Volumes 1 and 2 - Lord Loss/Demon Thief

He finishes with the knot, clutches the bottom of the bag and spills the contents out. A swarm of flies rises in the air. The stench is disgusting.

“What the…!” I cough, covering my mouth and nose with my hands, eyes watering.

Lots of bones and scraps of flesh at Bill-E’s feet. He separates them carefully with a large stick. “A badger,” he says, pointing to one of the rotting carcasses. “A hedgehog. A swan. A–”

“What the hell is this crap?” I interrupt angrily. “That stench is enough to knock–”

“I didn’t know why I felt I had to hold on to them,” Bill-E says softly, eyes on the putrid corpses. He looks up at me. “Now I know—to show them to you.”

I stare back uncertainly. This feels very wrong. If Bill-E was trying to gross me out, I could understand – even appreciate – the joke. But there’s no laughter in his eyes. No grisly delight in his expression.

“Not you personally,” he continues, looking back to the animals. “But part of me must have wanted to show them to some body. It was just a matter of time until the right person came along.”

“Bill-E,” I mutter, “you’re freaking me out big-time.”

“Come closer,” he says.

I study his expression. Then the spade lying close to him on the ground. I take a firm grip on my axe. Walk a few steps towards him. Stop short of easy reach.

“Look at them,” he says, pointing to the animals.

Like the fox Dervish found, their bodies have been ripped open. Heads and limbs are missing or chewed to pieces. I flash back to images of Dad hanging from the ceiling.

“I’m going to be sick,” I moan, turning aside.

“These haven’t been killed by animals,” Bill-E says. I pause. “Look at the way their stomachs have been ripped apart—jaggedly, but up the middle. And the bite marks don’t correspond to any predators I know of. If this was the work of a wolf or bear, the marks would be wider spaced, and larger, because of the size of their jaws.”

“There aren’t any wolves or bears around here,” I frown.

“I know. But I had to assume that it could have been a bear or wolf – or a wild dog – until I was able to examine the corpses in closer detail. I didn’t leap to any conclusions.”

“But you’ve come to some since,” I note wryly. “So hit me with it. What do you think did this?”

“I’m not sure,” Bill-E says evenly. “But I’ve checked out the teeth marks in the best biology books and web sites that I could find. As near as I could match them, they seem to belong to an ape–”

“You’re not telling me it’s King Kong!” I whoop.

“–or a human,” Bill-E finishes.

Cold, eerie silence.

→Dervish’s study. Bill-E leads me in. I’m not sure where Dervish is, but his bike isn’t outside, so he’s not home. Meera’s bike is gone too.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I whisper anxiously. “Dervish said this room is magically protected.”

“I know,” Bill-E replies. He steps in front of me, spreads his arms and chants. I don’t know what language he’s using, but the words are long and lyrical. He turns as he chants, eyes closed, concentrating.

Bill-E stops and opens his eyes. “Safe,” he grunts.

“You’re sure?”

“Dervish taught me that spell years ago. He updates it every so often, when he alters the protective spells of the house. It’ll probably be one of the first spells he teaches you when he decides you’re ready to learn.”

I feel uncomfortable, especially since I promised Dervish that I wouldn’t come in here without him. But there’s no stopping Bill-E, and I’m too curious to back out now.

“What are we looking for?” I ask, following him to one of the bookshelves. He came here directly from the clearing, without saying anything more about the dead animals he’d collected.

“This,” Bill-E says, lifting a large, untitled book down from one of the shelves over Dervish’s PC. He lays it on the desk but doesn’t open it.

“Demons killed your parents and sister,” he murmurs. My insides freeze. He looks up. “We inhabit a world of magic. My proposal would make an ordinary person laugh scornfully. But we’re not ordinary. We’re Gradys, descendants of the magician Bartholomew Garadex. Remember that.”

He opens the book. Creamy, crinkled pages. Handwriting. I try reading a few paragraphs but the letters are indecipherable—squiggles and swirls.

“Is that Latin, Greek, one of those old languages?” I ask.

“It’s English,” Bill-E says.

“Coded?”

He half-smiles. “Kind of. Dervish cast a reading spell on it. The words are written clearly, but we can’t interpret them without unravelling the spell.”

Bill-E turns to the first page and runs a finger over the title at the top. “Lycanthropy through the ages,” he intones.

“How do you know that if you can’t break the spell?” I challenge him.

“Dervish read it out to me once.” He looks at me archly. “Do you know what ‘lycanthropy’ means?”

“Of course!” I huff. “I’ve seen werewolf movies!”

Bill-E nods. “Dervish read bits of it to me. They were all to do with werewolf legends and rules. He’s fascinated by werewolves—lots of his books focus on shape-changers.”

Bill-E flicks to near the end of the book, scans the pages, flicks over a few more. Finds what he’s searching for and lays a finger on a photograph. “I discovered this a year or so ago,” he says softly. “Didn’t think anything of it then. But when I saw Dervish removing the bodies of the animals a few months ago, and found others ripped to pieces… always close to a full moon…”

“I don’t believe where you’re going with this,” I grumble.

“Remember the demons,” he says, and turns the book around so that I can see the face in the photo.

A young man, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Troubled-looking. Thin. His face is distorted—lots of hair, a blunt jaw, sharp teeth, yellow eyes. There’s something familiar about the face, but it takes me a few seconds to place it. Then it clicks—it reminds me of one of the faces from the hall of portraits. One that hangs close to Dad and Gret’s photos.

“Steven Groarke,” Bill-E says. “A cousin. Died seven or eight years ago.”

“I met him once,” I whisper. “But I was very young. I don’t remember much about him. Except he didn’t have hair or teeth like that.”

Bill-E flicks the pages backwards. Comes to rest on a page with another photo from the hall of portraits, this time a young girl. “Kim Reynolds. Ten years old when she died—supposedly in a fire.”

He flicks back further, almost to the start of the book. Stops at a rough hand-drawing of a naked, excessively hairy man, hunched over on all fours like a dog—or a wolf. Razor-sharp teeth. Claws. An elongated head. Yellow, savage eyes.

“That’s not a human,” I mumble, my mouth dry.