Whispers of the Flesh (25 page)

Nine

B
Y MORNING, THE rain had ceased and the sky had cleared. Adrien awoke to find his bedroom ablaze with sunshine. He rolled over carefully, so as not to awaken Isabel, but her side of the bed was empty.

He donned his dressing gown and slippers and checked the bathroom. She wasn’t there, nor did she answer when he called her name down the hall.

He went downstairs, thinking she might have decided to make
him
breakfast. The kitchen was empty, as was the rest of the ground floor. He even checked the gardens surrounding the lodge, although he didn’t expect to find her out there; it was sunny, but chilly.

She was gone. She’d gotten up during the night and left. Slipped away without even saying goodbye. Of course, she hadn’t been too keen on sleeping there in the first place, ostensibly because it would only draw them closer together. It was all right to have sex, but not to share a bed and enjoy breakfast together in the morning. So much for their twelve stolen hours, their crêpes and berries and orange juice and big pot of strong coffee.

Adrien returned to the kitchen and set about making his usual small pot of coffee for himself. He put some water on to boil, ground up a handful of beans, got his press pot out of the cabinet over the vintage enameled stove, and hurled it at the opposite wall, where it cracked in a burst of glass shards.

“Zut!”
Adrien kicked the stove, smashing his three smallest toes into its corner. He could feel the little bones splinter and crumple within the slipper-clad foot.

He dropped to the floor, bellowing
“Merde! Zut! Merde!”

For a minute, he lay on his back grinding fists into his forehead as if that would help to stifle the pain in his foot.
“Crétin,”
he growled.
“Imbécile.

He sat up, wincing as he pulled off the slipper, already snug from the swelling on the right side of his foot. By grabbing on to the stove, he managed to haul himself to his feet. Gritting his teeth, he limped over to the phone, snatched it from its cradle, and punched the button for the gatehouse.

“Bonjour, mon seigneur.”
It was Mike.
“Puis-je vous aider?”

“Pouvez-vous me conduire à l’hôpital?”
Adrien said. “I broke my damn foot.”

It wasn’t until the sun had set the following night that Adrien made it back to the château.

He hobbled into the courtyard on his booted black walking cast, over which he wore a pair of blue jeans with the side seam of the right leg split from knee to ankle. Not wanting to ruin any of his good trousers, he’d dug the ratty, twenty-year-old jeans out of an attic trunk, along with the wrinkled and threadbare Rolling Stones T-shirt and denim jacket he’d put on simply because they’d been underneath the jeans.

On coming back to the hunting lodge from the hospital yesterday afternoon, he’d turned off his cell phone, unplugged the landline, and lain down for a fourteen-hour nap. For the past thirty-six hours, he hadn’t shaved, combed his hair, or consumed much more than a half bottle of Grey Goose, a hunk of Saint-Nectaire, and a desiccated old baguette. Nor had he bathed, although he did brush his teeth and splash some water on his face before heading over here to check on Emmett.

The
administrateur
’s aura had dimmed considerably over the past few days. It was irresponsible and shamefully self-indulgent of Adrien to have stayed away so long. Three fractured metatarsals and an aching heart were really rather trifling in the greater scheme of things.

The courtyard was swathed in shadow, its only illumination being the light from a scattering of windows, so when Adrien noticed a faint radiance on the balcony of Emmett’s apartment, he stopped and stared up at it. It was an aura, the aura of a woman reclining on a chaise longue facing away from him. He couldn’t see anything of her but an afghan with the shape of a pair of legs under it, but the corona of light shimmering around her was unusually vivid.

What struck him wasn’t just its silvery color, which was a definitive indicator of pregnancy, but the tiny sparks sputtering within ribbons of light that undulated slowly, like aurorae borealis. The aurorae meant that the child within her womb was a male.

The sparks meant he was gifted.

Adrien didn’t have his watch on, but it seemed to him that Inigo’s little redheaded playmate, Chloe, should have started her overnight shift by now. It would appear that Elic had taken a turn with her after “tapping” some
gabru,
though why he would have chosen to transfer precious
zeru
to Chloe, when there were far more worthy women available . . .

Something fell from the chaise onto the floor of the balcony—a book. The notion of Chloe turning pages in anything more challenging than
Cosmopolitan
was so unlikely that Adrien realized, with considerable relief, that the lucky
arkhutu
must be Grace Garvey. But then a hand reached down to lift the book, the hand of someone with very fair skin.

Isabel.

Adrien stared, dumbfounded, at the scintillating aura. Isabel was pregnant. With a gifted child. A son.

But
she
wasn’t gifted, which meant there was only one way for her to have conceived this child.

“Je n’y crois pas,”
he whispered.

Adrien entered the castle through the door in the middle of the east range and prowled around until he located Elic in the billiards room. The dusios was standing at the massive, Victorian-era pool table, his back to the door, watching Lili set up a shot while Tony Bennett sang “It Had to Be You” over the speakers built into the walls. Inigo sat in the corner, one hand raising his ubiquitous tequila bottle to his mouth, the other thumb-texting a rapid-fire message on his cell phone.

Looking up as Adrien stalked gimpily into the room, Inigo said in English—he loved English—“Hey, Morel, heard about the foot. Holy shit, look at you. Is it Casual Friday, or what?”

Elic, turning to check out Adrien’s atypically grubby attire, smiled and said, “Hey, I remember that T-shirt. You used to wear it when—”

“I just saw Isabel,” Adrien said.

He must have looked and sounded as
furieux
as he felt, because Elic paused in the act of chalking his cue, his expression wary and also a little surprised—as well he might. Not only was it incumbent upon a
gardien
to address the Follets in his care with the utmost deference, but Adrien had no closer friend at Grotte Cachée than Elic, regardless that he was a god and Adrien a mere druid.

Lili and Inigo glanced at each other as Inigo rose from his chair.

Elic said, “Adrien, I’m sorry if I’m supposed to know what you’re talking about, but—”

“Why
her
?” Adrien asked as he advanced on Elic, wishing he wasn’t hampered by the goddamned cast. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Inigo snorted. “Dude. Mr. Clean said ‘fuck.’ ”

“I think he’s talking about the night before last,” Lili told Elic softly.

“What on earth possessed you to choose Isabel?” Adrien demanded.

In a pacifying tone, as if he were trying to calm a temperamental child, Elic said, “Look, I realize she’s the
administrateur
’s daughter, which under normal circumstances would put her off limits, but it’s not like she’s going to be taking over from him. And you may not know this, but she’s been talking about how much she wants a child, so I thought why n—”

“Whose seed was it?” Adrien asked.

“Jason’s, but it’s no big deal,” Elic said. “Nothing came of it.”

“Elic, I just
saw
her,”Adrien said, his voice rising unsteadily as he took another step forward. “She’s pregnant with a gifted son.”

“She
is
?” Elic said, his feigned bewilderment only fueling Adrien’s ire.

“Awesome!” Inigo said. “Blondie gets knocked up, Elic gets him a little
arhkutu
action . . . Where’s the downside?” he asked Adrien.

“How about me having to know that I wasn’t the only man to sleep with her that night?” Adrien said.

After a moment of stunned silence, Inigo said, “Seriously? You and Blondie? That is so totally—”

“Inigo.” Lili caught his eye and shook her head.

“But . . . you don’t even like her,” Elic said.

“I
love
her. If I could have given her a gifted child, don’t you think I would have asked her to marry me years ago?”

“So you and Isabel . . .” Elic stared at Adrien a moment, then started chuckling.

“What’s so fucking funny?” Adrien asked.

“And now she’s carrying a gifted child, and of course it can’t be yours, ’cause she’s just a civilian.” Elic shook his head, still laughing.

“Okay, shut the fuck up,” Adrien said, but Elic’s hilarity was apparently unquenchable.

So Adrien hauled back and punched him in the face.

Elic spun around, cracking his head on the pool table’s side rail of inlaid rosewood as he fell to the floor.

“Holy
shit
!” exclaimed Inigo through a burst of laughter as he darted around the table, along with Lili, to come to Elic’s aid. Elic appeared to be unconscious, but being a Follet, he’d be good as new within a few minutes, without even a headache to remind him that the druid charged with seeing to his welfare had just laid him out.

Adrien limped away to the ground-floor balcony off the library, where he smoked a Black Russian. He lit a second cigarette off the first, and smoked that. And then he climbed the stairwell in the southeast tower and walked down the hall to Emmett’s apartment.

Not wanting to disturb Emmett in case he wasn’t awake, Adrien didn’t knock, but rather eased the door open and stepped inside as quietly as he could, given the cast. The room was dim, the only light source being a small lamp on the desk that held the
administrateur
’s medications and various medical paraphernalia. Through the open French door that let out onto the balcony, Adrien could see the bottom end of the chaise and Isabel’s blanketed feet.

Emmett was, indeed, asleep in the hospital bed that had replaced his leather couch, dragging in slow, rattly breaths through his nasal cannula. Given how skilled Emmett was at keeping up appearances, it came as a shock to see him like this, bedridden with his hair all askew, a sallow film of skin clinging to the too-sharp bones of his face and hands. With most people, unless some special circumstance had boosted the energy they were emitting, as with Isabel’s gifted pregnancy, it took a bit of concentration to get a clear vision of their aura. The healthier the individual, the less effort it took. Only through an intense mental strain did Emmett’s darkly moribund aura become visible, an indication that death was imminent.

I will miss you, old friend.

In one bony, spotted hand, Emmett clutched a wadded-up handkerchief. Between his bed and the wall stood a hospital-style swing-out table laid out with a plastic cup and pitcher, the thickening powder, and Emmett’s beloved Russian edition of
War and Peace.
The magazine rack on the floor next to his bed was stuffed with an ever-burgeoning cache of periodicals that appeared to have gone unread for weeks:
The Economist, Air Enthusiast, Ski, Vanity Fair, Ski & Board, The New Yorker, Country Life . . .

Something moved under the bed. Darius was curled up under there on a bunched-up towel, yawning. He blinked his slitted eyes at Adrien, who raised his hand in greeting. Darius nodded, adjusted his position, and went back to sleep.

Adrien crossed to the balcony door. Isabel wasn’t reading the book—it was actually too dark for that—but rather holding it to her chest as she gazed bleakly at nothing.

He said her name—whispered it, actually, so as not to disturb Emmett’s sleep.

She turned and looked at him, her aura fluttering orangey-pink for a moment. “Adrien.”

He held a finger to his lips and pointed toward Emmett.

She nodded, saying softly “If we keep our voices down, I don’t think he’ll hear us.”

“Where’s Chloe?” he asked as he stepped onto the balcony. “Taking a break?”

Isabel rolled her eyes. “She didn’t show up when it was time for her shift to start, so Grace went to her room and found her sleeping off the day’s copulatory antics. Grace dragged her out of bed and told her to shower and dress and get her butt over here pronto. Meanwhile, I’m holding down the fort.”

“Chloe should have been sent packing the first day.”

“Tell that to Dad. I’ll never understand how a man who’s so big on duty and responsibility can tolerate such an ass—idiot.”

“How’s he doing?” Adrien asked, knowing the answer to that, but wanting to find out if Isabel was still in denial about how much time her father had left.

She shook her head, started to say something, cleared her throat. “It won’t be long. Only two days ago, he seemed to be doing so well. He was in such good spirits, hanging out with us in the Beckett Garden, talking and everything. But maybe he overdid it. He hasn’t eaten a thing for the past two days, and he won’t drink water except to take his pills, which he can barely choke down anymore. Yesterday he had trouble sitting up, and today he didn’t even get out of bed. And you know how he hates being in that damn . . .” She sighed. “. . . in that darned hospital bed.”

“I know. I’m so sorry, Isabel. But at least he seems fairly comfortable.”

“It won’t stay that way. I wish to God he’d let Grace put in an IV for diamorphine so he doesn’t have to suffer at the end. He’s such a control freak. He hates the idea of being in an opiated stupor, but
I
hate the idea of him struggling for air, which is what’s going to start happening pretty soon. I can see it starting already.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“I’d appreciate that. He respects you so much.” Taking him in thoughtfully, from his bed head to his cast, she said, “What happened?”

He said, “I broke three metatarsals kicking the stove yesterday morning.”

She met his eyes, looked down and shook her head. “I’m sorry. About, you know . . . leaving like that. I tried to call you. Did you get my voice mails?”

“I’ve had the phone unplugged.” Indicating the chaise, which was the only seating on the balcony aside from the chairs tucked under the café table, he said, “May I?”