Master of the Moors (27 page)

"That night, in my room, which
Edward had so graciously allowed me to keep in this very house,
free of charge, she showed me the meaning of
strigoi
, and a new word,
strigoaica
, the females
of those fabled creatures, which is what she claimed to
be
.
She stood and
disrobed, a move I assumed, as any man in my place would, that we
were to make love. Instead, she changed. Before my very eyes her
skin turned silver, as if she had frozen to death in an instant,
and yet she moved. One blink and her hazel eyes glowed the color of
sunlit brass. Her hair thickened, lengthened. I crammed my knuckles
into my mouth to keep from screaming. If I tried to run, I can't
remember, but I do recall desperately trying to convince myself
that it was an illusion, something the gypsy folk had mastered as
an art form, or as a weapon. I crawled backwards on the bed and
tried not to look, but it was impossible. There, at the foot of the
bed, stood not the Romanian beauty my brother had brought home, but
a vile, hideous thing the color of a statue, its flesh cracking,
birthing fissures that rippled with the hissing of air through
them, its suddenly long face cradling a wide mouth full of long,
bone-like teeth. Worst of all though, in the mottled countenance of
that hideous thing, I could
still see
Sylvia looking out at me
, gauging my
reaction. I could feel my sanity threatening to sunder unless I
forced myself to believe that what I was seeing was an illusion.
But I couldn't. Witchcraft seemed more likely."

The urgency in Stephen's
voice alarmed Neil. Whether or not this preposterous tale held even
a modicum of truth, it was clear by the way he spoke that his
captor believed it, and to Neil, that suggested utter insanity. As
quietly and surreptitiously as he could, he placed his hands
beneath him and slid back a few inches, stopping only when Stephen
spoke again.

"Golden eyes," he said.
"Like doubloons they were, fixed on me, penetrating me, searching
my soul. And then, just as the horror threatened to drive me stark,
raving mad, she hunched over and made a sound like someone choking,
and when she straightened, she was herself again. Just Sylvia with
the hazel eyes. No scales, no blue-white skin, no needle teeth.
No
strigoaica
.

"I wept and curled into a
ball, afraid that now that I knew what she was, she would kill me
to keep her secret. But she didn't. Instead she sat on the edge of
the bed with her back to me, and whispered, "This is what I am. I
understand your fear and your revulsion, but there is something you
need to know, something
you
need to understand."

"It was then I realized
she was weeping, and to hear such a pitiful, mournful sound from
something so monstrous lessened the fear a little. I no longer
thought she meant me harm, but still the thought of having touched,
caressed and
fornicated
with such a thing made me retch. But as it turned out, the
repercussions of our union were more horrible than I dared
imagine.

"'You are corrupted and
poisoned now by your association with me,' she said. 'You'll become
one of my kind once you acknowledge the disease that is, even now,
reshaping you, redesigning you. Resist it, and it will kill you
with a kind of agony that would make the devil himself take notice.
Accept, and you'll be with me forever.'

"Almost immediately, as if
it had been waiting for the truth to hit my brain, to be
acknowledged, the pain began. It was small, no more troublesome
than a headache, but immediately I believed her. I knew she spoke
the truth, for I had seen her change and feared what our coupling
might have transferred into me. I wailed into my pillow, rammed my
fists against the sides of my head to jar the pain free, and
writhed in the horror of what she had done.

"'Let it take you,' she
said then and I braved a glance at her. She had turned to face me,
one hand rubbing circles over her belly. She was smiling. 'And be
the father to your child.'"

The wind soughed through
the splintered roof. Neil raised his head and swallowed with an
audible click. "I don't believe any of this," he said. "You're
completely mad."

Another crash of wood into the
fire.

"No," Stephen said. "I'm
not. And I would never lie to my son."

Neil scrabbled backwards,
his nails scooping up dust as he struggled to rise. It only took
him a moment to find his feet but just as quickly, hands grabbed
him. "No!" he screamed. "Let me
go!
" The man's arms were like tightly
wound cords.

"I already told you I
would," Stephen said sternly. "But first you must hear the whole
story. Hear the truth. Then, and
only
then, do you get to leave. That
is, assuming you'll still want to."

Neil continued to kick and struggle
until he was shoved forcefully down onto the ground again. He
landed hard and winced with the shock to his tailbone.

"We're almost done,"
Stephen said. "But it's important that you hear the rest. That you
know who, and most importantly,
what
, you are."

23

Grady thumped on the door until his
knuckles sang with pain. Fat heavy drops of rain from the eave
above him tapped against his skull and he shuddered with the
cold.

"What are we doing here?"
Kate asked him, raising her lantern so she could see his face.
Before he had a chance to answer, the door to the tavern opened
just enough for his own light to reveal the eye peering out at him
through the space between door and jamb.

"Sarah?"

"What do you want?" the
barmaid asked. The stench of alcohol wafted out at them, and Grady
suspected it wasn't all coming from the bar. Sarah regarded them
with eyes at half-mast.

"I have a favor to ask
you," Grady said, absently massaging his knuckles. "Neil's missin'.
I want to ask if I can borrow yer horse."

"No," Sarah said and
started to close the door. Grady quickly shoved his foot in the
way. She looked at it as if it were a dead rat.

"Please. We think he's on
the moors. If we walk it, it'll take us all night. On horseback,
we'll cover more ground in half the time."

"Why don't you use your
own horses?"

Grady sighed. "We got rid
of them after the---" He'd been about to say 'hunt' but caught
himself in time. Reminding Sarah of the day of her husband's death
wasn't the best tactic to employ if he hoped to get her to loan
them the horse. Then again, the change in the barmaid's demeanor
ever since that day suggested she hadn't let go of the memory
anyway. "We got rid of them ages ago," he said instead.

"Well I can't help you,"
she said and glared at his foot.

"Why can't you?" he asked,
annoyed now. He knew all it would take would be for Sarah to give
him the key to the back gate and he could manage the rest himself.
There really wasn't any good reason that he could think of why she
should refuse him, and yet she seemed intent on doing that very
thing.

"Because it's my husband's
horse," she said defensively, "And I don't want him coming back to
find it missing."

Grady's mouth fell open.
At first he wasn't sure he'd heard her properly over the moan and
sigh of the wind and the sizzling of the rain against the road, but
as her words sank in, he realized the extent of the barmaid's
grief, and what it had done to her. At a loss for words, he was
relieved when Kate stepped forward and asked, "Can we borrow it for
a short while, Mrs. Laws? Please? My brother is lost on the moors
somewhere and I'm really worried something's going to happen to
him. We won't be gone long, I promise you. We'll have your horse
returned to the stable long before your husband comes
back."

Sarah stared hard at her,
and Grady feared even Kate's gentle tone hadn't worked, but then
the barmaid's eyes softened and she nodded. "He's been gone ever so
long," she said sadly. "So long I worry that something might have
happened him too." She reached behind the door and there came the
unmistakable sound of keys jingling. A moment later, she held a
single rusty key out to Kate, who took it and nodded her thanks.
"If you see him out there," she added, as they were preparing to
make their way around the tavern to the stable. "Tell him to come
home, that I'll be waiting up for him."

From the ashen hue of her
face, Grady guessed that particular vigil was one she'd been
keeping for quite some time.

Lightning cracked the sky,
turning the world a ghostly white and momentarily freezing the rain
in place.

Kate looked from Grady to
Sarah, and gave her a pleasant smile. "I will, Mrs. Laws. I
promise."

They said their goodbyes,
then headed toward the stable. On the way, Grady expected Kate to
bring up what had just happened, but she said nothing, even though
the troubled look on her face had deepened. He had a feeling
tonight would be the night when she'd learn everything there was to
know about madness, in all its guises.

He prayed she'd live to
appreciate the knowledge.

The gate shrieked as they
swung it open. From the stable, the mare huffed and hoofed the
floor. After a moment spared to calm her down, they saddled the
horse and mounted it, Kate behind Grady, her lantern held in her
lap, free hand gripping his raincoat. As they rode through the yard
and back around the tavern, Sarah raced out to meet them. For one
desperate moment, Grady thought she'd changed her mind and was
going to demand they get off the mare and walk, but instead she
thrust something at him he only barely managed to catch. He looked
down at it---a bottle of Irish whiskey---and raised it to her in a
salute. She nodded, and he chose to ignore what she cried after
them. It didn't fit the warmth of the moment, and only further
testified to the woman's madness.

Make sure you share it with
him
, she'd said.

***

They were not alone. A
shuffling, slithering sound from above made Neil raise his head,
ears cocked. "What's that?"

Stephen spoke, and in his
voice there was pride. "We are an aberration, you and I, anomalies
descended from what once were wolves until nature and
cross-breeding with other mutated souls bred a whole new species.
We are hunters, Neil. We exist for the specific purpose of taking
our rightful place as the dominant species, to hunt men and kill
them, or force them to become one of us, to join us as
gods
."

Neil, terrified beyond
words, lowered his head to his crossed arms.

"Whatever we are, we are
old and we will mold this world to suit us, starting here in this
small pitiful little village. Contact is sufficient to perpetuate
our kind, you see. If we inflict a non-fatal wound on a man or
woman, our nails secrete an enzyme that contaminates the blood,
immediately starting the change. The mechanics of that change
however, remain a mystery to me. Even Sylvia could not explain why
the effect is sometimes immediate, and other times protracted,
sometimes by decades. Her supposition was that will alone can delay
the process, an unfortunate choice for the subject, as resistance
merely renders the enzyme unstable. Change becomes decay and over a
period of years, the body slowly rots from the inside out. As was
the case for the man who played your father for so long. Sylvia
infected him too, but rather than accepting the change, he
resisted, and the virus fed on him."

More shuffling and what
might have been the scratching of claws on the ceiling. Neil tried
to tell himself it was nothing more than field mice nesting, but
Stephen's words had chilled him, making it difficult to believe
anything even remotely natural was causing those sounds. He wished
the man would stop talking, stop trying to fill his head with these
bizarre and frightening fantasies. It proved he was insane and that
frightened him even more, for it meant there could be no reasoning
with him, and no escape.

"You would have liked your
mother," Stephen said. "And she would have adored you. But things
do not always work out as planned, do they? Her death was a
mistake, an act of homicidal rage by my poor, misguided fool of a
brother." He sighed. "Although I cannot claim innocence either. It
was I who informed him of Mansfield's affair with Sylvia, hoping
Edward would call upon his lifelong inability to face anything with
a level head, and kill the man. The authorities would try him for
murder, in which case the house, the land, and my beloved Sylvia
would be mine for the taking."

Sadness entered his voice.
"Even knowing how ill-tempered and unstable he was, I never dreamed
he'd do what he did. It was my idea to arrange a hunt, during which
he could kill Mansfield. Instead, enraged by her treachery, he beat
and tortured my Sylvia to within an inch of her life and led the
hunt to her, in an effort to prove his dominance over her and any
man who attempted to steal her away from him.

"She tried, at the last,
to change into her
strigoaica
form," he said. "But he'd cut off her hands and
feet. Even changing would have done her no good." His voice wavered
as if he were about to cry, a sound Neil found so undeniably
genuine it was alarming. "I followed the hunt, content to observe
my brother in action, until I saw what he'd done to Sylvia." There
was a sound like fists thumping against the floor and when next the
man spoke, he spoke with rage. "I lost control. Maddened, I lashed
out with everything that was in me at those members of the hunt. I
changed for the first time, and it was a wonderful, glorious thing.
But while I ran them down, one of them shot and killed my brother.
At the time I didn't care; the stupid old bastard deserved it for
what he did. But before I could finish them off, the horror and the
grief set in, overwhelming me with visions of my beloved Sylvia
shuddering as her life's blood drained from her, and I began to
revert to my human state. I couldn't stop it.