Bad London

I did not mention the possibility that she had been attacked by a werewolf. I couldn’t, not until I knew for sure. Even if it had been a werewolf, I told myself, that didn’t mean she would become one herself. There was still some uncertainty regarding how the infection was transmitted. I’d heard stories, though admittedly not many, of people bitten by werewolves who never became one themselves. 

Evelyn still had a chance. 

It had taken several surgeries to stabilize her. She was lucky, in some ways. The wounds along her ribs hadn’t been deep enough to hit any organs, and though the bite to her thigh had been deep, it hadn’t been deep enough to hit the large femoral artery that ran along the bone. That seemed odd to me, given what I heard of the states of the deceased, but what did I know? I wasn’t a doctor. Surely she hadn’t simply healed that quickly. That would be impossible.

My entire life was dedicated to the impossible.

The bigger problem than the wounds was the fever. The spike in white blood cells. The infection the doctors couldn’t quite identify. 

I spent much of my time with Jackson, keeping him distracted from the state of his family. Evelyn was in and out of consciousness. Sarah was inconsolable. Daniel always seemed to have the lingering smell of whiskey on his breath. Jackson wasn’t so young as to be unaware of it all, but I still did my best to keep his mind off it. Sitting him with Evelyn would only distress and likely traumatize him, and sitting him in the waiting room wouldn’t do him any favours either. I took him to museums, the zoo, the libraries, the same way I took him and Evelyn every time I was home. He was a very intelligent child, reading well above his year level. On the second library visit, I caught him pulling books about werewolves off the shelves. I knew he saw through my attempt to direct him to something else, to change the subject every time he brought it up. 

The easiest thing would have been to tell him, as Daniel had, that werewolves and witches and magic and all the other things he asked about weren’t real. I couldn’t bring myself to lie to him like that. Instead, I did what I thought was a decent job of interesting him in books about Ancient Greece. Surely that was a safe enough topic. I had a vague recollection of reading about Ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt when I was his age.

That, I realized in hindsight, might have been what had started my interest in the occult. Oh well. Too late to do anything about it now. Next time, I would see if I could convince him to take out a book on gardening instead.

At one point, Daniel finally convinced Sarah to let him take her home to shower and rest properly, for pity’s sake, leaving me to sit alone with Evelyn. 

For the most part, she slept. She looked so young like that, plugged into monitors. Her skin was both ashen and clammy, with none of the implied tan from a spring and summer spent playing football outside. I read to her from one of the books I had picked up from the library, something the librarian told me was popular with teenage girls. It certainly wasn’t something I would have picked out myself. Still, I found myself getting pulled into the plot more than I wanted to admit. It was certainly a change of pace from the heavy arcane tomes I usually read these days. I might have to pick up the sequel when I finished this one. To read to Evelyn, of course.

When a nurse came to change the bandages, I stepped out of the way. The nurse’s body blocked my view of the bite. Even if I had been able to see it, I doubted I’d be able to identify the animal that had made it. 

A large dog. That was it. Nothing worse than that, I told myself. 

“It’s healing quite well,” the nurse assured me as she re-bound the bite on her thigh as though that wasn’t exactly what I had feared. 

I should have been glad. I was glad. That didn’t mean my stomach didn’t churn with worry.

The nurse left the room, and I sank back into the chair that reminded my lower back of every one of its years. Thirty-three wasn’t terribly old, I reminded myself, but I had my share of injuries from field work. When I had started with the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence, it was purely from a research standpoint. My job had been to research and translate. For a long time, I had been more than happy to sit behind my books and screens. Then, my presence had been requested in Romania where a ring that Atanasie Bălan, either a witch or a vampire or simply a man who knew powerful people, had used to command animals had surfaced. From that moment, I’d been hooked. I loved research, I truly did, but it was nothing compared to actually seeing what I was reading about. Besides, some information wasn’t quite so easy to get my hands on, literally and metaphorically. There were all sorts of libraries all over the world, but not all information was stored in them. My visit to Romania had made me truly appreciate just how much was passed through oral tradition.

Living in libraries had been safe, but it hadn’t been truly living.

The signs of my living sometimes made their appearances in ways I didn’t always appreciate. A dull ache between the bones of my wrist from an old break suggested it was raining outside. I closed my eyes for a moment to ease some of the burning in them. Sarah wasn’t the only one who needed some proper rest. Their couch wasn’t the least comfortable place I had ever slept, but my mind hadn’t quieted since the moment I’d received Daniel’s frantic phone call. Jackson wasn’t the only one who needed distracting. During the day, at least I could look after him or busy myself with the cooking or some cleaning around their house. 

At night, though…

I had retrieved my ThinkPad laptop from Royse’s flat, and my sleepless  nights were spent either working or researching or some combination of both. I had a handful of translation requests, a question about the history of a cursed Tudor crown, and three verifications sitting in my email to get to at my nearest convenience. The laptop was currently in my bag under Daniel’s couch, evidence of my searches regarding any possible werewolf attacks in the area filling my history. Werewolves weren’t exactly my area of expertise; I specialized in arcane artifacts. That didn’t mean I knew absolutely nothing of werewolves. I knew more than enough to get started, enough to know what to look for in attacks, enough to know to track the lunar cycles the way I tracked the weather, and enough to know when to contact Sister Halla Vánagandr of the Holy Hollow of the Blood Moon of Fenrir. I hadn’t given her any details either, only told her I suspected someone I knew had been bitten by a werewolf. She had sent me a list of symptoms to watch for, many of which seemed to overlap with the symptoms of being a teenage girl, and the reminder that there was hope for all of those with Fenrir’s blood. 

Somewhere into the third hour of my silent vigil at her bedside, Evelyn awoke briefly. She sat up slowly. The bones of her knees protruded against her skin as she hugged them to her chest. Her collarbones and ankles stuck out just as much. Daniel had mentioned a few months ago that she’d become a picky eater. 

I swallowed down the concern. One thing at a time. There was more than enough to worry about right now.

“Do you remember what happened?” I asked her as gently as I could. My voice came out as barely more than a whisper so as not to upset her. And, a small part of me thought, so she might not actually hear me. 

A bead of sweat rolled down the side of Evelyn’s face. She scratched the back of her head. I caught her wrist with two fingers to stop her before she peeled off the scabs that had formed over the scrapes in her scalp. She made a face, a quick grimace, lips pulled back over teeth. She shook her head and gave a slight shudder as though to shake off the expression.

“We were sleeping,” she rasped. Sharp nails left crescent imprints on her shins. She scraped her nails over her skin, raising bright red lines. I handed her the glass of water with a straw to drink from, keeping hold of it so it didn’t fall from her shaky hand. “I don’t know who it got first. Ellie, I think. She was the one at the far end of the tent. Felecia was in the middle, and I was at the other end. There was— Screaming and— and—“

I squeezed Evelyn’s hand, mindful of the IV. My mouth tasted slick and bitter. I had to fight to keep from picturing it. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I assured her. I didn’t need to know that badly, not right now. Deities knew she would likely have to tell the story more than once. 

Deities knew I didn’t want to hear the rest of it.

Evelyn shook her head. Her hair was greasy and matted together in some spots. I would have to ask Daniel to bring her hairbrush. There was a spot of dried blood behind her ear, whether hers or somebody else’s was impossible to tell. Her breath stuttered on every inhale. She swallowed hard and took a determined breath. “I think I got out of the tent but I don’t think it was through the door. I think it tore a hole in the side. I remember feeling grass on my feet, even though I’d been wearing socks to sleep. It was cold at night, and my feet were cold, and— And Felecia had lent me a pair of fuzzy socks because my feet were cold. The ground was wet. I thought it had rained but— It wa-wasn’t rain. 

“I guess Mr Dixon heard all the screaming. It attacked him. He had a knife. I think he stabbed it maybe. I don’t know. But it—“ Evelyn turned to me. It was, I told myself, the fever and the fluorescent lights and the tears that gave her eyes the impression of being much lighter than they should have been. “He looked at me, Uncle Zachariah. I keep seeing him when I sleep.”

He. Him. I didn’t miss the switch in pronoun.

“Was it a man?” I asked, as though I did not already know the answer.

Evelyn’s lower lip trembled. She swallowed twice and shook her head. Her mouth formed a word, but there was no sound behind it. 

She didn’t need to make a sound for me to know what she had said.

I dragged myself across the hotel room and picked up the receiver. Outside the window was a game of street football, shouts of Italian punctuating the smack of foot on ball. Even through the curtains, the mid-summer Italian sun was almost blisteringly hot. Having spent the bulk of my life in England, this might as well have been the surface of the sun. My t-shirt, soaked through with sweat, clung to the gap between my shoulder blades and the small of my back. I closed my eyes against the dry burning in them.

“Zachariah Barrett Waller speaking,” I said in case the call was intended for the room’s previous resident. There had been another Zachariah Waller in my class all the way from primary school until high school, and it was still difficult not to think of myself without all three names.

“Zach. It’s— It’s Daniel.” My brother’s voice was strained, tight and almost shaking at the same time.

Sleep vanished from my body. My spine snapped into rigidity. Our communication on my trips had always been solely through email, though I always swallowed the long-distance fees to call on his children’s birthdays. For him to be calling me, to be sounding like that, to be calling me Zach rather than—

I braced for the worst. My nails dug into my palm and my shoulders tensed in anticipation.

“Evie is in the hospital. She was attacked. It’s b— It’s bad, Zach. We don’t know if she’s going to pull through.”

Evie. Evelyn. My niece, my eldest godchild, who I had called just a few weeks ago when she’d turned thirteen.

I was wrong. I’d thought I had braced for the worst, but the words still knocked the air out of my lungs. My heart was in my throat, and I was moving toward the door before I realized it. The pull of the phone cord grounded me back to reality. The received was pulled almost violently from my hand and clattered loudly against the side of the desk. I scrambled for it.

“Zach? Zach, you still there?”

“I’m— Yes. I’m here. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I promised, already scrambling to unlock the room safe where I had stored my passport and other items I didn’t want anybody getting their hands on.

Getting back to England took far longer than I would have liked. Granted, if it had taken five minutes, it still would have been far longer than I would have liked. There was no way around it. I had to get first from Pompeii to Naples, a half-hour drive, then an hour flight from Naples to Rome, then finally another two and a half hours to London. My colleagues, of course, were not entirely thrilled at my abrupt departure but were completely understanding about the circumstances. Even if they hadn’t been, I hardly would have cared enough to notice. We’d collected what we had come to Italy for anyway. My absence wasn’t likely to be noticed.

It hardly made sense to drive the four hours it would take to get to my home in Oxford then back to London. As such, I left my belongings with Royse, another colleague who lived in Inner London’s Camden Town, which very quietly held one of the city’s largest population of witches. While I had a key to Daniel’s home and could have easily gone there instead, there were certain items I couldn’t risk anybody getting into. Between all of that, it wasn’t until early evening that I reached the London Royal Hospital. I found my brother, his wife, and their young son in a waiting room near the Critical Care Unit.

“Uncle Zachariah!” Jackson sprinted to meet me. His arms wound around my waist as tight as possible for an 8-year-old. His face pressed hard into the base of my ribs. I pushed my glasses back into place and hunched forward to return the embrace. He looked up at me with watering eyes, the same melted chocolate colour that Daniel, Evelyn, and I had. His lower lip jutted out and trembled in a way that made him look so very young. “Is Evie going to die?”

Something stuttered in my chest. I had to force myself to exhale. “Of course not,” I said. The assurance was just as much for myself as it was for him.

I looked over his head to Daniel, silently searching his face for any clues as to Evie’s condition. He had given me no details over the phone, and his follow-up email only told me where to meet him. He was half-turned away from me, and all I saw of his expression was a jaw clenched as tight as his fist. Looking at his wife Sarah was even less helpful. At Jackson’s question, she had burst into tears and dropped into in an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair with her face in her hands.

Jackson tugged on my rumpled shirt to recapture my attention. “Uncle Zachariah, is Evie going to turn into a werewolf?”

The sound that came out of my chest was between a heave and a laugh. My blood froze in my veins. My skin prickled.

Daniel hadn’t told me who — or what — had attacked Evelyn. I’d assumed a person, but could it have been—

“Werewolves aren’t real,” Daniel snapped. His eyes locked hard on mine with a stern, unspoken warning. Daniel was five years older than myself, the same age difference between Evelyn and Jackson. He looked so much older than 38 right now.

I knelt on one knee to meet to Jackson’s height. I braced both hands on my thigh to keep them from shaking. “Would you like to know what I brought you back from Italy?”

Jackson’s eyes lit up, and I distracted him with stories of my trip — excluding, of course, anything to do with my professional reasons for being there — until his eyes could no longer stay open. Daniel suggested to Sarah that she take Jackson home and get some rest herself, but she made it very clear that she had no intention of leaving this place without her daughter.

“I’ll come with you, then,” Daniel said. He kissed the top of Sarah’s head mechanically. She didn’t react.

I carried Jackson on my hip and sat him in my lap throughout the journey. Every time I tried to pass him off to Daniel, he woke just enough to grab at my shirt again. In truth, I didn’t mind it. I had so little time to spend with him, I wanted to take advantage of every minute I could. Time, after all, was precious. Neither I nor Daniel spoke until the boy was tucked into his bed.

“You aren’t going away again, are you?” Jackson mumbled through the sleep pulling him down.

“Not right away,” I promised. I stayed beside him until his grip on my hand slackened and he was finally fully asleep.

I found Daniel in the kitchen sipping at a half-glass of whiskey. He offered me the bottle, and I waved my hand in rejection. I let him finish his drink in silence. Now that I was no longer moving, my body seemed to remember that I was running on barely three hours of sleep, plus maybe an extra half-hour or so on the flight back to England. The copious amounts of caffeine I’d consumed in transit may have been the only thing keeping me upright.

Daniel unscrewed the cap and topped up his drink.

I traced my thumb over the lighter I quite literally could never lose to steady myself against the twisting in my gut. Part of me wanted to extend the silence forever, but I had to know.

“What happened?” I kept my voice quiet so that Jackson didn’t hear me, and perhaps so that Daniel wouldn’t either.

Daniel didn’t answer right away. He sipped at his second drink. A glassiness came over his eyes, either from alcohol or tears or both. He blinked rapidly and rubbed his hand over his beard first, then over his eyes. His shoulders sagged with a heavy sigh.

“She was out camping with a couple friends and one of their dads up in Hertfordshire. Sarah didn’t want her to go but she’s thirteen, for God’s sake. They were supposed to be fine, they—“ A shuddery breath. “They had an adult with them. I’ve camped with her up there half a dozen times. I was her age when I started camping there with my mates. It— It was always fine.”

I knew the place he was talking about. Hertfordshire was about an hour’s drive north of Central London, the country park less than that. I remembered being about Jackson’s age and demanding with tears to know why I couldn’t go camping with Daniel and the other big kids. Wasn’t I old enough, mature enough, brave enough? Thinking of my little nephew, I realized I hadn’t been.

On second thought, maybe I did want a drink. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and poured just enough whiskey to cover the ice I found in the freezer.

“Iain, the father, he had a cell phone. Thank God he had reception out there. He died on the way to the hospital. The other girls—” Daniel gripped the edge of the counter with his free hand and finished his drink with the other. “He said it was a wo— a large dog. There’s no wolves in England,” he added quickly.

Daniel was mostly right about that. Wolves had been hunted to extinction some time ago. Werewolves, on the other hand… Most people knew of the witch hunts. Not as many knew of the werewolf hunts. They were hunted near equally so, but there were still a fair few in England.

I didn’t have to check to know that we were in the middle of a full moon. It was a habit to track the cycle. It wasn’t just for werewolves. Certain witches and artifacts’ powers waxed and waned with the moon.

Just because there were still werewolves in England didn’t mean it was a werewolf that had attacked them. It could have been a large dog, a stray or something wild. There was no reason to think that it was anything supernatural.

“Was she bitten or just scratched?” I asked. An edge of desperation made it into my voice despite my best efforts to tamp it down.

Daniel’s eyes snapped to me with a sharp clarity. “There is no such thing as werewolves, Zachariah.”

Though I had never been explicit in what I dealt with in the course of my work with the Assistants in the Arts of Nonstandard Existence, I had also never particularly kept my interest in the arcane, occult, and supernatural a secret. He knew, at least on some level, what was out there. At the very least, he knew what I believed was out there.

“You have to at least consider—“

“No, I don’t,” he snapped. “I don’t want my kids involved in any of your magic bullshit. And if you even think about saying that sort of thing in front of Sarah, I’ll—” Daniel shook his head aggressively, his lips pursed as tight as his grip on his glass.

I swallowed down the sting at his words. I had always known what he thought of my work but hearing it phrased that way bit at me in a way I couldn’t explain. Could I really blame him for it, though, especially under these circumstances?

Still...

“Why did you call me here?” I asked.

Daniel hesitated. “I don’t know.”

He did know, just as well as I did. Because if there was a chance that Evelyn had been attacked by a werewolf, even just the slightest chance, no matter just how slight...

I didn’t blame him for not wanting to consider it.