Chapter Twenty-Four
Sorcha and Aidan returned to Hallow, to further promenade and call attention to their betrothal, to the curator who would display his most prized artifacts in celebration: a gold hagstone said to have belonged to Merlin, feathers from a druid’s cloak, and the Ossory wolf tooth.
In the meantime, he bought her candied lemon peels. She bought him a worn antique book the size of her palm filled with handwritten spells.
It was lovely. Normal.
Until Sorcha turned down one of the crooked laneways.
“What are you doing, songbird?” Aidan asked, keeping pace.
She blinked innocently. “Why, I am placing an order for wine for our betrothal, of course.”
“Of course.” He noted the shadows, the sounds of raucous laughter. A cat chasing a mouse.
The pub door plastered with posters offering a reward for the Red Cloak.
He stilled, arching an eyebrow.
Sorcha shrugged with a grin. “I am sure they sell wine.”
He made a sound of doubt.
“Ale?”
“Black ale, maybe,” he allowed. “Made by the goblins.”
“Love the stuff.”
“You hate the stuff.”
She put her hands on her hips. “You don’t know that.”
“Sorcha, everyone hates goblin ale. It tastes like salt licorice and the bottom of a swamp.”
“Yum.” She slipped her arm through his. “Come along, Lord Coventry.”
He sighed but allowed her to pull him into the pub. The air was thick with pipe smoke, the floor sticky, but the tables were clean. Candles burned, struggling to pierce the haze. An automaton offered to read fortunes in one corner.
The clientele was sparse in the middle of the day, flicking glances at the newcomers and then returning to their beer-and-beef pies. The bartender nodded to Aidan. “Afternoon.”
“Hello,” Sorcha replied.
“Don’t get many fancy folk in here of an afternoon, don’t mind telling you.” He crossed his arms. “Don’t sell tea. Or crumpets. Or champagne.”
“Oh, we’re not here for tea. We’re here for black ale.”
“Black ale? For your lot?”
Aidan cleared his throat at his tone. The bartender swallowed.
Sorcha smiled her brightest smile. “Which is why my betrothal ball will be the talk of the Season. Anyone can drink champagne.”
He snorted. “It does take a strong constitution to drink black ale. Not even the students in their last year can manage it more than once.”
She lowered her voice as if imparting a great secret. “Lycan do not have a refined palate, I am sorry to say.”
The bartender snorted again. “Fair enough.”
“How about regular ale? Say, three barrels?” she asked. “With a single barrel of black ale for the adventurous?”
“We could manage that.”
“It’s a bit short notice, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve got stock in the back.”
“Wonderful! Would you mind terribly giving my fiancé a taste? We do so want the canapes to complement it.”
“Canapes.”
“Yes.”
The bartender, faintly bewildered but eager for the exorbitant price he no doubt meant to charge them, gestured them around the bar and through a doorway hung with a curtain.
He led them to the storeroom down in the cellar, a maze of barrels and stacked boxes of bottles.
Aidan’s eyes glinted in the shadows. He accepted a glass of the ale with a wry glance at Sorcha.
She peered into a box of glass bottles filled with pale liquid and marked dandelion wine.
She widened her eyes at Aidan, nodding pointedly to the bartender. Aidan stifled a sigh and turned him toward the black ale, inquiring as to the vintage. As if goblin ale had a vintage.
Sorcha took a small pouch from her pocket. It was filled with a fine dust made of dried nettles and rue and powdered brambleberry thorns. She whispered the spell Briar had taught her and blew the fine powder over the dandelion wine.
When Aidan and the bartender turned back, she was all smiles. “All sorted, then?”
“Aye.”
Aidan did not speak again until they were in the laneway.
“What was that about then?” he asked. Sorcha was very sure her smile was as devious as it was smug.
“I spelled the dandelion wine.”
“Why?”
“If you order the dandelion wine, you get informed when the next Cauldron is on. It’s their code. Doesn’t give us any more warning than we already have, of course.”
“Then why do it?”
“Justice,” she said with a glower. “If there was no audience, there would be no Cauldron.”
“Ah.”
“Now we’ll know who the spectators are.”
“How will we know?”
“For one thing, that many boils will be hard to conceal.” She smirked.
Aidan shook his head. “The ancient Roman Furies were a type of winged bird-women, weren’t they?” Also known for seeking vicious justice.
“Yes.”
“Thought so.”
Sorcha was still smirking when the screaming began.
The only warning was the low, throaty croak of a raven.
He was closer to her than a paper bird, three streets over, where he was pecking at the remains of a dropped pasty. He sent her images: an overturned apple cart, sparrows fleeing for the rooftops, two gentlemen nearly colliding in their haste to run away.
And then the screaming.
Aidan thundered ahead of her, trying to shield her in his usual way. His eyes glinted gold as he caught some scent or a thread of magic. “This way.”
He led them down a side street, through the back door of a shop selling cauldrons and out the front to where the screaming had stopped in favor of the kind of stunned silence that choked the throat.
Evil-eye beads spun madly. A gargoyle swooped down from the roof but there was little it could do, no errant spells to gobble up.
Even a gargoyle was no match for a moon-mad wolf.
The street had cleared, but there were a few pedestrians trapped between the thick stone wall of the shop and the wolf. They were frozen, whispering for help.
She was huge, with wild eyes burning like coals and saliva dripping from her powerful jaws. Her fur was white, streaked with mud and blood.
“Orla,” Sorcha said, stunned.
Orla’s ears twitched and she snapped her teeth upon hearing her name. A woman lay crumpled in front of her, unconscious. There was blood on her temple, under the auburn hair. A man with thick whiskers held his umbrella like a sword. His familiar, a glowing toad, crouched on his shoe.
When Sorcha tried to inch closer, Aidan’s arm snapped across her torso. “No sudden movements.”
“I know that.”
Someone threw apples from an upper window. Orla snarled when one of them caught her on the shoulder. Her lips peeled further back, teeth sharp and gleaming.
“Kill her!” someone yelled. “Before she takes one of the children!”
Someone else threw a butter knife.
“Stop it,” Sorcha shouted. “That’s not helping. Everyone, stay calm. Orla. Orla.”
The wolf only continued to growl.
“I thought saying a Lycan’s name three times made them release the wolf,” Sorcha said, desperately.
Orla was a danger, there was no questioning that.
But someone was going to provoke her into attacking when she might still be stopped.
And then they would kill her. It wasn’t her fault she’d been taken by the Collector.
If they could stop her from hurting anyone, she could still be saved.
“Orla,” Aidan said, the command of an Alpha wrapping around his tone like iron.
She tensed. Her growl muted, but did not stop.
The man with the umbrella jabbed her in the snout. She snapped, breaking it in two. He yelped, cowering back.
“Orla,” Aidan snapped. Everyone stood a little straighter, as if he had spoken their name instead. The power that rolled off him was palpable, recognized by some forgotten, primal part of the mind.
“Everyone, stay calm,” Sorcha all but begged. “Lord Coventry works for the Museum of Magic. He knows how to bind baneful magic. Let him help.”
“Shoot that beast already! Someone must have a pistol.”
“She’s under a spell,” Sorcha insisted.
“She’s a monster!”
That was enough.
Sorcha whistled, one long blast, three short.
Pigeons and sparrows and little brown wrens flew from chimney stacks and roof ridges and treetops.
Crows darkened the sky. The spaces between the shops, over the street, around the wolf filled with feathers and beaks and claws.
It was difficult to see anything else, certainly too difficult to shoot a pistol with any degree of accuracy.
The raven added his call, another warning.
“The Order is nearly here,” Sorcha translated.
They would trap Orla with iron chains, with jet to drain her magic, a collar to trap her. They would treat her like a warlock, when she was a wolf. And she might be able to help them stop the Collector. She deserved the chance, surely.
“If the Order catches her, she’s done for,” Aidan said grimly. He stepped closer, taking off his spectacles. He snagged Orla’s gaze. “Orla,” he growled, for the third time.
She jerked, whining softly, as if caught by invisible chains. The Alpha’s command, even if he was not her Alpha.
But she still did not shift back into a woman.
Whatever spell, whatever this moon madness, it had her in a tight, unbending grip.
Aidan swore. “I need to get her out of here, but I need to call off the Order first. They’ll only make things worse. I can see the threads of the moon madness around her, and they’re strangling her. She’ll die and it’ll start a war.”
“Let me do it.”
“Like hell you’re leaving my side.”
“I don’t need to.” Sorcha sent a request to the raven, pushing all of her magic through her witch’s knot to lend it power when she was out of sight. Please, let this work.
“Orla,” the raven croaked, in the way ravens did, mimicking a human’s voice.
“He’ll lead her to the camp,” Sorcha murmured to Aidan. “If you tell her to follow.”
“Orla,” Aidan commanded, “follow him home.”
The wolf snarled, whined.
“Now.”
“Orla,” the raven croaked. “Orla, Orla.”
He dove down in front of her and then flew away. The combination of an Alpha’s command and the wolf’s innate instinct to chase had her lunging forward. Her eyes were still too bright, too wrong. She was fighting more than anyone else could see.