Silver (Wicked Woods #3) Read online

  Silver

  The Wicked Woods #3

  kailin gow

  Silver

  Published by THE EDGE

  THE EDGE is an imprint of Sparklesoup LLC

  Copyright © 2011 Kailin Gow

  Al Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, please contact:

  THE EDGE at Sparklesoup

  P.O. Box 60834

  Irvine, CA 92602

  www.sparklesoup.com

  First Edition.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN: 1597486337

  ISBN: 978-1597486330

  DEDICATION

  For the town of Arrowhead, thank you for the inspiration.

  For my little girl who always make me look for the silver lining in every cloud, thank you.

  For my loyal fans, my blogging friends, my group leaders who stick by me with such encouragement and faith, thank you!

  Prologue

  Summer 1865 - Wicked, Massachusetts

  Blood spattered the pil ow as the mayor’s daughter entered a coughing fit that convulsed her sixteen-year-old frame. The wooden wal s of the bedroom echoed with the sound as her parents looked on, her mother tearful, her father doing a better job of hiding his worry. Even in a town as smal as Wicked, you did not get to hold onto public office by letting people see what you real y felt, and the mayor, a big man in his fifties, stood stoical y. Only the slight disarray of his house coat, the slight lack of care for his beard, suggested that he wasn’t as calm as he appeared.

  For his part, the town’s doctor looked grave. Even in his shirtsleeves, he was warm, the fire in the grate was built up so much, and yet the girl was as cold as if they had left her outside at midwinter. He had taken her temperature, observed her symptoms, and spent much of the last five minutes simply staring as she lay on the bed, the disease burning through her.

  Time to cal in a priest. The doctor knew death when he saw it. This was not something that was going to pass.

  Tonight, or tomorrow night, it would leach away the last strength that the girl possessed, and the mayor of Wicked would find himself preparing for a funeral. He would probably start looking for a new doctor too. The mayor was not a forgiving man.

  As if on cue, the big man cleared his throat. “Wel ?

  We cannot have Amelia sick much longer. She is to be married next month.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I fear that there is little to be done, sir.”

  The mayor took a step towards him. “That is not acceptable. Find a better answer if you want to earn your fee, man.”

  The doctor shrugged. He had known that he would be making a loss on the day almost as soon as he saw the condition of the man’s daughter. Powerful men paid only for successes. It was simply the way things were.

  “If there were something I could do, do you not think I would be doing it?” he asked.

  “If there is nothing you can do,” the mayor countered,

  “you do not need to be here.”

  “You’l send him away?” his wife demanded, speaking for the first time that evening. She was a smal , fragile looking woman, who always looked slightly out of place beside her husband and always slightly frightened by the world. The doctor was always reminded a little of a mouse when he saw her. She looked over at him with pleading eyes. “There must be something that can help my Amelia.”

  The doctor was not a young man anymore, being almost thirty now, and he had seen more than his share of death. You became hardened to it quickly, in a world where so many died young. Even so, there was something about the grief in the woman’s voice that touched him.

  “Ma’am, I’l give it some more thought, but I can make no promises.”

  For the doctor, seeing the hope in her face was like watching an axe being raised above him. That one phrase had bought him time, because there was no way the mayor’s wife would let her husband eject him now, but it had done little else. What could he do? Why had he been stupid enough to say it?

  The doctor tried to remember some scrap of knowledge that might be useful. He recal ed reading a paper about Mon. Pasteur’s work on the transmission of disease through bacteria just recently, yet it had suggested nothing about how to deal with them. It had even seemed fanciful to him at the time.

  Maybe it was the idea of fanciful things that triggered the memory, but the doctor found himself remembering back to when he had been a child in the town.

  For a nurse, he had an elderly Danish woman who had lived there most of her life, and who had loved to tel him stories about the place’s history when the settlers first settled in Wicked. She had told him about Wicked’s first inhabitants, the Wickhams, and their role in founding the town when they arrived on the Mayflower with the first settlers.

  The Wickhams were upstanding people… leaders who seemed to genuinely care for the people of Wicked.

  They were from the long line of Wickhams from England, an aristocratic lineage, who brought with them an old world charm. However, they were also mysterious, often disappearing into the woods for long stretches of time.

  Did the Wickhams have anything to do with the lore of Wicked Woods? That the Woods was a magical place where those who were on the brink of death could go and be renewed? Lore had it that loved ones would carry their sick dying ones into the woods, lay them down and left them there through the night.

  In the morning, when they came to see their sick ones, they would find them healed, radiant, and even ethereal beautiful. But their sick ones would only drink blood, blood kept them young and alive, wel and not sick.

  They would offer them pheasant, animal blood, which would satisfy them at first, but after a while, these sick ones with bloodlust soon began preying on people. Some of the people of Wicked fought back, but many fel prey. Of the few that fought back, they found a precious weapon right in the woods itself on the highest slope, large quantities of silver ore. The people began making silver crucifixes with the silver, which seemed to drive al the “Undead” back into the woods. She had told him stranger stories too; of beasts that walked like men, and of odd guardian creatures from the legends of her homeland.

  In amongst such nonsense, though, she had also said something that the doctor found himself latching onto.

  Years back, close to the time the Wickhams had first come to town, people too sick to help had sometimes been left in the forest at night. They had apparently come back cured of al their il s, so healthy that they seemed younger and more beautiful. Even as a boy, the doctor remembered laughing at it, yet the old woman had claimed that it had been done with an aunt of hers, and that she had stayed looking young for years before disappearing one night. Had she been serious?

  More to the point, was he real y getting desperate enough to trust to fables and stories for children? The doctor almost laughed as he realized that he was. He liked this town, and did not want to have to find somewhere else to ply his trade. Nor did he want to have to watch the mother’s face as her daughter slid down into darkness.

  Nothing else he knew would help now, so why not try something that might? What was there to lose?

  The doctor made up his mind. Yes, he would probably look stupid. Yes, the mayor would probably have him thrown out of the town just for suggesting it, yet he would not stand by without at least making the attempt. He cleared his throat.

  “Sir, there might be one thing we can try…”

  Win
ter 1865 - Wicked, Massachusetts

  The doctor wrapped his greatcoat around him and braced himself against the cold as he waited, watching from the shadow of a doorway. The house he stood observing was quiet and dark, yet he knew he could not take his eyes from it. Too much had happened in recent days for him to let slip his vigil.

  It had taken almost half an hour of talking to persuade the mayor to leave his only daughter in a forest overnight. Half an hour of the desperate pleas of his wife, and an admission that there was nothing that the doctor’s science could do for the girl. They had laid her down unseen by the edge of the trees, and forced themselves to walk away.

  Of course, the doubts had set in almost as soon as they got back. The mayor had accused him of trickery, and had threatened to have him hanged if his daughter died from being left out there. Somehow, though, some spark of hope had made them wait, to keep from going back to where they had left Amelia.

  She had walked into the mayor’s home in the morning as though nothing had happened. Her mother had been ecstatic, of course, while her father had given the doctor almost a hundred dol ars. A fortune for a single night’s work. What did it matter that the girl would not answer questions about what had happened, or that she refused to eat? She looked wel . In fact, she looked radiant.

  Al had seemed wel . Amelia had married her suitor, and moved into the house that the doctor now stood watching. She had taken her place at the heart of Wicked’s society, and was said to be wel loved by al . Everything had seemed perfect. So much so that the doctor had tried his unusual cure twice more, with great success. Two young women were walking around in the world that would not have been without the stories of his nurse.

  Yet, as time passed, the doctor started to hear the rumors. That Amelia Fischer, as she now was, slipped out at al hours. That animals were being found kil ed in the forest with strange marks on them. That one of the women who had been saved had been spotted coming out of the forest with blood on her mouth.

  The doctor had tried to tel himself that it was al superstitious nonsense. That people were making up stories to explain such sudden recoveries. When he had heard his housekeeper uttering old tales from Eastern Europe about blood drinking beasts, he had even threatened to dismiss her if she went around spreading such foolishness.

  Last month though, Amelia’s new husband had sickened, and the doctor had seen for himself how pale he was. How anemic. Then the Evans boy had gone missing.

  Oh, people said that it was just the winter, or a bear, or simply an urge on the boy’s part to see the world, but that didn’t ring true. The boy knew enough to stay safe in the woods, and he seemed happy enough where he was. It wasn’t quite proof, but it was… worrying.

  Which was why the doctor was standing in an inch of snow at one in the morning, watching the house of a young woman he had helped save. When he saw the door crack open, and a cloaked figure slip out into the night, he nodded to himself, and started to stride forward.

  A hand clamped onto his shoulder, strong enough to drag him back into the shadows. The doctor looked around, and found himself facing a man slightly younger than he was, dressed in the kind of rough furs hunters sometimes wore in the cold. Given the way the doctor currently had to struggle to keep his teeth from chattering, he envied the young man his coat, even as he tried to pul away from him.

  The young man kept his hold easily. “What are you going to do, doctor? Confront her?”

  The doctor tried to draw himself up to his ful height.

  He would not be accosted by strange men like this.

  “Unhand me, sir.”

  “If I do that, I reckon you won’t live through the night, doctor. Not if you’re going to do stupid things like walking up to one of the blood drinkers and demanding she stop drinking blood.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The young man’s smile flashed bright in the darkness. “Of course you do, doctor. You didn’t know what you were doing, more the pity, but you aren’t so stupid that you can’t see what she has become.”

  The doctor sagged. “How do you know about that, then?”

  “My family have been trying to deal with their kind for a long time now. We thought we had them under control, too. We’ve never been able to pin down where the blood drinkers come from, but we have at least been able to keep them in the woods.”

  “Sorry.” The doctor said it automatical y.

  The other man shook his head. “Don’t be sorry. Just help me to deal with the blood drinkers.”

  “You have only just told me not to confront the girl.”

  “She’s hardly a girl anymore,” the other man said.

  “And no, we won’t be confronting her. We wil just be doing what needs to be done.”

  The doctor caught the edge to that. “And that is?”

  The other man laughed. “You know what that is, doctor.” He reached into the furs he wore with gloved hands, pul ing out a silver cross that gleamed even in the dark. The longest part of it had a sharp blade. “Take it.”

  The doctor shook his head. “You haven’t so much as told me your name, haven’t told me anything much, but you want me to murder someone with you?”

  The other man shrugged. “My name’s Saul Wickham. When you’re done here, I’l put you in touch with some other people who’l tel you al you want to know.

  People I got that cross from. It’s time to choose now, doctor.”

  The doctor stared at the other man for a long moment. He looked at the house he’d been watching, where a man lay dying from lack of blood. Final y, with trembling hands, he reached out and took the crucifix.

  Chapter 1

  Present Day - Wicked, Massachusetts

  The sounds of the battle started to recede as Briony clung to Kevin’s back, the silver sword she had used in the fight kept careful y away from his fur. The long strides of Kevin’s wolf form were taking them further from the fight at a rate Briony could never have managed on her own. Relief that he had been there to help her get clear from the carnage of the vampires’ ambush blended itself with guilt at running. Guilt at abandoning others to fend for themselves once it became clear that she could not help them.

  Who had died? Even as Briony thought it, the sound of running feet came to her, and she caught sight of flashes of fur speeding through the woods not far from her. Which of the werewolves would it be? Her brother, Jake? Josh, the werewolf king? One of his family?

  Briony ducked her head to avoid a low branch. They were moving quickly now. Too quickly to stop and think. Yet flashes of memory came to her. Of Josh ordering the retreat, and then fleeing with as many of his family as he could find. Of Jake helping Josh’s irritating sister, Carol, buying her time. What had she seen since then?

  From the back of a moving wolf, it had been hard to tel exactly. Briony had thought that she had spotted Josh and his brother Brian changing and sprinting off, and that looked like the color of their fur out in the forest. She hadn’t seen anything more of Carol though, or of her twin, Channing.

  Then there was Jake. The last Briony had seen of her little brother; he had been leaping into the safety of the forest canopy after helping Carol. Had he managed to get clear of the violence? Briony wanted to believe that he had.

  After al , he was part vampire and part werewolf, so no single vampire should have been able to stop him. Yet they weren’t talking about single vampires, were they? What if there had been half a dozen of them? What if…

  Briony found herself snapped from her thoughts by a flash of movement above her. A vampire, a young man dressed in casual clothes, his fangs bared in anticipation of the kil , was already in mid-leap as she looked up. He obviously intended to knock her from Kevin’s back and finish Briony while she was stil stunned.

  Briony reacted on instinct, bringing the sword around in an arc that caught the vampire halfway. The momentum of Kevin’s forward motion only added to the stroke, and the blade sliced through the
creature so neatly that Briony barely had to grip with her legs to keep her seat.

  Looking back as Kevin ran on, she saw the two halves of the vampire hit the ground, already burning with the cold, blue fire that would consume him.

  Briony shuddered, yet she was careful to keep a firm grip on Kevin’s fur. She knew that in a battle like the one she was fleeing it was kil or be kil ed, yet somehow, she felt that it shouldn’t be so easy. Taking a life shouldn’t be something you did on instinct. Yet what else could she do?

  It was almost a minute before the next vampire leapt out. Kevin’s speed took the pair of them past the initial leap, but the creature succeeded in snagging a hand in Briony’s sleeve as it tumbled past. Briony found herself spinning from her spot on Kevin’s back, having to tuck and rol to avoid the worst effects of the fal .

  Even so, it rocked her. At the speed she had been travel ing, she lost her grip on Kevin’s back and fel hard, smacking the ground that jarred her entire body. She forced herself to her feet, knowing that the vampire would not be slowed by a fal like that, and that she would be easy prey lying down.

  This creature was a brunette woman who appeared to be in her early twenties. She was dressed more for a night at the opera than an ambush, in a long dress slit up one side. She even wore high heels.

  “You did n o t just land safely in those,” Briony managed to gasp out. She looked around for the sword.

  Had it fal en into one of the nearby bushes?

  “Looking for this?” the vampire woman asked. She picked up the sword from a patch of undergrowth, holding it gingerly, with just her fingertips on the pommel. Without changing her grip, she flung it so that it lodged hilt deep in a nearby tree. “That’s better.”

  Briony edged around to her left, looking for another weapon. She stil had her cross pendant, but she couldn’t use that yet. Not if she wanted the element of surprise.

  “Pietre wil want me alive,” she said, trying to buy time.