Renegade (35 page)

“Abbie!” Simon suddenly stood in the doorway, holding the sword. He looked terribly pale, and clutched the doorframe for support. Nevertheless, he had a ferocity in his eyes that I had never seen before.

“No, no,” I gasped, signaling him to stop where he was. I stared at her body; Simon froze, seeing that Seraphina was wounded. “It’s all right,” I said. “She cannot hurt us now.”

I crept forward, through the coins, and then, gingerly—I’m not sure entirely of my reasons—I pushed her thick hair out of her eyes. She breathed heavily, gasping, wheezing. I knew that every breath pained her.

With a trembling hand, I pushed the hair further away from her face. A slice cut across one eye from where I had first struck her. The other eye, unblemished, pale green, rolled up at me with an expression that I could not read, that I could not understand. She tried to speak, but her voice simply gurgled in her throat.

She wanted to speak. Her lips trembled, but again, there was only that terrible gurgling. There was a desperation in her expression.

It might work,
I thought, putting my hand out. The moment I touched her hand, a force came out from her, strong and vibrant as an ocean current, and my mind latched upon it. I saw what she wanted to tell me.

I saw Seraphina in the parlor of a great home, a very grand, ornate home. Silver candelabras and a mahogany clock rested upon the mantel of an enormous stone fireplace. But the parlor was in shambles, torn to pieces. The drapes had been shredded; I saw broken plates and teacup pieces scattered all over the floor. A bookshelf had been emptied, leaving books and torn pages everywhere.

Then I saw her, crouched naked in her human form, blood smeared all over her legs and arms. As the vision pulsed, initially blurry in my mind and then refocused, I saw that she crouched over the bodies of two men. The older had graying hazelnut hair. Her father. The younger dead man, I knew intuitively, was her fiancé. Their hearts had been torn out, and all that remained of their chests were great dark holes. Nonetheless, she crouched over the bodies, frenzied. Weeping.

The realization slammed over me. In in the confessional booth, Max had mentioned that she’d killed a few Bromwell natives after escaping from Robert Buck. She had returned home. She must have been hurt, terribly traumatized, to return to them and then attack them like this. Had they reacted in scorn to her monster form? With hatred? What a terrible weight killing her own father, her fiancé, must have been upon her all of these years!

In the vision, I saw a shadow cross her pale, crouched figure.

Max.

He had a blanket in his arms, a blanket he placed around her shoulders.

“Come. Come with me, my love,” he said to her, wrapping the blanket around her bloodstained shoulders and lifting her into his arms. “I think we can find a better place for our pretty beast.”

In this vision, this memory, Seraphina didn’t say a word to him. But I saw misery, and terrible sorrow, on her face. I felt how she had nursed this, along with whatever other rages she harbored from her human past, all these decades in this place.

She wanted me to see all of this, and I knew that I was seeing her confession.

The vision swiftly left me as she coughed. She leaned to her side as the gurgling in her throat continued, and then she spit up blood. I saw that she was trying to tell me something still.

“Shhhh … ” I whispered, feeling an odd sting of tears in my eyes.

I could barely hear her, but between her heaves, she said, “There is a letter … a letter that Max had dropped on the beach … ” She gasped, showing her teeth, lovely human teeth now; her fangs had receded. I tried to hush her again but she continued. “Look in the photograph album … ” She gasped again, and I knew that she would speak no more.

She coughed and looked up at the ceiling, her eyes focusing and then glazing over. She drew a deep, rattling breath, and then died.

Why would she tell me that? About a letter in the photograph book? Why would she give me her confession, only moments after she had tried to kill me? I felt such an onslaught of emotions in those seconds as I watched her still face.

I remained crouched in the pile of gold, clutching her hand, frozen. Tears slid down my cheeks.

Simon brought me out of my tearful reverie as he stepped forward from the doorway. I had nearly forgotten his presence; he still held the sword in his hand, and his face was stony. As my energy drained from me, I detached my hand from Seraphina’s grip and took Simon’s hand. My arm was stiff with shooting pain. Simon helped me as I struggled to stand, to catch my breath.

“She killed them,” I murmured, croakily. “She was so sad and terrified—she returned home and killed them—her fiancé and her father.”

Simon said nothing, just hushed me with an embrace.

“How is he?” I asked urgently as Simon led me from the room. I had stopped reeling from the recent battle, from what Seraphina had shown me. I paused as we entered the great hall, clutching Simon’s arm again for support. When he did not answer my question, fear gripped me.

“He is still unresponsive,” Simon finally said. “But his breathing has steadied a bit since the transfusion. Abbie … I cannot say for certain whether or not he will survive. You must remember that.”

When I reached William, still lying on the floor of the bedroom, I found his breathing was indeed stronger. There was a hint, a mere hint, of his old flushed color returning. After Simon found the keys to the shackles, in the menagerie, we were able to free William. I cleaned my stomach wounds while Simon attended to the wound on my arm, cleaning it and applying a healing salve. I watched his long lashes flutter as he worked, but we said very little; we were both too sobered over Neil’s and Seraphina’s deaths, and William’s current state.

Then, as Simon built a fire in the bedroom, we heard feeble whining coming from the great hall—we rushed out and discovered, to our great relief, that Hugo was still alive.

While Simon attended to the dog’s wounds, I returned to William and I knelt beside him.

“William, I am here. She is slain and cannot hurt you anymore.”

I held his arm tightly. I fumbled for what to say. My rage at his past actions seemed so misplaced, so foreign here. I thought of Simon, of all that had happened between us, and of how I now felt absolutely certain of my heart’s choice. I knew the nature of my love for William.

“I cannot
not
love you,” I said. Bending over him, I kissed his lips.

I watched anxiously for a flutter of eyelids. For something. Anything. I was at the end of the reversed fairy tale, the princess reviving the prince, and I clung to my own foolishness, my adherence to the narrative justice that he must awake.

But nothing happened.

Simon had been cautiously optimistic, and I was desperately hoping that William would recover. But I knew how inaccurate even the best physician’s guesses could be.

I laid my head on William’s bare, battered chest, and I heard his heart beat far below my ear. The beat was weak, but steady.

My head still on William’s chest, I felt myself crying. What if all of this was to be in vain? What if William did not awake from this?

I heard the tiger growling from the other side of the bed, softly, melodically almost. I didn’t feel that his growls were such a threat, or a warning to us anymore. I felt that he sensed his mistress was gone; instinctively, he felt the loss. From out in the hall, I heard Hugo whine as Simon continued to stitch his wounds.

Then my heartbeat paused. My hair had come undone from its knot during the battle with Seraphina, and I felt William’s fingers suddenly entangled in it. I lifted my tear-streaked face.

“William!” His eyes were not yet open, but I saw his lips move, as if he were trying to speak but could make no sound. His chest heaved under me at the exertion. I grasped his hands in mine.

“William!” I heard myself say. Even more tears spilled out then.

“I … ” he muttered.

I held my breath.

He paused.

“Don’t speak if it hurts,” I said quickly.

But he shook his head, and I realized he was pushing himself out of this, surfacing to speak to me.

His eyes remained closed, but after he had breathed hard for several seconds, and then became still again, he spoke. “I have been unjust, weak, resentful. I have behaved unforgivably. But when we were together, Abbie, I was never inconstant. Nor will I ever be. I am in love with you, Abbie. Irretrievably in love.”

And then, in the dim bedroom light, with the groans of the grieving tiger in the background, I kissed William. He tasted like blood, like her venom; his skin had Seraphina’s serpent-scent. But I didn’t mind. I thought of how he might still hurt me, but it didn’t matter—it was far too late for me to abandon him now. Indeed, my love for him was like a poison in my own blood.

I kissed his lips, then lightly kissed his jaw, his neck. William was wild. Untamed. But he was my William. I had fought this battle, but I knew that he would fight a thousand battles for me. In the firelight, with his dark curls and handsome face, he looked like a fallen hero—I thought of the mortally wounded Paris.

But there was no anguish for me now, because I knew William would heal. He would recover.

Twenty-seven

A
fter Simon stitched up the wounds in Hugo’s side, he returned to the bedroom where I remained with William. I had attended to the fire, concerned about keeping William’s body temperature from dropping. Simon’s salve had already eased the pain from my own bite wound, and the swelling had ceased a bit.

Simon and I now cleaned William’s wounds more carefully, washed the dried blood from his forehead and hair, and placed him in Seraphina’s bed. His breathing and heartbeats steadied even more after Simon gave him some laudanum, and he fell into a deep sleep.

Simon and I then tranquilized the tiger and moved him to his cage in the menagerie. We collected Seraphina’s and Neil’s bodies, and we buried them in a sandy part of the island. As we dug their graves, we found several bones and bone fragments in shallow graves that must have belonged to Seraphina’s victims. But I think we were both too weary to discuss the matter much. As we dug into the hard sand, I felt an increasing sense of Seraphina’s loneliness, of her isolation.

The morning had come on full force, yet the heavy mist that blanketed the island remained settled about us. Nature moved restlessly nearby; my eye caught several razorbills in their nests on the rocky cliffs above. A peregrine sat on a boulder near the waters, eating a fish. I still felt cocooned in this place, set apart. The isolation was almost unbearable, and I longed to return to the mainland.

As we buried Neil, I felt my heart grow even heavier. There were no circumstances under which I could consider returning his body, in its grim state, to his widow, and I did not look forward to seeing that little girl again when we went to his house to speak to his wife. I choked back a sob. A wet gust of wind blew at my hair as Simon and I packed the last bit of sand over Neil’s grave.

Neil had said the child was strong; she would have to be. I tried to push away the memories of Mother’s death, of Roddy’s death—I carried, and would always carry, those memories with me, but they did not cripple me. The child might still be all right.

When Simon and I returned to Seraphina’s home, a wave of sleepiness almost overwhelmed me, for the first time. But I could not sleep in the clothes I wore, with Seraphina’s and Neil’s dried blood stained across my shirt and trousers. So I went to her bedroom, hoping to find clothes and to attend again to William.

I felt my heart leap a bit as I entered—William’s eyes were open. He was awake. He lay where we had left him, in bed, propped up a bit against the mound of Seraphina’s pillows. Although still very pale, with terrible bruises about his neck and wrists from the shackles, he seemed better. But he still seemed far too fragile, and I feared embracing him. He rolled to his side, wincing in great pain at the movement.

As I rushed to his bedside, he considered me with a sardonic grin. “What are you wearing?”

“Simon’s clothes,” I said, twirling a bit. My attempt at humor felt lovely after all that we had been through.

“That is most distasteful,” he said, with a scowl and another great wince. “Speaking of the man, I believe that I’m carrying some of his blood.”