The Shadow and the Rose

by Amanda DeWees

  Chapter 18

  Joy decided to take a different approach toward the problem and began researching Melisande. It wouldn’t hurt to have an idea of what her rival was capable of, and it might be useful for the Ash Grove guardians as well.

  According to Gail, the tip about Melisande’s use of herbs was inconclusive. The council had purchased some of her skin-care products to test (Joy got a kick out of imagining the dignified Dr. Fellowes in a mud face mask), but they couldn’t find any supranormal qualities. They agreed that the unguent she had used on Tanner sounded like witchcraft, but with only hearsay to go on they couldn’t be sure. Now, if Joy only had a sample of the ointment…

  Of course she didn’t. With that avenue closed at least for the present, she would see what she could find out from public records.

  Predictably, Melisande’s age was a mystery; less predictably, so were her origins. She seemed to have sprung full-fledged onto the scene in the mid-1970s. She moved around a lot—she owned property in many different places, it seemed, and that jibed with what Tanner had said. In her earlier years in the public eye she had been noted for her many husbands and lovers; she never seemed to stay with one man for very long. And in the last fifteen or twenty years, it seemed, she had begun mentoring young talents and steering their careers, which usually meant carrying on a romance with them as well. Almost all were young men, although Tanner seemed to have been among the youngest. Joy clicked through to some of their websites to see how they had fared.

  To her amazement, none of these protégés seemed to be working anymore. The websites she found were fan sites, not maintained by the models or actors themselves. She sought articles about them in Wikipedia and actor databases, but they offered precious little information, none of it recent. It looked as if, after a few years of exposure under Melisande’s wing, they dropped out of the industry and out of sight entirely. Tired of the life? she wondered. Or was it more like a witness protection program, in which they dropped off the grid to avoid being tracked by their former mentor?

  There was only one exception that she could find among Melisande’s former protégés. About five years before Melisande took Tanner under her scaled and leathery wing, a rising young model named Gareth had abruptly left New York and vanished from the modeling scene.

  Joy followed a wild hunch. When she was a kid, her father had spoken of one of his more talented students dropping out of Ash Grove to pursue a career in modeling. His name was Gareth, and it might have been around that time. Joy had remembered the incident because it was the first time it had occurred to her that some people actually modeled for a living; up until then she had assumed that the people in catalogs were killing time between acting jobs. What was the student’s last name? It had been alliterative, she knew. Gareth Godwin, that was it. Was there any chance he had come back to North Carolina to retire from the business?

  There was. An address in the name of Godwin was less than ten miles away.

  But Gail, her usual ride, wasn’t available. “I’m sorry, Joy, but I can’t get away until tomorrow. If you can wait until then—”

  “Please, Gail! I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. What about Jim? Could he take me?” She used her most beseeching eyes, and Gail gave in.

  “Here’s the key; you go ahead and take the car. Just be really careful, okay? And don’t stay out too long. I don’t like to think of you driving on those mountain roads after dark.”

  Joy promised to be careful and to make the trip as short as she possibly could. Since she didn’t know if Gareth Godwin would be able to tell her anything helpful, it wasn’t a difficult promise to make.

  With the aid of the GPS, she made good time to the address she had found online. Godwin’s house turned out to be a small cabin, probably originally a vacation home, since it was smaller than those most full-time residents chose. Well kept, but modest; an American flag was mounted next to the door, and the sound of a lawn mower greeted her as she drove up. A Honda Civic seven or eight years old was in the driveway.

  The lawn mower and the man who was steering it came in view from around the side of the house. He was handsome in a Mediterranean way: olive skin, dark eyes and hair. He looked to be in his late twenties. About right.

  She got out of the car. “Gareth Godwin?” she queried, suddenly wondering how he would react to the appearance of a total stranger, let alone to being quizzed about his past. “My name is Joy Sumner, and I’m a student at—”

  “He’s inside,” said the man, pulling off his baseball cap and wiping his forehead. “Let yourself in if you want; it can take him a while to get to the door.”

  Taken aback, Joy made her way up the neat gravel walk to the cabin’s porch, where she found that the front door stood open behind the screen door. She knocked briefly and let herself in, looking around. Sparsely furnished, the cabin’s living room was dominated by a widescreen TV, presently playing something loud and Japanese, and a big sofa across from it. In one corner stood a walker with an oxygen tank attached.

  On the sofa sat a man who was old enough to be the grandfather of the man outside. His hair was sparse and graying, and his face and frame were—ravaged was the only word Joy could think of. He was gaunt, his cheeks and eyes sunken in his face, and his skin tone was so ashen that Joy wondered if he was ill. He gave her a dull, uninterested look and thumbed the mute button on the remote control.

  “Can I help you?” he said tiredly. “If you’re selling something for your school, you should talk to my brother—”

  “Are you Gareth Godwin?” she asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  She must have connected the wrong dots. There was no way this man had been an up-and-coming professional model just a few years ago. “I think I made a mistake. I was looking for the Gareth who was mentored by Melisande, the supermodel. Do you have any idea—” But there she stopped, because the man’s eyes were widening in such an expression of horror that she forgot what she was saying.

  “For God’s sake, stay away from her,” he whispered. “Is she back again? You’ve got to keep away from her.”

  Joy set her handbag on the coffee table and carefully sat down on the edge of the sofa. “What do you mean? What did she do to you?”

  He gave a hoarse bark of a laugh and indicated himself with a gesture. “This. She did this to me. You saw my brother outside?”

  She said doubtfully, “The guy mowing the lawn?”

  “Yes, he’s my brother. My older brother, actually. That’s what I looked like until Melisande got through with me. She left me like this.” He let the words sink in. “So now she’s on the hunt again? Who’s the unfortunate victim?”

  She was getting scared now. “If she does have a victim, it’s a young man who I—well, he’s very important to me. He’s been her protégé for almost two years now.”

  With an effort that made the ropy muscles in his arms strain, Gareth pushed off the sofa and made his way into the adjoining kitchen. “I think I need a drink for this conversation. You look a little young for bourbon; can I offer you a ginger ale?” She accepted and sat jiggling her leg impatiently until he returned with two glasses. He moved like an old man, slowly and cautiously, as if he was on the edge of exhaustion. What had Melisande done to him that had made him like this?

  He eased himself back onto the sofa, looking spent. “Does Melisande know about your connection to this—?”

  “Tanner,” she said. “I mean, Tristan. Yes, I’m afraid she does.”

  He took a swallow of his drink. “That’s bad. She’s a dangerous enemy. I mean, look what she does to the people she likes.” It was an attempt at a joke, but neither of them laughed.

  “What does she do, exactly?” ventured Joy. “I’ve seen her force of personality, the way she can exert her will over some people. But other than that, all I have is some theories.”

  “It’s simple,” he said. “What she does is, she absorbs your life. Not in the sense of your lifestyle—she actually sucks away your l
ife force. Your energy, your vitality. She drains out of others the nourishment to stay young and beautiful. I think that’s why she only surrounds herself with physically perfect people: she doesn’t want any homely energies sullying her perfection.”

  “When you say she drains the life out of you… do you mean she drinks your blood?” Could Melisande, in fact, be a vampire? Perhaps it wasn’t as ridiculous an idea as she had thought.

  But Gareth was shaking his head. “No, she’s not like that. I don’t think she’s like anything; I think she’s unique. Thank god.” He picked up his glass again, and the unsteadiness of his hand made the ice cubes clatter. He took another slug. “I don’t usually drink, by the way. Nothing harder than energy supplements, anyway. I’m still trying to recover from her.” After a moment he went on, slowly: “Some of it is just being close to her. In the same room as her. She draws life from that proximity. Especially if you’re susceptible to her.”

  “Romantically, you mean?”

  “Yes, but also hero worship, or celebrity worship, or whatever you want to call it. She thrives on that. But the strongest source of her vitality is a lover.”

  Joy felt a chill flood through her. “You mean, when she sleeps with someone, she—feeds off him?” He bowed his head in confirmation. “So that’s why she’s had a series of partners and protégés. She must use them up, like batteries. Is that why she keeps replacing them?”

  Gareth looked at her steadily. “Yes, I believe so. I believe that she draws everything she can out of her favorite, and then discards him. You’re looking at one of those discards.”

  “And the others?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know.

  He leaned back into the sofa, closing his eyes as if keeping them open took too much effort. He looked exhausted; she could see the dark circles under his eyes, the fragile crepey skin on the backs of his hands.

  “Dead, probably,” he said.

  In the silence that followed she could hear the growl of the lawn mower coming from outdoors.

  “Literally?” she breathed.

  “Oh yes. I only escaped with my life because at the last minute some instinct for self-preservation—or maybe just self—came to my rescue. In the end I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Go through with what?”

  At that he hesitated. “I’m not sure I should tell you. If you’ve managed to find me, she could track me down, and I’ll tell you honestly I’m terrified to think what she’d do to me if she knew I was giving away her secrets.”

  She wanted to shake him. To be so close to the truth and have him clam up was something she couldn’t take. “I’m afraid she poses a threat to a lot more people now,” she said. “She’s been working to create a kind of symbiotic relationship with Ash Grove School, and now I think I understand why. The more students who come to admire and worship her, the more energies she’ll have to draw from. I would think that would make her terribly powerful.” He didn’t contradict her, and she rushed on, pleading. “Don’t you see, the more I know about her, the better chance I have of stopping her. We can’t let her endanger hundreds of kids. You can’t let her do to them what she did to you.”

  He raised a hand feebly to quiet her. “You’re right, of course. I’ll tell you what I can. But some of it’s kind of indistinct.”

  She sat up even straighter to show she was paying attention.

  There was a ceremony, he said. The final, ultimate sacrifice. When she decided to take a new favorite, the outgoing one would submit to complete consumption.

  “Complete what?” said Joy, thinking she’d misheard.

  “Consumption. I’m just going by what I was able to put together, but I think that when she performs certain rites—maybe the location or the position of the stars or god knows what has something to do with it—she can quite simply lay her hands on a man and draw out his substance until all that’s left of him is a shriveled rag that blows away in the wind.

  “I can see that you’re skeptical, and I don’t blame you. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never felt that pull from her, that enervation. It’s a little like being doped. But that might be her herbal potions as well.”

  So her knowledge of herbs extended beyond the unguent she had used on Tanner. Joy remembered how lethargic he had been at the open house, and how hazy had been his memory of that night. Maybe it wasn’t just Melisande sapping his energy; she might also have been using herbs to keep her victim docile. We’ve got sex and drugs, thought Joy a little wildly; all we need now is the rock ’n’ roll.

  “So how did you end up this way? Did she try to… to finish you off and not succeed?”

  “As I said, I turned against her at the last moment.” He shut his eyes as he thought back. “I can’t remember where this was. I was a bit vague at the time; one of the side effects. I remember being taken outdoors. Her entourage—the closest circle of her most devoted followers—was there. It was dark, and cold; I remember I was shivering. And when Melisande took my face in her hands and told me I was about to become part of her—I said no.”

  He shuddered at the memory.

  “She had a knife of some kind. And what she did next I think was sheer malice. If my refusal meant that she couldn’t get what she needed from me, she made sure that I wouldn’t be any good to myself, either.”

  Joy waited in apprehension.

  “She whispered something I didn’t understand, and pricked her finger and mine, and held them together so the blood mingled. Then she smeared some of the mixed blood on the forehead of one of her followers, then another. And they rushed at me. I remember thinking that they were going to eat me alive. Actually tear into me like wolves. It was almost as bad, though. They grabbed at me, my arms, my legs, my hands, whatever they could reach. And wherever they touched me, it felt like parts of me were being dragged out through my skin, like I was being pulled inside out.” He raised a trembling hand to cover his eyes. “I never imagined anything could hurt so much. And when they were finished, this is what was left.”

  She couldn’t find anything to say. His breath rasped in and out for a few minutes, as if the recollection had winded him. Presently he added, “It was days before I was found. Greg—that’s my brother—he said that some hikers discovered me. I wasn’t able to move under my own power; I had to have physical therapy before I could even walk again.”

  “So those are the options,” said Joy at last. “He allows himself to be consumed, or he has half a century of life and health stolen from him.” After a moment she added, “I wonder how she determines when she’s going to perform the ceremony. I can’t imagine it’s random.”

  Gareth briefly lifted a hand and let it fall again. Recounting his story had clearly depleted his already minimal reserves. “I wish I could tell you. But that’s all I know.”

  “Mr. Godwin, I just have to ask: if you’re that frightened of her, why did you come back here?”

  “I had nowhere else to go,” he said simply. “My brother can’t relocate because of his job, and I can’t manage on my own yet. But I’ve tried to keep a low profile, and we plan to move as soon as we can.”

  “Thank you so much for telling me all this,” she said, rising. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I know it must have been horrible to relive all this, but you may have helped save a lot of lives.”

  “I hope so.” He gave her a faint smile. “You’ll understand if I don’t walk you to your car. But before you go, just to give you an idea—you see that photo album on the kitchen table there? Open it and look at the first photo.”

  The picture was a print from a digital source, with the date time-stamped in one corner. It was dated less than four years ago. The portrait was a candid shot of a handsome young man with olive skin, dark hair, and laughing brown eyes. He was dressed only in swim trunks, and his body was strong and well muscled. He was standing on a diving board, about to plunge into a swimming pool.

  “You?” she asked. It didn’t seem possible.

  �
�Look at the birthmark,” he said.

  The right hand of the man in the picture had a strange port-wine mark between his index finger and thumb. Gareth held up his unsteady hand. Although it was faded as if with age, Joy saw the same mark on his hand.

  On the drive back to campus Joy had a difficult time concentrating on the road, she was so busy with her thoughts. It looked dire for Tanner—for all of Melisande’s future consorts as well. But there was the possibility that Gareth’s memory was not to be trusted. If Melisande doped him with her special herb concoctions, he might well have imagined the strange ritual; his premature aging could be the result of a disease, or he might not even be the real Gareth Godwin. The birthmark could have been faked—although why anyone would fake such a thing, she had no idea.

  But she couldn’t afford to assume his story wasn’t true. She had to get word to Tanner—and she had to report to the Ash Grove guardians that Melisande was a threat.