“We keep the beast in the cellar,” Bainbridge said by way of explanation, handing Drew the lantern he’d just lit and lighting a second for himself.
The beast.
The creature.
It.
Drew’s skin crawled with uneasiness. He dreaded what he was about to see, and with his wolf pacing anxiously inside him, he was worried as to how he would react when he entered the cellar. He, Marguerite and Wynne had all agreed that Bainbridge must be kept alive for questioning, but without the steadying influence of the others, Drew worried how his unruly wolf would react when he saw Alys. Muzzled.
And then there was the thug-manservant. Drew had not liked how the man had looked at Marguerite, and even knowing that she could eviscerate him without breaking a sweat did not entirely relieve Drew’s qualms about leaving her alone, particularly when there was a second man at large somewhere. Two men who might well know about their kind.
“What can I expect to see?” he asked Bainbridge, as the man fiddled with the hook on the door of his own lantern. “The beast is a werewolf, is it not? Will it look like a wolf? Or a man? The skeleton I was shown had a human body, though the head was canine.”
Bainbridge met his eyes. His smile was disturbing, knowing and amused. The smile of a man who knew he was about to shock his audience.
“This beast is not like the skeleton—that was clearly some other sort of hybrid creature,” he said. “This beast—which I can assure you is a werewolf—has two distinct and separate forms: a wolf form, and the form of… a human female.”
Drew did not have to feign shock. Despite everything, having that confirmed aloud rocked him to his core and he felt himself pale.
Bainbridge’s eyes gleamed with pleasure.
“What form is she in now?” he asked faintly.
“Presently, it is in its human form,” Bainbridge said, adding, “My apologies for correcting you but it is important that you do not anthropomorphise these creatures. They will take advantage of any pity you show.”
Swallowing back nausea, Drew said, “How am I to know it is a wolf? For all I know you may just have some woman chained up to trick me.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Bainbridge said, “When we unmuzzle the beast, it will transform near enough immediately to its wolf form. They do that when they are weak, you see, to heal their injuries. We can leave it in its wolf form for a few hours before we must bind it again.”
“Bind it?”
“They can be trapped in their human forms with bonds made of silver. But you will see all of this momentarily. Come—follow me.”
Lifting his lantern. Bainbridge led Drew to the rear of the kitchen where there was a hatch in the floor. Taking hold of the heavy brass ring, he lifted the wooden hatch, the underside of which was marked with a number of complicated glyphs daubed in what looked like dried blood.
“What’s that?” Drew asked.
“A protective spell,” Bainbridge said, his tone matter-of-fact. He stood aside, revealing a flight of narrow stone steps—or at least the first few steps, before the profound darkness from below swallowed them up.
A wordless groan came from the gloom below, a terrible noise that made the hair on the back of Drew’s neck stand up. It sounded like some dumb creature in agony, pleading for death. He glanced at Bainbridge in alarm but the man only quirked a brow.
“After you,” he said.
Heart racing, gut roiling, Drew set his foot on the first step. Immediately, he recoiled, overwhelmed with powerful scents of terror and despair. He almost cried out from shock but somehow managed to stay silent, realising that the spell must be keeping the scents contained somehow, so that he could only discern them when he made physical contact with some part of the cellar chamber.
“What’s wrong?” Bainbridge said behind him.
“Nothing,” Drew said and began to descend, holding his lantern high. At first the dark was so profound—and the cellar so large—that the lantern did little to illuminate the space, but as he gradually moved downwards, and Bainbridge followed him with the second lantern, he began to see the edges of the place—the walls on each side, the stone-flagged floor, the long, low shape of a trough against one wall… and finally, what looked like a mound of rags slumped against the further wall from which another of those terrible, agonised groans emerged.
Drew froze, unable to move for a moment, till Bainbridge nudged him, saying crossly, “Come on, let me down. You can stay back if you wish.”
“Sorry,” Drew muttered, and descended the last few steps, stepping aside to let Bainbridge move past him.
Bainbridge began busying himself with the familiarity of man going about a daily task. He hung his lantern up on a hook, then stuck a taper into it to borrow a flame which he used to light two separate sconces of candles on opposite walls.
“Now, now,” he said when the bundle of rags groaned again. “If you don’t stop making that noise, I’ll have to leave you as you are rather than unmuzzling you for a while. You don’t want that now, do you?”
Silence.
“That’s better,” Bainbridge said approvingly, bustling forward and taking a handhold of the fabric covering the creature. It wasn’t rags, Drew saw as he dragged the material aside, but a tattered, dirty old blanket.
Bainbridge slung the blanket aside to reveal a small naked figure, curled up on her side, her thin arms covering her head defensively.
“Up!” Bainbridge barked, prodding her buttocks with one booted foot.
Drew couldn’t breathe. His heart was racing so hard he thought it would burst out of his chest, his wolf so close to the surface he felt like he might shift any moment.
The figure did not move.
“Up!” Bainbridge snapped again, and this time he reached down, grasping one of the woman’s wrists and yanking her up into a sitting position. For a moment, her other arm flailed as she desperately tried to cover herself with it. At first she tried to cover her face, then dropped her arm to shield her breasts, bending her chin to her chest to hide her face instead.
For a moment, Drew just stared at her downbent head, trying to make sense of what he was seeing: four metal bands enclosed her skull, intersecting at the top of her head. The rear band ran from the top of her head to the nape of her neck and the side bands ran down each side of her head, covering her ears. But it was only when Bainbridge grabbed the chain attached to the contraption and wrenched her head back, that Drew saw what this was: a branks—a scold’s bridle.
The front band ran down the centre of the woman’s forehead to the middle of her eyebrows where it divided into a two-pronged “V”. Each of those two bands ran down either side of her nose where they met a horizontal band that encircled her chin and neck, joining with the side and rear bands to fully enclose her head. Her mouth was tightly covered by a thick metal plate that was riveted to the same horizontal band. There would, Drew knew, be another metal plate inside her mouth, pressing her tongue down. Muting her.
This was, after all, designed as a punishment for nagging wives—and others who spoke out of turn. Though in this case, it was something more.
Though the metal was dull and tarnished, Drew knew it was silver, not only because Bainbridge had said so but because Drew could feel its repellent power from where he stood—and because he could see what it was doing to this woman—to Alys. The silver had burned away her hair and skin, leaving inflamed red welts on either side of each tight band that crossed her head.
Her eyes were dull and hopeless, and she did not seem to recognise that Drew himself was a wolf, but then she was clearly extremely weak, her wolf imprisoned and her body poisoned by the silver.
Drew made himself breathe deeply, fighting an instinctive desire to shift and attack Bainbridge. He needed to be calm. His first priority was to get the branks off Alys, something that neither he nor Marguerite would be able to achieve with its being silver.
“So,” Bainbridge said. He was watching Drew carefully. “What do you think?”
Drew met his gaze. “I’ve never seen such a wretched creature in all my life. Do you really expect me to believe this is a werewolf?”
Bainbridge gave a short laugh. “Prepare yourself, Niven. You’re about to see this creature’s true form.”
Pushing her head forward, Bainbridge drew out a key and undid a mechanism at the back of the branks, then lifted the rear band, which was on a lever. The bottom band loosened first, then the whole contraption sagged, listing to one side, the metal plate over Alys’s mouth sliding down to reveal a livid red welt of the same rectangular shape. The tongue plate stayed where it was though, and Alys made a distressed sound—she seemed to be trying to spit out the plate without success.
“Come now,” Bainbridge said, inserting his fingers into her mouth. “You know you can’t do that with your tongue all burned away. Let me pull it out.”
Drew retched then, unable to conceal his horror any longer, but Bainbridge didn’t seem notice, or perhaps he just didn’t care. He was too busy working the tongue plate out of Alys’s mouth while she drooled blood and gagged and made heartbreakingly inhuman noises with her ruined mouth.
Then Bainbridge began the business of pulling the branks off her head roughly. It was a tight fit on her—it must have been made to measure—and the metal was stuck in places to the welts and sores the silver had made, but he tugged it free without any care for Alys’s comfort. And perhaps that was the best way because the instant Bainbridge lifted it off her—just as he had said would happen—she began to transform, slumping to her hands and knees, spine arching as her body began to crack and remake itself. Watching her, Drew realised that in her weakness, Alys’s change would be slow and painful.
“It is changing now,” Bainbridge said, his voice ripe with satisfaction. He pointed at her sobbing, twitching body. “You will see it in the limbs first. Look, here in the forearm.”
Drew became aware of a new and subtly powerful scent in the cellar. Alys’s scent. It was complex and unfamiliar and he felt a familiar desire to pull it into his lungs and hold it there, to learn it and to know it in a deep, wolfish way.
Instead he forced himself to keep talking.
“How long does this change take?” he asked. He was acutely aware of how vulnerable Alys was just now, and that Bainbridge was equally aware of it. If Drew moved on him, knowing he had to keep him alive, Bainbridge might be able to take advantage of that. It was best to keep him talking for now.
“Quarter an hour or so,” Bainbridge said, his tone clinical. “Though sometimes as long as half an hour when the creature is very weak, as it is now.”
“My God,” Drew said faintly. He considered his own shift slow, but quarter an hour? Longer even? Alys’s face contorted into a pained rictus and he ached to take her pain from her.
“I know,” Bainbridge said, misunderstanding him. “It’s an extraordinary sight, is it not? I remember the first time I witnessed this—it must be all of seventeen years ago. Back then, I never imagined that one day I would become the creature’s master myself.”
Seventeen years. Christ above.
“How long—” Drew began. He paused, swallowing back another wave of nausea to pass. “That is, how long have the Order had her—it.”
“The creature was captured by a witchfinder named William Cargill in fifteen hundred and ninety-three with the aid of an accused witch”—Bainbridge paused meaningfully—“so you see why the Order considers the creature so important. It is at least two and a half centuries old, and perhaps far older than that. I am the creature’s nineteenth master and each master has made a careful study of it in hopes of discovering the secrets of its seeming immortality and ability to heal itself.”
Over two hundred years in captivity—would Alys even be sane now? Drew glanced at her. She was still on her hands and knees, though she looked ready to drop to her belly with exhaustion as another whole-body contraction racked her frail form. Inside him, his wolf whined and paced. He closed his eyes briefly, gathering himself, forcing himself to be patient.
“You say the capture was achieved with the aid of a witch?”
Bainbridge nodded. “In return for her freedom, the witch imparted secrets to Cargill regarding the binding of werewolves with silver. Cargill had a silver yoke made before the ambush took place. Over time, her bonds have been adapted according to the preferred method of her various masters. The present arrangements were my predecessor’s invention. I may revisit them in time.”
Alys’s scent intensified, swirling so powerfully that Drew wondered that even a human like Bainbridge could not seem to detect it. And then, above their heads, came a crash and a muffled scream. With his enhanced hearing, Drew had heard it distinctly, but he could see from Bainbridge’s uncertain expression that he had only heard a faint echo.
“Did you hear something?” Bainbridge asked, brows furrowed.
“No,” Drew said. “Did you?”
“I thought—perhaps not.”
Another thud came then—but this one was softer and Bainbridge didn’t notice. He began to talk about his work with the creature, but Drew wasn’t listening now. He was tuned into the sounds from upstairs—and the scents. Scents of blood and panic and fear, and of deadly Marguerite getting closer as she moved down through the house, floor by floor, in a sweet haze of violets.
He saw the moment that Alys scented her. Her head, which had been hanging low, came sharply up. Her jaw had begun to lengthen and to human eyes she would appear truly terrifying, a misshapen monster. But to Drew she was one of them—one of their pack—and all he could see was her pain and her need. And briefly, for a moment as Marguerite’s scent reached her—her joy.
She threw her head back, throat arching, and howled. Brokenly, painfully, but still she howled and Drew saw from Bainbridge’s reaction—falling silent and staring at her, eyes wide—that this was not something she usually did.
And then Marguerite answered her.
Marguerite’s howl was angry and vengeful.
“What was that?” Bainbridge cried. “Who—what—?”
A man screamed—the second servant, Drew surmised—a bloodcurdling sound that abruptly ended. Bainbridge certainly heard that—since that slaying had taken place much closer to the cellar.
“I think,” Drew said gently, “that is my wife.”
A figure began to descend the cellar steps.
Drew stepped back, putting himself between Bainbridge and Alys, deciding that he would make protecting the injured wolf his priority and leave the rest to Marguerite.
It was not, however, Marguerite, who appeared at the bottom of the steps. At least not immediately. Wynne preceded her, his face set in a grave, faraway expression.
He raised his arm and pointed at Bainbridge. “Witch killer,” he said softly. “I would slay you myself if my mistress did not wish to do it.”
Bainbridge stared at him in horror. “How do you know I-I—” He stuttered to a halt as Wynne moved aside and a new figure descended.
Drew had thought she might arrive in her wolf form but she had shifted back after slaying Bainbridge’s servants. Her clothes were gone though. She descended the stairs, naked and bloody as a maenad. Her mouth was covered in blood, her chest and shoulders spattered with it. She was terrible and beautiful at once.
Her eyes were wolf eyes.
Alys made a guttural noise and Marguerite’s face softened briefly, then hardened again when she returned her gaze to Bainbridge.
She said, “I told you that I am my husband’s right hand, did I not?”
Bainbridge’s eyes were wide. “Yes,” he whispered.
She cocked her head to one side. “I lied.” A quick, mirthless smile. “He is not my husband. And I am not his right hand. He is mine. But some things I like to do myself.”
Drew saw the intention harden in her eyes.
“Mim, wait,” he said quickly, breaking the unsaid rule that he did not use that name. “You said—”
“That does not matter now,” Marguerite said. “For what he has done he will die. Now. No mercy. No time. No reprieve.”
She moved towards Bainbridge and he stepped back, stumbling over the tattered blanket he’d thrown so carelessly to the floor earlier
“Wait—” he stammered. “P-please!”
“You like to watch wolves change?” Marguerite asked, her voice dangerously pleasant. “Watch this. One last time.”
And with that, she shifted, leaping forwards in the same instant, one moment a woman, the next a wolf, roaring into her beast as she knocked Bainbridge to the stone floor and tore into his throat.