Camille, Claimed

by Ginger Talbot

  And he does.

  His eyes light up and he nods approvingly. “Very well said. With time, you may grow more comfortable with our traditions—assuming you have time.” Interesting. He didn’t sound threatening when he said it. Just matter-of-fact. “Come. It’s time for you to learn of your glorious family history.”

  He shoves his chair back and stands. He takes a plate piled high with eggs and dumps it on the floor. Then he dumps the leftover bacon on top of it. “The Sinners may eat,” he says. As we leave, the women are scrambling for the food, grabbing it with their hands and shoving it into their mouths. The redhead is starting to stir, moaning, but they ignore her.

  Augustus pauses at the doorway. “If this isn’t all cleaned up by the time we’re back, I’ll cut your fingers off and feed them to you,” he calls out, in that pleasant, honeyed, Southern-gentleman tone of his. As if he were inviting to help themselves to more grits and have a nice day, y’all.

  Chapter Eleven

  Bastien

  We stroll out into a glorious morning, the perfumed breezes caressing us as we head down a flagstone path. Solomon and Paxton trail behind us.

  “So what was Maria’s offense?” I ask. “Did she try to steal the silverware or something?”

  “No, no. Her grandmother did.” He smiles benignly. “Her name was Ruby—a pretty little thing, from what I’ve been told. She was the maid at a little house my father kept in Philadelphia. When she was caught stealing, she was brought to the estate here to be broken and trained, and she served my father. He was a young man at the time. Once she was used up to the point where she was no longer desirable in the eyes of her master, he had her inseminated. One of his bodyguards did it. After she gave birth and suckled her daughter for a few months, Sinner Ruby was finished off in a hunt, and her daughter, Sinner Leah, sent off to an orphanage owned by my family, then a finishing school. On her eighteenth birthday, they brought her back here to be broken and trained, just as her mother was.”

  A hunt. Hunting humans.

  The words click perfectly into place inside me. They fill an empty spot I wasn’t aware of until just now, settling in nicely. I need to hunt people.

  He smiles in reminiscence. “It was quite a surprise to her. Leah was raised to be a sweet little virgin, and she thought she was coming back here for an arranged marriage. I got to have my fun with her after my father broke her in. My father’s passed on now, but we continued the tradition. We had Sinner Leah impregnated, and she gave birth to Sinner Maria, and we hunted Sinner Leah and shipped Sinner Maria off to be raised at the orphanage. I got her a year ago. She was a stubborn one at first. She’s got scars from my branding iron to prove it.”

  “The sins of the father,” I muse. “Or mother, in this case.” I’m following him down a path walled in by glossy green hedges.

  “Exactly.” He nods approvingly. “When we reach the fourth generation, we stop. The Bible says so. So when Sinner Maria has a daughter, she will serve one of my sons until she’s no longer useful, and we will dispose of her, and that will be the end of it.”

  “What would happen if she had a son?”

  “There are certain members of our family who will take on the task of punishing male Sinners.” In other words, members of the family who were gay sadists, but he was prettying it up. “In the past we would send the son to one of them, then breed the female Sinner again as many times as necessary until she produced a daughter. These days, however, medical advances allow us to select the sex of the baby.”

  “And let me guess. Ruby was very poor, in desperate financial straits, possibly caused by something your grandfather did, and you left out something tempting for her to steal.”

  He glances at me with surprise. “Yes, that’s right. Her mother was dying, and Ruby wanted money to take her to the doctor. And my grandfather had given Ruby her two weeks’ notice. We only punish those who transgress against us. And we may lay temptation in their path, but we never force anyone to sin against us. That’s on them.”

  “Do you breed all your Sinners?” I slip into the parlance he’s using, to encourage him to speak openly. If he senses the slightest hint of disapproval, he’ll shut down, I can tell.

  “No—we hunt some, we breed some. We have half a dozen Sinners who are ripe with fruit currently, so for now we’re more in the hunting phase.”

  “What about Paxton’s mother? Was she a Sinner?”

  “Oh, no.” He looks shocked. The very idea. “When we take a bride, that’s a special process. She has to be from a good family, intelligent, attractive, and a virgin. Superior breeding stock, in other words. That’s a universal family rule.” He smiles. “When you see a news report of a young, beautiful college student who’s gone missing, there’s an excellent chance she’s been claimed by a Franklin.” He says it with pride.

  “But what about Judge Franklin? Senator Franklin?”

  “There are a few prominent members of the family who must compromise because they’re in the public eye. They are powerful men—they help protect our way of life and ensure our businesses get every advantage, so they make that sacrifice. They do, however, marry women who are raised in the Franklin orphanage—women who are trained to submit to their husbands, as is fitting in the eyes of the Lord.”

  “Are you married?” I try to imagine how a wife—even a kidnapped, beaten, shock-collared wife—would react to all the half-naked “Sinners” serving meals. Or maybe the Sinners were only trotted out to assess my reaction. Perhaps they were usually tucked away in a basement.

  “I’m a widower.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say automatically, the etiquette lessons of my childhood still drilled into my head.

  “Don’t be. I killed her.” He grimaces as if tasting something bad. “She was a lovely thing; a nursing student when I took her. Fought like the dickens. I thought I had her properly trained, but after she gave birth to Paxton, she tried to take him and escape. Franklin women only leave the family one way. So we had a hunt. Also family tradition. Started when my great-great-great et cetera grandfather Isaiah’s second wife turned out to be a treacherous little Sinner who tried to run away with a local fur trapper. After that, we started keeping our wives isolated.”

  “It sounds like these traditions go very far back.” We’re heading toward an apple orchard now. I can see what looks like an old wooden cabin at the far end of the orchard, and beyond that, thick forest.

  There’s a faraway look in his eyes. “Hundreds of years, to Isaiah Franklin and Jedediah Franklin, two cousins who settled this land in the 1700s. But we’ll get into that in a little while. Let’s talk about Robert. I assume you know he was my son.”

  Past tense. So he knows.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Someone killed him. And his little Sinners, and his guards.” He glances at me. “Was it you?”

  Interesting. He doesn’t look upset.

  “What if it was?” I say. I want to understand this family. They hold the Franklin name in highest regard, but what kind of individual loyalty do they have?

  Paxton, trailing behind us, makes a snarling noise.

  “Easy, there,” Solomon says with a laugh. “You think your father can’t handle himself?”

  “Kiss-ass,” Paxton spits at him. “Just wait for the fucking challenge.”

  Challenge? This sounds interesting.

  Augustus is staring out into the distance. “If he let you, alone, walk in and wipe out him and his guards, I’d be disappointed in myself. I thought I’d raised my son to be able to defend himself like a man.” He heaves a sigh that’s thick with frustration. “It’s just as well that the challenge is coming.”

  I stare at him, fascinated. Even though my parents are fictional characters who strangled me in a web of lies, I know one thing. I believe it on a cellular level. They would burn the world down to get at anyone who hurt me. This man believes I might have hacked his son’s head off, but he’s strolling along beside me as if we’re on a friendly nature
hike.

  “It wasn’t me,” I say with a shrug that’s perhaps overly casual, considering that we’re talking about his son’s life here. “Four very well-trained men broke into his house. It was a professional operation. They took out his guards, they disabled his alarms. I was crouched in the woods watching his house when they came running out. I shot them, left their bodies on the front lawn, went into the house and found your son’s head sitting on a platter. There was a note next to it that said, ‘MAYbe he should have been a little more careful,’ with the word May in capital letters.”

  He stops walking and his face flushes with anger. He stands there for a minute or two, breathing heavily, then winces, rolling his shoulders back. “Damn it. Damn it to hell! Such a waste. He never could tell the difference between confidence and foolhardy carelessness. He shouldn’t have left the estate during a challenge.”

  What is this challenge business? I want to ask, but I suspect that a control freak like Augustus will reveal what information he wants to, when he wants to, and not before.

  “A sniper tried to shoot me earlier that day. They came very close to taking my head off,” I say. “I’m guessing he was sent by the same people who killed your son. Did you find the bodies of the men I shot? The ones who were outside on the lawn?”

  “No. There were no bodies. Not even any blood. Sections of lawn had been cut away.”

  Interesting. So whoever sent the men did a cleanup operation after I wiped out their squad.

  Augustus chews his lower lip and looks at me with resignation. I think I see a glimpse of sadness there too, just for a moment, but then it vanishes, replaced with steely, angry resolve.

  “All right. It’s time for you to learn some of our history.” He starts walking again, heading straight for the wooden cabin. Solomon and Paxton are still trailing behind us.

  “I will start at the beginning. I told you that about the two cousins. Jedediah was a traitor. He tried to kill his cousin Isaiah, because he wanted his land and he lusted after his woman. He invited the family to dinner here, then shot Isaiah and left him to bleed out and die. But Isaiah was stronger than that.” His eyes gleam, and his mouth turns up in a triumphant smirk. So I can guess which branch of the family Augustus is descended from.

  We reach the front door of the wooden cabin. An old wagon wheel leans on a wall. There are wooden barrel planters on either side of the doorstep, bursting with fresh flowers. He stops there, his eyes shining. His son and nephew hang back, watching.

  “Jedediah told the two sons they must bow down to him and serve him. One of them submitted to his uncle out of fear. He let Jedediah sodomize him. He begged his uncle not to kill him, and offered to be his servant for all his days.”

  All his days? Okay, now we’re doing eighteenth-century preacher talk. I keep the impatience from my face as Augustus continues. “Jedediah whipped the other boy, Homer, half to death, but he wouldn’t bend. No, sir, not for anything!” Augustus’ voice has risen and rings through the air as if he’s preaching to a church full of hymn-singing believers.

  “Jedediah took Isaiah’s wife, Sarah, right there in front of her sons while Isaiah lay near death on the floor, and because she was weak, she did not preserve her virtue from him. She should have taken her own life rather than submit to the lustful perversions of her husband’s enemy, but she was a craven coward and a whore. She lay there and let Jedediah rut her like a sow. Isaiah called upon God for strength. And the next day Jedediah left the house to tend to his flocks. And God gave Isaiah strength, and he rose up from the floor, and he grabbed Jedediah’s shotgun, for God gives strength to the worthy—only to the worthy!”

  Augustus is gesturing to the heavens now. Would it be poor form to ask for the Reader’s Digest version? Yes, I imagine it would. His son and nephew, who surely have heard this story a time or two, have schooled their expressions into an appearance of rapt attention, so I curse inwardly but do the same.

  Augustus continues. “Isaiah shot his wife, Sarah, for allowing Jedediah to dishonor the family name. He shot his weak son, the one who had parted his buttocks and allowed himself to be defiled. He only spared Homer, from whom I am descended. And he knew that God had saved him for a purpose, so he could be an example to his children and preach the ways of true manhood to them and teach them how to live and die as God intended.”

  Did I miss some Bible verses? Apparently. Like the ones where you get to kidnap, rape, and breed women? Those would have made Sunday school so much more fun for me.

  With a flourish, Augustus flings open the door to the cabin. I follow him inside.

  The one-room cabin has been wired with electricity. It’s air-conditioned, and there is a single overhead light. There’s a plexiglass box on a stand, containing a faded brown book. Those seem to be the only concessions to modernity.

  There are ancient wooden cabinets on one wall, with deer-antler handles. In the middle of the room sits a hand-hewn wooden table and chairs, and I see the faint outline of a faded stain on the wooden floor, next to a pot-bellied stove. “Isaiah’s blood,” Augustus says proudly, following my gaze. “So strong that it never faded.” Yeah, because they never cleaned it up.

  He points at the plexiglass box. “That is the family charter, in a book bound by Jedediah’s skin. We all memorize and abide by the rules of the charter.”

  Up against the wall, by an ancient window that probably hasn’t opened in a hundred years, is a bed made of rough wooden timber, with a mattress covered only by a sheet.

  “When we first claim a woman, we bring her in here,” he says. “The Sinners Maria and Sarah and Jess, the women who served us this morning, they all were broken in on this very bed.”

  I sit down on one of the wooden chairs. I have a feeling this is going to take a while.

  I glance out the door at his son and his nephew. “You’ve all been talking about a challenge. What’s that about?”

  “It’s why my son died.” That faint, fleeting look of sorrow visits his face and makes him look almost human. Then he goes all lofty and hard again.

  “I currently occupy the seat of family Patriarch. The Patriarch can be unseated at any time by a challenge from any other male family member. Then the Patriarch has the choice to either step down or agree to a fight to the death with his challenger. Tradition. We only use knives. Isaiah, with the strength given to him by the Lord, he left his cousin’s shotgun behind and hunted Jedidiah down with a knife, in the woods behind this cabin. We do the same.”

  “Who did you kill to get your position?” I ask. “Your father?”

  He gives me a sidelong glance. “No, my father died in a car accident.” He looks a little disappointed at that, as if his father should have picked a more honorable way to die. “I bested Solomon’s father in a challenge. I’ve raised Solomon since then; he was twelve, but I knew he was worthy. His younger brother wasn’t. Weak little bastard. When I showed him his father’s body, he cried and cried. And he joined his father one minute after. Solomon didn’t even blink when his brother died. Franklin men don’t cry.”

  “Who killed Robert, then?” I ask. “And why?”

  His face twists, then smooths again. “Most likely someone hired by either Troy, or Benedict, who issued the challenge. They’re brothers. Relations of ours from a branch of the family that split off from us in the 1890s. After they told me to step down or face them in the forest, Solomon and Paxton threw their hats into the ring.” He says that with pride. “And now there’s you, and there would have been Robert if he’d been smart and stayed on the estate. The other men in the family, those who don’t have the physical prowess, chose not to challenge. There are nineteen men in the family who could qualify, altogether. You make twenty.”

  Troy and Benedict. I’ll have to dig up everything I can on them. “They don’t live here?”

  He shakes his head. “No, they live on their own estate a few hours from us, called The Promised Land. They’ve got something of a similar setup. Large property, their l
and is isolated, they follow the charter, and we all partake of hunts together. We visit on occasion and enjoy punishing their Sinners, and they visit us here. They claim their women a little differently, but still within the charter rules. We take turns—sometimes on their land, sometimes on ours.”

  A little thrill shivers through my body at the thought of a hunt.

  He runs his fingers reverently over the rough wooden bed frame. “Nobody from that branch of the family has been Patriarch in the last sixty years. I knew their challenge was coming, though. Troy and Benedict have been training for this their whole lives, waiting until they were sure they could beat me.”

  “Why didn’t you just have them killed before they got the chance?”

  He looks mortally offended at that, dropping his hand from the bed frame. “Are you calling me a coward? We don’t kill each other outside a challenge. There are rules.”

  “Such as?”

  He begins reciting. “Once the challenge has been declared, every challenger has the right to kill any of the other challengers as long as they are outside their home estate, and every male challenger who is last standing at the end of that time meets in the woods, wearing only jeans and sandals, all armed with the same type of knife. Whoever emerges alive is the new Patriarch. None of us will have been in that section of the woods before. It’s walled off and guarded. That way we go in without any advantage.”

  I arch an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware of the challenge, but they tried to kill me.”

  At that, he looks a little discomfited. “I believe Robert told them you had thrown your hat into the ring. That was wrong of him. If you wish to withdraw, I can formally notify the other contenders that your name was entered in error.”

  “Hell no.” I grin fiercely. This challenge sounds more fun than an all-day pass to an amusement park. Again, I see that light of approval shining in his eyes.