Chapter 13
XIII
The dawn was bright and clear. The forest glittered with new snow, and the silvery chatter of snow finches joined the gentle clinking of chains in the morning air. A pot of lemon-mint tisane bubbled over the coals of the fire; I inhaled its fragrant steam as I stirred in a spoonful of honey.
Jacques was naked and chained to a tree behind me. My companion was slowly recovering from his eventful evening. He was still unconscious, but the convulsions had stopped and he was mostly human again.
My fine traveling clothes were black and stiff with dried blood.
I had awoken from my delirium around midnight, weak and heaving, on my knees beside Aherin’s torn remains.
The blood that covered me and the foul taste on my tongue confirmed the true nature of my otherworldly banquet.
But it was the feather clutched in my hand that dismayed me the most; a calling card from the Archangel himself.
Sim Sala Bim.
The words were a sudden fist around my heart. Sarmodel was distant, no doubt as debilitated as I was, and for those brief moments it seemed I was alone—alone—on the freezing mountainside. Worse, I was still hungry, in spite of my abominable repast.
I saw only horror behind me and more horror ahead; I had seldom felt more wretched. I wept there in the darkness. For misery, for despair, for the sheer futility of still being there.
I cast the feather into the campfire embers and turned to the slowly changing abomination that was Jacques. By dawn he was bound and secured, and the memory of Michael had lost its sting somewhat.
Sebastian, he is waking. If you’re not going to kill him, you’d best prepare yourself.
I was indeed considering killing him very seriously.
But the truth was that there were too many things I still didn’t know—his condition hinted glaringly at some unfinished business of mine, and I would need his help to resolve it.
There was also the matter of the six hundred livres I had been offered to complete the contract; I doubted the bounty would be forthcoming if I arrived with Jacques’s corpse.
Sarmodel’s warning was accompanied by weak coughing and a new bout of retching from Jacques.
Very well.
I checked my Wards carefully before pouring myself a generous measure of the infusion from the pot.
My trapper’s chain was sturdy enough, but I had encircled Jacques with lethal Admonitions in horse blood just to be safe.
His monstrous flesh had sloughed away and dissolved in the meantime, and he now sat in a sticky puddle of mud and yellowish plasma.
Jacques only opened one eye (the other was swollen shut), but I was relieved to see that it was once again human.
“Professor?” he slurred. He flailed weakly in his chains, his eye blinking in confusion.
“Good morning, sir,” I said. With my free hand, I raised my pistol, taking aim at his midsection. “Take a minute to collect yourself. Know that if you even twitch in my direction, I will be very pleased to end your legacy.”
Jacques sat up slowly, his eye on the muzzle. He grimaced and cupped his hands over his manhood, which was no doubt quite tender. “You . . . you are insane, as I suspected. What reason do you—”
“Be silent.” I cocked the gun in warning. “We are going to speak properly now, as two men who nearly killed each other last night.”
“Killed? You are speaking madness, Professor.” His face slowly changed as he took in the scorched wreckage of firewood and horseflesh scattered around him.
He stared at my crimson face and my blood-soaked clothes.
For a moment, he was almost endearing in his bewilderment.
“By the Christ. What happened? What have you done?”
“Me? No, sir, this was all your doing. Do you not remember?”
“I . . . confess I do not, though my head is aching.”
What do you think? I asked Sarmodel.
He seems sincere. And he’s certainly afraid; I can smell it.
“Then tell me,” I said aloud, “tell me what you do remember. Be truthful. I will know it if you lie.”1
“Professor, put down your weapon! I will say nothing with a pistol in my face.” He shivered and gathered his legs close to his body. “And must I always be naked when you wish to speak?”
“You may have a blanket when I am satisfied.” Nonetheless, I obliged his first request and lowered the muzzle of my gun. “Now answer me: What happened after I left you last night?”
His one-eyed glare was vicious. “Very well. I was—I was to kill Aherin.” He looked down.
“I remember that. At your behest, I was to kill my own horse. I had the blade. And I believe he knew. He was scared of me.” He struggled weakly against the chains, trembling.
“Professor, I don’t remember. I spoke to him, to calm him. And then I awoke here.”
“Why was he afraid of you, young sir?”
“I do not know.”
“Shall I guess? Aherin was afraid because you have been feeding on him for at least the last week.” I took a warming sip of tisane.
“I found where you were cutting him on what was left of his neck. All those nights, whispering by his ear; I thought it was remorse driving you to his side, when instead—” I raised the gun as he tried to interrupt.
“—instead it was a far different demon in charge. You were clever to hide your handiwork under the mane. But you must have known he would eventually weaken if you kept drinking his blood.”
“Drinking his blood? I say again, Professor, this is madness! I—believe me when I say I would never do such a thing.” But something troubled him; his words faltered. “How can you even suggest it?”
“Do you deny it? I am a madman holding a gun, so think carefully.”
Jacques shivered again and his eye clouded. “Perhaps. Perhaps there have been dreams. A voice.”
“A voice? What does it say?”
“It . . . he speaks of things I would never do, desires I have never had—not truly. Yet he knows me somehow. He speaks of hypocrisy and injustice, and it rouses the fury in me. And he speaks of eating, and I have awoken with a hunger such as I have never known. But I would never.” The young man grew quiet. “Aherin? I couldn’t—I mustn’t.”
“He” speaks of eating. No need to guess who “he” might be, I remarked, as Jacques seemed to lose himself in his fractured recollection. It seems the Beast has been with us this whole time.
What—this thirsty toddler? This hairless kit? Come, Sebastian, it makes no sense. This is a pitiable shadow of the Beast himself. You remember him as well as I do.
A shadow. Or a fragment, perhaps.
Indeed, replied Sarmodel. My love, whatever the case—this one is dangerous. Be done with him now and let me feed. We could certainly use his strength.
I do not disagree. But not just yet. He is still Antoine’s son—and I need to know more.
“I am curious about this voice, sir, but let me inquire on a different matter,” I said to Jacques. “Tell me again how you were shot.”
And now he was silent.
“This is where it happened, is it not?” I pressed. “I wondered why you were so disinclined to camp here. Now I know, of course, that you have been here before.”
“Why? Why must we revisit my every humiliation?” he snarled at me.
“Yes, Professor, if you must have an answer. Yes. This is where I was betrayed. This is where my friends and brothers took my money, beat me and shot me with the weapons my family gave them. This is where they left me for dead with Aherin as my only companion. This is where I considered returning to my family in failure, stopped only by the knowledge that I may be the last chance they have, because my father is a stubborn pig who would save us with prayer and scripture!” He stopped, breathing hard.
“Yes, Professor, you have deduced correctly: this is the place.”
He gave a nervous whimper as I again took aim at his crotch.
“My loyalty to your father stays my hand this once, but if I hear another lie from you, the shot will fly. I found them, Jacques.” I pulled a grayish, gnawed ear from my pocket and tossed it on the ground in front of him. “Your friends. I found them.”
He recoiled from the ear, uncomprehending. “What is this?” Then his brow creased and he shook his head. “No. No! You are wrong. Gerard and Henri are halfway to Saint-Chély by now.”
“They are where you left them after you killed them. It will be no trouble to bring them here if you so desire, sir; they are much lighter without their innards. I would warn you that they may be di?cult to recognize, however.” The severed ear began to shrink and blacken; my circle of Admonitions was quite unforgiving on foreign tissue.
“Their hearts sustained you most of the way to Corvano, but your hunger has been growing, I believe—to Aherin’s great cost. Do you deny it? ”
His gaze was bitter, betraying a flash of the monster he had been. For several moments, he said nothing, and I feared he would indeed test my willingness to shoot him. But then his eye closed and he spoke again, barely above a whisper.
“I cannot.”
“Go on.”
He took a deep, di?cult breath. “I returned from hunting to find my companions rifling my belongings. It was as I said: When I confronted them, they told me they were not returning to blighted Ocerne. They begged me to come with them, to start somewhere else with the money I had been given. I was so angry and the voice—his voice—was all I could hear.” Jacques was barely audible.
“And then nothing. It was as now. I awoke wounded, covered in blood—just over there, in fact.” His sudden laughter was a mad, floating wheeze.
“It was like surfacing from a dream. The others were gone. The voice was silent. Only Aherin remained.”
“And was that the first time you awakened so? The truth—speak!”
“No. It has happened before.”
“When?”
“The first time, perhaps a year ago.” Now that he was resigned to it, the truth came quickly.
“My father arranged a deer hunt for my birthday, with all the noble families of Gévaudan. My own grandfather, the Baron d’Apcher, killed a stag that was mine by rights—they were my birthday honors—and I was overcome by thoughts of vengeance.
Not just vengeance; murder. I heard it—the voice—so clearly, telling me I could kill every man in the camp while they slept and they would never take anything of mine again.
I did not listen—who would countenance such a thing?
—but the next morning I woke naked and covered in filth in the middle of the forest. I thought it a prank, some elaborate jest for my birthday, and I managed to make it back to the camp before the others were awake.
We learned on our way home that the local farms had been raided in the night, their livestock torn to pieces.
” He suddenly began to sob, a huge, ragged sound that was most of the way to screaming.
It was horrific to hear in the snowy stillness.
“I knew. I knew! I denied it, even to myself, but I knew I had done it.”
“And it has happened again since? How many times?”
“I do not know. Ten? A dozen? The voice returns and it speaks of hunger and it must eat.” Again, that terrible sob. “I do not remember—please believe me!”
“I do, sir.”
A man who becomes a monster in the night, and is only satisfied by the kill,2 I reiterated. What did we leave behind in Gévaudan? Is this my fault, Sarmodel?
Almost certainly. How many loose ends must come back to eat us before you start listening to me? Come now, time to pull the trigger.
“Kill me, then,” said Jacques suddenly. He was clearer than he had been since we met. “If I am half a monster already, if this is how it will be, I cannot bear it. But you must first promise me you will continue on to Ocerne. At least take the news to my family, even if I am lost.”
“Lost? I will not concede defeat so easily, and nor should you, young sir.” I holstered the pistol. “And no, I am not going to kill you.”
What?! Are you joking?!
His red, bleary eye narrowed. “Why not?”
“Because I believe you and Gévaudan can both be saved.”
“Must you frustrate me even in this?” He shook his head. “How can I return to the chateau—to Eloise—knowing what I will become?”
“Leave that to me, young sir.” I lifted the pot of tea from the fire and splashed it across the bloody marks in the snow.
My Admonitions dissolved along with them.
“Now, let us get you out of those chains, and we will set some new rules for the remainder of our journey. And have no fear—I am also half a monster, and I have a great deal of unfinished business with your Beast.”
1. A bluff on my part. One of the greatest limitations on a Contract of Truth is that it requires agreement on both sides, and I certainly wasn’t about to step inside the Wards to shake his hand. Nor did I particularly want any deeper entanglements with Jacques d’Ocerne, the man-eating abomination.
2. Yes, I see you there, hurling your peanuts and bawling, “He’s a werewolf, you idiot!
” Please be aware that the contemporary “werewolf” with which you are familiar was quite unheard-of up to this point—and then suddenly they were everywhere.
Perhaps you are beginning to understand why this is such a landmark case.