Page 40 of Ashwood (Wallflowers and Demons #1)

RAVENOUS THINGS

KATHERINE

S tepping down from the carriage, I immediately taste ash on my tongue.

It dances through the air. The wind swirls it.

Ahead of me, the silhouettes of Windermere lie in ruin.

Timber sticks out from collapsed roofs, fences are crushed and snapped.

Smoke carries on the breeze, drifting from the town centre.

Dorian stands beside me, silent. I grip the rail until my knuckles ache. Blood—my blood—throbs behind my eyes. I can’t let fear show. For his sake. For theirs.

“Dorian,” I whisper, “we are…too late.”

He stares at the ruined chapel spire collapsed sideways into the square.

Together, we climb down. Each footstep crunches on rubble and bone—animal remnants, human, I can’t tell. I swallow hard and clamp a hand over my mouth, though it does little to block the stench.

Dorian grips my hand in mine, pulling me back and through the empty streets filled with rubble.

“God,” I breathe. “They were butchered…”

I see my reflection in dried blood through a window—white-faced, ragged, stunned. Dorian’s hand hovers on my shoulder.

We hear an agonised cry.

“Hello, is someone out there?”

My brows furrow as Dorian glances at me.

“You heard that?”

“Dorian,” I say and release his hand. I race toward the sound. “There are survivors! Quickly!”

We hurry on, passing beside collapsing barns and carts still upturned in the dust. Everywhere death is revealed in dried pools, scattered limbs and shattered wheel spokes.

Eventually, we come upon the slaughterhouse made of broken planks, hanging hooks and drips of dark red.

I step over a coarse leather apron soaked through.

My stomach churns; I swallow hard.

“This town smells of old piss and worse,” Wexmoore announces cheerfully, to no one in particular. “Quite a fitting place for death.”

I shake my head at the thought.

A group of four survivors stand in a corner of a half-collapsed building. They are pale, clutching small knives and a few pistols. They stand frozen, their heads pitted with despair.

A woman steps forward.

“We are saved! Miss Eliza Tremaine at your service,” she offers a gloved hand. “This is the local blacksmith, Caleb.” She points to the young lad. “The butcher’s son, Benjamin, and this poor soul, we only found him wandering moments earlier, his name is Gregory, a local fisherman’s son.”

She watches the group of Bow Street runners behind me. “Thank you,” her voice wavers as tears streak down her cheeks, “for coming. We didn’t think anyone would.”

“Please, come with us,” I offer her an arm and she takes it. “We will find you something warm, perhaps some food and water.”

“You are so kind my lady, though I must admit I have never seen you in Ashwood before.”

“I am Katherine Storm, the new Duchess of Ashwood.”

Her eyes widen and she stops suddenly, in a flurry to curtsy. “Your Grace! Oh-oh-my deepest apologies, I did not know!”

“Think nothing of it,” I shrug.

It is then, a scout returns.

We stop to wait as he moves along with the convoy while we move underneath a half- crushed building to rest and plan.

“What did you find?” Gabriel asks.

“My Lord,” he says, out of breath but keeps his horse steady as he it trots on the spot, “we have reports. Our scouts located nine giants resting west of here. One is awake—but the rest are slumbering.” He turns his horse as more scouts arrive.

“The giants bore heavy wounds. Some with missing limbs. It seems the town didn’t die only screaming. They fought back.”

Wexmoore sits on a crate and Dorian takes the spot beside him.

“Is it possible there’s some rhyme to their madness?” Gabriel offers.

Thinking of Dorian’s severe transformations, I stand in my position.

“There must be a pattern. Perhaps each time a giant feeds or endures sustained damage, it collapses into a catatonic slumber. It sleeps to recover—like The Duke when he is battered and broken. They are…healing.” I clench my fists.

“This is it. It’s our opening. The town of Windermere has given us that. ”

All the men turn and face me.

“We lure the beast away,” I continue. “And we kill it, meanwhile learn what we can so we can destroy its brothers. We find its weakness. It is easier than facing all nine at once.”

Eyes on the runners shift to me.

The men glance at each other and I sip cold air through clenched teeth. “ They are not gods. They are but flesh and bone, albeit horrific flesh and bone.”

With a hand over my right hip, I press on. “If we isolate one, we draw it away, kill it, learn from it. It is not all. It is but one.”

Then Gabriel nods. “It may work. As long as we do not alert his friends.“

Dorian finally speaks. “Her Grace is right. The giants are not far from Ashwood. Now is our chance to destroy them. If they move before us, they could devastate Ashwood City by morning.”

Gabriel peers ahead, towards the dark horizon. His attention strays to Dorian briefly. Then back to me.

“This had best work or I admit, I will be furious.”

Dorian exhales. “I have a secondary plan for that.”

Gabriel raises a brow. “You do?”

I glance at Dorian again. His face is set, hard as steel. I step forward and place a hand on his arm.

“I trust your brilliance,” I say softly. “Whatever it is, it will work.”

His fingers tighten around mine. “Tonight, it must.”

Gabriel issues orders to the Bow Street Runners.

“Snipers to the ridgeline,” he says. “Rope teams east and south flanks. Trappers—we’ve a giant to catch.”

He points at an improvised map written in chalk on the courthouse steps. Dorian’s diagram from yesterday’s meeting. I see where he’s marking—trails into the forest, high ground, clearings, chokepoints set for the trap.

I watch the runners move—eager, grim, professional. Their rifles and ropes, pulleys and oil torches clatter across wagons as they arrange them like soldiers loading into formation.

I glance at Dorian who sits perched on a crate beside me.

He plans inside his notebook, quill scratching.

His focus is fierce, but I know the nights of shattered sleep he’s endured after each violent transformation.

Bone-breaking, muscle-rending, each time removing him for hours to sleep off the madness.

My stomach clenches.

Can men truly outwit beings that walk eighteen feet tall?

DORIAN

Around the slaughterhouse, a dozen hands work quickly, their faces hidden behind coarse cloth masks tied tight over their noses and mouths. Carcasses hang on meat hooks — pigs gutted clean, their stiff hides peeled back with practised brutality.

The runners smile. Their eyes reflect hope and it is catching. They spread to their positions with decisive purpose. Final preparations begin: torches lit, nets repositioned, lines secured.

We collected the flowers from the town's edge. It is a sign of how fast the poison is spreading. The poisonous flowers from the forest—beautiful, deadly—are scattered across the wooden tables. The Daphne of Winter. Pink, gentle….and entirely poisonous and cursed.

We will make them ingest too much, burn their insides before they collapse into the fires of internal Hades.

Underneath the mask, Katherine’s eyes burn, watering as she tears open the stiff hides of the pig carcasses.

It is a nasty job. Inside, she carefully stuffed handfuls of the toxic blossoms, each petal soaked with hallucinogenic venom.

The sickly sweet scent fills the air, threatening to choke even through the masks.

To her right, Eliza helps, stuffing fistfuls directly into a pig’s belly.

“We all wear these for a reason,” Katherine reminds them. “One whiff too deep, and this whole plan dies before it begins, for we will all go mad.”

The survivors are grim and work in silence, stabbing thick needles through flesh to sew the carcasses shut. The risk is clear: they handle death itself.

Caleb and Benjamin oversee the construction of snares, nets, and heavy ropes, marking the trap site—an old mill capable of holding one giant.

“We will know soon enough if fire kills it,” Caleb says. “And I for one, cannot wait to see this nightmare end.”

There is no other alternative. I am bait and executioner, and only death waits.

I am smaller than they are.

Weaker.

They’ll smell me first—sense the blood that stains my name. They will lock me inside with the creature, and Katherine will stab me, again.

Time ticks forward and around the old slaughterhouse, a dozen hands move in grim synchrony, faces obscured behind coarse cloth masks, each tied tight over the mouth and nose.

This isn’t just war.

I-I don’t know what in God’s name it is.

Katherine, her face half-shadowed by her bonnet and mask, works with intensity. Her fingers stain further with crimson red as she shoves fistfuls of blossoms into the open belly of a swine.

Sweat pearls her brow and between the valley of her breasts. A noblewoman shovelling blood and guts — I am the worst husband on Earth.

The workers nod mutely. They know. We are packing rot with poison, then sending it to march into the mouth of monsters.

Grief clings to our survivors who had to step over their neighbours’ limbs to see another sunrise. They move in silence. For them, each knot and flower is a deliberate bullet meant to harm.

Now, it’s their turn.

Katherine looks up at me for the briefest moment.

She doesn’t need to say it twice.

We’re not just poisoning giants.

It is aimed at you as well….

Should I transform, lose control, and feed — this will be my execution. I will die from the slow suffocation of blood and toxin scalding through my marrow.

I have made peace with that.

Gabriel appears at the door with a curt nod. “They’re ready.”

The heavy, flower-stuffed carcasses are then loaded onto the trolley. The wheel groans beneath the weight of meat, and iron whips against cobblestone in loud dings. One by one, the carts roll into place, pushed by pale, sweating men — the last of Windermere’s defenders and the Bow Street Runners.