My Demon's Kiss

“By God’s grace,” she answered aloud. “I will pray you’re right.”

“My lady, you’re awake,” Kevin said, coming in looking pale. “You should go upstairs.” He looked around the hall. “Where is Brautus?”

“I couldn’t say,” Isabel answered, confused. “What has happened?”

“He’s upstairs,” Hannah answered at the same time.

“Go and fetch him,” Kevin told his wife before turning to Isabel. “Go with her, my lady, and stay.”

“I will not,” Isabel said, getting up. “Kevin, what’s wrong?”

For a moment, she thought he would refuse to answer, but Raymond and some of the other men were coming in behind him. “We went looking for Susannah,” he began, obviously unhappy.

“Did you find her?” Hannah said, alarmed.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “But we found three others.” He nodded to Raymond, who went back out again. “My lady, they are dead.” Raymond came back in leading Mother Bess, leaning heavily on his arm on one side and her gnarled willow cane on the other. “I fear the wolf ha

s returned.”

She watched with Hannah standing beside her as the bodies were carried in, her arms crossed tightly over her breasts as if to hold back a scream. “You found them together?” she asked, shocked to hear her voice sound so calm.

“Aye, my lady,” Kevin said as the third and last of the dead men was laid before the hearth. The first two were dressed in the leather clothing of soldiers with heavy woolen mantles of a Scottish weave. They looked as if they might have been killed by the same beast as the woman Isabel had seen at the chapel. One’s throat was eaten nearly to the bone, and the other had a deep gash in his throat just under his jaw. But the third was no fighter. He was dressed for the festival in a finespun linen shirt and woolen hose and a vest still decorated with a wilted flower. He was younger than the others, too, and handsome, and Isabel could see no mark of violence on him anywhere. But he was dead just the same. “They were arranged in a clearing near the grove,” Kevin explained.

“Arranged?” she said.

“Aye,” old Wat replied, his leathery face more gray than his beard. “In a triangle, head to foot, with their arms outstretched, like this.” He scratched the beginnings of the pattern in the ashes on the hearth, but his wife, Glynnis, struck the stick from his hand with a shriek.

“Old fool,” she scolded, rubbing out the scratches with her foot.

“The young one is the miller’s son,” Tom said, looking even more greensick than Isabel felt as he stared at the dead man’s face.

“The one who was with Susannah?” Isabel said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Aye, he was with her.” He looked back at her, a strange light in his eyes. “But he wasn’t the only one.”

“What is it?” Brautus said, coming in with a speed to put his injuries to shame. “What has happened?” He saw the corpses and stopped, appalled. “Isabel… come away from there.”

“Brautus…” Without thinking, she ran to him, hiding her face in his shoulder.

“Hush now,” he rumbled, holding her with his good arm. “It’s all right.” She wrapped her arms around him, desperate to believe him. “It will be all right.”

Simon awoke from unquiet dreams to find Orlando and Raymond, the peasant from the woods, standing over him. “The sun is down,” Orlando said, looking grim. Simon had released him from the catacombs at dawn, but they had barely spoken, the vampire saving his confessions for the night, when he would be wakeful enough to defend himself.

“My lord, you must come,” Raymond interrupted. “My lady needs you in the hall.”

“Is she all right?” Simon asked him, getting up.

“For the moment,” the man answered, pale and obviously frightened. “Please, just come.”

He made it to the hall just as Isabel was running to the arms of her Black Knight. “My lord,” Kevin said in obvious relief as he came to meet him. “Christ save us, come and see.” Brautus scowled at him as he passed, still murmuring comfort to Isabel, but she didn’t look up from his shoulder. And once Simon saw the bodies, he was just as glad.

Two were the brigands he had murdered himself, looking no better for their day spent dead in the woods, but the third was worse somehow, a man he had never seen before. “Where did you find them?” he asked, pretending to wince at the wound in the first one’s thick throat as if he hadn’t been the one to put it there. “Were they together?”

“Aye.” Kevin stood just at his elbow. “We were just telling Lady Isabel, they were left in a sort of witch’s pattern in the woods.”

“Witches my arse,” Brautus scoffed. “You there, Sir Crusader—I thought you killed this wolf.”

Simon looked back at him, suppressing a smile. In a different world, he would have been quite fond of Brautus, he thought. “So did I,” he said. He made a careful examination of his second kill to satisfy his audience, then moved on to the only one he needed to see, the handsome peasant. “No wolf did this.”