Wolf in Shadow-eARC (54 page)

“Hmmpph,” Rhian turned her back on him, eliciting another chuckle.

They resumed their trek up the hill in battle formation. Rhian found herself walking alongside Gaston.

“So, girl on the train, you are a dark horse, or should that be dark werewolf?” Gaston asked.

“I’m not a werewolf,” Rhian answered truthfully. “But if it helps you to think of me as one, be my guest.”

Heorot was perched on top of the ridge, surrounded by twisted, leafless trees. The wooden mead hall was rectangular with a thatched roof, from which smoke drifted although there was no sign of a chimney.

A loud groan bellowed, seeming to come from the earth itself. A mound of earth beside the hall unrolled and stood upright on two legs. Two arms disengaged from the loose soil tumbling around the trunk. Earth-covered eyelids opened to show bloodshot eyes. A mouth with fangs like a
T. rex
roared like a minor earthquake. The thing overtopped the hall, at least four meters high.

Jameson said. “Sergeant!”

“Sir?” Gaston replied.

“You and your men, full auto, the earthy looking chap with the attitude.”

“Rock and roll, boys,” Gaston said.

The surviving gamekeepers started firing before he had finished giving the order. Rhian put her hand over her ears to shut out the hammer of the guns. Earth flaked off the troll in strips, carved away by the streams of bullets. Gary and Max added their contribution and Grendel shed soil. The material of his body continually rearranged to maintain shape.

Grendel was smaller when the guns stopped hammering, but hardly small. He kept on coming at a slow lurch. Gaston snapped out an order and his two remaining men ran in and threw what looked to Rhian like cricket balls at the troll before diving to the ground. Concussive thumps rocked the monster, chipping off more of its bulk. Gaston changed the clip on his gun and resumed automatic fire in short bursts.

Grendel dropped to all fours and rolled over on his back. Jameson walked up to him and put two bolts between his eyes and two into the middle of his trunk. The troll’s eyes winked out and he shuddered, becoming just a mound of earth again.

“That should keep him quiet for a while,” Jameson said, reloading the bolt pistol. “He will regenerate of course. That’s the way of trolls, but we should be long gone by then.”

“A bit of an anticlimax,” Frankie said. “Grendel gave Beowulf one hell of a fight.”

“Beowulf only had a sword,” Jameson replied. “My lads have H and Ks and grenades.”

“Humans get more dangerous every year,” Karla said, looking at Max.

He shrugged. “We can adapt.”

“Can we?” Karla asked. “I wonder.”

Gaston and his men kicked open the door to the hall and deployed inside, followed by the rest of the team.

Rhian gagged on the smell of rotting flesh. Heorot was a charnel house of scattered body parts and offal in various stages of decomposition. There was enough material here to keep an international conference of forensic scientists in work for a year.

“Christ, I knew people had gone missing, but there must be the remains of dozens here,” Jameson said.

“It’s London, Major. Hundreds deliberately disappear every day, hundreds more arrive unannounced from the provinces, and that’s before you include the illegals living off the grid,” Gaston said.

“Blood magic,” Frankie said.

The worst part was that the body parts twitched with unnatural life as electrical sparks jumped from piece to rotting piece. Long, thin wire worms writhed slowly among the carnage, connecting body parts. Peristaltic waves moved slowly up and down their bodies in complex patterns.

The top half of a man’s body was nailed to a wall, arms splayed in an obscene half crucifix. His chest had been sliced vertically and the ribs spread out and nailed back. His jaw hung almost off on rotting gristle. It twitched spasmodically, rattling out something that sounded like Morse code.

“It’s like an alchemist’s computer built for Genghis Khan,” Jameson said in disgust.

“Nobody touch anything,” he added, completely unnecessarily as far as Rhian was concerned. “This isn’t a Hollywood bomb and it can’t be shut down by cutting a few wires. Gaston, you and your people stay by the door. Frankie and I will move down the end, to the throne.”

Gary, Max, Karla and Rhian, went with them. Jameson looked as if he was going to object but decided against it. Rhian picked her way delicately through the butchery. The roof of the one-room building was supported by wooden columns in two lines. Heads hung from them by their hair knotted around wooden pegs. They chittered constantly, making insectoid noises.

The remains of a man in a laboratory coat that had once been white, but was now various shades of rust brown, sat on the wooden throne. Bronze spikes pinned his wrists to the arms of the chair.

“King Hroðgar’s magic throne, the one place that Grendel could not despoil,” Frankie said, almost under her breath. “This would be the center of the magic.”

The man on the throne was dead, wireworms reaching from the floor to bury in his flesh. They probed into all orifices, whether natural or the product of decay.

“Doctor Vocstrite, I presume,” Jameson said lightly.

Presumably he was trying to lighten the mood, but Rhian found the joke in bad taste. To her horror, the man’s eyes opened and stared at Jameson. His mouth worked, trying to form sounds despite being filled with a pulsating wire worm reaching down his throat. At first the sounds were mere gurgles, but eventually Rhian discerned words.

The man was repeating “kill me, kill me, kill me,” over and over again. His dead eyes pleaded with them.

“Not to worry, old chap. It’s almost over,” Jameson said, glancing meaningfully at Frankie.

She took off her rucksack and busied herself setting up her apparatus.

The sitting man shuddered and closed his eyes, to Rhian’s eternal gratitude. Frankie began her spell, not bothering to put up a pentagram or circle. Rhian was not sure if they were irrelevant in the Otherworld or whether there was simply no place to draw one on the carpet of flesh. She was expecting something extraordinary in the way of magic, but Frankie just did what she always did, burning herbs and chanting. Frankie always said magic was nine-tenths willpower, and the ritual was mostly to aid concentration.

Rhian felt the buildup of charge that she associated with spellcasting. An almost translucent sparkling mist formed and rotated gently around the throne, gradually thickening into streamers of colored fog.

A bellow sounded in the distance.

“That bloody troll is coming ‘round, Major,” Gaston said from the other end of the Hall.

“After Grendel, Beowulf had to defeat his even more ferocious mother,” Jameson said.

“Terrific!” Gaston said.

“And after that there was the dragon that finally topped Beowulf.”

“Fecking great, it just keeps getting better,” said a trooper, fingering his weapon.

“Be quiet, lads, and let the lady work,” Jameson said.

The magical vortex whipped around the throne like a whirlpool of water marked with various dyes. Frankie pulled a pathetic little bundle out of her rucksack. It was wrapped in ancient bandages.

“A mummified cat, a powerful animal totem in Egyptian magic, to take the place of blood magic in our ceremony,” Frankie said by way of explanation.

She chanted a little more, kissed the mummy, and tossed it into the vortex. It bounced off the wooden throne and lay among the carnage.

“Isn’t something supposed to happen?” Jameson asked, after a while.

“Yes, I don’t know. I’ve never tried to perform an Ancient Egyptian spell before,” Frankie said slightly hysterically. “Something’s wrong. I need time to think.”

Another deep bellow sounded, closer than before, and it changed to howls of anguish.

“I think Mummy just found the remains of Junior,” Jameson said. “Time is something we are clean out of.”

“I know why the spell has failed,” Rhian said, tiredly.

“Really?” Jameson asked neutrally.

They all looked at her with doubt-filled eyes. Rhian wished they were right, wished she was just a silly little girl with an overactive imagination, but she was far more than that. She was the wolf, and she knew what they didn’t. She felt what they couldn’t. She heard the howl of the pack over the frozen steppe.

“What is it, Snow White?” asked Max, he alone taking her seriously.

“Do you remember, Frankie, in Lundenburh when you pretended to be Freyja? You were accompanied by a raven and a wolf. Why was that?”

“The goddess Freyja is Odin’s female partner of war and battles, and she controls half the Valkyrie. Odin is accompanied by two wolves and two ravens, so why not Freyja? I could only get one of each, but the Danes were predisposed to accept Freyja as having just one of each totem, as a mere goddess. Typical male sexism,” she said, looking at Jameson.

“You’re missing Rhian’s point,” Jameson said. “The cat was an Egyptian symbol. I understand why Miss Arnoux chose one, this being an Egyptian spell, but we aren’t in Egypt. We’re in Northern Europe, where the raven and the wolf are totems.”

“Don’t, Snow White, we’ll find another way,” Max said.

It was strange how the men understood but Frankie still hadn’t got it. Perhaps she didn’t want to get it.

“But we don’t have a raven . . .” Frankie’s voice trailed off and she gazed at Rhian in horror.

“We have a wolf,” Rhian said, moving towards the vortex.

She found she wasn’t afraid at all. Perhaps this was what it was all for. Why she was fated to wear Boudica’s brooch, to wear the magic artifact with Morgana’s wolf symbol. James’ death would finally mean something and the karma would be all played out. She smiled at her friends, Frankie, Gary, even Max. In different ways, she had come to love them all, but it was time to join James. She had loved him above all. James, the one person she could not protect when he needed help. She would summon the wolf and jump into the vortex, and her death would mean something. Perhaps the saving of so many lives would wash the stains from her soul.

She closed her eyes and called to the wolf.

“Hang on a moment,” Jameson said.

His hands ripped open her blouse. She opened her eyes in shock.

“Jameson,” Frankie said, outraged.

He gripped Morgana’s brooch and pulled hard, using his other hand to anchor the chain against Rhian’s neck. A link broke with a snap and Jameson had the brooch. He threw it into the vortex. Rhian had one last glimpse of the wolf symbol before the brooch exploded in a soundless yellow flash that was brighter than the desert sun, more searing than an atomic test.

CHAPTER 28
LOOSE ENDS

“Snow White, wakey, wakey, Snow White,” Max said.

Lips touched hers and Rhian woke, opening her eyes to see.

“Why is it you end up sick every time I take you out?” Max said.

“Probably something to do with your personality,” Rhian said coldly. “I believe I can walk if you put me down.”

Actually, that was a slight overestimate. Max had to steady her until the world stopped rotating. The Admiral’s house was in flames. Gaston and his men sat on the ground, watching the fire. Karla and Jameson left the house, then Gary and Frankie staggered clear. Smoke drifted off their clothes.

Rhian realized that she had only been unconscious for a few seconds. She had been hit hardest by the collapsing magic field, perhaps because of her link to Boudica’s brooch. Max must have grabbed her as she fell and carried her out of the fire.

“Um, thanks, Max,” she said, reaching up to kiss him on the cheek.

He waved a hand languidly. “Life would be so much duller without you, Snow White.”

“I’m called Rhian,” she said, without much heat. “I am glad that is over. It is over?”

“Absolutely,” Frankie said, in between coughing smoke out of her lungs. “The whole infernal engine has been wiped.”

“Well,” Max said, looking up at the lightening sky. “It will be dawn soon, so I must be on my way. Can I give you three a lift?”

Frankie shook her head. “Looks like it will be a nice day, so why don’t we take the river taxi? A slow boat ride will do us good.”

“Don’t forget to post the check,” Gary said.

Max smiled and waved a hand while heading for his car.

“Are you sure you don’t want to rejoin The Commission, Frankie?” Jameson asked. “We would all be glad to have you back on board, wouldn’t we, Karla?”

“Ecstatic,” she replied, without any enthusiasm.

“I don’t think so, Jameson. I kind of like being my own boss, and it will be nice to go back to locating lost cats and curing sick buildings. I’m all apocalypsed out.”

“As you wish.”

The three friends walked towards the river, Gary with a woman on each arm.

“You’ve got my number, phone,” Gaston said to Rhian.

She smiled and waved a hand. She couldn’t decide whether she would call him, but she would put it in her mobile’s contacts list. It would sit next to “Max.”

“Actually, in all the excitement, I haven’t had time to tell you my news,” Gary said.

“Something nice happened?” Frankie asked.

“Not really. The company management have been in touch to tell me the Swan is to close. They’ve decided not to refurbish but sell it off, austerity and cutbacks and all that. I’m afraid you are out of a job, Rhian.”

“Never mind, I’ll find another,” Rhian said. “Maybe you’ll want to employ me in that swish new wine bar up west you will be managing.”

“’Fraid not, they are letting me go as well. Austerity . . .”

“And cutbacks and all that,” Frankie said.

“Yes, but I do have some good news for you.” Gary produced a page torn from a notebook. “I managed to negotiate a payment-on-results fee from Jameson. After all, you were doing The Commission’s job for them. I pointed out that failure would inevitably forfeit the contract, given it would destroy London and possibly the rest of Western civilization as well, so what did he have to lose? He signed like a lamb.”

“Jameson didn’t mention it,” Frankie said.

“I think he’s forgotten in all the excitement. No doubt an invoice will refresh his memory.”

Gary handed to paper to Frankie, who stared at it for quite some time.