The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  “Tell your driver to stop the carriage,” he said. “I’m going back to St. Andrew if I have to walk the whole way.”

  “I can’t let you out.”

  “Stop the carriage!” he thundered, rising to his feet and pounding a fist on the carriage’s roof. I tried to make him sit down, but the driver had heard him and pulled the horses up.

  Jonathan flung open the tiny door and bounded out into the knee-deep virgin snow. The driver turned, looking down on us doubtfully from his high perch, his mustache frosted with his own breath. The horses shuddered for air, exhausted from pulling the carriage through the snow.

  “We’ll be back. Melt some snow to water the horses,” I said in an attempt to distract the driver. I ran after Jonathan, my skirts slowing me in the snow, and grabbed his arm when I finally caught up to him.

  “You’ve got to listen to me. You can’t go back to St. Andrew. You’ve changed.”

  He pushed me away. “I don’t know what happened to you since you’ve been away, but I can only surmise that you’ve lost your mind …”

  I held on to his cuff fiercely. “I’ll prove it to you. If I can make you see that I’m telling the truth, do you promise to come with me?”

  He stopped but looked at me as though he expected a trick. “I promise you nothing.”

  I held up my hand, releasing his sleeve, signaling for him to wait. With my other hand, I found a small but sturdy knife in the pocket of my overcoat. I tore open my bodice, exposing my corset to the frigidly crisp air, and then, grasping the knife’s handle in both hands, I plunged it into my chest to the hilt.

  Jonathan nearly dropped to his knees, but his hands reached for me reflexively. “Good God! You are insane! What in God’s name are you doing—”

  Blood welled around the hilt, quickly soaked up by my clothing, until a huge sunburst of deep crimson spread across the silk from my belly to my sternum. I pulled the blade out, then grabbed his hand and pressed his fingers to the wound. He tried to pull away but I held him fast.

  “Touch it. Feel what is happening and tell me you still don’t believe me.”

  I knew what would happen. It was a parlor trick Dona performed for us when we gathered in the kitchen to wind down after a night on the town. He would sit before the fire, toss his frock coat over the back of a chair and roll up his voluminous sleeves, and then cut deep into his forearms with a knife. Alejandro, Tilde, and I would watch as the two raw ends of red flesh would crawl toward each other, helpless as doomed lovers, and sew up in a seamless embrace. An impossible feat, done over and over, as sure as the sun rises. (Dona would laugh bitterly as he watched his own flesh re-join, but re-creating his trick myself, I saw that it had a sensation all its own. It was pain we sought but couldn’t re-create, not exactly. We came to want an approximation of suicide, and in its stead we would have the temporary pleasure of inflicting pain upon ourselves, but even that was denied us. How we hated ourselves, each in our own way!)

  Jonathan’s face went pale as he felt the pulpy flesh move and shudder and close.

  “What is this?” he whispered in horror. “The devil’s hand is there, surely.”

  “I don’t know about that. I have no explanation. What’s done is done and there’s no running away from it. You’ll never be the same again and your place is no longer in St. Andrew. Now come with me,” I said. He went limp and stark white and he didn’t resist when I placed my hand on his arm and guided him back to the carriage.

  Jonathan did not recover from shock for the entire trip. It made for an anxious time for me, as I was eager to know if I would get my friend—and my lover—back. Jonathan was always the confident one and it made me ill at ease to be the leader. It was foolish for me to expect anything different; after all, how long had I sulked in Adair’s house, withdrawing into myself and refusing to believe what had happened to me?

  He kept to the tiny cabin during the sailing to Boston, not stepping on deck once. That whetted the crew’s and other passengers’ curiosity to be sure, so even though the seas were smooth as well water, I told them that he had taken ill and did not trust his legs to be up and about. I brought him soup from the galley and his ration of beer, though he no longer had the need to eat and his appetite had deserted him. As Jonathan would soon learn, eating was something we did out of habit and for comfort, and to pretend that we were the same as ever.

  By the time the ship arrived at the Boston harbor, Jonathan was a strange-looking creature from his many hours in the semidarkness of the cabin. Pale and nervous, with eyes rimmed pink from lack of sleep, he emerged from his cabin dressed in the set of ragtag clothes we had purchased back in Camden from a tiny shop that sold second hand goods. He stood on the deck, enduring the stares of the other passengers, who doubtless had wondered if the unseen passenger had died in his cabin during the journey. He watched the activity on the pier as the ship was secured in its berth, eyes widening at the crowds. His incredible beauty had been dampened by his ordeal, and for a moment, I wished that Adair would not see Jonathan looking so poorly for their first meeting. I wanted Adair to see that Jonathan was everything I’d promised—foolish vanity!

  We disembarked and had gone not twenty feet up the pier when I saw Dona waiting for us with a couple of servants. Dona wore a funereal outfit, black ostrich plumes in his hat, and he was bundled in a black cape and leaned on his walking stick, towering over the ordinary people like the grim reaper himself. An evil leer crept over his face as he spied us.

  “How did you know I was returning today? On this ship?” I demanded of him. “I sent no letter on ahead to tell you of my plans.”

  “Oh, Lanore, you are laughably naive. Adair always knows such things. He felt your presence on the horizon and sent me to fetch you,” he said, brushing me off. He lavished all his attention on Jonathan, not attempting to disguise that he was inspecting him from head to toe and back again. “So, introduce me to your friend.”

  “Jonathan, this is Donatello,” I said, curtly. Jonathan made no move to acknowledge him or return the greeting, though whether it was because of Dona’s bald appraisal or because he was still in shock I couldn’t say.

  “Doesn’t he speak? Has he no manners?” Dona said. When Jonathan didn’t rise to the bait, Dona brushed off the snub by turning to me. “Where are your bags? The servants—”

  “Would we be dressed like this if we had anything else to wear? I had to leave everything behind. I barely had the money to make it to Boston.” In my mind’s eye, I saw the trunk I’d left behind in my mother’s house, inconspicuously tucked in a corner. When they inspected it—waiting until curiosity got the best of them before they’d violate my privacy, even though they’d know I was not coming back—they would find the doeskin pouch fat with gold and silver coins. I was happy that the money pouch had been left behind; I felt I owed my family that much. I considered it Adair’s blood money, paying my family for the loss of me forever, much as he’d assuaged his guilt by leaving money for his family centuries earlier.

  “How consistent of you. The first time, you came to us with nothing. Now you bring your friend, both of you with nothing.” Dona threw his hands in the air as though I was incorrigible, but I knew why he acted peevishly: even in Jonathan’s current state, his exceptional nature was obvious. He would become the apple of Adair’s eye, the friend and compatriot against whom Dona could never compete. Dona would fall from grace with Adair; there was nothing to be done for it and that was clear to Dona from the moment he laid eyes on Jonathan.

  If only Dona had known, he wouldn’t have wasted his envy. Our arrival that day was the beginning of the end for all of us.

  Jonathan came back to life on the carriage ride to Adair’s mansion. For this was his first trip to a city as big and varied as Boston, and through his eyes, I got to relive my arrival three years earlier: the masses of people on the dusty streets; the proliferation of shops and inns; the amazing houses made of brick, towering several stories high; the number of carriages on the stre
et drawn by well-groomed horses; the women in fashions of the day, revealing décolletage and long white throats. After a while, Jonathan had to sit back from the window and close his eyes.

  Then, of course, Adair’s mansion was as overwhelming as a castle, though by this point, Jonathan had grown numb to the novelty of grandeur. He allowed me to lead him up the stairs and into the house, through the foyer with the chandelier swaying overhead and the liveried footmen bowing low enough to inspect Jonathan’s crusted shoes. We went through the dining hall with its table set for eighteen to the double-bowed staircase, which led to the bedchambers upstairs.

  “Where is Adair?” I demanded of one of the butlers, eager to get this part over.

  “Right here.” His voice rose behind me, and I whirled around to see him walking in. He’d dressed carefully, with a studied casualness, his hair tied back with a ribbon like a European gentleman. Like Dona, he eyed my Jonathan as though considering a fair price for him, rubbing together the fingers of his right hand. For his part, Jonathan tried to be indifferent, glancing at Adair and then looking away. But I felt a charge in the air and a recognition pass between them. It could have been what mystics claim as the bond between souls destined to travel throughout time together. Or it might have been the dance of rival males in the wild, wondering who will come out on top and how bloody the battle will be. Or it might have been that he was finally meeting the man who kept me.

  “So this is the friend you told us about,” Adair said, pretending it was as simple as having an old friend down for a visit.

  “I am pleased to introduce to you Mr. Jonathan St. Andrew.” I did my best impression of a doorman but neither man was amused.

  “And you are the …” Jonathan fumbled for the word to describe Adair from my fantastic story, for indeed what would you call him? Monster? Ogre? Demon? “Lanny told me about you.”

  Adair raised an eyebrow. “Did she? I hope Lanny did not make too much of a mess of it. She has such a grand imagination. You shall have to tell me what she said, someday.” He snapped his fingers at Dona. “Show our guest up to his room. He must be tired.”

  “I can take him,” I began, but Adair cut me off.

  “No, Lanore, stay with me. I’d like to speak to you for a moment.” It was then I realized I was in trouble: he simmered with anger, hidden for the sake of our guest. We watched as Dona led a sleepwalking Jonathan up the winding staircase, until they disappeared from view. Then Adair whirled on me, striking me hard across my face.

  Knocked to the floor, I held my cheek and glared at him. “What was that for?”

  “You changed him, didn’t you? You stole my elixir and you took him for yourself. Did you think I wouldn’t find out what you’d done?” Adair stood over me, huffing, shoulders trembling.

  “I had no choice! He had been shot … he was dying …”

  “Do you think I am stupid? You stole the elixir because you had intended from the beginning to bind him to you.” Adair reached down and grabbed me by the arm, hoisted me to my feet, and shoved me against the wall. In his hands, I felt the terror of the episode in the basement, strapped in the diabolical harness, helpless in the face of his violence and drowning in panic. Then he hit me again, a stinging backhand that dropped me to the floor a second time. I reached up again to my cheek and found it smeared with blood. He’d split the skin open, and pain was radiating through my face even as the wound’s edges began to knit back together.

  “If I meant to steal him from you, would I have come back?” Still on the floor, I scrabbled backward like a crab to get out of Adair’s reach, slipping on my own silken hem. “I’d have run away and taken him with me. No, it’s exactly as I told you … I took the vial, yes, but as a precaution. It was a feeling I had, that something bad was going to happen. But of course I came back. I am loyal to you,” I said, even though there was murder in my heart, fury at being struck, for being helpless to do anything about it.

  Adair glared at me, questioning my declaration, but did not strike me again. Instead, he turned and walked away, his warning to me echoing in the hall. “We will see about your professed loyalty. Do not think this is over, Lanore. I will crush the tie between you and this man so completely that your bond to him will be as nothing. Your thievery and your scheming will come to naught. You are mine, and if you believe I cannot undo what you have done, you are mistaken. Jonathan will be mine, too.”

  I remained on the floor, holding my cheek, trying not to panic at his words. I couldn’t let him take Jonathan away from me. I couldn’t let him sever the tie to the only person I cared about. Jonathan was all I had and all I wanted. If I lost him, life would be meaningless, and unfortunately, life would be all that was left to me.

  THIRTY-NINE

  QUEBEC CITY, PRESENT DAY

  It is near midnight when they arrive in Quebec City. Lanny directs Luke to what appears to be the best hotel in the old part of town, a tall fortresslike building with parapets for a crown and flags fluttering in the cold night wind. Grateful to be driving the new SUV instead of his old truck, Luke hands the valet the keys and then he and Lanny walk empty-handed into the lobby.

  The hotel room is about the most luxurious place he’s ever stayed; it puts the hotel where he spent his honeymoon to shame. The bed is a plush affair with feather bed, a half dozen pillows, and Frette sheets, and as he settles into its voluptuousness, he levels a remote at the flat-screen television. The local news programs should be on in a few minutes and he’s anxious to see if there is any mention of the disappearance of a murder suspect from a hospital in Maine. Luke hopes that St. Andrew is too far away and inconsequential for the story to be carried in Quebec.

  His gaze wanders to Lanny’s laptop, at the foot of the bed. He could see if there’s anything online, but Luke is struck by a sudden irrational fear that if he searches for their story online, he will give them away somehow, that the authorities will be able to track them down through the combination of an internet connection and the use of suspicious key words. His heart pounds even though he knows this isn’t possible. He has made himself almost dizzy with paranoia when he’s not sure there is any reason for it.

  Lanny comes out of the bathroom on a cloud of warm, damp air. She’s swimming in the hotel bathrobe, which is huge on her, and has a towel over her shoulders, her wet hair falling in tendrils over her eyes. She fishes a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket. Before lighting up, she offers one to Luke, but he shakes his head.

  “The water pressure is heavenly,” she says, sending a stream of smoke toward the sprinkler heads embedded discreetly in the ceiling. “You should take a nice long, hot shower.”

  “In a minute,” he says.

  “What’s on television? Are you looking for something about us?”

  He nods, twitching his stockinged feet at the plasma screen. A flashy logo for the news program flits across, then a serious-looking middle-aged man begins reading headlines while his coanchor nods attentively. Lanny continues to sit with her back to the screen, toweling her hair. Seven minutes into the program, a head shot of Luke flashes behind the anchor. It’s the posed personnel photo they took at the hospital that appears every time his name is mentioned in the hospital newsletter.

  “… is missing after treating a murder suspect for the police at Aroostook General Hospital yesterday evening, and the authorities fear that something may have happened to him. The police are asking anyone with information on the doctor’s whereabouts to call the crime hotline …”

  The entire story lasts less than sixty seconds, but it is so alarming to see his face on the television screen that Luke can’t absorb what the anchor is saying. Lanny takes the remote out of his hand and turns it off.

  “So, they’re looking for you,” she says, her voice breaking his paralysis.

  “Don’t they have to wait forty-eight hours before they can consider you a missing person?” he asks, weakly indignant, as though an injustice has been done to him.

  “They’re not going to w
ait; they think you’re in danger.”

  Am I? he wonders. Does Joe Duchesne know something I don’t know? “They read my name on the air. The hotel …”

  “No reason to worry. We registered in my name, remember? The police back in St. Andrew don’t know who I am. No one is going to put two and two together.” The girl turns away and blows another long stream of smoke. “It’ll be okay. Trust me. I’m an expert at escaping.”

  It feels as though Luke’s brain squeezes against his skull, as if in a panic it is trying to get out. The enormity of what he has done hits him: Duchesne will be waiting to talk to him. Peter undoubtedly has told the police about the SUV and the email, so there’s no way they can continue to use it. In order to go back to his home, he will have to lie convincingly to the sheriff and repeat that lie to everyone back in St. Andrew, maybe for the rest of his life. He closes his eyes and fights for breath. His subconscious led him to help Lanny. If he can only fight through the alarm clamoring in his head, his subconscious should tell him what it is he really wants, why he walked out on his life and went tearing down the road with this woman, bridges aflame behind him. “Does that mean I can’t go back?” he asks.

  “If that’s what you want,” she says carefully. “They’ll have questions, but nothing you wouldn’t be able to handle. Do you want to go back to St. Andrew? To your parents’ farm, the house full of their belongings, the absence of your kids? Back to the hospital to take care of your ungrateful neighbors?”

  Luke’s uneasiness grows stronger. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Listen to me, Luke. I know what you’re thinking.” She slides across the bed to sit next to him, close, so he can’t turn away from her. He smells the faint perfume of soap, warmed by her skin, rise from under the bathrobe. “You only want to go back because it’s what you know. It’s what you have left. The man I saw walk into the ER looked overwhelmed and tired. You’ve been through a lot with your parents and your former wife, losing your children … There’s nothing there for you anymore. It’s a trap. You go back to St. Andrew and you’ll never leave. You’ll just grow older, surrounded by people who don’t give a damn about you. I know what you’re feeling. You’re alone and you’re afraid you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life, rattling around in a big house, no one to talk to. No one to help with the burdens of living—no one to eat dinner with, no one to listen to stories about your day. You’re afraid of old age—who will be there for you? Who will take care of you the way you took care of your parents, who will hold your hand when it’s your turn to die?” What she’s said is brutally true and he can barely stand to listen to it. She puts one arm around Luke’s shoulder and when he doesn’t push her away, she pulls him closer.