Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2) (62 page)

McKendrick retraced the arc. They caught a glimpse of a low shadow that moved away like lightning. Left behind was the carcass of a sheep, gleaming slickly, the white bones protruding like enormous teeth. It had been so torn to pieces they had trouble recognising which part was which.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” McKendrick hissed. “It is a dog!” He nestled the barrel of his gun over his forearm while still trying to manipulate the torch.

“Careful,” Witch said. “It might be rabid.”

The white light washed over more grass, its movement jerky with McKendrick’s anxiety, so at times it looked like they were glimpsing images illuminated by a strobe: a rock that made them all start; a sheep running in their direction. The carcass again. The wind had whipped up and was moaning across the high land, scudding the clouds across the moon and stars so it became darker than ever. And against it all was the sound of the sheep’s hooves constantly driving across the grass, disorienting them so it was impossible to tell where the dog was.

McKendrick gritted his teeth in frustration. “Stay behind me. If I see it I’m just going to let rip with both barrels. Might scare it-“

They had heard tell of animal sounds that could chill the blood; McKendrick had thought it poetic license, but when the howling rose up, at first low and mournful but then higher and more intense, they felt ice water wash through them. The primal sound triggered some long-dormant race warning that was so overpowering that their instinct rose to the fore and instantly drove them towards the house.

Just as their backs were at the door, McKendrick’s final sweep with the torch locked on to a prowling shape, so fleeting they caught only a glimpse of golden eyes glowing spectrally in the light. McKendrick fired instantly, but they didn’t wait to see the result. They slipped through the door and locked it firmly behind them.

“I think I got it,” McKendrick said breathlessly with his back pressed hard against the door. “Winged it, at least.”

Veitch wasn’t so sure. Anna and Tom waited anxiously in the centre of the room; it was apparent from their faces they had been as disturbed by the howling. McKendrick and Veitch looked at each other, but it was the older man who finally gave voice to what they were both thinking.

“It was a wolf, I’m sure of it.”

Anna shook her head furiously. “You’re Joking! There haven’t been wolves here for centuries.”

“But this was once their homeland,” Tom mused. “Perhaps they’ve returned.”

“With the forests,” Veitch added.

“How?” Anna asked. “That’s crazy!”

McKendrick went to the window and peered out cautiously. “Crazy things are happening all the time these days,” he mumbled.

“Are you sure it was a wolf?” Tom said pointedly. “Not a man?”

Veitch knew what he was implying. “Bit bigger than normal, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

Anna looked at them both curiously, but said nothing.

“If you did hit it, we might be able to track it at first light. Follow the blood,” Veitch said confidently. “It would be easier if we could see the bleedin’ thing. We don’t stand a chance out there in the dark.”

This seemed like the most sensible course of action, so while Anna retired to the kitchen to make a pot of tea, the men sat by the fire, slowly feeling their heartbeats return to normal.

McKendrick retired an hour later, and while Tom dozed fitfully in a chair in front of the fire, Veitch attempted to make up a bed on the floor in one corner. Anna helped him, talking animatedly in a hushed voice.

“Sorry if I’m rattling on,” she said with a giggle. “It seems like ages since I’ve had a body to talk to. Apart from my da’, that is.”

Veitch lay back on the collection of cushions with his arms behind his head. “He seems like he’s got it pretty much together now. He’s a tough bloke. Bit of a no-nonsense life he’s got going up here. Maybe it’s time to get back to your life.”

She looked wistful. “I don’t know. I can’t be selfish-“

“You’ve got to be, sometimes. Otherwise you can just give up your life to all these responsibilities everyone throws at you. They’ll never stop.”

She stifled a yawn, then lay down next to him, staring up at the ceiling. “That sounds like a lot of sense. Right now. But then I’ll catch him looking at Mum’s photo and crying when he doesn’t think I’m around-“

“Don’t you get lonely?”

She turned to look at him with her deep, dark eyes. “Sometimes.”

He rolled on to his side and propped his head with his arm. “You look like you like big fun. You’re gonna go stir crazy in this place after a while.”

“Sometimes I think I already have.” She shrugged. “You know how everybody needs something in their lives they believe in? Well, this croft is Dad’s thing. For all the blood and sweat that goes into it and the poverty that comes out, he loves it. He’d die if he moved away. It looks boring, bleak, hard. But then you get up on an autumn morning to see the dawn slowly moving across the mountains in orange and brown. And you hear the wind across the hillsides on a winter’s night, almost like it’s a real person.”

“So what do you believe in?”

“Right now, looking after a man who raised a bairn while managing to keep body and soul together in a place like this. He’s sacrificed for me. It’s the least I can do in return. The very least.”

Veitch rolled back, his expression faintly puzzled, vaguely troubled.

“And what do you believe in?”

That question troubled him even more. “Still looking for it, I reckon.”

She leaned over and gently touched the tattoo on his forearm; her fingers were cool, the contact hot. “Tell me about these.” She smiled with mock lasciviousness. “Do they go all the way down?”

Before he could reply, the door to the bedroom swung open and McKendrick glared out. “Anna! To bed. Now,” he hissed.

She smiled at Veitch a little sadly, but there was nothing else to say.

The gale picked up during the night, whistling in the chimney and clattering around the eaves. Veitch woke repeatedly, reminded of Anna’s description of the wind as a real person; at times he was convinced he could hear an insistent voice, warning or challenging. Over near the dying embers of the fire, Tom grumbled and twitched in his sleep. Veitch checked his watch: 3 a.m. Shouldn’t be too long until dawn.

A rattling ran along the length of the roof. He sat bolt upright in shock an instant before he realised it was still the wind. He wouldn’t be surprised if half the tiles were off come morning. He lay back down, but the rattling sound came back in the opposite direction.

His instincts jangled. Slowly he raised himself on his elbows and listened. It didn’t sound like the wind at all. It sounded like there was someone on the roof.

A shower of soot fell down the chimney and the fire flared. His attention snapped to it, but his mind was already racing ahead. The resounding crash against the front door had him to his feet in an instant; it was so hard he thought it was going to burst the door from its hinges.

Tom staggered to his feet, still half asleep. “What … what in heaven’s name … ?”

Veitch ran to the window and peeked out. A large grey wolf which looked, in his state of heightened tension, as big as a Shetland pony, was hurling itself at the door. With each impact, the hinges strained a little more. Veitch struggled briefly to make sense of the wolf’s unnatural actions before jumping back and yelling, “McKendrick! Bring your gun!”

But the crofter was already half out of the bedroom with his shotgun, looking dazed. “You better see this,” he said.

Veitch ran into the bedroom. Anna was sitting up in a Z-bed, trying to make sense of what was happening. The curtains had been dragged back and outside Veitch could see several sleek wolves circling, all as big as the one battering the front door. The rattling on the roof echoed again; at least one of them was up there too.

“There must be eight or nine of them!” McKendrick said in disbelief.

“Have you got another gun?” Veitch snapped. The crofter shook his head.

Cursing, Veitch ran back to the living room and scrambled for his crossbow, suddenly aware of how feeble it really was. He barely had time to load a bolt when the door burst open and the wind howled in; the curtains flew wildly. The wolf struck him full in the chest with the force of a sledgehammer. He went down, winded, and then it was on top of him, jaws snapping barely an inch from his face. Its meaty breath blasted into his nostrils, its saliva dripped hot on his chin. He could barely breathe from the weight of it.

He forced his face to one side in desperate, futile evasion, anticipating the enormous power of the jaws stripping the meat from his skull. And then the strangest thing happened: deep in his head he felt an uncomfortable tickling sensation, like a dim radio signal on the end of a band. Slowly he found his face drawn back round until he was looking deep into the wolf’s eyes, golden with the cold circle of black floating at the centre; they drew him in until he was lost in a gleaming intelligent soup, at once alien, yet a part of him.

The terrible spell was broken with the sound of smashing glass. Another wolf burst through the window and sprawled in the centre of the floor before righting itself. And then the rest of the pack was inside, circling low and fast. Tom tried to fend one off with a wooden chair. The wolf played the game for a second, then suddenly unleashed its jaws in a frenzied snapping that turned the chair to splinters in an instant.

From the corner of his eye Veitch could see his crossbow where it had fallen. Slowly he crept his hand spider-like along the floor towards it; it was already loaded, so he could put a bolt through the wolf’s head with just one hand.

He was halfway to it when the wolf noticed what he was doing. A low, bass rumble started somewhere deep in its throat then rolled upwards into a bloodchilling snarl. Its movement was so swift Veitch barely saw it. Those golden eyes were shining before him, and then suddenly he was encompassed in darkness and the foul stink of the beast’s breath. He felt its fangs sink into the flesh at the top of either cheekbone; fiery pain ran deep into his temple. It had his entire head in its mouth; it had to exert only slightly more pressure and his skull would shatter.

It held him like that for a few seconds while every desperate thought he had ever had rattled through his mind, and then, mysteriously, it released its grip. Before he could begin to fathom what was happening, it had released the crushing pressure on his chest and was padding away and out of the door.

All the other wolves had gone too, but the room looked as if it had been torn apart by a tornado. Shattered furniture lay all around, covered with shards of glass and torn material. Tom was slumped in a daze in one corner, but as he struggled to sit up it became apparent he wasn’t badly hurt.

McKendrick, however, lay on his back half in, half out of the bedroom. His face was covered in blood and his gun was nowhere to be seen. Veitch scrambled over to him and raised his head so he could dab at the wounds with a remnant of curtain. After the shock of his appearance, the cuts seemed mainly superficial and it wasn’t long before his eyes flickered open. Veitch began to speak, but the panic that flared in McKendrick’s face silenced him instantly.

“They’ve taken Anna,” he croaked.

The winds had moved off across the mountains with the first light of dawn as they picked their way across the chill, dew-laden hillsides in search of Anna. Veitch took pole position with Tom at the rear; between them was McKendrick, who looked like a spectre, his skin grey, his eyes filled with a painful desolation; it was the face of a man who had seen his entire world destroyed in an instant.

They hadn’t been able to bring themselves to discuss Anna or what was likely to have happened to her after the wolves took her. Instead they had attempted to understand why the pack had acted so unnaturally, and there were no easy answers there either. And so, silently and unanimously, they had agreed to pursue the creatures to bring back Anna, or what was left of her.

Veitch felt numb. His emotions about Anna and Ruth had been so confused, although even his usually superficial self-analysis admitted that Anna’s minor problems were a psychological substitute for Ruth’s more intractable ones; solving the former had been his unrecognised key to achieving his heart’s desire. And he had been thwarted again.

The track was easy to pick up, even for the untrained eye: flattened grass and too many splatters of blood, which they tried to convince themselves belonged to the wolf McKendrick had wounded. They made quick progress downhill, but there was no sign of the wolves ahead of them. The pack had moved away from the croft with alarming speed.

They soon found themselves on the perimeter of the new-grown forest, which already seemed to have attained its own ecosystem: thick forest floor vegetation, woodland flowers and a wide array of birds. Mist had settled in the depths of the valley and among the trees like candyfloss. The more they penetrated the shade beneath the verdant canopy, the thicker it became, blanketing all sound, obscuring what lay on every side.

After they had moved through it a little way, Tom pulled Veitch on one side. “This is insanity. If the pack attacks here we don’t stand a chance. They could be circling five feet away from us now and we wouldn’t know.”

Veitch agreed, but he couldn’t turn back. “If we retreat now we’ll lose the trail.”

“You can’t help saving damsels in distress, can you?” Tom said sourly. “It’s a pathological obsession.”

“I might listen to what you’re saying if you weren’t so fucked up yourself.” Veitch marched back into the lead with an irritation that came from knowing Tom was right. He had to save Anna because that was what heroes did. And if he couldn’t be a hero, he had to be the person he always had been, and who could live with that?

They’d progressed about half a mile into the thickest part of the forest when they first heard movement, all around. McKendrick’s finger jumped to the trigger and Veitch had to rest his hand on the barrel to calm the crofter; he looked like he was about to have a breakdown.

“Take it easy, mate,” he whispered in a strong, calm voice. “You’ll end up blowing one of us away.”