The Passion (37 page)

He grabbed her shoulder then, shaking her once, hard. "You know nothing about us!" he hissed into her ear. "Nothing!"

"Why?" she muttered. Desperately she searched the dark. "Why would you rescue me?"

"For my own purposes, I assure you, and after they are served you may run back to the dungeon or fling yourself to the dogs or rot in hel for al I care. You surely didn't think I would have only one plan and trust it to a human, did you?" Out of patience, he swept her into his arms, her face pressed against his shoulder to muffle her screams, and carried her like a child..

There was nothing so remarkable about their escape. Denis knew that the queen, deep within the protective wal s of the Palais, would be protected by a regiment, but who would care for the fate of one human who had neither the strength nor the wits for escape and who was destined for judgement at any rate? No personnel would be wasted on her; no one would be expecting trouble from her.

He had taken a chance on entering the grounds, but was proven right in his hope that the confusion would disguise his scent and that he would be lost in the crowd. The trackers would know him, yet he avoided them. The queen would know him, and so would Alexander, but he had no intention of getting close enough to give them the chance to identify him.

He used his nose to fol ow the tunnel, the smel of dampness, the smel of cold, the smel of river air.

He kicked aside piles of fal en rubble and dragged Tessa over when they proved to be too much trouble to move. They came out of the earth near the river, on the far side of a patterned garden. The Palais lights were distant, but guards were not.

Denis could hear them patrol ing not two minutes away at a fast run. He waited until the turn of their footsteps and the direction of the wind would carry his voice away from them, and then he set Tessa on the ground, holding his hand tightly across her mouth.

"Run," he said, low and quiet into her ear.

He released her and stepped quickly away, moving toward the river as he stripped off his shirt. Tessa did not move.

"You were a fool," she said, "to trust any part of your plan to a human."

At first he barely noticed her, and her words were like the annoying buzz of insects in his ear. It didn't matter what became of her now; he was finished with her. But then something struck him as strange about the way she stood there, her bandaged arm strapped so awkwardly to her chest… strange and quiet and inexplicably eerie, the way she simply stood there with her heart slow and steady and her breath unhurried, watching him.

He tossed his boots far into the bushes to better mislead the trackers. His shirt he flung in the other direction. "Don't waste your breath chattering, you sil y girl. You wil need it to plead for more balm when the one they've given you wears off, although by then it wil probably be too late."

"I am an excel ent shot," Tessa LeGuerre said, quite clearly. "What makes you think I missed?"

He turned slowly to her. Her smile was oddly calm, her shoulders straight, her head high.

"What?" he said, in the slow dread way of someone who knows the truth but finds it far beyond reason to believe.

"You know nothing about us," she replied simply.

"Nothing."

She lifted her head and screamed, "Here! We're—!"

Denis lunged at her, cutting off her cry in mid-echo as he flung her into the river. He fol owed, diving into the sluggish flow only half undressed. But it was too late. Already he heard the guards.

ALEXANDER

Chapter Twenty-one

As happens sometimes in moments of deep stress or sorrow, I went into my natural form without consciously wil ing it, or remembering the Change at al . There is a danger in this, of course, especial y for unmated persons, that the depression wil grow so deep, the comfort of the wolf form so soothing, that we wil never again summon the energy to transform ourselves into our human shapes and face the problems that drove us to ground in the first place. I was to know many tragedies in my life and some—though I would not have believed it then—

would cause me even more sorrow than this. But Tessa's betrayal was the first, and the loss of her the most wrenching emptiness I had ever known. I took refuge in my wolf form because I could not have borne the pain otherwise.

I do not recal how I spent the remaining hours of that night, only that sometime after moonset some instinct cal ed me home. And home was wherever I might be at my queen's side.

I moved into the house and past the guards, to the queen's inner chamber. A spiral formation of guards was in place—whereby a series of ever tightening circles of guards, half in human and half in wolf form, surround the palace, the inner chamber, the bedchamber and even the bed itself of the queen—

signal ing a state of heightened security that was more symbolic than practical. Tessa was imprisoned, and the threat had been eliminated.

Or so I thought.

Al of the pack had volunteered to take their turn in joining the formation; it was an honor to be able to display one's loyalty in such a way, to unite again against a common enemy—in this case humans, and al they represented. I wondered if it broke Elise's heart as it did mine to see her dream of joining forces with humans perverted like this. A bul et in the night and al of history is changed. Such is the way of humans, and no surprise. But it was brutal y unfair that our world should also be so rocked by their capricious violence.

I did not know whether I would be welcome, or would, in fact, be driven out by virtue of my association with Tessa, yet I was prepared to take my place in the formation. Somewhat to my surprise, the spiral parted to admit me into the royal bedchamber, and then beyond the draperies that enclosed her sleeping dais, to the bed itself.

She was curled among the pil ows in her natural form, sleeping lightly, as of course she would. She opened her eyes when I approached, and there was no reproof there, no disdain, no anger. There was instead only relief, and welcome. She beckoned me.

I jumped up onto the bed beside her, and the long sigh she released said,
Now you are here. I am
safe
. My Elise. She felt this. After al I had inflicted upon her, she wanted me stil . That was when I knew I would survive this horror. I could endure this loss. For Elise, I could conquer anything.

We lay together back to back, and eventual y fel into a more-or-less regular pattern of sleep. And here is the interesting aspect of our situation that night: in wolf form she could not tel me what she had learned from Tessa or warn me of Denis; perhaps if she had, I would have been better prepared. Yet if either of us had slept that night in human form, it is unlikely we would have survived the events that were to come.

The guards deployed around the bedchamber rotated shifts every hour from inner to outer chambers so that no guard remained so long in a single position as to become complacent or comfortable with his duty. It was virtual y impossible for an enemy to slip through such lines of defense, and considering the fact that the enemy—so far as any of us knew—was at that moment languishing in a prison from which not even a werewolf could escape, I should have slept easy next to the one I loved. I did not.

With every rotation of the guard I was awake, though I concealed the fact careful y. I can't say why, except that I think even we have senses of which we are not completely aware, and that night a secret sense was whispering to me of danger. It wasn't until the fourth rotation of the guard that I understood why.

The bed where we slept was on a dais, surrounded by two sets of draperies—heavy tapestry to seal in warmth in the winter and filmy gauze to keep out insects in the summer. On this warm summer night only the gauze draperies were drawn, but there was a corner at the foot of the bed where the tapestry drapes pooled, and it provided perfect cover for the guard who slipped through them and stood next to the bed on which the queen slept.

I think he was startled to see me, but I was so stil he must have believed he could finish his business before I stirred. And in fact he might have done so, for I never saw the thin wire stretched between his hands with which he intended, presumably, to garrote the queen. What I did see was the way he moved toward the center of the bed, where Elise slept, and how he bent near her. Stil , he might only have been checking that she was wel , which in some loose interpretation of his duties might have been within his rights. But as he bent over, his hair fel away from his face and I saw something else.

He had only one ear.

This, then, was my first inkling of what must have real y been going on that night, of the conspiracy against the queen and of the mastermind behind it. I didn't reason it out then, of course. I didn't think at al . Between the time I saw him and the time I moved, there was not so much as an indrawn breath. In absolute silence, as swift as a striking snake, I lunged at him, and opened his throat with one slash of my claws.

Elise was instantly alert and on the defensive, springing at him as I did; blood sprayed the bed, the wal , my fur and Elise's as we al crashed to the floor together. The guards surrounded us instantly with much snapping and tearing and braying of alarm, but they were too late; the last of the kil er's life bled out between Elise's jaws.

For me, the crisis was not over. Propel ed by fury and fierce in my certainty, I left Elise to her victory and broke from the room. I could not spare the energy or the time it would take to change into human form, and I was faster and stronger as wolf. I burst through the open window and into the night, quick on the trail of my brother Denis.

But I was too late. Even that vengeance was to be denied me. I had not cleared the first garden wal when the howl of triumph reached me, signal ing the capture of the enemy of the queen—and his human al y.

The tribunal assembled at dawn. Justice is swift in cases such as these and the pack would have nothing less. History records this moment in song and splendor, but I recal it as a very stark and undramatic affair.

Perhaps I am not the best judge of memory, however. I can never look back upon that night without seeing it al in the shades of gray that would color the rest of my life. My brother, and my dearest Tessa, conspiring together to overthrow the pack leader and murder the woman I loved. When I traced the smel of Tessa to the weapon, I had thought I knew despair as black as it could get. But despair had not even begun.

The huge inner courtyard with its glassed ceiling and its tal sheltering trees and plants was crowded with those who would attend the judgement; a thousand or more of the highest ranked were given viewing space, while their underlings mil ed about in the hal ways and gardens, putting together pictures of the proceedings with their ears and noses. Al were in human form, deigning not to show their natural selves to the traitor and the human, and al were clothed.

Elise, wearing the royal blue of her station, took the seat of judgement on the dais beneath the rising sun. She cal ed me to stand beside her, thus making clear to the pack without a word what was my role in the entire affair. I stood at her right side, one step below her. My muscles were stiff, my senses alert, and my heart was fil ed with hate.

Denis was brought up first, shackled hand and foot and so tightly bound with heavy chains that even if he had been able to change he would never have escaped. He was stil wet from the river into which he had tried to escape, his hair dark and tangled in limp strands around his shoulders, his sodden woolen trousers riding low on his waist. Yet he held himself like a king, even when the roar of the crowd shook the courtyard and echoed off the ceiling. He neither flinched nor bowed but looked straight ahead, his head high and his gaze strong, turning to show himself to the crowd proudly and deliberately.

The disdain in the curve of his lips was a chal enge to them al , for though they had rejected him, though they had arrested and convicted him, he had won tonight. He would never be their leader, but he had proved his way was the right way: humans were the enemy, never to be trusted, bent on the destruction of us al . The lesson he had taught us on that score would echo throughout the reign of the Devoncroix queen, tainting everything she did or hoped to accomplish.

I wanted to kil him. That was not, of course, within my purview.

When they brought Tessa up, I could barely glance at her. She was wet, too, from having been tossed into the river by Denis just before he himself had dived in—although whether it was with an intent to drown her or merely to disguise her scent from the guards, no one ever said. I do recal wondering why the guards had bothered to pul her out; it would have been easier on her to be left to drown.

Elise al owed the assembled witnesses to vent their fury on Denis with their voices for as long as they would, and he endured it with arrogant contempt. If they had been loosed to pelt him with stones or tear at him with their teeth, I am convinced his demeanor would not have altered. He was royalty. About that I have never argued.

When the roar began to die, Elise spoke in a loud clear voice. "Denis Antonov, son of Falquois and Chanson, brother of Charles, Minet, Lissom and Alexander, grandson of Simon and Leonette…" And so it was required that she name us al unto three generations, and she did, and we shared the shame and the responsibility for this, a member of our family gone bad. As she spoke, each one who was named and who was present ritual y stood and turned his back on the offender, except for me. I had been cal ed to stand in judgement, and I had to watch it al .