Chapter Thirty-One
Douglas kicked a broken basket, sending moldy potatoes rolling across the dirt floor.
Stay here, she’d said. Do not go outside.
Do not be seen. Douglas kicked another basket, his foot going through the weave.
Fuuuck. He shook his foot, flinging the broken basket across the room.
Damn Cordelia. And damn Isobella. He didn’t want to stay in this filthy excuse for a house in the slum pit of Langeais.
In the tenth fucking century. Not when Cordelia was swanning it up in swanky digs in her fancy clothes.
This wasn’t what he’d signed up for. He’d signed up for Irena King and his place in the takeover of the San Francisco Bay coven.
He eyed the soiled covers on the cots. Didier didn’t even have a decent fucking bed.
Not that he could sleep here, with the skitter of mice in the roof thatching a constant irritation.
All day, all night. It grated on his nerves, made him all twitchy.
Were they mice or rats? Some of them were pretty fucking big.
Hadn’t he read somewhere that rats had been responsible for the plague?
His skin crawled. He would end up with some incurable disease if he stayed any longer.
He had to get out of here. Douglas strode toward the door.
Out of this fucking century. Right now. He wasn’t waiting for Didier’s return.
His hand on the wooden bar that constituted a doorknob in this pitiful excuse for a house, he stopped.
He couldn’t leave. Not because Cordelia had told him not to.
Though the thought of crossing her made him break out in a sweat.
No, he couldn’t leave because he didn’t have the fucking spell.
Only Cordelia had that. If she ever left her grimoire untended, she would guard it with more wards than there were security systems at Fort Knox. Except…
Isobella.
Dear old Isobella. His ex-fiancée. She knew the spell.
Would have memorized it, because it was her only way home.
Douglas smirked. She was his ticket out of this cesspit.
He flung open the door and stared out at the grubby streets with their rickety huts.
According to Didier, after Isobella and her twin rescuers had disappeared right in front of their eyes, she’d wound up at some keep owned by the d’Louncrais.
All he needed to do was find her and snatch her away from the Langeais wolves.
Isobella wouldn’t put up much of a fight.
She never had. Too soft. Too weak. Why they had sent her on this mission was beyond him.
She didn’t have it in her to do what needed to be done.
Lord knew he’d treated her like dirt, and she’d still come back for more.
Because she’d lurved him. Pfft. He’d played her so easily.
Like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter.
Taking her away from the Langeais wolves wouldn’t be that simple.
Not when the werewolves had a magic of their own.
It wouldn’t stop him, though. No way in hell was he staying here.
He glanced back through the door at the cot with its lumpy straw mattress.
Douglas wouldn’t put it past Cordelia to fucking leave him here.
After all, she’d done exactly that to her son.
Brought him back here when he was a sixteen-year-old pimply kid.
Whipped him away from his Atari and his pin-ups of some actress named Farrah Fawcett and dumped him at the bottom of the peasant heap in a world without sanitation or supermarkets.
Douglas stepped out into the street and grabbed the beggar boy walking past. He needed a horse, and he needed information. No way was he going to become the next Didier.
* * * *
Didier moved through the forest with a stealth most humans did not possess.
Working for the d’Louncrais for all those years had been beneficial after all, despite what his mother had said.
Up ahead he caught a glimpse of deep scarlet, like the blood that forever followed in his mother’s wake, as she skirted a prickly bush.
Didier crept closer, peering around the bush.
She disappeared into a hut, all but half of one wall reclaimed by the forest.
His mother was hiding out here? On any other day, he might have walked past it and never known it was there.
No grand house. No servants to wait on her.
He sneered. My, oh my, how the mighty have fallen.
She could dress in her fine clothes and put on airs and graces, but at heart she was nothing more than a peasant. No better than him.
He scanned the area until he found a suitable tree to hide in, clambering up its trunk and finding a perch with a clear view of the ramshackle cottage.
She would be alert for magic, so he had chosen not to use any.
Not yet. He had had over four decades to practice since she had abandoned him in this wretched time, dooming him to a life of servitude.
He was a pawn to her. Someone to command, set to watch over her creations.
To report back to her. Watch the d’Louncrais.
Learn everything you can. To do her dirty work.
Kill Sabine. Dump her body in a ravine. That he was her son meant nothing.
Not anymore.
He had learned a thing or two in her long absences.
Found his own way, made his own plans. Knowledge was power, and he had used it to survive.
It would be his salvation. For he knew if his mother was here, so was her grimoire.
And in her book was the spell. The one that would allow him to move through time.
Like she did. He would find it, and he would use it. Then he would leave this place forever.
He had dreamed of it. Hungered for it. He would have it.
Electricity, running water, television, women in short skirts with their legs bare.
His memories of the century she had ripped him away from had faded, but his desire to return there had not.
Now she was here again, determined to destroy that which she had created.
She always brought her grimoire. He had been practicing his spells, waiting for her return.
This time he would find it, and he would steal it from her.
He had been sitting in the tree for better part of the day when the cottage door creaked open.
With her fur cloak wrapped around her shoulders, she passed right by him, none the wiser he was hiding up a tree but a few yards from the trail.
Didier smirked. She might be a powerful witch, but she was not all seeing, all knowing.
Those visions of hers were vague at best, and she was not the only one capable of being cunning. He was, after all, his mother’s son.
Didier waited. Then waited some more. The afternoon sun was dipping low when he climbed down from the tree. Still, he remained cautious. It was not wise to underestimate his mother.
Nothing. No movement, no sound but the birds in the trees.
He approached the cottage, every muscle in his body tense, poised to run.
Had she known he was there all along? Was this a trap?
He paused, bare steps away from the door.
It was possible. His heart beat a rapid rhythm.
Despite the cool afternoon air, sweat broke out on his brow.
It was too late to back out now. If she were here, if she had retraced her steps and snuck up on him from behind, he was already doomed.
Or the hut could be empty. He could fling open the door and find nothing more than rotting and broken furniture.
Didier took a cautious step forward. The hum of her ward tingled across his senses—discordant and prickly. He almost crowed. She would not have warded an empty hut.
He took another step, fighting against the power of her magic, the chill of it that seeped into his bones. Anyone else would make the sign of the cross, then scurry away. Not him. Not with the prize inside he itched to lay his hands on. He would break through it.
She would know her ward was broken, but when she returned her grimoire would be gone. So would he. She could search for him, hunt him through the centuries, but if his memory of the future did not lie, he would be one man in a sea of people. He would disappear amongst the masses.
Didier steeled himself against the pain he knew would come, then pushed through his mother’s ward.