XXII - Werewolf Hunters

  The Dusty Pumpkin was old—considerably older than any of the buildings that surrounded it, all of which were also aged structures constructed long before Sybil or likely even Vlad was ever born. Unlike its cobblestone brethren, the street that the building was on was little more than a long, straight line of loose dirt, which had been turned to cold slush with the coming of the snow. The buildings, especially the Pumpkin, complemented this untreated street in their neglectedness; the tavern’s entire structure, from its old stone walls to its crooked, mismatched windows, to its faded slate roof looked ready to give way at the slightest suggestion of a passing gust, or else from the meager weight of the snow that rested on top of it. Sybil was hesitant to even step inside of the building, for fear that it would collapse the moment she passed beyond its warped oak doorframe.

  But step inside she did.

  The inside of the tavern looked about how she would have expected it to, given the rough state of its exterior. It was crammed full of neglected and well-used wooden tables, around which were stuffed a collection of mismatched chairs and stools that each looked entirely out of place in their own, unique way. An equally worn bar counter was situated along the wall opposite the entrance, behind which Sybil could see a few wooden casks that she suspected contained a limited number of alcoholic options. Glasses and tankards rested on damaged shelves that barely clung to both life and the wall behind the counter, and if she looked at the drinkware close enough, Sybil was certain that she would be discomforted by what she saw. A winding stairwell disappeared behind a wall in the rear corner of the tavern, up which she presumed the building’s lodging to be, though she questioned if she wanted to see the state of the rooms above.

  All in all, the tavern, both inside and out, was the most seedy, mistreated establishment that she had ever been to in her admittedly less-than-well-travelled life. And yet it was the first place she had seen in all of Fenwick that actually possessed any sort of much-needed vitality.

  Bodies—living bodies—dotted the tavern. Even at that early hour, some of those tightly-crammed tables were alive with patrons, who were all in the midst of eating their meals and enjoying the company of their companions. Most tables were not filled, and while the counter was occupied, it still had plenty of seats available, but Sybil could only imagine just how bustling the place was in the later hours of the day, when it was filled to the brim with villagers who, after a long day’s work, just wanted to relax with a tall drink and some agreeable company. Sybil once again found herself questioning whether or not she actually wanted to spend multiple nights in such a busy, clamorous building.

  She only had a few moments to take in the visage of the surrounding tavern before Finn took a step forward and began navigating his way through the building. Sybil followed after him, and together they made their way to the counter, avoiding a table of patrons in the middle of the space as they went. While they walked, Sybil noticed a table placed in the far corner of the building that was rife with commotion. She could not get a clear look at its occupants in the gloom of the tavern, but several forms sat in the chairs surrounding its wooden surface. They chattered noisily without any effort made to diminish their volume, and were clearly the loudest group in the entire establishment. Despite being situated so far out of the way, their merry voices carried all the way to where Sybil and Finn walked on the other side of the space.

  A young woman, her form partially obscured by the relative darkness of the poorly lit tavern, stood behind the counter, and was in the middle of serving a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage to a broad-shouldered old man who was sipping milk from a pewter cup. The woman looked to be half the older man’s age at certainly not much older than thirty, but her tightly-cropped brown hair and hardened gaze lent her an air of maturity that was beyond her years. The man, however, possessed a shaggy carpet of a grey beard that would have likely made him look significantly older were it not for the toned muscle that still clung to his aging body, and which allowed him to retain a portion of his younger self.

  The old man took a large, messy bite out of his meal, causing flecks of yellow egg falling into his beard. After considering the food in his mouth for a moment, he swallowed it and frowned. “You left shells in my eggs again, Amabel. If I didn’t know better, I would say you do it on purpose to torment me.”

  “I don’t,” Amabel said, “but I’ll start to if you keep complaining about it.”

  “You’ll do it regardless, so there is no reason not to complain.”

  She picked up a less-than-fresh cloth and began wiping at the vacant spot next to the man. “You should be thanking me, Randolph. An old fellow such as yourself needs to get as much nourishment as he can so he doesn’t keel over. Those shells are likely saving your life, you ungrateful scoundrel.”

  “Good morning, Miss Cook,” Finn said, his voice so quiet that Sybil barely heard him.

  Amabel looked at him and smiled, then narrowed her eyes slightly in mild annoyance. “I thought I told you to stop with the formalities, Finn.”

  Finn flushed. “Sorry, Amabel.”

  “I’ll forgive you this once.” She looked at Sybil. “And who might this be? I know Avice certainly didn’t make her in her forge. She could never craft anything half as lovely.”

  It was Sybil’s turn to flush, but she wore her reddened cheeks with a kind smile. “Sybil Fletcher. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Cook.”

  “And now I’ll forgive you for that one since you’re green here,” Amabel said, “but we do not allow formalities in this tavern. Please, call me Amabel.”

  Sybil nodded. “Alright, Amabel. It’s very nice to meet you.”

  Randolph spoke with a forkful of food in his mouth. “You might think differently once you’ve eaten her eggs.”

  Amabel leered at him, then looked back at her two young guests. “Never mind the old fool. What brings you in today, Finn?”

  “We’re actually here because Sybil and her mentor Mr. Albescu need to rent lodging for a handful of days,” Finn explained. “At least one room, but two if possible.”

  Amabel frowned. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, tucking her rag beneath her arm. “Apologies, you two, but I’m afraid I’m fully booked. Those folks over there arrived this morning and took all of my rooms.” She used her head to gesture toward the lively table in the far corner of the tavern. None of them seemed to even notice that anybody else was there in the building, and so they continued on with their merriment as if they were the only souls present.

  Finn shared in her frown. “Well, that’s rather unfortunate. Who are they?”

  Amabel shrugged, taking her cloth out from beneath her arm. “I haven’t a clue, but their silver is good here, so I can hardly complain.”

  “I can,” Randolph said. “They’ve already been through enough ale to intoxicate half of Fenwick, and it’s not yet noon. Not even I drink so much this early.” He snorted, looking at Amabel. “Although these eggs of yours just might compel me to start.”

  Amabel, ignoring him, continued to speak to Finn and Sybil. “You might ask if they’d be willing to part with one or two of their rooms. Surely they could make do with less than the entire second floor to themselves." She glanced at the table, then back at the two youths. “I must warn you, though, that they are a rather… eccentric lot.”

  “In what way?” Sybil asked.

  “To explain would not do them justice. You will just have to see for yourselves.”

  “Well alright, then,” Sybil said. She offered an uncertain glance at Finn before the two of them made their way toward the circular corner table.

  As they approached the merry table and the gloom separating them began to thin, Sybil was able to more easily discern the collection of four figures sitting around it. There was a tall, lithe woman with shoulder-length black hair and a pair of pistols holstered to either hip. Flanking her on one side was a burly, bearded man who wore a thick breastplate even as he sat lounging at the table; on the other was a thin, bald man whose diminutive body was garbed in a muddy grey cloak. The burly man had a large battleaxe resting against the table next to him, while the cloaked man held a bow in his lap, keeping its smooth wood in his left hand even as he nursed a tankard of ale with his right.

  Sitting opposite the woman, with his chair positioned slightly away from the table so that he was partially facing the approaching Sybil and Finn, was a third man. He enjoyed a stature somewhere between his shorter and taller companions; his body was clad in a brown jerkin over a flowing white shirt which he tucked into his black breeches. A slender rapier hung from the leather belt at his hip, and leaning against the nearby wall was a musket, its barrel pointed downward toward the wooden floor. His face was clean shaven save for a thick, curled moustache which matched the color of his flowing chestnut hair.

  “... and so, as I drew my magnificent rapier I offered the scoundrel my usual ultimatum,” he was saying, speaking with an accent that was unfamiliar to Sybil, but which strangely reminded her of her mentor’s own foreign way of speech. “‘Stand down, villain, and accept your inevitable defeat,’ said I, ‘or you shall face the wrath of my hungry steel’. Naturally, as brigands tend to do, the fool failed to heed my advice, and so…” He wrapped his hand around an invisible hilt and mimed stabbed a sword forward through the air. “... I skewered him with a single thrust of my blade! His companions, certainly intimidated by my swift and cunning prowess, chose to take the warning that their once-leader did not, and they scrambled out of the hamlet as quickly as their legs could carry them, never to be seen again by a soul of any worth!”

  The large, armor-clad man and the gun-wielding woman applauded following their associate’s story. The archer remained silent and sipped from his tankard with a satisfied smile.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “As wonderful a raconteur as ever, Gaston,” the woman said. She mimicked her cloaked companion, taking a sip of her own tankard. “I never grow weary of hearing how you bested that rapscallion!”

  “Aye,” the larger man said, raising his tankard in praise. “Truly magnificent theatre as always, chap!”

  Gaston bowed in his seat, tucking one arm in front of his chest dramatically. “In truth, I appreciate the varlet for acting contrary to his best interests. Were it not for his foolhardiness, I would not now possess such a wonderful tale to tell! Although there are certainly more from where that one comes, as you are all quite aware.”

  Sybil and Finn stood in front of the table, going unacknowledged as the exchange continued. Feeling awkward and certain that they would remain unnoticed until she spoke, Sybil chose to finally make their presence known. “Pardon my intrusion, but I was wanted—”

  She was startled when a medium-sized dog, its coat black as midnight and its underbelly brown like the earth, appeared from beneath the table and immediately began barking at her. She and Finn each recoiled a couple of steps; Sybil would later be embarrassed that she was unable to hold back a sudden cry of alarm.

  “Poniard!” Gaston said, turning to look at the dog as it snarled at the two youths. “To me!”

  Poniard did as it was told; its aggression immediately ceased, and it slunk back to the shadows beneath the table, returning to its master’s side. Gaston then turned to look at Sybil and Finn and smiled while remaining seated. “Please accept my sincerest apologies for the conduct of my most loyal beast, Miss. Poniard can be very particular around any new faces that she fears may threaten her benevolent master. I would say that her bark is worse than her bite, but I would be fibbing.”

  Sybil felt her cheeks flush for a second time since entering the tavern. “Think… think nothing of it.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Now, with that bit of nasty business behind us, please tell me: What can I, Gaston Armond Dupont, and my band of stalwart companions, assist you with?”

  At first Sybil was not certain how to proceed. Her mind flashed back to Amabel’s earlier warning, and she silently wished that she had better prepared herself for this less-than-comfortable interaction. “Well, Mr. Dupont,” she managed to say, “my mentor and I are planning on staying a number of days in Fenwick, and seeing as you have taken every room in The Dusty Pumpkin, we were hoping that you would be so kind as to relinquish one of those rooms to us.” She paused briefly. “We would be more than happy to compensate you, of course.”

  Gaston shook his head with exaggerated regret. “Please allow me to offer my sincerest apologies, Miss. Under normal circumstances I would be obliged to honor such a fair request, but unfortunately this is not something that I can accommodate. You see, this rather quaint, little tavern is only in possession of five rooms available for lodging, and seeing as that happens to be the exact number of rooms that we require, we cannot spare a single one.”

  Sybil frowned. “You need five rooms? But there are only four of you.”

  “Ah, you forget my lovely little canine, Poniard, who mere moments ago was intent to pounce upon your waiting throat.”

  “You need an entire room for your dog?” Finn asked.

  Gaston was almost brought to laughter by the question; he chortled lightly, eliciting a similar reaction from his companions save the archer, who merely grinned to demonstrate his amusement.

  “But of course not, young man,” Gaston said. “Poniard shall share the space with all of our equipment, which is already properly tucked away in its lodging.” He smirked. “After all, one needs ample accoutrements when hunting werewolves, no?”

  The word caught Sybil off-guard. She tried not to show her surprise, but feared that she wore it plainly upon her face; thankfully the voice that came from behind her would quickly take any attention away from her struggling countenance. “Werewolves, you say?”

  She and Finn both turned at the sudden disruption. They saw Vlad Albescu mid-approach, having already cleared most of the tavern in his route to the waiting table. He smiled cordially as he came up next to his apprentice and her companion. “And here I believed such ghastly creatures to only exist within our most grim of fairy tales, or otherwise in our darkest nightmares.”

  “Well, I would certainly hope not, sir,” Gaston said, “for then we slayer of werewolves would be swiftly out of work, no?”

  “And just how many of these ‘werewolves’ have you slain, my good man?”

  Gaston glanced over his shoulder at his allies. “Certainly more than we have left alive, eh, follows?”

  They all vocalized or nodded their agreement.

  “Not so much as a single hairy mongrel has crossed us and survived to recount the tale,” the armored man said.

  “What Arne means to say is that none that have crossed Gaston have survived, at the very least,” the gunslinger added. “As for Arne, Piers, and myself, we all still have much to learn from our esteemed mentor!”

  “You give me far too great a share of the credit, my sweetest Fiora!” Gaston said, bowing his head with mock humility. “Gaston Armond Dupont, while great in his own right, is nothing without the devotion and loyalty of his wonderful companions!”

  Again they offered him their praise.

  “Well, in that case the Mother smiles great fortune upon Fenwick to have brought you here,” Vlad said. “Besides by Her grace, what has led you and your esteemed band of werewolf slayers to this humble village? Certainly there is not one amongst us that needs slaying.”

  “Oh, but certainly there is,” Gaston said, “or have you not heard tell of the nasty killings that plague this village by night—excuse my use of that most dreaded word.”

  “I have,” Vlad said, “but I had hardly considered them to be the result of werewolf attacks.”

  “And that is why you are not in the business of slaying werewolves, my friend,” Gaston said. He leaned back in his chair with a smug grin before proceeding. “It takes a certain breed of man—namely, a man such as myself—to know the signs of a werewolf attack. We were less than a day’s ride from Fenwick when we heard tell of the terrible, violent goings on here, and I, being the kind of man that I am, was able to sniff out the signs of a lycanthrope just from the description given. It was then that I knew we had to lend this poor village our aid.”

  “Werewolves sneaking into Fenwick by moonlight and tearing villagers to shreds,” Randolph snorted through a bite of his meal from the other side of the space. “And here I thought that, in my old age, I had heard it all.” He swallowed. “Never in all my days have I been forced to swallow such rubbish—and I’ve had plenty of Amabel’s cooking.”

  Gaston looked past Vlad and his young companions to the old man sitting at the counter. “Today you may call my claims nonsense, but I am certain you shall be singing a lovely new tune when we lay that wicked monster on the ground at your feet.” He casually ran a hand through his mane. “Your skepticism is far from unique—I have seen your ilk many times, and as many times I have shown them the folly of their words. The same will be true for you, my dear man—you’ve just yet to realize it. And I shall not hold it against you when you are soon proven incorrect.”

  Randolph leered back at the man, but said nothing as he stuffed another bite of food into his mouth. A brief, tense silence followed, which Vlad eventually broke. “Well, I suppose I shall leave the art of slaying lycanthropes to you, my friend,” he said. “After all, I am but a meager Plague doctor—I also apologize for speaking that word—and I unfortunately will be of little assistance to you unless I can interest you in a few of my elixirs.”

  Gaston shook his head. “I am afraid we will have little need for such remedies in our coming battle with the werewolf.”

  “Then I suppose we shall have to take our leave,” Vlad said. He looked at Sybil and Finn. “Come along, you two. Upon my arrival, I gathered from Miss Cook that my apprentice was asking Mr. Dupont to spare one of his rooms, and seeing as he was presumably unable to honor this request, Night Owl and I will simply have to find lodging elsewhere. My coin purse, please, Night Owl.”

  The three of them turned to go and made their way toward the front door of the tavern. Upon passing Amabel behind the counter, Vlad pulled a coin from his recently recovered purse and offered it to her. “A silver for your trouble, Miss Cook.”

  “Much obliged,” Amabel said, taking the coin, “but please, call me Amabel. I apologize for not being able to accommodate you fine folks.”

  Vlad shook his head. “Think nothing of it.” Sybil followed his gaze as he glanced back at the table in the corner, which had already resumed its earlier merriment, their conversation with the Plague doctor seemingly forgotten. “It is abundantly clear that you shall have your hands plenty full for the next number of days.”

  ___

  They walked along in silence for a brief time, all of them taken aback by their experience with Gaston Dupont and his group. When The Dusty Pumpkin was several paces behind them, Sybil finally spoke. “What are we going to do now?”

  “An excellent question, Night Owl,” Vlad said. “Without any available rooms at the tavern, our options for lodging are rather… limited.”

  “I’m certain I can convince Madam Avice to allow you to stay in the forge,” Finn said, “although I cannot guarantee that the accommodations will be terribly comfortable.”

  Sybil felt her heart sink. She had been looking forward to sleeping in a real bed for the first time since she had left her home with Vlad. Evidently she would not be granted this opportunity.

  “That is much appreciated, young Finnian,” Vlad said with a smile. “In any event, Night Owl and I are quite accustomed to spending our nights beneath the stars, so we can continue to do just that if need be.”

  There was a pause in their conversation before Sybil spoke again. “A peculiar bunch, that Mr. Dupont and his companions are.” She looked at Vlad. “Do you truly think they will try to slay the werewolf, Mr. Albescu?”

  “Well, if they do, they will certainly die very violent, very painful deaths.”

  “So you do not believe them to be real werewolf hunters, then?” Finn asked.

  Vlad shook his head. “Not in the slightest, Finnian. At best they are akin to the many false monster hunters that I have come across in my day: charlatans who travel from town to town slaughtering diseased or starved wolves and coyotes and claim to be eradicating a lycanthropic threat. If they have ever even slain a werewolf at all, it must have been a more pathetic specimen than I have ever seen—more akin to a hare-creature than a human-turned-canine.”

  Sybil tried not to think about the fact that she had failed to slay a hare on multiple occasions.

  “And at worst?” Finn asked.

  “At worst,” Vlad said, “they are the cause of the very problem that they claim to be here to resolve.”

  Sybil looked at him and frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we cannot rule out the possibility that either Mr. Dupont or one of his companions could themselves be the werewolf that they pretend they are here to slay.”

  “But how would that be possible if they have only just arrived in Fenwick?”

  “They could send the lycanthrope among them to their intended location early,” Vlad explained. “The others could then arrive later in order to ‘slay’ the beast. Instead they subdue it with some kind of weak toxin or potion, and then when the werewolf recovers, they repeat this process in their next destination. In this way they could be chasers of fame and fortune without ever actually putting themselves in harm’s way. The same cannot be said for the victims that they sacrifice to their lycanthrope companion.”

  Sybil grimaced. “What a horrible thought.”

  “Of course, this is only one possibility,” the Plague doctor said. “It is certainly not the only possibility. The fact of the matter is that anybody in this town could be the werewolf in question, just waiting for their next chance to strike. And when anybody could be the werewolf…” Vlad turned his head to lock eyes with Sybil. His icy gaze accentuated his next words, so that they would certainly live on in her mind for all eternity. “... it means that nobody can be trusted.”