Seduction (24 page)

As I got into bed, I thought about my failed attempt to enter Belmondo’s mind. Why hadn’t I been able to read him? That was a talent I’d possessed all my life. I could even read
furniture
! But Belmondo . . . had he known? Did he block me? Or had I just been so giddy with his nearness that I’d lost my magic?

I closed my eyes. I knew I’d been asking for trouble just by being with him. Maybe losing my magic was the price I would have to pay for losing something else. My integrity, maybe. My loyalty to Peter. My innocence.

And maybe I’d lost that before now.

Last winter I had an encounter with the Darkness. That’s a euphemism for something so terrible that it can’t really be named or even adequately described: It’s the distillation of pure human evil that lives among us all. Cowen can’t recognize it, but witches can.

The Darkness moves into people through death. When someone infected with it dies, the evil in them jumps into whoever happens to be physically nearest to them. Of course, no one knows if he or she has been infected. Evil people never think they’re evil. They just make excuses for the horrible things they do.

But sometimes the Darkness doesn’t just peek out from behind human eyes. Sometimes it likes to show itself in its true form—massive and reptilian, a creature more like a snake than anything else, but a million times more vicious than anything nature could create.

That was what I met last winter.

I’m only alive now because of an extraordinary sacrifice someone made. That’s another story, but the point is, I came close enough to the Darkness to feel like I’d be dirty forever. Even when it was all over and I was safe again and amazed that I was still in one piece, I knew that having been in the
Darkness’s sights had somehow changed me. I’d been too close, gotten too familiar with death.

I’d never been anyone’s idea of a typical all-American girl, but that experience made it so that I would always feel somehow apart from everyone I knew. Tainted. Damaged.

As late as it was, I knew I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon, so I picked up Azrael’s book to distract me from my depressing thoughts. His story had become a sort of haven for me, a place where I could go to escape the questions about my own life that I wasn’t able to answer.

Speak to me, Jean-Loup,
I thought as I turned the page to the next chapter.

1453

The Apprentice

With Veronique’s death, Jean-Loup lost his desire to live.

What do I care anymore?
he thought as he rose each day from the bed that still carried the scent of the woman he loved. His life was empty and worthless to him.
I should die
, he thought. He wanted to, needed to be done with his suffering. But every time he thought about the peace that would come with death, he remembered his promise to Veronique as she lay dying.
Care for my sisters,
she had said. She had given the last of her life force to him, and all she’d wanted in exchange was his promise to protect the women of her abbey from the horrors of the outside world. With the gold he gave them, he brought them safety.

No, he could not grant himself the luxury of death. He owed it to Veronique to live.

But he did not have to live righteously.
I can do anything, Jean-Loup realized, be anything. I can dance for the Devil himself, if it suits me.

And it did.

He became a pirate.

• • •

By the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France, Jean-Loup (now known only as
Loup
, the Wolf) had amassed a fortune by waylaying English merchant ships and their wealthy passengers as they were forced from their estates in France. Of course, he did not need or even want the money. It just felt better to steal it. Then again, there was a certain pleasure to be had in the danger involved in his new line of work. On any particular day, he might be killed.

And then his suffering would end.

He became famous as a swordsman. Legends sprang up around this man named Wolf, the pirate whom women in drawing rooms spoke about with soft voices and heaving bosoms, the captain whose crew would follow him into Hell.

As his men drove the terrified English nobles from their cabins, they assured the people whose possessions they were taking that at least their lives would be spared.

“The women and kiddies, anyway,” the boatswain explained as he paraded them at sword point onto the deck. “Any man who wants can take his chances with the captain, though.”

They all looked to Loup, who stood on deck holding his gold-hilted sword.

“It’s the Wolf,” one of the passengers murmured with relief. Loup did not kill innocent people who followed his orders. As usual, they were deposited farther down the French coast, having been relieved of their treasures and weapons but with at least their travel and identity papers intact.

One by one the male passengers, who nearly always declined to duel with Loup, slinked past him while their women looked on contemptuously. Occasionally a woman, despite the unpleasantness of her situation, flashed a lusty glance at the handsome pirate with the gold-hilted sword.

Loup was always courteous. He nodded graciously to the ladies, and only smiled at their cowardly husbands. In his entire career as a privateer on the high seas, he prevented only one person from leaving his ship. That was a ten-year-old cabin boy who had been trying to sneak off the deck unnoticed.

“You,” Loup said, jabbing at the boy’s leather jerkin with his sword. “Who are you?”

“I ain’t nobody, sir,” the boy said.

“Oh, stop it. You’re not talking to an English lord. What’s your name?”

The boy looked up through a mop of dirty hair. “Henry Shaw, sir.”

“Shaw!” Loup roared with laughter. “Do you know what that means in your pitiful language?”

The boy shook his head.

“Wolf! It means wolf, the same as me! Perhaps you’re one of my descendants!” He slapped the boy on the back. “What do you say to that, Henry Shaw?”

Henry swallowed. He had no idea what the mad pirate was talking about, but the man’s fancy sword was still poking into his ribs, so his lifted his face and said in a clear, loud voice, “That’d be fine by me, guv.”

“Good. I need a servant. The last one ended up getting thrown overboard.”

• • •

That was the last venture in Loup’s century-long spree as an outlaw. With young Henry Shaw at his heels, Loup returned to Toujours, although he’d never again referred to it by that name after Veronique died.

The place was in ruins. He had not visited it in decades, and the neglect was obvious. Aside from its sturdy Romanesque walls and part of a roof, there was little indication that human beings had ever lived there. All the furniture had been stolen long ago, as had nearly everything else that could possibly be carried. Rats and birds had made nests throughout the house. The fields and vineyards, once so carefully tended, now lay covered with weeds. The barn was no more than a pile of stones.

“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Loup told the boy as he emptied a bottle of rum into his mouth and then tossed it into a corner.

Impossible as the task seemed, young Henry managed to get the place into a livable, if primitive, condition before the first snows of winter.

Loup, meanwhile, uncovered a chest of magnificent leaded stained glass from one of his outlaw forays. “I never seen anything like this outside of church,” young Henry said, picking up one of the sheets.

“Well, polish them up. And don’t break anything, or I’ll have your head.”

The boy took a cloth to them, first wiping down the glass, then rubbing the lead pieces until they shone. “Blimey,” he whispered. Even the colored glass panels in church didn’t gleam like these. He went in search of his master, who had passed out from drunkenness, and shook him awake.

“Captain Loup! Come see this!”

“What is it, you little toad?” Loup roared as he reached for his goblet, which Henry had been instructed to keep filled at all times.

The boy had long since ceased to be afraid of the French pirate who had taken him from the cargo ship. Despite the Wolf’s bluster and perennial drunkenness, Henry knew that his master was not a cruel man. Sometimes when the boy could not sleep at night, he heard Loup weeping. Henry never asked about these melancholy episodes—he respected Loup too much to embarrass him with his knowledge. He knew that Loup must have lost something more precious than life itself to mourn so deeply.

“Speak up, you bloody pig turd!”

“The leading around the glass, sir,” Henry answered. “Look!” He held up the sheet of leaded glass.

“By Saint Peter’s beard,” Loup remarked as he touched the gleaming lead, which was not lead at all, but gold. “What’d you do?”

“Nuffink,” Henry insisted. “Got beat once for coin clipping, but I didn’t do nuffink then, either.”

“Coin clipping?”

“One of the toffs on the ship said I was pinching gold off of his coins while I was cleaning his shoes, but I wasn’t. All I was doing was shining his bleedin’ buckle. I don’t know how the gold got under me fingernails.”

Loup looked up from the stained glass with its golden border. “Gold was under your fingernails?” he asked, instantly sober.

The boy shrugged.

“Were you thinking about gold at the time?”

“How do I know what I was thinking?” Henry said irritably. “Thinking just happens. You don’t plan it.”

Loup nodded slowly. “Wait here,” he said. In a few minutes he returned with a kitchen pot made of black iron. “I want you to think of gold,” he said, placing the boy’s hands on the sides of the pot.

“
What?”

“I said think about making gold, you scurvy cur, or I’ll feed your scraggly head to the rats!”

“All right, all right,” Henry said. “Though you’re a madser, and no mistake.”

“Shut up and think. And hum.”

“What’s that you want?”

“I said
hum
, slimy worm! Make a noise.”

“What kind of noise?” Henry asked.

Loup took off his boot and threw it at him. “A
gold-making
noise, idiot boy! Go on, go on.” He flapped his hand at Henry. “And be serious about it, or I’ll wring your scrawny neck. Don’t think I won’t.”

The boy closed his eyes as he rubbed the pot. The area where his hands had come in contact with the metal changed from black to gold. “Can I stop thinking now?”

“No, damn you,” Loup said.

The boy rubbed some more. And more. He rubbed the iron pot until his hands began to blister. “Loup—”

“Look.”

When Henry opened his eyes, they bulged. “God and king,” he breathed.

Loup laughed. “It took this long because you don’t think well,” he said. “But I’ll teach you.”

Henry hardly heard him. He was looking at the golden vessel between his hands.

“In case you have any ideas about running off, I should tell you that you’re welcome to do so. But if you do, you probably won’t live to your next birthday.”

The boy knew Loup wasn’t talking about what he himself would do to him, but about Henry’s fate in the hands of the public. “Am . . . am I a sorcerer, then?” he whispered.

“That’s what they’ll say.”

He looked closely at Loup. “And you?” he asked after a moment.

Loup took the lid to the pot and ran his hand over it. With one sweet caress, the lid transformed into gleaming gold. He grinned at Henry.

“So we’re rich?” the boy asked.

“Is that what you want?”

Henry shrugged. “I’d rather stay with you,” he said.

Loup nodded slowly. They were the kindest words he’d heard in a century. He didn’t trust his voice. “Then keep your mouth shut,” he said hoarsely. “And get back to work.”

• • •

It had been that simple.

Loup and Henry did not live like rich men, but continued to farm the land that Loup owned. They employed only a cook who came in from the nearby village three days a week, and a few extra hands at harvest time.

In the evenings, the two of them read. Loup introduced Henry to mathematics and science and art—all the things that had once been his principal occupations in the days before he’d discovered the dubious gift of alchemy. He hadn’t wanted to stop drinking, but Henry’s avid interest in education forced Loup to keep his mind relentlessly clear. Finally, when Henry was twenty-one, Loup took him along to the Abbey of Lost Souls.

By this time Loup looked as if he were in his sixties. Although he’d arranged for a chest of gold to be sent to the abbey each month, he hadn’t attended the ceremonies regularly. Consequently, he’d aged like a normal man during most of the years he’d spent raising Henry. Nevertheless, the abbess—a new one, with a controversial past—welcomed him warmly when he came to them with his ward.

“Ah, your son,” she said, taking Henry’s hand between her own. If she remembered Drago, she did not mention him.

Loup winced at the thought that his real son had lived in the thrall of evil, and had probably burned in Hell long ago.