Werewolf Knight 2, page 24
When I turned around, Melchior had already dipped the paintbrush in the mixture. He used the side of the bowl to remove the excess liquid, and then with one smooth movement, he swept the paintbrush over one of the pages of the notebook. A thin, silver sheen appeared on the page, and then the surface writing disappeared.
“Holy crap,” Tabitha said under her breath.
“Shit,” I added angrily. “Did you just destroy the notes?”
“Just wait,” the cipher replied. “Soon, the pigments from the red bergamot will kick in.”
I was ready to kick the cipher up and down the island if he’d somehow lost Wenderoth’s notes, but a few seconds later, the shimmer faded and small red letters started to appear.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Sybil said as she leaned in closer.
“Just like I said,” the cipher replied with a shrug. “The mixture erases the pigments from the top layer while releasing the pigments below.”
“But why would the vampires do this?” Tabitha asked. “If it’s so difficult to decipher, why would they go to so much trouble? No one even has these ingredients.”
“There are darker ways to make a mixture such as this,” the cipher said and sighed. “Methods that a vampire wouldn’t find any fault with.”
“What,” Sybil said. “Like… blood?”
“No, not blood,” the cipher laughed. “No, it involves chemicals that are released when the body decomposes. But that’s enough of that. Let’s get to work on deciphering this.”
The cipher opened a drawer on the desk from which he produced another notebook and a pencil. He plopped into his chair, and with the two notebooks side by side, he started to scratch furiously on the empty pages. Every so often, he would brush the moon-beam liquid across another page of Wenderoth’s diary and then scribble in his own notebook again.
While the cipher worked, I peered over his shoulder at the hidden notes. But it wasn’t just notes. There were mathematical calculations, charts, and lists of data. The Lupercalian nobles might have believed that vampires were stupid, but the notebook was proof that wasn’t true. My bad feeling was getting worse, and I still didn’t know what the vampires were even planning.
“Any luck?” I asked a few minutes later.
“Luck isn’t the word I’d use, but those pages are done,” the cipher said nervously. “Let’s see what the next pages bring.”
He repeated the process of dipping the brush in the liquid, removing the excess, and then carefully dragging the tip across the page. It still made me gulp when the writing disappeared, but I told myself that the cipher had made really good copies of the top layer.
“What is that?” Sybil asked.
The page we were looking at had very little writing and no formulas or data. Instead, there was something that looked like medical diagrams of a wolf and a human as well as close-ups of important organs and body parts. The next page featured a close-up image of a human with the torso open so that all the organs were displayed in their proper position.
“That’s… unusual,” the cipher muttered before he moved on to the next page.
“That was creepy,” Tabitha said. “Were they trying to figure out the weak points or something?”
I shrugged as I waited for the cipher to finish with the text he was reviewing. I could feel tension in my shoulders, and that only increased when the cipher frowned at whatever he was reading.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This seems to be about the questing knights who don’t survive,” the cipher replied.
“Many questing knights don’t come back from their first quests,” Tabitha said mournfully. “Why is that important to the vampires?”
“They’re probably tracking how many knights are in the kingdom,” I said. “So they know how strong… or weak the Lupercalian army is.”
“There’s that,” the cipher agreed. “But what’s the royal protocol in such cases?”
“What do you mean?” Tabitha asked and cocked her eyebrow.
“I mean,” the cipher started, “do you ever see the bodies of the questing knights returned to their families when they’re proclaimed dead?”
Tabitha stared at the floor for a moment without blinking. Then she looked back up to Melchior, with wide and frightened eyes.
“No,” she said. “They’re given a small procession with a wooden effigy. There’s no burial grounds for them, or…”
“Exactly,” the cipher nodded. “The bodies don’t come home. The assumption is that the monsters have destroyed the bodies themselves or left them for nature to take care of. But these diagrams are suggesting something different.”
“Like what?” Sybil asked. “What could they possibly do with the bodies?”
“It looks like the vampires have been collecting the bodies, or parts of them,” the cipher said.
“Oh, my Goddess,” Tabitha gasped. “That’s despicable.”
“What are they doing with the bodies?” I pressed.
“Nothing good,” the cipher said as he turned to the next page. “Let me look at these last pages.”
The cipher set to work on the last few pages in the notebook, and his frown only deepened as he read through the passages and studied the pictures. When he finally reached the last page, we held our breath as he brushed the solution over the last of the writing.
At first, nothing happened, and I wondered if that was it for the hidden writings. But then strange symbols began to appear on the sheet, all carefully placed to form a circle. Some of the symbols reminded me of Greek and Cyrillic letters, but there were other symbols that resembled snakes, and other marks I’d never seen in my life.
“Are they runes?” Tabitha asked.
“It’s an apotropaic inscription,” Sybil said confidently.
We all looked up at the young witch, who had placed her hands on her hips as she nodded at the notebook.
“Clever bunny,” Melchior said with a look of approval. “You really know your stuff.”
“She’s the most talented witch I’ve ever met,” Tabitha said. “Also the only witch that I’ve known this personally, but you get my drift.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Could you say that word again?”
“Apotropaic inscription,” she said. “It’s a collection of sacred lettering that forms a kind of spell. It’s what appears on protective amulets, and many of the townspeople put them on their tombstones as well. It’s like alchemy, but instead of tangible objects, it conjures or pushes away certain types of energy. I can recognize that this is an inscription, but I’m not familiar with it. I don’t know what a lot of the lettering means, let alone the delicate combination.”
“That’s where I come in,” the cipher said. “I’ve only taken a quick glance, but unfortunately, I think that this might confirm my suspicions of the vampires’ plan. Let me just check some references.”
The cipher stood up and wandered over to one of his bookshelves. He scanned the spines of the books, selected a couple, and then returned to the desk. He started to flip through the books, though he stopped every so often to study the inscription again. His frown became so severe that his eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead. Whatever the hell the spell was for, we were clearly not going to like it.
“Hey, Sybil,” I said when I realized that the tension in my shoulders was working its way down my spine. “You wouldn’t happen to have any peppermint on you, would you?”
“Peppermint…” she murmured in confusion. “Oh. Sure. I have a peppermint and lemon balm that might help.”
She rummaged through her basket and pulled out a jar of balm, which she handed to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “Hopefully this can calm us down a bit.”
I twisted open the jar and took a small swipe of lemon and peppermint balm, which I rubbed on my wrists. Then I handed the jar to Tabitha, who did the same. As she handed the balm back to its maker, I took a big whiff of the stuff.
I was instantly calmed, and I felt the tension in my body break. The smell was rich, crisp, and comforting, and I knew that we’d be alright. The balm woke me up, but not in the same intense, haywire way that the coffee or the speed potion did. It was more like a fog had lifted from my brain, and now I was ready to tackle the mystery of the notebook.
Melchior stood up again and ran back to the shelves. He grabbed a large dusty tome, flipped through several pages, and then stared at something intently for a moment, like he was in a trance. His eyes lit up as he jabbed at something on the page, and I knew that he’d hit the jackpot.
“Okay,” he said and slammed the book shut.
A big cloud of dust burst out of the book as he did so, and for a minute, he fell into a coughing fit. When he didn’t recover, Sybil awkwardly patted him on the back until his hacking stopped. After a minute or so, he stood back up with red eyes and set the book on the shelf.
“I should probably do some cleaning in here,” he wheezed
“What’s the inscription for?” I asked impatiently.
“It’s complicated,” he replied. “We need to put all of the pieces together to figure out what the vampires are trying to do.”
The cipher sat down on his mattress, and we stood around him. I felt like I was back in library class in kindergarten, and we were waiting to hear a story about stone soup or something.
“Why don’t you start by telling us about the first translation?” Sybil suggested.
“Well, as I said, there’s an emphasis on the sacred blessing from the Moon Goddess ceremony at Lake Wahaya,” he replied. “That’s what’s on the first layer. It looks like Wenderoth had been tracking the king’s whereabouts. So that’s our starting point.”
“Do you think they’re planning to disrupt the ceremony?” I asked. “It would make sense if they wanted to make sure that the crops were bad and that kind of thing.”
The girls shot a nervous look at each other.
“Yes,” the cipher said with a nod. “That was my assumption. Obviously, Wenderoth didn’t believe there was a knight who could kill him, so he didn’t make much of an effort to conceal the fact that he was tracking the King. Well, and why should he bother? He’d been ruling the Obsidian Temple for years.”
“He was laughing when I killed him,” I said. “Like he didn’t think I’d really be able to do it. He also said that things were far from over, and that this was just the beginning.”
“From the looks of these sophisticated plans, I believe him,” the cipher said.
“So what are those plans?” Tabitha asked.
“Where to begin?” he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “So, let’s start with the last two sets of pages, because those made more sense. The diagrams are basically notes on how knights stay in their hybrid form when they die, and how their shifting potential doesn’t depend on the type of blue blood they have, which is what the palace suspected but never told anyone because, well, the whole blue blood thing.”
The girls shot a look at each other and then up at me.
“That’s true,” I said.
“Excuse me?” the cipher asked.
“I can shift, and I don’t have blue blood,” I replied
The cipher’s eyes glittered as he looked at me for a few heartbeats.
“Well, I’m glad you told me that,” he said. “Because it’s the type of discovery that is important to Lupercalian knowledge. I’d love to hear more about it, but first we have to tackle this.”
“You’re right about that,” I said. “So what about the rest of the pages?”
“The diagrams made reference to using some of the recovered body parts to create a new werewolf,” he said.
The room fell quiet for a moment, and I could tell that the girls were having just as hard a time making sense of the cipher’s words as I was. Had the man really just suggested that the vampires were also relatives of Frankenstein?
“Sorry, what was that?” Tabitha asked. “Did you just say that they were… building a werewolf from the bodies of dead knights?”
“Yes,” the cipher replied with a nod. “They would salvage what they could, preserve them somehow, and then when they had all the… er, parts, they would try to rebuild a new knight.”
Sybil put her arm over Tabitha’s shoulder as Tabitha grabbed her head.
“I think I’m going to be sick…” Tabitha murmured, and in a flash, she ran out of the hut. Sybil shrugged at us and followed her through the door, which was now wide open.
“She’s a Blueclaw, after all,” I said.
“I assumed she was from one of the noble families, just based on her attitude,” the cipher said with a quick smile. “This is dark stuff, however. There is an evil hand in this, one that hates the werewolves.”
“And one that would do anything to destroy them,” I said. “That much is clear. But what’s the purpose of trying to create this other werewolf?”
“I’ll admit, when I first started reading the notes, I thought they were just studying the corpses so they could come up with a disguise,” the cipher said. “Hollow them out, maybe, and use the skins to infiltrate the palace. But the magic they were using is a twisted form of some of the healing magic. And there’s an inventory in there as well. They rated the various body parts they collected for things like speed and agility.”
“That’s…” I said and trailed off because I felt my stomach heave.
“There’s more,” the cipher said quietly with a glance toward the door. “They were trying to find a way to make their werewolf even more powerful.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “So, they were actually trying to create a super werewolf?”
“Yes,” he said. “One that was under their control.”
The cipher clamped his mouth shut when the girls returned. Both women looked pale, and Tabitha’s makeup was once again smeared.
“Sorry about that,” the noblewoman said in an official tone of voice. “My imagination ran away with me."
“It’s quite understandable,” the cipher replied. “It’s harrowing stuff to be sure, and you probably knew some of the knights.”
Tabitha nodded, though she seemed determined not to cry again in front of the cipher. She kept her chin up, at least until Sybil handed her a handkerchief that smelled of the lemon and peppermint balm. Tabitha brought the handkerchief up to her nose and took a deep breath before she glared at the cipher.
“Don’t stop talking on our account,” the blonde said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”
“She’s right,” I said before the cipher could protest. “And basically, what we know is that the vampires had some theory that they could use the body parts to create a super werewolf.”
“But they’re dead,” Sybil said. “How would that even work?”
“That’s what I thought at first, too,” the cipher replied. “When I read the surface notes, I thought it was just some weird fantasy that Wenderoth was entertaining, kind of like a notebook where he scribbled dark thoughts about stalking and killing the king. But here’s where it changes.”
He grabbed the notebook from the table and pointed to the inscriptions with the word that only Sybil seemed to be able to pronounce.
“What’re those called again?” I asked Sybil.
“Apotropaic inscriptions,” she said. “Heavy-duty spells.”
“And do you know what this one refers to?” he asked as he pointed to some of the strange script.
“I don’t recognize it,” Sybil replied. “Though it sort of reminds me of some healing spells I’ve seen.”
“And there’s no reason you should,” he said. “It’s banned in most places. It’s necromancy.”
“But that’s impossible,” the witch protested. “It’s an aberration of the gifts the Moon Goddess gave us, and nobody’s ever been able to successfully do it before.”
“That’s not entirely true,” he said nervously. “I looked up the combination of the lettering, and it’s been successful. Admittedly, on a much smaller creature, but I’m assuming these changes are what are required to give life to their super werewolf.”
“But how could a vampire figure this out?” Tabitha said and shook her head. “How could a vampire figure out how to do something that even… even you couldn’t do.”
The wizard made a low laugh.
“Just because I don’t choose to involve myself in certain types of magic doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” he replied. “In truth, this type of magic would make sense to a vampire. After all, vampires are the living dead, aren’t they? They’re blood-suckers and dark creatures. There are certain boundaries of nature that they cross by merely existing. If anyone could find a way to do this, it would be such a creature.”
“It does make sense,” Sybil replied. “The venom they use to turn others into vampires is very much like necromancy. And if they alchemized their venom with other magical properties, there’s a chance that they could succeed in reanimating something they built out of body parts.”
Tabitha shook her head and sighed. Tears welled up at the corners of her eyes again, but she quickly wiped them away.
“All that’s missing is the lab in the castle and the bolt of electricity,” I said.
“Uh, what?” the cipher asked.
“Sorry, an obscure reference to an old book,” I said. “But let me just see if I’ve got this right. We think the vampires have created a monster from the bodies of dead knights, and they’ve found a way to bring that monster to life using their own venom and some spells. Wenderoth seemed especially interested in the King’s trip to Lake Wahaya, so we think that whatever attack the vampires are going to make on the King with this super werewolf will take place at the lake.”
“I believe that’s it,” the cipher replied.
“This is messed up,” Sybil said and shook her head.
“But it seems like there’s still a lot of details missing,” Tabitha said. “Not least of which is whether they’ve actually managed to create a werewolf. And what about all these other pages that you said didn’t make much sense?”
He flipped back to the first pages, which were full of what looked like coordinates and calculations, and then turned the book so we could see the careful calculations.
