Title:  The Hour of the Wolf (1/10)

Author:  Emma

Characters: Jack Harkness, Ianto Jones, Torchwood Three team and their offspring

Rating: R

Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?

Spoilers: None. This takes place in my Homecoming AU, four years or so after The Eye of Neith.

Summary: Something is happening in St. Catherine’s Glen, and whatever it is will change the Cooper-Williams family forever…

 

            The monastery was built of white-washed stone. The wall surrounding it was more of a visual barrier than a physical one, ending at around waist-level and topped with ornamental iron in a floral motif. Inside the tiny chapel, cheerful murals portrayed scenes from the life of Saint Francis. The guest house was spotlessly clean. Iron cots were made up with thick pillows and warm blankets, and the bath water was plentiful and stinging hot. Lunch had consisted of bowls of delicious sausage and lentil stew and big loaves of warm chewy bread.

 

            Pryce Cooper-Williams was getting a really bad feeling about it all.

 

            He could tell Yan was uncomfortable too. In a family of theatrical extroverts, his twin was odd-man-out: cool and self-contained, Yan seldom gave anything away. Right now, sprawling on one of the stone benches that marked the boundaries of the kitchen garden, teasing Merry, laughing at something Don had said, he seemed the dictionary definition of relaxation. Only someone who had shared everything with Yan from the cradle – and that limited the pool to Pryce and Addie – would be able to read the little signals of tension.

 

            The trip to Scotland had been Jonathan Conway’s idea. Pryce, Yan, and Addie had befriended Meredith Conway on their first day of junior school. It had been Addie who had turned the god-awful Meredith into Merry, claiming the small, pale boy looked the character in the Lord of the Rings films. The four of them did everything together until Merry turned fourteen, when Mr. Conway’s business had taken the whole family to Spain for a few years. While visiting Africa on holiday the whole family had caught some kind of virus; Mrs. Conway had died, and Merry and his little sister Leah had come close. After they recovered, Mr. Conway moved them back to Cardiff, and the whole group had picked up where they’d left off.

 

            For Merry’s nineteenth birthday Mr. Conway arranged to send his son and his two best friends of the male variety on a hiking trip to Scotland. Pryce suspected Merry would have preferred a weekend in London with Addie, but he had accepted his Tad’s gift with his usual good humor. They were joined by Don Riddell, the son of one of Mr. Conway’s business associates, who sang in the same choir as Merry and Yan.

 

            Mr. Conway had hired James Booth to, as he put it, “ride herd on you lot”. The man was a fucking stereotype – tall, brawny, with wild curly red hair and a Scottish accent you couldn’t cut with a claymore – but he knew all the best places to camp and could identify every species of tree, bush, flower, bird, fish, and mammal they came across. They’d had a great time hiking from Edinburgh through the hills south of the Dee Valley and up into Royal Deeside.

 

            Right about the time they reached Kincardine O’Neill, they all noticed Merry had started to look pale and tired. Pryce had assumed they would stop at the village, which had a couple of nice bed-and-breakfasts and a clinic, but Booth had decided to push on to a local monastery where the monks were expert herbalists and often served as medics for the farming people around them. Which may well have all been gospel truth, but it was still the monastery at St. Catherine’s Glen, and that was enough to give Pryce and Yan the heebie-jeebies.

 

            They weren’t supposed to know what their mother and her friends, their adoptive uncles and aunts, did for a living, so of course they knew all about Torchwood by the time they were twelve. Torchwood Three security systems were tough, but Torchwood One could be a little careless and Torchwood Two was a joke. Well, to be fair, they did keep out most hackers, but Adeola Milligan-Jones wasn’t just any hacker, and Yan could read encrypted data like Pryce could read English and Gaelic. They knew all about Queen Victoria’s encounter with the monks of St. Catherine’s Glen and their werewolf.

 

            As far as Pryce had been able to discover, this bunch was relatively new. After the Doctor killed the werewolf, the remaining monks had disappeared. The monastery had stood empty until about ten years before, when the Brethren of the Order of St. Francis had leased it from the Durwood estate. They had rebuilt the place and made themselves well known and liked in the area. If they seemed to put a little too much emphasis on the story of St. Francis and the wolf, well, Pryce was willing to concede that maybe it was just a little Torchwood prejudice.

 

            Until Yan noticed the mistletoe.

 

            It was everywhere. The decorative iron showed mistletoe at every stage of growth. The young apple trees in the orchard were festooned with it, as was the old oak towering over the far end of the garden. The monk in charge of the infirmary used both mistletoe oil and mistletoe tea in his concoctions. Yan swore that the oil was rubbed into windowsills and door frames.

 

            And then there was Booth.

 

            He had told them he’d met the monks when they settled in the area and he’d needed their permission to camp on monastery lands. That seemed to be corroborated by comments they had heard from some of the locals of Kinkardine. They had treated Booth like one of their own, and some of the older ones mentioned Booth’s family farm, which, Pryce gathered, was run by Booth’s sister and her husband.

 

            Once they had arrived at St. Catherine’s Glen, though, their hiking guide was transformed into someone totally different. He attended all the services, even the night-time ones. He spent most of his time with Father Robert, the abbot, or with Brother Isaiah, the herbalist. They kept dosing Merry with disgusting stuff, or rubbing his back and chest with even more disgusting stuff. Once Pryce had overheard Brother Isaiah call Booth Brother Herald, as in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

 

            The man who had led the monks during their encounter with the Doctor had been called Father Angelo.

 

            And now Brother Isaiah and Father Robert had decided that Merry was much better and needed fresh air and exercise.  Booth had told them they would be camping out in the glen, near the burn that separated the monastery lands from those of the nearby manor house – which he very carefully did not call by its proper name.

 

            Time to call in reinforcements.

 

            Pryce knew his uncle Jack would not be happy to find out his adoptive nephews and nieces, down to ten-year-old Toshi and nine-year-old Fran, were all aware of what Torchwood really did. On the other hand, the Captain was a pragmatic man; stomping on whatever was happening at St. Catherine’s Glen would take priority over reading them the riot act. Pryce figured by the time it was all over the leader of Torchwood would have calmed down… a little. If worse came to worse, Pryce could sic Uncle Ianto on him.

 

            The problem was getting the information to Uncle Jack without giving themselves away. The family cover story – that Gwen Cooper-Williams was a senior officer in a major anti-terrorist unit – had held up very well over the years, but Merry knew about Torchwood. Pryce had to assume the worst case scenario was that Merry had spilled the beans for some reason and they were already hostages, but their captors didn’t want to show their hand just yet. On the other hand, maybe they were there purely by chance; the monks’ obsession with Merry seemed to indicate that whatever was happening centered on him. Either way, it wasn’t likely they would be allowed to scream for help.

 

            There were things, though, that even Merry didn’t know about, and that gave Pryce and Yan an ace in the hole.

 

            “Hey, Merry,” he said as if the idea had just occurred to him, “maybe we should give Addie a call. She was pretty pissed off at you for not inviting her along.”

 

            “Yeah.You’d think she’d be more reasonable, what with my Dad and his rules.” Merry said forlornly. “No cell phone reception for miles, though.”

           

            “The monastery has Skype. Brother Isaiah was just telling me yesterday that he orders special ingredients from London.”

 

            “I’d forgotten that.” Merry’s smile could be used to power up a small city. “Let’s go ask him.”