The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (11 page)

A shadow appeared suddenly in the doorway that was formed from the tent’s tied-back entry flap. It was guarded by two highlanders of the 84th, both of whom stepped smartly aside to allow the newcomer to enter. The figure stepped forward into the candle-light. Dr. Reed Caldwell had never felt so glad to see his commanding general in his entire life.

“A very good evening to you, Dr. Caldwell,” Wellesley said politely, almost deferentially. His usually dark eyes glowed a pale red, lighting up the shadows like twin suns at daybreak.

“Good evening, sir.” Caldwell didn’t salute, as was traditional with most army doctors, but straightened his bearing nonetheless and offered Wellesley a courteous nod.

“How fares Captain Campbell?”

Was it Caldwell’s imagination, or was that a note of genuine concern in the general’s voice? “Had you asked me that same question just an hour ago, sir, or even half an hour ago for that matter, I would have told you that his prognosis was grim. But as it stands now…” He hesitated, struggling to force his groggy brain into organizing his thoughts.

“Yes?” Wellesley asked impatiently, unwilling to brook the delay.

“As it stands now, I feel that Captain Campbell may have just turned the corner. His pulse has regained its former strength, and more besides…” Caldwell gestured with one hand, and Wellesley followed it, taking in the captain’s whipcord-taught muscles as they strained hard to break out of their leather bonds. The Scotsman threw back his head once more and howled, the veins standing out like thick ropes on either side of his neck. At his temple, an S-shaped vein throbbed angrily.

“He is in considerable pain, Doctor. Have you given anything to help with that – morphia, perhaps?”

Caldwell dismissed that notion with an angry shake of the head, thought (but did not say) I do not tell you how to do your job, sir, so pray extend to me the same courtesy. Wellesley’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and it was only then that Caldwell recalled with some trepidation the vampire’s ability of reading mortal minds, when they so choose. Had Wellesley perceived his disobedient thought? If he had, then he seemed unwilling to act on it, which came as a great relief.

“No, sir, I have not. Until very recently, the strength of Captain Campbell’s pulse has been extremely poor – caused, no doubt, by the great volume of blood that he lost during his struggle with the undead. Morphine has the effect of slowing the respiratory rate and weakening the pulse even further, which could have been extremely dangerous – if not fatal – for Captain Campbell. I therefore had no choice but to withhold analgesia from him, as dismaying a prospect as that may be.”

“Captain Campbell’s wounds were not caused by the risen dead, Doctor.” Arthur regarded him levelly. “They were inflicted by a were-tiger. The creature who is named Jamelia, daughter of the Tipu Sultan.”

Caldwell’s eyes narrowed. “Then his physiologic sea change suddenly makes a great deal more sense to me.” The doctor place a hand firmly on top of Campbell’s skull, clamping it in place as best he could, and with the fingers of the other hand slowly prised open one sweat-slicked eyelid. The iris underneath was now a pale yellow in color. Of greater concern was the fact that the ink-black pupil was no longer round: instead, it had taken on the shape of a thin, almond-like vertical slash.

Like that of a cat.

As though triggered by the sensation of light falling on his exposed eyeball, the captain’s muscles gave an almighty spasm. The buckle on the strap that secured his right wrist gave way, unable to withstand the sudden spastic jerk. Caldwell and his orderly took a step back. Wellesley held his ground, silent and immobile. The left wrist strap went next. Rather than bend at the waist to free himself from the ankle straps, Campbell instead clutched at his temples, howling as though his skull was about to burst.

Which apparently, it was.

Something was taking place behind the tortured Scotsman’s face. His yellow eyes screwed tightly shut again, but Caldwell and Wellesley could see them bulging out of their sockets, as though pushed from behind. His nose came next, slowly beginning to protrude forward until it began to look like more of a snout than anything else. The sound of cracking cartilage which accompanied the warping of Campbell’s facial features made even the seasoned doctor wince, although the vampire general remained impassive, simply watching the grotesque events play out on top of the makeshift operating table.

Campbell opened his mouth to scream, only for several of his teeth to elongate, sinking downward and rising up to meet one another. With an almighty crunch, his jaw dislocated, pushed and stretched out to the limit of its tolerance. Still the face elongated, the brow straightening and becoming somehow flatter. More catlike.

Fingernails became sharp black talons, extending outward from the quick and slicing a series of bloody parallel grooves in the captain’s face. He barely seemed to notice, so great was his overall sense of pain, as trails of blood ran down the side of each cheek in rivulets, oozing from the twin sets of new lacerations. Barely had the first drop of blood reached his chin than it was absorbed, matting the orange and black tufts of hair that were sprouting from Campbell’s pores with unbelievable speed. The same hair was emerging all over the captain’s body. The doctor and his assistants had already cut away his shirt prior to treating his wounds, but his grey trousers remained in place – to afford him a little dignity, if nothing else. Now they began to tear, splitting down the inseams with a slow but steady ripping sound.

Caldwell made to move toward his patient, but was stopped by the casual yet incredibly firm grip of Wellesley’s hand. He looked his general in the face, and received an almost imperceptible shake of the head. It went against all his innate instincts as a healer, to simply stand back and do nothing while one of his charges suffered, but Caldwell knew that the general was right: there was nothing left to do now but let nature – or in this case, supernature – take its course.

There was another violent thrash. The wooden table broke, splitting in half down its long axis. Campbell was dumped unceremoniously onto the dirt floor. Not that he seemed to care, or to find it anything more than a minor distraction. Now Wellesley did step back, three deft steps, guiding Caldwell backward along with him. Campbell’s back arched, flopping onto his left side in something close to the fetal position and drawing his knees in tight toward his chest. His spine began to curve, causing the accompanying cracking and popping noises to reach something close to fever pitch. Caldwell watched with frank astonishment as several bony prominences along his spinal ridge began to stretch and elongate, pushing his legs outward.

“The hips must be dislocating and re-fusing. See, look there.”

Trying to figure out what exactly was going on anatomically was proving to be an almost impossible challenge, yet despite the horror of the situation, the doctor was fascinated nonetheless. He had never seen anything remotely like this before, not even during his academic training. Oh, shape-shifters –
weres
– existed, everybody knew that. So did many other types of supernatural creatures. Yet the weres were notoriously elusive, bordering on the hermetic, in the British Isles. They lacked the societal clout that the vampires took for granted, tending to live in isolated villages in familial clans; The less social of their number really did roam the moors and valleys, preying on wildlife for the most part…and on occasion, or so the hushed whispers said, upon the unwary traveler. Some were truly feral, and in some rare instances had required the army to hunt them down and destroy them, using volleys of silver-flinging musketry.

It was one thing to know of their existence, on an intellectual level, at least; To have read about them in books and periodicals. It was quite another to find oneself face to face with one, watching as it was…well, Caldwell supposed that born was as good a word for it as any, right before his own two disbelieving eyes.

And yet, a small part of his brain wondered, why was this so unusual, when one got right down to it? He had grown accustomed to the ways of the vampire, for he could hardly have served in His Majesty’s army without becoming so. The outbreak of the hungry dead had taken him by surprise, he would freely admit that; and yet he was coping with it admirably, shoving aside the utterly blasphemous nature of the sins being inflicted upon the newly-risen human corpses, and giving his scientific curiosity free reign.

Part of him wanted to flee; a mean part, the part that lurked beneath the civilized veneer in all men. But Reed Caldwell would not give in to it. He would not. He was a doctor, after all, and not just any doctor: he was a military doctor in the service of King George, and that bound him with an iron sense of unshakable duty. If there was any way in the world that he could help the suffering, then he was honor-bound to do so.

And Colin Campbell was most assuredly suffering.

His arms and legs, thrashing frenziedly, were warping into some new shape. The hands and feet were becoming paws, complete with pads and wickedly curving black claws. Campbell flopped onto his belly, face down amid an ocean of wooden shards and fragments, all that remained of the trellised operating table to which he had been secured since nightfall. His appearance was far more that of a tiger than of a man now. Somehow, a tail had sprouted from just above his buttocks, long and as sinuous as a whip. The tiger breathed rapidly, its chest rising and falling in the manner of a blacksmith’s bellows, pumping air in and out of the muscular orange and black-striped chest.

Finally, rising up onto all four legs, the great cat threw back its head and roared.

“That will be quite enough of that, Captain Campbell.”

The were-tiger growled, turning in the direction of the vampire’s voice. Wellesley seemed unruffled, his voice carrying the easy air of natural authority and command that the officers and men of the army had grown so used to hearing. Had he wanted, the general could have interjected a little enhanced “persuasion” into his voice; it was one of the many advantages that vampires enjoyed over the mortal race. But Caldwell had heard the general employ such suggestibility before, had learned to recognize the slightly lilting edge that came into his voice. There was no trace of it now, just Wellesley’s own inbred air of natural authority – one that Caldwell suspected he had possessed long before he had accepted the Dark Gift.

If he had been asked before this moment whether he thought that a giant tiger would be capable of looking uncertain, Caldwell would have scoffed at the very notion: but here it was, in the flesh, so to speak. The beast’s brow furrowed slightly, as though it were deep in thought, attempting to comprehend the situation. Surely every feline hunter’s instinct was telling the great cat to pounce, to lash out at himself and the general?

“Captain Campbell...you will stand to attention, sir.” Wellesley enunciated every word carefully and clearly, his voice losing not an ounce of either authority or calmness.

Slowly, the tiger obeyed. It sat on its hind legs, straightening its back until it was about as upright as a hunting cat could possibly be. Was it his imagination, Caldwell wondered, or was that a newly-found sense of clarity in the creature’s yellow eyes? They fixed upon Wellesley, and then the powerful jaws opened. Not to bite, but rather to say, “I am…sorry, sir.”

“Well, bugger me.” Caldwell couldn’t help it. The words just leaked out. Hardly proper decorum for an officer, and he hope that none of the medical orderlies still working inside the tent or any of their living patients had heard the imprecation. And yet, surely such a lapse was forgivable, when one considered…well,
that.

If Wellesley was irritated at the remark, he didn’t show it. Instead, he remained resolutely focused on the feline.

“You are looking…better, Captain Campbell.”

The tiger blinked, as though considering the validity of the statement. “I am feeling better, sir. Now that the pain is gone.” There were scars running through his tufts of fur, where the original tooth and claw wounds had been inflicted on his skin. If what Caldwell recalled from his studies was true, then those scars would never go away, for they had been supernaturally inflicted. But when Campbell said the word pain, the doctor thought that it had perhaps been imbued with a double meaning, for the process of transformation itself had looked to be sheer agony.

“Are you in full possession of your faculties, Captain? Your sense of…control?” Wellesley asked cautiously, and Caldwell resisted the urge to laugh at the notion of a vampire not wishing to cause offense to a were-tiger. What he truly meant, of course, was: “Are you sure that you aren’t going to go berserk and attack every last one of us in this field hospital?”

“I am, sir.”

The doctor found it strange to hear a human voice emerge from between such powerful jaws – jaws which could tear out a frail human throat with a single bite. And as for the eyes…they held a queer preternatural intelligence, despite their catlike appearance. It was going to take some adjustment, Caldwell knew, for him to accept the fact that behind those twin yellow pools, flecked with reddish-brown, was the mind of a man.

“Very good.” The general was suddenly all business, seemingly taking the captain at his word. “Then on to the business of the night. We shall have an officer’s meeting in fifteen minutes. Captain Campbell, you are still my adjutant, I do believe?”

The tiger looked up at him blankly, as though he had not even considered the fact. He finally said, “Of course, sir.”