Juliette stood frozen, hand halfway to the hilt of the short sword that she wore thrust through her belt. The bisected child twitched slowly and then was still, the animal aspect fading until it was just a small boy wretchedly butchered. Blood leaked from both halves in a brackish stream, soaking into the loamy forest soil.

“By the Saint and the Sister,” Juliette breathed, feeling the gorge rise at the back of her throat. The sight and the smell competed to make her lose the stew she had eaten for dinner but she forced it down. Feeling foolish and too late to be of any help she took her hand away from her sword.

 

“They will never believe us that he was tainted,” she said after a moment. The corpse of the child had a cherubic innocence about it, his mouth open in death in what looked to be gentle surprise, not the devouring snarl she had seen a moment before. Juliette had seen mobs before, and in town where the people were not nearly as scared as they were here. They needed to be on horseback and putting as much distance between this place as they could manage before the killing was discovered.

 

“Something infected the boy,” Torm replied, a steely tone to his voice as he knelt down and seized the boy’s hat, wiping the great blade clean with practiced ease before tossing the soiled cloth to the ground. Julliette was shaking her head.

“They wont believe us,” she repeated, hand fiddling with the hilt of her weapon in spite of her best efforts. A wolf howled in the night, a long keening moan that seemed to shiver the trees around them, giving them a nightmarish aspect in the moonlight.

“You misunderstand, I do not shrink from the deed, but its author must be destroyed. Another howl split the night, seeming closer, though that could have been a trick of her nerves. They headed deeper into the forest, following the trail as best they could. It was clear that it was little more than a game run. Perhaps it had once been used by woodsman, but if so that was long ago. The howling continued every so often, often enough to make Juliette suspicious that they might be being led into a trap. Around midnight they came up onto a small rise where a hilltop broke the trees. Across a shallow mist shrouded valley another hill was visible. It was crowned with tumble down ruins of some ancient structure, perhaps a church or abbey. The skeletons of mostly rotted timber buildings stood around it like the stumps of decayed teeth. In the moonlight Juliette thought she saw movement at the base of the ruin.