She grimaced in disgust.
“You had something in your hair,” he quipped, tossing the living appendage away. He stretched out his legs and looked over the wriggling churchyard. “Now with a bit of time I should be able to fashion a spell to suppress these poor wretches and keep them in the earth.”
“Good.” Kate regarded him. “I’ll have a first kiss story that will surely dominate the garden club.”
Simon laughed as the bells began to chime in the frigid night air.
Chapter 10
It was early morning and Malcolm tried not to think about Hartley Hall and the creature sleeping there. He had been days thinking of it while searching for any sign of lycanthropes remaining in London. He tried not to think of the blank look on Imogen’s face as he had turned from the slumbering little form with the pistol in his hand. Even though she had looked no more involved than staring at a tiresome painting, there was accusation in her strange eyes. Charlotte wasn’t a little girl; it was a monster, Malcolm thought with a flare of anger. They would never understand that until it rose up and killed them. Malcolm had no intention of being one of them.
Amateurs.
Although he had to grudgingly admit Simon had done amazing things, led their frail little group against Gretta Aldfather and Dr. White, two of the most fearsome creatures that ever stormed from the darkness. Malcolm had started to believe that the man had promise even though he was a magician. But now the Scotsman started to think that Simon was typical of magicians after all, prone to absorb concepts of their own greatness the way they absorbed aether. The man was walking the path to destruction because he had begun to believe in his own power.
Well and good, Malcolm thought, except that Simon was taking Kate and Penny with him. Those two might stay with the scribe until it was too late. But it wasn’t Malcolm’s mission in life to exercise power over anyone else. Every man and woman was a free agent. He would no more tell anyone what to do than he would accept someone’s telling him.
Malcolm found himself taking a cold, dark route that sent him past the St. Giles soup kitchen. It was nestled between a dilapidated storefront and an empty, crumbling building. He wasn’t exactly sure why he went there. He fingered the thick woolen scarf around his neck. It felt ordinary, but his throat had been a hairsbreadth from being cut but for this scarf. He wanted to treat the woman who had made it to a fine meal. She had offered him warmth and a kind word in a city that teemed with opportunists and charlatans. For that alone he was willing to pay his respects and thank her.
There was a dim light in the window. The door was unlocked, as he suspected it would be, so he entered the empty open space filled with simple, long tables and benches.
Malcolm’s knuckles rapped as he closed the front door behind him. “Hello.”
There was a loud clanking as if someone was banging pots and pans about in the kitchen. He made his way to the back and opened the other door. A rank smell wafted out that near brought the Scotsman to gagging. It was as if the week’s garbage had been left to spoil in the bins.
Malcolm spied a figure beside the iron stove straight across from him. She had a wooden ladle in one hand and a pot in the other. This wasn’t the woman he sought however. This person was taller and heavier, and dressed in a ragged and filthy coat. He coughed as the overwhelming smell of rancid meat filled his throat again.
The figure shifted at the sound. A dead, rotting face, half-consumed in writhing maggots and with its jaw hanging askew, turned toward Malcolm. He took an involuntary step back and yanked out his Lancaster pistols, pointing them at the woman.
He hesitated, waiting for the walking corpse to make the first move, but it merely stood there, clutching the wooden spoon in a hand comprised of bone and sagging flesh. Malcolm flashed back on Old Mrs. MacIntyre, who had terrorized him as a young lad from her reclusive sod shack near Loch Lomond.
Suddenly, there was a sound behind him and he spun around, one pistol still on the dead woman and the other pointing at a new arrival. The young woman he was searching for entered, dressed in her familiar plain grey dress and white bonnet. The eyes behind the small glasses perched on her nose widened at the dark Scotsman. Then she caught a glimpse of the horrific creature by the stove and she screamed. The bundles in her arms tumbled to the floor.