The Watchtower (38 page)

31

The Beast

Before I could do anythi
ng to stop them, the coach with Dee, Marduk, and the friar with the striking similarity to Roger Elden pulled away. Should I try to follow? But there was no way I could catch up to them on foot. The coach was racing up the hill toward the north coast road. Even if I could get back to our coach in time, it would be unable to get across the beach on the damaged south coast road. Besides, there was my Will to attend to--if he was still alive.

He lay in the shadow of the tower as still and cold as the stones looming above him. I crouched beside him, unable to see his face well in the dusk. I tried listening for breath or heartbeat before remembering that a vampire had neither. I stroks hair back from his brow and my hand came back sticky. Even his blood was cold.

I wept then, leaning against the tower wall, my Will's head cradled in my lap. He'd risked everything to become mortal by drinking Marduk's blood and died in the attempt. All my fears that he loved Marguerite more than me were gone. He had chosen mortality--and me--and died for his trouble.

While I sat there, someone came out of the tower and stumbled in the sand--a figure so familiar I thought it was the ghost of the man who lay dead in my lap until I remembered it was
young
Will, inexperienced Will as he had been in 1602.

A seething, all consuming, completely irrational hatred for young Will seized me. It was
his
fault all of this had happened--
his
self-absorbed quest for immortality on the pretext of being in love that had led us here. The least he could have done was kill Marduk thoroughly enough that his future self wouldn't get killed by him! In the next few minutes my hatred turned to contempt as young Will fell to his knees on the sand, tore his shirt open, raised his face to the moon, and howled. Perhaps he thought he'd become a werewolf, I thought snarkily.

"My day now night, and night now day,

eternity's my enemy!

Instead of solace, treachery.

Instead of love, blood has its way!"

A poem? Was he really composing a poem?

"You were right," I said to
my
Will. "You
were
an idiot. How did you ever become the man I love?"

"Four hundred years of living the consequences of my mistakes," he answered hoarsely.

I peered hard into the shadowy face below me. "Will? Are you...?"

"Still dead," he answered, struggling to sit up, and rubbing his head. I touched the back of his head gingerly and felt the skull solid where a moment ago it had been broken. In return he touched my face and brushed my tears away. "I failed. And I let loose that monster ... Marduk. What happened to him?"

"He left with Dee in a coach. There was someone else with them. An old man I think I recognized."

"The abbot, no doubt, that rogue Charles Roget. Which way did they go?"

"They took the north road." I could wait to tell him that his abbot looked like a man I'd met in twenty-first-century Paris.

"We have to get back in our coach and try to overtake them on the south road at Quimper. We have to destroy ...
that thing
."

"What about&2026;?" I gestured toward young Will, who was still ranting in verse, too caught up in his own drama to notice us.

Will sighed. "He's almost done. He'll spend the day cowering in a cave. At nightfall he'll walk to Audierne, buy a horse, and then ride to Paris to find Marguerite. He still thinks they have a future. There ... he's found her ring."

The moonlight caught a glint of gold in the sand. Young Will crouched down and kissed it.

"He thinks that now at least he has the ring to give back to Marguerite, but she'll refuse it..."

Will's voice trailed off, his head drooping. I shook him, alarmed that he'd lost consciousness again. It had been too long since he'd fed. I still had Marguerite's brooch, its sharp pin stained with Marduk's blood. The thought of that tainted blood mingling with my own was the only reason I hesitated before drawing the little dagger across my wrist. Will stirred when he smelled my blood and this time he was too weak to turn it down.

* * *

Once he'd revived, we returned to the coach, woke the still-snoring driver, and set out after Dee and his colleagues. On the road to Quimper I told Will about recognizing Roger Elden.

"Roger Elden?" he repeated the name thoughtfully. "The man I knew in 1602 went by the name Charles Roget--more commonly known as Lightning Hands for his ability to wield lightning."

"Wait, Roger Elden told me about a man named Cosimo Ruggieri who conducted experiments with lightning. He took me to the tower that Catherine de Medicis had built for him."

"Really?" Will asked, one eyebrow raised. "I didn't know you had that much time for sightseeing when you were in Paris."

I let out an exasperated sigh. "I was waiting for you for over a week! And is that really the point you want to bring up right now? That I spent a night up on a sixteenth-century tower with a man, or that the man might have actually been a four-hundred-year-old evil sorcerer?"

"The whole night...?" Will began, but then seeing my expression, changed tack. "Okay, I agree. The important thing is whether the man with Dee and Marduk now is Cosimo Ruggieri. Tell me everything this
Roger
person told you."

Ignoring the disdain he had interjected into Roger's name, I recounted the stories Roger Elden had told me about Cosimo Ruggieri. How Ruggieri had been banished and then forgiven by Catherine de Medicis and then assigned the revenues of an abbey in Brittany.

"So he could have been the abbot there," Will said. "I remember thinking at the time that he didn't look like your average friar."

"No, I suppose not. Especially considering that he refused the last rites on his deathbed." I told him the story of how Ruggieri was dragged through the streets Paris. Then I told him the rumors that Roger had relayed, about him dragging himself into the catacombs and finding an eternal life that condemned him to aging and suffering over and over again.

"That sounds worse even than the immortality I chose," Will replied, yawning. It was almost dawn. He'd need to sleep soon. His eyes snapped open though when he spied a coach on the north road approaching the intersection. "That's them," he said. "Whoever the third party is, we need to follow Marduk and find out where he hides. We must destroy him before he grows any stronger."

Before I could ask how we would do that, Will passed out. Unable to endure another day closed in the coffinlike interior of the coach, I climbed up next to the driver and told him to follow the other coach. When it was clear I was going to stay outside with him, he sniffed his disapproval and whipped the horses into a jerky trot that nearly sent me toppling from my seat. I caught my companion smirking as I righted myself. He smirked, too, when it started to rain and asked in mock politeness if "Mademoiselle" wouldn't rather go inside and seek shelter with "Monsieur." I supposed I could have risked opening the coach door in the murky gray light, but I didn't trust the driver to stay on the other coach's trail. Twice when we lost sight of it, he assured me that there was nowhere for it to go. There was only one major road and it led to Rennes.

Despite his assurances I urged him to go faster, but the horses were clearly tiring and we had to stop in Josselin to let them rest. I paced up and down the cobblestoned street in the rain, impatient to go, and unwilling to let the carriage out of sight. I considered rousing Will and making him switch carriages, but I was afraid that in his weakened state even minutes in this gray daylight would harm him. The driver, dry and cozy in the window seat of a pub with a pint of ale and a pipe, observed my anxiety with amusement. I could see him pointing me out to his new pubmates, who laughed heartily at whatever story he was telling about me.

Although there was no reason to continue riding on the outside, a perverse urge made me stick to my perch beside the driver all the way to Rennes. We reached the coach inn there a little after dark.

"Voila," my tormenter pronounced, pointing at the black coach bearing Dee's coat of arms. "What did I tell Mademoiselle? Your quarry has gone to ground here."

As soon as Will was awake, we made inquiries at the inn, but we discovered that the three gentlemen who had arrived in the previous coach had hired another one immediately and had left.

"Did they say where they were going?" Will asked.

The innkeeper squinted at Will. "One of the men looked much like you, monsieur. A profligate brother, perhaps?"

Will flinched, but then he nodded stiffly and through gritted teeth told the innkeeper a story about a "simpleminded" younger brother who had fallen into bad company, from which Will was endeavoring to rescue him. The innkeeper clucked his tongue sympathetically and told us that the "evil-looking, yellow-eyed man" had named Paris as their destination. Then he told us where we could hire a coach to take us to Paris. Before we left, he shook his head and tapped his nose. "You can't fool me, though. That man is not your younger brother. He looked ten years older than you. He's absconded with the family money, hasn't he?"

Will grunted noncommittally, but I saw that the news alarmed him. When we were seated in our new coach, he told me why.

"Marduk shouldn't be aging--vampires don't age. It must mean he's unable to maintain the shape he's stolen, which means he'll either die before he reaches Paris--or be forced to assume another shape, which will make it harder for us to track him down."

"Why do you think they're making for Paris?" I asked.

"I'm not sure, but I imagine Dee has his reasons. He knew what creature he was summoning. He must have some plan for Marduk ... no doubt one that requires Ruggieri's help ... and whatever that plan is"--Will shuddered, which I'd never seen him do before--"we have to stop it."

Will shuddered again and I realized he was actually shivering. "What's wrong?" I asked. "You look like you've caught a cold, but you can't ... can you?"

"I need more blood," he hissed. "But not from you. You've already given me too much. We'll have to stop."

Will told the driver to pull over on the outskirts of a small village, saying he needed to stretch his legs. He strode away toward the huddle of stone buildings, disappearing in the fog. I tried not to think about where he was finding his blood while I waited. The driver--this one more polite than our last, but also more taciturn--observed a stony silence as we waited for Monsieur.

We waited so long I was afraid that Will had been caught in the act. I was beginning to picture villagers with pitchforks storming the coach when Will appeared suddenly out of the fog and, with a terse command to the driver to go quickly, swept into the coach beside me. His cloak was soaked through. His face was white and drawn, his skin as icy as when he had left.

"What happened?" I asked.

"The whole village was on alert. There'd been an attack earlier tonight. A young boy had been garroted, hung up by his feet and drained of blood."

"Ugh! Do you think it was Marduk?"

"A vampire wouldn't bother with the garroting or wait for the blood to drain out. Possibly Dee and Ruggieri are collecting blood for Marduk because he's too weak." Will lapsed into a thoughtful silence--a chilly silence. The fog seeped into the coach, clinging to our damp clothes. Soon I was shivering almost as much as Will.

Will tried to hunt again at the next town but found all its occupants sheltering behind locked doors and shuttered windows. The few villagers not in their homes huddled together in the pub, whispering of monsters of the night that drank blood. Each town we passed through was similarly shuttered and barred, as if news of the bloodletting had traveled as quickly as wildfire. Or perhaps these villages were always on guard against such monsters.

Will thought we should find out. In a small village near Chartres, he sent me into an inn to ask for food and drink and see what I could find out, my too basic French notwithstanding. At first the innkeeper was not going to let me in, but then seeing a lone woman he relented and unbarred the door.

"Mademoiselle must not be alone on the road tonight," he said, his eyes nearly bulging out of his head. "There is something very bad afoot." He lowered his voice. "Some say
la bete
has come back to these parts."

I thanked him for his advice and assured him that I'd stay in my coach until I reached Paris. He was so rattled that he didn't seem to notice my French was modern, accented, and error riddled. When I rejoined Will, I told him what the innkeeper had said. "He called it
la bete
. I know that means 'beast,' but he said it like it was a
particular
beast."

"La Bete du Gevaudan," Will said through chattering teeth. "A creature that terrorized the mountains of the Haute-Loire for one hundred and one days. The beast killed over a hundred people by tearing their throats out. Only the beast of Gevaudan wouldn't hang a victim up to drain his blood.
And
the Beast of Gevaudan was abroad in the eighteenth century. Perhaps Marduk terrorized the countryside before then and the legends of strange beasts can all be traced back to him. At any rate, I'll have to wait till Paris to feed. The hunting's always easy there."

It was a sign of how far gone Will was that he'd say something so unguarded to me. I tried not to dwell on the many, many years of preying on innocent victims the remark revealed. Will looked too pathetic to blame for anything right now. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes glassy, and his limbs trembled like an epileptic's. I had hoped that when dawn came he would fall into an easier rest, but he continued to shake and now called out in his sleep. He called my name, but also Marguerite's and even someone named Bess. Through my own chattering teeth I muttered, "One more woman's name, mister, and I'm pushing you out into the sunlight."