by P. J. Fox
Some time later, Tristan had learned—and once again had also experienced—that the demon’s bloodlust had a strong effect on his, or her, personality. To the point, really, of warping it beyond recognition. His host had been, after a fashion, a gentle man. He’d valued kindness, and virtue, and beauty, things other men had dismissed as feminine. He’d been no stranger to death and had killed, but never for the sheer joy of it. Always for a purpose. And while Tristan retained his host’s memories, and some understanding of his values, these things were like flies trapped in amber: perfectly preserved, museum pieces. Trapped in time. Dead. He could view them, study them, but not truly access them.
His transformation had robbed Tristan, that portion of his host that lived on, of his humanity. Or, rather, that bundle of traits collectively referred to as humanity: empathy, compassion, conscience. Love. Things that, in Tristan’s experience, actual human beings never displayed but that were nonetheless touted as representative of their kind.
But demons, meanwhile, were creatures of instinct. Instinct, and reason. They planned and plotted to attain their goals, often wrapping themselves in the convenient cloak of others’ expectations. People saw, in short, what they wanted to see. Tristan could appear romantic, or enraged. Or cold. Depending on what, at the moment, suited his purposes. But inside he was a void. For all demons, whatever they chose to show the world, were vicious, violent, and sadistic. If anything truly excited him, it was pain.
As Brenna had learned, to her sorrow, there was no such thing as resurrecting the dead. The pleas that might have worked on Tristan, before, now fell on deaf ears. Her fear, and her self loathing, and eventually her despair meant nothing to him.
Some eastern sects taught of two souls: the earthly soul and the true soul. And in the end, his desire to understand this concept had been what motivated his decision to go east. He, too, was an earthly soul—if a demon had a soul at all. He needed to know what he was.
And he needed to forget what he’d done to Brenna.
And so, when he made his decision to leave Darkling Reach, he’d gone east.
East, to where the answers were. And where he’d lost himself in an orgy of sensation. During his time there, he’d learned a great deal. Some of it useful, some of it not. He’d learned all about the pleasures of the flesh, taken with both men and women. He’d drugged himself into a stupor, lounging on perfumed cushions as he watched the harem dancers through half-closed lids. But he’d also studied, during the early morning hours when all households were asleep. His hosts all owned great libraries, and it was for this reason that Tristan had come to visit them. Tristan, potentate in his own right from the west, had been welcomed as an equal. In some households, one in particular, he’d lingered a long time.
One of the things he’d learned, reading, was that after decades—sometimes even longer—some demons had regained something of a moral compass. It was possible, the author of the book asserted, if the demon truly wanted to. Tristan had wondered, though, if this assertion wasn’t the fanciful creation of some poor mortal in love. A woman, perhaps—the author wrote under a pseudonym—in love with a demon. A lover who’d needed to believe that she could be loved, as she herself loved.
Tristan himself had professed words of love, when doing so suited his purposes. Or when the act amused him. He’d done it, too, to lure his victims out into the night. A tryst, a disappearance…such unfortunate things happened all the time. And still, the idea intrigued him.
Could he love?
Did he want to?
He was adept at calling up the souls—or remembered souls—of the dead because he, too, was a revenant. He was nothing. A specter. He liked using honeyed words to draw his victims out; he liked to see the terror and surprise on their faces, in those last moments. The hopelessness. As Brenna had been hopeless.
Brenna.
EIGHTEEN
The witching hour. The hour of the wolf. The hour when most men crossed over to the plane beyond, the hour when sleep was deepest.
There were different names for it but all men knew it, if only in their bones.
The hour of death.
In the North, it was called the hour of the wolf because it was said to be when the dire wolf, bane of the woods, lurked outside of people’s doors. Waiting patiently for them to stumble forth, their sleep-filled eyes half closed, to care for their livestock. A farmer’s day began early, before dawn; the beast knew this. And it waited. Heavier in build than a southern wolf, the dire wolf—or fearsome dog in the old tongue—was as tall as a pony and weighed more than most grown men. A bitch weighed twelve stone, her mate a good deal more. When, as a young man, Tristan had gone in pursuit of a dire wolf that was menacing lakeside cottagers, he and the beast had been nigh on evenly matched. Tristan was a tall man, over eighteen hands, and his sixteen stone was pure muscle. Still, he’d almost died.
With its unflagging patience, it wasn’t surprising that the dire wolf had become the symbol of the North. Death, like the dire wolf, lurked everywhere. And could afford to wait. Death was a fact of life in the North, its fixed eye far from no man. Animals killed, as did other men. As did snow. And cold. And lack of food.
The hour of the wolf was the hour between night and dawn. That strange nether time when a man’s system was at its lowest ebb. The church taught that it was the time when creatures such as witches, demons and ghosts appeared and were at their most powerful. Women caught out late at night without what, in the church’s jaundiced eye, was a legitimate reason could be tried for witchcraft. In the North, where the old gods held sway, the third hour after midnight was significant because of its correlation to the three fold law and the three fold goddess. Black magic was at its most effective.
The night that he took Brenna, Tristan waited outside her window like the wolf.
Not her window. The window of the room that she’d been given, by one of her would-be husband’s allies. Tristan had been right: they’d gone to Enzie. The western moors were uncivilized by any standards; its people painted themselves with woad and drank the blood of their dead, just like the northern tribesmen. In the coming years, long after Brenna was dust in her grave and long before Isla had been born, these tribesmen would retreat and join their brothers in the North. The West would lose its wild charm, becoming one more chattel of the Southron king. But now, tonight, the West was still bright and new and fearsome. Its days of decline were far in the future, only the faintest promise of their coming evident in Enzie’s struggles—with the capital, and to gain supplies and sell its goods. Struggles that had been nonexistent a decade before.
Enzie would fail. This kingdom would fail. Tristan saw it clearly. They’d forged a dynasty that couldn’t hold together. The king was an inbred fool; his children would be inbred fools. Trade concessions were granted to houses that hadn’t earned them and were too stupid to use them wisely. Sheriffs took bribes and cheated their overlords; too many good and capable men, men who could have stemmed the tide of disaster, lay rotting in the fields.
Yet Brenna, hairbrush in hand and a smile on her face, saw nothing. He couldn’t hear her through the glass, but her lips were pursed as though she were humming. She’d ever been musical, Brenna. And she looked warm, and self-satisfied. She glowed from within.
She had every right to be happy. She’d just finished her rehearsal dinner, a feast that had dragged late into the night, and on the morrow she’d be married. To a handsome and strapping, if indifferent man. A man with a good many funds at his disposal, who’d lavish them on her. And he’d look, in his fine raiment, much like the proverbial Prince Charming from the fairytales.
Brenna, too, would be beautiful in a gown she’d sewn for the occasion. Tristan wondered if it would be a new gown, or the same one she’d planned to wear for their own wedding. That gown had been a lovely thing, all gossamer silks and seed pearls. He’d thought, then, that Brenna was a delicate flower of a girl. Too delicate for the functional garb of other women, or for tramping around in the
mud. He knew now that she was merely too priggish. She was no princess to toss and turn for lying on a pea but a rigid and grasping woman who hated to sully herself with the trappings of an inferior world. She thought herself above such things as dirt.
And for a long time, she had been.
Would still be, if she’d accepted him.
But now, now she’d pay.
Tristan had relished this moment, in his mind, anticipating it as a human might a fine wine that he’d put aside for a special occasion. A marriage, or the birth of a first son. Ever since those first moments of realization in the glade, his plan had been forming. A plan he hadn’t realized he had formed until it popped unbidden into his head.
His tongue darted out, snakelike, over very white teeth.
The witching hour. The time when a man’s system as at its lowest ebb. Strange, then, that it should also be the time when Tristan was most alert. And others, too, he was sure. How many mortal men, he wondered, had lain awake at this time when nature dictated that they should be sleeping? As Tristan had done himself, before?
He couldn’t count the times he’d stared out at the endless night, anxieties twisting in his gut. He’d been held in a pall of sorts, unable to truly waken and escape from his terrors but at the same time unable to find restful sleep. His dreams, if he could truly call them that, had been a repeating loop of forgotten responsibilities and terrible surprises. Of himself, unable to accomplish even the simplest tasks. Of failure, and fear.
And then sometimes he’d lain awake, staring up at the canopy that covered his bed and reviewing all his past failures. One’s own faults never seemed so clear as during the witching hour, nor the list of one’s transgressions so long. We stopped checking for monsters under the bed, an old tutor of his had said once, when we realized that the monsters were us.
His lips curved into a small, thin smile. How true that was. And how convenient that, now that he’d thrown off his humanity, he no longer slept at all. The dead had no need for sleep; death was an eternal sleep. An unchanging one. Unchanging, like Tristan, the newly fledged demon crouching at the window like some forgotten gargoyle. He, at that time, knew no lust except bloodlust. His studies, his desire to know himself, would come much later and at a high cost.
But for now, all he wanted was pleasure.
And revenge.
And he thought, as he watched, that he was a monster and the night was his. And he reveled in the knowledge that he could come and go as he chose, do as he chose, and there was no one to stop him. No one who could stop him. He was a slave no more, free once and for all from the shackles of others’ whims. He’d spent eons in servitude, to one master after another. Now he was master. He, and he alone. The thought sent a rush through him that he found almost overwhelming. The closest thing he’d experience, for a long time, to joy.
Outside on the battlements, he could hear every noise. Taste the myriad flavors on every breath of wind. Owls hooting, branches groaning under the weight of the snow and, somewhere in the woods, the faint snap of branches breaking as the sap within their veins froze and swelled and burst apart. Wood smoke and peat smoke and the smell that was just cold.
The dire wolf was a specter of nightmare. It represented passion, and fear, and unholy anger. Craving. Need. The slow, creeping surety of death. The absolute loss of control. The dire wolf, unlike the man, was free: to rape, to pillage, to feed. The dire wolf contained within it all that man repressed.
And he was the dire wolf.
And it was his hour, now.
He crouched without moving. She didn’t see him, as still and silent as if he’d been another crenellation; hadn’t even glanced in his direction. And why should she? What should she expect to see, so high up, except an owl? She was on the third floor of the manor, in a tower room. Nothing faced her windows except the night. More clouds had come, promising more snow. Sometimes, these late season storms were the worst. Even in the West, which was nothing like the North. Winter here was nothing more than a mild spring by northern standards. But there was no moon, tonight, and no stars. Even if Brenna had glanced in his direction, she wouldn’t have seen a thing.
She paused, a small smile playing at the corner of her lips. She was undressing, her hands at the small of her back as she undid a lace. She had such a thin waist, and such delicate fingers. So deceptively fragile, so…innocent. He wondered what thought had occasioned that secret quirk of the lips; probably her betrothed’s riches.
Freeing herself from the bodice of her dress, she moved across the room toward her dressing table. She glanced up at the window without really seeing it. The face he’d once thought so sweet now seemed so…bland. What he’d mistaken for guilelessness was really just vapidity.
Sleep was deepest, now, for those who slept. Brenna had been up late, reveling in her success. Tristan had no doubt that the revelry still continued in the great hall; come morning, more than one guest would be found with his ass still on a bench or his face in the straw. The rushes would smell like vomit. And piss. Brenna had retired, no doubt, only to preserve her looks—and her chastity. No bride wanted to appear before her groom with pouches under her eyes like an old woman, yawning from lack of sleep.
Her wedding would be marvelous.
Too bad she wouldn’t be there to experience it.
Gaining his feet in one smooth motion, Tristan reached forward with fingers as cold as the surrounding battlements and opened the shutter. It covered the lower half of the window; the upper half was the glass through which he’d been observing Brenna. He had no need of such a dramatic entry; he could have simply appeared in the room. But he wanted to savor the moment; savor the dawning terror on Brenna’s face.
He held a single finger to his lips.
She clutched her nightshirt to herself, the thin material molding to her curves as she backed away. “Leave,” she ordered, her voice trembling. “Leave or I’ll scream.”
“Scream and I’ll kill you,” he replied conversationally.
He meant it, too, a truth she saw in his eyes. She stumbled to a halt, her slippered feet silent on the tiles and her back against the wall. Her mouth worked equally silently. She was frightened, yes, but also offended. And now that she’d gotten over her initial shock, the one was gaining precedence over the other. Summing herself up, she straightened her shoulders and faced him. “I’m sorry, but—”
“You’re sorry?” He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. It made him sound almost human. She expected him to believe, at this late hour, that she was sorry for what she’d done? For not merely rejecting him, and doing so publicly, but turning him in to the church authorities? Playing on his love for her, and his trust in her love for him, to betray him? She’d taken the last of his human sentiment and twisted it neatly to her own uses. She’d shown herself to be as amoral and heartless as any demon. And now she was sorry?
She turned her mouth down in a moue of disappointment. “For hurting you. Of course. But Tristan, darling, the heart wants what it wants. I can’t help that I’m in love with—”
Tristan chuckled. Brenna’s eyes met his. The little remaining color drained from her cheeks.
“Once,” Tristan said softly, “I might have believed you. I dreamed of squiring you through the rose gardens, you know, like a proper gentleman. Of giving you everything you ever wanted. Because I thought you loved me.”
“But Tristan, I—”
“No.” He eyed her coldly. There had been so much emotion in that one plea, and she’d delivered it so prettily. Her hand clutched at her throat, as though hoping to pull an explanation from it. Words that would sway him. She didn’t realize, because she was far too stupid and far too used to getting her own way, that there were no such words. The time for bargaining had passed, with his humanity. He wanted one thing, now.
He took a quick step forward and pulled her to him. She made a single surprised noise, almost a sigh, and then she was in his arms and staring up at him. Their pose was almost intimate.
She struggled and then, realizing the futility of the gesture, stopped. He could see it in her eyes: she was thinking that maybe if he thought she wanted him, he’d relent. Realize how much he loved her. Allow himself to be manipulated.
She stilled against his chest. The moment held. He stared down at her. It was true: once he had thought of taking Brenna through the rose gardens. Of giving his bride her own gardens, in which to do as she pleased. He’d envisioned her there with her friends, laughing, or with the children that now he’d never have.
But now he had very different plans for her. She’d spent the weeks preparing for a union that would never take place; instead, his lovely former sweetheart was going to have a very different wedding night. She was going to be his, after all. He was going to take her back with him, to his own kingdom, and…teach her to appreciate him.
“Brenna,” he said, brushing the hair back from her face. His voice was as sibilant as a snake’s. “Lovely Brenna. You’ve kept yourself so lovely…so fresh…so pure. In form, if not in spirit.” In spirit, he’d met tavern whores that were more virginal. “Don’t worry,” he continued, smiling slightly. “all that virtue isn’t going to go to waste.”
One second too late, she screamed.
NINETEEN
Isla stumbled toward her tent, fighting to keep her eyes open until she could throw herself down on the hard ground and pass out.
Who knew that merely sitting on a horse for ten hours at a stretch could be so utterly exhausting. But she’d been in the saddle for longer than that now, for weeks. Since leaving Enzie for Darkling Reach. When they did stop, it was only for a few minutes and getting in and out of the saddle only reminded her of how sore she was. And how bored.
