Skin of the Wolf (5 page)

T
homas was happy to be indoors and out of the cold.

He wasn’t sure, though, that he was happy to be in this house. His last experience in a house where Spencer George lived had been one he’d never forget, nor want to repeat. The circumstances here tonight did not portend a relaxed evening of cognac and catching up, either.

Michael Bonnard led them through the small foyer and under an archway on the left. Open glass doors revealed a high-ceilinged parlor. The house wasn’t among the grandest of Upper East Side residences, but it was comfortable enough, and these days in New York it must have cost a pretty penny.

In Rome last fall Thomas had been granted a look into the lives of the Noantri—lives ordinary enough to those who lived them, but to Thomas, full of amazements large and small. The finances, for example, of eternal life. One Noantri could exuberantly expend all his resources and find himself facing eternity penniless, while another might husband and invest and grow rich. The Noantri leadership—the Conclave, before whom Thomas had stood in awe—were wise, judicious men and women. Prudent investment over centuries had filled coffers ample enough that any Noantri in need had but to ask.
None was refused; what purpose would that serve? This was a policy that Thomas might have wished his own Church, possessed of inestimable secular wealth, would adopt; but Thomas was a Jesuit, devoted to a life of scholarship, forswearing issues of Church governance. Perhaps things were being done as they should be. If not, it wasn’t his place to agitate for change. Certainly not based on a comparison between the hierarchy and rules of the Catholic Church and those of a Community of vampires.

Spencer George, in any case, had never needed the Conclave’s help. A respected historian of the Noantri people, he had come from wealth, and through the years protected and grown his fortune. The building he’d chosen for his New York home was unremarkable among its neighbors—neither more grand nor more shabby, well kept but, in its context, discreet. In all ways, perfect.

They entered a parlor of dark blue walls hung with prints and paintings. A Persian carpet covered the floor, various coffee tables and side tables stood about, and two upholstered armchairs matched a sofa on which, propped up by pillows, Spencer George was reclining.

He looked terrible.

Spencer George had become Noantri at the age of fifty-two and hadn’t changed in the centuries since. Right now, though, he looked twice that age. The brown of his thinning hair only pointed up the pallor of his skin. Nearly healed but still-visible scratches on his long face echoed the raw, angrier ones on Bonnard’s. A large bandage circled Spencer’s throat and his hands were wrapped like mummies. He didn’t lift his head as Thomas and Livia entered, but he smiled.

“Livia, my dear. How good to see you. And Father Kelly. It’s been too long.”

“Oh, Spencer!”

To Thomas’s ears Livia’s tone conveyed as much exasperation as
concern. Michael Bonnard turned an odd look on her as Spencer said, “Livia, would you mind?” He waved a bandaged hand vaguely. “Downstairs, behind the wine cellar.”

Thomas didn’t understand what Spencer wanted but Livia clearly did. She turned to Bonnard. “Where’s the cellar door?”

Bonnard hesitated, then shrugged. “Under the staircase.”

Livia found the door and disappeared through it. Thomas stood uncomfortably under Bonnard’s dark scrutiny, but didn’t speak. He looked to Spencer for guidance but Spencer’s eyes were closed. Best, then, to keep silent and not add to whatever difficulties were under way.

The cellar door creaked. Livia returned. “Gentlemen, please. If we might be alone for a few minutes.”

“I don’t think so,” Bonnard said.

“Michael, it’s quite all right.” Spencer roused himself to speak. “Livia means me no harm.”

“Spencer—”

“Really, Michael, I must insist.”

Bonnard stared at Spencer long and hard. Spencer, blue eyes watery in his ashen face, looked back calmly. Shaking his head, Bonnard turned and led Thomas back through the archway and down the hall to the kitchen. Behind them Thomas heard Livia shut the curtained doors.

M
y God, Spencer.” Livia opened her bag and took out a brown glass bottle the size of a bottle of beer. “What went on?”

“To tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure.”

On the sideboard next to decanters of cognac and brandy Livia found a silver corkscrew. She opened the bottle. “Can you hold this?”

“It would be easier without these annoying bandages. Michael, as it turns out, is an EMT.”

“I thought you said he was a microbiologist. Doing a postdoc at Rockefeller.”

“That, and an MD, also. With residency rotations in emergency medicine. On the reservation, apparently, one must wear many hats. Of course,” he added, brightening, “you yourself were once a nurse, weren’t you?”

Livia sighed. “Yes, I was.” She picked at the tape and unrolled the bandage from Spencer’s right hand. She could see the new pink patches of skin, angry red at their centers, what looked like animal bites. She handed him the bottle. He lifted it to his lips and without stopping downed its entire contents.

“Ah.” He sighed in contentment and let his eyes close. His hand dropped back to the blanket.

Livia took the empty bottle from him. “Better?”

In a few moments the color started to return to Spencer’s face. He opened his eyes, now their accustomed bright blue. “Much better, thank you. It was one of the fresh ones, though. I should have told you the aged bottles are on the bottom.”

“Well, I apologize if it wasn’t quite to your taste, but this wasn’t really about a gourmet experience. It was about avoiding a couple of months’ sleep, which would have been hard to explain to your friend out there. Come on, I’d better rewrap that hand.”

“No.” Spencer, instead, began unwrapping his other hand. When he was finished he peeled the bandage from his throat. “It’s rather too late for dissembling explanations.”

Livia nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Livia understood what had happened to Spencer; it happened to every Noantri at one time or another. Somehow, one’s Noantri nature revealed itself to an Unchanged. One healed from an injury impossibly fast, or emerged alive from what should have been a fatal event, or was forced to use a Blessing no Unchanged should have been allowed to see. Whatever the cause, no recourse remained but for the Noantri to disappear: to leave for foreign parts, or remain nearby but change residence, identity, and sometimes, courtesy of Noantri plastic surgeons, even features. And, of course, to break off contact with the Unchanged who’d been a witness. The process, called Cloaking, was required of every Noantri every few decades in any case. A condition of the fifteenth-century Concordat between the Noantri and the Catholic Church was that the Noantri, though in plain sight, remain hidden, passing unnoticed among their
neighbors. Once your neighbors stopped complimenting you on your ageless appearance and began whispering about it, you were no longer upholding that bargain. Since the Concordat also assured each Noantri a supply of blood for sustenance—such as the bottle Livia had just brought up from the hidden room behind Spencer’s wine cellar—most Noantri took seriously their Concordat obligations. Those who flouted the agreement faced the displeasure of the Conclave, which every Noantri took very seriously indeed.

Spencer would have had to leave New York sooner or later, but he’d only recently arrived, and he’d come here from a life in Rome he’d been enjoying and was decades away from needing to abandon. He’d left Rome as part of a scheme that, among other things, allowed Livia’s own life to continue unhindered. She’d been grateful to him, relieved and pleased to hear that he was enjoying New York, happy that he’d found a new romantic interest. Now she felt dismay that he would have to uproot himself so soon.

All this had been expressed when she said, “I’m sorry.” Now she added, to commiserate, “Your friend—Michael—he’s already seen?”

Spencer fingered his neck, where shiny pink scars made ragged patterns. “I was positively gushing blood. Like a fountain. I might have thought it quite lovely if it hadn’t been mine. We were in Central Park. Michael wanted to take me to a hospital. Of course I refused and demanded to be brought back here. I assured him the damage appeared much worse than it actually was. Since I was conscious and could, with his support, walk, he acquiesced. I was lying; the damage was quite serious. I expended all my strength making our way home, and once here was barely able to move. I was unable to prevent him from applying bandages. When he did, he couldn’t help but see. The wounds were already healing.”

“Gushing—Spencer, maybe you’re exaggerating. Worrying for
no reason. Maybe it never was that bad. Michael’s all scratched up, and I didn’t see his shirt—I guess he took it off to bandage his shoulder. But I didn’t see any blood on his pants. If it was that bad and he helped you walk—”

“I’d stanched the flow by the time he put them on.”

Livia stared. Then she started to laugh. “Spencer! In Central Park in February?”

Her old friend snorted. “Hah! Don’t I wish. No, nothing that alluring. But Livia?” Spencer sat up, rearranging himself on the sofa. “We were not mugged. What happened is not precisely clear. Before you arrived, as I wandered in and out of consciousness, I thought perhaps I had dreamt certain events. I no longer think so.”

Livia opened a drawer in the coffee table, to get the bottle and its crimson-tipped cork out of sight until Spencer was strong enough to return them to the cellar. “Are you sure you should be sitting up? You seem—I don’t know, a little agitated.”

“I’m perfectly fine. Pour us a brandy, if you don’t mind. There’s something I wish to discuss.”

A
s soon as the kitchen door shut behind them, Michael Bonnard spun on Thomas and demanded, “Who is she?”

“Who? Livia? They’re old friends. From Rome. She’s a historian, an art historian. They’ve known each other for . . . years.” Was Bonnard also Noantri? Thomas couldn’t tell, though he knew Livia could. If he was, Thomas didn’t need to equivocate; but if he was, why had Livia been so curt? “She used to be a nurse,” Thomas added. “Maybe she just wanted privacy to look at his injuries.”

“And that trip to the cellar?”

Thomas, a second late, shook his head, as though he didn’t know. He did. He’d seen a bottle’s shape outlined in Livia’s purse when she returned. The idea of what was in it, even with his knowledge of and respect for the Noantri people, made him a little queasy.

Bonnard’s sharp black eyes with their golden rings held Thomas and Thomas knew the man didn’t believe him. Bonnard didn’t speak. He turned his back and, using his good hand, ran water into a moka pot and set it on the stove. He reached for the coffee canister.

“I’ll do that,” Thomas said, taking it and twisting off the top. “Sit down. You look like you could use some rest.”

“I’m fine.” Bonnard, who did not look fine, took the open
canister from Thomas and spooned coffee into the pot. Thomas shrugged and sat gingerly in a chair that looked antique but turned out to be surprisingly sturdy. Well, why not? Just one more surprise in a surprising evening. This sort of thing—some inexplicable occurrence that Livia nevertheless seemed to have a handle on—had happened pell-mell in Rome, but now Thomas had resumed his quiet scholarly life and he’d thought all that was behind him.

He did know, though, that it would be a waste of intellectual energy to try to puzzle out what was going on. Sooner or later, the two Noantri would tell him, or they wouldn’t. They were of necessity a guarded people, and he had already been allowed access to more of their secrets than most Unchanged would ever know. It would be presumptuous to expect to be brought into every confidence.

Still, his curiosity, at once a useful tool and a hazard of his scholar’s mind, was burning.

For something to occupy himself, he examined the room. Botanical prints added color to the white-glazed walls, and pots and pans showing evidence of serious use hung beside the stove. Thomas watched Bonnard, a tall, broad-shouldered man whose graceful movements radiated a tight-coiled strength, like a spring—or an animal ready to spring. Bonnard seemed to know his way around this room. Thomas wondered how long he and Spencer had been together.

Bonnard turned to face him. “Abenaki,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your eyes were drilling holes in my back. Usually that means someone’s trying to figure out whether I’m an Indian. Abenaki tribe. Upstate New York. You?”

“I—I’m not—” Thomas caught on and grinned. “Oh. I see. Jesuit. Society of Jesus. From Boston, myself.”

Bonnard nodded. “Jesuits were good to us. I was baptized by a Jesuit. You came to convert the savages, like all the missionaries, but a lot of you took on our ways, and you brought us a Jesus we could use. We called you ‘Blackrobes.’”

“To the extent that that’s true, I’m grateful.”

Bonnard took two porcelain mugs from a cabinet. “You take milk?” Thomas admitted he did and Bonnard retrieved a glass bottle from the refrigerator. He poured the coffee and sat.

Thomas said, “Maybe Livia should have a look at your shoulder, too.”

“I’m a doctor.”

“You can’t dress your own wound, even so.”

Bonnard didn’t answer and retreated into silence, drinking coffee. Something was obviously worrying him. Spencer’s condition? The priest in Thomas wanted to offer reassurance—the one thing he did know was that Spencer George, being Noantri, would make a complete recovery—but this was complicated ground.

“I think he’ll be all right,” he ventured. “He’s very strong.”

Bonnard snapped his head up. His eyes showed confusion at first. Then he relaxed. “Spencer? Yes.”

Something occurred to Thomas. “Did you call the police? About the mugging?”

“No, or an ambulance, either. He wouldn’t let me. Just told me to bring him back here.”

“But that’s a dangerous man, whoever did this. Violent. He needs to be stopped.”

Bonnard nodded slowly. “Oh, yes, he’s dangerous.”

“Then why . . .” Thomas let the question trail off. Of course. Calling attention to himself and especially in the face of injury would be the last thing Spencer George would want. Thomas had
once seen Spencer’s Noantri body react to a serious wound, had watched it begin to heal itself in seconds. That was something you wouldn’t want a doctor to see.

Even a doctor you were close to.

Thomas and Bonnard regarded each other wordlessly. As though reaching a decision, Bonnard put his coffee down. “All right. If she’s an old friend and a nurse, he’s in good hands. I wanted to talk to him, but I’d better go. I’m sorry we didn’t meet under better circumstances, Father.” He stood.

That wasn’t what Thomas had been expecting. “Wait, you’re leaving? He won’t—”

“No, he won’t, which is why I’m not saying goodbye. Tell him I hope—”

The kitchen door opened. “Gentlemen.” Livia stood in the doorway. “I apologize if I seemed rude. It couldn’t be helped. Will you please join us?”

Bonnard said to Thomas, “Well. I guess I’ll get to say goodbye after all.”

Livia threw Thomas a questioning glance. Thomas rose and the three made their way back across the hall.