HOWL : Tales of 1859

CHAPTER FOUR : First Light,First Blood

Alyssa woke with her cheek pressed to cold stone and the taste of copper and ash coating her tongue, her skin feeling too tight like something larger was trying to tear its way out from beneath it, and every sound in St. Giles hit her at once in a way that made her want to scream and run and hide all at the same time—the rat scuttling in the gutters, the woman coughing two streets over, her own heartbeat too fast and too strong, and Darran’s breathing steady and patient only three feet away like he’d been watching her sleep and waiting for her to open her eyes so he could start this conversation she wasn’t ready to have. She didn’t open her eyes at first, lying there pretending that if she didn’t acknowledge it, the change wouldn’t be real, but Darran’s voice cut through the silence anyway, soft and infuriatingly gentle as he said, “Good morning, love. How do you feel?” When she finally forced her eyes open, the world was wrong—too sharp, too bright, colours bleeding into each other with a clarity that hurt, and she could see the grain in the wood of the abandoned shop they’d holed up in, could smell the rot in the walls and the dried blood on Darran’s hands and the fear-sweat of the three wolves sleeping by the door, and when she answered “Thirsty,” her voice came out rough and alien even to her own ears. Darran smiled and crouched beside her, holding out his wrist with blood beading on the skin, saying “Drink. It’ll help,” but Alyssa slapped his hand away and said, “I’m not an animal,” and he just tilted his head and asked, “No? Then why do you smell like you want to tear my throat out and why are your claws digging into the floorboards?” She looked down and saw it—her fingernails had split, black talons curving from her fingertips and scoring deep grooves into the wood, and she yanked her hands back like she’d been burned, saying “Make it stop,” but Darran just shook his head and said, “I can’t. But I can teach you to control it,” before standing and stretching with bones cracking and turning his attention to the pack outside where fifty wolves were waking in doorways and cellars and sewers, moving like a single creature now, and he said, “We hunt tonight. But today… today we show London we’re not afraid of the light.”

The fog over St. Giles Market was thick enough to hide them but not thick enough to hide what they were, and Darran walked down the middle of the street bare-chested and covered in dried blood like he owned every cobble and every terrified face that turned his way, twelve wolves moving in pairs behind him sticking to the shadows without attacking yet because Darran wanted this to be a message first and a m******e second, and Alyssa stayed in the alley pressed against the wall breathing hard with her eyes fully yellow now and hating that she couldn’t force them back to brown, hating that she could hear the child crying in the doorway of the baker’s shop and smell his blood and milk and fear so strongly it made her teeth ache. “Come on,” Darran called back to her without looking, “they won’t hurt you. Not with me here,” and when she said, “They’re afraid of you,” he just said, “Exactly. And fear is power,” and then a butcher dropped his cleaver and ran, a woman pulled her child off the street and slammed her door shut, and Darran stopped in the middle of the market square and turned to her and said, “Stand with me, Alyssa. Let them see the New Age.” She stepped out because she couldn’t not step out, and the crowd went quiet in that way crowds do when they see something that breaks the rules of the world they thought they lived in, and then she saw the boy—no more than six, frozen and crying after his mother had dropped him and run, and the hunger rose up in her sudden and violent and undeniable, and she could hear his heart hammering and see his throat pale and pulsing and she took a step forward before she could stop herself, saying “Darran, make it stop,” and he crouched slightly and said quietly, “You can take him. One bite. You’ll feel better. Stronger. You won’t hurt anymore,” but she said “No,” and he said, “You will anyway. Tonight. Tomorrow. The beast doesn’t wait, love. It only gets louder.” Her claws came out again, her vision tunneled until all she could see was that throat, and she dropped to her knees sobbing “No, no, no” and drove her claws into the cobbles instead, splitting stone and splitting her own skin so blood ran down her hands and the hunger receded just a fraction, and Darran watched her and said, “Stubborn. You’ll break, Alyssa. We all do,” before standing and spreading his arms to the crowd and shouting, “Run! Run and tell them what you saw! Tell them the wolves are here, and we’re not hiding anymore!” and the screams tore through St. Giles as his wolves moved through them nipping at heels and slashing at legs but never killing, just hurting, just scaring, and Alyssa stayed on her knees shaking with blood dripping from her hands and didn’t look at the boy because if she looked she wasn’t sure she could stop herself next time.

Sergeant Morris stared at the report in his hands at Bow Street Station and felt sick, reading aloud, “St. Giles Market. Wolves. Walking upright. Talking. Biting but not killing. Children attacked but left alive,” and his constables shifted uncomfortably because nothing in their training covered something like this, and Morris said, “It’s him. Pecker. He’s back, and he’s brought more,” and when Constable Ellis asked, “What do we do?” his hands wouldn’t stop shaking, Morris looked at the claw marks gouged into his oak desk and said, “We find the Silver Guard. And we pray they answer before Pecker decides to stop playing.” Meanwhile the pack had retreated to an abandoned mill on the edge of St. Giles, and Darran sat on a crate watching Alyssa who sat in the corner with her hands clenched and her yellow eyes fixed on the floor like if she didn’t look up the world would stop being real, and he said, “You did well. You didn’t kill him. That’s more than I managed my first night,” and she finally looked up and said, “Don’t compare me to you,” and he smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes and said, “I’m not. You’re stronger than me, Alyssa. You always were,” before crouching in front of her and saying, “Tonight, we hunt for real. No more games. No more warnings. London needs to understand,” and when she asked, “And if I refuse?” his smile turned cold and he said, “Then the beast will refuse for you. And I won’t be there to pull you back,” and he stood and told the pack, “Rest. Sunset in nine hours. Tonight, we take Whitehall,” and they howled, and Alyssa closed her eyes and prayed she wouldn’t wake up.

In a derelict warehouse in Whitechapel, Inspector Hale sat surrounded by fifteen wolves of his own, still wearing the tatters of his uniform with his eyes fully yellow, and he said, “Pecker’s getting sloppy. Showing off in the daylight. Making a spectacle,” and when Briggs, a former dockworker now turned wolf, snarled, “So what? We follow him, don’t we?” Hale shook his head and said, “No. We’re better than him. Smarter. Tonight, we hit Whitechapel. Quiet. Efficient. We build our own pack. Our own territory,” and he stood with claws extending and said, “Pecker wants a war? We’ll give him one,” and the wolves howled because civil war was coming whether Darran wanted it or not. Back at the mill, Alyssa dreamed of running through woods and streets faster than wind and thought with Darran running beside her laughing and shouting, “Faster, Alyssa! Don’t hold back!” and she tried to answer but her throat was full of blood, and she woke with a scream with her hands clenched so tight her nails had cut into her palms again, and across the room Darran watched her without saying anything because he didn’t need to—she knew what he was thinking, and she knew what was coming, and she knew that soon, very soon, she wouldn’t be able to stop it.

The hours between dawn and dusk crawled like a man dragging himself through broken glass, and Alyssa spent every one of them locked in the back room of the mill with her own breathing and the sound of Darran’s voice outside giving orders to a pack that was no longer men and women but something else entirely, something that answered to him with a loyalty she couldn’t understand and didn’t want to. She tried sleeping and couldn’t, tried thinking of anything other than the boy in the market and the way her body had betrayed her and came up empty every time, and when she pressed her hands to her face she could feel the shape of the beast underneath her skin like it was waiting for her to drop her guard for one second so it could rip its way out. Darran didn’t come in. He didn’t need to. His absence was part of it, a pressure that reminded her he was out there managing them, feeding them, turning the whole of St. Giles into a board he could move pieces across, and every time she heard his laugh carry through the thin walls she felt something inside her fracture a little more because part of her still wanted to hear that laugh directed at her, still wanted the Darran who stayed up three nights straight trying to cure her cough instead of the one who called bloodshed a new age. Outside, the city was changing. Word spread faster than any constable could contain it—whispers in the markets, shouts from preachers on street corners, the kind of fear that made people lock their doors at noon and keep knives by their beds, and somewhere in Whitechapel Hale was doing the same thing on a smaller scale, building his own pack in the shadows while Darran played at being a god in public. By the time the sun started to bleed orange across the rooftops, Alyssa’s hands were shaking so badly she had to sit on them just to keep from tearing at the walls, and when Darran finally opened the door his eyes were already yellow and he didn’t say anything for a long time, just looked at her like he was measuring how much of her was left.

“Sun’s down,” he said, and his voice was low, almost reverent, like he was announcing the start of a holy day. “You can smell it, can’t you? The city’s ripe.”

Alyssa didn’t answer. She stood because her legs didn’t feel like they belonged to her anymore, and the floor felt too far away and too close at the same time, and when she looked at Darran she saw the man she loved and the monster he’d become stacked on top of each other like a bad painting.

“Whitehall,” he said. “Parliament’s in session tonight. They think they’re safe behind their guards and their walls. They think we’re animals.” He stepped closer, and the rest of the pack fell silent behind him, fifty pairs of yellow eyes watching her for her reaction. “We show them what animals do when you corner them.”

Alyssa’s throat was dry. “You’ll get them killed.”

“No,” Darran said, and for the first time that day he sounded serious, stripped of the performance. “They’ll get themselves killed. I’m just giving them the chance to see it coming.” He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face with fingers that still had blood under the nails, and when he spoke again it was quiet enough that only she could hear. “You don’t have to come, Alyssa. But if you stay here, the hunger will. And I won’t be there to pull you back.”

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to run until London was gone behind her.

Instead she followed him out into the night.

The streets of Westminster had emptied out in a way that felt unnatural, like the city itself was holding its breath, and the gas lamps cast long shadows that moved wrong when the pack passed, stretching and twisting like they were trying to get away. Darran walked at the front, bare-chested again, blood from this morning still flaked on his skin, and he didn’t hide, didn’t flinch when a window slammed shut or when a woman pulled her child inside and locked the door, and the pack moved with him like a tide, quiet and inevitable. Alyssa stayed near the back, keeping her eyes on the ground because if she looked at the people watching from doorways she’d see the boy from the market and she’d remember what it felt like to want to tear him apart, and the hunger was already clawing at the inside of her ribs, louder now that night had come and the beast knew it was time. They didn’t run at first. Darran wanted them seen, wanted the fear to build slow, and it worked—by the time they reached Whitehall the shouts had started, the bells were ringing, and a line of constables had formed at the gates with rifles that shook in their hands.

“Stand down!” one of them shouted, voice cracking. “In the name of the Queen!”

Darran stopped ten paces from them and smiled.

“In the name of the New Age,” he said, and then he moved.

It wasn’t a fight. It was a collapse. The constables fired, but the wolves were faster, and Darran was faster than all of them, a blur of muscle and teeth that hit the line like a hammer and shattered it in three seconds, and Alyssa felt herself moving before she decided to, felt the beast take the reins and run with her body while her mind screamed at it to stop, and the next thing she knew she was on top of a man in a blue coat, her hands around his throat, and he was staring up at her with pure terror and she could smell his blood and hear his heart and the hunger was roaring now, deafening, and she opened her mouth—

And stopped.

The man gasped, scrambling back, and Alyssa staggered to her feet with her hands shaking and blood on her lips that wasn’t hers, and she looked around and saw what they’d done: constables broken on the ground, the gates torn open, Darran standing in the middle of it all with his head thrown back and howling at the sky like he’d just won a war.

“Inside!” he shouted. “Let them see us!”

The pack surged forward, and Alyssa followed because staying behind meant being alone with what she’d almost done, and the halls of Parliament were wide and cold and full of people who hadn’t even realized they were about to die.

Lord Gareth Allen was in the chamber when they broke through the doors, standing at the front with his face pale and his hands gripping the edge of the podium, and when he saw Darran he didn’t scream. He just said, “You’re dead. I saw you die.”

Darran grinned. “I got better.”

The wolves spread through the room, and the Lords and MPs scrambled under benches and behind pillars, and Darran walked up to the podium like he belonged there, like he’d been waiting for this moment since he was buried in Highgate Wood.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and his voice carried across the chamber without effort, sharp and clear and wrong. “You’ve spent years making laws about men like me. About men like us. You’ve called us criminals, madmen, beasts. You’ve never once asked why.” He paused, letting the silence stretch, letting them see the blood on his hands, the yellow in his eyes. “So I’ll tell you. Because you were afraid. Because you built your city on lies and called it order. Because you think being human means being weak.”

Alyssa stood in the doorway, watching, and she could feel the beast in her pacing, waiting for her to give it permission.

Darran turned and looked at her, and for a second his face softened.

“But you don’t have to be weak,” he said, speaking to her now, to all of them. “Tonight, you choose. Bow, and live in the New Age. Or fight, and die in the old one.”

Lord Allen opened his mouth, and Darran moved.

It was fast. Too fast. One second Allen was standing, the next he was on the ground with Darran’s teeth in his throat, and the chamber erupted into screams.

Alyssa didn’t move. She couldn’t.

Darran pulled back, blood running down his chin, and looked at her.

“Choose, love,” he said. “Now.”

Alyssa stood in the doorway of the chamber with blood on her lips and Lord Allen’s dying eyes on her, and for three seconds the entire world narrowed down to the sound of her own breathing and the roar of the beast inside her that wanted nothing more than to run into that room and tear it apart until the floor ran red and Darran was smiling at her like she’d finally understood, and she could feel her claws extending and her teeth aching and the last thin thread of Alyssa Cartwright slipping through her fingers like smoke. Darran was watching her, blood running down his chin, his eyes yellow and bright and hungry, and when he said “Choose, love. Now,” it wasn’t a threat—it was an invitation, the same invitation he’d been offering since the night in Highgate Wood, and part of her wanted to take it because it would make the screaming stop, would make the hunger stop, would make her stop being afraid of what she was becoming and just become it already. But then she saw the boy from the market again behind her eyes, saw the way he’d cried when she’d leaned over him, saw the way the constable under her hands had begged, and she realized that if she stepped forward now she would never come back, that Alyssa would die in this room and only the wolf would walk out, and so she did the only thing she could do: she turned and ran. Her feet hit the marble floor of Parliament like gunshots, and behind her Darran shouted her name but she didn’t stop, didn’t look back, because if she looked back she’d see him standing there with blood on his face and disappointment in his eyes and she knew that look would break her faster than any bite ever could. The pack parted for her as she ran through them, confused and snarling, and she burst out into the night air of Whitehall with the bells still ringing and the city screaming and the smell of blood so thick it made her gag, and she didn’t stop running until she was on Westminster Bridge with the Thames black and cold below her and the wind tearing at her hair and her hands shaking so hard she had to grip the stone railing to keep from falling.

She stood there for a long time, breathing, trying to remember what it felt like to be human, trying to push the yellow out of her eyes and the hunger out of her chest, and when she finally looked up Darran was standing ten feet away with his arms crossed and Lord Allen’s blood still on his mouth, and he didn’t look angry. He looked sad. “You ran,” he said quietly, like he’d expected it but hated that he’d been right. “I thought tonight would be the night you chose me.” Alyssa shook her head, gripping the railing until her knuckles went white. “I chose not to become you,” she said, and her voice sounded broken even to her own ears. Darran stepped closer, and the pack stopped at the edge of the bridge like they knew not to come any further. “You will,” he said, and it wasn’t arrogance anymore—it was certainty, the kind of certainty that came from knowing someone better than they knew themselves. “The beast is in you, Alyssa. You can run from it, you can fight it, but you can’t kill it. It’s part of you now. It always will be.” He reached out and touched her cheek with fingers that were still wet, and she flinched but didn’t pull away. “Tonight you chose them,” he said, nodding back toward Parliament where the screams were still echoing. “Tomorrow, you’ll choose me. Because when the hunger gets bad enough, when it gets so bad you think you’ll go mad, I’ll be the only one who understands. I’ll be the only one who can make it stop.” Alyssa pulled away from him, tears mixing with the blood on her face. “Don’t wait for me,” she whispered. Darran smiled, but it was the saddest thing she’d ever seen. “I don’t have a choice,” he said. “You’re mine, Alyssa. You have been since the woods. You just don’t know it yet.” He turned and walked back toward the pack, and before he reached them he stopped and looked over his shoulder one last time. “Tonight was a warning,” he said to the city, to her, to the world. “Tomorrow, we come for all of it.” Then he was gone, melting into the shadows with fifty wolves at his back, and Alyssa was left alone on Westminster Bridge.