Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [73]
„We‟re very... different,‟ he finally managed.
She grinned, and Harry could have sworn that her teeth were much more pointed than they had been an hour ago. Or even five minutes ago. „That does not have to be a problem,‟
she said. And then she shivered, shuddering heavily down from her head to her fashionable court shoes.
Harry leant forward again. „What is it?‟ he asked.
She couldn‟t speak for a few moments. „So much...‟ she said at last. „This night... it will not be easy for me. I can feel the moon already, it runs through my veins, shining in my blood. It wants me, this moon, this whole moon, it tells me I belong to it, that I am its servant, its slave. It has nearly risen, and tonight I know I can deny it nothing. And then there is the blood. Blood and power, it calls to me from the earth, and I must answer it. It screams for blood, much more blood, and it knows it is coming...‟
(„The Doctor will stop it; said Harry, but it seemed as though she did not hear.)
„.. .the earth has awoken for me, and is angry that I am not there, am not with it, am not bringing the blood to the land.‟
She threw her head back with a bestial howl of agony and longing that horrified Harry. He spied a glistening streak on her cheek and thought first that she was bleeding, then that she was crying, and then realised that both were true; she was weeping tears of blood. „Let me go!‟ she screamed, straining against the iron chains so hard that Harry feared they wouldn‟t hold her. „The land is calling for me! The earth calls me from below and the moon calls me from above, and the blood calls from everywhere, to all of me. I must go!‟
Harry had risen from his chair, stumbled over to the living-room door, unlocked it. If she was changing, he had to leave, he knew. But how could he desert someone in such torment?
He was, after all, a doctor.
There was a knock on the front door.
Harry didn‟t even consider for a second going to answer it.
If it were an innocent passer-by - well, then, how would he account for being in someone else‟s house with a clearly distressed woman chained to a chair? And if it were not... he had confused memories of evil only being allowed in a place if it was invited. He wasn‟t going to risk inviting anything in.
Emmeline howled again, tugging at her bonds. „Ssh!‟ Harry whispered desperately, „someone‟ll hear!‟ He hurried towards her, leant over her, arms outstretched, but at the last second shying away from actual physical contact. Her teeth looked more pointed than ever.
And because Emmeline was shrieking and Harry was concentrating solely on her, he never heard the footfalls behind him. In feet, he didn‟t realise anyone else was in the room at all, until he felt the blow of the sandbag. But then, some deeply buried instinct, perhaps honed by his travels into peril with the Doctor, came into play. He dived forward and to the side, so the blow only glanced his neck - it hurt, yes, but he was still conscious, and that‟s what counted.
Desperately, he rolled over on to his side, trying to scramble to his feet, knowing he mustn‟t give his assailant the advantage of being above him.
His assailant, he now saw, was George Stanton. George, it seemed, had been raiding his mother‟s wardrobe, and was kitted out in what Harry could only assume was his idea of what the well-dressed Dark Age prince would be wearing.
George was still in the shirt and tie he‟d been wearing earlier in the day, but his trousers were rolled up to the knee and the material on the thighs was slashed, perhaps in emulation of the puffed out breeches seen in portraits of Henry VIII.
Below these he wore stockings, not Henry VIII‟s elegant hose, but Lady Hester‟s tan nylons. He‟d waxed his moustache, but as it was such a sorry specimen there was not enough of it to form satisfactory points, and it instead stuck out in front like a row of bristles. And to cap it all, around