Prologue
She is looking for me. I haven't decided yet if she's hunting me, or just searching for evidence of my existence. The thought that this young, slight woman that looks like she splits her time between the library and the running track could possibly be hunting me makes me laugh softly to myself. I've been hunted before. Fools have come looking for me, and the glory that might come with capturing or killing something like me. They've hunted my brothers as well. Since the Scientific Revolution, we've been tracked more by the curious and seekers of the biologically impossible than by glory hounds. But they all end up just as dead. The other creatures of the world are more careful, and they leave us well alone. But humans are apparently not so bright as that.
Chapter 1
"Good Morning, Chloe." Thomas says a little too loudly for this library, greeting me the same as he has every day for the last two weeks in his musical, lilting Irish voice. It's a voice made for soft words, and whispers over whisky in front of a warm fire in old rooms. In short, all of the things I've denied myself ever since I resigned myself to scholarly spinsterhood upon completion of my undergraduate degree. It isn't as though I've been celibate, I was involved with a man all through my time at a smallish American University pursing my Bachelor's degree, a relationship that ended when I commenced a torrid affair with my Master's thesis advisor, a man almost two decades older than myself. That ended predictably, having forgotten my sister's advice, "Remember Chloe, if he'll cheat on someone else for you, he'll probably cheat on you for someone else."
And it's not that I don't like men. In fact, I adore men. My personal taste being for the biggest, burliest, roughest, most stereotypical man's men I can find. And if such a man can clean up and look good in a suit, my panties get automatically wet. But such men are emotionally messy and complicated, and besides, in my experience a man rarely knows how to really rock my world on his first trip to my bed. To really get the toe-curling satisfying fuck I need usually takes a bit of practice. So usually when I have an itch to scratch I turn to my trusty drawer full of toys, which are uncomplicated, dishwasher safe, and have never yet failed to get me off.
But I haven't needed to did into that drawer too much in the last couple of months, and barely at all since planes and trains brought my to a darkened carrel in The Bodelian, Oxford University's most famous library. I can barely understand what I'm doing here, searching ancient books for a secret so outside of my normal, completely natural historian's existence that it cannot possibly be true. I'm here looking for what can only be monsters. These are monsters that cannot die. Monsters who, carefully concealed, have carved a bloody trail through human history going back at least two millennia.
When the thought first occurred to me that the legendary warriors that served the Khans in the butchery Mongol hordes inflicted across Eurasia were actually the same man, I laughed out loud at the preposterousness of the idea. But the more I read, and the more cultures I looked into the more and more I couldn't deny my own hypothesis. Now I know that their isn't just one. I know there are a least five, if not possibly more.
I found the phrases translated, "he who tames the beast within" in an ancient codex in the Near East, that should have been translated from that long dead Semitic dialect, "He that becomes the beast within." In a dusty bin in Berlin I found a Roman record of Germanic folk tales about the beast that guards the people of the North. And later in Munich a record of a man who held a bridge against an army single handedly. That text was rendered to English, "He fought like a pack of wolves, and destroyed us all." But only because of that professor's lack of knowledge of the Old Latin, or perhaps unwillingness to admit that the text actually should have been read, "He became a pack of wolves, and destroyed us all." I'm still not sure what these things are, or where they come from, but I am convinced that if the same vicious warriors keep showing up again and again across the bloodiest page of human history for centuries then some of them might still be alive.
This is what led me here, to a long table alone in the great room of the oldest and grandest of all the libraries still left in the world. If only the Library of Alexandria hadn't been burned to the ground in antiquity. I'd be at a table there, combing the very earliest records of humanity in my search. But for now this place will do. I've just gotten myself settled, and my pencils (no pens allowed here) and notepad arranged when the cute for a librarian Thomas comes in carefully carrying the manuscript I've asked him for. It's one of the oldest extant copies of the epic poem Beowulf, one of the few works remaining from Old English, composed as early as 700 AD and first written down over as a thousand years ago. Of course I don't think Beowulf himself, the hero of the story, was one of my monsters but I'm looking for clues in his supporting cast.
"What would such a pretty lass as you want such a dark tale for?"
Thomas asks me, in a drippingly patronizing tone. I despise it. But I've been hearing this shit since I entered the University at 16, so I won't punish him too harshly, and I just ignore the comment.
"Thank you, Thomas. Set it here please, and let me get to work." My tone is unmistakably one that suggests I do not wish to be bothered.
"As you wish Dr. Bishop." His reversion to my title rather than first name does not go unnoticed; I had no intention of wounding him. I favor him with my brightest smile and pay him an innocuous compliment and thank him. Having thus gained temporary forbearance from the impending storm of my displeasure he lashes himself to the tiller and sails madly on, "Perhaps after you're done with the death and the darkness you'd like a pint or a whisky to cheer up with, and maybe some company to go with it?"
