[The Journey Through the Catskills. October 31st, 1866]

"They're gone," Karsten noted, unsurprised.

"Ah, yes," Romy nodded. "They eat their dead. And their wounded, if they aren't fit to fight back."

"Do they lick up the blood, too? You'd never know that we lost a driver."

"They do," Romy answered. "The good news is that they're unlikely to be back again. They got their food, they got a good scare, and they'll be hunting elsewhere. Let's get on the road."

The two roused the others from bed amidst much protesting. "The sun isn't even up!" groaned Aaron.

"They might set a roadblock," Karsten noted. "Best travel sooner than they'd expect. Miss Havek is driving, you can sleep in the coach."

With much cajoling from Karsten, the men were dressed and found the women waiting by the coach. "Don't we have to pay the proprieters?" Aaron asked, wiping sleep from his eyes and looking with disdain at the conveyance.

"It's been taken care of," Romy answered, climbing into the driver's seat. "Get in."

Aaron looked at Karsten, who shrugged. The passengers piled in and Karsten checked his weapon before climbing into his seat from the night before.

The journey into the rising sun was much less eventful than the previous night. Karsten allowed himself to doze for a portion of the leg, though never fully allowed himself to sleep. When the sun made dozing a struggle, he shook himself into full alertness. 

He looked at the pale woman in the driver's seat and noted her relative lack of apparent fatigue. "You must be used to long hours," he noted, watching the glowing blue veins pulse beneath her skin. 

"The longest," she acknowleged.

"You going to tell me what those things were last night?"

"Ruffians dressed in wolf skins?" Romy ventured, eyeing him wihtout turning her head.

"Bull."

"Oh? What do you think they were?"

"Werewolves."

She did turn to look at him, surprise evident in her face. "What?"

"Werewolves. Men who can turn into beasts. That what they were?"

"If I told you no, would you believe me?"

"Not especially. Perhaps if you gave me an alternative."

She sighed. "No, there are no alternatives. Those were werewolves, true enough. Eastern Ohio down to New Orleans and up into Georgia make a triangle of territory that they control. Spots of it out west, too. We should be in the clear. Only places they hold sway in Europe these days are in Western France and the Carpathians. Other parties made moves during the war between the Germans and the French and they lost most of their holdings there."

"Other parties? Goblins and whatnot?"

"No, not goblins," Romy answered, taking the suggestion seriously. "Witches mostly. Some black magicians. Does this bother you?"

"Not really. Saw some folk magic in the Appalachians. Figure magic is just progress that people forgot."

"That's not an inaccurate way to look at it, really. You've impressed me again, Mister Yeager."

"Aim to please."

They rolled along with only the rattling of the coach and the clapping hooves to fill the silence. 

"The witches going to give us trouble?"

"Yes. Probably. It's unlikely that they remain unaware of our mission and therefore will try to stop us."

"What is our mission?"

Romy grinned, smile not touching her cold eyes. "You were there when everyone was told. I will not embellish further. Our mission, yours and mine, is to keep those in the coach beneath us alive."

"I'd just like to know where we're going so I can know what we're looking at for security," he explained. "Whatever skullduggery your mistress has planned doesn't have anything to do with me. I know how to keep quiet."

"No doubt, but it might not be up to you," Romy explained, "Our enemies are varied and diverse. These witches, for instance, have the ability to drink your brain and discover things that you knew. The first thing a necromancer learns in scholomance is how to treat a fresh corpse with a poultice and it will answer any question put to it. Best if she's a little mysterious with us."

Karsten grinned. "I knew she hadn't told you anything."

Annoyance flashed through Romy and she shot Karsten an angry look. "What?"

"You have acted as if you were in the know from the moment we met you, but she hasn't explained any more to you than she did to us, has she? You've just been living in this world and can piece it all together better than us. I hit the mark?"

Romy laughed. "I know more than you do. I will share what I can. She has shared what she could with me. That's enough."

"Enough for you," Karsten grumbled. "I don't like the idea of getting killed by a thing I don't know about in support of a cause I've never even heard of."

Romy squinted up at the sky. "You may ask anything you like. I will answer, if I can."

"What else do these particular witches and necromancers do?"

"All manner of things. The specific witches we are likely to cross in Saxony is the Falkinzirkle. They are known for their birds, and their poisons. There is a necromancer operating in the area named Gnádís Ríkarðsdóttir. She is an accentric, likes to collect and mummify important men who die.The Falkinzirkle knows something of our mission, and will seek to stop us. Gnádís is likely to attempt to stop us on the principle of an old animosity between her and Madame Posat."

"And Miss Ríkarðsdóttir; she... learns things from the dead?"

"That's not all she can do. She has a wide variety of curses and black magic at her disposal. Her knowledge is the work of many lifetimes. Many of those 'important men' that she's collected would be entirely unknown to you, as you are not a scholar of the occult. She can wake them and pick their brains whenever desired."

"Curses," Karsten grumbled under his breath. He looked out over the passing Catskills and remarked, "The horses will need to rest soon."

"Not these horses," Romy answered. 

Karsten looked forward and cocked an eyebrow. To his eye, the horses looked sickly, malnourished and weak. They should be collapsing now. He bobbed his head to make sure that what he was seeing wasn't an illusion and turned back to her. "They don't look special. In fact, they look like they're about ready for pasture."

"They died years ago," Romy answered. "You didn't find it strange that a pair of stagecoach horses weren't at all gunshy and barely reacted to monsters attacking us?"

Karsten opened his mouth, then closed it again. She was absolutely correct. He looked again. The horses hadn't eaten, were awake when they'd been put away and had been awake when they pulled them out of the stable again. He hadn't even seen them soil the road since the journey began. "I'll be... that's a neat trick. Takes beating a dead horse to a strange place, though."

"This is where I would usually lecture you about how there are things in the world that men once knew but time had all but forgotten, that you can learn things if you look hard enough, but I believe that you summed it up as well as I've ever heard: Magic is just progress that people forgot."

Inside the coach, Inola sat by the window. Hers was the only curtain that wasn't shut tight, and she was the only one awake. She watched the Catskills rattle by and made a few mental notes on how far they'd come, impressed by their speed. The cartographer sketched a landscape in chalk. It wasn't any particular part of their journey, but rather the general impression of their journey thus far. The rolling hills were covered in black roses, and despite the beauty of the scene there were suggestions of monstrous things in the shadows.

Inola pondered this last, as it had been something of an accident. Her mind had wandered and her hands had done the ominous shadings. She slipped her artbook into her bag and drew out her atlas. She flipped through the loose leaf papers, alternatingly smiling and cringing at her own hand. Fjords had always given her the most trouble, she always got distracted by the realization that either someone had traveled miles and miles of miniature feathered peninsulas just for the purposes of mapmaking, or someone had simply said 'here there be fjords' and just made them up. The first seemed pointless for actual navigation and the second one seemed... dishonest somehow. Neither seemed to make much sense for her.

She traced the maps for a while for the sake of practice, then swapped her books out again and began drawing Dupont as he slept. She was just shading a bit by his ear when he and Palmer both jerked awake and upright at the same time with cries of fright. Palmer had a knife in his hand, which he held threateningly in front of him to ward off some imaginary foe.

Inola let out a breath that would have been a scream of her own had it escaped her paralyzed lungs and leaned back. "Bad dreams?" she asked.

"I swear I heard-" Dupont started, trailing off only for Palmer to finish his sentence.

"The howling."

"I didn't hear anything," Inola told them, with a pit forming in her stomach. There was something in their look, something about how they both jerked at the same moment rather than one setting the other off, that made her feel as though she'd missed something.

"It was the same," Dupont whispered, trying to catch his breath. "Those... ruffians that attacked us made that noise."

"Ruffians?" Inola asked, confused. "You mean beasts..."

"Do I?" Dupont asked, uncertainly. "I don't know, it's like a nightmare. I try to remember, but I see men wearing wolfskins."

"Men couldn't do what those things did," Palmer groaned, searching for his gin. He found only an empty bottle, which he discarded angrily out the window. "All I can remember is wolves. Big ones. But I know that's wrong, because one of them opened that door. Wolves can't handle a latch, and they'd have done for the horses long before coming after us."

"What do you remember, Miss Gibson?" Aaron inquired.

"I remember..." Inola hesitated. What did she remember? "I remember their eyes," she decided. "They glowed. It wasn't just light reflection like a dog or cat, the eyes glowed red. And there were hands, but the hands had claws. They weren't long fingernails, either. They were claws, like a dog's but sharper. And a... scar. Couldn't see it on the dog face but when it wore a man's face it had a little puckered scar like a bullet wound on its forehead."

There was silence, and then the coach slowed. When it stopped, voices could be heard outside. Inola was the first to open the door a crack and look out. There were men on the road. They wore smiles and guns, though the guns were far more genuine. They were talking to Karsten.

"You folks traveling East?" the biggest man with the biggest smile and smallest gun asked.

"Is there a problem with the road up ahead?" Karsten's words were more clipped than usual. He made no secret of his dislike for these men.

"Lots of problems, stranger. Main problem is what's at the end of your road."

"What's that?"

"Why don't you tell us, maybe we're wrong and you get to go on your way."

Karsten laughed, but it was Romy who answered, "Matrimony?"

That brought Karsten up short, and the big man frowned. "What?"

Inola leaned a little further out, surprised to see Romy wrapped in scarves. Very little of her was visible. Havek clarified, "My fiancee and I are going to New York to get married." 

The laugh that was the man's response was strangely bestial. "You sound so convincing! Have you tried theater?"

The scene was suddenly very tense. Inola could feel the impending violence of it. Karsten broke the pause, "What would it take to get you to let us through?"

"A little honesty would be nice."

"Fine. We're going to New York to sail all the way across the ocean. Happy?"

"In service to that thing, Pusat?" As the menace increased in his voice, his Missouri drawl became thicker.

Now it was Romy who laughed. "Who are you to talk about 'things' to us?"

"Careful," the big man warned, "You don't want to get into a 'no witnesses' sort of situation, do you?"

Inola gasped as the wind picked up and the man's long, greasy hair swayed in the breeze. The movement was just enough to reveal a puckered scar, much like a bullet wound.