Chapter Five #2
“Why the fuck are we going into the woods?” Lyssa hissed, resting a hand on her pistol.
Brandy’s low growl was a constant rumble at her side as the two of them followed the glow of Alderic’s lantern.
The cab had let them out where the paved road turned into a dirt track leading into the forest, the driver tipping his hat to Alderic with a promise of same time tomorrow.
“If this is some kind of con, I swear I will shoot you through the throat.”
The light swayed wildly as Alderic stumbled over the uneven ground. “I’m not going to rob you,” he said, and swept a hand out to indicate a graveled road branching off the dirt path. “My manor lies at the end of this.”
Lyssa looked around; most of the trees here were some kind she had never seen before, their trunks riddled with massive thorns almost as long as her forearm. “Why do you live in a forest that looks like it crawled out of a nightmare?”
“Do you like it?” Alderic asked, as if he were talking about an expensive wine he had allowed her to sample.
“Bleakhaven is one of the only places these trees can still be found in all of Ibyrnika, apparently. I have heard it told that those nasty thorns are a defense mechanism they developed in order to protect themselves from some rather enormous ancient herbivores that used to roam the island. I have found them to be a wonderful deterrent for trespassers.”
He had a point. Even the most motivated of burglars bent on robbing a rich drunk’s isolated manor would think twice at the sight of these woods. “My question still stands: Why, exactly, have you taken up residence amongst the murder-trees?”
“I told you, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Beast,” he said, his fancy shoes crunching on the gravel as he started up the road. “And since the Beast is in the woods, so am I.”
“Is it close by?”
“The monster, or my manor?”
“The monster.”
“Very close,” he said, and her skin prickled.
“Where?” It was almost a whisper, her breath billowing out in a foggy plume.
Alderic waved his hand impatiently, a ripple of lace at his wrist. “I have its den marked down on a map somewhere in the parlor. I will give it to you when the time comes. You’ll never find the creature otherwise. Ah, here we are—my humble abode.”
There was indeed a structure at the end of the gravel drive, but Lyssa would never have thought to call it a “manor.” Its outer walls stretched up into the forest canopy above, and there were iron spikes set into the stones at the top as if to spear anything attempting to leap over them, though there wasn’t a thing alive—faerie-made or otherwise—that could have jumped that high.
“It looks like a prison,” Lyssa said as they approached the iron gates set into the outer walls, the bars too close together for anything but an emaciated mouse to squeeze through them.
“It even has a dungeon,” Alderic said brightly as he fumbled with an enormous ring of keys, “complete with shackles on the walls and drains in the floor.”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“Don’t you have a servant for that?” she snapped after a few minutes of watching him struggle to find the right key. It was even colder in the forest than it had been in Bleakhaven, and if he took any longer opening the gate, she was going to freeze to death.
“I don’t have servants anymore.”
“You do seem a touch melodramatic,” she said, wrapping her pathetic excuse for a coat more tightly around herself, “but I didn’t peg you for the ‘scare away all the servants with his rages’ type.”
“I didn’t scare them away,” he said, holding a key up for closer inspection. “They died.”
If Lyssa had fur, it would have tufted up in a ridge along her spine, the way Brandy’s was doing now. She drew one of her knives and pressed the tip against the side of Alderic’s neck; it vanished in the layers of ruffles.
“I would again like to remind you,” she said as he stiffened and looked sidelong at her, “that I have a plethora of weapons on my person, and would not hesitate to kill you with any of them.”
His eyes widened, but what came out of his mouth was not the stammering reassurances or shrill scream she had been expecting. “That is an exquisite knife,” he said instead. “The craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the absolutely sinister edge … my goodness, it must have cost a fortune!”
She blinked at him, baffled. For all the men she had threatened with a knife—and there had been many—Alderic was the first to admire the blade pointed at his throat. “Um, not really. I got a good price for the materials.”
He gasped. “You made that?”
“I … well, yes, I did,” Lyssa said, then shook her head, reeling at how effortlessly he had derailed her attempt to intimidate him. “I am threatening your life. You … do understand that, don’t you?”
Alderic flapped one of his hands, as if waving her away. “Yes, yes, you’ll kill me in an instant, I heard you. But truly, you have a gift. If you ever run out of creatures to kill, you could make a fine living selling your wares, I assure you.”
Lyssa flushed with pleasure, and was immediately angry with herself for it. She snatched the knife away from his throat and sheathed it. “A man like you should be pissing yourself by now.”
“My sincerest apologies for disappointing you. Ah, here we are,” he said, turning a key in the gate’s lock with a clink and pushing it open. “I really should label those, shouldn’t I?”
The road ended in a circular drive, at the center of which was a dried-up fountain filled with dead leaves.
Beyond it, Alderic’s manor loomed dark and dismal.
Lyssa imagined that carriages had once dropped off well-dressed couples here for elegant dinner parties, but now the windows of the enormous house were thick with cobwebs and overgrown ivy, and the carriage house was boarded up.
“Please excuse the sad state of disrepair,” Alderic told her, as if she were some cultured lady who might take offense to the condition of his property instead of a bounty hunter with a pistol at her hip and knives in her boots.
“This place was empty for generations before I took up residence—an old ancestral home my family had all but forgotten about, due to its rather lackluster location. Aside from the … fortifications … I have made little effort to spruce things up.”
“Building the outer walls does seem like more of a pressing concern than cleaning the cobwebs,” she agreed.
“It was my only concern.”
Lyssa didn’t blame him. She wouldn’t have wanted to live out in these woods, knowing the Beast was nearby, without some measure of protection, either. If anything, a fortress with a spiked rampart surrounded by murder-trees wasn’t secure enough for her liking.
“Anyway, I’ll be quite relieved to get out of this godsforsaken place once and for all.
” He struggled for a moment with the front door, at last holding it open for Lyssa with a sweep of his arm.
She sailed past him, into the darkness of the foyer, and was just tilting her head back to look at the expensive chandelier when it exploded with light.
Lyssa gasped and flung her arms up to cover her eyes, Brandy barking wildly.
“It’s best not to look directly at it,” Alderic said, as if she had done it on purpose.
“How was I supposed to know it was electric?” Lyssa shouted, blinking away the spots in her eyes. “The whole fucking town only has one gas lamp!”
“Right. My apologies. Sometimes I forget about these little indulgences I allowed myself whilst making this place inhabitable. I’ve become so used to them.” He motioned for her to follow him. “Come on, then. The claw is in the parlor.”
“You keep it in the parlor?” She had imagined a more secure location, like that dungeon he’d mentioned. But he’d said the map of the Beast’s location was in the parlor, too, so maybe he kept them together, in some sort of lockbox or safe.
Alderic strode toward the first closed door in a hallway full of them, flinging it open with a loud thud, as if there was something blocking the entrance.
There was. In fact, the entire room was crammed so full of things that it would take months to paw through it all. Suddenly, keeping the claw in the parlor made perfect sense, like stowing a needle in a stack of hay.
Lyssa peered through the doorway at the mounds of clutter. “I thought you said you haven’t been here for very long.”
“I did,” he said, sounding confused by the question.
She rolled her eyes. These rich assholes were all the same—too much money and absolutely no self-restraint. Although, judging by the look of things, Alderic straddled the line between “avid collector with funds” and something more concerning.
Lyssa commanded Brandy to stay in the hall lest he knock anything over, but he followed her inside anyway as she picked her way carefully down the narrow strip of bare floor.
Alderic, on the other hand, maneuvered through the space as nimbly as a cat, as if he knew exactly where to step to keep from causing an avalanche.
There were lacquered chests and gilded clocks shoved in between the opulent furniture, carved wooden side tables spilling over with jewelry boxes and antique books, crates of golden trinkets crusted with gemstones.
There was also an abundance of the sort of useless artifacts bored upper-class women spent their days creating—embroidered slippers and decorated tobacco jars, beaded pillows and cross-stitched wall tapestries bearing sayings like “No Hands Should Be Idle.”
“Are you married?” Lyssa asked as Alderic waded farther into the room, stepping over a stack of newspapers yellowed with age. “Or … were you, at some point?” she added with a grimace, thinking of the despair on his face when she’d asked why he wanted to kill the Beast.
But he snorted, as if the question was ridiculous. “No. Why?” He looked over his shoulder at her, and she held up a floppy hat with absurdly large crocheted flowers affixed to the brim.