Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…

Mandrake grunted and gave our driver a signal. The vehicle started up and began moving slowly and inexorably towards the building. The other two fell in behind us. At first, there was no reaction, but as the first all-terrain began to ascend the steps the sound of cracking marble must have been as loud as gunfire because a massive were-lion in a red velvet robe ran towards us waving his arms. It was the Lion Lord his own self and he seemed seriously disturbed.
“What are you doing?” he screamed.
We drew quietly to a halt and Mandrake passed me a microphone.
“We are here because I’m displeased with you Leonard Lyon.”
He drew himself up to his full height. “Who dares to chide the Lion in his own place?”
I laughed. “The person who is about to order her vehicles to drive right through your pretty house if you can’t find your manners.”
He stomped about a bit but he really had no room for manoeuvre.
“Very well. What do you want?”
“A few moments of your time. And some amelioration of your behaviour.”
He didn’t like that one little bit and I was beginning to think of suggesting the vehicles inched forward a little further, when a hulking brute dressed in black leather ambled quietly out of the house.
“Give it up, Leonard. Whoever this is has you by the balls.”
I started to laugh.
“What?” Mandrake was right on the verge of being cross.
“Sorry love. That’s Wulfric. He’s the big bear.”
“Oh. I see. Should we give him back his children?”
“Yes. In a minute. I’ll speak to him first though.” I toggled the microphone switch. “I don’t know what you are laughing at Poppa Bear. I’m no more pleased with you.”
“And why would that be? I have no truck with females.”
I switched off the microphone.
“Mandrake, can you have his creatures evicted from the all-terrain, please?”
Mandrake whistled into his radio. A few seconds later a door opened in the belly of one vehicle and three figures stumbled out. They were no longer bound in silver, but they had spent so long halfway between forms that their bodies didn’t know whether to be human or animal. The resulting mess of heaving lumps and bumps, and odd clumps of hair, and unsuitable fangs and claws, might have been pitiable had I not personally suffered at the hands of the grim trio.
Wulfric laid hands on the two bears, which enabled them to solidify in more or less human forms. The rodent was less fortunate as, after watching his struggle for a moment or two, the big bear broke his neck and dropped his corpse in the snow.
The two were-bears stood silent under the regard of their master. He didn’t look too pleased to me.
His first words were accusatory. “Who dared mark the face of a bear?”
“One whose face he marked. In partial reparation for unnecessary cruelty to one who was bound and helpless.”
This wasn’t at all what he expected and he growled angrily before taking another verbal slash at us.
“I see your vehicles carry the mark of the Dragon Queen. How comes it that you are here in direct defiance of her orders?”
Mandrake took the microphone from my hand.
“Which orders might that be Bear Lord?”
It was Leonard Lyon who answered in a voice filled with glee and bloodlust. “The order not to interfere between houses Lyon and FitzRoy. An edict I received direct from the queen’s own lips.”
Mandrake allowed himself a chuckle. “We are not in defiance of such an edict.”
Wulfric, being a little more intelligent than Leonard, began to smell a rat. He turned to his frightened weres and placed a hand on each head. When he had listened to their thoughts he bowed his own head.
“Mea culpa,” he said, and I could hear the words burning in his throat like acid.
Leonard turned on him. “What is the matter with you? Why are you apologising to renegade dragons? I see what it is now. They have the girl. And now they have to hand her over or risk being declared wolfshead by their own queen. All that their intervention has done is make it worse for Demoiselle FitzRoy when I have her in my claws.”
“They don’t have the girl. They have the woman your agent kidnapped from the college. But. It. Is. Not. FitzRoy’s daughter.”
Leonard stared at him. “Don’t talk rubbish, man. The college principal assured me that the girl was in the hands of The Collector.”
“Well she lied to you.” He cracked his knuckles and the noise was very loud in the snowy air. “It’s a pity you had her killed, or we could have asked her what she was playing at.”
“You are seriously suggesting we had the wrong female.”
“I am. And we are in so much trouble.”
Leonard scoffed. “If the female lives, we must hand her back to her father with no harm done. And we go and get the FitzRoy girl ourselves.”
Wulfric grabbed him by the collar and shook him until his teeth rattled. “She’s a dragon mate, you stupid fragging pussycat. We are within inches of being declared prey.”
“Prey?” At last Leonard seemed to be grasping the edges of just exactly how deeply he was sunk in his own ordure. “Surely they can’t do that.”
“Can and are very likely to. Between us we are responsible for the abduction and ill-treatment of the mate of a battle dragon who would also seem to be a wing leader.”
“Battle dragon? Wing leader?”
Wulfric was relentless. “Yes. All that and, from what those two have in their brains, pissed off in the extreme.”
“But who is the female to dare to mark one of your enforcers.”
While he was talking, Leonard was moving towards the fallen fighter with the light weapon. Mandrake handed me the microphone and slid a small window open. As the Lion Lord made to grab the fallen weapon, Mandrake flamed briefly.
Leonard screamed and Wulfric spared him a glance. “Shut up pussycat, you aren’t hurt. Although whatever it was you were after has been melted into a puddle.”
The Bear Lord bowed towards our vehicle. “My apologies. This treachery was not of my making.”

Jane Jago

Writing inspired by the art of Ian Bristow

George was a gentle creature, slow moving even for one of his kind and deliberate of thought and speech.
When Mabel was introduced to the group, all the males hustled around her puffing out their cheeks and making their most macho grunting noises.
She ignored them, choosing instead to come and munch some fresh greens at George’s side.
When Alfred attempted to mount her she flipped him over onto his back and continued munching.
“A girl likes to be asked,” she said quietly.
It was many days before George did ask, shyly.
Mabel nodded, and they tended the eggs together.

 Jane Jago

Ian is an awesome artist and cover designer, you can find his work at Bristow Design.

Some whimsical words on whimsical themes…

When a gal from the WI
Was asked why the glint in her eye
She replied with a grin
That it isn’t a sin
To put plenty of gin in your pies

Jane Jago

An everyday tale of village life and vampires…

Em was half a churchyard in front of Agnes, and she heard Virginia Cropper making a brave attempt to save the bats. The woman might be a fool, Em thought, but at least her heart was in the right place. 
As she wrestled with the church door Erasmus landed on her shoulder and they burst in together, just in time to see a nightmare figure that didn’t seem to know whether it was a man or a rabbit point a gun at the unconscious woman on the flagstones. Why, Em wondered, would anybody point a rifle at an incapacitated foe. Then she found out why, as the mad creature laughed and shot Ginny in the neck. He seemed to be intent on filling his enemy’s body with lead, so Em took the only available option. She let forth a bloodcurdling scream and leapt onto the back of the out of control were.
Screwing up her face in distaste she bit hard, right about where the human jugular was to be found. Doug Turner dropped his gun and began clawing at her face. Em had never appreciated how sharp rabbit claws are until they were raking at her cheeks and eyes, but she held on for dear life and hoped for help.
Fortunately, it wasn’t too long arriving, and Agnes rugby tackled the man/rabbit to the floor. With them both sitting on him, he was finding it harder to move and his shifting from form to form became even more erratic. He jerked and twisted and foamed at the mouth alternately swearing and making high-pitched screeing noises that hurt Em’s head. Being a were, he was preternaturally strong and keeping him down on the ground was an uphill struggle. Just as Em was wondering whether or not two of them could manage to keep a hold, the cavalry charged in. Petunia leapt onto the flailing legs while Arnold gently elbowed Em aside and tidily rabbit punched the struggling were on the back of his neck. 
There was, Em thought, an irony there if one had time to think about it. But there was no time. While Arnold and Agnes trussed up the now limp form of the half-shifted wererabbit she turned her attention to the unconscious woman with the neck wound. Petunia was two steps in front of Em, and the face that normally heedless female lifted from the body was white with shock. She spoke with none of her usual girlish silliness, and Em was reminded that Petunia was a veterinary nurse by trade and the silliness was mostly a pose.
“Em. She’s nearly dead.”
“Don’t be silly. She can’t be. She’s bleeding. But not enough to cause permanent damage.”
“The reason she isn’t bleeding much is that her heart has just stopped. The pellet sliced her carotid artery. It should be pumping.”
“Why did her heart stop?”
“I don’t have the first idea. But it has. And as of right now she’s dead if we don’t do something.”
Em felt her own heart sink, and Agnes kicked the wererabbit in the genitals. Petunia looked Em steadily in the face. 
“It’s up to you. But the last thing we need is a murder investigation in the village and we are a Sister short.”
“So we are. And she couldn’t be much more trouble than the last occupant of her cottage. Hold her steady, Petunia. Agnes can you pry open her mouth.”
With her Sisters doing their part it only remained for Em to take the final step. She bit her own wrist and concentrated on the blood flow directing a scarlet stream into Ginny’s slack mouth. For a few seconds more nothing happened then Ginny’s throat worked and she began to swallow. The wound in her neck pumped briefly before the pellet was ejected with a pop and the wound closed over.
“Enough now,” Agnes said briskly and Em allowed the wound in her own wrist to close over. 
She laid one hand on either side of Ginny’s head and willed her to sleep while she healed.
“That went well, didn’t it,” she said a bit snappily and Agnes laughed.
“Let me clean your face before the scratches heal over. Rabbit claws are dirty things.”
An awful thought hit Em right between the eyes. “Petunia,” she said, “can you just have a look at Mzzz Cropper and make sure she isn’t growing any unwanted hair?”
“What? Why?”
Em sat down with a weary bump. “Because I just Fed her. And not five minutes before that I Bit a wererabbit.”
“Oh, bugger. So you did.”

Part 15 of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and Eleanor Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

Because life happens…

Exploring the mysteries of life through the versatile medium of limerick poetry.

Play

You know you are old when you say
Things were never like that in my day
And you no longer care
To spend hours on your hair
Cos you’d much rather go out and play

Eleanor Swift-Hook

It is not often one is granted insight into the mind of one’s parent through the medium of literature. But so it was that I came to understand Mumsie’s tendencies to overindulge in aspects of culture most regard as less desirable – sex and booze.

It was last summer and I had gone into her ‘retiring room’ to see if she had, yet again, absconded with my iPad as I had a hankering to take it and compose bucolic pastoral poetry whilst sitting in the garden. I needed something to provide the quintessential inspirational imagery so lacking in our squalid backyard, whilst I committed the consequential flow of rhyming commentary, contemporaneously to paper with pen.

Instead, I wound up reclining in the garden reading with interest a volume I had found poking out from under her favourite chair. It even reminded me of Mummy in appearance being much handled, rather fat and dog-eared. Surprisingly it had a Biblical quotation for its title, not something I would normally associate with my mater. There were also many self-revelatory notes in my mother’s long-lost youthful hand, highlighting passages or underlining phrases.

I later learned it is also a science-fiction classic.

My review of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

There is much written nowadays about supernatural beings like vampires and angels and this book falls neatly in that category.

In this book, the angel called Michael Smith comes to earth from Mars. He is fabulously wealthy and naturally has magical powers. He lives in a commune where everyone runs around naked and has sex with everyone else and they eat dead people. He is eventually killed and comes back as a ghost to explain that he is going to take over the world with a new super-race, by evolving his followers. In the end, it turns out he was really an archangel.

I found the story by turns cloying, disgusting, strangely sensual, often all three together and always puzzling.

Three stars for the intriguing footnotes and marginal commentary from my maternal parent.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

Summertime and the livin’ is wheezy
Nose is runnin’ and the pollen count’s high
Oh, your daddy’s face is no longer good lookin’
So hush, little baby, just you nebulise.

Most every morning
You’ get to rise up coughin’
Yes, you cough so bad
When the pollution is high
Mm, the weather man says
The very air can can harm you
Yes, with daddy and mommy standin’ by

Summertime and the livin’ is wheezy
Nose is runnin’ and the pollen count’s high
Oh, your daddy’s face is no longer good lookin’
So hush, little baby, just you nebulise.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…

Chapter Seven – Warring Weres

We sorted ourselves out into the vehicles, with ourselves in the first. My three kidnappers, now hooded and roped together, were in the middle one being guarded by half a dozen female dragons who didn’t like them at all.
“Where to?” Mandrake looked to Moth who grinned.
“Moth knows.”
She flitted to the shoulder of the young dragon who was our driver and spoke in his ear. I was impressed that he didn’t flinch. He just grinned at the impudent fae as he engaged a gear.
“How long a journey?”
Mandrake was in full commander mode, and I didn’t know whether to be impressed or kick his shins. In the end I did neither, although I did share a rueful look with Purslane.
Moth and the driver were engaged in a low-voiced conversation and after a minute or two he spoke up.
“It’s about ten miles to the Lyon country estate. In the normal way of things that’d be about a quarter of an hour – even in this beast. But my friend here smells a blizzard on the way, so we can reckon on an hour at least.”
“Okay. You just set a safe pace.”
The driver laughed. “Will do, uncle.”
Mandrake aimed a laughing cuff at his head.
In the end it was closer to two hours because the storm that came screaming in from the east was of the sort that has to be waited out and the three all-terrain vehicles lined up with their backs to the howling dervish of a wind. Instead of snow, this wind brought ice – long daggers of killing ice that hammered against the armoured vehicles as if determined to get inside. I shivered.
“You’re safe in here,” Mandrake said.
“I am. I’m just thinking about the car I was in not so long ago. I have a feeling that me and the rat would have died out here – even if the bears could survive.”
He frowned, then a shiver of his own crossed his whole body and he pulled me into his arms.
“I could have lost you,” he said thickly.
I put my arms around him. “But you didn’t. You rescued me. You and Moth and our dragon friends.”
The tension went out of his body. “We did. And you are warm and in my arms. Although I did want to kill the scum that had you. Was it them who took you from the college?”
“No. It was not. But I wouldn’t bother hunting for whoever did. I think they are probably dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. As in dead men tell no tales.”
“That figures.” Then he chuckled. “The bigger bear isn’t at all happy with us. He is swearing vengeance with every indrawn breath.”
I shrugged. “He is a dead thing walking. And if he isn’t bright enough to work that out for his own self…”
“Are you going to kill him, loved one?”
“Probably not. Much though I would like to. My money is on Leonard Lyon.”
Purslane chimed in. “Unless there is a senior bear at the place we are headed. They really don’t take too kindly to failure.”
Mandrake pushed out his lower lip in thought, then nodded briefly.
One of the younger dragons put up a tentative hand, almost like a child at school.
“You have a question, Nettle?”
“I do, sir. If the lady will be so kind.”
“Ask away.”
“If you knew that the bears had the wrong woman, why did you not tell them?”
“In a normal situation that would have been the correct move. However, by the time I realised who they thought they had in their hands there was already a trail of dead bodies behind us. It was pretty clear to me that if they found out I wasn’t the woman they were being paid for they’d have slit my throat and left me for the carrion crows. This lot really don’t care for loose ends.”
Nettle swallowed audibly. “So you were in their power, knowing they were taking you to be killed, and aware that it didn’t matter to them who you were?”
“That about sums it up. Except, of course, I had Mandrake and Moth hunting for me and both are formidable hunters.”
“They are indeed.” Nettle nodded.
By which time the ice storm had blown away and we could resume our journey.
The Lyon estate was ringed with razor wire fencing, which is fine against normal modes of transport, but our vehicles just pushed over it as if it wasn’t there. The guards that piled out of a couple of low, stone buildings were armed with rifles and heavy clubs – neither of which is any use at all against an armoured vehicle weighing several tons. They weren’t stupid, and most of them went back inside out of the snow which was falling thickly again. A couple of the younger, fitter lycanthropes trotted along beside us like a sort of an honour guard. I hoped the house wasn’t far, because it had to be fragging cold out there.
It was only around ten minutes at jogging speed and the three all-terrains formed up into a chevron in the courtyard. We waited.
A few guards formed up around us and one knocked politely on the door of the frontmost vehicle.
We ignored him.
A tall figure in the uniform of some sort of ceremonial guard came out of the portico and stood looking at our silent vehicles. When he had looked his fill he smiled thinly. He took something out of his pocket and aimed it. Mandrake pushed a button on the dash and dark screens came up across our windows. The flash of light would have blinded us had we not had the protective screens, but we did have them. The screens dropped as the functionary with the weapon hit the ground. He seemed to have grown something strange on his forehead – closer inspection discovered it to be the vanes of a crossbow bolt right between his eyes.
“Nice shooting, whoever,” I said.

Jane Jago

Writing inspired by the art of Ian Bristow

About his feet the little people quaked and cried. He curled his lip in scorn. 

He felt a strong desire to cook the soldiers in their metal cuirasses but chivalry demanded that he kill only where necessary so he reined in his fury.

Instead, he turned his face on the invading king and allowed himself one roar of rage.

The man fell to his knees and covered his eyes.

“Die infidel.”

As the king grovelled, a ballista twanged thickly and the iron bolt buried itself in Draco’s noble heart.

His dying flame razed a swathe of death a mile long.  

Jane Jago

Ian is an awesome artist and cover designer, you can find his work at Bristow Design.

Some whimsical words on whimsical themes…

When old Agnes died, the rest of her seven did what was necessary. They buried Agnes, gathered together her books, and burned her vardo. Young Mary was surprised when Agnes’ cat heaved his impressive ginger bulk onto the oldest wicca’s cart.

“He will stay with us until we find a human seventh. Without seven the magic would be weak.”

It was almost a year later when the seven found a young whore working in a backstreet stew. 

She was thin and fearful, but the magic filled her.

The ginger cat slowly faded until all that was left was his grin…

Jane Jago