by Kat Ross
They were an oddly endearing pair, one so serious, the other a buffoon, although Anne sensed it was an act they slipped into out of habit. Both wore pistols at their hips and she didn’t doubt they’d spilled blood. Gabriel had no use for untried boys.
Eventually, the conversation turned to politics. Salvado explained that he was from a middle class family who became embroiled in the upheavals following the Spanish withdrawal from Santo Domingo. In those tumultuous years, he told her ruefully, there were twenty-one changes of government and at least fifty military uprisings. Eventually, Salvado’s father was forced to take his family into exile in Haiti, which is where he met Jean-Michel.
“I took him under my wing at school,” Salvado said. “You should have seen him then. Skinny as a bruja’s shinbone and twice as ugly.”
“It’s the only reason I tolerated you,” Jean-Michel retorted. “As long as you were standing next to me, I was only half as ugly.”
“You remind me of a married couple,” Anne said, shaking her head. “Eternally bickering.”
“No, no,” Salvado said solemnly. “I am married to my pistol, and Jean-Michel to his pen.”
“They say it’s mightier than the sword.”
“It’s mightier than his sword, that’s for certain,” Jean-Michel remarked with a bland expression.
Anne gave them a puzzled look. “Are you comparing penises? Truly, a better simile would be some species of soggy mushroom.”
Salvado threw his head back and roared with laughter. Fanastil made a choking sound.
Suddenly, they both sobered up. Anne turned to see Gabriel watching them from the quarter deck, where he stood with Jacob Bell and Captain Dunham. He gave a brief nod and the men relaxed, but before he turned away, she saw the ghost of a smile on his face.
Anne was lying in bed reading one of Jacob’s books when a tap came on the door.
“It’s open,” she called.
Gabriel stood there, holding her parasol. “You left it up on deck.”
She smiled. “So I did. Thank you for bringing it back.”
He hovered in the cabin door.
“Do you want to come in?”
Gabriel hesitated.
“I won’t bite. Not hard, at any rate.”
His lips quirked. Gabriel moved inside, shutting the door behind him. He sat on the edge of the table and scrubbed a hand across his jaw. “This beard is prickly,” he muttered.
“Shave it off.”
“I can’t. Not until it’s over.”
She closed the book, leaving one finger between the pages to hold her place. “That’s your disguise? A beard?”
He gave a Gallic shrug. “It’s a start.”
Anne waited in silence. She sensed that whatever Gabriel had to say wouldn’t be rushed.
“Fanastil and Salvado like you,” he said quietly.
“And I like them. I think you’ve chosen well.”
Gabriel stirred restlessly. “Many men have passed through the ranks over the years. They must have the greatest integrity and intelligence. They must be willing to kill without hesitation, but they must also have compassion. The combination is rare. And now I find myself constantly questioning my own judgment.”
Anne knew he was no longer talking about Fanastil and Salvado.
“Constantin, you mean.”
He looked at her sharply. “Yes. I can’t stop thinking about him.” Gabriel stared out the porthole at the dark sea. “It’s like a thorn in my foot.”
She studied his stark profile and wished she could offer the comfort of an embrace, but that wasn’t why Gabriel had come to her. He only needed someone to listen.
“I can imagine,” she said softly.
“I’m not sure you can. We were together for more than four hundred years, Anne. He was always a harsh man, but he believed in our cause with all his heart. Or so I thought.” Gabriel let out a sigh. “I’ve gone over it so many times in my mind, trying to identify the moment when I lost him. But I can’t. He must have despised me and I never suspected a thing.”
Anne had only met Constantin once, very briefly, at the Monastery of Saint George. She remembered a large, bearded man with an intense gaze.
“Can he change his form?”
Gabriel gave a terse nod. “I taught him. And he’s mastered it completely. He could teach others. Necromancers who serve Bekker. I can’t allow that.”
A chill crept up her spine as she remembered the children Adrian had savagely murdered in Romania. Gabriel had been hunting him when he crossed paths with Anne.
“Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.” She gave a faint smile. “Mark Twain said that. It’s true. We all have the face we present to the world, and then we have the hidden face. The dark half.”
He met her eyes with a slight frown. “I don’t hide anything.”
“And you’re exceptional in that regard, Gabriel. But most people aren’t like you.”
He was quiet for a moment. “It’s no use talking to Jacob or Julian. They can’t think clearly. They only want Constantin dead.”
“I thought you did, too.”
Gabriel’s eyes flared. “Oh, I do. But I want to know why first.”
“You may never know,” she said gently. “And you may have to live with that.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You need to learn to let things go, Gabriel. You carry your grudges around like millstones.”
“I’ve forgiven you, haven’t I?” he said roughly.
She smiled. “I don’t think you have.”
He drew a long breath through his nose, exhaled. “It’s hard,” he muttered.
“I know. But sometimes not forgiving is harder.” She wiggled her bare toes, thinking. “Doesn’t the Bible say something about turning the other cheek?”
“I prefer Deuteronomy 32:35. ‘Vengeance is mine, and retribution. In due time their foot will slip; for the day of their disaster is at hand, and their doom hurries to meet them.’”
Anne laughed. “It has a ring to it.”
Gabriel’s lips twitched, his mood lightening. “Doesn’t it?”
“Hmmm. But don’t those who take up the sword perish by the sword?”
He frowned. “I thought you were an atheist. How do you know all these Bible verses?”
“I can still read fiction.” She gave him a saucy grin.
“‘I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh.’ Also Deuteronomy.”
“Sounds very Old Testament.”
“It is.”
Anne leaned back against the pillow, regarding him through half-closed eyes. “You’re aware that was written an insanely long time ago by people wandering around the desert with names like Habakkuk and Zephaniah?”
“Your point?” he replied crisply.
“Some things are unknowable, Gabriel. And you can let them haunt you forever or you can dig a hole and bury them deep.” She paused. “And then you can walk away and never look back.”
He gave a brief nod. “It’s late. I should let you rest.” He rose and strode to the door.
She sat up. “Gabriel?”
He turned back.
“Do you feel any better?”
He studied her for a moment. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Goodnight, Anne.”
The dream came back that night, and most others for the next week, leaving her wan and tired when she woke. Gabriel knew something was wrong. He brought food he’d made himself to her cabin, dishes he knew she liked, and asked if she was ill.
Anne described the dream, though in the light of day she felt a little foolish. It wasn’t even a proper nightmare. Nothing happened. She just walked and walked. It was the feeling that accompanied the dream more than the setting itself. Desperation mingled with nameless dread.
She confessed her fear it was a premonition, although of what exactly, she didn’t know. When Gabriel asked if she’d e
ver experienced such a thing before, she said no. It wasn’t exactly a lie … but it wasn’t the whole truth either.
At least he seemed more like his old self. His appetite returned and he gained back the weight he’d lost, the sun burnishing his skin to a healthy glow. She knew he still fretted about Constantin, but his laughter came as easily as his temper. It made Anne’s heart glad.
Gabriel took supper with her each day. He asked questions about the ceffyl dwr and other magical creatures she had come across in her travels, listening closely to the answers with childlike wonder. It was one of the things she loved about him. Despite the harshness of his vocation, Gabriel lacked an ounce of cynicism. When Anne exhausted her repertoire of tales, he coaxed her into games of chess, though between the listing of the ship and her own distraction, they rarely managed to finish one.
Mostly she passed the time reading the books she’d borrowed from Jacob. When she desired fresh air, Jean-Michel Fanastil and Miguel Salvado were usually on deck and they made amusing and witty company. Anne didn’t ask if they planned to take up the chains, but she suspected their talents lay elsewhere. When she passed the half-open door of their shared cabin one day, Anne saw hard cases stacked against the wall and smelled the odor of gun oil.
Julian Durand she avoided.
She prayed for foul weather, but the skies remained clear, the wind steady.
On the tenth day, she gathered the torn pieces of the sketch and tossed them overboard. The dream was probably just a metaphor for her own subconscious fears. A proverbial road to nowhere. She did love Gabriel, but their lives and goals were very different. In truth, she had no idea how they would reconcile those differences even if he decided to trust her again. The dream had started when she left London. It all made sense.
She told herself this, yet Anne believed that road led somewhere.
She leaned on the rail, watching the scraps of paper float in the ship’s wake like petals. Unbidden, the words to an old children’s rhyme popped into her head.
In the dark, dark wood
There was a dark, dark house
And in that dark, dark house….
Anne couldn’t remember the rest.
But she felt sure it wasn’t anything good.
Part II
“Open your eyes, Ambrosio, and be prudent. Hell is your lot; You are doomed to eternal perdition; Nought lies beyond your grave but a gulph of devouring flames.”
―Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
II.
Chapter 6
Balthazar lay on the canopied bed, legs and arms sprawled wide, a heavy gold pocket watch resting against his heart. For the last two hours, he’d done little more than listen to its relentless ticking. The tempo came in a swifter counterpoint to his pulse, which was slow and measured.
Tick, tick, tick, tick….
He was dressed for an evening out, though his cravat still hung loose around his neck. The daylight had faded long before, the room grown dark. Yet he hadn’t managed to rouse himself.
He’d been in a strange mood since the events at the Picatrix Club two months previous, both introverted and craving risk. More predatory than ever, yet curiously tender toward the women who sustained him. Reverent of the gift they gave him and desperate to be worthy of it.
After his brush with death, he’d hurled himself into an endless stream of parties and balls and late nights at London’s various nocturnal attractions. He had fed and fed, glutted himself with a dizzying variety of partners, far more than he needed. None had any inkling he’d done them a whit of harm and no doubt thought of him fondly. What he did to them was the opposite of pain, and some might even have paid the price willingly if they’d known. Or perhaps that notion was simply his own arrogance.
Tick, tick, tick….
Every second of his life was bought and paid for by a perverse exchange of pleasure and loss. Not for the first time, Balthazar wondered about the individual who had forged the ouroboros. It would take a deviant mind to even imagine such a thing. Someone with a macabre sense of humor and no morals whatsoever.
Perhaps someone not so different from the sort of individual who would use it.
The starched linen of the shirt pressed cool against his skin, a breeze from the open window caressing the sharp plane of his cheek. It might have been the surfeit of life pumping through his veins, or something else, but every sense was almost unbearably heightened. He could smell the beeswax the housemaid used to polish the bedposts and a hint of the soap she’d bathed with. Distant sounds drifted to his ears. The excited bark of a dog, a man’s laughter, the clop of hooves on cobbled streets, an enchanting strain of music heralding the onset of some new revelry.
Tick, tick….
Balthazar sat up abruptly, the pocket watch sliding to the rumpled sheets. The watch was not the talisman. It simply served as a reminder. Yet suddenly he was done tormenting himself.
If he was adept at seducing willing victims, how different was he from any other carnivore, gifted by Nature with tooth and claw in pursuit of dinner? The only thing capable of sustaining life was other life. This rule was not of his invention. He simply followed its dictates.
Now he felt acutely alive and grateful for it, aware it could all come to a screeching halt at any moment.
He rose and lit the lamps. Then he combed his hair, buttoned his waistcoat, and tucked the watch into a pocket. Long, elegant fingers quickly knotted the cravat. Balthazar hooked his coat from the back of a chair on his way out the bedroom door, shrugging it on as he went down the staircase.
“Lucas,” he bellowed. “Where are you?”
He strode through the hall to the library, where Lucas sat at a desk going through stacks of paperwork. He handled all of Balthazar’s properties and investments, most of them concealed behind a web of false identities. Balthazar enjoyed the comforts of money but had no interest in managing it, and Lucas’s meticulous nature made him ideally suited to the task.
In the soft candlelight, Lucas looked even younger than his twenty-seven years. He had a small neat moustache that he kept waxed to little points and deep-socketed brown eyes that gave little away.
“I’m going out,” Balthazar said. “Don’t wait up.”
Lucas glanced at him. “Do you require the carriage?”
The tone was mild if a touch cool, his face expressionless. The ire wasn’t directed at Balthazar’s evening proclivities. Lucas was used to those and his loyalty was beyond question. No, Balthazar knew Lucas thought he was a fool to stay in London. He’d urged his master to return to Spain, or better yet, retreat to a remote house he kept on Lake Baikal in Russia, one purchased under another name entirely.
“No need,” Balthazar said. “I don’t wish to interrupt you. I’ll find a cab.”
Lucas nodded and returned to the papers.
Balthazar hesitated a moment longer, wishing he could explain himself but somehow unable to do so. In truth, Lucas was right and Balthazar wasn’t entirely sure why he’d stayed, only that he was waiting for something. It was the same feeling one had on a hot summer night when the air grew heavy and charged. The primitive brain knew a storm was brewing long before the first thunderheads appeared on the horizon.
This did not trouble him – quite the reverse. He thrived on his little war against the Duzakh. Killing his former brethren was the only thing that gave him pleasure anymore.
Let them come.
“I’ll find my own way home,” he said at length.
“Very good, my lord.”
Balthazar quashed a pang of regret as he placed his hat on his head and stepped into the warm June evening, silver-headed walking stick tapping the ground, his chin dipping in acknowledgement of his fellow Londoners on the street. He drew lingering stares from both sexes, a reaction so commonplace Balthazar barely noticed anymore.
His features were roughly attractive, intent dark eyes with a wide, sensual mouth and slightly off-kilter nose, a souvenir of his childhood in the ghettoes of ancient
Karnopolis. His clothes were of an impeccable cut if severe, in somber shades that set off his olive-complected skin and coal black hair. The overall impression was of a large, sleek panther on the prowl.
A modern man for a modern age.
Balthazar strolled over to one of the hansom cabs lined up in front of the imposing edifice of Brown’s Hotel, telling the driver an address he’d been given at yet another party. It would likely be a crashing bore, but it was Sunday and he had nothing better to do.
They rattled off toward Pimlico, an area of stolid Regency homes that had once been affluent but parts of which were falling into decline. It was on one of these vaguely seedy streets that the hansom deposited him a short time later.
A woman with tresses of brown hair falling loose from their pins opened the door. She gave him a slow-blinking smile as he bowed and stepped inside. The house was large and very dim, with heavy drapes covering the windows. Candles flickered low, casting just enough illumination to outline bodies writhing in dark corners. He saw bottles of champagne, some tipped on their sides, and heard the strains of languid music coming from somewhere deeper in the house.
Balthazar moved into the entrance parlor, his dark gaze flicking over the revelers. A woman reclining on a sofa drunkenly seized his sleeve and he brushed his knuckles against her cheek with a smile, but didn’t pause. He disliked intoxicated partners. Their bodies were too numb to feel what he did to them, too distanced to experience true arousal.
The whole place reeked of alcohol and cigarette smoke. As he drifted from room to room, Balthazar began to regret allowing the cab to leave. This party had started hours ago and he had no desire to engage in pointless coitus with a stranger. At the moment, he brimmed with life and vigor. He could afford to be as choosy as he pleased, even to forego a liaison altogether, and he was on the verge of changing his plans to a late supper instead when a heavy male hand fell on his shoulder.