Renegade Read online

  But when had I not?

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  Chapter Sixteen

  I had been underground for almost three days. When I emerged my senses were befuddled, my body was all but broken, and I think had it not been for what happened afterward, I might even have convinced myself the whole had been a dream. The prince took me to a private suite in one of his hotels; I don’t recall which one. I remember lying down fully clothed atop a tufted silk counterpane in an ornately decorated room. And then I remember Lara’s voice: “Oh, my love, what have they done to you? What have they done?”

  The voice came to me as though through a tunnel, and I saw the blur of her face, such concern in her eyes, such anxiety. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her everything was all right, I was fine, all was well. I was too tired. I couldn’t lift my arms to hold her, couldn’t summon the breath to speak. I could barely keep my eyes open. I felt raindrops on my face. And then I realized they were not raindrops. They were tears.

  I dozed and dreamed, dreamed and woke, drifted in and out of fever. I dreamed of countryside flashing by from a train window, of Lara touching my face with a cool cloth, of the leather seats of a luxury car. I dreamed of Lara in a big hat and sunglasses, and Lara spreading over me a wool cape trimmed with foxtails.

  When I awoke I was lying on a tufted couch in what appeared to be a hotel lobby—no, it was larger than a hotel lobby, and more sparsely furnished. The great domed ceiling was glass, like a solarium, but the dust and grime on its panels was so thick the sky was barely visible. I pushed aside Lara’s cape and sat up slowly.

  Lara sat beside me swiftly. “Oh, Emory, you’re awake. I was so worried.” She pressed a cup of cold liquid into my hand. “Drink this. You haven’t eaten or drank anything in days.”

  I glanced into the cup groggily. It had a greenish tint. “What is it?” My voice was gruff, as though from long disuse. I coughed to clear it.

  “Sugar, mostly, and some mint. I don’t trust the water here, so I boiled it and made tea.”

  I took a cautious sip, and then drank more. It was thick and sweet, and the mint cleared my head. I looked around slowly.

  I could see our footprints in the layer of dust on the pink marble floor. There were tall Palladian windows all around the room, and a thin light filtered through the vines that covered them, giving the room an eerie underwater feel. The walls were covered in panels of silk moiré that might once have been blue; now it was faded and torn in more than one place, nibbled by mice in the corners.

  “What is this place?” I said. “Where are we?”

  “It’s the old palais, just outside Lyons,” she told me. “It’s been abandoned for almost a century. It was the only place I could think of that we would be safe. Humans are too afraid to come here, and the loup garoux never think of it anymore.”

  “Palais Devoncroix?” I stared at her. “Eudora’s palais?”

  She smiled. “I thought you’d like it here.”

  I stood up. The sudden movement made my head spin, and the burn on the back of my neck throbbed like fire. Instinctively my hand went to the bandage that was hidden beneath the high neck of my sweater, and I winced when I touched it.

  Alarm crossed her face and her nostrils flared as she caught the scent of the wound. “You’re hurt.” She reached for my neck but I caught her fingers.

  “It’s nothing.” I tried to find a smile. “A muscle strain, that’s all.” I don’t know why I lied. I couldn’t keep it from her forever. But I was suddenly ashamed, and uneasy.

  Lara caressed my arm, her eyes still dark with concern. “You’re dehydrated,” she said, “and half starved. I brought some food from the village while you were sleeping. Come, let’s eat. Time enough to explore later.”

  She started to move away, but I caught her arm. “Lara, what is this? What have you done? Why are we here?”

  “Oh, Emory.” Her eyes were soft with compassion, and she lightly touched my cheek. “Did you think I wouldn’t try to find you? You are my dearest friend and my truest love. How could I leave you there?”

  My head swirled with images of the night. The cold, the darkness, the visions, the rapture, the molten red cross that seared its mark into my flesh. The vow. My voice was hoarse. “How did you find me?”

  She lowered her gaze, her lashes forming crescent shadows on her pale skin. “I knew you wouldn’t meet me at the station,” she said quietly. “I overheard what Papa said to you. I know you thought you couldn’t defy him, and you were trying to protect me.”

  My heart clenched at that, and I had to look away in shame, because even after I had broken my promise to her, even after I had hurt and betrayed her she still loved me, and would not abandon me. The depth of her devotion made me feel small, and unworthy. Human. And I could not tell her what I had done.

  I said simply, “I will never love anyone the way I love you.” Beneath its damp and oozing bandage, the brand on my neck burned fiercely.

  “I was angry at first,” she said. “You had chosen him over me and I had begged you not to go, I had implored you to love me. I cursed you to your human hell and I wanted to leave you to wallow in the juices of your own mistakes … But then you didn’t come home. I went searching for you, and finally found the hotel where Papa had left you. You were barely alive, barely conscious. I couldn’t leave you there.” She smiled a little, a tight, uncertain thing. “I told the conductor on the train you were drunk. You slept the whole way. And then I got a car in Paris and drove here. ”

  When she lifted her eyes to me again there was a hardness there, a cool and quiet determination I had never seen before. When I last had seen her, she had been a girl. She was no longer.

  She said, “Don’t think I don’t know who he is, my papa. He offered you a bargain of some kind if you would go away from me, and he made it look like a gift. Don’t think I don’t know his seduction. But it is a cruel and calculating thing that will one day exact its pound of flesh, and a pint of blood as well. I love you too much to leave you to him.”

  I touched her hair, cupped her head with both hands. I draped my arms about her neck. I brought my forehead slowly, gently to rest against hers. I breathed, “Oh, my love.”

  I felt old. I had the taste of a thousand smoky nights on my tongue, the weight of a hundred thousand days in my bones. The innocence in me was gone. From the things I had seen, and done, and promised there was no turning back. Yet when I touched her, when I held her, I felt a thrill of such wonder, such incredible possibility, that it was as though I had been created anew for just this moment.

  I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted to tell her the choice I had made, the vow I had given, the possibilities that I had let slip through my fingers. For a hundred reasons, I could not.

  I whispered, “I will never deserve you.”

  I saw the tendons in her throat tighten as she drew in a breath, and started to speak, but then the breath was released unspoken with the taste of strawberries that fluttered across my lips.

  She forced a faint, brave smile and she looked at me with eyes that begged me to say no more. That begged me to allow her to believe in me, for just a little longer.

  She said, “I found wine, too. Come, we’ll make a picnic.”

  We ate fresh bread and soft cheese with fruit and wine, and afterwards we explored the great abandoned halls that had been erected as a monument to the most magnificent creatures ever to walk the face of the earth. Those walls bore the scars of the masterpieces that once had hung there, the walkways displayed pedestals that were devoid of sculpture, and the rooms echoed with the absence of the opulence that once had furnished them. But here Eudora the Queen once had walked. Here had sat Elise Devoncroix, and her father before her and his before him. Here had been born the tales of treachery, heroism, brutality and sacrifice that I had only imagined. Here the walls sang with magic.

  We could not see it all, of course. It was far too vast, and many of the rooms were not accessible to human for
ms. But when Lara, with a secret smile that lit up every cell of her being, took my hand and led me through a series of musty corridors that opened into large stone sleeping chamber, my breath caught. I knew where I was.

  I said softly, “Is this—can this be—Eudora’s bedchamber?”

  Lara pressed her cheek briefly against my shoulder. “Mother tells of visiting it when it was a museum room. Of course all the real treasures were moved to Castle Devoncroix and put on display there. They still have her nightdress, stained with the blood of the human, in a big glass case. I guess they couldn’t move the bed without dismantling the room, and the other pieces are reproductions. But it feels magical, doesn’t it?”

  The bed was a wide elevated platform of smooth, highly polished stone that seemed to grow right from the wall that formed its headboard. It looked like nothing so much as a great stone altar. There were tall carved chairs and marble tables, and silver candlesticks grown dark with age. In a human museum, these cast-offs would have been highly guarded and proudly displayed for their age and workmanship; to the Devoncroix, whose coffers were overflowing with treasures more ancient and more rare, they were not worth packing.

  I walked around the room in state of suspended wonder, touching a table here, a chairback there, the mammoth beam of the carved oak mantelpiece. I walked to the window and looked through the thick wavy glass to the valley below. Through the tangle of vines and thick forest branches I could see the spire of a small stone church. I managed, “Is that …”

  Lara nodded, looking as proud and happy as a child whose secret gift has been delivered at last and received with all the joy she had anticipated. “That’s the church where her carriage broke down, and she met the human priest.”

  I turned, my breath all but suspended, and walked back to the great bed, and the most incredible wonder of all. All along the wall and upward to the high ceiling a living canopy of roses had formed. The sturdy vines had dug themselves into the stones, and the blossoms they produced were a rich dark pink with a blood red center. The wall was lush with blooms, and a carpet of pink petals was thick upon the stone bed. The entire room was filled with the breath of roses.

  “It’s called the Eudora rose,” Lara said, coming over to me. “Mother tried to grow them in our garden in Venice but they were engineered to grow here, and don’t thrive anywhere else. Of course the legend is that they sprang from the blood of the human, but they were actually created by a horticulturist in the eighteen hundreds. Mother said they brought in special soil for the planter boxes at first, but eventually the root system grew all the way through the stones to the hillside below.”

  I had felt this way once or twice before. When I stood on Hadrian’s Wall and looked across the Tiber River, knowing that gods had stood there before me. When I touched the fallen columns of the Parthenon and stepped into the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Here lies history. Here lies magic. Here lies the imprint of a thousand powerful souls who have gone before you.

  I had walked into a fairy tale. I had walked into the promise of the future. My heart soared, and everything that I was, or had ever been meant to be, congealed into that moment.

  I climbed the steps and stood atop the stone platform, scattering the delicate rustle of rose petals as I moved. I reached to snap off a blossom and turned, holding it out to Lara. She came to stand beside me, and I tucked the rose into her hair. “There aren’t any thorns,” I noticed.

  “That’s how you know it’s a hybrid.” Her eyes filled the whole world. “Nature always makes thorns.”

  I kissed her then, and her arms wound about my neck and she pressed herself into me and though we had shared a hundred kisses before this one was like the first. This kiss was greedy and hungry and huge and demanding, for if we had been children before we were no longer. Now I belonged to something larger than myself, now I came to her as one who knew too much and had lived too little, and with a wild aching hunger for something that I knew already was lost to me forever.

  I tore my mouth away from hers. I breathed, “I have to tell you.”

  “No, don’t tell me.” Her eyes were hot and wild, and she thrust her hands beneath my sweater, against my bare chest, caressing my heartbeat. “Don’t say anything. I don’t want to know. I want you. I want you forever. That’s all I ever wanted. Just to be with you. ”

  I caught her hands, and moved them away. We sank to our knees together on the stone bed with the rose petals drifting down around us, the sound of our breathing echoing in the empty chamber, and I pulled my sweater over my head. I held her eyes as I removed the bandage from my neck and revealed to her the wound there. And I saw the dread that filled her face was nothing more than the proof of a truth she already knew.

  She whispered, “No.” She looked at the swollen red cross burned into my neck, she looked into my eyes, and the horror that crept into her voice was mixed with pleading, begging me to deny what she already had seen. “What have you done?”

  Alarm squeezed through the heart that had beat so wildly with desire only moments ago. I reached for her, but she shrank away. “No, Lara, you don’t understand. Listen to me.”

  She shook her head. “You chose him,” she said softly, her eyes dark with disbelief and a bleak and terrible hurt. “I have loved you with all my heart since before I knew how to love, and now I don’t know how to stop. But you chose him.”

  Desperation rose inside me and tried to choke off the words. I wanted to make it right, I was desperate to make it right as I had always done before. But this time words were not enough. I think I knew that from the beginning, but I had to try anyway. “That’s not the way it was, Lara. You know I never wanted to hurt you. Prinze-Papa, the others, they offered me a gift, a chance to be one of them, one of you. I couldn’t walk away. How could I?”

  Her fingertip was unsteady as it lightly traced the crescent scar beneath my eye. “What they offer is not a gift,” she said. “And the price, when it comes, will be a terrible one.” She lifted eyes to me that were dark with despair and brilliant with tears. “Oh, Emory, don’t you think I was offered the same gift as you? It is my heritage, isn’t it? Just because they call themselves a Brotherhood does not mean there are no females in their ranks. But I rejected their gift, I rejected it because I could not, would not pay their price!”

  The tears spilled over and caught in her voice. “You belong to them now, don’t you see that? You belong to them and you can never belong to another. The price is your soul.”

  “Lara, no.” I caught her hands but they balled into fists inside my fingers; I held them even more tightly and the desperation that was winding its steel band around my chest threatened to burst my heart. “Don’t you know nothing can take me away from you? Didn’t I promise you that?”

  “How many more promises will you make me, Emory?” she cried. “How many more times must I believe you?”

  She flung my hands away with a gesture that sent me reeling backwards, and the fire that blazed in her eyes dried the tears. She grasped the bodice of her dress and tore it with a sudden savage motion that bared her breasts and her abdomen, and then, with a single slash of her nails, she shredded the remainder of the fabric and let it fall away from her body in tatters. I sucked in my breath as she stood before me on the stone bed, nude and beautiful and ablaze with fury and pain and defiance.

  “Do you want to know what it is to be one of us, Emory? Is that what you want?” She caught my hands and pulled me up beside her. Her heat seared my skin, her fingers crushed my own. Her fever was a wild and raging thing that was torn with pain and desperation. “Know me, then.” She pressed herself to me, the fever of her torso branding my chest, the pressure of her pelvis burning through my trousers and into my loins. “Know my pain, know my longing, know my love for you! Know the heart that you have broken, know what we could have been and know what you have lost! Be what I am then, love me! Love me!”

  The small hairs on my arms and legs raised as though with a sudden wave of polarity
, and the air in the room cracked and flashed with static lightning. Her eyes were wild with the passion of a great, unspeakable power, and I could not have pulled my hands away from hers had I tried. Her hair lifted and lashed about her body as though on a violent wind, and sparks flew from it. Rose petals scattered and whirled and turned about her, suspended on their own magnetic charge. I drew in a gasp of air so thin it shimmered like glass around us. The hot prickling sensation in my skin was like a thousand crawling ants, and I cried out her name, I tried to pull away but she held me firm. I screamed with pain and terror, and my voice was matched with hers as she tossed back her head, crying out her power, her longing, her fierce and glorious nature. I felt the great glowing surge of rapture that formed in my core and spread upward through my chest and burst from my fingertips, that danced before my eyes, that swirled through the fibers of my skin and the nerves of my teeth and the cells of my nails and my hair. It was intensely sexual, powerful, galvanizing; it was, at its essence, her: Lara in all her wonder, all her devotion, all her glory, pure, magnificent, essential, Lara. It was a pain so pure it cleaved me in two; an emptiness so vast it sucked out my soul, a longing and a thirst and a wild and desperate hope, it was Lara. It was a heart too broken to beat but too brave to stop, it was a love so pure it could not conceive of betrayal, it was Lara. My very pores wept great, bitter tears for what she was, what I could never be; what I had taken from her.

  She filled my eyes with her wild and searing beauty. She was a thousand shimmering, bursting glowing lights. She was in my cells, in my lungs, on my tongue, in my brain and the hairs upon my skin and my fingernails and in my heart, in my heart. I felt her, I saw her, burst into all the colors of ecstasy and it was in my body, too, what she was; it was in my soul. When the great clap of magnetic force threw us apart I saw, just for a moment I saw, the magnificent wolf she had become and I felt her power in my bones; I was, for the briefest moment of sheer splendor and desperate, aching loneliness, what she was. And even when my frail human form could no longer support her immensity and I lost consciousness, my brain was filled with images of powerful legs racing down forest paths, of flashing greenery, of cold streams and brilliant clean air rushing over the tongue … and of a bleak and bitter sadness that was bigger than the sky, darker than the night, and so hungry that it threatened to consume me alive, because I knew she was saying good-bye.