Chapter 16
I slept hard. Didn’t expect to, not after everything that happened last night, but I suppose my body overruled my brain and forced it to shut down. I wash up and dress quickly, both reluctant and eager to see my husband again and talk more about our situation.
Quietly I slip into the hall and hurry to the nearest guest room. He isn’t there, nor is he in any of the other spare rooms. Did he sleep downstairs? Did he leave me again? If he turned coward and fled the house to avoid further discussion, I swear I’m going to kill him.
I run down the stairs, no longer trying to be quiet. Daylight seeps between the cracks of the curtains, then gushes in as I run from room to room, pushing the drapes open wide. No Beresford anywhere.
Maybe he woke up early and was hungry. Maybe he’s fixing breakfast.
I head for the kitchen, surprised to find the door closed when I reach it. We never close the kitchen door.
I don’t smell any food cooking, nor do I hear the sound of pans or pots. Cautiously, I push the door open.
There’s a skeleton on the kitchen table. Big white bones and a skull, sitting on patches of drying blood.
Beside the table, lying on bloodstained tiles, is my husband, naked and sound asleep. His blue hair and his beard are saturated with blood, and his hands are gloved in dark red gore. Scarlet streaks mark his chest, his thighs, even his cock. His stomach is oddly distended.
Considering what I learned about his kind last night, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what he was up to. He ate the original Beresford. Physically ate him, until only bare bones were left.
Eating human flesh goes against his personal code. But he did it last night, and now Beresford’s form belongs to him permanently.
It’s sort of a relief. It’s also nauseating. The kitchen is a mess, and the servants will be coming to the house in a few hours to accomplish their daily duties. We need to get this cleaned up before they arrive.
I tiptoe around the streaks and smudges of blood on the floor until I reach Beresford’s side. Crouching, I hold my wrist over his crimson mouth until I’m sure he’s breathing. Then I rise and kick him lightly in the ribs with my bare toes.
“Beresford! Get up!”
He doesn’t budge.
“Get the fuck up!” I kick him again. “We have to clean this place, and I can’t do it by myself. Up! Now!”
But no matter how loudly I berate him or how viciously I prod and poke him, he won’t move. He’s too soundly asleep. Maybe it has something to do with the way his body has to process all that raw flesh.
My stomach lurches and I run to the sink, holding my hair back while I vomit. I wash the bile down the drain and rinse my mouth. As I’m turning off the water, I hear a distant, determined knocking at the front door of the mansion.
The sound ceases, and I wait, holding my breath and hoping whoever it is will go away. But the knocking begins again, more insistent than ever.
No doubt there are servants already up and about, tending to the stables and the gardens.
If they see someone hammering at the front door, they might come to investigate.
Or the visitor might go to the servants’ house and start asking questions, and then I’ll be in deeper shit. I need to take care of this now.
“Fuck!” I hiss, nearly stumbling over my husband’s giant body as I race toward the entry hall. I unbolt the doors and pull one of them open just a crack.
My mother is standing on the front step, wrapped in a shawl, looking cold, tousled, and determined.
“Mama! What the fuck are you doing here?” I exclaim.
“You weren’t home yesterday,” she says tightly.
“Neither was your new husband. The servants gave us some bullshit excuse, but they didn’t seem to know where you’d gone.
I was so worried I couldn’t sleep last night.
We barely know this man, Sybil. I kept thinking, what if he hurt you?
What if he killed you? I had to see you with my own eyes and talk to you—”
“Hush, please, hush.” I open the door wider and pull her inside. “Get in here. You’ll wake the entire estate.”
“I was right!” my mother says triumphantly, her eyes blazing. “Something is wrong. Do you need me to kill him? I’ll do it, you know. It’s not as difficult as you might think. I would do anything for my girls.”
Something in her tone stops me cold. She’s absolutely sincere in her offer to kill my husband for me. And the way she phrased it makes me think it wouldn’t be her first time.
“Mama.” I take her shoulders and look her straight in the eyes. “Have you killed someone before?”
She scoffs. “Don’t try to change the subject.”
“I’m not. This is relevant to what’s happening with me. I need to know if you’ve ever disposed of a body.”
“You killed him yourself?” she exclaims. “That’s my brave girl!”
“Mama!” I shake her a little. “Tell me this, or I won’t tell you what’s going on with my marriage. Honesty first, then trust. Who did you kill?”
Her lips pucker and she makes a frustrated sound, averting her gaze. “It doesn’t matter who it was.”
“It matters,” I whisper. “Please tell me.”
She closes her eyes for a second, and when she opens them, they’re steady, cold, and unrepentant. “I think you already know the answer to that question. There’s really only one person it could have been.”
It all makes sense suddenly. The abrupt way my father ran off with the tinsmith he’d been fucking. The way he left everything behind, all his things, all his savings. The way he vanished completely—no more mentions in the local newspapers about his performances in Gresoul or at court.
My mother killed him and his mistress. And because of who he was, a known philanderer and an impulsive wanderer, no one questioned it. No one cared enough to investigate his departure. They assumed he had gone west with the tinsmith to begin a new life.
Mama is searching my gaze, a defensive anxiety in her expression. She wants to know how I’ll react, if I’ll judge her.
I’m getting a little tired of dealing with dramatic confessions from people I thought I knew.
“Where is he?” My voice sounds hollow and strange, even to me.
“In a bog near Grandmother Riquet’s cottage.”
“And the tinsmith? Did you kill her as well?”
“No! Gods, Sybil.” She stares at me reproachfully. “I went to meet her later, after… after it was done. I offered her money to leave the area, and I told her I wanted to make the marriage work for the sake of my girls. As it turns out, she was a decent woman who didn’t realize he was married.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You called her an impoverished little fool.”
“And she was, for thinking that your father meant any of the promises he made her. She left that night, and our neighbors figured he went with her. He had bragged about leaving to a couple of men at the pub in Loisay. That’s how I found out about his plan. One of the men’s wives told me.”
She pauses and wipes her trembling hands on her shawl.
“I convinced your father to go for a walk with me in Wormsloe, and when I confronted him, he admitted that he was leaving with her. He planned to take all our savings with him, and he said once he was settled in a new city, he would send some men to pack up the piano and the rest of his furniture and belongings—as if none of it was mine. He told me he was going to sell the house, too.”
“But there are laws,” I exclaim. “He couldn’t have taken everything. If you had divorced him, a judge would have awarded you something, surely.”
Mama shakes her head. “He had connections. He claimed that no judge in the land would side with me against him. If they did, he would go to the Crown to have the decision overruled. He believed that I had broken our vows, that I was responsible for the catastrophe that our marriage had become. And he still wanted a fucking son. He said the tinsmith could give him that.”
“Fuck him,” I hiss.
“Believe me, I called him every degrading name I could think of, cursed him with every foul word I know, and he shouted awful things right back at me. In the midst of it all, he revealed that he’d left you in the forest that night, when you were a baby.
That’s when I snapped. The way he talked about you—I couldn’t bear it.
I won’t repeat it. But that’s when I…” Her mouth works, and her hands clutch the shawl convulsively.
“You don’t have to talk about it any more.” Gently I pry one of her hands from the garment and take it in mine. “Thank you for telling me. And thank you for what you did.”
She lifts her gaze, hope dawning in her eyes. Her expression reminds me of the way Beresford looked last night when he realized that the truth hadn’t killed my love for him. “I would do anything for you girls.”
“I hope that’s still true, because I need your help.” I squeeze her hand. “If you’ll trust me, I’ll tell you everything as we work. We have to hide some remains before the servants come up to the house.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t,” I say with a faint chuckle. “But you will.”
She follows me to the kitchen door, and I push it open.
For a moment she stands motionless, taking in the scene. Then she points to Beresford. “Is he dead?”
“No. He’s alive. And he loves me, Mama, more than I realized. He would never hurt me, but he did deceive me.” I point to the skeleton. “That is what we must get rid of. And then we have to scrub this place until it shines.”
“You’ll explain as we work?”
“I promise.”
“Very well then.” My mother takes off her shawl and begins rolling up her sleeves. She glances down at my husband’s body, her eyes resting briefly on the huge cock lying against his thigh. “You know, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you on your wedding day.”
“And what’s that?”
She gives me a wink. “Congratulations.”
I tell her the story while we wrap up the original Beresford’s skeleton in a sheet and carry it along a hedge, out to a field where we hide it in a clump of berry bushes. My husband can bury the bones later. Right now, the point is to get the remains out of the house.