Awaiting the Moon (45 page)

And the idiot servants… again they had all gazed at Elizabeth as if she were a lunatic when she told them to get help. They would not try to get help, nor would they even find Countess Adele or Count Nikolas for her. It was her sex, she knew, for though the Countess Adele wielded some power in the household, no other woman had any right to give them orders. It was infuriating, and her only hope was that Fanny, with her intelligence and grasp of the English language and ready understanding, would get the message to Nikolas.

The one person she did not want to send the message through was Charlotte; her charge she had told to stay in her room, bar the door, and allow no one entrance. Until she knew where Bartol was, she was bent on not allowing Charlotte to be exposed to his hateful, insidious influence.

The countess was already in the forest; Elizabeth swore she would guard the woman herself for the next few nights, for she seemed too clever and too determined in her hallucinatory state. If no one could confound her wily ways, Elizabeth would herself. She would sit on her if need be.

But first she had to find her before the hunters, or the wolves. That might be terrifyingly easy, since she could hear the sound of men shouting and dogs baying. She crashed through the forest, hoping she wasn’t too late, terrified of what she might find. The snow was slippery and her feet went out from under her; she crashed to the ground, her bare hands grasping at snow-frosted branches and twigs, scraping them raw. No nightmare could be this terrifying, this horrible, she thought, clambering to her feet, weeping from pain and frustration.

Where had Gerta gone? Elizabeth was forced to pick her way, for there was a ridge she had not encountered before, a snowy hill, and then… there it was, moonlight still slanting through the trees to it. That same damned clearing! She had found the way, even though she had approached from a different angle.

Now she knew the significance… it was the place her husband had died, and in the arms of another woman. How that awful night must have haunted the poor woman! With fresh determination Elizabeth surged forward, bent on protecting Gerta from herself and from the despicable actions of her diabolical kinsman.

Elizabeth and the hunters reached the countess at the same moment. Gerta, gowned only in her nightrail and with her silvery hair streaming down her back, howled and swiped with her clawed hands while dogs crouched nearby, barking and circling her. Men with torches stood near, their dark, hooded forms menacing, the golden flames battling the silvery moonlight for supremacy.

“Countess,” she shouted, trying to approach the woman.

But the dogs snapped and snarled, and the countess did, too, pointing her chin to the stars and howling in an eerie, keening bay that was answered by the confused and incensed dogs. The men strode forward, and one took her arm, roughly.

He shouted in German, and Elizabeth understood only part of what he was saying. But she did understand by his gestures and movements that they intended to take Gerta with them to the village.

“No!” Elizabeth shouted, racing forward. But she was held at bay by the snarling dogs.

“Leave her alone! Let her go!” It came out in English… she couldn’t think how to say it in German, and the man just stared in her direction with a baffled expression.

Countess Gerta twisted and struggled, her countenance holding more fear now than madness.

Summoning every bit of her courage and inner resources, Elizabeth moved forward again slowly, speaking in her best German. “Please, you must see that the poor countess is only sick and troubled, not dangerous. She is just a woman; do not harm her. Let me take her home.”

“She is a werewolf,” the man replied, his dark visage twisted with fear and loathing. “She has hurt my daughter. She must be killed.”

“No!” screamed Elizabeth. Shaking, she covered her mouth with her hands, thinking, trying to figure out how to get to this man, how to reason with him past his superstition. “No! There
are
no werewolves, just a woman unhappy and troubled, perhaps even drugged. You see there is a drug—”

But another man took the countess’s other arm and they turned and roughly hauled her toward the far edge of the forest, in the direction of the village. They would kill her; Elizabeth knew it deep in her heart. Whether they intended to or not, that is how the night would end if she did not find a way to intervene.

And then, out of the forest a great, shaggy silver wolf erupted and stood, paws splayed, lip curled, his black and silver ruff of fur sparkling in the moonlight. The men gasped and fell back.

Nikolas! Elizabeth almost whimpered his name aloud but held back; when she called his name last time, that was when his involuntary transformation back to human form took place, and that would be death to him here. But it was him; she knew it by the look in his eyes and by the intensity of his stare as he first gazed at her and then at the newly released Gerta, who stood quivering and bewildered.

Elizabeth understood and didn’t need to be told again. With steely determination she refrained from calling out to him, and instead dashed forward and grabbed Gerta’s arm.

She stumbled away, roughly hauling the countess with her. She paused at the edge of the forest, thankful that Gerta was no longer resisting, and looked back.

The dogs were circling Nikolas, and his fur bristled as he readied for battle. One dog lunged at him and Nikolas leapt on the animal, his big mouth clamping down on the dog’s throat. The dog yelped and staggered away, blood coursing down his pale fur. Elizabeth felt her stomach twist in revulsion, but then it settled, her fear for Nikolas making her wish him success, no matter what he had to do. These men would kill him in an instant if they could.

The hunters, though, even the lead man, were staying well back, their fear of Nikolas in his bestial form as evident as their intention to do him grave harm. One raised his bow to his shoulder.

“Ni—” Elizabeth bit down on her tongue, exchanged one long look with the wolf, and knew her duty and Nikolas’s wishes, even as her heart clenched in pain and fear for the man who still existed even in the wolf form. She turned and without a look back pulled Gerta to safety in the woods and towards the castle. But behind her she could hear the sound of a battle and an animal howling in pain.

It seemed to take forever to retrace their steps. She went wrong a couple of times and had to refind their path. She was almost to the forest edge, almost to the castle, when she heard a crashing in the forest behind her. Only one creature or human, though, she thought, turning to see her fate, dread filling her mind with a certainty that if it was one of the hunters, she and Gerta would both die.

But it was Nikolas in human form, stumbling and reeling through the fir trees, naked but for the wolfskin kirtle and his black cloak.

“Nik!” she cried as he made his way to them.

He stumbled to the ground and gasped out, “It is all right, they are gone, chased away. My own wolves will guard the castle for the rest of the night, but…”

He collapsed in the snow. Elizabeth ran to him, pulled back his cloak, and saw the bloody haft of an arrow sticking out from his shoulder. He was pale, his handsome face drained and white in the last glimmers of the sinking moonlight.

“It… it must be tipped in wolfsbane,” he struggled to say as she crouched by his side.

“Nothing else would… would…”

“Nikolas?” Gerta whimpered. “My brother? Hurt?”

“I need to get you both back into the castle,” Elizabeth said, putting one hand under Nikolas’s arm and hauling him to his feet. He was far too big a man for her to do that alone; it required much effort on his part, but with him resolutely pushing past the pain he suffered, they struggled together across the open field and up to the castle.

The courtyard beyond the castle was ablaze with light, and there were shouts.

“What’s going on now?” Elizabeth muttered.

They struggled to the back, Elizabeth hoping to find some help, for she knew Nikolas was fading, the loss of blood beginning to tell on his ability to move. She could not carry him up stairs, she could not even support him further, for his strength was fading with the effects of poison.

One of the stable boys, eyes wide, was holding a horse, and it was rearing up as the wolf dogs snapped and snarled around them. But the most frightening sight was Bartol Liebner, surprisingly strong for such a supposedly frail man, holding Charlotte against him, her eyes closed, a knife to her throat.

He was hollering at the stable boy who was saddling the horse, but his hold on Charlotte kept slipping as the girl slumped heavily against him. The stable boy, doing as he was bid, led the horse to a mounting block.

“Bartol Liebner!” Elizabeth shouted. She was terrified for her student, for the knife near her throat kept wavering and it was large, easily big enough to slice her with the wrong movement. After all Elizabeth had done, she had failed in her one most important task of keeping Charlotte safe. Though she had warned the girl to stay in her room and bar the door, she had failed to specifically name Bartol as the enemy. Fury enveloped her. “Bartol!” she screamed again.

He turned and there was fear in his eyes, but defiance, too, and hatred. “Get away, or I will kill her, I swear it.”

“What do you think you’re doing? Where will you go?” Trembling with fear for Charlotte as the knife nicked the tender skin and a single ribbon of scarlet trickled down the unconscious girl’s slender white neck, Elizabeth was frozen, afraid to move, afraid to startle him lest he slice her throat. She had not foreseen this awful turn of events, believing that Bartol was confined in Nikolas’s care. Poor Charlotte! Bartol had seemed so inoffensive to Elizabeth for so long; how much more so must he have seemed to one so naive as Charlotte, who had the long habit of trust in him to deceive her? If he came to her door, offered her solace and a soothing drink— “You cannot succeed; you must know that,” she said, trying to reason with him.

“Leave me alone! I am taking Charlotte; she will be my wife. I mean her no harm, but you will force me into it if you do not get back now.”

Nikolas slid down to the ground as Gerta started forward, toward Bartol. She was whimpering and crying.

“Bartol, what are you doing?” the countess said. “I do not understand.”

“Get back. You are nothing to me now. If they had let me marry you… but you are getting old, and too mad even for my use.”

“No!” she cried out. “You love me; you have always said so! I am your precious, your own.”

“You are mad and barren! Ugly, old… skinny…”

His cruel words enraged her, and she shrieked out her hatred for him, running at him with fists flailing.

“No!” Elizabeth screamed, and she lunged after the countess, at the last moment grasping Charlotte’s arm and pulling her away as the old man moved to defend himself against the countess’s flailing fists.

What happened next occurred so quickly Elizabeth could only reconstruct it later. One of the dogs, on Nikolas’s shouted command, leaped between Countess Gerta and Bartol, knocking the man down, and in that instant a dead quietude rolled over the stable yard, all activity brought to an end by the sight of the motionless body of Bartol Liebner, blood pouring from his head into the dirty slush.

Gerta crouched by him and wailed, the dog cringed back, and Nikolas, with a superhuman effort, staggered to his feet and stumbled to the scene of grave suffering, bending over his sister and trying to raise her up. Charlotte lay nearby; Elizabeth ran to the girl and was reassured by the fluttering of a nerve in her neck and the rise and fall of her chest in regular movement.

Alone, his head split open by the mounting block, Bartol Liebner lay, a black and red blot on the ground of the stable yard. As servants raced out and Fanny took Charlotte’s care over, Elizabeth went to the man, whose pulse was slowing.

His dark eyes flew open, though, and he looked up at her and groaned, as his eyes fluttered closed again, “Damn you to hell! All my plans for naught…”

But he said no more, and Elizabeth whispered, “Whatever your depraved plans were, they were doomed from the start, and for the pain and suffering you have caused, I think you are the one consigned to burn in hell.”

A DAY passed of such unutterable weariness that Elizabeth, when she finally did find an hour to sleep, slumbered deep and dreamless, even though she had thought she would dream of that awful scene in the stable yard.

Uta and Frau Liebner, horrified by the terrible happenings of the night, had bundled both Gerta and Charlotte into Uta’s suite and with a recovering Mina—her strong constitution had thrown off a drugging that would have killed a lesser woman—guarded the two. Though physical danger was past, they were intent on discovering the extent of damage to their emotional well-being.

Heinrich, Cesare, and Melisande’s father had arrived at dawn, and Nikolas, bandaged against the wound in his shoulder, had descended to the village. From what she understood, Elizabeth assumed the villagers still had no proof of a werewolf, and certainly did not know that their liege was the beast. He had gone down, Cesare reluctantly told her, to calm their fears and order an investigation. He had long suspected that Magda Brandt’s wounds were not inflicted by an animal at all, but by a human source, and Cesare had learned, in his stay in the inn, that the girl had a secret lover who was a brutal and vicious man. Among the women of the village it was thought that he beat Magda, but in her fear of him she would not confess it easily.

Elizabeth was in the library with the door open doing some more research on the herbs used to drug Gerta when she sensed a presence and turned. It was Christoph. His eyes were red and his face pale, his shock of blond hair in wild disarray.

“Is she… is she all right?” he said, entering but staying near the door. His sensitive hands fluttered, but then he passed one over his wildly tousled hair, an echo of his uncle’s habitual movement. “No one will tell me anything. No one will let me see her. Is she all right?”

Not sure if he was asking after Gerta, his erstwhile lover, or Charlotte, Elizabeth was silent for too long evidently, for he groaned and covered his face with his hands.