Wolfweir (5 page)

But, as he makes his rickety progress around the edge of the clearing toward the parked circus wagons, he notes the sudden appearance of two riders who gallop as if "
hellbent
for leather" into the clearing.

Both riders are shrouded in billowing black capes lined with red silk. Both wear antiquated-looking
tricorner
hats. Their horses, reined in at the edge of the glaring firelight, stamp, frothing sweat.

He crouches in the cold grass to watch as the riders dismount.

The fat gypsy hastens over to the pair, still holding the Blue Orb, bowing obsequiously again and again -- bowing so low he nearly scrapes the ground with his sweaty forehead.

The short-tempered gypsy sorcerer "bowing and scraping" to these two mystery riders.
Why?

Then Alphonse sees, and his puppet teeth clatter. The two black riders are the strikingly pale and elegant Lord Edward and Lady Edward
Blackgore
.

(YOU'RE NEXT)

Under those black capes they're both dressed to the nines in what appear to be matched evening-out clothes, opera tuxedos even.

White bow-ties -- the scum!

He can't hear what they're saying, but he sees
Vesuvio
move to kiss Lady
Edwarda's
hand. She waves him off, scornfully, and
Vesuvio
bows again.

Lickspittle!
thinks
puppet Alphonse. Next the obese old fakir will be kissing their riding boots!

But no.
Lord
Blackgore
speaks sharply to the gypsy and gestures toward the cages.
Vesuvio
bows and shambles off, out of the glaring firelight.

The cages.
Lucia.

Alphonse is now thinking, in his hollow and frantic puppet head:
Haste. Go steal back your sword-cane already, puppet boy.

Alphonse makes all puppet boy haste, his gangly limbs rattling (cheap pine wood! he thinks) around the clearing edge to the circus wagon daubed with
Vesuvio's
sweaty, grinning mug.

He tries the latch.
Unlocked.
He lifts it and enters, shutting the flimsy door.

It's dim inside.

There's a dangling sailor's hammock. Clothing and underwear scattered underfoot.

Trembling, Alphonse knocks against an oil lamp, which rolls but doesn't shatter. He rights it, the oil sloshing.

He finds a box of matches on the same grimy table.
Strikes a match.
It flares with a hiss. By its light Alphonse sees:

-Boots, lined up regimental style.

-Boot polish.

-Rows of bottled hair-grease. Herbal extracts.
Snake oil.

-Wine bottles, mostly empty.

-Dirty plates in a heap, crawling with roaches. (Gross.)

**

E voila: grandfather's Toledo sword cane, stuck in a barrel with some Gypsy junk and a French horn.

Alphonse grabs it. As he turns to go, his match blinks out.

He drops it, fumbles in the box, lights another. Striking it with a rasp on
his own
forehead.

By this weak light, he glimpses a pair of silver-inlaid dueling pistols hung high up on nails.

Holy Marionettes! Alphonse thinks.

Alphonse leans his sword cane on the wall and clambers cricket-quick onto a grappa cask. He snatches the pistols and shoves them into his Basque-style red sash.

Next, scrabbling in the drawer of a cheap armoire, he finds a bag of powder and shot. This also he stuffs into the sash. He sticks the sword cane there, too.

**

He rolls the grappa cask to the door, pushes it wide. Then he bumps it down the three wooden steps. If we weren't made of wood, our Alphonse would now be sweating like a stevedore.

He rolls the sloshing cask across the wet grass, toward the lurid firelight.

Lucia, he beholds at a glance, is gone from her cage. The bear, gazing straight at Alphonse, lets out a small, sad woof.

Alphonse picks up speed, the cask bouncing as it rolls.

As he approaches the center of the clearing, he sees with pine-sap weeping puppet eyes: LUCIA.

But she isn't a little blonde girl now. She's a bristling-furred, fang-gnashing, foaming at the snout, blazing eyed White Wolf.

Chained to stakes driven into the grassy earth, she's whirling and snapping at the puppet boys stabbing at her with forked sticks.

Nearby stands
Vesuvio
, his greasy lips pursed in a smile, holding aloft the Blue Orb. No doubt it will play a role in whatever black magical ceremony the Gypsy has planned for Lucia.

He doesn't see Lord and Lady
Blackgore
anyplace. Maybe the
Vampyres
have stepped out to get into character, or to change into something more terrifying.

**

But he, Alphonse, has no time for heart stopping terror, nor for
so
much as a frisson of doubt.

He rolls the grappa barrel, bouncing and jolting, straight at the bonfire.

Dashing aside the clueless puppet boys like ten-pins.

Into the searing heat and light.

BOOM!!!

**

The explosion blasts
Vesuvio
to his knees. It's raining grappa-laced flames.
Puppet boys, transformed into living torches, dash wildly in all directions.

Alphonse runs to the Wolf Girl, ripping his sword free. Those iron chains -- the Toledo steel cuts them like tent ropes. Snap, snap, snap.

And Lucia, growling and bristling and wild, is free.

**

Whirling on Alphonse, the White Wolf bares her drooling fangs even as
Vesuvio
-- nimbly, for a fat man -- leaps from the shadows, swinging his hatchet like a lunatic chicken farmer.

Alphonse, dodging, parries with his blade and with a clang the hatchet spins off into the darkness.

He is bracing himself to run the astonished Gypsy sorcerer through the heart with his whip-thin length of steel even as Lord and Lady
Blackgore
float into the glare like monster bats.

Lucia lets out an electrifying growl. Alphonse, taking this as an invitation, leaps onto the Wolf's back, and they're off like a shooting star.
Running for their lives.

The Sewers of Paris

Alphonse does not stop to reflect that this White Wolf is four and a half times the size of the little golden-haired Lucia di
Fermonti
-- or that she has slavering fangs and bristling fur.

No. He leaps onto the Wolf, seizing her scruff in both puppet fists, the rapier gripped between his dentures, and they tear off like ball- lightning, the Wolf dodging tree trunks that appear to Alphonse only as dark, whizzing blurs to either side.

As they break into open space -- the grass whipping Alphonse's gangly wooden legs -- Alphonse sees it: the vast, silent MOONRISE.

So that's what the silly ghouls were waiting for.
Some kind of moonlit occult ceremony, thereby to transfer the Wolf's power to the
Vampyres
.
But no time for thought.

The Wolf is dashing through fields at breakneck speed, and Alphonse thinks with a rush of pleasure that even the
Vampyre's
frothing demonic black horses won't be able to keep this insane pace.

When he glances back, he can't see the bonfire -- it's not even a spark.

Then he glimpses, not far ahead, a moonlight shimmering curve of the Seine -- and a wooden bridge spanning the fast current.

A decrepit road sign reads PARIS, 2 km.

He pulls hard on the Wolf's bristling neck and points.

The White Wolf snarls and plunges left, downhill and through a flowering cherry orchard --ah, it must smell divine -- and then they are crashing across the planks.

But now Alphonse's pine-wood body turns to cold iron. The White Wolf lurches to a snarling stop.

For a black shape has settled down from the sky, congealed almost, to block their escape onto the far riverbank.

It wears a cape and a
tricorner
hat and its ghoulishly pale visage -- chalk green in the moonlight -- is pulled in a lopsided, toothy,
vampyric
leer.

It's Lord Edward
Blackgore
, brandishing what can only be a naked sword.

Alphonse glances fearfully over his shoulder just in time to see the other inky shape soaring down at them bat-like -- it's Lady
Edwarda
, screeching, a saber in her hand -- and without a thought or a feeling he draws the pistols from his waistband and fires one pistol, BANG, dead center at the chalk-faced harridan.

The report is so deafening that it drowns out the White Wolf's frenzied howl. The pistol ball strikes Lady
Edwarda
in the ample chest, spinning her like a top -- and as the Wolf springs at Lord
Blackgore
, Alphonse discharges the other pistol, point blank, into his
vampyric
grin.

Alphonse sees the face explode into a mess of blood and teeth and other stuff but, almost at the same instant, weirdly and magically recompose, grin intact, as the spent pistol ball drops to the planks.

It's a sight that might have been enough to kill the little boy Alphonse with fear -- but a puppet, luckily, has no heart for fear to stop.