The Book of Life (44 page)

Gallowglass wondered what had captured her attention. There was nothing to see but a misguided gray heron, his long, bright yellow legs too insubstantial to hold up the rest of his body.

“Come, Auntie. You’ll freeze to death out here.” Ever since he’d parted with his leather jacket, Gallowglass had worn nothing more than his habitual uniform of T-shirt and torn jeans. He no longer felt the cold, but he remembered how the early-morning air in this part of the world could cut to the bone.

The heron stared at Diana for a moment. He ducked his head up and down, stretching his wings and crying out. The bird took flight, soaring away toward the sea.

“Diana?”

She turned blue-gold eyes in Gallowglass’s direction. His hackles rose. There was something otherworldly in her gaze that made him recall his childhood, and a dark room where his grandfather cast runes and uttered prophecies.

Even after the plane took to the skies, Diana remained fixed on some unseen, distant view.

Gallowglass stared out the window and prayed for a strong tailwind.

“Will we ever stop running, do you think?” Her voice startled him.

Gallowglass didn’t know the answer and couldn’t bear to lie to her. He remained silent.

Diana buried her face in her hands.

“There, there.” He rocked her against his chest. “You mustn’t think the worst, Auntie. It’s not like you.”

“I’m just so tired, Gallowglass.”

“With good reason. Between past and present, you’ve had a hell of a year.” Gallowglass tucked her head under his chin. She might be Matthew’s lion, but even lions had to close their eyes and rest occasionally.

“Is that Corra?” Diana’s fingers traced the outlines of the firedrake on his forearm. Gallowglass shivered. “Where does her tail go?”

She lifted his sleeve before he could stop her. Her eyes widened.

“You weren’t meant to see that,” Gallowglass said. He released her and tugged the soft fabric back into place.

“Show me.”

“Auntie, I think it’s best—”

“Show me,” Diana repeated. “Please.”

He grasped the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head. His tattoos told a complicated tale, but only a few chapters would be of interest to Matthew’s wife. Diana’s hand went to her mouth.

“Oh, Gallowglass.”

A siren sat on a rock above his heart, her arm extended so that her hand reached over to his left bicep. She held a clutch of cords. The cords snaked down his arm, falling and twisting to become Corra’s sinuous tail, which swirled around his elbow until it met with the firedrake’s body.

The siren had Diana’s face.

“You’re a hard woman to find, but you’re an even harder one to forget.” Gallowglass pulled his shirt back over his head.

“How long?” Diana’s eyes were blue with regret and sympathy.

“Four months.” He didn’t tell her that it was the latest in a series of similar images that had been inked over his heart. “That’s not what I meant,” Diana said softly.

“Oh.” Gallowglass stared between his knees at the carpeted floor. “Four hundred years. More or less.”

“I’m so sor—”

“I won’t have you feeling sorry for something you couldn’t prevent,” Gallowglass said, silencing her with a slash of his hand. “I knew you could never be mine. It didn’t matter.”

“Before I was Matthew’s, I was yours,” Diana said simply.

“Only because I was watching you grow into Matthew’s wife,” he said roughly. “Granddad always did have an unholy ability to give us jobs we could neither refuse nor perform without losing some piece of our souls.” Gallowglass took a deep, breath.

“Until I saw the newspaper story about Lady Pembroke’s laboratory book,” he continued, “a small part of me hoped fate might have another surprise up her sleeve. I wondered if you might come back different, or without Matthew, or without loving him as much as he loves you.”

Diana listened without saying a word.

“So I went to Sept-Tours to wait for you, like I promised Granddad I would. Emily and Sarah were always going on about the changes your timewalking might have wrought. Miniatures and telescopes are one thing. But there was only ever one man for you, Diana. And God knows there was only ever one woman for Matthew.”

“It’s strange to hear you say my name,” Diana said softly.

“So long as I call you Auntie, I never forget who really owns your heart,” Gallowglass said gruffly.

“Philippe shouldn’t have expected you to watch over me. It was cruel,” she said.

“No crueler than what Philippe expected from you,” Gallowglass replied. “And far less so than what Granddad demanded of himself.”

Seeing her confusion, Gallowglass continued.

“Philippe always put his own needs last,” Gallowglass said. “Vampires are creatures ruled by their desire, with instincts for self-preservation that are much stronger than any warmblood’s. But Philippe was never like the rest of us. It broke his heart every time Granny got restless and went away. Then I didn’t understand why Ysabeau felt it necessary to leave. Now that I’ve heard her tale, I think Philippe’s love frightened her. It was so deep and selfless that Granny simply couldn’t trust it—not after what her sire put her through. Part of her was always braced for Philippe to turn on her, to demand something for himself that she couldn’t give.”

“Ysabeau said it was Philippe who sent her away.”

“Only once or twice,” Gallowglass said. “Mostly it was Ysabeau’s choice. Whenever I see Matthew struggle to give you the freedom you need—to let you do something without him that you think is minor but that is an agony of worrying and waiting for him—it reminds me of Philippe.”

“What are we going to do now?” She didn’t mean when they got to London, but he pretended she did.

“Now we wait for Matthew,” Gallowglass said flatly. “You wanted him to establish a family. He’s off doing it.”

“I couldn’t let him kill Jack.” Under the surface of her skin, Diana’s magic pulsed again in iridescent agitation. It reminded Gallowglass of long nights watching the aurora borealis from the sandy stretch of coastline beneath the cliffs where his father and grandfather had once lived.

“Matthew won’t be able to stay away for long. It’s one thing to wander in the darkness because you know no different, but it’s quite another to enjoy the light only to have it taken from you,” Gallowglass said.

“You sound so sure,” she whispered.

“I am. Marcus’s children are a handful, but he’ll make them heel.” Gallowglass lowered his voice.

“I assume there’s a good reason you chose London?”

Her glance flickered.

“I thought so. You’re not just looking for the last missing page. You’re going after Ashmole 782. And I’m not talking nonsense,” Gallowglass said, raising his hand when Diana opened her mouth to protest. “You’ll be wanting people around you, then. People you can trust unto death, like Granny and Sarah and Fernando.” He drew out his phone.

“Sarah already knows I’m on my way to Europe. I told her I’d let her know where I was once I was settled.” Diana frowned at the phone. “And Ysabeau is still Gerbert’s prisoner. She’s not in touch with the outside world.”

“Oh, Granny has her ways,” Gallowglass said serenely, his fingers racing across the keys. “I’ll just send her a message and tell her where we’re headed. Then I’ll tell Fernando. You can’t do this alone, Auntie. Not what you’ve got planned.”

“You’re taking this very well, Gallowglass,” Diana said gratefully. “Matthew would be trying to talk me out of it.”

“That’s what you get for falling in love with the wrong man,” he said under his breath, slipping the phone back into his pocket.

Ysabeau de Clermont picked up her sleek red phone and looked at the illuminated display. She noted the time—7:37
A
.
M
. Then she read the waiting message. It began with three repetitions of a single word:

Mayday

Mayday

Mayday

She’d been expecting Gallowglass to get in touch ever since Phoebe had notified her that Marcus had departed in the middle of the night, mysteriously and suddenly, to go off and join Matthew. Ysabeau and Gallowglass had decided early on that they needed a way to notify each other when things went “pear-shaped,” to use her grandson’s expression. Their system had changed over the years, from beacons and secret messages written in onion juice to codes and ciphers, then to objects sent through the mail without explanation. Now they used the phone.

At first Ysabeau had been dubious about owning one of these cellular contraptions, but given recent events she was glad to have it restored to her. Gerbert had confiscated it shortly after her arrival in Aurillac, in the vain hope that being without it would make her more malleable.

Gerbert had returned the phone to Ysabeau several weeks ago. She had been taken hostage to satisfy the witches and to make a public show of the Congregation’s power and influence. Gerbert was under no illusion that his prisoner would part with a scrap of information that would help them find Matthew. He was, however, grateful that Ysabeau was willing to play along with the charade. Since arriving at Gerbert’s home, she had been a model prisoner. He claimed that having her phone back was a reward for good behavior, but she knew it was largely due to the fact that Gerbert could not figure out how to silence the many alarms that sounded throughout the day.

Ysabeau liked these reminders of events that had altered her world: just before midday, when Philippe and his men had burst into her prison and she felt the first glimmers of hope; two hours before sunrise, when Philippe had first admitted that he loved her; three in the afternoon, the hour she had found Matthew’s broken body in the half-built church in Saint-Lucien; 1:23
P
.
M
., when Matthew drew the last drops of blood from Philippe’s pain-ravaged body. Other alarms marked the hour of Hugh’s death and Godfrey’s, the hour when Louisa had first exhibited signs of blood rage, the hour when Marcus had demonstrated definitively that the same disease had not touched him. The rest of her daily alarms were reserved for significant historical events, such as the births of kings and queens whom Ysabeau had called friends, wars that she had fought in and won, and battles that she had unaccountably lost in spite of her careful plans.

The alarms rang day and night, each one a different, carefully chosen song. Gerbert had particularly objected to the alarm that blasted “Chant de Guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin” at 5:30
P
.
M
.—the precise moment when the revolutionary mob swept through the gates of the Bastille in 1789. But these tunes served as aide-mémoire, conjuring up faces and places that might otherwise have faded away over time.

Ysabeau read the rest of Gallowglass’s message. To anyone else it would have appeared nothing more than a garbled combination of shipping forecast, aeronautical distress signal, and horoscope, with its references to shadows, the moon, Gemini, Libra, and a series of longitude and latitude coordinates.

Ysabeau reread the message twice: once to make sure she had correctly ascertained its meaning and a second time to memorize Gallowglass’s instructions. Then she typed her reply.

Je Viens

“I am afraid it is time for me to go, Gerbert,” Ysabeau said without a trace of regret. She looked across the faux-Gothic horror of a room to where her jailer sat before a computer at the foot of an ornate carved table. At the opposite end, a heavy Bible rested on a raised stand flanked by thick white candles, as though Gerbert’s work space were an altar. Ysabeau’s lip curled at the pretension, which was matched by the room’s heavy nineteenth-century woodwork, pews converted to settees, and garish green-and blue silk wallpaper ornamented with chivalric shields. The only authentic items in the room were the enormous stone fireplace and the monumental chess set before it.

Gerbert peered at his computer screen and hit a key on the keyboard. He groaned.

“Jean-Luc will come from Saint-Lucien and help if you are still having trouble with your computer,” Ysabeau said.

Gerbert had hired the nice young man to set up a home computer network after Ysabeau had shared two morsels of Sept-Tours gossip gleaned from conversations around the dinner table: Nathaniel Wilson’s belief that future wars would be fought on the Internet and Marcus’s plan to handle a majority of the Knights of Lazarus’s banking through online channels. Baldwin and Hamish had overruled her grandson’s extraordinary idea, but Gerbert didn’t need to know that.

While installing the components of Gerbert’s hastily purchased system, Jean-Luc had needed to call back to the office several times for advice. Marcus’s dear friend Nathaniel had set up the small business in Saint-Lucien to bring the villagers into the modern age, and though he was now in Australia, he was happy to help his former employee whenever his greater experience was required. On this occasion Nathaniel had walked Jean-Luc through the various security configurations that Gerbert requested.

Nathaniel added a few modifications of his own, too.

The end result was that Ysabeau and Nathaniel knew more about Gerbert of Aurillac than she had dreamed was possible, or indeed had ever wanted, to know. It was astonishing how much a person’s online shopping habits revealed about his character and activities.

Ysabeau had made sure Jean-Luc signed Gerbert up for various social-media services to keep the vampire occupied and out of her way. She could not imagine why these companies all chose shades of blue for their logos. Blue had always struck her as such a serene, soothing color, yet all social media offered was endless agitation and posturing. It was worse than the court of Versailles. Come to think of it, Ysabeau reflected, Louis-Dieudonné had quite liked blue as well.

Gerbert’s only complaint about his new virtual existence was that he had been unable to secure “Pontifex Maximus” as a user name. Ysabeau told him that it was probably for the best, since it might constitute a violation of the covenant in the eyes of some creatures.

Sadly for Gerbert—though happily for Ysabeau—an addiction to the Internet and an understanding of how best to use it did not always go hand in hand. Because of the sites he frequented, Gerbert was plagued by computer viruses. He also tended to pick overly complex passwords and lose track of which sites he’d visited and how he had found them. This led to many phone calls with Jean-Luc, who unfailingly bailed Gerbert out of his difficulties and thereby kept up to date on how to access all Gerbert’s online information. With Gerbert thus engaged, Ysabeau was free to wander around his castle, going through his belongings and copying down the surprising entries in the vampire’s many address books.