The monster turned its head and its hellish eyes found Lawrence. It uttered a low, hungry growl.
Lawrence scrambled to his feet and ran. For his life and soul and sanity, he ran. He saw Nye ahead of him, running toward his bicycle, which stood against a tree near the tethered gelding. The constable was screaming like a girl as he fumbled for his pistol, but the lanyard had become hopelessly tangled. Lawrence ran past him. The knife in Lawrence’s pocket was useless, his pistol was in the fire, but in the scabbard on his saddle was his father’s Holland & Holland elephant gun. Monster or not, the huge bullets in that rifle would blow this beast’s head off.
The last of the vigilantes rose up in his path and gruffly brushed Lawrence aside as he took up a shooting stance, seating the butt of the shotgun hard into his shoulder, aiming with professional skill along the barrel. Lawrence threw a backward glance to watch the shot, but the werewolf was not there.
Startled, Lawrence slowed to a half-run and looked around. People still screamed and ran, but the clearing was empty except for the dead and the bear, who had snuck back into its cage and cowered there, trembling like a whipped dog.
The vigilante shouted at Lawrence. “Where is the goddamned—”
It came out of the shadows to their left. Moving with inhuman speed it had circled them and come at them out of the forest, and it drove into the gap between Lawrence and the vigilante. One powerful shoulder clipped Lawrence and sent him spinning into a gorse bush. Lawrence wrestled himself onto his back and tried to find his footing, but as he raised his head he saw the werewolf use one paw to tear the shotgun from the vigilante’s hand and toss the weapon a hundred feet into the darkness. With the other it slashed him back and forth, and the man seemed to come apart like layers of a paper doll.
Then it flung the man toward Lawrence and vanished behind the row of vardos. Nye stood at the edge of the campfire, his face white with shock and splattered with drops of blood. Lawrence slapped his shoulder to shake him out of his stupor.
“It’s gone around back. I’ll circle to the right, you go to the left. We can catch it in a crossfire.”
The constable licked his lips and gagged as he realized that he was tasting blood. But his face hardened and he nodded and set off, pistol in hand. Lawrence lost sight of him almost at once.
Nye crept along the edge of a line of utility carts and saw the rearmost vardo. It trembled and shook, rocking sideways onto one set of wheels and then the other.
“Got you, you bastard!” Nye growled and hurried over. When he was ten feet from it he saw a figure slumped in the shadows. A man. He had no throat and his head lolled grotesquely from a single strand of tendon. The cart was no longer trembling. Had the monster done its bloody work and fled? Nye stepped over the dead man and parted the curtains with the barrel of his pistol. The interior of the vardo was black and he heard nothing. Then something bumped against his arm and he jerked it back.
He stared at it without comprehending what he was seeing. His coat sleeve was there, and the cuff of his shirt. But the hand that held the pistol was . . . gone.
A red geyser pumped from a jagged stump. The pain didn’t hit him for a full second. But by then a massive, shaggy arm had reached out of the shadows of the vardo and grabbed his gaping lower jaw. With a jerk Nye was plucked off the ground and pulled into the vardo. He fell forward into the shadows and there was no end to his plummet into darkness.
LAWRENCE NEVER HEARD Nye’s muffled scream. Instead his attention was drawn by the cries of a little girl who wandered through the carnage, crying aloud in Romany for her mother. Off to his left he heard—or hoped he heard—a woman’s voice calling for her child. He turned, spotted her, saw the moment when she located her child and began to run.
Then, up ahead, he saw the last vardo in the line begin shaking violently, then it abruptly stopped as the werewolf leaned its head and shoulders out to watch the woman race by. In an instant, driven by predatory mandates built into the core of its being, the creature leapt out of the vardo and gave chase.
Lawrence was on the wrong side of the line of vardos. He saw the creature in glimpses between the wagons as it raced down the line after the woman. Lawrence followed the line of flight and knew that the monster’s prey was not the woman . . . but the girl.
He was moving before he realized it, running, racing, legs pumping as he tore past fire and blood toward the little child. The mother cried out, the creature spotted him and howled in hate and hunger. It threw itself into a long dive, but Lawrence was already in motion, already leaping, one hand holding his pistol, the other out and curled, scooping up the child, and as he fell with her he could feel the heat and mass of the werewolf pass directly over him.
The mother screamed, and the little girl screamed, and so did Lawrence. But the werewolf screamed loudest, a shriek of frustration and fury that tore pine cones from the trees and burst the worms in the earth beneath its clawed feet.
Lawrence rolled off of the little girl, who was dazed but unhurt, and as her mother raced up he thrust the child toward the Gypsy woman’s desperate arms.
“Run!” he roared, and the mother gathered up her child and ran.
Lawrence bent and picked up someone’s fallen gun. He’d landed badly and pain lanced through his joints, but he ate it and used it to fuel his own hate. He snapped off one shot, another, sure that he hit the thing, but it kept moving. Not toward him, but across the camp. He pulled the trigger again but it clicked on an empty chamber.
Lawrence clambered to his feet and staggered toward the horse, who was trying to tear free of its tether. Lawrence grabbed the bridle and wrenched the horse’s head around so he could get at the rifle, and he yanked it from the scabbard. He spun and rushed back to the edge of the clearing, throwing the rifle to his shoulder, needing to kill this thing, to hurt it. For Ben. For everyone.
But the werewolf was not merely escaping. It was smarter than an animal. It had a cold and evil cunning, and there beyond the campfire, forgotten in all of the panic, sat another child. A boy, silent and shocked by everything that had happened, too terrified to move and confused by having been abandoned. The werewolf ran toward it and suddenly the boy screamed out in a shrill wail. The werewolf threw a brief look over its shoulder at Lawrence and for a moment it seemed as if the goddamned thing was grinning at him as if to say, You can’t save them all!
“No!” Lawrence bellowed, racing to catch up but not daring to take his shot. The child was too close.
Then the monster bent low and snatched the child off the ground, tucked it under its muscular arm and leaped across the fire. By the time Lawrence had reached the fire and ran around it, the werewolf and the boy were gone.
Lawrence stumbled to a stop, his chest heaving. All around him there were people groaning in pain or crying in loss and terror. A man with a bloody stump sat with his back to a tree, staring in dumb amazement at the arm that lay between his outstretched heels. A woman held something in her arms that might have been an infant, but there wasn’t enough left of it to tell. A muscular Gypsy with a broken nose and knife scars on his arms and face stood staring into the interior of a wrecked vardo, silent tears streaming down his face. The place smelled of death. Everything was splashed with bright blood.
The rifle sagged in his grip and hung from one nerveless hand as Lawrence looked around at all of the carnage that had been wrought by one creature in . . . how long? A minute? Less? Seconds?
The creature was gone. The leaves on the bushes and trees still trembled from where it had passed. The slaughter was over.
But it was chasing the boy.
Lawrence knew that it was death to pursue the thing. Only a madman would consider it. Only a fool would do it.
With a growl that began deep in his chest, Lawrence Talbot gripped the rifle in both hands and plunged into the woods.
Hunting something that could not exist.
Hunting a monster.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The moonlight showed
him the way. He moved as fast as caution would allow, following a path of destruction that marked the creature’s passage. Broken tree limbs, bushes smashed flat, the marks of clawed feet torn into the sod. Lawrence may not have been as practiced a hunter as his father, but he could follow this track. The monster was making no effort to hide its passage.
And then the underbrush thinned and the ground became rockier, and the trail petered out and vanished entirely. Lawrence slowed from a run to a trot to a cautious walk, bending low to search for any marks scratched onto the hardpan.
But there was nothing.
“No, goddammit,” he growled. “Don’t do this . . .”
He kept moving forward, hunting now by instinct rather than evidence. He climbed to the top of a hillock and saw that the rocky field led down to another part of the forest. A far older part, with huge trees that reached up from the earth like the fingers of buried giants. Their branches formed a heavy canopy that was so dense that it made the ground shrubbery very sparse. Though the ground cover was thinner there were bogs that belched up gray steam.
Taking a fresh grip on his rifle, Lawrence crossed the rocks and entered the old-growth forest. Once inside, the moonlight was filtered to a murky gloom which made forward progress much more dangerous. Cold sweat burst from his pores and ran in rivulets down his skin and under his clothes.
“Help me,” he murmured to a God who he had long ago ceased to worship. His faith had been torn away by the death of his mother, but here in this forest, in this terrible place, as he hunted a creature whose very existence was proof of a larger world, he sought for any help that might be offered. “Please . . .”
The forest was vast and empty and with every step it grew darker. The mist was cloying and smelled of sulfur and decay.
He pressed on, and after another quarter of an hour the pillars of the old trees began to yield to younger growth and thicker shrubs. But even here there was an innate hostility. The shrubs were mostly barbed holly or wild rose, and they nipped at his clothing like little teeth. Nettles clung to his trousers and the stiff leaves of wild rhododendron lashed his cheeks.
The ground beneath his feet began to yield but the mist had grown so thick that he had to bend and feel with his fingers to confirm that he now trod on thick moss. The ground sloped down and then began to rise again, and Lawrence stalked through the mist, thoroughly lost, his heart sinking as all hope of finding the child drained away drop by drop.
Then he heard a sound far off to his left.
Voices.
He stopped and strained to hear. Men were shouting, but the words were strange. Romany. The Gypsies were out hunting, too. Enough of them must have recovered from the attack to organize a hunt.
Good, he thought. Maybe their greater numbers would drive the creature toward him, like beaters flushing a tiger. But a moment later he knew that this guess was wrong. There was a single high scream of awful pain that rose above the mist and then stopped with a terminal abruptness. A second later Lawrence heard gunshots and more shouting.
And then the night was torn by the long, heart-rending howl of the werewolf.
For a moment it rooted Lawrence to the spot. Visions of claws and teeth and blood flashed through his brain, and in the next moment a murderous rage boiled up in his chest. He snarled aloud and began running through the mist, aching to reach the fight before it was over, needing to be the one to bring this monster down. For Ben’s sake, he needed that.
He ran and ran, but the mist distorted the sounds of the fight. One moment the gunshots seemed to be a hundred yards ahead of him and then they were way off to his right. Then to his left.
He kept running, tripping over roots, slipping on moss, fighting his way forward until something huge and dark loomed above him out of the mist. Lawrence slid to a stop and raised his weapon, but the shape was too tall, too solid.
With the rifle ready, he crept forward. A second giant form emerged from the swirling mist to his left, another to his right. And then Lawrence understood where he was and what he had found.
It was the ancient graveyard with its towering monuments. Somehow, lost in the mist, he had circled all the way around to the very edges of his own family estate. He had been here less than an hour ago. He realized with a queer jolt that his mother was buried in a mausoleum not half a mile from where he stood. How had he not remembered that earlier when he’d ridden through here on his horse? Now the idea drove cold spikes through his bowels.
Something moved in the mist on the far side of the cemetery, and Lawrence spun into a crouch, stretching out with his senses.
A small sound. A whimper.
“Boy!” he called softly.
Another whimper. Lawrence moved forward into the heart of the circle, fanning the twin barrels of the rifle back and forth.
The mist eddied and there, not ten feet from him, was the boy.
Alive!
“God almighty.” The words were jolted out of him. He rushed to the child, bent down and caught him by one arm. “Are you hurt? Can you run?”
The child raised a terrified and tear-streaked face toward him, but there was no sign of comprehension on his face. Lawrence repeated his questions but the boy just shook his head dumbly and said something urgent in Romany.
“Dammit,” Lawrence hissed. He hauled the boy to his feet and checked for wounds. There was blood on the child’s clothes, but Lawrence didn’t think that any of it was the boy’s. He turned the boy into the spill of bright moonlight and gasped as something on the child’s chest flashed bright silver.
The boy wore a medallion. The medal of St. Columbanus. Exactly like the one Ben had owned. The one that was now in his own pocket.
A thought reached into Lawrence’s brain and froze him in place. He had said to her: “It was found on my brother’s body.”
And her answer had been: “But he was not wearing it.”
The old Gypsy woman had given him back the medal, but Lawrence had shoved it into a pocket. This boy had worn it, and even though the werewolf had carried him off the monster had done him no harm.
“No,” Lawrence said, wanting to scoff at the absurdity of the superstition, but everything that had happened in the last hour mocked his disbelief.
He straightened and took the gun in both hands.
“Boy,” he said quietly and the child looked up, responding to Lawrence’s tone even if he didn’t understand the words. “Run.”
But the child had been through too much, had endured too much. He stared at Lawrence with the innocent expectation of any child who expects adults to solve all problems, to chase away all monsters.
“God,” Lawrence mumbled as he scooped the child up, hugged him against one hip and began creeping toward the edge of the nearest cluster of monuments. Above them the moon was huge and powerful, dominating the sky, and Lawrence realized with sinking dread that this was the Goddess of the Hunt, come to watch the slaughter here in this most ancient of arenas.
Lawrence began moving toward the edge of the circle, but out of the corner of his eye he sensed movement and he spun. There was nothing but a hole torn in the mist. He did not have to ask what it was. He knew. So did the boy, who whimpered and clung to him.
There was a sound, a scrape of a claw on rock and Lawrence turned again. Once more there was nothing but the mist, the vapor swirling as if something had been there and had fled the second before he turned.
It was here. He knew it.
And it was toying with him.
His heart was beating so hard he wondered why it didn’t make the stones tremble. The boy was heavy; so was the gun. If he could run to where the Gypsies were beating the woods then he wouldn’t need to shoot. But if he stayed, if he was forced to fight here in this place, he could not use the big rifle one-handed.
With a heavy heart he lowered the boy to the ground. The child tried to cling but Lawrence pushed him away, knowing that the separation would hurt the child, that it would feel like abandonment . . . and Lawrence k
new what that felt like, how it scarred.
He backed away from the wall of mist, trying to guess where the creature was, trying to be it in his mind so he could predict the angle of attack. He moved backward until his shoulders were pressed hard against the cold slab of upright granite. It could only come at him from the front but then his heart slammed to a frozen halt in his chest.
He could hear it. The deep, quick breath of the beast.
On the other side of the slab.
Behind him.
Icy sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes. It felt like tears.
He licked his lips and slipped his finger into the trigger guard. There was a chance. Just a chance. If he spun around the stone and backed up, if he did it right, then he could open up with both barrels from point-blank range. It was his best chance. His only chance. But dear God it terrified him. He almost sobbed with the fear of what he was about to do.
God help me, he cried in his mind. God . . . if you exist, if you’re there . . . if you give a fuck . . . help me!
He drew a breath and moved!
Lawrence spun off the stone and wheeled to his left, backpedaling five feet as he brought up the rifle. He pulled one of the triggers and the blast knocked him backward even farther as the bullet punched a big hole through nothing at all.
The werewolf was gone.
Lawrence stood there, flat-footed, shocked.
How could he have been wrong? He’d heard it.
Lawrence turned in a full circle, sweeping the smoking gun around, urging the creature to step out of the mist.
But it wasn’t in the mist.
He heard the growl. Low, sneaky, hungry.
Above him.
Lawrence looked up and there, standing atop the pillar, immensely powerful against the white splendor of the goddess moon, was the beast.
He tried to bring the gun up. He was fast. It was faster.
The werewolf pounced on him, reaching for him with its taloned hands and smashing him down onto the damp earth so hard that breath and blood flew from Lawrence’s mouth. His clutching finger jerked the second trigger but the bullet blew past the monster’s head and struck fire from the stone before speeding off uselessly into the woods.