The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3)

E. Catherine Tobler

Published by Apokrupha

copyright E. Catherine Tobler, 2016

ecatherine.com

Cover by Ravven

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apokrupha.com

Dear Mister Auberon,

This letter shall mark my final correspondence to you. I cannot continue this conversation, for it will leave us both unhappy. I cannot dance with this broken body. I cannot say yes. Having enjoyed your company prior, I have no wish to foster sentiments of ill-will between us.

Though it is against your explicit requests, I ask that you cease contacting me. Any future letters received will not be acknowledged—for if you cannot acknowledge this request of my own heart, why should I ever be swayed to listen to that of yours? I remain, as ever

C. Barclay

Through night-cloaked Jardin du Luxembourg, Eleanor ran.

On four long legs instead of two, Eleanor ran down the elm-lined paths that spiraled through the city park, a trail of paw-prints in the fresh snow behind her. She was not worried about anyone following her; in the cold night, she could not smell a soul but for Virgil Mallory, ahead of her somewhere, though if he had left a visible trail as she did, she had not spied it. On the winter’s air, Mallory smelled like dirt, dark and rich and ready for things to burst to sudden life inside him, and while she could not see him, it was this scent that urged her on, that caused her to slow and crouch and ponder her next move. It was game, lesson, and play all in one.

Every muscle in her lean jackal body tensed as a red squirrel crossed the snowy path. She told herself she would not be distracted by something so small and inconsequential, but her entire body wriggled, instinct warring with logic. Muscles tightened and prepared to spring after the squirrel, a low whine escaping her as she kept herself firmly and rigidly planted where she was. She quickly discovered that logic was the hardest thing to hold to while in this form; instinct was what wanted to run without rein. Keeping hold of her name in this form was a challenge all its own, a task she had only just mastered.

Her tail swished a long fan in the snow and she forced herself to remain crouched where she was, trying to focus on Mallory and his whereabouts. However, another scent intruded and she pressed herself lower into the grass, sensing the threat of an approaching city watchman. He smelled like wool and deeper down, whisky. His unsteady steps brought him closer to Eleanor’s hiding place and she took a skittish step backward, which only served to draw his attention. His was a face that reminded her of her father.

The watchman drew himself short at the sight of her. “What…” Then, he, too, took a wary step away.

She wondered what he would make of her—a jackal in Paris. These things did not happen surely, and she tensed to run before he could question it, before he could withdraw a weapon and try to capture her. But the whisky was on her side, for the watchman laughed and shook his head at the bare-branched trees rising all around them.

“Too much drink, is what,” he said, and when he looked at Eleanor again, he spit. “Go on, dog. Git.” He stomped a foot in the snow.

She bolted, turning tail to run and vanish amid the bushes that grew beside the paths. At her passing, snow whispered from every branch and twig, but she paid it no mind, wanting to place as much distance between herself and the watchman as possible. Her task was finding Mallory. Stalking, evading, tackling. Big brindled wolf, surely he wouldn’t be difficult to—

A squirrel bounded across the path, followed by a second. Eleanor stopped yet again, and if a jackal could look vexed, she was certain she did. She couldn’t override the instinct that grabbed hold of her this time; at the sight of the small red furred body, she wanted only to chase it, catch it, and eat it. This would have nauseated the human part of her, but in this form, she darted after the squirrel.

She knew from past failures she needed to reach the squirrel before it reached an elm. Now matter how extraordinary her jackal form was, climbing trees wasn’t an ability she had been gifted with. Running and speed, however, were and while one squirrel leaped to the safety of an elm, the other did not escape the fierce paws that befell it. There was a squeak, and then only the sound of crunching bones as Eleanor closed her mouth around the squirrel. It was so small, but warm, and filling, and—

She was only aware of Mallory at the last moment, when he leapt upon her and gently seized the back of her neck between his teeth. She yelped in surprise and annoyance both—foolish, attention-stealing squirrels!—and they rolled from the path and into the snowy grass. It was wrestling now, trying to get hold of him by any means she could, her mouth still bloodied and hot from the squirrel. Mallory’s fur tasted like the winter air—snow and smoke—and the thrum of his heart rumbled through her teeth when they closed briefly against his throat. He shook her off and pressed her to the snow. Though he was larger and heavier, she used her smallness to her advantage, sliding beneath him to scamper away as he rolled a shoulder into the ground.

Eleanor’s tongue lolled from her mouth as Mallory gave chase. This form was freeing, for she was capable of getting away with things a proper lady could not. In this form, she was aware of every part of her body as she ran: the strength of her legs, the breath in her chest and mouth, the latching of her claws into the cold ground beneath the snow. She was aware that the squirrels in the branches had gone entirely still as these larger animals came out to play. Ahead, the moonlight cut a bright path deeper into the park. Eleanor ran away from this, toward the scent of fresh water that pooled under thin coats of crackling ice. The pools stretched before the palace and she skirted these, threading a careful path instead between statues of French queens as she made her way toward the Medici Fountain. It stood ahead of her, shadowed in the winter night, its basin of water also covered with a thin coat of ice. The fountain was well-known to them, considered safe; the fountain meant the game was over, that she had not been captured or—

The movement of a low, dark shape caused her to draw up short. Was it him or another drunken watchman? She drew in a long breath of the night air and smelled Mallory upon it. A moment later, he emerged from the trees, still in wolf form but now ahead of her, tracking as if he believed her already at the fountain. She judged the still air and wondered if he could not tell where she was—could he not smell the squirrel blood that clung to her? Logic, she told herself, and kept low to the ground as she moved for him.

Eleanor wasted no time. In this form, she was quicker than quick; she took advantage of speed and slight form, and leaped for him as he crept ever toward the fountain. She caught his hindquarters with her teeth, only a playful snap. His yelp was one of surprise as he slid in the snow, and the chase was on again.

Through fresh snow and snow they had already disturbed, around trees that had shed their leaves and over bare-branched bushes, Eleanor ran until exhaustion tumbled her back into the snowy grass near the Medici Fountain. Part of her wanted to continue, wanted to spend the entire night romping through the park, but the larger part of her was sincerely exhausted, and kept her where she was, exhaling clouds of warm breath as Mallory loped to her side. He took a long survey of the land around them before he settled beside her, eyes wide and dark and calm. She trusted his assessment of their safety and inched toward his larger warmth, knowing this was soon to end.

They could not hold these forms forever, but had been teaching themselves better control over them. While it had once been anger that led them from human to animal and back again, it was becoming a rational decision, to be what they chose to be rather than what emotion dictated. Mallory had regaled her with many stories of him as a young man overcome by anger, having to flee a room before he became a wolf before his parents, his siblings. Eleanor had no desire to fall apart in such a manner before anyone—even Mallory—so viewed learning control as one of the most important things she could learn. There was much yet to learn, but this was held above most others.

It was fatigue that helped Eleanor to shuck her jackal form. It was no less painful than it ever had been, though the swallowing of the beast was less messy than the expulsion of it. She writhed in the snow-covered grass as her body knit itself from one form and into the other, mindless of everything else as jackal legs became once more human arms and legs, as the soft brown fur vanished under a guise of skin.

She despaired over this moment, returning to a body she never quite perceived as her own. The legs were strange and long, too heavy, incapable of running as she only just had. But as she came back and registered her arms as her own, she discovered her hands cradled in Mallory’s, he who knew the path a little better and had arrived before her. Waiting for her, as he ever did. His fingers slid over her cheek, smoothing her hair behind an ear. His own dark hair was in disarray, his jaw rough with stubble.

They did not speak; they never did right after coming back, their minds still striving to separate human thought from animal thought. They crouched naked and steaming in the snowy grass and breathed for a long while, remembering what it was to have two legs and not four. Eleanor expected these moments to be uncomfortable, but they never had been. Maybe it was because Mallory knew exactly what it was to shed one form for the other; he knew the way a body fought to come back to itself. There was no time to blush over abruptly bare skin, not when leaving the park was most on their minds.

Mallory pressed a kiss into her brow and moved from Eleanor’s side, toward their bundled clothes at the edge of the Medici Fountain. He pulled trousers on, then brought Eleanor her clothes before he finished his own dressing. Eleanor dressed herself with shaking hands, trembling from cold now and not only exhaustion. She loved her boots more than anything when she forced her chilled feet into them, and her scarf best of all when she circled it round her neck. At the sight of Mallory struggling with his jacket, a rough laugh broke from her, and she came to his side, to untangle a sleeve for him.

“It’s always the squirrels,” he said as he slid his arm properly into the sleeve. His brown eyes gleamed when he smiled, intent upon her.

“Always,” Eleanor agreed, and her stomach churned at the idea; how much of it had she eaten? She rubbed a hand across her mouth, and spat a tuft of red squirrel fur into the snow. “Oh, foul.”

Mallory laughed now, smoothing a hand over her back as she straightened. “I told you of the toads, yes?”

Eleanor grimaced, unable to help recalling the story of Mallory’s first transformation in his youth. He had eaten the toads his father had bade him bury in the family vineyard in an effort to help the vines fight the illness that plagued them. Had woken with a frog leg dangling from his mouth, and now, as she looked at that mouth, her own pressed into a thin line.

“We should never speak of it again,” she said. “Never.” As good as the idea of fresh squirrel sounded when she was a jackal, it was wholly unappealing while human.

Mallory pulled Eleanor’s coat around her shoulders, before shaking the snow from his own and donning it. “I suppose it’s one of the more difficult things, to separate animal thought from human. While they are separate things, they are also…rather not.”

Eleanor did not miss the pause before those last two words, nor did she misunderstand the reason for it. They were all only animals, after all. She wrapped her arm around Mallory’s waist as they walked a slow path through the park to the quiet, moon-dappled Rue de Medicis, where there was but one hansom waiting. They had asked the driver to wait and he, making a great show over Mistral agents having Significant and Late Business at Luxembourg Palace (which they absolutely did not, unless one counted overcoming squirrel distraction chief among them), did not question the need to wait. As earlier, he only nodded at them both, helped them into the carriage, and drove them back toward the townhouse housing Mistral’s French headquarters.

Once, Mallory had slipped out to visit opium dens; now, he slipped out in Eleanor’s company to throw off his human shape and run on four legs instead of two, to teach her how to do the same. Eleanor wasn’t sure which behavior might damn him more. She did not ponder this long, letting her head rest upon his shoulder as his arm enfolded her. Beneath the chill, he still smelled like a wolf.

Daughter
.

The dark and distant voice of Anubis, like a train’s whistle from far off, rose in Eleanor’s mind. Strictly speaking, Anubis was not her father; Renshaw Folley was human and safely ensconced in Ireland, in his Nicknackatarium where he belonged these days. She supposed, being part jackal as she was, Anubis was right to view her as a child under his keeping, but the idea remained troubling. She wanted to know more from him, even as the idea terrified her.

Anubis
, she thought.

There came no reply and this did not surprise her; they had not conversed at any length—certainly there had been no formal teas with cakes or biscuits or steaming Earl Grey.

She pressed herself deeper against Mallory’s side, sliding a hand into the warmth of his buttoned coat. Even this, now, after having been so recently in other skins, contained an edge of danger. Though the animal part of her was well-satiated, there was another part that had not yet been. Mallory had warned her off after many of their early training sessions together, but it was only later she fully understood why. She had come to recognize that same tension inside her body. Now, in the gently rocking carriage and cold night air, he appeared less motivated to set her apart. If he was not disinclined to kiss her even after she had eaten a squirrel, she was certainly not one to argue. She lifted her gaze to his, to find him watching her. Intent. Stalking.

“Miss Folley.”

She loved the warning that framed her name in his mouth, and the way he still had of reverting to formalities when he found a situation dire or tense. It had been thus when he proposed a courtship; she hoped it ever would be.

“Agent Mallory,” she whispered.

Her breath fogged in the cold air between them, but his mouth swallowed the fog and anything else she might have said, moving with certainty over hers. Within his coat, her hand tightened on his jacket, on the rumpled lines to pull him closer until every warm line of him had erased the December night. She was wholly cocooned within his embrace, thinking not of toads or squirrels, but of the pleasure that shot through her like fire across a lake of oil.

The carriage crested a bump in the road, the same bump that always signaled their drawing close to the Mistral townhouse, and their mouths parted. But Mallory kept hold of her, his nose pressed to hers, his eyes impossibly wide as he regarded her. She could not even see her own reflection within those eyes, only the darkness he kept bottled tight within himself.