“Are they all dead?” I whispered, wondering if he would spring at me.
The giant gory head nodded and he shook more violently. I think the beast and the man were at war. Clots of black leaked off his fur and spattered the ground and me. I turned my face back into the snow. I was ready to die. If Ambrose killed me, so be it.
Then I felt those sharp teeth move onto the back of my neck. I tensed. A tongue licked once and then Ambrose took hold of my sweatshirt just below the collar. As ever, my heart seemed to calm in his presence.
Ambrose dragged me back to the house, moving far faster than I had while crawling toward the road. I wasn’t going to die out in the snow after all. He mostly kept me off the ground, but the hummocks of snow-covered shrubbery now scraped my stomach in a few places and I got bruises going up the steps that were still covered in hoarfrost. I wasn’t complaining, though. A bruise on the body was better than a bruise on the heart. Ambrose was alive and so was I, in spite of impossible odds. The bites and scratches didn’t matter.
Fuck you, Saint Germain, I thought. You’ve done your worst and you still didn’t win.
And in a way this was true. To some people, his other misdeeds might seem more awful, but for me, having my parents pulled from their graves and sent to kill me was the worst thing he could do. I knew down in my soul that nothing else he ever tried to use as a weapon would horrify me half so much. There was a kind of awful peace in that knowledge.
I shortly found myself resting in front of the fire. Ambrose rolled me onto my back and laid a clawed hand—it was more hand than paw now—onto my chest. There was a flash of heat and I felt the last of the lead weight on my heart ease off. My lungs filled gratefully, glad to have a working heart to pass the oxygen on to starved organs and muscles.
“Stay here,” Ambrose’s misshapen mouth said, and he turned me onto my side.
I wanted to tell him that his pointy ears were kind of cute, but I just nodded and then went to sleep.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night
The water, like witch’s oils Burnt green, and blue, and white
—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All the yardarms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
—Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Chapter Fifteen
I woke up to the smell of hot chocolate and noticed a saucepan on the hearth. Beside it was a mug with fragrant steam rising from it.
“Ambrose?” I rolled over until I faced the sofa. My movement was somewhat impeded by an old afghan that had been wrapped around me, but I felt no pain. Perched about two feet away was Ambrose. He had showered and changed into clean jeans, but something about him was still not entirely normal. Perhaps it was the golden glow of his damp skin and the steam rising from his head as his hair dried. There were no marks on him, but I had this sense that he was in some kind of pain; if nothing else, that there was psychic bruising that hurt him terribly.
His eyes studied me for a long while, their expression grave and perhaps a little angry. When he spoke, it was in the voice and style of the Ambrose Bierce I had become fascinated with in college. The old-fashioned tone and choice of words lent gravity to what he said. “Under the scar tissue and yards of barbed wire I’ve wrapped myself in, a heart still beats. It wants and yearns as it ever did—and I believe now that it can love.”
I stared, speechless. Of everything he might have said, this was the most unexpected.
“You will hate hearing this, but it is your frailty that in part attracts me to you. From the first, I wanted to care for you and keep you safe while I studied this enigma of new love. How could a body so softly made hold so strong a will? I guess I needed an answer because I have been so very lost for so very long. And that is why I didn’t send you away from the island. Away from me. Even when I knew I should.”
I still didn’t know what to say—didn’t know what he was saying and whether it might be better to stop him.
Ambrose went on, his tone almost meditative. “What gives you the strength to endure your losses and loneliness when my own much stronger body and personality could not find the resolve to carry on? That I feel an attraction for you at all is astonishing. I have lost so much that I have simply given up trying to care for anything or anyone who is physically vulnerable. And you are all too vulnerable.” His slumberous, still slightly wolfish gaze sent heat through me. I wondered, if he stared long enough, would I be immolated, just burned to ash where I lay? “But all the while I was surviving on my own, playing at being a lone wolf, I was also slowly dying inside, hating and envious in my soul of what others so readily have. Even before my physical death, I could not speak to friends or family without some venom of envy in my words. And after…” He looked at the fire and then back at me. “That changed with your coming. Your arrival on my tiny island was almost enough to make me believe it was Divine guidance that brought you to me. Until today, my old rage was left sleeping between cycles. My beast came only at the call of the moon and went away again without argument when the sun rose on a new day. We had made a kind of peace, the monster and I, and I foolishly thought I could let you near the beast during a waning moon without endangering you.”
“Ambrose…” I held out a hand to him but, though he smiled briefly at my gesture, he did not take it.
“I thought I was fully prepared for the fact that time would eventually bereave me of you, as it has everyone I have known. Death is the natural end to life. I accepted this and told myself I would be happy with whatever days or years we had. But I can see now that I lied to myself. This is too soon for an end, and it lays unbearably hard on the conscience that I have anything to do with your premature death. I hate myself for letting this happen. I don’t think that I can forgive myself.” He said this quietly, expressionlessly, but I knew that he meant it. I could hear both rage and loathing in his voice.
“Why? What happened? What are you talking about? I’m fine.”
“You were injured. By me. While I was a wolf.”
Translation: I had been scratched by a werewolf, and had probably caught Ambrose’s lycanthropy.
Well, I had more or less understood this when I first felt blood running down my arm and back. I just didn’t feel like thinking about it then. Nor did I now.
“Lighten up,” I said, still too tired to actually consider the full implications of what had happened. “You had to intervene, and you were in wolf form. Anyway, I could have been infected with something serious like rabies if you hadn’t interrupted the sheriff’s dinner plans. I’d rather be a canine than a zombie dinner any day.” Ambrose’s expression didn’t change, so I added: “It isn’t like I would leave you because I’m angry about an accident, you know. In spite of my recent behavior with Max, I try very hard not to misdirect my anger.”
“I never thought you would leave because of an accident. You are far too forgiving and compassionate.” He paused a moment and I looked at him, not understanding why he still appeared so somber. “Still sure that you’re an optimist?” he asked. “Well, you’re correct in one way. There is something I can do to mitigate this mess. I have learned that supposedly irrevocable death can still be gotten around.”
“What are you talking about? Does it involve silver bullets?” I asked warily.
“No.” There was another long pause. “Just electrocution.”
“What?” I was finally startled out of the semi-trance his words and my exhaustion had put me in.
“It’s your choice, of course,” he said. “But if you don’t let me do this for you, you wil
l die at the next full moon.”
“But why? I mean, why would I die?” I had that nasty Alice-down-a-bad-rabbit-hole feeling again. “Why wouldn’t I be like you?”
“Your heart,” he said simply. “Very few humans are strong enough to survive the change into a wolf, even without a damaged heart. Why do you think the world isn’t crawling with weres? Most die during the first full moon. Their bodies simply can’t withstand the trauma of the alteration. The cells rip themselves apart and do not knit back together fast enough. They bleed to death, their organs turned inside out. It isn’t a fate I would wish on anyone.”
A wet splash on my cheek distracted me from Ambrose’s words, and I realized I was crying silently with a mix of frustration, rage and fear. I scrunched down in my blanket so he wouldn’t see.
“Damn it! Ambrose, you are not allowed to say you love me and then tell me I’m going to die. It’s fine drama in a novel but this sucks.” I gulped down a sob and then added fiercely: “Take it back!”
“But that’s my point. I’m not saying that you’ll die. I mean, you will. But just for a while. And we don’t have to decide now, but it would be best to act while there is a storm system nearby. I need a very particular kind of lightning for the ritual. Saint Elmo’s fire, of course.” His voice was calm, though I knew that he was seething inside. His eyes remained a dull yellow, though the normal blackness was slowly spreading out from the center.
“That’s like ball lightning?” My brain tried to grab onto some aspect of this situation that wasn’t horrible. “The candles of the Holy Ghost. Spirit ire. Will-o’-the-wisps.”
Translation: The creepy light that had been crawling over the zombies. I didn’t much like the sound of that. But it was marginally better than having my organs turn themselves inside out and dying from it.
“Yes, it’s called all those things. This kind of electrical phenomenon produces a form of electrical plasma that glows a violet blue with threads of green and white. You can get it in certain storms or volcanic explosions. It carries about thirty thousand volts per centimeter. It sounds different than regular lightning. It…sings.” He added cryptically: “Storms are safer than volcanoes. We have more control.”
It was my turn for a long pause.
“Are you sure this won’t kill me?”
He hesitated and then hedged: “It’s supposed to kill you.”
“I mean kill me permanently.”
His eyes as they met mine were anguished. “No. I can’t guarantee that it won’t. I’ve never tried doing this to someone else, let alone someone with a damaged heart. I watched the Dark Man do it many times, though, and know exactly what he did. I have also successfully reanimated myself when I’ve felt my body slowing.” He added softly: “It’s less violent than turning wolfen. It can work.”
“If my heart is strong enough.”
“If your will is strong enough,” he corrected. “This is as much about spirit and mind as it is about body. Unlike the lycanthropy, which leaves you no choice, you have to want to come back for this to work.”
So it was all on my head. Great.
“Will I be a zombie?”
“No!” His denial was swift.
“That’s good.”
“You might say that I am the lesser of two evils in this situation.” He smiled again, but there was no humor in it.
“You aren’t evil,” I objected. “Crazy maybe, when you’re a wolf, but not evil.”
“Maybe.” He nodded in acceptance.
I looked at the claw mark on my arm. It was already healing, knitting together without a trace of fleshy tearing. The virus was apparently alive and well and doing its work. I couldn’t pretend that perhaps I hadn’t been infected. Ambrose was telling the truth. I was going to turn into an animal at the next full moon. The only question was whether or not to let the next moon kill me. At the moment, though I was far from emotionally grounded, that seemed like a bad idea. Life—even an extremely altered one—was the better choice.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
He showed misgiving for the plan once I had agreed. “We can wait until you’ve rested and had a chance to think—”
“No. I might come to my senses. Better we do this now. We probably have other trouble coming our way. That wasn’t the only cemetery in town, and I need to be able to defend myself. The cold would have gotten me if the zombie hadn’t. I’m too weak to fight them as I am. Maybe…maybe this will be for the best.” I was trying to convince myself.
Ambrose nodded and glanced out at the window where the storm clouds roiled with green light. I was certain this time that he was calling them.
“I’ll need a few things. I have my medallion, but some heavy chain would be good. We need it for a conductor….”
“There’s some out in the shed.” A new thought occurred to me. “Ambrose, if my heart is healed…in this form, will it be possible for me to have a child?” I don’t know where the question came from.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He looked thoughtful now instead of sad. The change was a relief. “The Dark Man’s get was always sterile, but lycanthropy seems to heal anything. Changing at the full moon might do something odd to the fetus, though. I don’t know if a baby would be strong enough to survive if the mother changed around it. I don’t know if it would change too.”
“But it might work if both parents are lycanthropes and not human,” I persisted. “There is still a chance.”
“It might work. We could certainly try.” He took a deep breath and then gave a half smile, which was genuine and made him appear a lot more human. “What the hell. Life should be a daring adventure or nothing, right?”
“Right.” It was stupid, but I found myself feeling more optimistic. This was giving me a strong reason to fight if the endgame got tricky and I lost my nerve. I struggled upright, pushing away the afghan and reaching for the hot chocolate.
“You have your heart medicine?” he asked.
“Yes.” I patted my pocket. “Will I need it?”
“I don’t know. I have an adrenaline cocktail that should do the trick. That’s just for backup.”
“Any sign of the police?” I asked, sipping at my cocoa straight from the pan. It should have burned my mouth but I didn’t feel it. “I would have thought we made enough noise to rouse greater Maine.”
“No. I don’t think anyone heard anything. The storm must have drowned out the gunshots. Or maybe they were forced to sleep.”
“Could he do that?”
“I don’t know what he can do. There have even been wild stories about him overseeing his zombies by astral projection.”
I thought about the shadow, now less sure that it had been a hallucination.
“He might have done that tonight,” I said.
“Possibly. He was definitely controlling things.”
“We’ll have to burn the bodies?” It was half statement and half question. I was thinking that my parents were out there and their disposal was something else I didn’t want to consider. It was easy to push that thought away because I used both hands and feet.
“Eventually.” Ambrose still crouched just out of reach. His expression was almost guilty.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. “I mean, something else? Is it about the scratch? Am I scarred in some way?” He shook his head, now looking bemused. I knew I sounded exasperated, but there was only so much that I could take in at one time. “What then? Does the lycanthropy mean that I will somehow belong to you? I mean, you said that Saint Germain wanted the virus to make his ghouls obedient. What does that mean exactly? Will I be your slave?” I asked this last part hesitantly, because I didn’t want any more bad news that might dissuade me from this course.
“I’ve never made a wolf before. Or taken anyone into the fire. But I know from my own experience that creation does not mean ownership. Adam begat Cain, but he didn’t own or control him. The Dark Man never controlled me.”
Translation: I had free w
ill. It was a small mercy, but I took mercy any way I found it.
“But I am going to look out for you, Joyous. For a while I will be your constant shadow. No one should have to face this alone. I wouldn’t want you to…be like I was. So, you’re stuck with me whether you want to be or not.”
“I want,” I said briefly, because I had decided that the less I heard about the transformation, the better it would be. Suffice it unto the day the evil therein and all that. We still had to deal with a bunch of zombie bodies—don’t think about your parents!—and with Ambrose’s declaration of reluctant love.
It probably hadn’t escaped his notice that I had said nothing back about my own emotions. I wanted to, but I wasn’t at all sure just what I was feeling, and Ambrose had sounded more angry than pleased that he had feelings for me. This wasn’t a typical Hallmark moment.
“Okay. Let’s just do it.” I got to my feet. I felt remarkably sturdy considering what I had been through.
“Come to think of it, there is one really good thing about being a lycanthrope.” Ambrose also rose. His movements were strong and fluid. If he had been hurt in the fight I could see no physical signs. His skin was as perfect as ever.
“Yes?” I wanted to hear something uplifting, like I would always have a flawless complexion, smooth thighs and gain fifty points of IQ.
“Wolves come into season only once a year.”
I blinked.
“You mean that I’ll only have one menstrual cycle a year?”
“Exactly. Think of it as Nature’s apology for the other thing you’ll have to do once a month.”
Having my organs turn inside out and hair sprout all over my body seemed a lot worse than PMS, but I said: “Well, then. I guess every cloud really does have a silver lining.”
“And if I hang around you long enough I might even learn to look for them,” he muttered.
“Is there any other upside to being a werewolf? Shiny hair? Strong teeth? Flawless skin?”
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