction, and whether she liked it or not, she had to do something.

  Chapter Eleven

  Shared Bonds

  Wesley sat in the billiard’s room long after the clack of balls and disparate chatter had ended. He had had too much scotch. After abstaining for so long he had lost his tolerance, and now his body felt pleasantly warm and fuzzy, which was bad, very bad. But he didn’t care. The wolf hovered under his skin, lazy but restless. His eyes traveled to the woods beyond the glass. Maybe tomorrow he could go out for a walk and let the wolf free for a while. Closing his eyes, he tried to focus on what he had learned. The not-wolf was somewhere in the house. He had smelled it vaguely at dinner, but between the food and the guests, he couldn’t pinpoint who it came from. Though it was fainter than it had been at the crime scene, he was certain it was here. Someone had invited him to the party to discuss werewolves, yet he had found none, as far as he could tell. Roulet hadn’t been the one in London to find him at the park, so who had discovered who he was? He wanted to blame Miss Jardine’s beau. He had seen him after his release, and Miss Jardine had probably told him all about how her stupid brother got caught by the magic police. Wesley shifted to feel the rub of his revolver under his coat. If anything went wrong with this meeting, there was no way he was going back to the Interceptors’ gaol. He’d take care of it the Pinkerton way.

  “Mr. Bisclavret?” Colonel Roulet stood in the doorway with only a candle to illuminate his features. The face that had been bright and animated during dinner suddenly looked tired and haggard. Wesley had seen that look on his father in the hotel. “Are you ready?”

  Nodding, Wesley rose and followed Roulet through the halls. Wesley drew in deep breaths, searching for the smell of the not-wolf. As they crossed the foyer, he slowed his steps. He smelled a whiff, fairly recent, but mainly he smelled Emmeline. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of her citrus soap mixed with the dusty aftertaste of her magic. Traces of other people lingered in the rooms they wove through, but he couldn’t discern from whom they came nor did he care. When they reached the threshold of the study, Roulet glanced down the hall before turning on the lamps with a hiss and silently pulling the door shut. Wesley winced at the abrupt brightness as Roulet motioned for him to take a seat.

  “Drink?” he offered. “I have sherry and scotch stashed away.”

  “No, thank you, sir.”

  Roulet nodded before pouring himself a glass. His hands shook under the weight of the heavy decanter, and Wesley wondered if he was merely nervous or if he suffered from a soldier’s palsy. He had seen men like that who had fought in the War Between the States and were left with more than physical scars. Sinking into his chair, Roulet took a long swig before setting the glass down and regarding Wesley with a loosely furrowed brow.

  “You don’t look how I would picture a werewolf.”

  The wolf raised its hackles, but Wesley’s face remained impassive. “A werewolf?”

  “Let’s not play coy, Mr. Bisclavret. I have no intention of reporting you to the authorities or creating undue unpleasantness. The fact of the matter is, even if I hadn’t known, your name’s legendary origins aren’t exactly subtle.”

  Marie de France’s lais had been Eudora’s favorite bedtime story growing up. His father would recite the tale of the courtly werewolf who had been betrayed by his wife and forced to stay in wolf form only to be saved by his king when he proved his fidelity. That Bisclavret was rumored to be an ancestor, and when the wolves were caught in the crossfire of court intrigue, his family had fled to Spain and then France. His father often told them of how his great-great-great grandfather had come to Canada and then brought the family finally to Louisiana where they would no longer have to fear persecution for their wolf or Catholic blood. In Louisiana they could grow roots deep enough that they became part of the land, the Rougarou.

  As if reading his thoughts, Roulet frowned and said, “What you have in America is a far cry from what we have here. But you know that firsthand.”

  Wesley wanted to remind him that the country had large swaths of lawlessness and could barely keep itself together, so werewolf regulations were low on the list of the government’s priorities. Instead, he said nothing.

  “Please don’t think I’m trying to badger you, Mr. Bisclavret. Frankly, I don’t know how to broach this topic. I know of your arrest for shifting in London. It was very bold of you.”

  Was it reverence he sensed in Roulet’s tone? “I didn’t think twice about it at the time. Survival was more important.”

  “Survival.” He drummed his fingers on the glass in his hands. “You’re probably wondering why I asked to speak to you. I promise it’s nothing too clandestine. I just… I just can’t speak of it with everyone around.”

  “You’re a werewolf, too.”

  Roulet looked up at him, his eyes flickering with surprise followed quickly by betrayal and shame. “Is it that obvious?”

  “No, but why else would you ask me to come? We don’t know each other. Well, I don’t know you or anyone else here.”

  “Except Miss Jardine. I heard she was the one who came to your rescue.”

  Anger flared under Wesley’s skin, catching the wolf’s attention and making his ribs tighten. “If you don’t mind me asking, how do you know all this?”

  “They had a spy in the Interceptors’ Headquarters.”

  They. “Then why did none of your people lif
t a finger to help me?” he asked.

  It came out harsher than he intended, but he was furious. Someone had known, someone supposedly on his side, and they had done nothing. A girl who didn’t even know him did far more. The colonel released a tired sigh and ran a hand along his beard.

  “I have no say over what they do, and I don’t agree with their tactics. They said they couldn’t risk exposing themselves, and I understand the need for secrecy. Still.” He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say more but instead he paused and seemed to gather his thoughts. “Mr. Bisclavret, I’m merely providing a venue for this meeting in hopes of gaining answers for my own questions, but I am beginning to think they don’t have any more answers than I do and that this is all a grand experiment. That’s why I wanted to speak to you. Do you think you can help me?”

  At the pleading look in the man’s eyes, Wesley’s anger ebbed. How many people had looked at his father that way? “I will try, but first, I need a few answers of my own. Who has spies in the Interceptors? And why are we all here?”

  “I don’t know who their spy is or who has contact with them, but they are the descendants of the wolf families who were hunted in the Cull. They want to bring the wolves back to England, and they need help to do so.”

  The Cull. Every family who came from England spoke of those lost to the king’s purge of werewolves from his court and wolves from the countryside. One too many times they had stood in the king’s way, and if their strength, bonds, or lands posed a problem, then he would simply pay to have them killed. Animal and human alike had been hunted to extinction, and only those who fled across the channel or renounced their connection were allowed to live. His family had stuck it out as long as they could until they were forced to flee to France. They would never give up their wolves. The wolf rubbed against his mind at the thought. To never run through the forest or feel the wolf’s thoughts mingling with his own again would feel as if a part of him had died. Would he survive it? Would he want to if he could?