Now Russell was asking questions, too.
“Yes,” Marcus and de Clermont said at the same time.
A sudden, searing pain at his neck told Marcus that his carotid artery had ruptured. It was too late. He would surely die now, and there was nothing that anyone could do for him.
With a deep, rattling breath, Marcus gave up the ghost trapped in his body.
Hell, he discovered, was strangely cold now that his soul had flown. There was none of the fire and brimstone Reverend Hopkins had promised, and the heat of his fever was gone, too. Everything was icy and still. There was no screaming, or howls of pain, but only a slow, stammering drumbeat.
Then that faded, too.
Marcus swallowed.
When he did, there a sudden cacophony of sound louder than Washington’s band. Crickets trilled, owls bugled. The limbs of the trees beat out a rat-a-tat-tat.
“Christ, no,” de Clermont murmured.
Marcus fell from a height and landed with a thud. His skin prickled with awareness, the night air and the rush of the wind sending every hair on his head aloft, every hair on his neck rising along with it.
“What is it, Matthew? What did you see?” Russell asked.
The sound of Russell’s voice prompted images to flash through Marcus’s mind as though they were printed on Gerty’s deck of cards and she was shuffling through them at lightning speed. He seemed to be looking out at the world through a different set of eyes, eyes that saw everything in crisp detail. At first, the images were of John Russell.
John Russell in a dark tunic, his expression bitter and hard.
A sword slicing into John Russell’s neck, through a chink in plates of armor—a death blow.
John Russell sitting, hale and hearty, at a table in a dark tavern, a woman on his knee.
John Russell taking blood from a woman’s arm—drinking it, devouring it. And the woman liked it. She cried out in ecstasy, her fingers working between her legs as Russell fed.
“His family.” De Clermont’s voice sounded like broken glass, jagged in Marcus’s newly sensitive ears.
At the word “family,” the flood of images twisted and turned direction.
A golden-haired woman.
A mountain of a man with critical eyes.
A pale, slender creature with a baby in her arms.
The dark glance of a woman in yellow, her eyes hectic and wandering.
A gentle man who reclined in the eyes of another man—this one dark and handsome.
An old woman with a round, creased face and a kind expression of welcome.
Family.
“His father.” Hands took Marcus by the arms and grasped them so hard that he feared his bones might snap.
Father. This time the word shaped the images that followed into a story.
Matthew de Clermont, his hands holding a chisel and hammer, his clothes stained with sweat and covered in gray dust, walking home on a summer night, met on the way by the same woman Marcus had seen before, the one with the child in her arms.
Matthew de Clermont, leaning on a shovel’s handle, face damp with effort or tears, his expression bleak, staring into a hole that contained two bodies.
Matthew de Clermont falling to a stone floor.
Matthew de Clermont, covered in blood and gore, exhausted and kneeling.
Matthew de Clermont fighting with a hard-faced young man not much older than Marcus, who gave off an air of bitter malevolence.
“I know why MacNeil changed his name,” de Clermont said. “He killed his own father.”
* * *
—
FROM THAT POINT on they were constantly moving, and always at night. Marcus’s delirium gave way to a desperate thirst that nothing would quench. His fever abated, but his mind was still addled and restless. Marcus’s life became a patchwork quilt of jagged impressions and conversations stitched together with bloodred thread. Russell left them to return to the armies at Yorktown. De Clermont’s Indian friends led Marcus and Matthew along paths no wider than a deer trail and impossible to follow unless you knew the subtle signs that marked the way.
“What if we get lost?” Marcus asked. “How will we find our way in the dark?”
“You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont said briskly. “You have nothing to fear from the night.”
During the day, Marcus and de Clermont took refuge in houses along the road whose doors opened without question when the chevalier appeared, or in caves tucked into the hillsides. The Indian warriors who traveled with them kept their distance from the farmhouses, but always rejoined them after the sun set.
Marcus’s body felt unwieldy, both oddly weak and strangely powerful, slow one moment and then quick the next. Sometimes he dropped things, and other times he crushed them with no more than a touch.
While they rested, de Clermont gave him a strong drink that had a medicinal, metallic tang. It was thick and sweet and tasted heavenly. Marcus felt saner and calmer after he had it, but his appetite for solid food did not return.
“You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont reminded him, as if this should mean something to him. “Remember what I told you at Yorktown? All you need to survive is blood—not meat or bread.”
Marcus dimly recalled de Clermont telling him that, but he also remembered there was some mention of never getting ill again, and it being difficult for him to die. And de Clermont had told him that he had been alive for more than a thousand years—which was preposterous. The man had a thick head of raven-colored hair and a smooth complexion.
“And you’re a wearh, too?” Marcus asked.
“Yes, Marcus,” de Clermont replied, “how else did you become one? I sired you. Don’t you remember agreeing to it, when I gave you the choice of living or dying?”
“And Cole—Russell—is a wearh as well, and that’s why he didn’t die at Bunker Hill?” Marcus kept at his efforts to assemble the events of the past week into something that made sense. No matter how hard he tried, the result was always something more fantastic than Robinson Crusoe.
They had reached the border between Pennsylvania and New York when Marcus’s powerful thirst gave way to different urges. The first was curiosity. The world seemed a brighter, richer place than it had before Yorktown. His eyesight was sharper, and scents and sounds made the world crackle with texture and life.
“What is this stuff?” Marcus asked, drinking deeply from the tankard that de Clermont offered to him. It was like nectar, fortifying and satisfying at once.
“Blood. And a bit of honey,” de Clermont replied.
Marcus spit it out in a violent stream of red. De Clermont cuffed him on the shoulder.
“Don’t be rude,” the chevalier said, his voice purring in his throat like a cat. “I won’t have my son behaving like an ungrateful lout.”
“You’re not my father.” Marcus swung at him, his arm whipping out. De Clermont blocked it easily, cradling Marcus’s hand in his own as if there was no force behind it.
“I am now, and you’ll do as I say.” De Clermont’s face was calm, his voice even. “You’ll never have the strength to beat me, Marcus. Don’t even try.”
But Marcus had grown up under another iron first and had no more intention of giving in to de Clermont than he had to Obadiah. In the following days, as they continued to travel farther north and deeper into the woods of New York, Marcus fought with de Clermont about everything, just because he could, just because it felt better to wrestle with him than to keep everything bottled up inside. Marcus now had three powerful desires: to drink, to know, and to fight.
“You cannot kill me, much as you might like to,” de Clermont said after a wrestling match over a rabbit left them both temporarily bloodied, the rabbit torn to pieces and Marcus’s arms—both of them—broken. “I told you that on the night you were made a wearh.”
Marcus didn’t have the courage to confess that he didn’t remember much about that night, and what he did remember made no sense.