Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Matter of Britain”

  The pain that woke Wesley wasn't anything to do with the rib the old babushka removed, it was more the ebbing bits of fire that he felt envelope his brain…it was a sensation he’d yet to feel in all his years in the magical police.

  After dozens of times being hit by charms and curses, he’d never felt an ebbing fire like this.

  And, of course, he knew what it was.

  The werewolf’s poison was moving freely through his body, unencumbered by the silver hilt.

  The spot from which it had been taken felt emptier than it had before. Even after his actual rib had been removed.

  Wesley didn’t know if he woke right after these thoughts or not, but when he eventually did, it was like being hit over the head by a cacophony of other people’s senses. Dozens of smells, sounds, and tastes.

  He could smell everything, or so it seemed. The bread in the kitchens, some floors below. Wine two rooms over. Cigar smoke wafting through the open window. He could hear a plane flying above them, in the clouds, as if he were floating right beside it. A grove some half mile away, where a group of birds were all yelling at each other, or at least that's how it sounded.

  “What the–” Wesley asked, blinking.

  The babushka was putting her tools back into their bag and Esther was standing at the end of his bed, watching him. Cece, whom he’d hoped had stayed to watch over him, was nowhere to be seen.

  “You are safe,” Esther said. “For now.” She smiled at him lazily. “My babushka removed your little rib. Now your body is being fully infected by the werewolf strain. It isn’t a particularly nasty one, but where it was initially buttressed by the silver in the hilt, it seems it may have gotten stronger. Some kind of effect of the metal.”

  Wesley had to close his eyes so he could focus, the headache was growing.

  “You need to eat,” she told him. “I’ve had the staff make you a steak. A little bloody, of course, given your new…nature.”

  He scoffed. “My new nature? I’m not–”

  Something was shoved into his mouth, and he choked it down. It tasted like cloves and dirt. The pain began to slowly subside and ebb away.

  The babushka nodded, looking at him. “He’ll live,” was all she said, in an accent so thick it could have passed as a feral grunt.

  “Thank you,” Esther said, then glared at him as she crossed her arms.

  “Yes,” Wesley croaked. “Thank you.”

  She waved with a wispy hand and waddled out of the room. Another old woman entered the room, though she wasn’t nearly as old as the babushka, and she carried a silver tray. Wesley felt suddenly ravenous and could tell immediately that Esther was right.

  He could smell the blood still on the piece of meat. The rawness of it almost made him growl.

  But he managed to keep himself still. He wasn’t going to allow that kind of slip, even if it was a new sensation to him.

  The woman set the platter on his bedside table. “Thank you,” he managed, finding the words more difficult to say than he’d thought.

  Esther studied him further. “Can you control yourself, Barstow?”

  He nodded.

  She produced an ancient key from a pocket and proceeded to unlock the cold metal bar over his chest. It felt like he could breathe fully for the first time since he’d found himself in the bed.

  “And my legs?” he asked.

  “One step at a time,” she said, tucking the key away. She whistled a low, piercing sound and waited.

  Cece appeared in the doorway a second later, a look of annoyance plastered on her face. “I told you to stop that.”

  “What?” Esther said innocently, though a slight bit of humor touched her eyes. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Cece glared at the woman as she took her spot by the window.

  “Good,” Esther began, “now that we are all here, we need to discuss what we are going to do.”

  “Where is the hilt?” Wesley asked, grabbing the platter with the steak.

  Then something hard hit his shin, and he grunted in pain.

  “What was that for?” he asked, rubbing the spot where the hilt had hit him. It lay just between his two legs, atop the blankets. He could feel the power pulsating from it. It bothered him like a fly buzzing around his head would.

  “You asked to see it,” Esther said.

  “What do we need to talk about?” Cece cut in. “We are going to find the Nocturne and kill him.”

  “Ah, of course, because that just went so well.”

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  The retort made Cece roll her eyes. “Obviously we just needed the hilt.”

  “We had the hilt, and it still didn’t do a damn thing,” Esther shot back.

  Cece looked like she was about to explode.

  “My father said we needed to find the First Warlock,” Wesley said, annoyed at their arguing.

  While they eyed daggers at each other, probably annoyed by him, he took a bite of the steak, tearing it with his teeth. It was how he’d imagined ambrosia tasted to the gods. Like the sweetest honey.

  Wesley watched those thoughts cross his mind and knew he was in trouble.

  He’s become as baseless as an animal. As low as the lowest predator. He felt the very nature of himself had changed.

  Flicking across his mind were all the beasts he’d put down in his time. All those he’d captured. All those that had merely acted in their nature that he’d been forced to stop.

  Would that become him?

  He thought briefly about how things like this didn’t happen to people like him. This was a nightmare. How has it come to this?

  “I think,” he said between bites, “that we are looking for Merlin. The First True Warlock of our age. One of the first.”

  “He’s a myth,” Esther sighed, “People have looked for him for ages. If he did exist, someone would have found him.”

  “No, no. He’s very real,” Wesley said, brushing his hair out of his face. He’d just realized how much it had grown. Almost covered his ears. “That’s what this is all about. The Nocturne wants to control Avalon. He wants to draw power from it. The Nocturne wouldn’t waste so much time if it wasn’t real.”

  Esther seemed to be caught between wanting to believe and thinking it was all hogwash. “Is that even possible?”

  “It’s not only possible,” Cece said. “It’s already happening. For decades the Nocturne has been collecting artifacts from Avalon. Those that had made their way into our world. He draws immense magick just from those. Now he wants all of it.”

  Esther laughed, rubbing her forehead with a long, pale finger. “But…he can’t get there?”

  “No. Apparently, as it's told, Avalon doesn't welcome everyone the same. It has powerful magick guarding its barriers. Which is why the Nocturne was able to call beings from within it but not enter himself. It's rejecting him,” Cece explained. “Avalon, for all its fables, is a living thing unto itself. A being with some semblance of self-preservation.”

  Wesley was really not enjoying how much he was enjoying the nearly raw steak.

  “So he screwed himself?” Ester said quietly, leaning against the bed frame now.

  Cece nodded, impressed. “By raping and pillaging every artifact he could from our world, he made himself an enemy of it.”

  Wesley swallowed another bite and asked, “Then he thinks Merlin will show him how to enter even though Avalon itself doesn’t want him?”

  Cece lit up her pipe, blowing out smoke. “Bingo.”

  Esther looked like she wanted to strangle the both of them. “Fine. We find this Merlin and he takes us to Avalon. Or what's the plan?”

  Wesley blinked, looking to Cece for help but she only shrugged.

  Esther began to laugh derisively. “You two geniuses don’t know the big picture.”

  “The big picture,” Cece began angrily, “Is to kill the bastard. The rest of this is just getting to that point.”

  “The rest of this…” Esther rubbed her forehead again. When she started to speak again, her voice was strained but Wesley cut her off.

  “We find Merlin and we’ll ask him if he knows a way to put the Nocturne down. We start there.”

  Esther threw her hands up, pacing. “But we have no idea how to start.”

  Cece cleared her throat at that, and they both looked at her. She was staring at Wesley.

  “What?” he asked innocently.

  She rolled her eyes. “The Nocturne wanted you for a reason.” Her face implored him to pick up what she was saying but his newfound hunger was clouding his vision. She sighed impatiently. “You have a special gift. A gift he wanted you for.”

  Wesley’s eyes widened. “You think…”

  Cece nodded exaggeratedly. “He’s planned for you to lead him to Merlin.”

  Esther whistled. “That is a long play.”

  Yes, it had been. Wesley thought. If the Nocturne had been planning this the whole time…

  “If he had, then he could be waiting for you to do it,” Esther said pensively.

  Wesley had been thinking the same thing.

  “He can’t have known I’d figure this out,” he said. “I haven’t even been able to enchant anything with any real use.”

  “No, but I’m sure he was planning on teaching you.”

  Wesley mulled this over. So, he could enchant things with magic. Which meant…he might be able to enchant something to find Merlin. But he’d need something with Merlin’s presence on it. Something with his magick.

  Cece was nodding, watching him closely through the haze of her pipe smoke. “Are you sure you're the same detective who found the Bulwark Butcher?”

  Wesley scowled. “I’m a bit distracted, at the moment, you know. The whole scratched by a werewolf isn’t exactly life affirming.”

  The girl laughed giddily, and Wesley found the sound uncouth for the topic of their discussion. “Wesley, you’ve been given a gift. Can’t you see that? You’ve only been scratched. You might become stronger, faster, more deadly. Your senses could become better. At least that is one way to look at it.”

  Wesley closed his eyes for a moment, calming the rising rage he’d been feeling at her words. There was some truth to them, after all. He was stuck with this curse. Far as he knew, there was no cure.

  “Does this place have a library with magical texts?” Wesley asked.

  Esther nodded, her eyes narrowing.

  “Then we need to research how exactly I’m going to use this power to find Merlin,” he explained. “He won’t be easy to track.”

  Cece shook her head. “I’ve got an idea for that too.”

  Esther turned slowly, her face like etched stone, obviously annoyed with Cece’s antics. “Then tell us, girl.”

  Cece smiled. “Well, we have the hilt. We just need you,” she nodded to Wesley. “To imbue something that leads us to it.”

  He thought about it. “That would…take us to anything with a…Avalonian magical trace on it.”

  She nodded. “Indeed. But we can put runes on it that will take us only to a person.”

  Wesley felt his eyebrows rise. “You can do that?”

  Cece almost rolled her eyes but only nodded.

  “No magic,” Esther mused. “Only runes you can’t imbue yourself.”

  “Ah, well, we can’t all be bloodsuckers, can we?” Cece shot back.

  Esther chuckled darkly, and it sounded so utterly humorless it sent chills down Wesley’s back.

  He tapped the metal strap over his legs. “If you don’t mind.”

  The vampire woman blew out some air and threw off the covers around his legs and undid the restraint.

  It was like having a sudden warm breeze brush your body after hours of cold. The cool metal had dampened him. But now…the world opened to him. His hearing extended even further. Fawns prancing near a lake some kilometers away. And the smell…a car's exhaust from a road far away.

  Without thinking, he rose. The robe he’d been wearing fell away, leaving him cast naked in the bright sun coming through the window.

  He could feel the tension of his new body. The muscle fibers were taut, wanting him to fling himself upon some kind of prey. As he looked upon his body, he saw the lines of muscle, traced by dark veins. It was as though the scratch had eaten his fat away, what little there had been.

  When at last he realized he was standing naked in the room, he looked up, slightly confused. Both women were staring at him. Esther had an odd, hungry look on her face and was doing a bad job of hiding it. It was as though she wanted to ravish him.

  Cece on the other hand gave him a curiously appraising look.

  “You’ve changed,” she said simply.

  “Yes,” Wesley said, blinking, shocked at his own transformation.

  “Cover yourself,” Esther said, her voice throaty. “It is…distracting.”

  Wesley grabbed the robe.

  “I’ll need some clothes.”

  “Obviously,” Esther snapped, looking decidedly away from him. “I’ll have the maid bring some to the study. Come,” she snapped. “We’ve little time to waste. Let us find this Merlin.”