De Clermont reset Marcus’s right wrist with the practiced touch of a skilled physician and surgeon.
“Your arm will heal in moments. My blood—your blood, now—won’t allow sickness or injury to take root in the body,” de Clermont explained. “Here. Give me your other arm.”
“I can do it myself.” Now that his right wrist was working properly again, Marcus pushed his left forearm back together. He could feel the bones fusing, his blood crawling with power. That sense that something was invading his body and taking it over reminded him of being inoculated. Marcus was thinking about what it might be in de Clermont’s blood that would make him immune to sickness or harm—when the chevalier asked the question that had hung between them, unanswered, since that night in Yorktown.
“Did you kill your father because he beat you?” de Clermont asked. “I saw what he did. It was in your blood, when I took it at Yorktown. He beat your mother, too. But not your sister.”
But Marcus didn’t want to think of his mother and Patience. He didn’t want to think of Hadley, or Obadiah, or life before. He had killed his father but had always retained a small hope that he might return home again. Now that he drank blood, he knew that was out of the question. He was no better than a ravening wolf.
“Go fuck yourself,” Marcus snarled.
De Clermont rose to his feet without a word and stalked off into the darkness. He didn’t return until the sun rose. De Clermont brought him a small deer, and Marcus fed on it, better able to stomach the blood of a four-legged creature than another person.
Finally, Marcus and de Clermont reached the hills and valleys of a part of New York that Marcus had never seen before—far north, almost into Canada. It was there that they took shelter with the Oneida. Marcus recalled the spring of 1778, at Valley Forge, when news had swept through camp that the Marquis de Lafayette and his French companions had brought a troop of Oneida allies to fight the British. As the Indians who had guided them here were welcomed home by friends and family, Marcus realized that the Oneida had been ensuring their safety.
In New York, Marcus was at last allowed to hunt. He found relief running after deer and game, and pleasure in taking their blood. De Clermont also encouraged him to compete with the young warriors. Marcus might be fast and impervious to injury, but he was no match for the Oneida when it came to tracking animals in the forest. Next to them, Marcus felt clumsy and foolish.
“He has much to learn,” de Clermont apologized to a battle-scarred elder who was watching Marcus’s hapless attempts to trap a duck with ill-concealed scorn.
“He needs time,” the elder replied. “And as he is your son, Dagoweyent, he will have plenty of that.”
* * *
—
THE PUNISHING REGIMENS MARCUS WENT through with the other young men of the tribe did take some of the fight out of him. Marcus wanted to sleep but couldn’t seem to shut his eyes and rest. He still didn’t fully understand what had happened to him. How had he survived the fever? And why was he now so strong and fast?
De Clermont kept repeating the same information over and over again—that Marcus would heal from almost any wound, that he would be difficult to kill, that he would never be ill another day in his life, that his senses were now far beyond what most humans enjoyed, that he was a wearh—but there was something missing in the account, some larger perspective that would explain how all this could be true.
It was the hunting—not the fighting or the questions or even the drinking of blood—that finally brought the fact that he was no longer human home to Marcus. Every day and every night, de Clermont took Marcus hunting. They tracked deer at first, then moved on to other prey. Ducks and wild birds were difficult to capture, and contained only a small amount of the precious blood that kept Marcus alive. Boars and bears were rare, and their size and drive to survive made them formidable opponents.
De Clermont would not let Marcus hunt with a gun, or even a bow and arrow.
“You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont said once more. “You need to run your prey down, catch it with your wits and your hands, best it, and feed. Guns and arrows are for warmbloods.”
“Warmbloods?” Here was another new term.
“Humans. Witches. Daemons,” de Clermont explained. “Lesser creatures. You will need human blood to survive, now that you are growing and developing. But it’s not time to take it—yet. As for the witches and daemons, their blood is forbidden. A witch’s blood will eat away at your veins, and the blood of daemons will sour your brain.”
“Witches?” Marcus thought of Mary Webster. Had those old legends in Hadley been true after all? “How will I recognize them?”
“They smell.” De Clermont’s nose flared in distaste. “Don’t worry. They fear us and stay away.”
Once Marcus could bring down a deer quickly and feed from it without tearing the animal apart, they left the Oneida and traveled east. Along the route they met with fleeing soldiers, some wounded and others perfectly hearty. Some were British soldiers running away from the war. Others were Loyalists trying to escape into Canada and freedom now that they could see which way the fight would end. Many more were Continental soldiers who had grown weary of waiting for a formal declaration of peace and decided to go home to their farms and families.
“Which one do you want?” de Clermont asked. They were crouched in the tall grasses that grew beside a meandering stream, watching a group of British soldiers on the opposite bank. There were four men, and one was wounded.
“None.” Marcus was happy with deer.
“You must choose, Marcus. But remember: You must live a long time with your decision,” de Clermont said.
“That one.” Marcus pointed to the smallest of the lot, a wiry fellow who spoke in a broad, unfamiliar accent.
“No.” De Clermont pointed to the man lying by the water, groaning. “Him. Take him.”
“Take him?” Marcus frowned. “You mean feed from him.”
“I’ve seen you feed from a deer. You won’t be able to stop drinking from a human once you start.” De Clermont sniffed the breeze. “He’s dying. The leg is gangrenous.”
Marcus took in a gulp of air. Something sweet and rotten assaulted his nose. He practically gagged. “You want me to feed off that?”
“The infection is localized at the moment. He would smell worse otherwise,” de Clermont said. “It won’t be the sweetest blood you’ll ever taste, but it won’t kill you.”
De Clermont vanished. A shadow passed over the narrow, pebbled ford. The British soldiers looked up, startled. One of them—the largest, most muscular of the soldiers—gave a frightened shout when de Clermont seized him and bit into his neck. His two companions ran away, leaving their few possessions behind. The wounded soldier, the one with the dying leg, began to scream.
The smell of blood sent Marcus after de Clermont. He arrived on the opposite bank more quickly than he would have dreamed possible—before.
“We aren’t going to kill you.” Marcus knelt beside the man. “I just need to take some of your blood.”
De Clermont’s prey was slowly sinking toward the ground as his blood was drained.
“Christ. Please. Don’t kill me,” the wounded soldier begged. “I have a wife. A daughter. I only ran away because they said we would be put on a prison ship.”
It was every soldier’s nightmare to be flung onto one of the foul vessels anchored offshore with no food, no fresh water, and no way of surviving the filthy, crowded conditions.
“Shh.” Marcus patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. He could see the man’s pulse, skittering at his neck. And the leg—Lord, John Russell had been right at Yorktown. Warmbloods did give off a terrible stench as their flesh died. “If you would just allow me—”