The Watchtower (33 page)

As he struggled back to a sitting position, Will had the odd sense that he might have blacked out while prone on the bed. He sensed some small acceleration in time, and the sky outside seemed palpably brighter when the flash and flames receded. He had no sense of how long he'd entered the blackness or where it had been located. But he had this odd sense of time lapse as an external change and not an internal blackout, some room he'd entered, almost some nation he'd become a part of. A place far away, and a new Will Hughes emerging from this sojourn in eternal darkness. It was all so irrational, and hazy ... but
this
Will Hughes, like a man possessed to a new way of thinking, did want to go to Pointe du Raz, overwhelmingly so. He wouldn't hear of doing otherwise. This Will Hughes
only
wanted to be with Marguerite for eternity. Or else not at all! And he felt no caution about Dee ambushing him as Lightning Hands and Russwurin had done. Will would be extraordinarily cautious and have a weapon on him.

He scribbled a note to her and put it in the wall compartment:

My love, if you're reading this, you know I have borrowed your ring and your box, and my deepest apologies for not being able to notify you first. With any luck and Godspeed I will be returning them (and myself) to you shortly! I know what meager reassurance my own ring, left in the absence of yours, provides. Trust me that I would not have taken such an extraordinary measure as removing your property without the most absolute justification, and that my loyalty to you, I trust, will soon be rewarded by the most perfect harmony between us. In the meantime I am, lovingly, your servant and ever-devoted [signed] Will Hughes.

He cursed Dee for his night-visit requirement; otherwise he might well have been able to next see Marguerite, in the joy of new immortality, this very evening! He gathered up his belongings and concealed the box among them.

He was halfway out the door when another thought occurred to him, a thought that brought hot blood to his face. Although he'd paid in advance for the room, he had not left a gratuity for the maid, a sweet, simple girl who had been tireless in her ministrations to him throughout his stay. It was bad enough he was abandoning Marguerite; it was an outright affront to his conception of himself as a gentleman to stiff the maid. He removed several gold coins from his pocket and, depositing them in a pouch, left them on top of a chest with a quickly scrawled note:
Pour Anne Marie, Merci!
Satisfied that he had behaved like a gentleman even in dire circumstances, he descended to the street and walked briskly to the farrier'schee edge of town, where he retained a horse to ride to Pointe du Raz. The quick storm had cleared, and the sun was rising bloodred behind him as he rode out onto the main road. In his face was a hot wind from the west, rough and dust-streaked, like one that might blow down an alley in hell. In his mind was Marguerite and how, when he returned to her on the morrow, their problems would be gone forever.

26

Blood Moon

As soon as we were over the crest of the hill, the light grew brighter. For a moment I was afraid it was the rising sun, but then I saw that it was only the full moon--a huge, rust-colored moon that hung over the next valley like a glowing jack-o'-lantern. A small village nestled in the crook of the valley a mile or so away was blood-tinged as if it had lately been the scene of a massacre. The lake beside the village reflected back the ruddy face of the moon.

"Is that Paimpont?" I asked. "It's closer than I thought."

"It must be. I recognize the abbey, but..." Will looked thoughtful. The moonlight gave his skin a menacing cast.

"I saw the tomb of your ancestor there," I told him. "Guillem de Hughes."

"A bloody crusader. When I first came here, I was so excited to discover that it was the ancestral home of the Hugheses, but then the more I learned, the more I found that the whole family history was soaked in blood. From that first selfish bastard who shot his swan bride to keep her from leaving to mercenaries and crusaders to ... well, to
me
. Over the years I've come to wonder if becoming a vampire wasn't the natural evolution of my lineage."

"Don't talk like that. John Dee tricked you by summoning that vampire, just as Morgane tricked Marguerite. Melusine told me that Morgane only ever grants requests that she knows will turn out badly for the supplicant."

"Did she?" Will asked, his lips curling in an angry smile. "That sounds about right. And yet, I stole this box from you"--he patted a leather satchel slung across his chest that I hadn't noticed before--"and we have come all this way so that I could ask her to make me mortal."

"But that's a reasonable request. You deserve to be mortal. I don't see how that could turn out badly."

Turning to me, Will caressed my face, traced the line of my jaw, and tilted my chin up so he could see the marks his teeth had made on my throat. "You have an awful lot of faith in the monster that almost killed you."

"But you didn't," I said, clasping his hand in mine. "You stopped yourself. A monster wouldn't have been able to stop, but you did. So you're not a monster."

He lifted his hand to my throat and stroked the torn flesh. I trembled at his touch, not from fear but from the sudden overwhelming desire to feel his teeth there again. "Let's hope for both our sakes x2019;re right," he said. Then he turned, took my hand, and led me into the blood-lit valley.

* * *

As we descended, we walked through deep woods that obscured our view of the village, but when we reached a clearing just above the lake, we could make out the village landmarks: the tower of the abbey across the lake, the gate to the walled town--closed now, and bolted with heavy iron locks--and across from the gate the half-timbered inn looking especially quaint and rustic in the moonlight. I couldn't make out the car park from here or--I realized as we drew closer--any cars on the road at all.

"The village looks like something out of the Middle Ages," I said to Will. "Maybe they got rid of the cars for the Renaissance Faire."

"No," he said, pulling me under the shadow of a tree. "'I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.'"

"What?" I asked, confused.

"It
is
the Renaissance. This is how Paimpont looked in 1602. See that cottage? I remember getting my horse shod there in 1602."

The building looked familiar to me, too, only I recalled it housing a gas station and sporting a large sign that welcomed visitors to the Fairy Country. "Maybe they took down the sign," I said. "Just because it looks like sometime in the seventeenth century..."

I felt Will's grip tighten on my arm. I turned and saw that his face had gone as rigid as the stone effigy in the abbey. "Not just any time in the seventeenth century," he said through gritted teeth. "It's the night I stayed here with Marguerite. The night she gave up her immortality for me and I, fool that I was, left her to trade my soul for eternal life."

"How do you know?"

"Because there she is."

I followed his riveted gaze down to the edge of the pool. At first I saw nothing and hoped that the image of his lost love was only a delusion left over from his long confinement in the Summer Country. Because as distressing as it would be to think that Will had lost his mind, I was pretty sure I preferred that to the idea that we had traveled back in time to the turn of the seventeenth century.

But then I saw her. She was wearing a dark cloak, but when she moved, a flash of white appeared at the hem, a glimpse of the long nightgown she must have worn when sneaking out of bed--the bed she had shared with Will!--and coming down to the lake. Her long black hair hid her face, but when I took a step forward, cracking a branch beneath my foot, she turned and revealed, startlingly clear in the moonlight, her face ...

My face!

I started to gasp, but Will clamped his hand over my mouth. For a long moment Marguerite stared into the dark woods above her, her brow furrowing with concentration. What would she think if she saw us? To an immortal fey, visitors from the future might not seeimpossible. We could warn her that she was about to give up her immortality for nothing, but then she'd never have mortal children. My mother would never be born, nor would I.

After a long moment she turned back to the pool and sat down on a circular stone overhanging the water. She remained still for several moments, then she leaned over the pool, nearly touching her lips to the water, as if whispering something to it.

Will released me and moved forward, his feet gliding silently over the ground. I tried to follow him, but my footsteps crackled like fireworks in the still night. Will was already at the edge of the woods, crouched in the shadow of an overhanging branch. A pang of jealousy, sharp as Will's teeth, tore through me. Of course, it was
her
he'd wanted all along. I was a pale facsimile. When I'd seen Marguerite's face, I'd thought it was identical to mine, but now watching her whispering to the water, I realized how wrong I'd been. She radiated an unearthly serenity I could never hope to assume. No wonder Will was drawn to her. They were alike--two immortals. If Will stopped her now, they could remain immortals together. What would it matter to them if I would never be born?

As if in response to my despair the ground beneath my feet began to shake. An earthquake, I wondered, or was the fabric of time splitting again, this time to spit me out into a limbo of the never-born? But then I realized that the rumbling was coming from the lake. With a Klaxon-like cry, the water split open, disgorging an enormous creature of sinewy muscle that shot straight up into the sky and then hovered there, held up by incongruously delicate wings. The seal creature looked down at Marguerite with cold, impassive eyes. A moment ago I couldn't have imagined anything daunting the self-assured Marguerite, but now I marveled that she didn't bolt and run from the apparent malevolence of this creature.

But she didn't. Instead she engaged the creature in calm discourse, the words of which I couldn't make out, but the tone of which--surprisingly calm and reasoned--was clear. As they talked, I crept quietly down to the perch where Will crouched and listened, confident that the thrash of the water--still disturbed by Morgane's rising--would cover the slight sounds of my approach. Even Will failed to hear me, so engrossed was he in Marguerite and Morgane's conversation. By the time I was close enough to hear, I gathered that Marguerite had already asked her sister to make her mortal. Morgane was laying out the ground rules of the deal--that all Marguerite's descendants would assume the role of Watchtower, "guarding against usurpers and vipers crossing the boundary from mortal to immortal in either direction. And even guarding humankind, loathsome as it is, along with ourselves, from those malefactors like werewolves, shape-shifters, incubi, or--"

Morgane abruptly fell silent and raised her black eyes to look past Marguerite ... directly toward Will and me. Had my movement given us away? But it wasn't me she fixed her gaze on--it was Will. I saw Will stiffen. This would be his opportunity to step forward and reveal himself, to tell Marguerite that she needn't make the sacrifice she was planning. But he didn't. Instead he straightened up and stared back at the creature. In the moonlight I saw the flash of teeth as he bared his fangs. Morgane responded by baring her own longer fangs, not in a snarl but in a nasty smile.

"--or
vampires
who would seek to conquer or destroy humankind, or we fey or both. You must especially swear to abhor all vampires."

That bitch!
She knew what Will was--what he would become--and she was deliberately binding Marguerite and her descendants to perpetual enmity with the man Marguerite loved. I had half a mind to stop her myself ...

But it was already too late. Marguerite was now swearing an oath binding her to the terms of Morgane's deal, and Morgane, with a parting taunt that Marguerite would "know soon enough" that she was a mortal, disappeared beneath the water.

Marguerite stood up and remained for a moment staring at the water, as if she expected--or perhaps feared--her sister's return. Then she grasped the collar of her cloak and drew something out of the cloth. Silver gleamed in the moonlight, and then, quick as a dragonfly's dart, Marguerite stabbed her index finger with the pin. I couldn't see the blood from where we were, but I saw Will's nostrils quiver and I knew he could smell it. He was still hungry from his long months in Maeve's tomb. Would he give in to his hunger and pounce?

But he held himself in place as Marguerite turned and walked back in the direction of the inn. When she had passed out of sight, I stepped toward him and gingerly touched his arm. When he turned to me, I saw that tears of blood streaked his face. I reached for him, but he shook his head and strode away, down to the shore of the lake.

"Morgane!" he called. "Show yourself! You have a lot to answer for, you bitch!"

The water swirled and once again disgorged a creature, but this time instead of taking the shape of a monstrous seal, Morgane appeared as a woman--a beautiful woman with long, seaweed hair that only partly veiled her bare breasts. She rose from the lake until the water reached her waist.

"Will Hughes, I presume," she cooed. "Is this the man who stole my pathetic sister's heart?"

"It's you who are pathetic. You added that part about protecting humanity from vampires because you couldn't bear to see Marguerite happy. You knew what I had--what I will--become."

Morgane laughed. "So you
are
from the future. I guessed as much. And who is this?" She tilted her head to look at me, and I felt a chill as if I'd been plunged into the icy pool. "She looks enough like my sister to be her spawn. Let me guess, he says he loves you and wants..." She tilted her head the other way as if listening to something whispering from the water. "Oh, it's too rich!" she exclaimed. "
Now
he wants to be mortal so he can be with
you.
Make up your mind, Will Hughes."