The Intuition: Part 2, The Wolf

A Horror Story

Go here to read Part 1: The Intuition: Part 1

WARNING: Part 2 contains violence/rape

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“Where in hell have you been,” Tom growled from the darkness of Will’s suite. “I’ve been sitting here growing toothless, I have, and not even a fag to take me mind off our woes.”

Will, frozen in the doorway at the sound of Tom’s voice, closed the door and took up a match from the entry table. He struck a light, lit a lamp, and adjusted the wick with care, letting the nerves jumping under his skin lapse again into slumber before turning toward his friend. He held out his hand to show Tom the cold gleam of the little pistol lying there before slipping it back into his coat pocket.

“I might have shot you, Tom. If you’ve compromised me, I might yet. What are you doing here?”

Tom chuckled. “Ah, Billy, you know old Tom comes and goes like a London fog. Nobody seen me come in, and nobody’ll see me take my leave. I come from Mrs. K’s to warn you. That pretty dollymop you visited is deader’n a Christmas goose. The Kinsky’s in a froth, threatening to whistle for the police. I give her all the chink I had on me to stop her mouth, but it’s you she wants to see.”

Tom rose and helped himself to a cigar from a humidor on the rosewood desk. “Oh, she’s a bloodthirsty old bitch, that one is. Don’t give a fart in hell for the girlie, but she’ll have your balls for pearls if you can’t pay for her loss. Why’d you have to do it, Billy? We was in clover here.”

A light perspiration sprang out on Will’s forehead, and with it an exhilaration that wanted to climb his throat in a roaring laugh. He had a sudden desire to see Adele, to stroke her cold skin. Perhaps she still wore the paint of her virgin blood, as lovely as any silken garment. His tongue touched his lip where the memory of copper and salt lingered. He had paid well to be the first to have her, and now he would be the only one. He wished he could repeat the delight.

“Billy? You want some brandy?”

Will brought his attention back to Tom, who stood watching him warily, the cigar fuming between his lips as he reached for the decanter.

“No, Tom. I want to be away from here. Help me pack, and then I’ll go to Mrs. Kinsky and make sure she stays quiet.”

“You ain’t going to …” Tom pulled a finger across his throat.

“Certainly not. Accidents happen, Tom, you know that. It is a hazard of her trade. I will pay for her silence, and I have no doubt she will welcome us should we come again to Vienna. I’ve a new job for us. One that promises to make our profit from the Baroness seem like a goodwife’s pin money. I will bunk with you at the boarding house for the night, just to be safe, though.”

He crossed to the washbasin and pulled off his gloves. The right one clung to the blood on his hand, and he hissed as he peeled it away. He immersed the hand in the basin, watching the thin, crimson plumes disperse in the warm water. His knuckles did not look too bad. He had endured worse. “Tom?”

The other paused in his hurried stuffing of a leather valise and stared at Will’s pale eyes in the shaving mirror. “Yeah, Billy.”

“I’m sorry about the girl.”

“Sure, Billy. Don’t fret over it. Let’s just cut out of here and catch us a train to … where are we going?”

“Romania. The Carpathian mountains.”

“Coo-ee. You’re a devil for travel, boyo.”

Will smiled, and it transformed him. The face of an angel, his mum had always said. With those dimples, Will, you could catch a countess. The smile faltered and slipped away. He didn’t like to think of Mum. It had been so long since the last time he had seen her, he could not remember what she had looked like; only vague impressions of honey-colored hair gone grey too soon, and his own wintry eyes looking back at him. Eyes with pupils blown wide in death, pits of mute darkness that threatened to consume him.

The old familiar tremor started at the center of him, moving outward in lazy ripples, carrying with it the unbearable goads of horror and desire. He threw down the towel he had pressed to his knuckles and swung the door of the bath nearly shut. Through the slim opening, he managed to say, “I’ll have a bath first, Tom. Leave the grey suit out for me, there’s a lad.”

Will opened the taps and stood watching the steam rise from the bath. He shrugged out of his coat and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt without taking his eyes from the tumble of water, the roar of it far away. The tremor was in his fingers now, electrifying them. The slick surfaces of the buttons reminded him of pearls; reminded him of the sensation of sliding the ball of his thumb over the shining surfaces of Adele’s teeth.

A shudder gripped him, bending him forward, his arms cradling his belly. When he was able to stand again, he stripped the shirt from him and dropped it on the floor, not caring that he tore it. His reflection in the tall glass beside the bath turned to him, mocking him. He would not look at it. His skittish gaze roamed the walls, but with cruel inevitability came to rest on his twin, the wolfish Other in the mirror.

The torso painted with rusty streaks, the scratched ribs, the purple bite mark on one of the broad shoulders—those could have nothing to do with him. The Other turned, a malicious grin on his face, and revealed a pair of swallows tattooed, one on each shoulder blade, in indigo ink. A soft moan escaped Will. The man in the mirror was no Other. He owned the ink and the blood, and he owned the fluttering heat that rose in his loins at the sight of the blood. He took a deep breath, finished undressing, and stepped into the steaming water. He lay back in the cloudy warmth, and conjured the memory of lovely, dead Adele. Faded banners of scarlet rose around him, unheeded, as he gave himself up to savage pleasure.

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Her skin had been smooth and pale as fresh cream, not a line or a blemish on it. She was fifteen years old, brought to the city from the mountains and left to starve after cholera took her parents, her younger brother, and most of the squalid neighborhood around her. Her bones had glowed beneath her fine skin, a sacred sculpture. Her hair, brushed until it shone, fell around her in a wash of sunlit gold; but it was her skin that called forth the animal in him.

‘Will she do, my lord?” Mrs. Kinsky hovered at his elbow in the bedroom doorway, both of them staring in at the beautiful child frozen in the firelight. “She’s not been touched. I saved her especially for you. Is she not exquisite?”

Words had fallen away from him. His silence caused Mrs. Kinsky to finger the cameo at her throat in nervous irritation. “You’ll not find another like her in all Vienna, my lord. My house is famous for its beauties, as you well know.”

He turned to the woman, and she took a step back at his expression. Wordlessly, he dropped the coins in her outstretched claw and watched her hurry away down the deep blue hallway to the stairs. In the soft October light, she was a creature of the depths, descending away from him through watery shadows—a mermaid, sharp of tooth and soulless.

He entered the bedroom and kicked the door shut behind him. He towered over the seated girl, a fell shadow in his dark attire, she glowing bright as a church candle in her white shift. They had schooled her for her new profession, but terror kindled in her eyes at the sight of him. That, too, fed the beast inside. It paced and growled, making his limbs tremble, and he dragged on its chain in vain. In the hallway, he heard Tom and the girl he’d chosen laughing as they stumbled to an empty room.

“What is your name?” he asked, his voice husky in his tight throat. He pulled off his gloves and tossed them on the bureau.

Her lips moved without sound. She cleared her throat and tried again.

“Adele.”

She looked at the carpet, her hands clutching one another in her lap, the silk chemise sliding and buckling over her breasts. Her nipples shimmered beneath its thin veil.

“What shall I do for you? I don’t know what to do.”

Something like love cramped his heart. He wanted to hold her, to shield her from what was to come, but the wolf rose up and demanded to be fed. It was always the stronger of them.

“Let me teach you,” he said.

He reached down and grasped Adele by her arm, pulling her to her feet. The feel of her skin in his hand, the soft yielding of her flesh, drove the last vestige of reason from his mind. He thrust his hands through the tumble of her hair and pulled her close, inhaling the sharp, sweet smell of her fear. He put his mouth on her, on her white throat, on her shoulder bared where the flimsy gown had abandoned her. He tried the points of his teeth on her softness, rocking his hips into hers and pushing her against the brocade-covered wall. The crystals of the wall sconce quivered and sang like fairy bells.

“Stop,” she cried, shoving at him. She wriggled like an eel, panic giving her strength.

He grasped her by the jaw and ran his thumb over the slick enamel of her teeth, and she bit him for the first time. He stepped away and gave her the back of his hand. The first red mist of blood speckled his coat. Adele dropped to the floor. He undressed without haste, the wolf fully in control now, hungry and merciless. He stripped the gown from her; it tore like paper. He dragged her upright—a distant part of his mind noting the delicate rose of blood blooming on the ivory pattern of the carpet where she had fallen—and held her to him. She was cool and smooth against his burning skin. The daze faded from her eyes, and she looked at him with such sudden authority that he was held in momentary abeyance.

“Don’t,” she said.

Confused by her clear-eyed gaze, he might have let her run then; might have given her the chance to flee before him through the labyrinth of the house.

“You’re hurting me,” she whispered on a sob, freeing him from the spell. Pain was his purpose.

He licked the blood from the corner of her lips.

“I know,” he said.

He tossed her onto the bed, and she scrambled away from him, the counterpane foaming between them like an angry sea. He grasped her ankle and drew her toward him with a brutal jerk. She screeched and kicked out at him, but he was quicker. Her heel only grazed his belly, a rough caress that enflamed him. She twisted in his grasp and raked him with her nails. Lines of fire blossomed along his ribs. He laughed and cuffed her hard enough to knock her into the pillows.

“Lie down, pretty,” he said, and then he was on her, using his weight to subdue her.

He pressed a forearm across her throat to stop her screams and drove a knee between her thighs to open them. His hand found the hot center of her, fingers questing, and he took as approval the purring moan that was all the sound she had breath to make. Her eyelids fluttered. Her body jumped and relaxed.

He had spent the next hour playing with her, glossing with her blood the tender skin that had so maddened him, and she had only bitten him once more. He had left her quiet on the floor in her new gown of bruises.

Will came back to himself, drifting out to fill his own body from the dark hiding place to which he retreated whenever the Other, the wolf, commanded his frame. The bath water was cold and pinkish. He climbed out of it, toweled himself dry, and padded into the warm bedroom.

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Go here to read Part 1: The Intuition: Part 1