Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER
Fifteen
Ruben waited for Jane to shuck on her boots and a jacket before they walked out into the yard together.
The storm had tamed itself to a gentle drizzle and mud sloshed beneath their boots as they crossed through the mist. The island was considerably smaller than the day before; Jane could no longer see the drowned carriage.
Near the kitchen’s side door and within the cemetery, Jane noticed disturbances in the mud from the beast’s attack.
Even though it had rained, there were puddles of old blood in the slurry, and she looked away with a shuddering breath and continued following after Ruben as fast as her injury allowed.
Wet mud and slippery organs felt too similar, she learned; in the mud around them were the beast’s pawprints.
Like rows of teeth, the wood’s trees rose through the mist ahead of them.
Jane’s steps faltered. Ravens lingered. They took turns swooping down to pluck choice bits from the corpses that flooded the death-pit there, and the ones that remained atop their perches offered her challenging stares.
“Must we go in there?” She squawked past a dry throat. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the death-pit. She could still taste the decay and see those maggots consuming all that was once living.
Ruben paused to look back at her, but only briefly before continuing into the woods. “Lady Hayes said that the beast’s bodies were to remain hidden and away from those of the family. We’ve been burying them away from the family plot.”
Out of sight, out of mind.
Then how many of those graves do hold a human body?
Jane popped the collar of her coat so that the mink-fur lining could stifle the rising stank of rot as she followed in after him.
A rustling in the leaves drew her attention back to the wood’s edge, though.
There Terence lingered. He stood with his posture slouched, gaze shadowed by hair loosened by another chilled gust of November air.
The edges of his overcoat flapped in the breeze and his hands hung at his sides as he watched her; a dog listless without an owner to guide his chain.
How long had he been following them?
Jane paused to rest against her parasol, puckered her lips in a whistle, and patted her thigh. “Come! Come, boy!”
There was a moment’s hesitation before Terence crossed the threshold into the forest’s realm of death-rot with stilted strides until he loomed beside her. Cast firmly downward to the leaves that clung to his muddy trousers and shoes, his hazel eyes were as dark as charred wood.
Jane forced a smile as she cupped his chin and gave it a scratch in a manner like she’d seen her sisters praise the hound Patroclus; fresh stubble chaffed her fingertips. She hated the sensation.
Nonetheless, she cooed, “Good boy!”
He gave no response to her, or her touch. His shoulders slouched further, his eyes dimmed until they closed entirely, and a new line formed between his brows as he breathed out a heavy sigh.
Jane’s smile faltered. The novelty of teasing wore off if it garnered no response other than increased sorrow.
Though her leg, the very one he’d nearly eaten, panged with every step and fueled new hatred for the beast, she failed to hate him.
Not with how tamely he rested in her palm as her grip loosened and she traced lazy circles in the center of his chin with her thumb; she grazed his lower lip to part them just enough to glimpse his teeth, to ensure that they were blunt and human.
Perhaps she would’ve spoken to him, uttering a quick apology, if his eyes hadn’t opened again and looked toward Ruben deeper in the woods.
“Allow me to help, Miss Sterling,” Terence said and offered her an elbow.
Jane didn’t take it and instead glared at him, as a jab of her own out of the shock of his formal addressing of her. He seemed to notice, furrowed his brow, and ushered her along with a gentle ghosting of his touch against the small of her back.
As they continued on, Jane also noticed how Terence held himself beside her, especially as the sweetly sickening stench of rot from the death-pit assaulted her senses. A wall for her to hide behind.
The ravens in the trees above cackled.
The beast wouldn’t have been this gentle, Jane thought, as she felt another accidental brush of his touch against her back.
She was certain it would throw her into the death-pit, not even offering her the dignity of eating her, leaving only scraps of a plaything for the birds to pluck at until even her bones were spent.
She took a moment to brave a glance at Terence, and saw his gaze fixated firmly ahead; his body blocked her view of the death pit, but she could still catch glimpses of rib bones, Mistletoe’s bloated midsection. As he stepped on a branch, she thought it was the crunch of bone.
They reached the opposite edge of the wood, bordered by overwatered marshland rather than muddy lawn, and Ruben stood atop a ridge that overlooked another shallow ravine, much like the death-pit.
Unlike the death-pit, shrubbery encased the ravine’s bottom, with an ‘entryway,’ if Jane could even call it that, being a small tunnel formed by the brambles into a brown-shaded darkness.
Jane narrowed her eyes at Ruben, then Terence. “What’s down there?” As if she didn’t already have a guess.
“That’s where…” Ruben hesitated, lips pursed, and glanced in Terence’s direction.
“That is where we bury the monsters,” Terence said at last, cold and grating, as he stared into the dim tunnel.
Jane hadn’t noticed it before, but Ruben took hold of a shovel that lay just beside the tunnel’s entrance and then made his way down into it, ducking his head to avoid the sweeping catch of the brambles.
She went to go in after him, leaving Terence to loom over the trail in a shadow of misery when he showed no sign of joining them.
The incline was slight, but enough to make Jane’s leg ache as she followed in behind Ruben.
With an offered hand he helped ease her down as the ground leveled into a small glade within the bramble bushes, wherein laid several mounds of dirt.
Three of them, Jane counted, with one of them being considerably smaller than the rest, and the third dark with damp dirt.
A fresh grave. None of them were marked.
Ruben stepped toward this third grave and, wordlessly, struck it with his shovel.
Jane watched as he began to uncover the body lying beneath, starting with the half-rotted shape of a wolf-like head, eyes bulging open and littered with the grit of dirt. Its lips were curled to show large, curved fangs the color of bone.
Once the abomination was unearthed, Jane was overcome with the desire to run. Curiosity held her firmly in place.
The body—or rather, bodies—lay curled on its side, and it was mangled.
Warped and conjoined. There was the body of a beast, as wolfish and horrible as the one that attacked her, with moldy brown fur and flesh stretched over bunches of primal muscle, but from the torso burst forth a man.
He undeniably shared blood with Terence.
His sloping nose, heavy brows, and general visage of an utmost, tranquil melancholy reminded her almost too much of Terence, as he lay half-sloughed from the beast’s body.
Matthew Hayes.
Blood turned the corpse’s auburn-brown hair black, and bits of old meat clung to his beard. Two sets of hands melded together, twenty digits—ten of them blunt, ten of them tipped with claws—grasped at the dirt.
Matthew Hayes, wearing a beast upon his back as a coat.
A second skin.
Jane had been too enamored with the gruesome corpse to even notice the stench that permeated from it.
She couldn’t decide if it looked more like a man murdered whilst removing his (very ugly) fur coat or poorly rendered wax sculpture.
But it was neither. It was a parasite broken free from the very parasite latched onto its back.
She gagged into her sleeve as she dared to step closer, brandishing the silver pin-knife.
Her hands shook. She had never seen a human body before, let alone handle one post-mortem.
But she summoned courage with a shallow breath.
What was paleontology, and its adjacent sciences, but the desecration of antiquity and a disruption of its tomb?
Several bullet wounds marked the bodies of both man and beast, but the most savage one was the one purpling either side of Matthew’s throat. The killing shot. Made by the man standing right beside her, resting against the shovel and with his face shadowed by his cap.
Three graves—two brothers and a father, Jane guessed.
Did Terence feel any semblance of loneliness, or dread, in knowing that they were buried, leaving him on his own?
Did he fear which cemetery he’d be put six feet under if he, too, were murdered?
Perhaps being trapped between the realms of brutality and dignity, not sure to which he belonged, was what was most lonely.
Wolves—and wolfish beasts, Jane supposed—were pack animals. They weren’t manufactured to be without companionship. They required a pack. Jane had sensed that Terence had none, not now, or maybe ever.
Her heart pricked for him again, the fingers that cupped his chin itched, her maimed leg ached. Could a beast feel such loneliness? Was the beast more lonely, or the man?
She pushed these thoughts aside as she lowered herself into the grave, and brought the knife to the bullet wound in dead Matthew’s throat.
She punctured the skin, then slowly dragged it through the clammy gray flesh.
It was like cutting through old leather, tough and straining, and no blood flowed, no fluid.
Nor was there any steam or the smell of burning.
She jerked her hand back with a gasp, deciding she’d never want to feel the sensation of gliding a blade through a human corpse ever again.
Jane then did the same with a wound on the beast’s chest, and the skin was barely cut before she heard telltale sizzling.
There was only a whisper of steam that rose, but the skin bubbled and blistered and festered as she continued to drag her knife through.
And it was unlike cutting flesh, not like when she pierced Matthew’s hide.
The blade made its cut as swiftly as cutting melted butter.
When Jane brought the blade back, brown rotted fluid continued to boil along its length.
To test her theory once more, and perhaps out of impulse as she was tired of the thing staring at her, she pressed the knife to the beast’s dead eye until it burst with an audible, squelching pop. Steam fizzled from the oozing socket.
Morbid triumph flared in her chest.
Silver could be her salvation against the beast, should it decide to attack again.
She was still far from properly understanding it—if anything, it’d only made the creature more confusing as she wondered how similar their behaviors may have been to wolves, why they had been adverse to silver, and what it was about their physiology that allowed a man to share a body with them—but it was still something.
It was a start, and it was a semblance of protection.
Excitedly, Jane began to clamber out of the grave when she slipped upon the muddy ground that surrounded Matthew’s body. Only it wasn’t mud, but rather more of the beast’s hellish skin that seared beneath her hairpin’s silver touch.
Ruben caught her before she fell and steadied her.
When she looked up to thank him, she was met with him staring into the grave with wide eyes and a slack jaw. The grip he had on her arm shivered.
“Something the matter?” She asked, as if she hadn’t just desecrated a wolf-beast’s grave.
It was a long couple of moments before Ruben spoke again, his throat bobbing with a forceful swallow. “He wasn’t like that when I buried him.”