CHAPTER TEN
By the time Branwell woke up, well past noon, the day was bright and clear, and Emily had long since fired her father’s pistol over the churchyard and reloaded it. Over breakfast Emily had told Anne everything she had learned—and had told Tabby too, and in fact the old housekeeper had added a couple of cautions: Carry a new-cut birch stick with one fresh leaf on it, and if the leaf wilts, quick get inside four stone walls; and, Put a bright copper penny under your pillow, and if it’s gone black in the morning you know your dream was an omen. They were old Yorkshire superstitions that the two sisters had heard before, but they both nodded soberly.
When Branwell stumbled down the stairs at last, he had of course missed dinner, but Emily had carefully saved him a plate piled with mutton and potatoes, and he fell to hungrily. Emily directed Anne and Tabby to the parlor and sat down across from him at the kitchen table while he ate. The back door was open, and a warm breeze swirled dust across the stone floor.
When he had eaten everything on his plate, Branwell asked for more of the mutton, and when Emily had fetched it for him he made quick work of it too. When he had finished it all and leaned back in his chair with a sigh, Emily sat down again.
“Good morning,” she said. “Afternoon, actually.”
He looked away from her. “I suppose I disgraced myself again last night.” His fingertips were bruised and Emily saw a streak of dried blood by his ear, but his hair was back to its usual carroty color. “Your man was insulting.”
“Not my man.” She frowned at him. “Branwell, listen—do you know what happened to you last night?”
“I insulted him first—” He rolled his eyes. “Very well, I had some sort of fit.”
“A fit. Yes.” She sat back and stared at him. “Tell me about Adam Wright.”
Branwell’s eyes widened. “I never saw him before yesterday!”
“Don’t be silly, you’ve seen him a hundred times in the village and in church.” Emily cocked her head and smiled. “Tell me.”
Branwell blinked, and a tear ran down his sunken cheek into his once-again scanty chin beard. “You have whisky here someplace.”
Emily got up and lifted the emetic bottle down from a cupboard shelf, reflecting that they would have to find another place to hide it now. She poured a splash into a glass, hesitated, then filled the glass half full.
She had barely set the glass on the table before he had snatched it up and gulped a third of it.
“I told you they have no place for me,” he said on a long exhalation as he set it down. “Not for me. Do you remember the time I came home at dawn, from the moors?”
“Of course. You said you had been out by Ponden Kirk.”
“I—yes, well I saw a midnight funeral there, a funeral pyre. It was for a dead animal, like a big dog.”
Emily nodded, recalling the grieving howls that had rung across the hills that night.
“I didn’t know it then,” Branwell said, “but Adam Wright was the one who set fire to the carcass.”
He was staring unseeingly into the glass, clearly reliving that night.
“You didn’t know it was him,” Emily prompted.
“I washed hair off my face last night, coarse hairs!” When Emily didn’t comment, he went on, “Adam Wright was naked, that night, but covered with fur. I shook his hand—his paw. And that dark little boy was there, and for just a moment he occupied my body—”
Branwell was shaking. Emily reached across the table and gripped his hand. “Listen to me, Branwell! It was that boy, Welsh, who bit you, out by the front steps, when you were eight or nine.”
“What? He never—I remember that a dog—” He paused, still staring blankly, and Emily knew he was rapidly correlating memories. He gave Emily an empty look. “When Wright shook my hand, it was recognition of kin, wasn’t it?”
Emily glanced at the burn scar on her knuckles. “I’m sure it was. What happened at Thorpe Green last year?”
“Good Lord, I’ve told you all about that—Mrs. Robinson and I fell in love, and her husband banished me—”
Emily smiled at him. “This is me.”
“I think I must have been drunk.” He rubbed his free hand across his forehead. “I lost consciousness, I—I must have had a fit, there was broken furniture—and—” He exhaled for several seconds and then looked up at her and spoke quietly. “Obviously it was brief. No one was hurt.”
“No one?”
He didn’t answer that. “I fled to my room,” he went on quickly, “and—yes, my fingers bled and there were new, coarse hairs on my face and hands. I cleaned myself up, but Mr. Robinson drove me out at gunpoint—hah!—that very night. I told myself it couldn’t happen again, and it hasn’t, until last night.”
Emily decided to let her unanswered question go. “I think we can take measures to stave it off until we can free us all from the . . . the illness in the land.”
Branwell finally pulled his hand away from hers. “You know how to do that?”
“Not yet. But in the meantime there are some things we can do, if you want to save yourself. Do you?”
“I’m not worth saving. But if you think you can keep him from taking me, I’ll . . . try.”
During the next ten days Emily spent a good deal of time melting nuggets of lead on the kitchen range and adding rust flakes to it to cast more pistol balls, for she was firing the pistol several times a day now: over the churchyard at dawn, at random stones on the moors, and at Ponden Kirk. She carried Curzon’s old dioscuri knife with her everywhere these days, in a makeshift pasteboard sheath strapped to the inside of her left shin. And on her walks she generally remembered to break a limb from a birch tree and pluck all but one of the green leaves off of it; and she kept a bright copper penny under her pillow.
Branwell’s resolve was half-hearted and short-lived—he gladly let Emily take his old pair of spectacles and the vial of oil Mrs. Flensing had given him, but he complained piteously when Emily took his regular pair too, and only gave them back to him every day after taking him on a short hike out to nearby Sladen Beck, where she made him splash through the running water. He flatly refused to wear the eyepatch she made for him, and after a couple of days he stopped bothering to walk around with one eye closed.
He mostly complied with her instruction to stay away from the Black Bull, but that was because he had exhausted his credit there and his father wasn’t at home to give him money to stop his histrionic threats of suicide.
Twice Emily was sure Branwell nearly suffered a relapse.
He generally balked at stepping into the stream of Dean Beck, but one cold morning he recoiled and snarled at her, and his hair stirred more than the wind could account for. Keeper barked in alarm and Emily looked into Branwell’s eyes and had to firmly repeat, “Branwell” several times before she sensed her brother looking back at her.
And one evening in the kitchen she had noticed him staring through his ordinary spectacles at a teacup, and turning it around and moving it back and forth as if to comprehend its shape and distance; he had been speaking, but his voice sank to a wordless rumble. Emily had stood up and crossed to the nearest pail of holy water and dashed a handful of it across his spectacles. The startled and petulant voice that protested had been Branwell’s, and she had taken custody of his spectacles for the night.
Emily very soon located an old pair of her father’s eyeglasses and smeared some of the oil from Mrs. Flensing’s vial onto the lenses.
Wearing them, she ventured out of the house—and saw ghosts. The blurred forms, bag-headed and branched in approximation of limbs, sometimes hurried toward her as she walked past the churchyard, and her remembered occasions of shortness of breath there were explained now that she could see the things crowding up to her and sucking through their gaping mouth holes. But she had always been able to make herself breathe deeply in those moments, and now she could see that the ghosts were repelled when she resisted them.
On a couple of occasions a human face, dimly retained, had been visible on a shapeless head, and once she had recognized the face of a baker who had died in the village during the winter. She had tried to speak to it, and then had had to beat a retreat, panting, when the thing had clung to her and snatched at her breath.
She even walked around the village, lifting the eyeglasses to see normally and lowering them to see the supernatural overlay. A couple of the villagers seemed to glow when seen through the spectacles; others seemed to walk in personal shadow, and she wondered if those people were soon to die. She uncharacteristically attended Sunday church service, and let Anne borrow the spectacles to see several ghosts kneeling in the aisle. Though the things were invisible to everyone else, the swamp-gas smell of them made several parishioners sniff and slide away along the pews.
Often she faintly heard the beat of music through the earpieces, and saw the ghosts ducking and bobbing in clumsy dance steps; and several times she caught vibrations like a scream, and saw a ghost flee down the street from some long-ago peril. Twice she had seen particularly panicked ones spontaneously vanish in a flash of flame; on those occasions even unknowing passersby had blinked and looked around.
Only once, a week after Curzon’s departure, did she wear the spectacles on her long trek out to Ponden Kirk. The spectacles showed her trees where there were none, and unfamiliar standing stones on hilltops; a long-ruined farmhouse on a hill had a roof when viewed through the lenses, and vague hunched figures were visible in the doorway and windows, staring at her across half a mile of heather; under a withered cypress in a gorge she had seen the three old women who had metamorphosed out of ignis fatui a week before, beckoning and calling after her as she hurried away; and when she was standing on the slope below the towering monument of Ponden Kirk and looking up at it through the smeared lenses, the big black stones of it had seemed to flex, as though it might unfold enormous arms and burst the slope soil to stand up on stone outcrop legs.
Charlotte and his father were due to return home from Manchester in a few days, and Branwell was dreading it. Anne sympathized with his sufferings, though it irked him that she couldn’t seem to really believe that he had actually begun to turn into a werewolf in Curzon’s parlor a week and a half ago; Emily, witness to it and aware of all his failings, somehow never swerved in her loyalty to him.
The three of them would certainly not tell his father, at least. But old Patrick would reportedly be able to see now, for the first time in years, and Branwell knew how shocked and saddened his father would be to see his son’s wasted appearance.
On a Sunday morning when Tabby and Anne and even Emily had walked down to the church, Branwell sat in the parlor, trying to read the new issue of Blackwood’s with one eye closed. He had promised Emily not to open the eye until she got back, but it began itching and he blinked both eyes and left them open—and found that the magazine had lost all interest now that he could read it easily. The manuscript of his half-finished novel, And the Weary Are At Rest, sat in a drawer in his room, but he couldn’t bear the thought of looking at the last shredded page and trying to remember what he had tried to write there.
The parlor, the house, the whole world seemed drained of significance. He knew that he was being kept safe by Emily’s incessant shooting, and her daily confiscation of his spectacles, and her rule about keeping one eye shut—though there had apparently been one or two near slips—but he did wonder why Mr. Wright had not come to see him during these ten days since the crows had been sent after Emily. What is going on, Branwell wondered, while I moulder here?
He tossed the magazine aside. Not allowing himself to think about what he was doing, he hurried down the hall and climbed the stairs, and he had pulled open the top drawer of Emily’s dresser before he realized what he was looking for.
And tucked between the pages of an almanac he found the old pair of spectacles Emily had taken away from him. The little vial of oil lay on a handkerchief beside the almanac.
He quickly uncapped the vial and dipped a finger into the oil and smeared it onto the lenses of the spectacles. He recapped the vial and slammed the drawer shut, and twenty seconds later he was standing on the front steps of the house with the spectacles perched on his nose.
The bright sunlight seemed harsher, seen through the lenses, and apparently the churchyard ghosts didn’t like to venture abroad in it, for he saw only one or two of the spider’s-nest forms moving between the gravestones. A couple of boys kicking a ball on the lane were clearly visible through the lenses but weren’t there at all when he lifted the spectacles, and a cat on the low wall was three cats when he lowered them.
Branwell actually laughed. He would go to the Black Bull, see the occult sides of its familiar patrons . . . but one of the ghosts had flowed over the low churchyard wall and was wobbling toward him.
He recalled how easily he had eluded the half-witted things on that rainy afternoon when he had feared that Emily had been killed, and he didn’t flinch. And this one was shorter than himself, scarcely three feet tall.
He stood and waited while the bag-headed thing approached him. The marsh-gas smell of it grew stronger in his nostrils.
It was flickering like a frosted glass windchime in a breeze, and for an instant, and then for a moment again, it seemed to be a little girl before reverting to its previous indistinct form.
And his scalp tightened in shock, for he recognized her. This was Agatha, the village girl he had visited last winter—she had been sick with cholera, and he had spent half an hour at her bedside, and read to her from the Psalms . . . evidently she had not recovered.
But she clearly remembered him! “Agatha!” he exclaimed, stepping toward her with outstretched arms. And she arched into his embrace—and the mouth in her rippling mushroom head opened, and all the breath was sucked out of Branwell’s lungs.
She tried to cling to him with twiggy arms, but he easily pushed her away and stepped to the side. His breath was no longer being stolen from him, but it came in hitching gasps because he was sobbing.
He recalled Charlotte’s scornful doubt when he had mentioned visiting the sick girl. She hadn’t believed he would do such a thing.
He shouldn’t have.
Sixteen years ago, at the direction in a dream of what he now knew was the Welsh ghost, he had tricked Anne and Emily into hiking out to Ponden Kirk—and leaving their blood there—by telling them that they would meet their departed sister Maria.
Thank God that had been a lie!
Maria was entombed in the family vault in the church—not many feet from the grooved ledger stone that covered a headless monster—and Branwell hoped that her ghost stayed down there. He didn’t want to imagine Maria as one of the mushroom-headed thistledown apparitions trying to suck out his breath.
Suddenly fearful that he might recognize her among the few ghosts visible among the gravestones, he snatched off the glasses and hurried back inside, where he forced himself to read, with great care, every article in Blackwood’s.
Emily was in her room, reloading her father’s pistol, when Branwell stepped into the doorway. She looked up warily, but the defensive frown on his face was his own, and he was wearing his ordinary spectacles, and he even had one eye virtuously closed.
He watched as she lowered the hammer onto the empty pan and pocketed the brass cylinder that contained gunpowder. She wouldn’t prime the pan and cock the hammer until she was standing below Ponden Kirk.
She had changed into her boots, and her wool coat lay on the bed.
“You always bring the gun on your walks?” Branwell asked.
She stood up, and wondered if his height had diminished during the year—she was at least six inches taller than he was.
“You never know.”
“All of us used to go on walks together,” he said. “Can I come along?”
She kept any expression from her face, but she was doubtful about his ability to walk three miles and back, these days; and she was uneasy with the idea of bringing him to Ponden Kirk.
“It’s a sunny day,” he said quickly. “I’ll keep one eye shut. I can’t go to the Black Bull anymore, and I can’t bear to sit indoors another day.”
She knew he was anticipating a very uncomfortable time when Charlotte and their father came home in a day or two; and his two near-relapses had happened at dawn and after dark—probably the sun had a dampening effect on the change.
“I’ve added Ponden Kirk to my daily pistol targets,” she cautioned him.
“Well—just don’t let it ricochet.”
She made up her mind. “You’d be welcome.”
And in fact he seemed fit enough as he fetched his coat and tapped down the stairs. Keeper came in from the yard as Branwell was buckling his boots, and soon the three of them were striding along the path that led west, out onto the moors. Anne caught up with them before they had walked a hundred feet, and she too seemed surprised to see Branwell taking exercise.
“Branwell!” she exclaimed breathlessly, holding her hat onto her head against the wind that tossed her fair hair around her face. “You’ll be as brown as Emily if you keep this up!”
In fact Emily was uneasy to see Branwell’s evident energy as the three of them and the dog climbed gorse-furred hills and picked their way over fallen cromlech stones, but she was reassured to see him step right into the stream of Dean Beck before shaking water from his boots and crossing on the flat stones after her and Anne and Keeper. The sky was a deep cloudless blue and the breeze over the hills lifted the weight of the summer sun, and even the black rectangle of Ponden Kirk, tiny in the distance at first but filling more of the view as they drew closer to it, didn’t much dispel Emily’s enjoyment of the day.
They paused at the foot of the slope that led up to the massive monument, its top level with the western plateau.
Anne squinted up at the stacked black stones. “We were just children,” she breathed. She held up her hands as if to frame the edifice in her vision. “But it looks bigger now than it did then. Do you suppose some atoms of our blood are still in that cave?”
Branwell shifted uncomfortably and took off his spectacles. Emily had known from the state of her dresser drawer that he had handled his proscribed pair today while she’d been at church, but this was his ordinary pair, and his left eye was shut.
“Take your shot,” he said gruffly, “and let’s go home.”
“Yes,” said Emily, pulling the pistol from the pocket of her coat. “I’ve just got to prime the pan.”
A child’s voice rang then from up the slope: “Your father need not die.”
Emily spun in that direction. The swarthy little boy in tattered white shirt and trousers had stepped out from around the base corner of the monument and now began walking barefoot down the sunlit slope.
“Once more I come to know of thee,” he called merrily to Emily, “if thou wilt surrender, before thy most assured overthrow.”
Keeper had quickly stood up, the fur bristling on his broad shoulders, but he was sniffing the air and swinging his head from side to side, and Emily quickly dug the brass cylinder of gunpowder from the pocket of her dress and uncapped it.
She recalled that Keeper had been able to sense where the boy’s physical form was actually standing, eleven days ago by Minerva’s temple, when she had been distracted by a projection of it.
“Where is he this time, boy?” she whispered to the dog.
“The son’s destiny is set,” said the boy, walking slowly but only half a dozen yards up the slope now, “and in a sense he will be immortal. But the father—he could be spared, and not die and fester in these fields.”
“They’ll both be spared,” said Emily through clenched teeth as she flipped up the pistol’s pan-cover and shook powder into the pan. Her hands were steady.
“Branwell’s soul has always been immortal,” spoke up Anne, “and consecrated to Jesus Christ.”
The boy laughed. “Ask him how his immortal soul fares! But no—no Hell for him—he will be beyond all cares, at rest with the weary, forever.”
The boy stared directly into Emily’s eyes. “Amen I say to you,” piped the child’s voice, “this hour of this fateful day is your final opportunity to surrender to me and, in merciful exchange, to save your father.”
Emily raised the pistol in answer.
Keeper tensed and bounded toward a patch of heather a dozen feet to the left of the Welsh ghost; Emily snapped the pan shut and swung the pistol barrel in that direction. The stones and grass of the slope wavered at a spot there, and she pulled the trigger. The gun fired an instant before Keeper leaped.
A black explosion of eight or ten crows burst away from Keeper in all directions as echoes of the shot rebounded away down the valley.
From the corner of her eye Emily saw Branwell fall to his knees as she raced to where Keeper was shaking something furiously. She slid to a stop and saw that the mastiff had the bloody ruin of a crow in his mouth. Another crow lay a couple of yards farther away, its head blown off by Emily’s pistol ball. The crows that had taken wing were flapping away above the plateau behind the crown of Ponden Kirk.
Anne hurried up and stood beside Emily. “Branwell’s fine,” she said. “Just weeping. Did you and Keeper kill the Welsh ghost?”
“I think we shortened him a bit.” Emily stared up at the towering black monument, and noted the position of the sun in the blue sky—it was well past noon. “Let’s get Branwell home quickly. I’ve got that knife, but I only prepared one pistol shot.”
The energy Branwell had shown on the hike out to Ponden Kirk was gone. Emily and Anne had to walk on either side of him with his arms around their shoulders, while Keeper walked beside them, looking around and behind. Several times Anne or Branwell called for a five-minute rest, and Emily made sure to drag Branwell’s feet through the Sladen Beck as they crossed it. The sun was hovering over the western hills when they finally reached the parsonage.
Branwell was exhausted, muttering about damnation. He didn’t pay attention to anything they said, so they pushed and pulled him up the stairs and flopped him onto his bed.
As Emily pulled his boots off his limp feet—for what she thought must have been the thousandth time—he muttered, “I need distraction—a book—”
Anne crossed to his bookcase and fetched a book of Coleridge’s poems while Emily found matches and a scrap of glass paper on the bedside table. She folded the gritty paper and pulled the match smartly through it, and when the match flared she lit a candle in a brass holder beside the matchbox. As she blew out the match she pushed the candle several inches farther from the bed.
Branwell held the book in one hand while he flailed about with the other, trying to fold his pillow into a comfortable shape, and Emily was glad she had moved the candle away. At last he was settled, holding the book right-side-up and peering at the pages through his ordinary eyeglasses.
Emily turned to leave, but Anne caught her eye and nodded toward the painting hung on the wall.
Emily had of course seen it many times before, but she paused and looked at it, and saw that the figure of Branwell was gone now, replaced by a pillar. She just cocked an eyebrow at Anne and led the way back down the stairs.
When they had hung up their hats and coats, Anne lit the oil lamp and Emily set the kettle on the range, and the two sisters sat down at the table.
“I don’t think,” said Anne, staring at her hands and flexing her fingers, “that I ever quite believed your . . . accounts of all this.” She turned to face Emily, frowning over a frail smile. “Minerva in a magically appearing temple! Branwell changing in the way you said. I’ve seen that little boy before, from a distance, but today—!” She made a fist and bit her knuckle. “Papa will blame himself.”
“He didn’t know. Not fully. And he—”
“Merciful God!” Anne had sat back in her chair so suddenly that Keeper stood up from beside the back door. “Emily! Branwell painted out the face in the picture!”
“Yes,” said Emily, alarmed at her sister’s tone.
“It was never a good likeness of him, was it? Who did it resemble?”
“It—” Emily’s shoulders hunched involuntarily and her face was suddenly cold. “No, you’re just—”
“Think about it! Recall the face in the painting, and the face of that demonic little boy!”
“A child and a young man—”
“Yes yes, but was it the same person?”
“Oh.” Emily gave a shaky sigh. “I suppose. Yes.”
“I was fourteen when he did that painting of us all.”
Twelve years ago, Emily thought. Welsh has been aiming at possessing Branwell for a long time.
“Why all this now?” said Anne.
“I believe Alcuin Curzon forced the issue,” Emily said, “when he killed the werewolf patriarch.” She found that she had to defend Curzon: “Though obviously it was all going to happen in any case.”
Anne took a deep breath and let it out, then nodded sadly. “Yes. All because our great-great-grandfather saved what seemed to be an orphan child from being thrown into the sea.” She shivered and went on, “An old pagan demon!” Emily recalled that their father had used that phrase when he had first told his daughters about Welsh.
“That’s what we’ve got,” Emily agreed.
Anne glanced at the ceiling and turned a troubled look on her sister. “Do you suppose a person can choose damnation? Effectively?”
Emily knew that Anne had, after some struggle, come to the conclusion that all souls would ultimately be saved. Emily herself had no such conviction, and simply tried to be true to her own isolated self and trust in the aspects of God that she derived equally from Scripture and experience.
“Not if we can help it,” she said.
They both jumped when the back door creaked open, but it was old Tabby who stepped inside. She closed the door against a gust of heather-scented wind and crossed to the range, rubbing her hands together.
“I’d almost fancy a bit of emetic in the tea,” Tabby said. “Emily,” she added, “when did you break off that stick?”
Emily looked over her shoulder at a short birch stick beside the door. She had broken it off that morning in the churchyard, and had stripped off all but one of the leaves as she’d walked back to the parsonage.
The leaf now drooped limply.
Anne was looking at it too. “Yesterday, wasn’t it? And in the heat of the kitchen . . .”
Emily stood up. “It was this morning.”
This hour of this fateful day, the dark boy had said today, is your final opportunity to surrender to me and, in merciful exchange, to save your father.
She hurried to her coat and pulled the pistol out of the pocket. “Anne, my loading kit is in my room, under the bed. Could you—”
She was interrupted by something harder than a knuckle rapping fast and loud three times on the back door.
“Miss Emily!” came a shout from outside—and she shivered when she recognized it as the voice of Alcuin Curzon. A moment later he had pulled the door open and lumbered inside. In his boots and long coat, with his mane of disordered black hair, he seemed bigger than ever, and his dark face was tense. In his right hand he held a flintlock pistol and in his left he gripped a dioscuri knife.
Emily quickly lifted her leg and snatched out her own dioscuri, which had once been his. “Who have you come to kill?”
He slammed the door and slid the bolt. “The Flensing woman has got a new head for your monster, and she and some man are coming to kill you. I came after them from Keighley and just passed them on horseback in that steep street of yours, but they’re close.” Tabby was staring at him with astonished disapproval, and he added impatiently, “I came to your back door to avoid the delay of being announced, and because I expected to find you in here.”
“Anne,” began Emily, “hurry—!”
She was interrupted by the boom of a gunshot just outside and the clatter of the door bolt bouncing on the stone floor.
And Emily leaped to snatch a jar from the high cupboard shelf.
Branwell had awakened a minute earlier to find that he was not alone.
The little dark boy had been sitting in a chair against the far wall, just below the painting that until recently had borne his adolescent likeness. His legs weren’t long enough for his bare feet to touch the floor.
“Our travails now are ended,” the boy had said.
“Not yours,” Branwell had said with shaky bravado, avoiding meeting the thing’s eyes. He had been tense, not quite sure he wasn’t hallucinating, and cautiously confident that Emily would be up soon to check on him. “Emily and Keeper killed your crows.”
“You think there’s a shortage of crows, boy?” Branwell had shivered to hear a child’s voice call him boy. “I could gather up grass to show a form.”
Branwell had noticed then that one of the boy’s arms ended in a smooth stump at the wrist. “It cost you.”
“Soon to be restored. Today I offered terms, some mercy, but—tonight I call in all the Brunty debts. Your father was always forfeit, and you and your sisters signed promissory notes in your bloods, on stone, sixteen years ago.”
From somewhere outside there had come the boom of a gunshot. “I believe,” the boy added, hopping down from the chair and walking toward the bed in which Branwell lay, “the ghost of your sister Emily is even now finding a new and unpleasing head to occupy.”
A chubby young man in a top hat was the first to shove the door open and leap through the doorway, and as he slid to a stop he whipped off his hat. With loud buzzing, at least a dozen big wasps came looping up out of it, rocking heavily in the warm air. Then he dropped an apple-sized black ball—when it hit the floor it exploded with a stunning bang and a dazzling flash of light, and he leaped at Curzon.
Blinking against the glare in her retinas, Emily saw Mrs. Flensing stride into the kitchen. A heavy satchel swung at the woman’s hip from a shoulder strap, and she was ignoring the wasps—and now Emily could see that she was holding a pistol in each hand, though her right hand looked like a deformed crab with waving antennae. The woman swept the pistol barrels from one side of the kitchen to the other. Tabby climbed hastily onto a stool.
Keeper sprang at Mrs. Flensing—she stepped to the side and her right-hand pistol banged and flared, and the mastiff tumbled sprawling on the floor. Emily tossed aside the glass jar she had grabbed from the shelf.
Emily was looking straight down the bore of the other pistol when Mr. Flensing pulled the trigger, but in the same instant Emily lashed her fist to the side. She was clutching Mrs. Flensing’s two dried fingers, and the pistol jerked out of line when it fired. The boom of the shot battered at Emily’s ears, and her already-dazzled eyes stung with the burst of smoke in her face.
Another gunshot shook the air an instant later, and Emily was able to see Mrs. Flensing rock backward, blood jetting from between her bared teeth. Curzon dropped his fired pistol and lunged at the woman with his dioscuri knife—but the chubby young man leaped onto his back and clawed at his face, tearing away the eyepatch, and the points of Curzon’s knife wavered and fell short.
Tabby had grabbed another of the glass jars from the high cupboard shelf, and she swung it in an arc over the room, scattering iron nails in all directions.
Anne was on her feet and snatched the kettle from the stove; and, wincing, she shook off the lid and flung the boiling water into Mrs. Flensing’s face. The woman dropped both pistols and roared. The wasps had disappeared in Tabby’s hail of cold iron, but now the kitchen was suddenly as cold as the moors in midwinter.
Curzon jerked his knife backward over his shoulder; it thudded to a stop, and the man on his back screamed and slid off of him to the floor—
But Curzon stepped back, staring at Mrs. Flensing. His breath was steam.
Mrs. Flensing’s scalded face had turned black—and Emily’s ribs tingled in shock as she realized that the blackness was fur, and below the broad nose black lips were pulled back to expose fangs. The satchel fell from the woman’s infolding shoulders and her knees bent backward as she crouched, and when she sprang at Curzon there were claws protruding from her blunt, furred hands.
And what met her with a bone-jarring impact in midair was a similar creature—Curzon’s ruptured coat flapped around the shoulders and flanks of a mastiff half again as big as Keeper. Loud guttural snarls shook the now-icy air as the two big animals crashed against the wall, tearing at each other with fangs and claws. In the deafening bestial racket Emily and Ann ran back to crouch by the black-iron range, and Tabby hopped down from the stool to stand beside them. The cold air was astringent with a metallic smell.
The fangs of the Curzon creature ripped savagely at the other beast’s snout and neck, and the Flensing thing rolled on its back to shred the remains of Curzon’s waistcoat and shirt with its hind claws. The rippling dark fur of both creatures was splashed with bright red blood.
The one in the tatters of Mrs. Flensing’s coat broke free with a shrill wail of rage and bounded out through the open back doorway into the night, leaving her big satchel on the floor. The young man who had come in with her leaped past the Curzon werewolf as it thrashed on the floor trying to get its legs under itself; he picked up Mrs. Flensing’s satchel and Curzon’s dropped knife and took one wide-eyed look back, his face a mask of crisscrossed blood streaks, then blundered against the doorframe and fell onto the stones outside.
The thing in the tatters of Curzon’s coat hiked itself to its feet and spun toward the three women on the other side of the room. No glint of recognition or humanity showed in its unblinking black eyes. It flung the table aside and rushed directly at Emily with open jaws and red-streaked fangs, and she lunged at it with her dioscuri held in a fencer’s thumb-and-two-finger grip.
The creature jerked its head aside, and her knife plowed deeply into its shoulder.
She was braced for the impact of the thing’s massive body, but the knife in its shoulder stopped its rush like a pistol ball—though it had taken worse wounds in the last few moments from the Flensing werewolf—and it recoiled back and tumbled to the floor beside Keeper, who was beginning to twitch and roll his head.
Emily stepped forward cautiously, still holding the knife extended.
The body in the remains of Curzon’s coat and trousers was shifting, creaking and popping, changing shape. Groans were wrenched out of the flexing throat.
With a startling clatter of claws on the stone floor, Keeper stood up. A raw graze showed in the fur above his eyebrow ridge, but he was alert as he looked to Emily.
On the floor, her attacker wiped clumps of hair from its shortened face with bloody hands, and then it was recognizably Alcuin Curzon who rocked his head from side to side to look around at the room. He drew his legs up and tried to roll over, but the arm below the shoulder Emily had stabbed just slid limply on the floor.
He coughed, spat blood, then said hoarsely, “They’re gone?”
“Yes.” Emily still held the knife ready.
“Are you—unhurt?”
“Yes,” she told him, “because I stabbed you, in the shoulder. I was aiming for your eye.” His suffering gaze was helplessly fixed on hers, and she nodded toward Anne and Tabby and went on, “You were about to kill the three of us.”
He sank back, letting his head knock against the stone floor. “Do it now, for the love of God. Through my eye to my beast brain.” When she didn’t move, he thumped a bloody fist on the floor and managed to yell hoarsely, “Do you care nothing for the lives of your wretched family? Do it!”
Emily shifted her grip on the knife. “Two weeks ago I asked if you would try to kill me. You said you would not. I discover what your word is worth.” She knew it had not truly been him that had attacked Anne and Tabby and herself moments ago, when the change had been on him—but it had been his body, and could be again.
Curzon groaned and closed his eyes. “You’re right, it’s worth nothing, I’m worth nothing, do it!”
He’s a werewolf, she told herself, and took a tentative step toward him—
—When a full-throated scream from Branwell echoed down the stairs.