The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(29)
Vanessa gave a cry, understanding, with horror, what was going to happen.
“No. Lachlan…no…”
The man in black spoke over her.
“The law states; A king…for a king. That, Lachlan Laidlaw, is your destiny…” the man in black reached a hand, spreading the fingers across Lachlan’s face. Vanessa rushed him.
“No. No…please…” but she was plucked aside, picked from the ground by one of the other men and held.
Vanessa watched. The man in black did not turn his head from his task, as Lachlan writhed and groaned the man’s fingers traced patterns across Lachlan’s skull and beneath the fingertips crisp black lines formed and merged, angled and grouped on Lachlan’s skin, rising up into his hairline, the runes writing themselves onto his scalp.
“The King is Dead…” The man in black declared at last. Beside him Lachlan Laidlaw groaned and stumbled in his newly etched skin.
“Long live the King….” the men thundered, their feet stamping approval, the storm building around them, the noise unbearable now, beating at Vanessa.
She reached for Lachlan.
“Lachlan?” her voice was weak. The Ice King turned to her, his face now fully recognisable, the dream stranger’s face “Lachlan.”
“It is time to go.” The man in black looked at Vanessa, his eyes carrying sadness. Vanessa felt compressed, her limbs inactive, her breathing shallow. In the darkness there was a smell of blood, the cracking of bone and she watched as the Ice King Lachlan’s body bent and distorted at the storm inside him, scouring, displacing, ravaging. He looked at her,
“Vanessa.”
His jaw widened out, wider and wider until the bones snapped open, skin and fur folded and suddenly he was there.
The wolf.
Instinct should have made Vanessa step back, but she understood, there was no time. She reached forward, the wolf looking back at her, with one green eye, one brown.
“Lachlan?” the wolf tipped its head back and gave a mournful howl, a sound as bitter as the wind, the volume rising and rising, filling her head so that Vanessa could not think anymore. The howl widened, stretched, the other wolves joined, the noise tearing at Vanessa until the sound was no longer wolf, it was weather. A sound of snow and wind, of ice chinkling on the surface of a frozen lake, the sounds grew and combined, deafening until the roof began to rattle with the energy of it.
Hearts clash. She was choking with effort and fear, her lungs tightening in her chest. Bones break. Blood in her throat, the ice ringing and ringing around her. Until it did not ring, it groaned, there was a sound then as if the sky was tearing, shards of noise and a crack opened up above her.
The roof ripped off, whipping into the wind, bent like cardboard and the cold bit hard, gripped her skin, froze her breath and there was nowhere to go now, but darkness.
PART FIVE
There is No Time
“I hear your girl was a bit of a silly tart and got pregnant then?” Mrs Langdon was an unpleasant woman, revelling in other people’s troubles and keen to pass judgement wherever possible. Most people in Woodcastle disliked her but her small corner shop was useful if you ran out of bread, needed emergency beans or a pint of milk. It was a horrid shop, carrying an air of rancid fat and smelling of hay. Hettie Way always felt you needed a ration book to shop there. “So much for all her science then eh? Never did any biology did she not? Loves her Arctic Roll eh?” Mrs Langdon gave her grim smirk. She was an odd mix, a woman who was round in the middle, a heavy bust and heavier waist and hips, but she managed to be skinny at the edges, her arms sinewy and thin and her legs bony.
“You never had children did you Mrs Langdon?” it was the cruellest thing that Hettie Way had ever said in her life. Anyone who knew Mrs Langdon knew that her husband had left her for a woman who later bore him five children. For a second she held Mrs Langdon’s gaze, felt the way that her comment sliced into that flabby belly and let Mrs Langdon’s emotional innards slop out. She left the loaf of bread she had come for on the counter.
When Hettie returned to Cob Cottage Vanessa was sitting, as was her current habit, in the chair by the window with the notebooks by her. There had not been much salvaged from the wrecked Arctic research centre but the few notebooks had come in the supply plane along with Vanessa and some plastic boxes filled with samples of the local flora.
The compass was in Vanessa’s hand and she was staring at it, deep in thought. She had made copious notes today, Hettie could see the drawings and scribbled comments, the pages that had been filled and she wished she had thought to buy Vanessa another notebook. They had to be a particular kind, a cloth bound A5 size that they could only get in Castlebury. It would be useful to have that as an errand, Hettie thought, she needed to distract Vanessa from whatever terrible knowledge the notebooks withheld.
Hettie had pussyfooted around her daughter since her dramatic return. She did not have a phone and so it was young Sergeant Williamson who, initially, had come to the house with the news about the Arctic disaster. The first thoughts were that there had been an explosion, this theory being superseded a few weeks later by the evidence of a bad storm. It seemed to Hettie that no one knew what had happened and that no one was really bothering to go and take a look. It was a long way to travel after all and De Quincey Langport Ltd were on the brink of going out of business, a matter more pressing than unravelling the fates of the dead professors.