The monster sniffed the air. There was no one near. A few rats, but nothing that he wanted to hunt, and nothing that was hunting him. In the east a pale rim of light was slowly defining the outlines of buildings.
The creature’s eyes felt heavy. This spot felt safe. The hunt was over for now. It was time to rest.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Lawrence did not want to open his eyes. He feared the light. He feared being awake. He feared everything.
He gradually became aware that he was awake, but his body felt somehow missing, as if he was only consciousness with no form. Lawrence hoped that he was dead, prayed that he was dead.
Then, bit by bit, his physical awareness returned. The first thing he felt was pain. It was vague, an amorphous mass of pain in which his consciousness seemed to float, but it gradually became specific. He felt his back, one aching vertebra at a time, as if someone ran a finger along and poked each throbbing edge of bone. His arms sent messages of inert agony, and then his legs. Lawrence had no idea how long the process took. An hour, a year.
When he finally mustered the courage to open his eyes he had to blink them clear. He stared straight up to see a blue sky framed by grimy brick walls. The walls were gouged with claw marks and splattered with blood. It did not surprise him, but it sickened him. He wished the walls would crumble and fall in to crush the life from him.
Smell returned next and the stink was horrendous. Spoiled meat, rotten fruit, foul water, sweat and human waste. Lawrence realized that he was lying in a heap of garbage under a bridge. He gagged, and the stench more than anything else made him move.
Lawrence sat up slowly. Nausea was a sick wash in his stomach and his eyes watered from the smell. He looked at his hands and what he saw made the sickness a thousand times worse. They were caked with dried blood.
His whole body and his clothes were nothing more than tattered streamers smeared with gore and filth. The cry of gulls was a chorus of accusations that flayed him.
“God, no . . .” he prayed.
He looked around and saw that he was in an alley that was heaped with rubbish. And he was not alone. A corpse—an old beggar in castoff clothes—lay three feet away. The man’s face was a ruin, an arm was missing.
Lawrence buried his face in his bloody hands and wept.
LATER, DRESSED IN the dead man’s clothes and smelling of garbage and death, Lawrence Talbot shambled along the streets of London. He walked like a zombie, head bowed, eyes staring blankly at the ground, feet barely lifting from the concrete. Passersby saw him and walked around him, shaking their heads in disgust. Women pulled their children to the opposite sides of the street. Even stray dogs growled warnings at him.
As he walked he mumbled the words, “Please, God . . . please, God . . .” over and over again, and the unspoken end of that plea echoed in his head.
Please God . . . let me die.
But he did not die and Lawrence cursed God for His bloody indifference.
When he reached Essington Lane he stopped and realized that he knew where he was going. The thought jolted him. Lawrence stared at the street sign, set into the plaster of the side of the near building, and he turned and looked across the street. He could not understand how he had managed to make his way here without knowing that he was heading anywhere, and to a place whose address he had only heard but had never visited.
Yet there it was, right across the street, its reality proclaimed on a painted sign: conliffe apothecary.
Lawrence licked his lips.
What would the Conliffes do? Would they bar the door against him? They should, even though tonight’s moon would not be full. Would they call for the police? Half of him wished they would—and maybe he could contrive to get the police to shoot him down right there on the doorstep. Or would they shoot him down like the animal he had become? That would be justice . . . and perhaps a mercy. Throughout the morning, as Lawrence had staggered along the side streets and back alleys he heard the newsboys yelling the headlines. Mad killer on the loose, they all said.
Mad?
No . . . something far worse than mad.
He stared at the Conliffe’s shop. It looked closed, but there were lights on in the rooms above. Gwen had said that she and her father lived above their store on Essington Lane, between a milliners and a flower shop.
He chewed his lip. If they chased him off would he go? Could he go? Or did the survival instinct of the wolf still rule his deepest mind?
With these doubts gnawing at the walls of his soul, Lawrence risked everything and stepped into the street, threaded his way through the traffic, and crept up to the door of the shop. It took more strength than he thought he possessed to raise his hand and ring the bell.
Silence was the only answer. The windows were dark and he cupped his hands to peer inside. The establishment looked empty and his heart sank, but then he saw someone move in the shadows at the back of the shop. A moment later the lock clicked and the door opened.
Gwen Conliffe looked at him and opened her mouth to dismiss the beggar at her door.
“Gwen . . .” said Lawrence, in a voice that was filled with all of the heartbreak and need in the world.
Her eyes widened as she saw past the grime and dried blood and agony.
“Oh my God! Lawrence!”
“I—” he began, but Gwen seized him by the arms and pulled him urgently into the shop. She closed the door and pulled the shade and then hurried over to draw the curtains across the picture window so that only a sliver of the cold morning light sliced through the brown shadows of the shop. Then she turned to him, her hand touching her throat.
“Lawrence? What are you doing here? How did you—?”
“Is your father here?”
“No. He’s away on a buying trip in Paris. Oh God, please tell me what’s going on.”
Lawrence sagged back against the foyer wall and ran trembling fingers through the greasy tangle of his hair. “What’s going on?” he mused and almost smiled. The attempt was ghastly. “Horrible things . . . and it’s all true. All of it. Gwen . . . I am what they say I am.”
“No . . .”
“And it’s worse still than that.”
She still stood by the curtained window, ten feet away, and she did not move. “What do you mean? The things I’ve heard . . . what could be worse?”
Lawrence slid down the wall until he sat on the floor of the foyer, his head in his hands. “My father is . . . he’s the same as me. And—God, how can I even make myself say this—I’m certain that Benjamin knew about it and tried to stop him. I think that’s why he was in the forest that night.” Lawrence wiped tears from his eyes. “And I’m just as certain that’s how he was killed.”
Gwen stood there, her face defined by the sliver of cold, hard light of day. Lawrence could see how his words tore into her, how the implications lacerated her heart and soul. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and dropped like silver rain down her cheeks. He expected her to scream. He expected her to throw him out into the street.
He did not expect her to cross the room and kneel down in front of him. She touched his face with gentle fingers.
“I’m so very sorry,” she said.
Her words, her kindness, broke him. A huge sob hitched his chest and then he was crying uncontrollably. Gwen gathered him in her arms, and she, too, wept.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Lawrence lay shirtless in a guest bedroom above the apothecary. His clothes had been burned in the furnace. He’d bathed for nearly two hours in a hot tub as Gwen brought endless pots of steaming water. He scrubbed his skin until it was nearly raw, and even though the gore and filth washed away he could not cleanse himself of the feel of it, and knew that he probably never would. Not if he lived for a century, and he doubted he would see the end of this year.
When he had first awakened in the alley and had stripped off his rags to clothe himself in the dead beggar’s garments, Lawrence had been covered with scratches and cuts and the bites
of a hundred insects. Now his skin was totally unmarked. Lawrence did not remark on this to Gwen, but he knew that his lack of scars was damning proof that he wore the Mark of Cain. The mark of the Wolf.
The clock was chiming seven o’clock in the evening when Gwen entered carrying a dinner tray. As she set it down Lawrence saw the folded newspaper lying beside the coffeepot. With great trepidation he took the paper and unfolded it. He feared what it would say, but what he saw was worse than he even imagined. There was a photograph of him that must have been taken shortly after his arrival at Lambeth Asylum. The face it showed was that of a crazed, wild-eyed madman. The headline, with huge letters, read:
ESCAPED LUNATIC AT LARGE
DOZENS KILLED BY MONSTER
“ ‘Dozens’ . . .” he whispered and closed his eyes, and for the first time since his mother’s death, he crossed himself.
Once again he looked at Gwen expecting to see horror and revulsion, but again all he saw was compassion and pity. Fresh tears glistened in her eyes.
“I can help you.”
Lawrence threw down the paper and set the tray aside. He swung his legs off the bed and sat up. “There is no help for me,” he said in a low, savage voice.
“Maybe there is,” Gwen said as she held out her hand to him. Something silver glimmered in her palm. “Here.”
He sat there, unable to move, so Gwen took the medal and looped the chain over his head so that the talisman lay over his heart. The medal was warm from her palm, but the warmth seemed to sink into his flesh and loosen the strictures around his heart, and for the first time all morning he found that he could take a deep breath.
“If such things are possible, Lawrence . . . is not all of it possible? Magic? The Devil?”
He looked up.
“Even . . . God?” she asked.
Lawrence touched the medal, and something like hope flickered within him. A weak flame flickering in the black breath of the wolf, but there nonetheless.
“Yes,” he said softly. “It’s all possible.”
She knelt and took his hands, squeezing them with surprising strength. “Then there must be a way to stop it, too!”
“No . . . ,” he began, but the urgency in her eyes washed the protest from his lips. “Gwen, listen to me. I have to accept what I’ve done, and if there is a God then my doom is already certain. I’ll burn in Hell for the pain I’ve caused.”
“No! You were not yourself. Something else did that.”
“I did those things, Gwen. Whether I was in control or not.”
“Then it’s like an infection. If you are sick and your sickness causes harm to others then it’s not your fault.” She stroked his cheek. “This morning, when you told me what happened at that horrible asylum, you told me you begged them to lock you up, to chain you, to kill you.”
“Yes . . .”
“But they didn’t! They did not. If they had done as you asked no one would have been hurt. If your father had warned you in time, if he had locked you up back in Blackmoor rather than locking you out, then you would have harmed no one. This is not your fault, Lawrence. You’re a good, decent man.”
He attempted another smile. “No one has ever accused me of decency before.”
She shook her head fiercely. “This . . . disease or curse or whatever it is . . . this was done to you. Not by you.”
“No one else will think that.”
“I do,” she insisted. “And you must.”
“I don’t know. I have no control over this . . . and I can’t let this happen again. I can’t bear the thought of the beast getting free again. I already have too much blood on my hands.”
“Then don’t let it,” she said.
He stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“Sir John built himself a cage so that he could contain his beast. You can do that, too.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “I’m a fugitive, Gwen. Even if I manage to escape the police and flee the country, I’ll have to live in hiding the rest of my life.”
“It’s a big world, Lawrence. Change your name, become someone else. Leave all your pain behind. It’s better than becoming another victim of the monster, and that’s what you’ll be if you let this destroy you the way it destroyed Ben.”
Lawrence stood up and paced the room. Her words were like a tonic—not a cure, but at least a respite from the cancer of hopelessness. Then he stopped and turned toward her. “I have to end this with my father,” he said, his eyes hard. “I need to go back to Blackmoor. He may even be waiting for me to return. If I can stop him, then I’ll need to disappear. Forever. I . . . I’ll likely never see you again.”
Gwen rose and crossed the room to him and put her hands on his shoulders.
“No!” she said, her blue eyes fierce. “Please . . . let me find a way to help you. You can’t go into towns, you can’t be seen . . . I can.”
He did not know how to answer that. He wanted to insist that she stay away, but her strength, her sense, her beauty . . . were impossible to resist.
“Lawrence,” she said, “there must be a cure.”
He was intensely aware of the soft warmth of her hands on his naked shoulders, and he could see the moment when she became aware of it, too. And yet she did not move her hands.
“I must confess,” Lawrence said softly, touching her cheek, “I envy him. My brother. For the days he had with you. What joy he must have felt.”
When she blushed he almost pulled away. “Forgive me,” he said quickly.
“No . . .”
“I would have given anything to have known you in another life. And I can only pray that Ben forgives me. For . . . my feelings for you.”
He bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth, without force but with heat. Then he pulled his head back. “God, I’m sorry—”
“No,” said Gwen. “No . . .”
She pulled him to her and her kiss was filled with urgency and a passion unlike anything Lawrence had ever experienced. The intensity of it was fueled by the honesty and freedom with which the gift was offered, and he took her in his arms and the kiss became a scalding point of contact that spread its heat down through every other place at which their bodies touched—breasts and hands and hips and thighs moving toward each other, discovering the place where they fit and the ways in which they were welcomed. Their hands explored each other, running over bare flesh and pulling aside clothing to discover the reality of things seen and imagined. Lawrence began unfastening her gown as Gwen tore at the lacings of his trousers when—
Bang! Bang!
A heavy fist began pounding on the door downstairs and they froze together, clothing askew, eyes alert and afraid.
“Miss Conliffe!” a voice called from outside. Gwen disentangled herself and hurried to the window to peek out. Her gown was halfway off, one perfect breast exposed, the nipple swollen from his kisses. She appeared not to care about that, but instead peered carefully down through a slit in the curtain.
“My God!” she breathed. “It’s Inspector Aberline.” They stared at each other for a long moment. Lawrence crossed to her and kissed her forehead and then bent to kiss her breast once more; then he gently lifted the strap of her gown and placed it on her shoulder.
“You had better let him in,” he said softly.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Gwen opened the door. Inspector Aberline stood on the doorstep, his eyes smudged from exhaustion and stress. Two of his bulky assistants waited on the pavement, their faces set and hard. One of them carried a shotgun, the other had a pistol poorly concealed beneath one flap of his jacket. A light rain had started to fall, but the men from Scotland Yard seemed not to care.
Aberline touched the brim of his rain-spattered bowler. “Miss Conliffe, good morning.”
“Inspector,” Gwen said with forced politeness.
He glanced past her into the foyer, which was lit by a single candle in a wall sconce. “May I ask if you’re staying here on your own?”
“Y
es. My father is away.”
“May I impose?”
Gwen hesitated, but Aberline looked over his shoulder at the rain. She felt trapped by the moment and the demands of social graces. To refuse him entry under the circumstances would make him suspicious, so she nodded and stepped back and opened the door.
“Of course, Inspector, please come in.”
Aberline nodded his thanks and once inside he removed his hat and looked past her into the darkened shop, but Gwen held her ground, keeping the encounter confined to the foyer. The inspector smiled faintly.
“Ma’am, I must ask you directly: have you seen Lawrence Talbot? I’m sure by now you’ve heard of his escape.”
“Yes. I did take the news,” she said neutrally. “But, no, I haven’t seen him.”
Even as she said it Gwen knew that she had pitched her voice the wrong way. Her denial sounded flat and as false as it was. She saw Aberline’s tired eyes sharpen at once, and his gaze flicked quickly to the shop.
“I’m alarmed that your father allows you to remain here unaccompanied with a murderer on the loose. I would like you to come with me.”
“That’s entirely unnecessary, Inspector. However, I puzzle over why you think I may be in danger. Lawrence would never harm me.”
“Miss,” said Aberline firmly, “I cannot stress to you what mortal peril you are in.” With that he produced a newspaper from his deep pocket and let it fall open on the counter. It was the same edition she had brought to Lawrence, with the same bold headlines and a photo that made him appear quite deranged. “What peril you would be in should you find yourself in his presence.”
Aberline put his hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her to one side. She knew that if she had been a better liar he would never had taken such a liberty. The inspector entered the shop and began opening the doors to any closet or cupboard that was large enough to hide a man. When he found nothing he parted the curtains at the back of the shop and saw the set of stairs that led to the apartment above.