The Devil's Mistress Page 11

  “What about you?” Delia asked.

  Gently, Jacob took the flintlock from her hands. She looked relieved to lose it. “I may not move quickly, but I can shoot. Whatever it is…” He stopped as an unwelcome thought entered his mind. “Whoever it is, I’ll make this right. I have to.”

  The old woman searched his face. Then seeing the truth and heartbreak within it, nodded as she fought back tears of her own.

  Chapter 24

  Sloop stood at the north end of the mill, watching the last of the townsfolk rush down the trail. “Hold! Stand fast, you cowards!”

  But they would not stand fast. One after the other, they ran across the rocks and down the path to Saint Joseph’s Circle. Even Marianne had given up pretense and was now elbowing her way through the crowd.

  “Madam Huxley,” Sloop cried. “Where are you going?”

  “For God’s sake, Tiberius. Do you not see what is happening? I’m going to find my son!”

  Then she was gone, the top of her regal coiffure disappearing into the sweaty throngs. The roaches filtered out the doors after her, following the crowd down through the forest. Sloop stood at the entrance of the mill, a lone, holy warrior atop the mountain. After a moment, he resolved there was nothing to do but follow the others back to town. He would go to his parish. For there lay the weapons he required: the crucifix, the holy water, the rosary. These would allow him to stand against the night, and stand he would. Had he not done the same in his very own Nottingham, as a young man? Had he not sent nine women to the fire and rejoiced as their flesh blackened beneath the holy flames?

  Sloop began to walk. He had taken no more than a dozen steps when a scent came upon the air. Meat cooking upon a spit. It came not from the mill behind him but from the trees ahead, as if someone had stolen the Huxley’s roast pig and carried it into the wood. The scent grew stronger as he walked, assaulting his nostrils until he was forced to stop and question whether or not his senses had betrayed him.

  He turned and suddenly found himself face to face with a human foot. A woman had been crucified upon a nearby tree, her legs hanging down before him. Her skin had been burned off, exposing the bloody red musculature beneath. She stared at him through lidless, yellow eyes, the remains of which lay cooked within their sockets and oozing down her cheeks.

  Sloop stumbled, crying out in surprise and revulsion. But while strung up and deformed, the thing upon the tree was not dead. Its head tracked the old priest, smiling through a row of grisly, red-rimmed teeth. “Liar,” it whispered.

  The old man turned about face. There was a second victim crucified upon another tree, another woman with blackened, melted skin. “Liar,” it said.

  He turned again, seeing a third woman, and a fourth. Nine in all, strung up by the arms and cooked where they hung.

  One of the victims wore a medallion which had fused to her skin in the heat. Did not Patricia Dornell, the very first witch he ever condemned, wear such a medallion? She was not the only one he recognized. Did not the two figures next to her resemble the mother and daughter he burned upon the River Trent? Did the figure with the hole in its skull not resemble Susan Heape, the woman whose head grew so hot it literally popped like a cooked acorn?

  “Devilry,” he whispered. He made the sign of the cross, running down the path in search of his church.

  The path twisted, and before he knew it, he was back in the same small clearing, facing the same, deformed crucifixions.

  “Liar,” they said.

  Sloop ran back in the direction he had come, and again came upon the same tableau. He ran to the left, cutting through the forest proper. He tried running to the right, then back toward the mill. Each time, he returned to the same scene. Each time, the gruesome figures awaited his return, tracking his movements with their bubbling, lidless eyes.

  “Liar,” they chanted. “Liar. Liar.”

  Sloop turned toward the last woman he remembered from Nottingham, a girl of eighteen named Audrey Gallop who died in the fire almost four decades earlier. He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled as hard as he could, hoping to wrest her from her burning perch. What little skin remained sloughed into his hands like a used garment, and he fell backward onto his haunches.

  “Silence,” he shouted, squeezing his eyes shut. “God curse you, be silent, you hateful harpies!”

  To his shock and surprise, the chanting stopped. He opened his eyes and found himself back upon a deserted path. Where the figures had been was nothing but the empty wood.

  No. Not empty.

  There was someone at his back. Someone with pale, white skin and long, icy fingers. Those fingers dug into the meat of his shoulders. “We’ve seen the fate of the women who cross your path in your life, Tiberius. Would you like to see what happened to your pretty young wife?”

  Sloop tried to tear himself free, but the figure held him fast. She turned his head. There upon the path was his Gwendolyn, naked and screaming, her body sitting on what appeared to be an enormous, inverted ax. She was sinking slowly, every twitch and shudder causing the blade to cut through her groin in tiny, imperceptible increments.

  “She was captured by the French, put upon the blade and executed for witchcraft. What think you of that, Tiberius?”

  He tried to close his eyes, but the ice-like fingers held them open. Upon the iron horse, his wife continued to scream.

  “No,” he moaned. “Show me not this horror!”

  Something red and slippery had begun to poke through the growing hole between Gwendolyn’s legs. It threatened to slip down the blade and take the rest of her insides with it.

  Sloop put his hands to his face. “You’ve won, demon. Make me not look on this!”

  “Oh, but we’ve just begun,” the voice breathed, “and I have so much more to show you.”

  Chapter 25

  The wolves kept pace as he lumbered down the path. Four, then six, then ten shapes howling and yipping and darting between the trees. They seemed to be toying with him, mocking his stride and laughing at his wooden leg. His flintlock was a welcome burden, but if more than one broke free of the pack and charged, it would do him little good. So far, none had.

  He at last cleared the trees and came before the waterfront, turning to see if the wolves would follow. They didn’t, and he allowed himself a moment’s respite.

  A dark cloud drifted up from the center of town, and he started down the shore toward it. His leg did him few favors in the mud, but he deemed it the safest course. He strayed not toward the trees. The billowing black cloud grew larger as he approached the parish, but there was no odor upon the air. No crackle of flame. No glow of fire.

  Jacob stopped. It was not smoke drifting into the night sky, but a thick and burgeoning swarm of insects. Termites, beetles, cockroaches, and everything in between. They were pouring in from the forest, crawling over the parish and feasting upon its timber. A second swarm was devouring the structure beside it, wherein lay the hitching post and the abandoned horse stalls. A mere few thousand insects drifted lazily between the two structures, meandering over the side yard in search of sustenance.

  “You there! Come here!”

  Startled, Jacob looked across the yard but saw no one.

  “I said come here, boy!”

  Jacob looked again, and this time his eyes fell upon a divot in the side yard. Two hands had reached up to grasp the iron bars at the top, though the body to which they belonged remained hidden below. The boy hesitated, then wove through the swarm and approached the hole. He covered his mouth to avoid inhaling flies.

  “Let me out of here,” said the voice.

  Jacob peered down. “You. You’re that savage, aren’t you?”

  “If you do not let me out, I will die in here. Then you will be more savage than I.”

  Jacob looked at the swarm and back again. “Did you kill the Collins boy?”

  The response was swift and immediate. “No.”

  “Will you kill me i
f I let you out?”

  “No.” Then, “Probably not.”

  Jacob considered. After all he had witnessed, he had little reason to trust the word of the town watch. Isabella, too, had thought the man innocent. “Hold a moment.” He examined the bars. They were attached to a hinge but secured in place with an iron lock. “Where’s the key?”

  “Probably on the guardsman. I believe you’ll find him at the gallows.”

  Jacob made up his mind. He rose at once and moved to the side yard gate. He had never run so much in a single evening, even with Sands in charge.

  “Just a house in the countryside,” he told himself. “A little row of crops. Some horses.” His wooden leg caught in a rut, and he stumbled, crunching the shells of a dozen black-bodied vermin. “One horse,” he corrected, and pushed forward again. “Just a little cottage with one horse.”

  He came to the front of the parish and approached the hanging square. The light of the moon shone down upon the drop. The carpenter yet hung from the noose, his body creaking against the rope. Jacob put a hand over his mouth. As he looked down, a host of termites began crawling up his man-made leg and chomping at the wood. He cried out, wiping the small battalion off his person and rolling onto the platform. He collided with another body. It was the one called Wembly, the scrawny watchman from Isabella’s trial. The same man who was supposed to be guarding Moberrey’s door. Ants crawled to and from his half-eaten face, carrying pieces of his brain off into the night. Jacob staved off another retch, but the keys were there, attached to an iron ring on the man’s belt. He jerked them free and returned to the yard with haste.

  The Indian was waiting. “Did you find it?”

  “I think so.” He knelt next to the divot and worked the lock. It opened with the very first key. The iron bars flew upward, and the prisoner leaped onto the earth as if sprung from a trap. To most men, the Indian would have been considered tall. To Jacob, he was a giant with long limbs and sinewy muscle. He was wearing dirty settler’s clothes. In the dark, he might have even passed for a tall Englishmen were it not for his hair—which was long and black and shaved back from his forehead—and a ring in his nose, which glinted in the light of the moon.

  Without a word, the Indian sprinted into the small enclosure next to the church and disappeared. Jacob tried to shout after him, but he inhaled a flying roach and spent the next few moments coughing it out. As he recovered, the Indian emerged with a bow slung across his back and two long knives held within his hands. The blades looked as if they were intended for human rather than animal.

  Jacob shook his head. “You risked your life for those?”

  The man shrugged. “I am a hunter.”

  “That’s your name, isn’t it? Hunter of Shadows?”

  The other man nodded.

  “That’s a bit forthright, isn’t it?”

  Hunter removed the bow from his shoulders and began to brush the insects from it. “When I was a boy, I would follow my father every day into the wood. He went to hunt and did not believe I was yet worthy. So I began to hide, to stay unseen in the forest to prove my worth. I became so adept, they said I was of the shadows themselves.”

  Jacob stared at him, unsure of what to make of this.

  Hunter, meanwhile, had deemed the bow clean enough and returned it to his shoulder. “What is your name?”

  “Jacob Reeds.”

  “I am in your debt, Jacob.”

  “Then help me. I need to reach the mill. I need to find out what’s happened to this town.”

  Hunter looked at him as if he were mad, then took off at once toward the front of the parish.

  “Wait,” Jacob called, but this time, Hunter was only leading the way. He paused at the crest of the road and waited.

  When Jacob caught up, he realized his desire for answers was to be granted sooner than expected. There beyond the trees at the edge of town, upon the same jagged shore where sat the broken remnants of the dunking apparatus, were the remaining men, women, and children of Blackfriar.

  Or what was left of them.

  Chapter 26

  The wolves had driven them into the bay like cattle.

  At least three dozen figures stood waist-deep in the freezing waters, clutching one another in the black of night. A few men skirted the shoreline in search of escape, but their efforts were thwarted at every turn. The beasts paced along water’s edge with them, dancing and yipping in anticipation of their own Twelfth Night feast.

  Hunter regarded the scene from the relative safety of The Fancy’s pier. “Wolves do not do this. It is not natural.”

  Jacob came up behind him, panting. “I think what is natural has been staid for the evening, but it doesn’t matter. We have to save them.”

  “To save them? After all they’ve done?”

  “They were confused. Easily persuaded.”

  “They would have strung me by the neck for no greater proof than an article of clothing, and you for no greater sin than love.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Hunter pointed to the purple halo on Jacob’s neck as if it explained everything. Perhaps it did. Perhaps the man had heard enough from his hole in the earth.

  Jacob looked back at the water. “We will deal with those responsible in due time. These people, though. They are just normal folk.”

  Hunter made a low, grunting noise.

  “Do you wish to repay your debt or not?” Jacob said.

  “We cannot save them. Half are dead already. The other half will die of cold before the night is done. We must find the one responsible.”

  This time, it was the boy’s turn to grunt. No matter what madness had seized the town, they needed a practical solution. There were too many wolves to hunt, and even if they managed to kill one with an arrow or musket shot, its brethren would scatter into the woods.

  He stomped at the pier beneath his feet. “We need fire.”

  “We cannot block the entire shore.”

  “We can block this, here. The people can swim and then lock themselves within the tavern.”

  “And us? How do you propose we get free after the deed is done?”

  Jacob hadn’t considered that far. “We will deal with that when we come to it.”

  “Spoken as one with no regard for the future.”

  “Without these people, there will be no future. Not for this town.”

  Hunter’s gaze told him that would not be such a bad thing, at least in the eyes of his people. Before Jacob could rebuke him, though, the Indian took off in the direction of the market. Jacob shook his head, resolving that—if he couldn’t keep up—he would at least test the defensibility of his surroundings.

  He had only been to The Fisherman’s Fancy on one other occasion and hadn’t much cared for it. It was too loud, too boisterous, too full of fat and rowdy men he’d just assume avoid. Structurally speaking, however, it was as solid as a block.

  There was a torch at the entrance. He removed it from its housing and stepped in through the door. The front of the tavern was dark, but the faint glow of a candle shown from the kitchen.

  “Who’s there?” came a voice.

  Jacob moved farther in. Upon the floor was the serving maid, Carla Peabottom, surrounded by the corpses of The Fancy’s lemon cakes.

  “Who’s there?” she said, shielding her eyes from the flames.

  Jacob regarded her. “You’re safe in here?”

  “Course I’m safe. What are you on about?”

  “You don’t hear the… Get up. We need your help.”

  The woman lumbered to her feet. “You’re that boy from the hanging! What are you doing here?

  “I was let out.” Jacob indicated the crumbs on the floor. “What are you doing?”

  “Me? Just a bit of feasting. They go bad after a few days, you see. ’Tis the day, isn’t it? No need to tell the mister.”

  The patter of feet came from outside, and Jacob looked up. “Come with me.
”

  Something in his tone must have worked, as she immediately stood to attention and grabbed a rolling pin. “Something to defend me-self,” she said.

  He went to the door with the woman on his heels. At first, there was nothing.

  “What’s—” Carla began, and then a giant gray beast leaped from round the corner and charged.

  Jacob fell backward, dropping his flintlock and knocking the woman onto her rear. He landed on top of her. The wolf slid along the decking, pivoted in the tangle, then lunged, its teeth closing round the peg of Jacob’s wooden limb.

  Carla thrashed. “Get it off!” she squeaked. “Get it off! Get it off!”

  Something hissed through the air, and before Jacob could move, an arrow buried itself in the creature’s neck. There was a high, sharp squeal. It fell to the deck, its legs twitching their last.

  “Get off me, then.” Carla squirmed out from under him.

  A moment later, Hunter emerged from out of the dark carrying two enormous bales of hay. His torch was gone, and his bow was once more slung across his back. “Found these,” he said, throwing the hay at Jacob’s feet. He plucked his arrow from the body of the wolf, wiped the tip, and returned it to his quiver.

  Jacob opened his mouth, stumbled, then said, “Thank you.”

  Hunter nodded.

  “You’re… You’re that killer,” Carla squeaked.

  “A killer who saved your life,” Hunter said. “Look at what has happened to your town.”

  There was another great fracas from the shore. An old man had drifted too close to the shallows, and a trio of wolves set upon him. The man called out once, then disappeared in a flurry of splashes. For a long minute, there came nothing but the sound of the churning waters and his final, strangled cries.

  Carla could do nothing but stare, overwhelmed by what was happening just beyond the walls of her lemon cake repast. She squeaked again.