Growling in frustration, he crumpled the paper and tossed it into the dying fire.
Godwin and his family needed him.
Alek did not like to dwell on his past. His family had been slaughtered in the night. Godwin Marechal arrived like a savior to rid the small village of its monster infection. It seemed the fucking sunlight even gleamed on his golden hair when Godwin pulled Alek from the steamer trunk he had been hiding in for days.
Alek had been entranced. Godwin appeared so noble, so admirable, that the new orphan followed the hunter in a desperate case of hero worship.
Fortunately, Godwin Marechal was as good of a man as he appeared to a starry-eyed child. He took in the scared child, gave him a home, taught him a profession, and treated him like family. Until—
Alek could not say no; he owed too much to the Marechal family.
Unfortunately, much had transpired in the decade since he left the Marechal home. He hunted monsters, like the one that slaughtered his family, but paid a price. At the time, he had been happy to pay.
Now? He could not find it within himself to regret his choices. A cursed half-life for the lives of innocent people? A bargain.
If the Marechals knew of his curse, he doubted they would welcome his help. He could barely keep himself contained. Leaving would endanger the very family that sought his help.
And yet he yearned to see the only family he had, the people who needed him. Wind rattled the windowpanes and the house groaned.
Aleksandar retrieved the letter from the fire, batting at the charred edges and blowing away soot. There had to be a way to help. He would find it.
Chapter 2
Solenne
Boxon Hill
Marechal House - The Undercroft
* * *
The iron key rattled as Solenne shimmied it into place. The locking mechanism groaned in protest as she turned the old key and pushed the door open. At one time, the Marechal family had many functioning treasures of the old world. Now they had a room full of broken junk. Some still considered the useless machines to be treasures, which was why Solenne picked through the shelves.
The armor Godwin and Luis wore was a genuine treasure. Made of a lightweight and super-strong carbon, the ability to fabricate the material had been lost to time. The pieces were battered and failing. Fortunately, the blacksmith in the village had developed a technique to repair the carbon material. The mended fabric was not as strong, but still better than anything else. Leather was not durable enough, and metal, even chainmail, was too loud and too bulky for the family’s work. By this point, the Marechal armor was mostly composed of repairs. Solenne would eat her hat if more than 50% of the original material remained.
She moved aside defunct slabs made of a material as clear as glass but stronger and shatterproof. Sometimes, if she left them in the sun long enough, they glowed with an internal light.
Godwin would never part with a weapon, inoperable or not, but a long-range communication device that had not worked in decades? That could be bargained away.
Solenne found it difficult to believe that the machines of the ancestors ever worked, that technology could be reliable and dependent. It seemed like a fairy story.
The artifacts disturbed her. She knew it was not magic, but a lost technology. Electricity and circuits. It worked on a principle of gears and levers, heat and steam, or pressure and valves: the same as any machine. Still, images and symbols that she couldn’t decipher ghosted across the surface. She would rather leave well enough alone.
However, Miles, the blacksmith, couldn’t get enough.
She passed over non-functional pistols—or that’s what they looked like to her—and mysterious black boxes. At the back of a dusty shelf, she found a spheroid object, flat on the bottom with a handle. Once white, the casing had yellowed with age. The material was plastic, which, while no longer produced, was common enough. The oldest houses had entire dinner services made of the stuff. The ancestors had used it for practically everything, even trivial, single-use products. Discarded plastics were shredded into chips and melted to be reused. The end product was a crude but durable material, perfect for roof shingles and the like.
Carefully, she wrapped the item in cloth like a sacred relic and added it to a basket along with the damaged armor. She did not need to convince Miles to accept the item as payment for repairing the armor, but she could prevent it from being damaged during the journey.
A week had passed since the events of the full moon. Godwin refused to stay in bed and rest. Luis pored over old texts and fiddled with broken weaponry. The household was almost normal, if one could ignore the underlying current of worry. Every night brought them closer to the summer solstice when creatures prowled the night.
Alek had not replied to her letter, but it had not been returned as a person unknown, either. It had been delivered, presumably read. She had to be patient.
Time was not on their side.
Luis perched on a stool in the library, holding a small crystal to the window. Solenne knocked on the open door’s frame.
“A new gun will not help you,” she said. The ancestor’s weapons discharged searing bolts of energy. The weapons had little effect on the monsters and more often than not exploded in the operator’s hand. They were too dangerous to use. “You’d be better off practicing with the crossbow.”
“I did. I have the callus to prove it.” Luis held up his other hand, the palm red. The family had a crossbow made of a flexible carbon material similar to the armor, but they also had an armory full of models made from humbler material.
The weapon did not matter so much as the silver-tipped arrows did. Silver injured the beasts better than anything.
“I’m going into the village to see Miles,” Solenne said.
“I’ll walk with you.”
She thought he might.
Luis sprang from his seat. Tall and athletic, the morning sun picked out golden highlights in his dark hair. Solenne knew her brother much preferred history to fighting, but they were not given a preference for their lot in life. Solenne had once wanted to learn archery and become a swordfighter. Godwin forbade his daughter from such pursuits—bet he regretted that now as Luis was unequipped to handle such responsibility on his own—so she learned the uses of the plants of the forest.
“No worries. I just wanted you to know to expect me back in the afternoon. I’m calling on Charlotte for lunch,” she said.
“Let me.”
“Luis—”
“Solenne, please. I know nothing will happen during the day, but I need to know you’re safe,” he said. “Please.”
Her brother stood a few inches taller than her. Somehow, in the last winter, he shot up and filled out. At the end of every term when he returned home from boarding school, he was taller, broader. In the months since graduating, he shot up. The scrawny beanpole she remembered now rivaled their father in stature. He was eight years younger than her, but somehow Luis had grown into an adult without her noticing.
“If you must,” she said.
“I enjoy the way you make it sound like a hardship for yourself.” He grabbed an overcoat from the rack in the hall, and they made their way into the village.
The sun had finally pierced through a rainy spring, although a damp chill hung in the air. Rain was a constant for the season. Soon enough, the afternoons would grow warm and the greenery would explode in the valley. At the moment, mud colored everything.
The Marechal estate sat midway on Boxon Hill. A standing stone circle loomed above, at the very top of the hill. The top of the hill offered panoramic views, if a person could tolerate the humming from the stones.
A ring of old-growth trees surrounded the bottom half of the hill, and denser forest growth lay to the south. To the east, the village was a brisk walk away. Pastures suitable for grazing were to the north and to the west. Beyond the pastures were the plains, the West Lands, where the terraforming of the original settlers ended and the wild, indigenous pla
net began.
As removed as she felt from the defunct technology the original settlers brought from the old world, it defied comprehension to think the flora and fauna were also from another world. Another planet. Various histories all agreed that a portion of the world had been terraformed, whatever that meant. Livestock was revived from frozen cells. Seeds planted in newly transformed ground. All that humans farmed and harvested came from the old world. Even the forest and the wild plants were planted by the settlers.
Humans were aliens here.
It seemed impossible that humans had so much technology, so much power to change the face of an inhospitable planet, and it slipped away. Nexus energies caused havoc on machines and humans alike.
The settlers had changed the planet, but the planet had changed them as well.
In the sunshine, a sparkle at Luis’ throat caught her attention. Now interested, she studied his wardrobe. Luis wore his typical tan trousers and white shirt with a plain white waistcoat. The greatcoat was made of heavy wool and dyed a deep navy that hid many stains. His dark hair had been pulled back and tied with a red ribbon, but wisps had escaped. He very much had the air of a gentleman farmer.
That cravat though…
“Are you expecting to be attacked by a blood drinker in broad daylight?” she asked, keeping her tone light and jovial.
Luis touched the silver-infused cloth and blushed. “I thought it looked nice.”
She hummed and straightened the fabric. Pressing her lips to hide her grin, she looked away and said nothing. She counted Miles as a friend and he would make a suitable match.
Sneaking a glance at Luis, she approved of the excited gleam in his eye.
Just not for her. Luis’ crush on the blacksmith had been obvious for years, at least to her.
“Miles is awfully clever,” she said. Luis nodded. “Awfully handsome too.”
A furious red blush took over his face. “It’s not like that, Solenne. He thinks I’m a child,” he sputtered.
Luis had grown a lot over the winter and filled out his frame. Solenne suspected that Miles might reevaluate his opinion of Luis when they met.
“Have you spoken to him since you returned from school?”
“Once or twice.”
“Well, sometimes it’s easy to think of people as they had been, instead of noticing how they are,” she said.
“Trying to make him notice anything that’s not broken tech is impossible.” The sulk in his tone spoke to his youth.
Solenne turned her attention to the undergrowth near the edge of the trees, hiding her amusement. Her baby brother had it bad.
A purple blossom caught her attention. “Hold a minute.” She pushed the basket into his hands and drew out a small silver blade. The slight curve made it ideal for collecting plants.
“Lungwort,” she said, folding her collection carefully into a handkerchief. Luis rolled his eyes. “You’ll be thankful when you have a cough.”
The path emerged from the trees, and the air felt lighter. Luis tugged at his ear, like he had water stuck inside.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“It’s background noise mostly, except during events.”
The family was, to varying degrees, sensitive to nexus energies. It was, according to family lore, why the family had been given Boxon Hill and the surrounding land. They instinctively sensed any fluctuations in the nexus energy and could track its movements.
Well, Solenne could not. Luis described it as chasing fish in a river, which did not clarify things at all.
The strength of the gift varied from person to person. Solenne sensed nothing unless she stood directly on top of the nexus point at the stone circle. Even then, it was faint; a tingly, zipping sensation that grew into sparks, like static electricity discharging when she shuffled her stocking feet across a carpet. Leaving the immediate vicinity of a nexus point, however, always felt like a relief, like silence replacing a constant buzzing noise.
Open pasture stretched from the foot of Boxon Hill to the outskirts of Boxon village. Other than a small herd of sheep, livestock didn’t thrive on the hill—too skittish. The animals that lived on the hill were wilder and, sometimes, otherworldly. Solenne would be skittish too.
“You should practice archery with me,” Luis announced.
“What?”
“You used to be good with a bow and arrow, right? Back when Mama—”
Silence fell between the siblings. Injured while conducting one of her experiments, Amalie Marechal succumbed to her injuries. Solenne had been fifteen, Luis just seven.
Godwin immediately forbade Solenne from continuing her training. He lost his wife to an accident, and he would be damned before he lost his daughter to monsters.
Solenne pressed her lips together. Godwin’s actions, spurred on by love and fear, condemned them. Godwin would never regain his vision. Luis could not protect the entire valley on his own. If her father hadn’t been so stubborn—
“Father will be upset,” she said.
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Practicing with a long-range weapon is smarter than giving you a little dagger and hoping you never have to use it.” Luis frowned at the blade in the basket.
For months after their mother’s death, Godwin reluctantly allowed Solenne to continue her training. The day she broke her wrist, however, ended his tolerance.
Solenne rubbed her wrist. She shifted the basket to cover the motion. It had been an accident. Alek hadn’t known his full strength, but Godwin wouldn’t tolerate it. He sent Alek away.
She lost several things that day. The full use of her arm was only one.
Luis noticed. He noticed everything. “You were hurt, but he was wrong to stop your training.” His voice took on a deep firmness that Solenne had never heard before. For a moment, she got a glimpse of the man her little brother would grow into.
“He was scared and angry,” she said. A badly placed hit fractured her left arm and her wrist. Godwin’s reaction, though.
Godwin had not been himself, lost to grief and alcohol. That was the first and last day he ever raised a hand in anger to his apprentice, Alek. He never touched a drop of alcohol again, but the damage had been done. Alek was beaten and sent away, despite Solenne’s pleading. Alek was her oldest friend and the man she loved, and it had been an accident.
While her arm healed well enough, she lacked the strength to hold a sword. The only thing that hurt was the sense of incompleteness from her absent friend, and she learned to ignore that. After a decade of living with the loss, her resentment had mellowed.
“He’s a stubborn asshole,” Luis said. “He was wrong to send Aleksandar away and wrong to send us off to that boarding school.” Youthful anger and certitude colored his voice.
“Papa’s not a saint. We all make mistakes,” she said, thinking of how her time at university had been cut short because the funds ran out. When she returned home, she found the estate badly managed and the accounts in shambles. “A lot of mistakes.”
Luis huffed.
She leaned in until they bumped shoulders. “Hey,” she said.
He grumbled a reply.
“I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if I have the strength in my hand for a bow. Maybe a crossbow. Or I can practice with my left.” Training to use her non-dominant hand would be difficult, but his idea was sound.
Luis nodded. “There’s the blacksmith.”
On the edge of the village, the forge billowed out steam in the cool morning air. Luis fidgeted with the lapels on his greatcoat.
So cute.
“Come on. Let’s ply Miles with our treasures so he can work a miracle for us today,” she said.
Aleksandar
Snowmelt
Hardwick House - The Study
* * *
Words failed Alek; he tossed his original reply to Godwin Marechal, curt and quite rudely so, into the fire. He scratched out another response, filled with vitriol and a touch of gloating. That also j
oined its brethren in the fire.
He then wrote to Solenne, as he often did, because she was never far from his thoughts or his heart, and that went into fire. He had hoped that time would lessen the pull, but a thread connected them, always had, and it hooked directly into his heart. They were tied together. Sometimes he could go days without thinking of her, then some sound or a flash of color would spark a memory and the pull intensified.
Foolishly, he’d pen another letter, which ended up in the fire like all the letters he had written to Solenne over the years.
The beast inside him howled with hunger, impatience, and wanting. Always wanting.
Staying in exile as he had done for years was the best way to protect her from himself. Yet she needed his protection from others.
Either he left Solenne defenseless against the beast that attacked her father, or he endangered her with his own hungry beast.
There was no good choice.
Alek snarled with frustration and flung the pen and ink pot across the room. It splashed against the door and rolled onto the rug. Dark ink soaked into the sage-and-cream-colored rug.
He felt a moment’s worth of shame at his behavior. His tantrum punished no one but Mrs. Suchet, his patient and aging housekeeper, with her creaking knees. This room—a gentleman’s study, though he never used it and certainly never considered himself a gentleman—was not his den. He could not do as he pleased and ruin the furnishings.
Alek flung open the door. “Suchet!”
“Yes, Master Alek?” The aging housekeeper made slow progress down the hall. She called him by his childhood name, but he did not complain. Mrs. Suchet was one of the few people who remembered his parents and how alive the house had been before a monster invaded.
“How do I—” He waved a hand to the rug and the spreading ink stain.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’ll fetch the vinegar and a cloth.”
Wolf's Bane Page 2
