The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) by Richard Estep Page B

inseams with a slow but steady ripping sound.
    Caldwell made to move toward his patient, but was stopped by the casual yet incredibly firm grip of Wellesley’s hand. He looked his general in the face, and received an almost imperceptible shake of the head. It went against all his innate instincts as a healer, to simply stand back and do nothing while one of his charges suffered, but Caldwell knew that the general was right: there was nothing left to do now but let nature – or in this case, supernature – take its course.
    There was another violent thrash. The wooden table broke, splitting in half down its long axis. Campbell was dumped unceremoniously onto the dirt floor. Not that he seemed to care, or to find it anything more than a minor distraction. Now Wellesley did step back, three deft steps, guiding Caldwell backward along with him. Campbell’s back arched, flopping onto his left side in something close to the fetal position and drawing his knees in tight toward his chest. His spine began to curve, causing the accompanying cracking and popping noises to reach something close to fever pitch. Caldwell watched with frank astonishment as several bony prominences along his spinal ridge began to stretch and elongate, pushing his legs outward.
    “The hips must be dislocating and re-fusing. See, look there.”
    Trying to figure out what exactly was going on anatomically was proving to be an almost impossible challenge, yet despite the horror of the situation, the doctor was fascinated nonetheless. He had never seen anything remotely like this before, not even during his academic training. Oh, shape-shifters – weres – existed, everybody knew that. So did many other types of supernatural creatures. Yet the weres were notoriously elusive, bordering on the hermetic, in the British Isles. They lacked the societal clout that the vampires took for granted, tending to live in isolated villages in familial clans; The less social of their number really did roam the moors and valleys, preying on wildlife for the most part…and on occasion, or so the hushed whispers said, upon the unwary traveler. Some were truly feral, and in some rare instances had required the army to hunt them down and destroy them, using volleys of silver-flinging musketry.
    It was one thing to know of their existence, on an intellectual level, at least; To have read about them in books and periodicals. It was quite another to find oneself face to face with one, watching as it was…well, Caldwell supposed that born was as good a word for it as any, right before his own two disbelieving eyes.
    And yet, a small part of his brain wondered, why was this so unusual, when one got right down to it? He had grown accustomed to the ways of the vampire, for he could hardly have served in His Majesty’s army without becoming so. The outbreak of the hungry dead had taken him by surprise, he would freely admit that; and yet he was coping with it admirably, shoving aside the utterly blasphemous nature of the sins being inflicted upon the newly-risen human corpses, and giving his scientific curiosity free reign.
    Part of him wanted to flee; a mean part, the part that lurked beneath the civilized veneer in all men. But Reed Caldwell would not give in to it. He would not. He was a doctor, after all, and not just any doctor: he was a military doctor in the service of King George, and that bound him with an iron sense of unshakable duty. If there was any way in the world that he could help the suffering, then he was honor-bound to do so.
    And Colin Campbell was most assuredly suffering.
    His arms and legs, thrashing frenziedly, were warping into some new shape. The hands and feet were becoming paws, complete with pads and wickedly curving black claws. Campbell flopped onto his belly, face down amid an ocean of wooden shards and fragments, all that remained of the trellised operating table to which he had been secured since nightfall. His appearance was far more that of a