Whispers of the Flesh (12 page)

Still if some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says (De Trin. iii), so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.

St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologia,
Part I, Question 51, Article 3

One

Early Afternoon,
June of This Year

I
NIGO WAS PLAYING doctor with a couple of nurses when Isabel Archer came to check her father out of the hospital.

Isabel didn’t realize at first what was going on. She did find it odd that the curtains were drawn around the other bed, since her dad had a private room; the only reason there were two beds was because there hadn’t been any single rooms available when he was admitted. As she passed the curtained-off alcove, she heard a woman’s frenetic breathing and the sound of someone shifting around on the vinyl-covered mattress in a way that seemed anxious, perhaps even pained.

The noise had evidently not disturbed her father, who was sleeping propped up with pillows in the corner recliner, attired for his “breakout from this antiseptic Purgatory” in a pinstriped suit and lemon yellow tie with matching pocket square. Despite the nasal cannula delivering oxygen to his lungs, his breathing was strained. On his lap sat a huge, shabby old book, its spine secured with duct tape, the cover stamped Bo
H
a
                  
M
p archaic lettering from which the gilt had mostly rubbed off.

It had been last August that he’d confided to Isabel, during a visit to Grotte Cachée from her home in New York City, that he was suffering from aggressive, drug-resistant pulmonary fibrosis. She’d flown back to see him every few weeks since then, watching his salt-and-pepper hair bleach to ash gray, his lean, patrician features turn gaunt. Mindful of his admonition that she “not grieve for me while I’m still alive, thank you very much,” Isabel took pains, when she was around him, to act as if nothing were amiss. She’d internalized the act over time, becoming, if not quite accepting of her father’s fate, a good deal less anguished. Maybe there was something to all that stiff-upper-lip stuff after all.

The woman behind the curtain let out a tremulous moan.
That’s it.
Isabel swept the curtain aside, gaping at a tableau that instantly, and no doubt permanently, seared itself onto her retinas.

Chloe, the nurse’s aide whose job it was to assist Emmett Archer’s private duty nurse, but who seemed to think she’d been hired as Inigo’s personal little anything-goes, living, breathing party doll, was tethered spread-eagled to the bed by four-point medical restraints made of black webbing and Velcro. The skirt of her powder blue nurse frock was pushed up, exposing the lacy tops of her thigh-high stockings and a snatch as hairless as a Barbie doll’s, a big, scary syringelike device emerging from within. When she saw Isabel, Chloe yelped, displaying a tongue stud with the ace of spades on it.

“Oops! Sorry,” Inigo whispered from beneath his surgical mask as he paused in the act of thrusting the syringe thingy. He had on full operating scrubs, including one of those shower cap deals to contain his headful of wild black corkscrew curls. “Are we making too much noise?” To hear him talk, you’d think he’d been born and bred in his beloved New York City, where he’d kept a
pied-à-terre
for the past hundred sixty years—a home away from home whenever the château began to feel “like being stuck in the fifteenth century.”

“Merde!”
The pretty blond nurse standing next to him, who’d been masturbating him via a side slit of his lab coat, judging from the humungous bulge beneath it, whipped out a hand covered in lube and crossed herself frantically.

“Ne te fais pas de la bile,
” Inigo told her in a softly reassuring tone.
“Elle pas tattle.”

“Why the hell
shouldn’t
I tattle, if this is what my father’s nurses are up to when they’re supposed to be taking care of him?”

“It’s a hundred percent my fault. Could there be any worse influence in the world than me?” He pulled down the mask so as to display his disarming smile to full effect. “C’mon, Blondie. No harm, no foul. We’re just passing the time till they let your dad go.”

Isabel just sighed and shook her head, partly because of the nickname—he’d been calling her Blondie since she was a towheaded toddler—and partly because there really was no point in getting het up over this. For a regular human-type person to “pass the time” by playing kinky sex games in the hospital room of a gravely ill friend would be outrageous. But for a satyr, whose deep-rooted instinct was to squeeze the maximum pleasure out of every second of every day, having half an hour to kill and two frisky nurses at hand meant one thing: time to enact the psychosexual hospital fantasy from hell.

She said, “Look, just do me a favor and . . . wrap things up, okay? Dad’s itching to get out of here, and we can’t leave without you. I don’t drive a stick.”

“You got it,” he said as she shut the curtain.

She turned to find her father awake and regarding her with that patented ultra-arid smile of his. “You do realize the poor fellow can’t help it,” he said in his now-thready British accent.

Isabel rolled her eyes as she came to crouch next to his chair, whispering, “
She
can.”

“Who?”

“That
Chloe
. She’s supposed to be keeping an eye on you while Grace handles your release paperwork. I hate to think what’s gonna happen back at the château. She’s got the night shift. What if she’s off taking a little midnight nookie break when you have your next episode?”

“I’m counting on it. It’s no mean feat, trying to shuffle off this mortal coil with people constantly hovering about and butting in.”

During her father’s latest bout of respiratory distress, the worst yet, he had stubbornly refused to be put on a ventilator. “
If I must turn up my toes, then turn them up I shall, but not in one of those ghastly, exhibitionistic gowns with tubes sprouting from every orifice, and not in an opiated coma.”
Isabel had promised to go along with this on the condition that she be allowed to hire medical personnel to return with him to Château de la Grotte Cachée so that he could be kept as comfortable as possible during the time he had left. A control freak to the end, he had insisted she call a London nursing agency called Savoir Care that had a particularly sterling reputation.

Three days ago, the agency had sent a nurse practitioner named Grace Garvey . . . and Chloe. The two women could not have been more different. Grace was experienced, skilled, and compassionate, while Chloe was an orange-haired whore whose legs had been locked in the open position from the moment she’d made the acquaintance of their “dishy” visitor with the puppy-dog eyes and monumental cock. It turned out she was a wild child from a wealthy and aristocratic London family, which Isabel should have guessed from her Sloane Rangerish twang. Exasperated with her self-centered, shallow lifestyle, her parents had placed a condition on her trust fund before she could access it. She’d been made to attend a nurse’s aide training program followed by one year of full-time work, that particular job having been chosen in the hope that it would teach her to think about people other than herself. Having just graduated from the program, this was her very first assignment for Savoir Care, and if Grace had any say in the matter, it would be her last.

“Please, Dad,”Isabel begged,“
please, please, please
let me fire that little slut and have them send someone else. Grace wants her gone, too. She’s told me so, like a dozen times.” Switching to a rough facsimile of Grace’s South London/Barbados lilt, Isabel said, “ ‘She’s a spoiled, selfish little slag and a bloody fucking menace to her patients.’ ”

Chuckling drowsily, Emmett said, “Would you believe me if I told you I like her?”

“No.”

“Perhaps she reminds me of your mother.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“
Must
you swear like a cutter, my dear?”

“Again with the ‘cutter,’ ” Isabel groaned. “Tell you what, Dad. You tell me what that word means, finally, like in relation to swearing, and I’ll work on the language, okay? But Chloe and Mom? First of all, you and Mom called it quits twenty years ago, so as for you liking her—”

“
She
was the one who filed for divorce,” he said raspily. “She may have been impossible to live with, but there were always things about her that were . . . captivating. When I first knew her . . .” He trailed off, gazing out the window with rheumy eyes. “She was one of those girls . . . you know. The girls one finds oneself staring at, thinking about, trying to please, trying to make laugh. She was dazzling, utterly charismatic.”

Isabel was speechless. She’d never heard her father talk this way about the woman who had abruptly shucked him off and moved back to her native New York City, taking fifteen-year-old Isabel with her, rather than take up residence at Grotte Cachée when her husband succeeded his father as
administrateur
to young Adrien Morel, Seigneur des Ombres.

“And Chloe isn’t completely dissimilar to your mother,” he continued. “There’s that bright red hair.”

“Mom was
born
with hair that color, which, by the way, is not remotely similar to Chloe’s. No one has ever, in the history of the universe, been born with Crayola red hair.”

“She has an attitude of joie de vivre,” he said.

“You hate joie de vivre. You’re always saying people should be less impulsive, exercise more self-control. That girl is juvenile, irresponsible . . . everything you’ve always hated. Honest to God, Dad, I just don’t get it.”

“She amuses Inigo, and it’s my job to keep the Follets amused.”

Keeping them amused: a euphemism for providing humans for them to fuck, without which they would go bonkers or deteriorate to a vegetative state—or in Elic’s case possibly even die, despite the Follets’ virtual immortality. Isabel knew this despite the secrecy surrounding the Follets because she was Emmett’s heir apparent to take over the administration of Grotte Cachée.

The operative word was “apparent,” because she had resolved never to step into that role, a fact known to Adrien Morel and the Follets, but kept from her father so as not to worsen his condition through stress. It wasn’t so much that she was unwilling to trade in her life in New York City for rural France; she loved Auvergne, and being a freelance graphic artist had never provided the level of creative satisfaction she’d once hoped it would. It was about Adrien, and what had happened during that late-night swim in the bathhouse last August, the consummation of feelings that had been simmering between them since adolescence.

No one knew about the two of them, not the Follets and certainly not her father, and no one ever would, because nothing could come of it. As the last in a line of psychically gifted seigneurs of Grotte Cachée dating back over two thousand years, Adrien was duty bound to marry a woman with the Gift. It was the only way to ensure gifted offspring to carry on his sacred obligation of safeguarding the Follets. Gifted women being difficult to identify, Isabel’s father had yet to locate a wife for
“le seigneur”
despite years of looking. His successor, it was hoped, would have better luck.

Isabel had no intention of being that successor. How could she possibly play matchmaker for the man she’d loved with all her heart from the time she was sixteen years old? Even being in his company was painful, for both of them. For this reason, Adrien stayed in the hunting lodge, where he’d been brought up, whenever she was there, and they seemed to have an unspoken agreement not to visit Emmett at the same time during his hospitalizations. In fact, although she’d been at Grotte Cachée for almost a week now, they’d had but a few brief, excruciatingly cordial phone conversations.