The Bride of Time (25 page)

“I’ll do as ya say—that goes without question—but ’tis more than a man can comprehend, what you’re sayin’.”

Giles couldn’t help but wonder what the coachman would say if he knew the master of Longhollow Abbey would turn into a wolf in but a few short days, too. How would the poor man comprehend
that?

“Just think on this,” Giles said. “Somewhere in time, my bride is walking the same streets we walk. She is here, Able, among us right now, only in a different year, and she’s trying to get back to me. If it is at all possible, she will. You brought her to me once. I only pray you can do so again.”

It was nearly dawn when Giles reached the coaching inn. He would return to Cornwall by post chaise. Going thus was expensive, but it was the swiftest means and time was of the essence. After making the arrangements, he went straight to his room to collect his belongings. The innkeeper had warned him to let the fire go out, since they’d finally hired a boy to sweep the chimney. But it was too late for such amenities, and Giles was halfway to the stables when the sweep climbed up on the roof with his brushes.

The chaise was waiting, the coachman decked out in his colorfulrig, from the crimson traveling shawl beneath his wide-skirted green coat to his wide-brimmed, low-crowned hat of brown felt. Giles had paid for four horses and two postilions for haste. Though there was
room for two inside—not including the dickey at the back for the groom—he would be the only passenger, which suited him. It was a long distance to Cornwall, two days at best, and he was in no humor for idle conversation with strangers.

What made him look back before entering the chaise, Giles didn’t know. He certainly wouldn’t miss the inn. But when his eyes strayed toward it, his heart nearly stopped beating. There, on the roof, the chimneysweep had begun to ply his long-handle brushes. And it wasn’t just any sweep. It was Monty.

The boy hadn’t noticed him, and Giles crept back along the building, flattening himself up against the inn’s outer wall until he reached the ladder. Crouching low, to prevent the boy from seeing him until the very last, he rushed up the rungs, leaped onto the slippery tiled roof made slipperier by the rain, danced his way up the slope and yanked the boy from the chimney by the scruff of his neck.

“So, this is where you’ve been hiding, is it?” Giles seethed, hefting the boy over his shoulder. It would stand to reason. Chimneysweeps were always in demand, and the position earned him room and board. “What have you done with her? Speak up! Where is she?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Put me down! Let me go!”

“Ohhh no,” Giles said, jerking him back as the boy tried to bite him. “Go ahead!” he said. “Sink those teeth into me if you must. You can do no more harm than you’ve already done, and you might just cause me to lose my grip upon you. It’s a long way down off this roof, Master Monty. One slip and I will be well rid of you. Now, I’ll ask you again: where is she? What have you done with her?”

“I took her home,” the boy said, dangling precariously
as Giles shimmied down the ladder. “She won’t be coming back. Lemme go!”

“Well, you will be coming back,” Giles triumphed, “to show the guards from the Watch at home that I haven’t killed you. You’re a cunning little blighter, Master Monty Montague.” He hoisted the boy into the chaise and climbed in beside him. “Let us see what tune you sing by time we reach the coast.”

Tessa wiped the damp tendrils of her hair from her face and straightened up, soothing her back. Sessions wouldn’t convene for another fortnight, and in the meanwhile she’d been assigned custodial labor at the jail, which freed her from her cell for a time each day. While she was under constant scrutiny, that little bit of freedom gave her hope that somehow she could escape, for she would have a better chance of finding Giles if she were free to seek the corridors that she knew might re unite them. She was also pleased that her jailors hadn’t found her coin purse, which she now wore around her neck.

But things were not perfect: the moon was full, and she didn’t have to wonder if it would affect her when it rose. She had felt its pull for two days now. The wound upon her lip had healed, though traces still remained. It reminded her of the wound on Giles’s wrist in color and condition. There was no question. Next to her coin purse, she still wore the pentacle amulet about her neck beneath her frock. Already, it had begun to irritate and burn. The wolf inside her would rise with the moon. She was terrified that it would occur within the dingy walls of that dank London jail. But on the other hand, she was glad that Giles wasn’t there to see what would happen, especially since he was the one who had infected her.

Darkness came quickly. Her good behavior had
gained her favor with the turnkeys. That was her plan: to lull them into a careless mode. There was one called Samuel, however, a leering, foul-smelling individual whose familiar gestures and lewd advances terrified her. It was he who came on for the evening shift.

Tessa had deliberately drawn out scrubbing the lobby floor. It was torture being that close to freedom and not being able to escape. They hadn’t given her anything to wear, and her beautiful robin’s-egg-blue muslin was hopelessly soiled and tattered. They’d taken her wedding ring, and she knew she would never see her chinchilla-trimmed pelisse again. But none of that mattered as long as she could somehow find Giles.

She had worked herself closer and closer to the door, when something held her back, and she whipped her head around to face Samuel, who had tethered her with the toe of his heavy boot upon the hem of her frock.

“You’re done,” he said, hauling her to her feet. There was no mistaking what he wanted of her as he none too gently led her along toward her cubicle.

A high-set window at the end of the corridor showed her the moon, full and round and bloodred, as it often was this time of year. It was happening. There was nothing she could do to prevent it. All around her the moans and cries and restless laments of the inmates more mad than sane rose in reply to the commotion she and the turnkey were causing as he tried to force her back into her cell. This she could not allow, for he would have his way with her, lock her in, and all would see her turn into the wolf that even now was swallowing her consciousness. Already it was erasing her memory of the here and now, as it would much of what lay ahead when she transformed into the creature she feared she’d become.

All at once, her screams became guttural snarls. Her vision narrowed, and the periphery appeared through a
blurred auburn haze. There was pain—a great deal of pain as bones shifted, as muscle and sinew stretched and flexed, expanding and contracting into the shape of the creature taking control.

Tessa vaguely remembered knocking Samuel down. She had no other recollection of her flight until she plunged headlong through the foyer window. She only remembered that because the jagged shards of broken glass pierced her shoulders as she crashed through, tearing away what remained of her frock that Samuel hadn’t torn from her body during their struggle. The very air was rife with shards and specks and splinters of glass illuminated in the gaslight glow of streetlamps that had just been lit, and she hit the cobblestones on all fours, streaking through the moonlight faster than any man could have done on two.

On the vague periphery of her human consciousness, the she-wolf ran through the all but deserted streets, through the misty darkness beneath the risen moon. An echo in her soul directed her then, a fading, distant splinter of recollection nagging at her mortal incarnation. She found herself heading straight for the gallery, just as she had when she ran that first fateful day with the bobbies on her heels. Only, this time she was approaching it from a different direction, from the jail instead of Poole House. The wolf she had become wouldn’t know this, but Tessa knew, and not even knowing why, she ran until she feared her heart would burst through her barrel-chested body until she’d reached Threadneedle Street and Tatum’s Gallery.

The shop had long since closed for the day, though a light inside illuminated the alcove she had visited so often in the past. But it wasn’t empty now. “The Bride of Time” had breached time again. It was standing where it always stood, surrounded by Giles Longworth’s other paintings. His self-portrait beckoned. Could she have
come back through the corridor to a point in time before the paintings were sold…before that awful moment when she reached the little gallery for one last look only to find that they were gone?

She blinked, and the scene before her changed. The light inside the little gallery was snuffed out. Giles’s paintings were gone again, and all was in darkness. It had been a fleeting, dreamlike episode that didn’t seem real; but then, this was Tessa’s first time in the body of a wolf, and nothing did.

Her human periphery was closing in upon her again. She was losing control of her real self and becoming more and more the wolf. She threw her head back and loosed a howl that sounded shrill in echo all around her. She howled again, as if she desperately fought to beat back the inevitable, the mindless possession of the lupine creature in her that would kill her memory. Then, with her last shred of human consciousness, she ran behind the buildings into the alley the way she’d run when she’d escaped from the gallery loo.

Suddenly, the gallery seemed far away. The shrill cries of the lamplighter and two drunken slags calling “Mad dog!” and “Werewolf!” faded into the distance. Her vision was closing in altogether, except for what stretched directly in front of her, and that she saw only through an auburn haze that resembled dried blood. Another howl pierced the awful unfamiliar silence, Tessa only marginally aware that it was coming from her own throat. She could no longer draw the line between human and wolf. The edges were blurred. The light was fading. A ghost-like mist rose up around her like a cottony blanket, choking her lupine whines and turning them into guttural snarls. A hunger like no other overwhelmed her—the hunger of a ravenous beast seeking its prey.

The auburn stain before her eyes had turned blood-
red. Through the crimson haze, she saw a tall church belfry streak by; or was she streaking by the church it crowned? She could no longer distinguish motion, only need: an all-consuming passion to ravage and destroy. All trace of her humanity was gone. She was pure wolf now, streaking through the fog, bounding over cobblestones and paving stones, curbstones and milestone markers. On the she-wolf ran, over gravel and bracken-tufted dirt as the lane narrowed, on until her wolf’s heart felt as if it were about to burst. She bounded over the patchwork hills, on and on…until she ran headlong into another wolf: a wild-eyed, ravaging male.

Chapter Twenty

For a moment, the two wolves stood transfixed, staring at each other in the moonlight. The male was larger, darker. The female almost appeared silver in the haloed glow of first light trickling over the horizon.

The female howled into the mist, head thrust back. The desperation in the sound backed the male wolf up a pace, and Giles’s consciousness slowly bled into the madness of the wolf’s mind. His vision was widening. He could once again see with human eyes, though he remained trapped in the body of the wolf. It was agony, and he, too, howled at the sky.

Recognition was returning. He looked deep into the eyes of the female wolf—into
Tessa’s
eyes, limpid and sad. Rearing back on his hind legs, he sailed through the air, a guttural lupine snarl baring deadly fangs that turned into a human cry as he collided with her naked upon two feet, and fell to his knees, embracing the female wolf.

“Noooooo!” he groaned, fisting his hands in her silvery wolf’s coat, burying his face in the thick, lush ruff about her neck, clinging to her with all his strength.

The she-wolf wriggled in his arms, let loose a bestial howl and broke free, bounding away, off and over the
moor through the mist shrouding heather and bracken. The brush slowed her pace and she finally sprang, surging to her full human form in a silvery streak of displaced motion, an agonized whine pouring forth as the transformation took place. Sinew and bone reshaped itself, muscle and flesh, and she finally emerged naked and whole, tears streaming down.

But the shape-shift didn’t break her stride. On she ran, over clumps of tall swaying grass, bracken and furze wet with the morning dew, her long chestnut hair streaming out behind her like a pennant waving in the dawn breeze.

His long, corded legs pumping furiously, Giles gave chase. He was gaining on her. Why was she running from him? Her sobs were like needles piercing his soul, and he called her name at the top of his voice.

“Tessa, wait!”

But she kept on running, and his heart leapt inside as he recalled another time he’d run after her and lost her to a time corridor. He couldn’t let that happen again; not now. That fear gave his feet wings until they collided again, and he spun her around screaming in his arms, and drove her down in the mist-draped heather.

“Why are you…running from me, Tessa?” he called out, panting, the debilitating exertion of transformation coupled with the chase having rendered him breathless. “How did this happen? Answer me!” he demanded, shaking her.

Her sobs replied, and he shook her again, none too gently. She was close to hysteria, but he needed answers.

“Don’t, Giles,” she sobbed. “I didn’t want you to find out this way. Let me go!”

“Let you go?” Giles seethed. “You are my wife, Tessa. What is all this? How has this occurred? Was it Master Monty?”

Tessa let out a mournful wail, struggling in his arms,
and he crushed her close, burying his hand in the long silken flow of her hair. Her body, pressed so close against his own, naked but for a small purse around her neck, sent shock waves through him. Shapeshifting always prompted arousal. He was on fire for her.

“No,” she murmured. “It wasn’t.”

“Who, then? My God, Tessa, who? Where were you bitten?” He began searching her body with frantic hands. How warm she was, despite the thin veil of mist that moistened her skin from the morning dew. The tactile experience of caressing her petal-soft skin drenched in dew drove him over the edge. She felt like hot silk in his arms, fluid and malleable, seeking her own level against him the way a silken scarf slides across the flesh of the wearer, sensual and subtle, as if it had a life of its own.