Page 28

“God damn your ci-devant eyes!”

“Yes, yes.” Quieter: “But I can make this stop, you know.”

I. And only I.

Seduction, then infection, then cure—for a price. Loyalty, ‘till death . . .

. . . and—after?

How Prendegrace trapped Dumouriez, no doubt, once upon a long, long time past—or had Dumouriez simply offered himself up to worship at this thing’s red-shod feet, without having to be enticed or duped into such an unequal Devil’s bargain? Coming to Prendegrace’s service gratefully, even gladly—as glad as he would be, eventually, to cut his own throat to save this creature’s no-life, or spray fresh blood across a wet plaster wall to conceal the thing he’d hunted, pimped and died for, safely entombed within?

And for Jean-Guy, an equally limited range of choices: To bleed out all at once in a moment’s sanguinary torrent and die now, or live as a tool the way Dumouriez did—and die later.

Minimally protected, perhaps even cherished; easily used, yet . . . just as easily . . .

. . . discarded.

“There can be benefits to such an arrangement,” Prendegrace points out, softly.

“He sacrificed himself for you.”

“As was required.”

“As you demanded.”

The Chevalier raises a delicate brow, sketched in discolored plaster. “I? I demand nothing, Citizen. Only accept—what’s offered me.”

“Because you aristos deign to do nothing for yourselves.”

“Oh, no doubt. But then, that’s why I chose you: For being so much more able than I, in every regard. Why I envied and coveted your strength, your vital idealism. Your . . . ”

. . . life.

Jean-Guy feels the monster’s gaze rove up and down, appraisingly—reading him, as it were, like—

Hoarse: “A . . . map.”

The Chevalier sighs, and shakes his head.

“A pretty pastime, once. But your body no longer invites such pleasantries, more’s the pity; you have grown somewhat more—opaque—with age, I think.”

Taking one further step forward, as Jean-Guy recoils; watching Jean-Guy slip in his own blood, go down on one knee, hand scrabbling helplessly for purchase against that ragged hole where the wall once was.

“What are you?” He asks. Wincing, angrily, as he hears his own voice crack with an undignified mixture of hatred, fear—

(—longing?)

The Chevalier pauses, mid-step. And replies, after a long moment:

“Ah. Yet this would be the one question we none of us may answer, Citizen Sansterre—not even myself, who knows only that I was born this way, whatever way that might be . . . ”

Leaning closer still. Whispering. Words dimming to blood-thrum, and lower, as the sentence draws to its long-sought, inevitable close—

“ . . . just as you were born, like everyone else I meet in this terrible world of ours, to bear my mark—”

—or be my prey.

With Jean-Guy’s sight narrowing to embrace nothing but those empty eyes, that mouth, those teeth: his disease made flesh, made terminal. His destiny, buried too deep to touch or think of, ‘till it dug itself free once more.