Werewolf Parallel by Roy Gill Read Free Book Online

rushing air to slam the door.
    “Still glad you came?”
    “Definitely.” Eve gave a small smile. “I’ve decided it’s invigorating, almost being eaten alive.”
    “I’ll remember you said that.”
    The inside of the carriage was unlike any Cameron had ever seen before. There were no rows of seats. Instead, the space had been decked out to look like the garden of a Mediterranean villa. Corinthian pillars stretched from mosaic floor to ceiling, marking out a courtyard that contained a pond and low marble benches. Grapevines straggled round the windows, beyond which the strange Human/Daemon mash-up of the Parallel rolled by with increasing speed. The air smelled of dry earth and honey.
    A hard, abrasive sensation prompted Cameron to look down. A white kitten was winding its way round his legs. He touched its head, and found it was cold.
    It stared up with empty eyes, and
miaowed
lustily.
    “Great. Another stone moggie.” Morgan bared histeeth. “Go away!”
    “Pay no attention,” a voice said airily. “He’s on the mooch for peacock hearts again. He’s had plenty, the beastly little horror.”
    “Although, what is it they say?” a second voice added in ominous tones. “A raw heart a day – keeps the physician away?”
    “Oh shush. Stop trying to scare our guests,” continued the first. “They’ve had enough of an ordeal, poor dears, getting past that self-important guardian.”
    “And yet that shall be as nothing,” said the sinister voice, “compared to the trials that are to come.”
    A tapestry curtain parted. Standing in the doorway to the next carriage was a tall, muscular man dressed in a flowing toga. Curled dark hair framed broad shoulders and a most peculiar head: one set of eyes, nose and mouth pointed left, and a second, equally distinguished set of features pointed in the opposite direction.
    “You’ve got two faces,” said Eve. She clapped a hand to her mouth.
    Morgan raised an eyebrow.
“Really?”
    “Well, I didn’t know, did I?” she hissed. “I thought the image on the ward was symbolic…”
    “Yes, dear,” said the face on the left, not unkindly. “We do. It goes with the job –”
    “With the Godhood of Portals, more accurately,” said the face on the right. “We see everything that comes and goes –”
    “All life’s little entrances and exits!”
    “For I look wearily to the past,” right sighed, “and am filled with regret.”
    “Whereas I look to the future,” said left, “and amdelighted by possibility.”
    There was a blur and Janus’s head spun: the curly hair somehow remaining static while the dual faces exchanged sides.
    “Or is it,” said the face now on the left, “that I look to the past, with fond remembrance?”
    “And I look to the future, with apprehension and terror?” said right. “We’re not going to tell! Believe me, darlings, we’ve tried prophecy. It doesn’t end well.”
    “He’s like a double act,” Cameron muttered out the corner of his mouth, “but in one body.”
    Morgan gave his head a tiny shake. “He’s no joker.”
    The stone kitten mewed delightedly and ran over to Janus, who dug in a pouch hanging from his toga and produced a black, withered-looking object that he threw to the ground. The kitten seized it and slunk away under the benches.
    “Monster!” said both faces together, with great affection. Their blue eyes turned back to the visitors. “And who has come to call on us today? Romulus and Remus, surely?”
    Cameron looked blank and Morgan shrugged.
    “Two wolf-boys at any rate, if my four eyes do not deceive. Whatever can they want with little old me?” Janus gestured to the marble benches, then turned to an alcove containing an amphora and some carved goblets. “You will join me in a libation?”
    “Am I just invisible or something?” Eve, who’d been looking increasingly irritable, coughed loudly. “Or is this another boys’ club I don’t get to join?”
    Janus’s back stiffened. The