Seduction Page 22

  “A while ago. You seemed to be looking for someone.” He jerked his head toward the door where Belmondo had just exited. “Him?”

  “No,” I said. “I was looking for Jeremiah, if you must know. I was afraid he’d take Marie-Therèse.”

  “I doubt that. He’s in London.”

  “Oh.” Great, I thought, my stomach churning. A perfect evening. “Really?”

  Peter grunted. “And it looks like your new boyfriend’s found somebody else to feed strawberries to.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said, as if I weren’t writhing with shame inside.

  “Let me tell you something, Katy,” Peter said. “He’s playing you. You’re nothing but a toy to him.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” I shrieked. “Pierre!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Peter said. Two spots of red colored his cheeks.

  “Why should I? You just think I’m childish and stupid, anyway. Besides, you’re never here—”

  “That song is getting old, Katy,” he said evenly. “Things haven’t gone wrong with us because of my work schedule, and you know it.”

  “Oh, go boss someone else around,” I said. He grabbed my shoulders. I shook him off. “Get away from me!” I shouted. Some people turned to stare at us.

  “Fine,” Peter said with deadly quiet. “If that’s what you want, fine.” Then he walked away, his fists clenched.

  I tried to blink away my tears, but my whole face was threatening to fall apart, so I ran upstairs into my room, where I threw myself on my bed and sobbed into my pillow.

  A few minutes later someone was knocking on my door. “Katy?” Marie-Therèse called from the hallway. She kept knocking until I got up and opened the door.

  “You left so quickly,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, averting my face so she wouldn’t see my swollen eyes. “I’m glad nothing happened to you tonight,” I added.

  “Yes. All that worry, for nothing!” She laughed. “When I am ready, I shall go to the Poplars under my own steam.”

  “Right,” I said flatly. I didn’t want to think about that just then.

  “Well, get a good night’s rest, dear. I hope the party isn’t too loud for you.”

  “No problem,” I said dully.

  I kept my eyes closed as she kissed me briefly on both cheeks. “I do appreciate all you’ve done,” she said. “Oh, dear. Are you sure you’re well?”

  I started to cry again. I couldn’t help it.

  “Ah,” she said. “You’re overwrought.”

  “Tired,” I said.

  “Then I’ll go. Everything will look brighter after you’ve slept.” She smiled and closed the door quietly behind her.

  I doubted if anything would look brighter ever again. Belmondo had gone off with Joelle, Peter had walked away from me—again—and instead of protecting Marie-Therèse, I’d acted like a bawling baby in front of her.

  She’d been right about one thing: Our worries had been for nothing.

  Everything I’d done in this city had been for nothing.

  CHAPTER

  •

  THIRTY-SIX

  The next day I went to see Azrael after school. “Fricadelles de veau mentonnaise,” I said, holding out my latest offering, veal patties with tuna and anchovies. We’d made the calf brains, too, but I’d deposited them in the garbage before I left.

  “Delightful,” Azrael said without looking up from the newspaper I’d brought him.

  I wiped my sweaty face with a tissue. “I ran the whole way,” I confessed.

  “Oh?” He turned a page and snapped the paper. “Then you must either have been dodging a pursuer or anxious to ask me some difficult and embarrassing question,” he said.

  “Well . . .”

  He sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Remember when I told you about that guy Belmondo?” I asked baldly.

  “Of course,” the old man said.

  “I think he’s in love with Joelle.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “She left with him the other night. After the party.”

  Azrael peered over the newspaper. “And?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Is this news you’re telling me?”

  I shrugged again, embarrassed by my misery.

  With some reluctance, he folded the newspaper and set it on the table in front of him. “What are you trying to say, Katy?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Stop that!” he snapped. “You’re beginning to look like a marionette.” My eyes filled. Azrael’s rolled ceilingward. “Would you like some tea?” he asked more gently.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that . . . Oh, I feel so stupid.”

  I told him about the party, how nothing had happened, and that Jeremiah Shaw hadn’t even shown up.

  “Oh? And you’re unhappy about this?”

  “I just don’t understand it. At the house in Vincennes—”

  “Yes, yes, the agitated maid, the mysterious butler.” He waved his hand in a circle, urging me to speed up my recap of events.

  “I was just sure that something was going to happen to Marie-Therèse.”

  “Would you have been happier if something had happened? If she’d been spirited away by assassins? Or perhaps murdered beside the banquette of hors d’oeuvres?”

  “No, but—”

  “It could be that your spell worked after all,” he offered.

  “I thought about that,” I said. “But . . .” I had to be honest. “It couldn’t have been that. The spell was lame. At least the way I did it.”

  “You don’t know that,” Azrael said. “Why, it may have been a perfect—”

  “I set fire to the floor, and then a leaky pipe squirted water in Marie-Therèse’s face,” I said.

  Azrael blinked a few times. Then he turned away. I could tell he was trying not to laugh.

  “Go ahead. I know it was stupid.” I sighed resignedly.

  “And this concerns Belmondo?”

  “Huh? Oh. No, I guess not. But he was there.”

  “With the evil Joelle.” He rubbed his hands together like a silent movie villain.

  I had to laugh in spite of myself. “Why did he pick her, of all people?” I said, mostly to myself.

  Azrael cleared his throat. I looked up. “Perhaps the debonair Monsieur Belmondo is not the sterling character you take him to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He spread his hands. “Katy, you are a very young girl. Ah.” He put one hand over his mouth. “Forgive me. I can see by your expression that you do not agree with me on the subject of your youth. However, I hope you can appreciate that, from my vantage point, you are far from . . . shall we say meretricious?”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. Still, I let it go.

  “What I mean is that if Belmondo had escorted you from the party instead of Mademoiselle Joelle, he would have been behaving badly indeed. Also illegally.”

  “That’s what Peter said.”

  “Peter, the undemonstrative paramour?”

  “My boyfriend,” I said. “Ex-boyfriend.”

  Azrael tutted. “Surely you are not discarding him because of one remark—a truthful remark, I may add—uttered at a party.”

  “It’s more than that,” I confessed. I took a deep breath. This was going to be hard. “Someone told me something about the Enclave,” I said. “It’s going to sound very weird.”

  “Is it about their trivial use of magic to maintain their youth and beauty?”

  “More than that.” I swallowed. “They’re old, Azrael,” I whispered.

  “You say that as if age were a disease.”

  “I mean really old. Older than you can imagine.” I told him about the book Fabby had found, and the conversation between Sophie and Joelle that she’d overheard. “The book had a portrait of Sophie in it, and it was rea
lly her. It said she was the mistress of King Louis the Sixteenth.”

  He chuckled. “I rather doubt that,” he said.

  “I did too, at first—”

  “Louis had little time for women.”

  “What?”

  “He was too busy playing with his toy soldiers, from what I’ve read—”

  Suddenly he lurched forward, his face purple.

  “Azrael!” I screamed, grabbing him before he fell.

  “Please,” he gasped. “It’s nothing. Nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” I said. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  “Nonsense. Just a spate of indigestion,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “I feel better already.”

  He really didn’t look as if he felt better, but there wasn’t much I could do, short of dragging him through the underground passageways to the street above. “Are you sure?” I asked uncertainly.

  “Do stop worrying,” he said, and smiled. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some things to attend to.”

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what he had to do that was so pressing, but I guessed he wanted me to leave. “Maybe I ought to stay with you until—”

  “No,” he said flatly. “I told you, I feel better.” He gave me a hard stare.

  “Okay, I’ll go.”

  “Katy?” he said before I reached the doorway. I lifted my chin in answer. “Don’t look too closely at those aristocrats. They have secrets that are too ancient and dreadful to explore.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “And stay away from Belmondo.”

  I coughed. “Why?”

  “He can’t give you what Peter can.”

  “Peter,” I spat as I walked away. As if Peter could—or would want to—give me anything.

  But halfway down the corridor, I stopped. There was a sound coming from Azrael’s cave. A dry, whooshing sound, like the noise a snake would make as it slithered along the walls of the tunnel.

  “Az—”

  “Go!” the old man shouted, his voice echoing through the passageway like a dream.

  CHAPTER

  •

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The evening was quiet, for a change. Marie-Therèse was in her room, resting. Fabienne had pretended to be in bed with a stomachache, but was really teleporting to Hakone, Japan. She’d invited me to come along, but I still wasn’t finished repairing Azrael’s book. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a passenger with a novice teleporter. Who knew where I might end up?

  And Peter was gone. I didn’t know what he was doing. Working, I guessed, although he might be going out with one of the coven women, for all I knew. With a sigh, I took the book and my sewing things out of my backpack and settled into a pile of pillows on my bed. I was sad and confused enough as things were, without the bizarre coincidences that kept cropping up in Azrael’s manuscript. But reading it was turning out to be like watching a car accident: Jean-Loup’s long-ago world—and its inexplicable connection to what was currently going on at the house where I lived—was horrifying, yet I couldn’t look away.

  1688

  Blood Kin

  While Henry Shaw was making his way back to France, Jean-Loup lived quietly at Toujours. Jean-Loup’s neighbors sometimes brought him vegetables or milk out of pity, because the lonely man had no children to care for him.

  He was pottering in his garden when he sensed, rather than heard, a presence behind him. Turning around, he saw a young man dressed in odd, foreign-looking clothes and shoes that were completely unsuitable for standing in a muddy field.

  “Yes?” Jean-Loup began, but any further words dried up in his throat.

  The stranger’s dark hair was accented by a thick streak of white in exactly the same place as Veronique’s. “I don’t suppose you remember me,” he said softly.

  “I don’t . . . but . . .” Jean-Loup swallowed. He suddenly felt as if the air in the field had grown still. Still as death.

  “I see you’ve done well, Father.”

  A strangled sound escaped from Jean-Loup’s lips. “Drago.”

  “Surely you’re not still angry with me.”

  “That was . . .” The old man’s voice trembled. “That was nearly five hundred years ago.”

  Drago smiled. “There are many ways to live beyond one’s years,” he said. “Yours is not the only magic.”

  “Magic?” Jean-Loup repeated vaguely. For the past two centuries, the only gold he had made had been for the casket delivered to the Abbaye des mes Perdues each month.

  He no longer railed against the life that meant so little to him. Through the centuries he had resigned himself to his nothing of an existence, aging slowly but inexorably, forever alone.

  “Actually, I came because I heard about an immortal man in France who kept a harem of witches.”

  “I am not immortal,” Jean-Loup said, nearly overcome with an urge to be away from the intense aura of evil surrounding Drago.

  “Oh? That’s not what I—”

  Suddenly there came the sound of panicking horses and shouting men from the road nearby. Almost relieved, Jean-Loup ran immediately toward the commotion, with Drago following behind.

  A robbery was in progress. A merchant’s carriage lay on its side, its horses straining and choking on their twisted reins as a man—no doubt one of the bandits who’d toppled the carriage in the first place—struggled to free the animals.

  A richly dressed corpse was draped across the window of the carriage, while another well-dressed man fought, unsuccessfully, with a second highwayman. Jean-Loup arrived in time to see the hapless fellow run through with a sword. Blood spurted out of his mouth as he stared, immobile, in surprise.

  “Hurry up with those horses,” the man with the sword growled. “Either get them free or kill them.”

  “I’m trying!” the other bandit shouted. “It’s just . . . oh, merde alors.” He spotted Jean-Loup and Drago. “We’ve got company, damn it.”

  Nervously, Drago unsheathed his sword. “Do you know how to use that?” Jean-Loup whispered. Drago didn’t answer, so the old man snatched it away from him.

  A lot of time had passed since his privateering days, but as soon as the sword was in his hand, the old man’s skill returned. He ran the blade through the bandit with the horses first. Then, with a single stroke, he cut through the animals’ strangling reins, and the horses fled. He stepped away to clear a path for them, only to see the second bandit lunging at Drago, a dagger held high.

  Jean-Loup ran toward them, but his years had slowed him down. Just as he neared the two struggling men, the bandit’s dagger jabbed deep into Drago’s gut.

  It happened fast. The thief fell back as Jean-Loup’s sword entered his neck and came out again, making hot, sucking noises as it exited the man’s windpipe. Then, pushing the filthy body aside, the old man knelt beside his son, who was blinking in bewilderment as his hand came away from the wound in his abdomen coated with his own blood. A second later, he crumpled to his knees.

  The world seemed to have grown suddenly silent. Even the horses galloping down the road made no sound. In his mind, Jean-Loup heard only the faint murmur of an infant nestled in Veronique’s arms.

  “We shall name him Drago,” Veronique had said, blowing on the baby’s forehead. “And like the dragon for which he is named, he shall be full of magic.”

  “Father,” Drago groaned, breaking the silence and the terrible sweet memory, “bring me my attacker.”

  Jean-Loup looked over at the highwayman to whom he had delivered a mortal blow. The man’s legs were twitching, and blood gushed from his mouth. “He will be dead soon enough,” he said softly as he placed his coat beneath his son’s head.

  In a fury, Drago threw the coat at his father. “I said bring him to me!” he shouted, bloody spittle spraying from his lips. “Bring him now!”

  Jean-Loup obeyed. The highwayman was still alive, but did not possess even the strength to resist when Jean-Loup dragged the
robber over to his dying son. “I’m afraid it won’t do any good to—”

  “Give him to me!” Drago bellowed, clutching at the outlaw and pulling him close beside him.

  “Son, what are you doing?” Jean-Loup whispered, but Drago had no time to answer. With shaking fingers he forced the bandit’s mouth open and put his own lips near enough to catch the rush of fetid breath that exuded from the man’s mouth along with a clacking death rattle. It reeked of blood and rotten teeth, and Jean-Loup winced in distaste, but Drago was trembling with excitement as he sucked in the man’s final breath. Then he sighed, cast the body aside, and lay dazed and blinking into the sun.

  “Drago?” Jean-Loup probed. “Son?” Tentatively, he parted Drago’s bloody waistcoat to look at the wound.

  There was no wound. Beneath the blood-soaked clothes, Drago’s skin was perfectly intact.

  Astonished, Jean-Loup felt his son’s neck for a pulse. Drago slapped him away, then sat up, laughing.

  Jean-Loup felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Drago’s wound had been mortal, but not even a scratch remained. He sat back on the muddy ground, remembering the sight of his son bending over Sister Béatrice those many years ago, sucking out her life with his greedy lips. Drago had the same satisfied look on his face now as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, his eyes fixed defiantly on Jean-Loup’s. Beside him lay the dead highwayman, facedown in the mud.

  Jean-Loup turned the body over with his boot. The man’s face was as dry and withered as a corpse that had lain in the sun for a thousand years. Jean-Loup did not know how long he remained there, staring at the dead man as if he were stuck in a dream. But when he came to his senses, Drago had moved farther down the road to the highwayman’s partner, who still lay where the old man had felled him. He was leaning over the man, the muscles in his back working.

  “Drago, don’t,” Jean-Loup said, choking, trying not to vomit. “Please . . .” He swallowed. “Drago, listen to—”

  The words dried up in his throat as Drago turned his head to face him. The second man’s face was as unrecognizably dessicated as the first’s had been. And Drago’s lips were smeared with blood.