The Watchtower (39 page)

But he'd already sunk from articulate syllables into moans and sharp cries. I drifted into sleep myself eventually, a broken, restless sleep, punctuated by feverish dreams.

I was running down a wide, flat allee, Hellequin's hunt hard on my heels. They'd been pursuing all along, through Brittany and into the past, and now they were almost upon me. I looked back over my shoulder and there was Hellequin, a vicious grin below his bloodred/night-black mask, his tattered cloak billowing behind him. I saw Octavia La Pieuvre's face surrounded by her fluttering tentacles, and Monsieur Lutin's, and Melusine's, her wings flapping dryly in the wind, her eyes green flakes of lichen.

"All your friends are here," Hellequin said, grinning. "Come join them."

Something about his voice was different. It wasn't the voice I remembered from Fontainebleau, but one I'd heard somewhere else .... Willently ...

"Even your darling Will is here." He held his cloak out and I saw Will's face, desiccated as an autumn leaf, his mouth frozen in a scream of pain. I looked up into Hellequin's eyes--but they weren't Hellequin's eyes, they were the yellow eyes of John Dee.

I turned to run but was blocked by a dark figure. I looked up into Will's face. Relief flooded through me, but then he lifted a clawed hand to his brow and tore his skin away revealing Marduk's face--only he now had the face of a wolf. This was the beast Hellequin pursued. The famous Bete du Gevaudan.

I startled awake in the coach. I must have slept through the whole day because Will was awake also, staring at me as if a monster's face were hidden beneath
my
flesh. Perhaps he'd had his own nightmares.

"We're here" is all he said.

"Here?"

"Paris."

He drew the curtains open. We were crossing a bridge lit by torches. Looming above us was the dark mass of Notre Dame, gargoyles silhouetted against the violet dusk.

"How will we find Dee, Ruggieri, and Marduk?"

"We'll follow the trail of blood they leave behind them," he answered glumly. "But now, my dear, I have to ... go out." He said it as if he were going to a play. "I'll instruct the driver to take you to a house where you'll be welcome and safe. I'll come there before dawn ... unless..."

He didn't have to finish his sentence. If he found Marduk and won, he would drink his blood and come back to me a mortal. But if he found Marduk and lost, he wouldn't be coming back to me at all.

32

The Watchtower

Young Will spent his first
day as a vampire cowering in a seaside cave, hidden from the sun, watching a family of crabs burrow in the sand. Was this his fate, he wondered, to spend eternity with the lowliest creatures of the earth?

At dusk he walked to Audierne and rented a horse to ride to Paris. He thought it would take him days, but soon the horse was moving at a supernatural speed, as if he had transmuted his own frantic energy into the horse. The horse now had the ability to jump substantial obstacles in their path, like a stream thirty feet across. When he looked back at it, Will suspected that this ride marked the beginning of his ability to transmigrate his own atoms over distances. In this case, he was actually transmigrating the horse.

By midnight he was within twenty miles of Paris and it was there that he experienced the second phenomenon of his enhanced powers. He "saw" Marguerite. Not in the flesh, but in a sort of vision. He saw her sitting by the Seine in the shadow of Notre Dame. For an instant, he was elated. Then she turned her head and Will could see the wan, almost tearful expression on her features, and his spirits sank. Perhaps she was simply missing him. But as a fellow immortal, he asked himself, shouldn't she at least have been able to
sense
his arrival in her world? Shouldn't the stunning news of his immortal transformation--wretched as its circumstances had been--have reached her somehow and outweighed his absence? It startled Will how, absent fangs, he could take a favorable view of the nightmare at Pointe du Raz. But he
so
needed this reunion with Marguerite to be harmonious.

On the contrary, Marguerite looked so weary at the moment, it were as if disappointment over his absence had turned her blood to that of a mortal's. Atomsight had given him the ability to look into veins; his own bubbled with vigor since Dee's tower, with a diamond-blue sheen brimful with the depths of time. However cruel his new life might be, to himself and others, he recognized how immortal his new blood was. But Marguerite's blood, as she sat by the Seine, had no such quality. He shuddered icily. No doubt it was the psychological effect of his absence, but the aura about her now, or the lack of one, made her look ... mortal ... and, worse, made him long for her blood.

In a panic as bad as any he'd experienced in Dee's tower, he urged his horse faster toward Marguerite now, not to attack her but to learn her situation before it was too late. He hoped for every inch of the ride that a reversal of their natures had not happened. Or that, if he was sensing one all too accurately, the reversal could in turn be reversed. For otherwise his world was about to come crashing down, and in the worst irony of all, forever.

* * *

Will tied up his horse a block south of Notre Dame, as he wanted to come to Marguerite as unobtrusively as possible. The moon was higher now, and he observed its rubied sphere reflected in the Seine's black mirror as he walked to the top of the riverbank. He slowed with the beautiful sight, then thought about a dark similarity between this walk and his earlier one in Paris, the dawn walk on which he'd first approached Julien-le-Pauvre. That walk had brought, for the longest of intervals, futility. And he was afraid now that this one would be bringing him ruin, a most bitter ending. He paused, almost at the edge of collapse despite his physical powers. But he gathered himself together and went on. Better to know his fate now than to postpone it. And her fate as well.

Marguerite had moved halfway down the bank in the time since he'd dismounted, as if gathering up the courage to dive in. Maybe she could sense his approach, he surmised, though why so morbidly he couldn't fathom and was terrified to ponder. He started down the bank and called softly, "Marguerite."

She turned without getting up, and though she smiled, she looked so depleted he felt crushed. He sat down next to her, taking her left hand gently in his right. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. They sat holding hands for the longest while, in a strange immobility, gazing at the moon in the Seine as if it were an oracle and they were waiting for an answer.

A breeze tore the gleam into a thousand shards, red knives, and they both sighed. Finally Will spoke. "I'm sorry I had to take off so suddenly. I had business."

She turned to him, cpped his chin in her palms, and kissed him. "I had business, too." She shrugged, gazed up and down the river. "But all's well that ends well. Now we are together." She put her left arm around Will. "My comrade. My soul. My mate."

Will was thrilled by her words and unnerved by her listless tone. Why was she so subdued? Was it because he hadn't returned box and ring, which she hadn't even mentioned yet? And why hadn't she made reference to immortality, that great gulf between them that had now been bridged?

"Together at last," he whispered back. "But tell me, my dear. Do I seem different to you in any way?"

Marguerite replied in a livelier, almost jovial tone. "Why Will Hughes, I do believe you have that magical glow about you again tonight. The one that has so enchanted me many times, though not so much in recent weeks, when you've had that unfortunate preoccupation. Which, I have the grace to tell you, is vanished now."

"Preoccupation ... it's what?"

"Vanished! The chasm between us is no more. For I am mortal, too."

Shocked at having his worst intuition confirmed, Will nonetheless had the aplomb to respond, "How on earth did that come about?"

Her look went far away. "Those details are better left for another time. Let me just say that a family member rendered the necessary assistance."

For the second time this night, Will felt the tingling of bloodlust. He could smell Marguerite's mortal blood now--it hadn't been his imagination--and it smelled
delicious
.

"Family member?" he asked through clenched lips.

She nodded. "My sister. But let's not go into that. Let's just enjoy this moment of being back together. 'Forever,' as mortals say. Which for them--for us--simply means the length of their lives. Which is more than enough for me, so long as I am with you." She rubbed Will's cheek affectionately. Her spirits seemed to be improving, which baffled Will. Perhaps she had no sense of what had happened to him, and her earlier listlessness had simply been from the lesser vigor of mortality, and sadness over his absence.

Once Marguerite took her hand from his cheek, Will could feel the tips of his growing incisors brush against the interior of his mouth, below. In seconds he'd have to maneuver them beyond his lips, to avoid excruciating pain, and their moonlit enamel would give him away. He might as well make his confession now.

"I have a terrible truth to tell." He reached across to caress her.

She grasped his hand and pressed it closely to her. "Terrible? How can that be? This is the most glorious moment of our lives!"

"It may still be, if either one of us can reverse what has happened to us in the past forty-eight hours." He extended both hands out toward the moon-jeweled river, palm up, in a gesture that combined resignation with small hope. "Can you reverse what happened to you?"

Marguerite got up and swept around in front of Will as though she were a wind, half standing, half crouching, gazing at him as if she wasn't sure if he was angel or demon. She might be mortal now, Will reflected, but the light in her eyes came from another world. "What has happened to
you,
my love?" she asked in a wild voice.

"The venomous John Dee has tricked me," Will said as matter-of-factly as he could. "I have not been honest with you about the use I made of your box and ring, which you may observe I do not have with me--or at least not the box." He glanced at her hand and for the first time noticed she wore his silver ring. It gave him courage to go on. "At the depth of my despair over our separation, I was crazy enough to seek counsel from Dee. He offered me the bargain of immortality in exchange for the use of your box and ring. He kept one part of his bargain, though he omitted major details about what immortality meant to him, but he did not return your box. The ring I have. Sadly Dee--and his cohort Charles Roget--has escaped, but I will find him and justice will be done."

"What details did he omit?" Marguerite asked in a stunned voice. "Oh, Will, how could you deal with that man--that thing--he's the soul of Satan himself!"

Will began to weep, for he had no answer for her. He heard Marguerite gasp. She touched his face and brought back a bloodred hand, as if touching him had wounded her.

As long as he would live, a portentous thought now, he would never forget the expression in Marguerite's eyes: they loathed him, they recoiled from him, they hated ... him! Or not so much him as what he had become. But was there a difference? He knew in the instant he asked this bleak question that there wasn't. And that was when his world fell apart. His lover had become his hater. He had bargained away his Christian soul for that of a night thing, a crawler and bloodsucker. Marguerite was right to loathe him. The Will Hughes she had loved had destroyed himself.

Slowly, Marguerite seemed to regain control of herself. She had been staggering a little down the riverbank away from him, but now she stopped moving. The expression in her eyes calmed from loathing to uncertainty. She might be conquering her revulsion with thoughts of their past love, Will reflected hopefully. Which emboldened him to speak.

"I may be a creature of the night, but I still love you. Tell me, sweet love, is there really no hope for us? Can't you walk back across the bridge you went to the mortal side over? Would your family member not help you out, seeing as circumstances have ... changed?" His beseeching gaze was desperate, but he could tell from her expression what her answer was going to be.

"Alas, Will, it's not possible. My family member hates humans with a vengeance, and I would be coming to her as a human. She would not recognize me as kin, and she would never honor a human request. What's worse, I have made a pact with her to guard the mortal world against supernatural creatures like yourself, whom she hates even more than humans, vampires in particular.

"You'me. enign enough at this moment, but who knows what sort of monster you may turn into in the future, with all the desolate years ahead of you, always needing to feed on your own kind, or what used to be your own kind. Eventually you won't be able to feed without developing a hatred for your prey. No animal can. And your prey is a class of beings that I now belong to."

Will had to admit to himself that, teeth full in, he was starting to feel hunger pangs. In one unwilling moment he beheld the tenderness of Marguerite's neck, pale flesh just to the left of ... ugh!--he caught himself. But the damage to his esteem was done. He was not the same Will Hughes anymore. And would never be again.

"And you can't make the journey the other way," Marguerite went on. "The only person who knows how to make
that
happen, except for Dee with my box and ring, is my sister, and she would sooner die than make me happy. Let alone you. If Dee hangs on to my box, he could do it, but he'd prefer to die also. Believe me."

Will could see a tear on Marguerite's cheek, and her lower lip quivered. Moonlight made the tear look like a drop of blood. He felt a sliver of lust for it, then shuddered with despair.

She wiped it away. "I shall not weep in front of you, Will Hughes. Though I shall weep many hours, indeed many years, once you are gone. Now it is my official duty, as Watchtower between the worlds, to order you begone! To cast you from my presence! To bid, indeed command, that you return to the nether regions to which you belong! I suggest you seek the catacombs--that is where creatures of your sort generally go."