Chapter Nine
CHAPTER
Nine
Mistletoe was dead.
Near the stables, in a distant, waterlogged corner of the property, everyone stood around the horse’s carcass when Jane crossed the lawn to join them.
She had seen them from the guest room window, and it wasn’t until she was washed over by the coppery reek of blood that she realized what they were gathered around.
As she approached them, she kept a wary eye on the woods—and the fresh tracks that now marked its border. She couldn’t see yellow eyes watching her, only the ravens.
Mrs. Foster was crossing herself, Ms. Hudson held a palm to her mouth to hide quivering lips, and Ruben wept as he knelt beside the horse, blubbering something Jane’s ears couldn’t work out through the discordant sounds of his grief.
Terence had been standing between them all, looking especially discontent and noticeably disheveled when Jane caught his attention.
His stride swallowed great lengths of earth as he came to meet her. “Look away, Jane! Please, go back to the house, now—”
He reached to grab her arm but she stepped back with a scowl. “What? You think of me too delicate to see blood—”
But it was too late. She caught a glimpse of the body and bile surged into the back of her throat.
The mare lay on her side, belly split open to reveal what remained of her organs—a mess of viscera, congealed blood, and entrails strung like pearls between broken ribs.
Her throat bore a gaping hole, the wound ragged along its edges from being torn asunder by horrible teeth.
The kill was older, not fresh enough to steam in the November chill and blood having long since moldered into a brownish maroon.
It was a slaughter, one that frightened Jane so because this was not just the death of an animal typical of nature’s cruelty.
It was the intentional desecration of something tame, domestic, civil.
A kill done for the sake of a killing, for the sake of channeling rage.
Survival was not what occupied this beast’s mind as its teeth ruined flesh.
If the beast maimed a horse, how much longer until it sank its fangs into one of the staff, Terence—into her?
Taking her elbow, Terence whispered harshly, “Jane—inside with Lottie and Georgianna. Please.” His words stumbled and his tone was tense as he hissed that final syllable.
Jane looked up at him with her own wordless plea, tongue paralyzed. His hazel eyes were a storm, winced and shadowed with a despair that’d begun to frighten her. “T-Terence—”
Before Jane could even have a moment to ask more about Mistletoe, Mrs. Foster swooped over and replaced Terence’s touch on her arm to usher her back to the house.
“Y-yes—yes, come, Miss Sterling. It’s gnarly, garish business, it is.” Mrs. Foster’s chatelaine jingled with every step, the sound shuddering as fiercely as her bony fingers that dug into Jane’s arm.
Jane looked behind them as Terence tore a hand through his hair and returned to Ruben, still hunched over Mistletoe.
Blood ran deep in the mud, filling in another print right beside the body, a print in the shape of a beast’s paw.
Back in the house, Mrs. Foster and Ms. Hudson had taken to ignoring Jane to instead speak to each other in hushed, frantic whispers in the kitchen.
Under the guise of making tea, Jane tried to eavesdrop but as she waited for the kettle to boil, both women replaced their chittering with sharp sideways glances she couldn’t read.
Ms. Hudson’s glare was indecipherable as she took Mrs. Foster by the arm and, together, rushed from the room to resume their whispering elsewhere.
Jane tried to ignore a bitter twinge within her. Why wouldn’t they include her in such conversation, especially if it may have concerned whatever beast may have been roaming the grounds?
Still waiting on the kettle and requiring some semblance of movement in her numbed, tingling limbs, she retrieved her drawings from upstairs and ran a finger along Old Man Hayes’ books in the sitting room until she pulled out the first title she thought would be of most use (and entertainment) to her—On Wards Against Spooks, Demons, Witches, her appetite was missing, her thirst nonexistent.
The chamomile was a sludge on her tongue and she struggled to swallow as it clawed its way down into her belly like molten sandpaper.
She sighed and sat back in the chair so that she could watch the rain dribble across the skylight.
She suddenly hated the rain. The more it rained, the longer she would be stuck at the Drowning House, deep in the bowels of the Wolf’s Run marshes.
No horse to ride or to pull a carriage meant she’d have to resort to walking to Wolf’s Run to hail a cab back to Cambridge—that was if she wasn’t so worried about ruining her wardrobe, on top of drowning in an ocean of mud.
Jane began to wonder how her mother was faring in her absence. She wondered if anyone had told Mrs. Sterling about the rains flooding the marshes, and that there was a logical reason for her daughter to be gone, not because of a murder or being gobbled up by some marshland creature—
Jane smacked her palms against her thighs. She couldn’t allow herself to stew in these thoughts for too long, for, in time, they’d score unpleasant lines along her mouth and sag below her eyes.
Turning to the book and pile of papers, she took her drawings and spread them across her lap, offering her a view of each one.
After another sip of tea to moisten her cracked lips, she flicked through the thin book.
She didn’t pause to read any passages, instead seeking out symbols and illustrations that could hint at anything useful.
Most pages had illustrations, some pentagrams and crescent moons—protection sigils if the title was anything to go off of—though none resembled her drawings.
Without her glasses, her eyes had grown sore with all their flickering between the book and her drawings, and she tossed the book onto her lap with an exasperated sigh.
As she rubbed her temple with a thumb and forefinger, she found that she was pinned beneath the stare of a great, unblinking eye peering up at her from the page the book splayed open to.
At the eye’s center, in place of a pupil, was a spiraling, circular rune, not too unlike in Jane’s drawings.
In the margins of the page were nonsensical scribblings, wavering lines of ink scratched into the paper with a slanted, etching script. The penmanship of Old Man Hayes?
Jane canted her head to the side and held the book up to her face so she could attempt to read without her glasses.
Only managing to decipher every other word between her farsightedness and Old Man Hayes’ poor handwriting, the annotations described the eye to be used as a general ward against evil, an “evil eye,” a malevolent stare of envy and misfortune to frighten away spirits—the eye of a protective God.
But what spirits was Old Man Hayes so afraid of that warranted, seemingly, several protective sigils carved into floorboards?
Jane’s finger tapped the drawing of the eye.
If this symbol was to ward off evil, then she was certain the others beneath the bed were as well.
It was now only a matter of deciphering what Old Man Hayes felt he’d need protection against. She paused her tapping.
Had he been seeking protection against the beast, something similar to the one clawing at her door, murdering horses, and skulking in the dark of night?
What if legends of the black shuck were true—
Jane scoffed and rolled her eyes. “No. It’s nothing more than Spiritualism and spooks shenanigans—”
Lightning flashed, blinding the room, a heartbeat before it was pursued by a clap of thunder that shook the house and rattled the skylight panes.
Jane jumped with a yell. Her knee knocked against the table holding her tea, and she hissed as the thing shattered on the floor in an explosion of porcelain chips and hot liquid.