Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

36. The White Mule

Chapter 36

The White Mule

“You… you bastard.” I mouthed the words breathlessly at the horrific apparition, my voice stolen away by my own cold rage.

Victor gripped my shoulder harder, holding me back, and I felt his deep shadow unfurl and then draw in protectively around me, fiery with fury restrained.

The ghastly mule-head broke into sudden laughter: an unearthly braying howl, horrible to hear. “So surprised, both of you? Am I too early for the tea and cakes?”

“Gremio,” Victor intoned, making the very name into a warning and a threat, the deep vibration of his voice rumbling through me again. “What have you done with Fortunato?”

“The Wandering Spaniard? Oh, well—you know it is: he had places to go, people to stalk and dismay.”

“Gremio. Do not cause me to enforce you.”

“I was watching him.” Gremio’s tone abruptly sobered, and I noticed then that the mouth of the white mule-head did not move entirely with the words his voice spoke, the quivering equine lips leaking a long, slow trail of saliva that glistened by the glow of the oil lamp and the disprite’s own pale eyes. “Surely, I thought, but surely Vittorio D’Arco would attempt to teach his apprentice summoning and banishment before my return— seeking cheap advantages as always—such a gallant, chivalrous man.”

“Almost as fine and upstanding as a Duke of Tartarus who invites himself unbidden into my parlor, violating our mutual contract yet again. I don’t know how you got in here, what you did to Fortunato, but?—”

“ Did to him? Fortunato summoned me! ”

“Impossible.” Victor’s voice was thick and tense with sheer vitriol; surely his jaw was clenched behind his steel mask. I felt his body grow taut against mine, his hard muscles stiffen like a cornered beast contemplating some savage, desperate spring. His fingers bit into my shoulder; only at my quiet groan of pain did he remember himself, slacken his hand, yet hold me closer in his arms.

“Evidently not,” Gremio replied, and I came to realize that the floating head was no head alone. I watched in horror as Gremio stepped closer on his hollow hooves—his full, ghastly form beyond the black smoke of Victor’s circle half-revealed by the single, flickering lamp—and without the comfort of doubt, there formed before my Sight a clear vision of the monster that at Crystal Palace I had only glimpsed. In my disquieted mind I could think only that I beheld a living kelpie , a deadly water-horse that crept somehow out of the nightmarish old tales, and yet more grotesque even than I could have dreamt. He was a man-beast of about my height, half-crouched and bone-white, his long limbs almost skeletal; his sickly mule-like head was crowned with bull’s horns and a trailing mane of lank, white hair that looked slimy and damp; he was naked, covered only by a second such growth of long hair that hung from his sunken abdomen and thin thighs; the tail of a bull swung limply behind him, and his bent goat-legs ended in cloven hooves.

But his hands—the hands that Victor and I had severed and burnt with our combined art, reducing his wrists to ashy stumps; the hands that Victor said Gremio would grow again in time (but not now, not yet)—I remembered to look to his hands, and was sorry for it as soon as I did. Gremio’s right hand had only three long extremities, clawed and webbed and jointed in too many places, as if he misremembered the shape of human fingers. The left was not a hand at all: only the tips of two short, misshapen claws protruding through the charred and blasted wrist.

Victor was right: it would take Gremio longer than this to heal his wounds and regrow his severed hands.

But little had that proved to deter the Duke of Tartarus.

“You have many enemies, Vittorio.” The glow of the lidless white eyes darkened; his salivating mule-lips twitched back from his broad, yellowed teeth in a malicious grin. “And it would seem that even your tenuous allies can be bought. After we last spoke, I gave myself a little time to think: who would you teach your apprentice to summon first? There are, after all, a few you might choose, and all of them scattered across the worlds. But time was of the essence—isn’t it always, Vittorio?” Gremio’s braying laughter ended with a sharp intake of breath, and he wiped the strings of slaver from his mouth with the blackened ruin of his left wrist. “And so I had to choose. To guess. I did not have time ,” he allowed the word to linger gloatingly in the air, “to pursue them all. But I wagered rather well, didn’t I?”

Victor said nothing. My hand was still pressed against his chest, rising and falling with the deep swell and release of his breath.

“So silent, so stoic. I wouldn’t want to admit it to me either,” Gremio nickered. “Wouldn’t want word getting out. Just like you wouldn’t want her —” he gestured to me with all three of his long, spidery fingers, the membranous frog-webbing between them glistening with slime, “to know about your?—”

“ Damn you! ” Victor’s deep voice lashed out in visceral rage; I thought him ready to lunge forward, and I braced myself to be thrown aside or left behind—but he seized me closer against him, his black cloak swirling around me, my cheek against his chest and my eyes toward the lonesome oil lamp. It should have been a comfort to be held so—too tightly, his hands too hard, and yet relieved from the abominable sight of Gremio—but it was instead a terrible vexation to be so forcibly turned away, no knowledge of what doom might soon befall us both, my ear against the thundering of Victor’s furious heart.

“Don’t listen to him, Elizabeth,” Victor whispered with a desperate urgency; his head was bowed so deeply over mine that I could feel the cold pressure of his mask against my bound hair; his voice was so low behind its steel that I could scarcely make out the words. So low, I hoped, that Gremio would never catch his utterance of my true first name, neglecting the alias of Charlotte Hartford that we had used before him at Crystal Palace Park. “Don’t listen to him. Don’t look at him. As long as I survive,” Victor’s voice was thick and heavy now, and I felt one of his powerful hands curl into the fabric of my black shawl, “I’ll keep you safe.”

My hand gripped the front of his dark robes tighter in reply.

I knew already, I was certain, what Gremio implicitly threatened to reveal to me of Victor’s past—what Victor did not know that I knew—but I could not reassure him now: the Talisman hung against the sweat of my skin in the valley between my breasts, and it was only my breasts themselves, pressed at an oblique angle against Victor’s chest, that concealed the shape and feeling of the Talisman from his body. And despite his possessive, protective arms around me, despite the warmth that welled within me unbidden at the promise of his words, I could not forget the terrible truth: my audacity in wearing the Talisman of Thoth trapped me between the two of them, making me as likely to be prey for one as for the other; I was caught between a Duke of Hell and the sorcerer bound by contract to seize the very trophy he held unknowingly in his arms, between the devil and the deep blue sea.

I heard a hiss from the direction of the door: a long, savoring intake of breath.

“ Elizabeth , did he say?” Gremio seemed to taste my name; I despised how slippery and vulgar it sounded on his tongue. “Elizabeth Buckingham?”

My body tensed instinctively in Victor’s arms, as never should it have: in my moment’s reflex of fear and disgust, my reaction revealed to Gremio the truth of my name.

I felt Victor raise his head, his spine straightening, his broad chest filling with a deep breath.

“Yes,” Gremio continued. “Yes, you are Elizabeth Buckingham—you never did look much like a Charlotte Hartford. Oh, what a strange, small world, what deliciously perfect irony, that Vittorio D’Arco should take for his apprentice the widow of S.R. Buckingham?—”

“ Leave her out of this , damn you,” Victor snarled, “if you value keeping your filthy pelt attached to your flesh!”

I did not think Victor the kind of man to make empty threats, and by his long pause and shift in tone I thought that Gremio knew it well. “I seem to have touched a nerve. In that case,” he made a grisly sound with his mouth, something like a gruesome caricature of a man clearing his throat, “back to my story of how I got here. After I made one of my hands into something moderately useful, I sought your friend Fortunato. I assure you, Vittorio, he does not forget that you and he were rivals once, and so when I explained to him something of your recent escapades, he was willing enough to grant me the one small, simple favor that I asked of him.”

“And how much,” Victor muttered, “did you pay him?”

“Is it always money for you, Vittorio? No, no: it was an exchange of good deeds: I offered to bargain on his behalf with the royalty of Erebus, as his envoy and representative, for the purpose of reducing the duration of his exile. Giving him more time underground with his love. Find me the evil in that , Vittorio, and then tell me which of us is the villain! But I digress,” Gremio’s voice continued after a malignant pause. “In return for all of this, which meant so much to him, I asked him only one single, simple favor, as I told you: If Vittorio and his apprentice should summon you , I said to him, summon me in turn, and I will go in your stead. Just once, Fortunato. Once, ” his voice sounded as if his fleshy horse-lips had gone slack and slick with spittle and anticipation, “ is all I need. I only needed one try. The scent of mortal desire made you all too easy to find.”

My own desire, I could not help but think, the weight of the notion sinking through my chest like a stone dropped into deep water. My tortured vow of celibacy, teased and flaunted every time I touched Victor’s hand, his chest, his thigh. My love—when I had loved him, in those halcyon days before the dawn of my doubt—that I dreaded would be both of our dooms.

“And what, pray tell,” Victor replied, his slow words laden with the kind of sardonic exasperation that comes of asking too trite and tiresome a question, “do you want?”

“The Talisman. Right now.”

My breath stopped, and with it my heart.

And in that long, terrible portion of a second before the latter resumed, I could think only of whether Gremio knew, and how he knew, and whether he could sense somehow that the Talisman was before him, when it seemed that even Victor could not?—

I could not faint, I exhorted myself, shifting my weight against Victor just to try to stay strong; I could not faint now, and risk the Talisman being found on my person, or most likely I would never awaken again.

“Providing,” Gremio continued, his tone greased with smug satisfaction, “you both prefer to stay more or less above ground, rather than?—”

“You insufferable fool.” My heart leapt, and in spite of my peril, I nearly smiled as Victor took the upper hand: his low voice was undaunted, utterly commanding, rising with his ire as if from the stony depths of the earth itself. “Do you forget who I am? Even if I had the prize of your trivial caprice in my own hand, do you think that I—the thrice-damned mortal sorcerer Vittorio D’Arco, the iron thorn in the side of Tartarus, Erebus, and Dis—do you truly believe, you preposterous ass, that after what you did I would give it to you now?”

“If not the Talisman,” Gremio replied, his voice festering with indignation, “then you . Or her.” One of his hooves slashed against the stone floor like a restless horse pawing the street. “In honor of our long acquaintance, I leave the choice to you. Whoever isn’t going to Hell today will be going a little later—rather obviously—and you’ll only be together in Tartarus when I can make it particularly unpleasant for you both. If you think the tortures promised to you in Dis and Erebus are disagreeable— Dis -agreeable!” Gremio laughed at his own belated pun, a croaking bleat both bitter and inhuman. “Then wait,” his laughter stopped suddenly, “until you see what I have in store.

“In fact, if it’s all the same to you, Vittorio, I think I should like to wait for you until Walpurgisnacht: a suitably festive occasion for celebrating the demise of Doctor D’Arco. Yes, I should spare you the burden of decision,” Gremio continued, and I could not help but think of his salivating mule-lips or his hideous webbed claw reaching out for me again, “and take her first.”

The unmoored wrath of Victor’s shadow surged through me, weaving with my own swell of sorcery and shuddering through my spine, and before my eyes the dim, pale smoldering of his circle leapt for a second into a sudden flash of flame. I heard an unearthly scream, the clatter of hooves, and I forced myself from Victor just enough to whip my head toward the door: Gremio had taken two steps back and was poised for more, his pure white eyes wide, fervently shaking his long right hand in pain. Oily black fog seethed in the dim light from the tip of a double-jointed finger, and I heard the tap of something small and hard hitting against a stone wall beyond the reach of the light, as if something loose had been flung from his hand.

By the time his hand stilled, I saw that his first finger was scorched and missing its claw.

Victor laughed; the familiar, merciless, ominous sound rang from the cold stone of his parlor—but he stopped as my body slumped against his.

Again, foolishly, I spent more of myself in sorcery than I knew, before I knew that it was too late. I did not again feel as if I should faint, and that was some relief, but nor for the first few moments did I feel as if I could stand without his arms around me for support. He held me upright, steadying me, keeping me from a fall; I let myself hold onto his muscular arms, listening to him repeat something under his breath that I could not discern.

“She’s a vicious one,” Gremio said, licking his ashy wound with a long black tongue. “Vengeful! True desire to maim me, and maim me again, or she never would have managed it. No remorse! No wonder—” He guffawed suddenly, a repeating squeal and huff like the ghoulish cry of a mule, briefly unable to control himself as if he found the notion genuinely amusing. “No wonder you wear your mask—to guard you from the true infernal art, yes, but most of all to protect you from your own apprentice . What would she try to do to you,” Gremio’s milky eyes glowed brighter, “if she knew what you did to her?”

I felt a deep growl roll through Victor’s chest.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t told her, Vittorio? Not particularly forthcoming of you. Not particularly honest. But I suppose it doesn’t matter when you only need her for a little while. Oh, you’ll string her along until then, keep her in the dark until she does whatever you wanted her for, and once she’s no more use to you, you’ll leave her behind. No wonder you kept your secrets. She wasn’t worth the risk nor the trouble to tell.”

“His game is to separate us for his own advantage,” Victor murmured behind his mask, holding me closer, “to turn us against one another—to tear us apart. Elizabeth, when we’re safe again, I’ll explain everything.”

Victor was right, I knew that he was right about Gremio; and yet how could I not wonder, knowing what Victor had kept from me, whether the rankling poison of Gremio’s words had within them some drop of truth?

How could I not doubt?

“No, Vittorio,” Gremio sneered, a long strand of slaver leaking from his equine lips. “I think you should tell her right now . Come clean, sorcerer! The least you can do is tell her the truth before she goes to Hell—an entirely avoidable doom, which she would never have suffered if not for her involvement with you .”

“Sanctimonious mule, if you cared one whit for her, or for justice, you would take me instead.”

“No, Vittorio,” Gremio said again, slowly shaking his long, horned head. “No substitutions now. I’ve named my price,” he drew himself up somewhat straighter than his usual crouch, flexing the webbed fingers of his right hand, “and now I shall claim it.”

“You want her?” Victor almost imperceptibly slackened his grip on me. I do not know if he had pressed into my mind, or if it was simply a lingering effect of his long possession of me, but I knew the moment for action had come. I understood what he meant to do.

My fingers curled against his chest in acknowledgement.

I did not know whether the sensation that tightened around my heart was the anticipation of victory or the grip of a premonition of doom, hope or apprehension or despair.

But I could still take out the Talisman and put a stop to it all , I thought to myself, could I not?

Could I not?

Would Victor defend me still, if I did?

Would Gremio truly stop, and accept his prize, and return benignly to Tartarus? Or would he wield the Talisman as a weapon against Victor?

Or was it already (as I surmised) too late, and I would be beset by a twin pair of ravening wolves, one on either side, pulling me this way and that until together they tore me apart?

“You want her, mule? Then you’ll have to get through me .”

“Through you , Vittorio? You are no more in the end than a common criminal, an adventurer and a charlatan and a highwayman, a particularly fortunate outlaw whose luck alone has kept him ahead of the kingdoms of Hell and of earth—but your luck runs out here. At least Elizabeth Buckingham will know, before I take her down to Tartarus, that the man who attempts to protect her now, for his own selfish ends,” Gremio’s fleshy lips quivered as if savoring the words—and then they drew back into a venomous smile, “is the man who killed her husband.”

And then, with an echoing roar of utter, demonic fury, Victor charged.

I could not have known that these would be the circumstances, these the final words that Gremio would speak before Victor unleashed himself upon him, but I knew that Victor would burst forward, that we would release each other, that I would dart aside?—

In the rush and force of the moment I stumbled over my own feet, caught myself, and stumbled again; I fell onto my hands and knees on the old round rug in time to feel Victor’s potent art seem to shift the very foundation of the earth, driving all of nature toward Gremio. The circle broke, the ring of pale fire went black, and wreathed in the last tendrils of his dark smoke Victor tore toward the pale beast-man, the thundering strikes of his black Hessian boots on the stone floor marking the distance closed; I watched his cloak spread behind him like the vast wings of the night, his hood fall back to reveal his flying black hair with its thin silver streaks, the lurid glow of Gremio’s milky eyes reflecting from the cold steel of Victor’s mask?—

I was rising, trying to stand, but the shuddering impact of Victor ramming into Gremio shook me back to the ground. It happened all at once: the brutal slam of Victor’s shoulder into Gremio’s chest, the flicker of the iron blade I had not seen him draw, the crash and shatter of wood bursting apart, no match for their combined strength and weight and sorcery as Victor drove Gremio’s bent back through the parlor door. In an explosion of wood shards and splinters they hit the floor together—another tremor reverberating through stone, joined by Victor’s deep grunt and Gremio’s unearthly shriek—as the light from the hallway flooded in, and I scrambled to my feet, watching Victor’s black form as he raised his long dagger and stabbed down with all his strength into the grotesque shape beneath him. There was no ceremony, I thought to myself, no ostentation: a quick, violent, brutal end.

But it was not the end at all.

Scarcely had I a moment’s false respite to draw a breath before Gremio’s long, ghastly right hand shot up toward Victor’s face, the thin fingers curling around his mask in attempt to pull down his head, the stunted claws of Gremio’s mangled left wrist-stump hooking into the vertical slits in the steel—Gremio must have squirmed away when Victor tried to stab him; the sharp snap I heard must have been Victor’s iron blade breaking on the stone floor—and with a growl of effort and indignation Victor seized Gremio’s forearms with his left hand while his right slashed at the demon’s body, half-blindly raking the broken blade down and down again; I drew closer despite the danger, watching with horror and a strange fascination as Gremio’s grasping hand began to slowly blacken and Victor’s mask, like his ruined dagger, began to smoke.

“A shame to break that one,” Gremio hissed, and as they struggled I saw his horse-head turn toward me, the white eyes flashing with fire. “The very dagger, isn’t it Vittorio, that you stabbed into Simon Buckingham?”

“If it weren’t for you and your damned plan ?—”

“Enough about that!”

A gruesome thud punctuated Gremio’s sentence; from the twisted position of the fiend’s body on the ground, the way Victor lurched back with a sudden grunt of pain and a hand to the sternum as his broken dagger clattered to the floor, I thought Gremio had thrashed aside, freed a leg, and kicked a cloven hoof against Victor’s chest. Victor brushed a scrap of wood from his shoulder and stood up, fighting quickly to regain his breath as ghostly tendrils of smoke rose in the candlelight from his steel mask, and I do not know if I saw in the world or in my mind that his black eyes burned with an insatiable violence.

“Don’t forget, Vittorio,” Gremio sneered as he slithered to his feet, taking advantage of having knocked the breath out of his foe for a moment, his pale body streaked with dark slash wounds that leaked trails of ashy fog, “that I was Mr. Buckingham’s friend, the benefactor of his excavation—he dedicated that damnable book to me, you know—while you became his hated tormentor,” Gremio turned, looking to me as if to ascertain that I understood, “haunting the grove behind his house, driving him to misery and perturbation?—”

That single moment of distraction was all Victor needed. He rushed in again, terrifying in his speed and size and fury, his scarred fist smashing into the side of Gremio’s long face and then following with a vicious backhand across the mouth. Gremio staggered once, and with a horrible gurgling bellow he sank his claws into Victor’s chest, grappling with him; then with a burst of sorcery or supernatural strength he slammed Victor back against the wall of the hallway, the sickening impact of bone and muscle against unforgiving stone echoing in the earth.

“Victor!” I cried out; the blow had momentarily stunned him, but I saw him rouse at my voice—and then I winced, my stomach turning as I saw Gremio sink his yellowed, newly broken teeth into the flesh of Victor’s shoulder.

Victor grunted in pain, grabbing Gremio’s snout with both hands and wrenching him away, the quivering mule-lips running with thick saliva and red human blood; but the close air of the underground was alive with the sensation of Victor’s shadow, and I felt something shift in the very walls: the slow, creaking groan of some unseen mechanism shuddering to life.

The portcullises.

Those same gates of latticed iron that Absolon had used to taunt and frighten me away would now turn the hallway into a cage, an arena for two gladiators in what seemed likely to become a battle to the death.

And I would be trapped with them.

Had Victor, master of all within his cavernous dominion, set them into motion to trap Gremio? And was my presence within their confines of any moment to him now, seized as he was with the thrill of the fight?

Or had Gremio somehow triggered their release, in hopes of trapping Victor and me both?

“Run, Elizabeth!” Victor called to me; I felt my breath quicken as I watched the rows of great iron spikes begin to gradually drop from the ceiling at either end of the hallway, the sounds of massive gears and old chains grinding inside the walls “Run! Get past one of the gates! I’ll take care of this horse-face. Go!”

“You trust him to send you to safety, Elizabeth? You think he cares for you?”

No sooner had I broken into a run than I halted again, standing in place, watching the teeth of the portcullis gate before me sink closer toward the stone floor. Gremio’s second question caught me, stopped me, and slowly I looked back to them both.

They were locked together, Victor leaning over Gremio from behind with the fiend’s neck trapped in the crook of his elbow, Gremio’s pale hand running with red blood as his claws dug into Victor’s overpowering arm to try to pry back the stranglehold; I thought I heard Victor mutter a spell under his breath as Gremio struggled, tossing his maned head aside in attempt to strike Victor with his horns while his cloven hooves began to paddle desperately at nothing: Victor straightened, lifting Gremio off the ground by the throat, hanging him in place without the civilized convention of a rope.

“This sorcerer,” Gremio gasped for air, his words punctuated by the choking sounds in his gullet as his claws scrambled at Victor’s constricting arm, fighting to steal space to breathe, “who asked everything of you, demanded your art and risked your life for his own petty ends—shaped you into a weapon for his private grudge against me—he couldn’t be bothered with the minor detail of telling you that he killed your husband? Is that how he—” Gremio’s hoof punched into Victor’s shin; he drew a hoarse, croaking breath as Victor groaned in pain. “Is that how Vittorio cares for you, Elizabeth? And now you’ll go to Hell, lose it all—for a man who kept you in the dark, just like Simon Buckingham did—a man who never loved you, never respected you enough to trust you with the truth!”

He may as well have taken up Victor’s broken dagger and twisted it into my heart.

The falling portcullis gates closed the last few inches to the stone floor, entrapping all three of us in the hallway.

The great hidden gears in the walls shuddered to a stop.

But all I could hear was the beating in my head of my own fevered blood, all I could feel was the grinding of my clenched teeth—all I could think was that it had happened again—it had happened again—another man had made me his fool.

I watched with a strange detachment as they fought: the blood and the sweat, the black ash and the fog. With a brutal, primal violence Victor heaved Gremio against the iron grate of the gate at the other end of the hall, the impact a bone-jarring shock of distant thunder as Victor’s faerie fire crackled in the air; Gremio frothed and brayed like a mad mule, caught fast between Victor in his surging power and the iron that burned him, a terrible suffusion of smoke rising into the still air of the underground, stinking of sulfur and charred hair.

Should I have been relieved, elated, comforted that Victor had now the clear advantage, and—as Gremio writhed and bellowed in vicious desperation—that the fight seemed soon to be over? There is no doubt. And yet I felt no joy in it, no assuagement of my own rage, no satisfaction of my vengeance, no gratitude for Victor nor concern for his wounds.

They ought to have destroyed each other.

And if they did, I thought with a bitter, sardonic shake of my head, I would be trapped here still, the prisoner of the portcullis gates, left to starve and die underground—so well did they both care for what would become of me.

Perhaps Absolon would free me, I mused. Or perhaps Absolon, admirably absent from the ferment, had already freed himself from this tomb.

But for now, I remembered some recourse, small though it was. I heard a wet, gruesome crack —bone or horn, I did not know—and I turned away, darting toward the library door. I did not doubt from the sounds that followed that I had heard Victor deal the killing blow to Gremio, but I did not look back. I would not have shied away from the sight of Gremio’s savaged carcass; I would still, I supposed, have found some cruel relief in the spectacle of that monster decomposing before my eyes into a detritus of ash and fog.

But I did not want to see Victor’s triumph anymore.

Never had I considered what would happen next, what would become of me once the race were run, and the silence after Gremio’s final braying howl made me shiver with its portent: if this were the end of our strife with the Duke of Tartarus, Gremio’s corporeal form annihilated and his spirit sent back to the depths of the earth—what use now would Victor have for me? After all this about my apprenticeship, about my necessity in the dual banishment spell, he had banished Gremio by himself.

He needed me no longer.

And soon I would be alone, alone again.

The door to the library was unlocked. I pushed it open on its creaking hinges, stepping into the room; my heart beat wildly against the damned Talisman hanging between my breasts as I stepped toward the bookstand with the old French grimoire and picked up Victor’s scorpion cane.

I twisted it open, drew the long iron blade, watched the cold precision with which the tines of the hilt snapped into place.

Holding the dagger at my side—not quite brandished, nor quiet at ease—I turned toward the library door and waited, steeling myself. I considered whether it would be better to wipe the perspiration of my palm on my dress, risking the readiness of the moment, or whether it better to risk the weapon slipping in my grip when I?—

When I… what?

I caught myself, listening to my quickening breath. I wondered what I meant to do.

I did not have time to wonder long.

A sense of nauseous vertigo crept over me before even I felt the solid shock of Victor’s art through my bones; I slumped down heavily into the upholstered leather chair beside the grimoire on its stand, the dagger still in my hands as I waited for the sensation to pass. Was Victor’s sorcery, once grown so familiar—so pleasurable in its dark touch—now hostile to my own? Had the last vestiges of his possessing shadow within me gone wrong somehow with the turning of my heart?

With a deep breath I willed myself to sit up straight, to be strong: I heard the solid, unmistakable falls of his boots as he approached.

“Elizabeth.”

He appeared as a vast darkness in the doorway, eclipsing the glow from the hall. His steel mask and the black, fiery glint of his eyes were all that marked him as a man, as something more than a midnight ghost; and I do not know why I expected, as my gaze rose to those eyes and that mask, to be haunted again by the apparition of a moon-pale skull where his face should have been. Yet as my eyes adjusted to the dark void of his form he grew slowly more human, not less. I made out the drape of his torn black robes and cloak, and I thought they hung differently now from his massive frame, damp and heavy with his own blood and sweat—but he was strong yet, despite it all: his heaving shoulders were held high and undaunted, his stance was tall, his gait was even and firm.

Then he looked to the dagger in my hand—his own weapon turned against him—and he paused where he stood.

I said nothing, marveling at my own power and resolution: I had gone this far. I had presumed. For a passing moment, it seemed that my little hand and my borrowed blade held back the night itself.

I had gone this far. And if he pressed me, I could go farther.

“Elizabeth,” Victor repeated with a single step toward me.

I rose from the chair, fighting to still the trembling of the dagger in my grasp.

“Why, Victor?”

“To ascertain that you are well, after I watched you run.”

It was not the answer to what I meant to ask. I shook my head, and asked something else: “And what now?”

I did not notice that he carried something with him until he let it fall to the ground before me, and I watched it drop from his bloodied hand onto the bold pattern of the rug: a large, cloven hoof hit the floor in a small burst of oily soot, thin trails of black fog rising like smoke from where there once had been an ankle, and with fell it a lock of Gremio’s long white mane tied into a knot.

And what now should I have felt? What now should I have understood?

I witnessed the barbaric trophies of a criminal who killed his own former conspirator with his bare hands, a token and portent that I was now, at best, extraneous to his plans; or I beheld the return of my own black knight, who slew in my name the dragon that had injured me and come back to lay its severed head at my feet, returning from his triumphant survival of the fight—longing, battered, heroic, innocent of my cruel designs—only to find himself betrayed at the point of my ungrateful blade.

“Now I find my broken dagger,” he said, “and go back, and finish the rest of him. A mere formality now,” his voice was still low but strangely bereft of tension, and I could not help but think I heard a tinge of something like the resignation of regret, “but I prefer to be thorough.”

“You came back to me first?”

With a deep grunt as his reply he stepped closer to me again, his eyes only on mine, as if the long dagger in my hand were of little consequence—as if it meant nothing to him at all.

My hand tightened around its grip. That intimacy that had once been a comfort suggested now a looming threat.

“Elizabeth,” he spoke my name again as he closed the distance between us, near enough that the movement of his cloak caught briefly on the dagger’s honed tip.

“And what manner of spell, sir,” I whispered under my breath, “do you mean to cast upon me now, speaking my name thrice?”

“None. But I would turn back time, if only I could.”

“To when?”

“To tell you. To tell you everything.”

In the penetrating silence that followed, I caught from the corner of my eye a shift in the light of the hallway beyond the door—and as I turned my head to determine its cause, I could feel my eyes widen in utter horror.

“I trust I am not,” a broken, almost croaking voice sneered from the shadows just beyond the doorway, panting between labored breaths and the intermittent chafe of something moving across stone, “interrupting an intimate moment? The knife’s a nice touch—keeps you apart—easier to aim.”

“ Gremio! ” Victor snarled as he wheeled toward the door, every candle in the library guttering at once with the force of his shadow drawing into him, gathering like a rushing storm.

It was Gremio—or what was left of him. Haggard and twisted, he dragged himself slowly across the floor by his webbed hand, pushing with his left hoof while his maimed right leg trailed uselessly behind him, already halfway disintegrated into ash: he looked like a gaunt, sepulchral creature crawling out of its own grave, thick slaver running freely from his mouth, his pale hide charred away here and there to bare his long white bones, his way lighted by the malevolent glow of his one remaining eye.

“Stand aside, sorcerer ,” he spat, as if the word itself were abhorrent to him; as I heard him gurgle and mutter under his breath I felt, impossibly, a breeze pick up in the subterranean confines of Victor’s library, lashing a stack of ancient parchment leaves into the crackling swirl of dust motes and musty air; the cover of the medieval French grimoire on the stand caught and fell open as its pages turned one after the other—faster, faster—and I felt a sinking, inexorable sense of anticipation and dread.

“ Now, Vittorio, she’s mine! ”

“Get behind me, Elizabeth!” Victor called to me as the world seemed to warp—the very air rippled, like the heat distortion above a candle flame—and Victor rushed into me, the glancing impact of his powerful body against me throwing me aside through a pile of codexes, and I heard my own sharp groan of surprise and pain as I skidded into a low bookshelf.

But that was nothing beside the sound of Victor’s deep grunt, and the single quake that shuddered through the entire room and its stone walls as something heavy and solid hit the floor.

“Not what I had in mind,” Gremio mumbled, his nickering chuckle growing into wheezing, snorting laughter, “not what I had in mind—but oh, it’ll do! It’ll do very, very well.”

I shook my head to clear it, trying to pull myself together, wondering if it were the room itself or my own vision that had gone so dark and dim with haze—I smelt the smoke of extinguished candles, the tinge of acrid brimstone in the ashy fog that seeped from Gremio’s wounds as he crept in slowly through the door. The floor was littered with papers, torn pages, and old leaves of vellum; the only light was from the lone candle flame to somehow survive the wind, and from the ghastly luminescence of Gremio’s single, milk-white eye, burning with a lurid, gloating leer.

My mind and my memories were still in disarray—the disruption of Gremio’s art, or the shock of my fall—but I knew that I had held an iron dagger only a moment ago, and that it must be somewhere on the floor, and that Victor had been with me?—

Victor.

My searching hand found Gremio’s severed hoof, cast it aside in disgust, and then closed around the hilt of the scorpion blade.

And then I caught my breath.

The light changed again—Gremio must have turned his baleful eye to me: its cold glow glinted from the grey edge of the dagger in my hand—and near the center of the library, where once had been only deep shadows, I watched with horror as tendrils of pale, fog-like smoke rose from the massive form that lay slumped on the floor with his great cloak pooled around him, dark as midnight, still as stone.

“I’ll take that souvenir,” Gremio grinned weakly, pointing a webbed finger at the severed hoof, his drooling mule-lips twitching back from his broken yellow teeth, “and my hair.” Both of the grisly trophies dissolved into fog, and in that moment which froze me in aghast indecision, so too Gremio—exhausted, panting, eyeing my iron dagger—began to vanish before my eyes into the same black vapor.

“And I shall return,” he added, “for his body, and for you . In good time. Because, unlike Vittorio D’Arco,” Gremio paused, savoring his revolting triumph, “I have all the time in the world.”

The spectral light of Gremio’s glowing eye was the last of him to disappear, leaving Victor and I alone in dim, wavering candlelight and utter silence.

And then the tears came.