Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [25]
Harry offered around a bag of jelly babies he‟d found in his coat pocket, a paper packet that his Doctor had thrust into his hand at some point. He discovered that in this day and age they were called „Peace Babies‟, having been launched at the end of the Great War, and to his disgust the Doctor revealed that they were made out of boiled up animal bones and ligaments, and he wouldn‟t have one, thank you very much anyway. Which, (a) showed yet again that this wasn‟t
„Harry‟s Doctor‟, and (b) made Harry not want one either.
Godric expressed surprise that eating effigies of babies had seemed an appropriate way to celebrate the end of a war, unless they were supposed to represent the babies of the defeated enemy, and also declined. Harry again decided he didn‟t really want one, and put the bag back in his pocket.
They came to the wood yards before it was expected. Every acorn that had fallen from a tree had grown into a new tree, and those trees had dropped acorns in their turn. Tiny shoots slithered up into saplings as they watched. No natural trees would have found the nutrients to spring up in such abundance, but here, wherever there had been a space, there now was a growth.
„We should have brought an axe,‟ said Harry.
„Harry, Harry, Harry!‟ said the Doctor. „Have you forgotten George Stanton and the shotgun?‟
Harry hadn‟t. „But I don‟t see how else we‟re going to get through,‟ he said. „I‟m not the smallest of chaps.‟
„Nonsense!‟ said the Doctor. „It‟s just a question of wanting to enough.‟
„Will it help?‟ This was the first time Godric had spoken for a while. He was a lad of few words, at least at the moment.
Harry couldn‟t blame him: he‟d had rather a lot to take in. „If we step back in my footsteps, find out from whence I came, will it aid your magicks in defeating this beast of the forest?‟
„Good point,‟ said Harry. „Happy to do whatever it takes, Doctor, obviously, but how will this help us?‟
„We need to understand,‟ the Doctor said. „Something is happening here.‟ He stood up straight and looked at them in turn. „Last night, a girl died, ripped to pieces by a wolf - a werewolf, we are assuming. Her blood is spilled on the earth, and something happens to nature. This all happens in this wood, and it is in this wood that Godric found himself after a sleep of over a thousand years! No no no, I don‟t believe you‟re connected to the murder,‟ he said to Godric, whose mouth had opened to say something, but there is a connection of some sort. And if we can find out what it is, it might help us. We must send the earth back to sleep. And we must destroy the beast.‟
Chapter Five
Operation Lunatic
There were blisters on her wrists, so many blisters that no more could form. Some had been rubbed so hard they had burst, and tiny trickles of liquid had rim down her arms and dried. She wanted to rub herself clean but could not reach, and anyway the slightest movement might bring a new fraction of skin into contact with the cuffs.
She felt an animal rage inside her, and it was nothing to do with the wolf within. They were keeping her against her will, restraining and torturing her with silver, trying to force unnaturalness on unnaturalness. Just because she was not human did not mean they should treat her like she was not human.
She had come almost to welcome the injections: each jab of the needle distracted her for the tiniest instant from the pain of the silver cuffs. Sometimes whatever she had been filled with made her feel nauseous, more often it didn‟t have any effect that she noticed. At no time was her reaction the one the men were after.
They had tried the most ludicrous things: shown her moving pictures of the moon, offered her raw flesh, draped a wolfskin around her shoulders. None of these had brought on the change. They had brought in a wolf - from London Zoo, she had heard someone say - and locked it in the room with her. The wolf had cowered away from