Chapter Thirty-Three
Aubert’s sword hand itched with a need to cut, thrust and disembowel something.
No more than a score of footsteps away was the man who had hurt their mate.
He had betrayed her, and he was the reason for her imprisonment beneath the chapel.
How close they had come to losing her was too much for him to contemplate.
Aubert eyed the slovenly hut. He could not get to Faucher, but he would see Douglas paid for his transgressions.
That he was working with their enemies one more reason to want him dead.
But Aubert, tucked away in a filthy alley with Isobella by his side, waited for Remi.
She was nervous. As fixated as he on Didier’s miserable abode, her pulse rapid at the base of her throat.
Aubert slipped his hand in hers again. He would give his favorite blade to have her safe back at the keep with the other women, but he understood the reasoning behind her presence.
He would see her safe. They would see her safe.
Her hand was small and soft in his, and he ran his calloused thumb across her skin.
She rewarded him with a skip in the beat of her heart.
When they returned to the keep, they would show her what it really meant to be theirs.
Shut themselves in her bedchamber and not let her out until she was claimed and bitten, boneless and satiated and thoroughly theirs.
They would give her more than a miserly moment of pleasure in, of all places, the spartan and cheerless training room with the memories of past turnings seeping from the walls.
A soft step alerted him to the other presence creeping up behind them. Remi had returned.
Remi pushed past them and poked his head out of the alley, checking the street both ways. “Cordelia is not here, but she was. This morn. They tried to follow her, but they lost her in the crowd.”
“Probably witchcraft,” whispered Isobella.
“Right now, Didier is here all alone.”
“No Douglas?” Edmond made no effort to hide his disappointment.
“No. He left and he was in an awful hurry, looking for a horse and directions to the d’Louncrais keep. Our friend kindly gave him directions.” Remi’s grin was smug. “Not the ones he was looking for.”
Aubert tightened his grip on his sword, eager to storm the cottage. “Coin does not buy friends.”
“No, but it buys food and a warm coat and a place in someone’s stable for the night.” Remi’s eyes no longer held the hint of the mischievous and audacious boy they had caught picking Edmond’s purse. “And as long as there is more coming, it does buy loyalty.”
D’Artagnon had drawn his sword, and there was a feral eagerness in his eyes. “Shall we take care of Didier before Douglas returns?” He stepped out of the alleyway.
“Wait,” said Remi. “There is something else. When Cordelia left this morn, Didier followed her.”
Edmond’s eyebrows shot up. “Followed her as in snuck along behind her as though he did not wish her to know she was being followed?”
Remi nodded. “Yes.”
“But…” D’Artagnon frowned. “She is his mother, and they are working together.”
Remi shrugged. “Perhaps she should have paid him. Family ties do not always make for lifelong commitments.”
There was something in the slump of Remi’s shoulders that gave Aubert pause.
He and Edmond had always had each other.
Even when there was Sabine, he had never doubted that in all else his brother would be there for him.
And he had his pack. As long as he remained one of the Langeais wolves, he would always have family.
Something told him there was more to Remi’s interest in becoming a werewolf than it appeared.
“The thing is,” said Remi, taking them all in, “when Didier returned, he returned alone. What is more, he did not look well.”
“What do you mean?” asked D’Artagnon.
“He was coughing up blood.” Remi screwed up his face. “And it was leaking from his ears. And his nose and his mouth.”
Some sort of illness? A disease?
“And he was redder than a stonemason’s face on a hot summer’s day.”
“Cordelia.” D’Artagnon spun on his heel and bounded across the street. Edmond was not far behind him.
Aubert turned to Isobella and Remi. “Stay close, but wait outside until we know it is safe.” He dashed across the street, with Isobella and Remi on his heels. Who knew what they would find.
D’Artagnon flung the door open and was inside before they could stop him, Edmond trailing behind him. Aubert, his sword ready, ducked his head and slipped through after him.
A single tallow candle flickered on the table, casting eerie shadows across crumbling walls and dilapidated furniture.
Mice rustled in the sagging roof and through baskets of shriveled vegetables, but it was the hum of insects swarming over the figure on the cot like a living cloud that drew all of them.
Remi’s spy was right.
Aubert scrunched up his nose. The stench of rotten food, sweat and stale urine was almost unbearable, but it did not mask the smell of death. Or of blood. There was a lot of blood. Didier had bled from every orifice. It stained his clothes, the straw mattress and the dirt floor.
D’Artagnon waved his sword at the swarm of flies and they shifted, giving them a clear look at Didier.
His eyes were wide, his mouth open in a silent scream and his body, curled up in a ball, was taut not with death, but with agony, and his skin was red and puffy.
Didier’s death had not been quick, nor painless.
D’Artagnon stood beside the cot, staring at the body as flies settled once again on the gruesome offering.
“She boiled him alive from the inside out.”
It was a worse death than D’Artagnon would have granted him, but Aubert could not find it in himself to sympathize. Not after what Didier had done to Constance.
D’Artagnon closed his eye, his sigh coming from deep within his soul. “It seems fate does not want to grant me any vengeance.”
Lance had almost killed D’Artagnon. Had forced him to flee and left him scarred. Lance still lived, having escaped his due. Now Didier dying had stolen D’Artagnon’s chance to right this wrong.
Aubert squeezed D’Artagnon’s good shoulder. “I am sorry.”
“Perhaps it is best this way.” D’Artagnon sheathed his sword. “Despite what he did, he was Constance’s father.”
“Might have been awkward had you killed him,” agreed Edmond.
Would it be the same if they killed Douglas?
Isobella might be a werewolf now, but she had not been for long, and she had come from a different time.
A more advanced one. For all he knew, they dealt with such things differently in the twenty-first century.
Would she understand their need to eliminate all threats to her safety? To exact vengeance on her behalf?
“He is dead.” D’Artagnon stopped in the doorway. “That gives me some satisfaction.” D’Artagnon stepped out into the night.
“Merde.” Remi stood in the doorway, a mix of horror and grim fascination on his face. “Cordelia did that?”
“Did what?” asked Isobella, filing in after him. She halted, her attention fixed on the gruesome sight on the cot. She paled, and her body shook.
Edmond wrapped his arms around her and turned her away. “Do not look. It is not a pleasant sight.”
“Is he…?”
“Dead?” Aubert grabbed a worn blanket and tossed it over the body, the cloud of buzzing insects lifting, then settling back down again. “Yes.”
“Come.” Edmond turned her toward the door. “We should leave. Get you out of here before Douglas returns.”
“But we came here to…deal with Douglas, too.”
He met his brother’s gaze. That pause. It held weight.
Isobella pulled out of Edmond’s arms. “And there might be something here, some clue, that could help us locate Cordelia or…” She strode to a lopsided shelf and started pushing things aside, looking behind them, in them, keeping her back to the body on the bed. “Or help us fight her.”
Were her movements too jerky? Was her spine too stiff? Did she imagine Douglas meeting the same fate as Didier?
His brother shrugged, but Aubert sensed his brother’s concern.
“Isobella is right. We should take the opportunity to look while we are here.” Edmond tipped over a basket and shriveled potatoes rolled across the dirt floor. He tossed it aside and picked up another one. “We might not get another chance.”
Remi’s eyes brightened, and he rubbed his hands together.
“You never know what we might find.” He picked up a coat with his fingertips, held up the torn and filthy garment.
“Though I have seen beggars that live better than this guy.” He grimaced and dropped the coat to the floor.
“I think I will keep watch outside with D’Artagnon. ” He disappeared out of the door.
Aubert eyed Isobella. Her body screamed, ‘do not touch me.’ He set his sword down on the table lest he should need it in a hurry, sidestepped a bloodstained patch of dirt and lifted the lid of a chest. Clothes.
None were in any better state than the coat Remi had discarded.
He rifled through them. Nothing. Aubert tossed the blankets off a second cot, marginally cleaner, and checked under the straw mattress.
He opened the sack he found under it. Boots the likes he had never seen before, breeches and a tunic made of a soft material and a small, flat rectangle object.
Things from the twenty-first century? Belonging to Douglas?
He held up the rectangle object. “Do you know what this is, Isobella?”
She spun around, flinching when her gaze fell on Didier, quickly refocusing on what he held in his hand.
“Oh, that must be Douglas’ phone. I wonder…
” She took it from him and pressed something on the side of it.
“Shame.” She handed it back to him. “It’s no use to us now.
His battery’s flat. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get into it, anyway.
I might have guessed his password, but I think Douglas used biometrics to lock it. ”
Aubert had no clue what anything she had said meant, except that whatever it was could not help them.
He shoved it back in the sack, and they kept looking.
He lifted the blanket he had thrown over Didier.
Again the insects stirred. He batted them away so he could get a better look.
No obvious bulges beneath his clothes. His attention snagged on something.
A shape tucked behind the cot. He leaned over and extracted it.
A book. Leather-bound. Most of the bloodstains on its cover were old and faded.
Some were fresh. From Didier? He flicked it open and thumbed through the pages.
More bloodstains and writing. Not Latin.
Not Franceis. Not any language Aubert was familiar with.
Yet, it reminded him of the big book Constance had had back at the d’Louncrais keep.
Edmond joined him, looking over his shoulder. “What have you found?”
“I am not sure. A book of spells?”
Isobella stilled, then pulled her hands free of the basket she was sorting. “A book of spells? A grimoire? Don’t touch it! Don’t open it!”
They both stared at her, stunned by her vehemence.
Aubert shrugged. “I already have.”
Isobella’s face paled. “Are you all right? Do you feel any pain? Do you feel ill, dizzy, nauseated?”
Aubert shook his head. “No, why?” He held the book out to her.
Before she took it, she unpinned her headscarf and wrapped it around her hands. “That’s odd. It should’ve had a ward protecting it. Something to prevent you from opening it.” She glanced at the body on the cot. “Maybe it did.”
She eased the cover open then paused, holding her breath.
When nothing happened, she flipped over a page, then another and another.
Faster and faster, past pages and pages of spells until she was at the back of the book.
At the last page. She looked up at him then, a beatific smile spreading across her face.
“Do you know what you’ve found, Aubert? This”—she snapped the book shut—“this is the grimoire with the time-travel spell in it. The one I used to get here.”