by Donna Boyd
Rolfe’s gaze was steady, dark, and unfathomable. “Something happened to you recently in France,” he prompted. “Tell me what it was.”
Emory said nothing.
Rolfe glanced at his watch. “I have nothing but time,” he assured Emory with a small smile. “Yours, unfortunately, is limited.”
Emory drew a breath, released it, took a final sip of his wine, and set the glass on the table. “Each year,” he said, “I make of pilgrimage of sorts to a little church in the Valley of the Loire.” His tone grew reminiscent. “They say it dates back to the fourteenth century, perhaps even older. There is a huge palais at the top of the hill, the chimney tops barely visible over the trees. But the palais is private, its gates closed and locked, and no one ever goes there anymore. I like to go in the spring, when the roses are in bloom.”
Rolfe prompted gently, “You wait there for Lara.”
Emory kept his heartbeat still, his breath even. “She never comes.”
“And this year?”
“This year as I sat in my customary pew in the empty little church in the quiet of the day, a priest, the rector of the place, passed by me, as he often does, and said to me, as he often does, “God bless you, my son.” He clasped my hand in both of his and when he moved away, there was a slip of paper in my palm. It said, Our friend has gone abroad. He said to tell you his time has come. And thank you.”
Emory was silent for a moment, gazing at the glass before him. Then he looked at the man opposite. “I left the church. I remember standing at the bottom of the hill, looking up at the palais. The roses were spilling over the top of one of the garden walls. And that’s all.”
Rolfe regarded him thoughtfully. “And so,” he said in a moment, “let us review. You did not kill David after all, as you told me when we began this interview.”
Emory looked down at his glass, found it almost empty, and refilled it with the last of the bottle. “No,” he said. He was tired. The muscles of his face sagged, and his voice was heavy.
“You lied.”
“I did.”
“That was foolish.”
Emory sipped his wine, and almost managed to form his lips into a smile. “If you’ve learned nothing else about me today, you should have learned that I have been a greater fool for far less reason.”
“Still, it’s a pity.” Rolfe sounded genuinely regretful. “I’ve grown rather fond of you in the course of our time together.”
“Thank you,” Emory replied. “I wish I could say the same.” And he lifted his glass in a salute. “Although you do keep an excellent wine cellar.”
“I am puzzled,” observed Rolfe mildly, “over the great fuss that has been made over this hybrid, your David. You risked your life, betrayed your vows, and gave up your future to save him, as did the lovely Lara. You were willing to kill the only father you have ever known to avenge him, and now, it appears, you will in fact die for him. And to what end? You know nothing about him—except, if your report is to be believed, that he is capable of single-handedly destroying both of the planet’s dominant species. What else is he capable of, I wonder?”
Emory did not reply.
Rolfe’s expression grew mildly speculative. “He has been locked away in this Sanctuary for, what? Over a decade? I wonder what that must have been like for someone as accustomed to the freedom of the wilderness as he was. I wonder what that might have done to him.”
Emory sipped his wine. “I’m sure I don’t know.”
Rolfe said, “Where is David?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your loyalty is admirable,” Rolfe pointed out, “but very likely misplaced. He is dangerous, by your own admission. He is very possibly also quite mad. Of course he must be captured again, and contained.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
“Ah.” Rolfe smiled. “Somehow I don’t believe that. So let me ask you one question that I believe you will have no trouble answering honestly. Why did you do it? I understand why the Devoncroix would want him out of the way. I understand why the Brotherhood would consider his very existence a threat. But why did you go to such lengths to save him? What good can you possibly think will come of it?”
And now Emory smiled, and gave a small shake of his head. “You really haven’t been paying attention, have you? I’m an idealist. I believe in things greater than myself. It wasn’t David I gave up everything to protect, it’s what he represents. What he can be.”
Rolfe inquired politely, “And what is that?”
“What the human race was meant to be,” Emory explained simply. “What the loup garoux were meant to be. We’ve been at war with each other and with ourselves since creation, trying to fill the emptiness. But David is the end of all that. He will bring us together. He is the best of both our species.”
“Or the worst,” suggested Rolfe.
“Perhaps.” Emory conceded. “Either way, it’s over. History has been changed, for both of us. And I have lived to see it begin. I’ll die without regrets. ”
Rolfe said abruptly, “The note that the priest gave you—what did it really say?”
“I told you that.”
“Was it, in fact, the priest who approached you, or was it someone else?”
“It was the priest. I told you.”
Rolfe sipped his wine, his eyes unblinking, studious, unrevealing. “This,” he said at length, “is why the loup garoux hold your species in such contempt. You are pathetic liars.” He raised his glass again to his lips, found it empty, and said mildly, “Damn. That’s the last of it.”
His gaze shifted then, over Emory’s shoulder, and Emory heard the door open. He half turned, and caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye of the man who entered. Tall, slim, long-haired and incredibly strong. He slammed Emory back against the chair and bound him, chest and arms, before he could summon much more than a token struggle. The strip of reinforced plastic that secured him to the chair was so tight it compressed his ribs, and he could feel the thrum of his heart against it. His breath was a little short.
“Good Christ,” he said. “We’re not really going to play this out, are we?”
Rolfe said, “I am a man of my word. And I count four lies you have told me. That translates into four fingers. Although,” he added courteously, “I do appreciate the effort you have made to relate the remainder of your story. I found it both entertaining and enlightening, and it filled in quite a few blanks in recent and ancient history that have tormented me.”
The tall man seized Emory’s left arm and jerked it forward, pinning his hand to the tabletop at the wrist. In his other hand he produced a heavy bladed knife with a bone handle, its edge honed razor-sharp. Emory’s muscles stiffened in visceral resistance although he knew a struggle would only prolong the pain.
He said, “Is this worth the life of your children, then? The extinction of your whole race? I told you, I am infected.”
“So you did,” agreed Rolfe.
Once again the door opened behind him and Emory twisted his head around instinctively. His heart stopped beating in his chest, his saliva dried up in his mouth, his very blood seemed to stop coursing through his veins as Lara, bound and shoved by an unseen hand, stumbled and fell to her knees not six feet away from him.
She was dressed in white jeans and a pink silk blouse that was torn and stained and untucked. Her feet were bare. Her hair was loose and dull and tangled around her face and her back. When she fell her head snapped forward but she immediately jerked it upright again, revealing a bruised and bloodied left eye and a crust of dried blood near her temple. And a small pink scar bisecting her eyebrow. She looked at Emory.
She looked at him, and her eyes were filled with triumph and defiance and a furious determination for survival and when she looked at him his eyes flooded with tears and all he could think was, Lara. Lara ... But he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t even say her name.
Rolfe was watching him with mild amusement. “It was noble of you to try t
o conceal your bond from me, but completely unnecessary. I’ve known from the beginning. Without the bond she never would have known how to find you, would she?”
“Bastard.” His voice was hoarse, barely a croak. He strained against his bindings.
Rolfe gave an impatient jerk of his head and the man released Emory’s wrist and stepped to Lara, pulling her to her feet and shoving her into the chair at the head of the table, between Emory and Rolfe. Her hands were bound behind her back, as Emory’s had been when he was first brought in, but the man with the knife released them. Before she could make use of them, however, he slammed his hand against her throat, bending her head back against the chair and rendering her effectively paralyzed. Her eyes went wide with shock and the instinctive effort to breathe. Emory struggled uselessly against his bonds.
Rolfe looked bored, and actually glanced at the hands of his watch. “One last chance, Professor, to tell the truth. This is an easy one. No prevarication, and I will allow you and your lover to depart in more or less the same condition in which you arrived. It was David who came to you in the church at the foot of the Devoncroix Palais in the Loire, we already know that. What he put in your hand was an instruction as to how to contact him should you need to. You’ve memorized and destroyed it. Tell me what it said now, and you both go free.”
Lara’s eyes blazed at Rolfe. “You know nothing about us, if you think it will be easy.” She was gasping for breath, and practically spat the words at him. “You may prepare to breathe your last.”
The tall man drew back his hand with an almost negligent gesture and struck her hard across the mouth. A bloody gash appeared where her beautiful lips once had been.
Emory shouted, “Stop it! She doesn’t know anything!”
Rolfe smiled. “On the contrary. She knows everything.” He glanced at Lara. “You’ve had quite the career for yourself since you left New York, haven’t you, Princess? Or perhaps you would prefer to be addressed as ‘Commander.’” And he laughed softly.
Lara lifted her chin, her eyes cold. “I would prefer,” she said, “that you did not address me at all.”
“Your efforts are pointless of course. Effective change was never won through blind resistance, but through …” and he gave a polite nod in Emory’s direction, “allowing nature to take its course.”
He turned briskly to Emory. “Now, here is the situation. Your lover’s fate is in your hands, and it will be a simple matter for you to stop this. Please observe the way my friend Cameron is holding her.” Once again the werewolf with the knife slammed his hand against Lara’s neck, pinning her head back against the chair. Her eyes flared with fury and pain, but she was helpless.
“Do you know what becomes of a loup garou who is injured and who is physically refrained from Changing to heal herself? No? Well, she will eventually die, of course, or suffer the long-term impairment of her injuries. But long before that happens, she will endure the agonies of convulsions, she will lose control of her bladder and her bowels and at last, her dignity. She will rage and hallucinate and forsake all that made her uniquely loup garou, the top of the food chain, the dominant species on the planet. She will hate you. You will pity her. It will all be so sad I don’t know if I can bear to watch. So how are your ideals holding up, now, Professor? I ask you for the final time, how can I find David Devoncroix?”
Emory’s face was wet, his hair dripped into his eyes. He pressed against the plastic bond until he thought his ribs would crack. He said nothing.
Rolfe made a small moue of disappointment, and glanced at Cameron. Before Emory could so much as draw a breath for a shout, Cameron grasped Lara’s arm, slammed her hand upon the table, whipped out the evil-bladed knife, and sliced.
Blood gushed and pooled in a dark river on the polished surface. Lara’s scream, hoarse and wild and terrified, filled the universe. Her small finger, the nail perfectly buffed and polished and sculpted into a delicate crescent shape, skidded several inches across the tabletop and lay there, separated at the last joint from the body to which it had once belonged, in the growing, pulsing, black pool of its own blood.
It wasn’t until he heard Rolfe’s voice that Emory realized his own scream had melded with Lara’s, that the sound he heard was not of her agony but his own, and when it died he was looking into the cold, cold eyes of the werewolf called Rolfe.
Rolfe lifted his arm from the table to avoid staining his immaculate shirt cuff with the slow trickling rivulet of blood, and the expression of his lips as he did so was of faint disgust. “Now, you see what you have done,” he said mildly. He looked at Lara. “That’s one.”
Lara struggled against the cruel restraint of Cameron’s hand against her throat. Her face was chalk white, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her muscles set as she fought the pain and her own body’s natural instinct to Change.
Rolfe said, “Shall we try for two?”
Cameron, without releasing his crushing hold on Lara’s trachea, produced the knife.
Emory threw himself against his bonds. He shouted hoarsely, “What do you want from me? I don’t have his fucking cell phone number!”
Cameron grasped Lara’s blood-slicked arm and once again slammed it onto the table. "Emory screamed, No!” and the blade came down again. Bone and flesh broke and the bloody shape of another finger lay on the table, severed from the hand. The sounds that came from Lara’s mouth were guttural and animal-like and hoarse and gasping. She tossed her head from side to side against the chair, shuddering.
Rolfe inquired mildly, “Shall we talk once again of ideals, Professor?”
Emory clenched his teeth together hard, his breath coming in puffs through flared nostrils. Sweat congealed around his eyes and dripped into the corners of his mouth.
Rolfe glanced again at Cameron and Cameron, dispassionately, lifted the knife.
Emory shouted, “Wait!”
Rolfe looked at him.
“Wait, stop, I’ll tell you, I will!” Emory’s breath was ragged, his words barely distinguishable. Lara bucked and struggled against her captor, whose hand was on her throat again, so tightly that no sounds came. Rolfe looked at Emory inquiringly and he spoke quickly, quickly before he lost his nerve, quickly before Lara could stop him.
“It was a computer code,” he gasped. “An IP Internet address that connected directly to his handheld device. I can find him anywhere in the world with it. Get a pen. Write it down.”
Lara screamed, a furious, despairing, death-welcoming scream, and thrashed against Cameron’s restraining hand. Rolfe did not spare her a glance. His gaze was steady upon Emory. “Tell it to me.”
Emory, gasping and shaking, recited the numbers.
Rolfe, smiling very faintly, said, “Wrong, Professor.”
And he said to Cameron, without once looking at him, “Thank you. You may leave.”
Cameron’s exit was swift and wordless, and Rolfe stood almost in the same motion, and moved to Lara. Emory’s breath and his heart were thundering a counter-point cacophony, his whole body shuddering; he couldn’t focus or try to form words and it seemed a long, time-elapsed moment before he understood what was happening, before that understanding translated to his consciousness and finally to his soul; before he accepted it. Before he understood.
Lara was white and drenched in sweat, trembling, her eyes rolled back, her teeth chattering, barely conscious. Rolfe swept behind her and bent low, his arm around her throat as Cameron’s had been, his head bent over hers, embracing her, almost as a lover might. His hand moved downward over her bloodied, shaking arm, caressing it, owning it. And when he reached her hand he stretched the fingers forward, oiling them in blood, even the pulsing stump of the missing fingers, and he covered them in his own, stretching out his hand to clasp the severed digits that lay dead upon the table, covering them.
Emory could not see her face. Rolfe’s shadow encompassed it. He could see her body stiffen, almost as in its death throes, and then, abruptly go limp. He threw himself once again ag
ainst his bonds, sobbing. But Lara’s breath was quiet and even. Her face had relaxed its rictus, her eyelids fluttering to open. And her poor, mangled hand, glistening with blood and stretched forth upon the tabletop, was curled into a quiescent posture, with all five digits attached.
This Emory noticed in the time it takes one wet, desperate breath to dry in one’s throat, in the time it takes a universe to shift, in the space that lives between what is real and what is not. His brain had not yet analyzed what his eyes reported when Rolfe straightened up, and stepped away from Lara. Only it was not Rolfe at all. His hair was no longer dark, but blond and shoulder length. His features had changed. And his eyes were Devoncroix blue.
The color had returned to Lara’s face, the bruises faded, the cut lip healed. Her breath was suspended between parted lips, her gaze fixed upon the creature who stood over her. She cradled her bloody right hand in her left one, flexing the fingers, all of them. She said a single word: “David.”
He plucked a silk pocket square from his jacket and used it to wipe the blood from his hands, then, with a small expression of distaste, tossed it on the silver tray with the crusts of cheese and fruit rinds. “That, my dear professor,” he told Emory with a quirk of his brow, “is the way to tell a proper lie.”
He stepped over to Emory’s chair and snapped the heavy plastic cable that bound him between his thumb and forefinger. Emory’s upper body sagged against the chair as blood rushed painfully back into his limbs.
“Cleverly played,” David told him. And then he added curiously, “What would you have done, when I tested your non-existent IP address?”
Emory couldn’t answer. Even had he been able to draw enough breath into his throat to produce words, his brain could not form them.
A delighted smile touched David’s face as he answered his own question. “But it didn’t matter, did it? You wanted only to distract me long enough to give Lara a chance to Change. That was the plan from the beginning. Delightful.” And he laughed out loud, pleased with himself.