His mouth was not human.
Now, daughter. Eleanor slid to the floor, trembling. Mallory crouched before her, his face nearing hers. He smelled angry, his wolf close to the surface, and something in her responded to that.
“You will never see your mother. You will never know. You will never have any of the answers. We are not going.”
Eleanor’s hand shot out, curling hard into the sheet wrapping Mallory. She held on so firmly, she heard the fabric begin to tear, but then realized it wasn’t the strain on the fabric so much as the gleaming black claw that tore it. The claw from her own hand.
“Virgil, I cannot do this.”
“I won’t let him carry you away the way he did your mother.”
Her entire body spasmed, becoming a thing she could not control. Her hand fell away from Mallory’s sheet, but he caught her around the wrist. She saw the terrible understanding crossing his face and the way relief and worry both flooded him.
“Forgive me, Eleanor,” he whispered.
As many times as he had asked for forgiveness, she couldn’t give it now, even as she understood what he had done. He pushed her to this point to see if she was like him.
Her rage was all-consuming, closing over her the way a canvas sack had once closed over her head. The memory of the panic she had known then, coupled with the fresh anger over Mallory’s ceaseless denials, swept her away.
She wondered if this was how it had been for Mallory the first time he changed. The loss of control, the realization that he could do nothing but allow it to come. A distant part of her mind thought she might eventually learn to control it, harness and use it, but for now, she could only exhale as the fury subsumed her. Her body came apart the way she had seen Mallory’s do, reassembling itself into something wholly new.
The pain was a blinding fire. She screamed and was struck by the way her voice changed mid-shriek, from something human to something deeply primitive. She had heard wolves before, their howls carrying across night mountains, but this was not the cry of a wolf. This was something different, yet something familiar.
Jackal, she thought, as her bones broke apart and began to refashion themselves. She would have slumped flat to the floor had it not been for Mallory’s hold on her. The heat of him still soaked through her, providing a focal point through the horror of her transforming body. She clung to that shred of warmth the way she might his hand, though now she had no hands with which to hold him.
She tried to speak his name, but couldn’t do that either. Her jaw snapped and reshaped itself, and then the entire world vanished as the pain at last consumed her. The room vanished in a flood of black.
His mouth was not human.
The thought woke her, as did the scent of the man beside her. Her nose twitched, ears perking forward when he spoke.
“God, Eleanor. Forgive me for this.”
She knew in some distant part of her mind that she was Eleanor, but could not say whether she forgave this man or not. What was forgiveness? In this moment, she knew only a handful of things: she was hungry, she was tired, and this man smelled like her mate.
“We had to know,” he said. “Forgive me.”
She rolled out of his lap, stumbling as she came to her feet on the rug. That there were too many feet was her first thought; she stood there and trembled, trying to find a thought beyond her hunger and exhaustion. She could not remember being inside, did not understand the debris scattering the floor, but she somehow knew the man. She tried to put a name to him, but could come up with nothing other than Mate.
Her first steps were halting, experimental as she tried to put four legs into some manner of order. Soon enough, she pranced a steady circle around Mate. Coordination was difficult, and so was attention, because a hundred new scents clamored for her notice. Nothing smelled the same but Mate.
She bowed her head and knocked it into Mate’s shoulder. He laughed, a pleasant sound that made her back-step in surprise.
He reached for her slowly, tentative. She allowed him to touch her, to smooth his fingers over nose and into the fur behind her ears. Her eyes closed by half; exhaustion began to win out over hunger.
She made another two circles around him before she angled herself into his lap and flopped in an undignified heap. Something jangled loose around her neck, but she didn’t look to see what. Tired, hungry, safe: these were what she knew. She stretched, yawned, and pressed herself into Mate’s belly. His hands settled upon her, one at her side, the other at her neck. She slept.
The change woke her. As her body had once broken apart, it came apart again, to order itself into what it had been before. Bone and muscle shifted, hands and feet emerging from paws; the fur withdrew.
In the end, Eleanor lay naked in Mallory’s lap, the rings still gleaming from their chain around her neck. He tugged the blanket from the bed, and this was distantly familiar to Eleanor, even if she couldn’t form a full thought in the moment.
“Forgive me.”
The words were a whisper against her temple; his lips brushed over her heated skin, and she closed her eyes. She was aware that he left and returned, but the sounds of him moving about were hushed. She was aware of the stroke of wet linen across her skin, and then of being placed back in bed. The bed that had been his as a child, where he had curled up after such transformations.
“Virgil.” Her voice was ragged from screaming, his name broken on her tongue.
“I’m here. Sleep now.”
Eleanor slept. She sank into the reassuring circle of Mallory’s arms and slept, for once without dreaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“This wasn’t the first Mallory vineyard here in the valley,” Jean Mallory said to Eleanor the following morning as they walked through the vines. Virgil followed them at a slight distance, silently delighting in the sight of Eleanor with his father.
As Virgil Mallory was not well acquainted with fainting women, neither was he well acquainted with anything that had happened so far this day. Chief among them, waking to find Miss Eleanor Folley tangled in his arms, naked but for the rings she wore, the way she had been for most of the night.
“The first vineyard,” his father continued, “was near Nantes, farther toward the coast.” His gesture encompassed the west. “But the winter of 1709 was so terrible, the entire coast froze! Can you imagine? Every vineyard died. We Mallorys moved inland and have been here ever since.”
Virgil tried to follow the thread of the conversation (also a thing with which he wasn’t yet acquainted—to walk and talk with his father again), but his mind kept drifting to the night before. It was only right that they had been in the room that had been his own with its familiar balcony and the old mirror still in the corner. He had looked at the reflected image there a long while, he and Eleanor tangled in his old bed, before looking to her once more. Her bare shoulder had peeked above the blanket, its curve smudged with the beginnings of a bruise from the transformations.
“You have done more than well here,” Eleanor said.
Virgil could hear the rough texture in her voice. He knew what that was, to have one’s throat not entirely the same afterward. His eyes slid downward to the curve of tweed along her hip. Bare hip last night, he remembered, and tried to rein the memory in.
“Giada loves it here, and I wouldn’t move us for all the world,” Jean said, then gestured to the line of smoke that rose from further out in the vineyard. “I need to help Adrian finish this pruning work, before winter truly sets in.” He glanced backward, Virgil lifting his eyes from Eleanor’s trousers just in time to nod at his father. “Be sure she sees the garden.”
“Oh, indeed,” Virgil said.
He offered Eleanor a nod as his father moved deeper into the vines, tracing a path toward Adrian. Virgil stole a look at the hilltop where Auberon paced; somewhere, Gin also roamed.
I am not letting you go. Despite the lies he had spoken to Eleanor last night, those words were true. He would not let her step alone into the void,
into whatever came when they gained the final ring. He stepped toward her now and offered her an arm. She hooked her own through it, holding to him as he guided her toward the garden.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. They hadn’t had much time to talk this morning, for the children were early risers and Margarite had delighted in running up and down the hallways, singing to wake everyone. Virgil had done well to escape Eleanor’s room unseen, or so he prayed.
Eleanor surprised him with a soft laugh. Her hand tightened on his arm, speaking volumes. “How were you after your first transformation?”
He grunted. His question was foolish. “A wreck.”
It was only the sound of their booted feet over the paths that interrupted the silence and the occasional birdcall from the trees above. Then, “Eleanor, I must apologize for last night.”
Eleanor’s hand slid to the crook of his elbow. “No, Virgil. I think—” She walked a few steps in silence before saying, “I’m glad you were there. I’m glad that you—”
“I thought I might control it. I remember wishing I’d had someone with me, someone to sit with me and carry me through, and it was entirely selfish.” He looked down at her, to find her attention on him. “If it were true, I didn’t want you going through it alone. If it weren’t, we would have a pointless argument, in which I said little that was true.” He looked back to the path as they continued toward the walled garden in the distance. “The sight of Anubis, with his hands on you— The idea that he might simply take you was maddening.”
Eleanor’s cheek pressed into his arm. “I know.”
Virgil’s free hand came to cover hers. “I remember wanting a teacher so desperately, someone who knew what the hell was happening to me, and yet, I don’t think I would have listened. I thought I understood everything. Eleanor, I’m sorry—I wish I understood more.”
“We know more than we did yesterday,” she said, her voice wavering more than a little.
Virgil felt the shaking in her hand and halted their progress to the garden. “Eleanor, of everything I said last night, one thing is true: I am not letting you go. You won’t face this alone—and if we are able, you will see your mother. You will know. I only needed something to terrify you.”
Eleanor freed her gloved hand to touch Virgil’s cheek, and it felt like an absolution of sorts. It was more than he believed he deserved, the way it washed calm through him.
“I am terrified, Virgil. Of so many things.” Her laugh broke apart into a sob. “One step at a time, we’ll work this out. Together.” She wiped her cheeks dry, nodding to the garden walls. “Step one, the garden.”
Going slowly would have its merits, Virgil knew, and he tucked Eleanor’s hand back into the bend of his elbow as they walked on. The garden was a spacious place, one Virgil remembered running through when he’d come home naked and bruised. The ancient elm still stood guard in the center of the space, spreading its thick branches out and upward. His mother kept the place orderly, no doubt easier now that she didn’t have children digging holes to bury pirate loot among her flowers as he and Imogene certainly had.
And yet he was startled to see that someone had been digging holes, for he recognized the signs of it even after all this time. As he took Eleanor around the mostly fallow flowerbeds, he spied countless disruptions to the soil, divots and mounds and small footprints trailing through all.
“Do you have rodents out here?” Eleanor asked.
“Only if you can call them Margarite, Jean, and Daniel . . . ” Rabbits never ventured into the garden, with its gates and walls, and they certainly didn’t dig holes and fill them back in. “As children, Imogene and I often played at digging here, though—no one saw us, not even Adrian. He would come to the garden, thinking himself alone until we jumped out at him.”
A private garden, where one might dig holes and hide loot, with no one else the wiser.
“At least you don’t mean for us to dig up the entire vineyard,” she said, amused.
Virgil looked at the ground before them with a new interest. Had Caroline been here? “We might have to overturn the entire garden, even so . . . ” No one place in the garden screamed that it was more special than another; the night winds had stripped the trees nearly bare, bushes and flowers too, though low-growing evergreen dotted the paths here and there.
“These marks look fresh, though, Virgil—look at the dirt there.”
The flowerbed Eleanor indicated showed signs of being disturbed. The dirt was darker than that which surrounded it, more recently overturned. “Imogene and I would never remember where we buried things,” he murmured.
Footsteps crunching up the path caused Virgil to fall silent. He took a step backward and drew Eleanor beside him against the wall, holding his breath as Margarite stomped into the garden. She wore a frilly pink dress covered with a long, woolen jacket; her boots were bright yellow, and she carried a small spade and box.
“Margarite Mallory,” Virgil said. Had they found their wee digger after all?
The little girl cried out at Virgil’s voice and stopped in her tracks. She turned in place, ever so slowly, to stare at Virgil and Eleanor with a look of sheer terror. Her eyes were wide and round like saucers, her mouth gaping open. Virgil frowned at the box; it was empty.
“Uncle,” Margarite said and tried to make a small curtsey. Her fingers, however, were turning white around the handle of her spade.
“Niece,” Virgil said and bowed to her, trying not to find amusement in her outright dread. What was she about? “What do you have there?”
“Oh, Uncle—you cannot tell! You cannot!” With that, the child burst into tears.
“First your mother, now your niece,” Eleanor murmured before she moved toward the young girl.
Margarite’s breath hitched at the sight of Eleanor, and the girl allowed Eleanor to lead her to a nearby bench. Virgil trailed after them.
“He’s simply terrible, isn’t he?” Eleanor asked.
Margarite sniffled, drawing her wrist across her nose and with it a smudge of dirt. “M-maman . . . she told me not to dig in Grandmother’s flowers, b-but there are no flowers!” She pointed quite firmly to the empty flowerbeds with her spade as Virgil joined them.
Virgil settled on the opposite side of Margarite, picturing the girl out here digging. Was she digging things up or burying them? Virgil wanted to rush ahead with his questions, alarmed at how quickly the agent within him came to the fore even when family—a child at that!—was involved, but when Margarite moved closer to Eleanor, Virgil told himself to bide his time. Perhaps Eleanor would have better success.
“I like t-to dig,” Margarite continued, her crying beginning to cease as she found an unknown audience in Eleanor, someone to whom she might appeal. She clutched her spade close, as if refusing to be parted from it no matter what Virgil or Eleanor said.
“I like to dig, too,” Eleanor said. “My father taught me how.”
Margarite’s eyes widened at this, and she looked at Eleanor with a renewed interest. “I don’t know who taught me—maybe me! One day, I found a bracelet in the garden dirt and the next, I thought I could dig to see what else there might be, but when Maman found me, she shouted.” Margarite turned toward Virgil now, abandoning her spade to clasp his hands. “She said that I ruined Grandmother’s garden, and I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.”
Virgil tried not to be swayed by those small hands clutching his own. “I shall tell you a secret if you tell me one,” he said, wondering if it was possible that this little garden archaeologist had unearthed what Caroline had possibly hidden here.
“Secrets?” Margarite whispered. This clearly made the entire conversation much more interesting to the girl. Virgil could hardly blame her, after all. It seemed a Mallory curse, the need to know more.
Virgil dropped his smile. “Where do you keep your treasures?”
Margarite shifted on the bench again, moving away from Virgil and abruptly into Eleanor’s lap. The little girl curled ther
e, as if afraid of Virgil’s question.
“I know,” Eleanor said, “that sometimes when we find treasures, it’s difficult to share them with others. In some cases, though, it’s good to share. Have you been to museums, mademoiselle?”
Margarite sat a little straighter in Eleanor’s lap. “Oh, yes—people dug those things up?” Her expression changed, moving from wariness over Virgil’s question to interest in Eleanor’s revelation.
“Some of them,” Eleanor said, and Margarite clapped.
“Uncle Virgil, do you want to put my treasures in a museum?”
Virgil crossed his legs as he considered her question. He wished the rings could be preserved, as he was certain Eleanor did, but given human nature, he knew such a thing would not be possible. He would be truthful with the child.
“Unfortunately not. Miss Folley and I are looking for an item, love, and we believe we have traced it to this very garden. It’s quite possible that you have already encountered it on your many excavations.”
Margarite squirmed a little. “And you said there would be a secret for my secret?”
Virgil grinned, unable to contain his delight over his niece’s cleverness. “Indeed! A secret involving . . . ” He looked around, pretending to be sure they were alone. “Your aunt.”
Margarite gasped.
Virgil looked to Eleanor, who was smiling now, an echo of the grin that remained adhered to his own face. The sight of Eleanor with Margarite on her lap gave him pause, though, and made him question if Eleanor had ever wanted a family of her own. He wondered if such a thing were even possible, considering their natures.
“I keep my treasures in a box, in my room,” Margarite said, unable to contain herself a minute longer. She squirmed out of Eleanor’s lap and onto her knees on the bench. She knelt beside Virgil, squeezing his arm. “Surrender your secret.”
Virgil laughed. “Very well. Your Aunt Imogene used to dig in this very garden, making twice as many holes as you have made.”
Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure Page 34
