"I'll have to reach for it."
"Do that, would you?"
Doyle undid his coat and slid his hand delicately inside. With fiercely intelligent eyes, the wolf looked slowly back and forth from Doyle to Sparks. This was by far the biggest of the three brutes: six hands high, at least ten stone. As it inched forward, Doyle pulled out the pistol, but instead of attacking, the king wolf took two running strides and in a high arc leapt out one of the open windows behind the altar. Doyle got off one errant shot and rushed to follow it. Looking down, he saw the drop from the window was at least twenty feet to the cushion of drifts below. He held out a lantern, but the animal had already disappeared from view.
Eileen and Larry attended to Barry, whose lower left arm had borne the brunt of the wolf's attack. Blood ran freely down his hand as she guided his arm gingerly out of the sleeve.
"Not too bad, is it, old boy?" asked Larry.
"Coat took the worst of it," said Barry, testing his fingers, the movement of which was not impaired.
"Ghosts, can you fancy that?" said Eileen, with the calm neutrality of a practiced nurse.
"Seen worse," said Barry stoically.
"I hate nuns," said Eileen. "I've always hated nuns."
"These woolly sheep-eaters were real enough, weren't they, though? No hocus-pocus here," said Larry, leaning over to kick one of the corpses and then retrieve his knives from its hide.
"All right then, Barry?" asked Sparks, reloading the shotgun with shells from his pocket.
"Ugly as ever, sir," said Barry, with a toothy smile for his ministering angel as she examined the puncture wounds on his forearm.
Doyle's heart rate was just coming under control again when he glanced back out the windows.
"Have a look at this, Jack," he said.
Sparks joined him. In the distance to the south was a line of bright orange lights, moving in formation toward their position.
"Torches," said Doyle.
"Coming for something. Us. Maybe that," said Sparks, gesturing back at the crate. "Keep an eye on them."
Doyle estimated they were still a good mile away. Sparks moved to the crate and knelt down to examine the dirt on which it rested, rubbing it between his Fingers, sniffing it. Sparks dislodged the lid. He made no sound, but when Doyle turned back, he saw a sick, stricken expression on Sparks's face.
"What is it, Jack?"
"Games," muttered Sparks darkly. "He's playing games."
Doyle moved to Sparks's side and looked into the crate. There was a corpse inside, little more than bones really, amid rotting burial clothes and matted clumps of scorched hair and flesh. A photograph in a gilded frame had been positioned between its skeletal hands in a travesty of covetous possession: a formal posed portrait of a man and woman, married and upper-class English by the form and style of them.
"What is this?" asked Doyle.
"My parents," said Sparks, nodding at the photograph. "Those are my parents."
"Good Christ."
"And this is my father's body."
The outrage that welled inside him rendered Doyle speechless. Any remaining doubts he harbored regarding the mon-strousness of Alexander and Jack's relative innocence were finally and irrevocably removed.
"Soulless monster," spat Doyle finally.
Sparks took a series of deep breaths and clenched his fists, closing and opening them rhythmically, trying to bring his tumultuous emotions under control. Moving back to the window, Doyle saw that the lights were moving closer, at least six torches, and moving against the snow beneath them he could make out dark shapes. A formidable number of them. A quarter-mile away and closing fast.
As Eileen finished dressing a strip of shirt cloth around Barry's wounds, Larry joined Doyle at the window.
"What should we do?" asked Doyle.
"The odds don't favor a fight here, guv. Not against those numbers. No cover or high ground. Too many doors. Too hard to defend."
"Tell him," said Doyle, gesturing toward Sparks.
"He knows," said Larry. "Give him a minute."
"A minute's all we've got."
Larry winked at him. "Minute's all we need."
Larry picked up the shotgun and gave a short whistle, Barry jumped to his feet, kissed Eileen on the cheek, and the brothers quickly moved out of the cathedral toward the trackers. Doyle could differentiate individuals in the group now; there were at the least two dozen in the pack. Eileen stepped back onto the altar. To prevent her from disturbing Sparks, Doyle gestured for her to join him at the window.
"Are we just going to stand here and wait for them?" asked Eileen.
"No," said Doyle, steadying his pistol on the window, taking aim on a lead torch-bearer. Before he could squeeze off a shot, he heard the rolling crack of the shotgun from off to the left; there were shouts, and two figures in the group went down. The man with the torch stopped to look in that direction; Doyle fired, the figure fell, and its torch was extinguished in the snow.
"Here! Over here, you rotters!"
More taunting shouts followed. Doyle saw Barry wave their lanterns, trying to draw the party away from the abbey.
"Come on then! Get a wiggle on, we 'aven't got all night!"
Six attackers ran after Barry; the rest continued toward the ruins. Doyle emptied his pistol at the advancing column, felling another of them. As he reloaded, he heard the shotgun boom again and saw one of the men headed for the brothers fall silently.
The rasp of the cover coming off the coffin pulled his attention back to the room. Sparks emptied the oil from his lantern into the crate, then set it aflame by crashing the lantern on top of it. The crate ignited like dry tinder. Sparks stepped back, intoned something Doyle couldn't hear, and watched the fire consume the box, committing his father to final rest.
"We really should go, Jack," said Doyle, waiting a decent interval as he reloaded his pistol.
Sparks turned away from the flames and picked up the lid to the crate by its handles. "This way," he said, heading toward the end of the nave they'd entered.
"What does he want with that?" asked Eileen, pointing at the lid.
"I'm sure I couldn't say," said Doyle, as they caught up to Sparks and ran into the antechamber where they'd stacked the snowshoes.
"We'll need those," snapped Sparks, pointing at the shoes.
As Eileen bent to retrieve them, three gray hoods came in through the front entrance. One raised a spiked cudgel to strike at Sparks. "Jack!"
Sparks whirled, lowered the lid, and drove it into the chests of the three hoods, his legs pistoning mightily, pushing them back and pinning them against the wall. Doyle stepped forward and methodically fired two shots in each of the hoods as they squirmed behind the wood. "Behind you!" shouted Eileen.
Two more hoods rushed in at them from the cathedral. Doyle spun around and pulled the trigger, but the pistol was empty. The three dispatched hoods slumped to the ground as
Sparks let go of the coffin lid and turned to face this new assault. Eileen swung a snowshoe up by the tail and cracked the trailing one hard across the face, knocking it off its feet. A blow from the onrushing hood's club clipped Sparks on the arm: he dipped, caught the hood's momentum with a shoulder, straightened up, and flipped the creature against the wall. Eileen whacked the downed hood a second time as it tried to find its footing; Doyle turned the pistol in his hand and whipped the handle across the back of the hood until it lay still. Sparks drove a boot down into the neck of the second attacker, and it snapped like a hollow branch.
Bright light and the rush of many footsteps entered the cathedral. Sparks picked up the lid and ran out the door.
"Hurry!" he said.
Doyle and Eileen gathered the snowshoes, and they scrambled after Sparks. He dropped the lid so it hung over the lip of the hill that sloped steeply away from the ruins and anchored it with his foot.