The Bloody Birds of Britain

Chapter 15

The corridors are empty and quiet. No one watches as Hortense races to the Queens room, moving so fast that she's barely a blur to the human eye. However, she's moving slower then normal, her residue energy having been burnt already by battling with the beast.

She reaches the Queens room in seconds.

Something was terribly wrong. 

The guards outside were dead. Slaughtered, chopped and piled neatly like a string of sausages. Their blood soaked the floor, darkening the grey stones further.

She stepped over an eyeball and a fingernail with flesh still attatched.

Opening the door involved crossing the grey bloodstream, thus ruining her dress. She sighed in irritance, blood stains were a nightmare to get out but nevertheless she stepped over it.

Carefully she pushed the door, causing it to open with a loud creak. What she saw terrified her.

The Queen lay on the floor, bedraggled and deathly pale with her eyes shut. 

As far as Hortense could see and hear, no one else was in the room. She hurried quickly to the Queens side and felt for a pulse.

"Yes," she grinned, feeling a slow but steady heart beat emmitting from the Queens arm. "Your Majesty," she said opening the Queen's eyes with her fingers as gently as possible. 

The Queen was unconcious, she did not reply. Instead she lay with her mouth slightly ajar, a small line of blood dribbling down her left cheek. 

"Hortense...," came the Venetian behind her; "what have you done!" He swooped down beside her and pushed her away from the queen.  He cradled the Queen in his arms as he checked for a pulse.

"It wasn't me," she snapped back at him angrily. Kneeling back down beside she began to check the Queen for injuries.

"Well I suppose even you aren't that fast," he sighed pushing the hair from the queen's forehead.

"Are you going to check her for injury or are you just going to fawn over her;" Hortense said as she continued to look. Slowly she pushed up the Queens blue dress over her knees, hoping her thighs were unpiereced.

"There is a strange smell lingering," the Ventetian said whilst he pulled back the Queens hair to reveal her perfectly fine neck.

He had began to remove the dress from her shoulders when Hortense ordered him to stop.

"That's the Queen you can't undress the Queen!" She scolded as she found the Queens thighs untouched. Hortense rolled back down the beautiful dress and looked back at him. Why hadn't he responded?

"There's a scratch on her right shoulder, come and look," Hortense got up and moved next to him. Not only was there a deep aggrevated jaggered scratch but a terrible stench seemed to emmit from it as well.

Hortense could call the first time she had encountered that terrible stench. She and Valentin, whilst visiting the fjords of Norway at the height of winter had come across a blood trail. Very small at first, just little drops in the deep pure snow. The strange thing was the lack of prints, there had been one maybe every twenty of their footsteps. Valentin had grown more and more worried as they followed the trail. When they came across the poor wretch there was little more left then his  slashed chest and head - the rest was simply gone.

"A werewolf," she said with great disdain, "I'm not sure about the scratch however, the only cuts I've seen were straight and reasonably clean."

"How'd they get in? We would have smelt them from the moment they got here..." He tailed off and took another look at the scratch; "what if it wasn't a werewolf but just it's blood on a blade... What if..."

"What?"

"Trust me," he said picking her up with his great strength before racing to the other side of the castle. He stopped outside her bedroom, she was still mystified as to what and why had just happened. "It's a trap."

"But the Queen," she began in protest.

"She'll be fine, the werewolf blood will heal her. She will turn and there's nothing we can do about that. For now we must save our own skins." He said as he began as he started to remove his clothes.

"Now what are you doing," she sighed as he began to remove his trousers.

"Whenever I've fed I always grow hungry with lust, so-" she stopped him with a large slap across the face making him smile.

"No I don't think so somehow, " she snarled at him angrily. "I don't care how good a cover you think it might be."

"I think your scared," he smiled again opening the door to her bedroom.

"I think you like pressurising people into doing things they don't want to," she smiled back. "Go find one of your beautiful swans," and with that she stepped inside her room and closed the door in his half naked face.

She lent her head against the door listening to his faint footsteps grow fainter.

"I thought he'd never leave," came a voice behind her.