Whispers of the Flesh (9 page)

I cannot fail in this,
he thought as he crossed to the door. He mustn’t fail.

Were there nonhuman entities here or not? That was the question. It was his responsibility—his mission—to answer it.

He stepped on a hard little ball that pitched him forward as it rolled away with a silvery jingle.

Shit!
David stumbled and fell, grabbing automatically at the nearby bed. Landing on the floor with a grunt, he found himself clutching the arm of the sleeping man, now bolting out of bed, his book tumbling to the floor as he flung David halfway across the room.

“Qui est-tu?”
demanded Darius, standing over David with an expression of fury. He was tall, with dark, overgrown hair in sleepy disarray, and fierce black eyes.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais?”

“E-excusez-moi,”
David stammered as he sat up, hands raised in a gesture of appeasement.
“Je ne voulais pas—”

“You,” Darius said in a gravelly, just-awakened voice, his vague accent nominally French, but with a trace of something older, almost primeval. “The English gardener.”

“Er . . . Yes. Yes. I am, indeed.” David grabbed his hat and went to push himself off the floor, pausing as his hand brushed the little ball that had tripped him up. He lifted it, squinting in bewilderment.

It was a walnut, sans husk, the two halves of the shell held together with a network of carefully knotted gold thread. Two threads dangled off it like tails, each one terminating in a tiny silver bell. “What the devil . . . ?”

Darius sat on the bed with a sigh. “It’s . . .” He scraped a hand over his jaw with an expression that struck David as almost embarrassed. “. . . something I play with. Inigo made it for me.”

David looked from Darius to the walnut, wondering how to respond to that. Before he could decide, Darius said, “You speak French remarkably well for a man who doesn’t speak French, Mr. Beckett.”

Shit.
David rose slowly to his feet as he dusted off his trousers, thinking
Shit shit shit shit shit.

Ten

W
HAT ARE YOU doing here?” demanded Darius, appalled to think that a stranger had found the well-hidden entrance to the footpath that led here.

No sooner had he asked the question than he knew the answer. He’d known it on some level since the moment he’d sprung awake, bombarded by this human’s needs and desires, his arm buzzing ever so slightly where the bastard had grabbed him.

Are there nonhuman entities here or not? That is the question. It is my responsibility to answer it.

Just as it was now Darius’s responsibility—his undeniable compulsion, now that Beckett had touched him—to provide that answer.

Fuck,
thought Darius.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
The little hairs quivered from his nape right down to his tailbone. Were he in his feline persona right now, his fur would be bristling, his back arched.

“You have me at a disadvantage, sir,” said Beckett. “You know who I am, but I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of—”

“We’ve met.”

Beckett regarded him with guarded curiosity. “When—”

“Several times. My name, as I suspect you are already aware, is Darius.”

“You must forgive me, but I do not recall having made your acquaintance.”

With a resigned sigh, Darius said, “I can become invisible when forced into contact with humans. More commonly, I will adopt the guise of a cat, or sometimes a blue rock thrush. You’ve seen me in both of those incarnations.”

Beckett’s nonplussed expression turned knowing. “I think Lili has told you that I credit the existence of demons, so you’ve decided to have a bit of fun at my expense. You’re not the first to do so, and I daresay you won’t be the last.”

“I’m afraid the notion of ‘fun’ has been quite foreign to me for some time, and in any event, I do not lie.”

“At all?”

“Yes, I know,” Darius said. “Most people have trouble believing that it’s possible to go through life without telling the occasional—”

“No, it’s not that. I believe it’s
possible.
I mean,
I
don’t lie, so—”

“Christ, why the devil not?” Darius would if he could, at least when his survival was at stake.

“I took a vow as a boy,” Beckett said.

“It is a rare boy who exhibits such extraordinary righteousness.”

“I did it at the behest of my nursery governess, but I was old enough to know what I was doing. Truth is a special virtue. We men are social animals, so each man naturally owes the other whatever is necessary for the preservation of human society. It would be impossible for men to live together unless we knew we could believe one another, speak the truth to one another.”

Darius greeted this soliloquy with a few indolent claps. “Well done, Father.”

Beckett looked taken aback, as Darius had expected.

“You
are
a churchman, are you not?” Darius asked as he crossed to the corner cupboard and fetched a half-full bottle of wine. “That little speech about truth is straight out of St. Thomas Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica
. Part two, question one hundred nine, article . . . two?”

“Three.”

Darius set two glasses on the marble table and squeaked the cork out of the bottle. “It is generally only ecclesiastics who can recite chapter and verse from the writings of the Church fathers.”

“
You
can, and you’re not an ecclesiastic.” Placing his upturned hat on the marble table as a receptacle for his gloves, Beckett accepted the glass of wine Darius proffered. “You
aren’t,
are you?”

“Hardly.
À votre santé,”
toasted Darius, raising his tumbler.

“Santé.”

Gesturing Beckett into the leather chair, Darius took a seat on his new Chinese book trunk. “My passion is not for religion, it is for feeding my greedy mind.” He sat back against the wall, crossing his legs as he brought his glass to his mouth. “I take it you’ve been sent here on a mission of exorcism. Else why would you be so intent upon determining whether there are ‘nonhuman entities’ here?”

“How . . . that is, what makes you think I’m intent upon . . . ?”

Prostrating himself once again at the altar of that merciless mistress,
the Truth,
Darius said, “When a human touches me, as you regrettably did just now, it sparks a psychic conduit that transmits, in the space of a split second, that human’s deepest desires—which I must then strive to fulfill, regardless of how they may inconvenience me, disturb me, even sicken me. This is intrinsic in my race, an involuntary physical reaction akin to an electrical current. I can no more prevent it than I could prevent my next breath.”

With something very much like a smirk, Beckett said, “If you’re trying to convince me that you’re a demon, you shall have to—”

“You humans throw that word ‘demon’ around rather cavalierly,” Darius said. “Any being who appears human, or roughly human, but is not must be either an angel or a devil in your scheme of things—either good or bad. Therefore, if I’m not an angel—and I promise you, I am not—I must be a servant of the Prince of Darkness, is that right?”

“I suppose that’s the gist of it.”

“Well, Father, as it happens, Old Scratch and I aren’t even on speaking terms, so you may want to save your holy water for some more meaningful purpose.”

“It is not I who would perform the rite of exorcism. I’m not even a priest, not yet—I’m still in minor orders. I was sent here because I’m something of an expert on demonological matters. It strikes me as unlikely that an exorcism is called for, though. I have yet to encounter any actual proof that this place is inhabited by anyone other than normal human beings—such as yourself.” With a smile and a shrug, he said, “You cannot be what you claim to be, Darius. I felt your warmth through your shirtsleeve. Demons are cold to the touch.”

“Actually, the body temperature of most Follets is about what is normal for humans, give or take a few degrees.” Grinning at the Englishman’s expression of bemused forbearance, Darius said, “Have you concluded yet that I am mad?”

“If you are not, then it is as I said before. You are simply amusing yourself at my expense. After all, knowing who I am and why I’m here, why on earth would you freely admit to being a dem—a Follet?”

Darius sighed as he refilled their glasses. “Because, as I have already explained, I am compelled by a physiological force beyond my control to satisfy your desire for the truth about the presence of our kind at Grotte Cachée. As for what I’m going to do about you to make sure you don’t go running to your Church superiors with the information I’m being forced to reveal . . .”

Darius scratched his morning stubble as he thought about it. Beckett could not be permitted to leave here with this damning information. This valley had been a haven to him and his fellow Follets for a very long time—a haven they would lose if outsiders were to discover the truth about them.

“Christ, but I wish one of the others was here,” Darius muttered into his wineglass. “They know how to deal with humans.”

“Others?”

“I am not the only Follet who makes his home at Grotte Cachée. Lili, Elic, and Inigo are—”

“Lili?”

“She is what is commonly referred to as a succubus, although the Babylonians considered her a—”

“That’s enough.” Beckett stood abruptly, wine sloshing from his glass. “You will leave her name out of this perverse heresy.”

Oh, for pity’s sake.
“For an expert on demons, you certainly are hard to convince.”

Not only was Darius obligated to satisfy Beckett’s quest for answers about the Follets, he felt an increasingly fervent need to provide them. It always happened this way, with the human’s desires gradually insinuating themselves into Darius’s mind until he was utterly fixated on satisfying them. In essence, the human’s wants and needs became
his
wants and needs, usurping whatever else he cared about at the moment, including his own well-being. This psychic thralldom didn’t stop until the desire in question had been fulfilled.

“Demonology is a science, not a superstition,” Beckett said. “I need to be persuaded by irrefutable evidence before I accept a claim as fact.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Darius pulled his legs up and crouched on the trunk, arms bent and slightly outstretched. The more similar his position before and after the conversion, the less jolting it would be.

“What are you doing?” Beckett asked.

“Providing irrefutable evidence.” Darius closed his eyes, held his breath, and concentrated fiercely. Before his next heartbeat, he was tottering on eight spindly toes, wings fluttering for balance, eyes squeezed shut to block out his dizzyingly panoramic range of vision until he’d attained some equilibrium.

“Jesus.”

Darius opened his eyes to find Beckett gaping at him. The glass slipped from his hand, shattering on the table in a spew of blood red that made Darius jump. It was hard to tell for sure, because his avian depth perception was abysmal, but the stunned Englishman appeared to be backing up as he executed the sign of the cross.

Darius walked to the edge of the trunk, nodding his big, ungainly head to keep Beckett’s image from jittering wildly.
“Don’t leave,”
he called out as Beckett turned and lurched through the door, but of course it emerged as a warbly little chirrup.

With a screech of vexation, Darius pumped his wings and flew after him. He’d been an idiot to transmute so suddenly, without taking the time to warn this human what he was about to witness. It had been a precipitous decision born of irritation. Darius had wanted to prove his assertions, yes, but in truth, he had also wanted to shock this demonological “scientist” with his smugly wrongheaded convictions. Now that shocked human was fleeing before Darius had figured out how to convince him to keep his newfound knowledge about the Follets from his superiors—assuming that was even possible. If it wasn’t . . .

Would that David Beckett could just disappear from the face of the earth; that would take care of things.

The sun had broken over the mountaintops, lightening the fog a bit, although the air still felt thick and damp as Darius scooped it with his wings. He’d expected Beckett to head for the footpath to the west, but he sprinted instead to the deer track along the edge of the stream gorge. It was a precarious little strip of mud and rocks, and he was scrambling down it much too fast on stockinged feet, grabbing tree limbs to keep from slipping.

Beckett pulled up short when Darius swooped down in front of him. He swiped at the bird, clutching at a branch as his feet slid out from under him. The branch was thin, and snapped off in his hand.

Shit!
Darius willed himself back into a human before he’d even landed. He hit the ground hard, smashing a knee into a rock and twisting an ankle. He lunged for Beckett, grabbed for his legs, but it was too late.

Beckett screamed as he pitched over the side of the gorge, and then the only sounds were the thuds of his body slamming into rocks and trees. Darius converted back into a thrush and dove to the bottom of the ravine, watching helplessly as Beckett landed faceup beneath a tall pine tree at the edge of the stream.

Settling next to the limp and battered Englishman, Darius resumed his human form, thinking,
Christ, what have I done?

Beckett’s right leg and left arm lay at unnatural angles, as did his bloodied head. He looked toward Darius with a dazed expression that swiftly turned to alarm. At first, Darius assumed he was simply unnerved to find a “demon” hovering over him, but then he realized that Beckett was fighting for air. Every labored breath he managed to drag into his lungs sounded like a death rattle.

Darius hovered his hands over Beckett’s chest, moving them in a circular path as his mind probed and searched. He sensed no open wounds, just some contused flesh over the ribs, four of which—no, five—were cracked, two in several places. Thankfully, none had punctured a lung.

Still, something felt wrong inside him, very wrong. Darius skimmed his hands over Beckett’s body, deeply dismayed by what he felt—or rather, didn’t feel. There was a dull stillness within him, as if his body from the neck down were that of a corpse.

Darius pushed Beckett’s right sleeve up and pinched his arm. There was no response. The alarm in Beckett’s eyes turned to raw panic. Still straining to breathe, he gritted his teeth as if striving vainly to move his arms and legs.

“Easy.” Darius slid his hand very gently under Beckett’s nape, barely touching him. His worst suspicions were confirmed. The third and fourth cervical vertebrae were broken, and that section of spinal cord torn. The paralysis from such injuries was always permanent and inoperable; every great surgeon from Imhotep to Charles Bell had acknowledged this. If Darius had to choose between being perpetually incapable of movement or being heaved over the side of a boat with a stone around his neck, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter.

David Beckett would not be in this hellish predicament but for Darius’s poor judgment. It was his doing, and now there was but one humane course of action available to him, although he loathed having to resort to it.

The odds were slim that there was anyone nearby to witness what he was about to do, but just in case, Darius scanned the area thoroughly. Then he drew in a deep, fortifying breath and wrapped his hands around the Englishman’s throat.