The Blood: A Denouement

That night, the nude man simply becomes a wolf and I am left with Piers, wrapped in his cloak.

Piers tells me this man is Hagano. He is the spirit of our family, our family he says, for Piers is a distant cousin, and he tells me that my family knows of its past but has forgotten what to do.

“You no longer remember how to Change,” he says. Once, he says, we all changed.

“Once we changed without the cloaks,” he says.

I ask him how he knows Hagano, and he tells me he saw him from the corner of his eyes, as a boy, that when he was a boy Hagano came to him.

“He will come to you, too,” Piers says, “if you let him.”

Piers says, sounding more serious than I have ever known him:

“He will teach you all things.”

The next day, tired and weary, an old woman arrived at the courtyards outside the kitchen. I went to see her because my mother, who was always a gracious mistress went first.

“Old Mother, what has been done to you?” my mother asked her.

She was obviously a peasant and hard done by, not simply old but hungry and half dead, and she told us of how she had left her home because there was no family to care for her any more and right now she only desired some gruel or a crust of bread.

“You will have that,” my mother said judiciously, “for I doubt you could handle more in your current state. And you will have rest as well, and my own mother who is skilled in healing will see to you.”

I followed my mother and my grandmother as they got this old woman into an actual bed in the house. Hospitality was ever the rule of our family. My grandmother, severely dressed as she was, was a great contrast to this old woman and for the first time I saw the difference between simplicity and poverty.

Having eaten, the woman fell to sleep murmuring, and while my grandmother gently washed her hands and her limbs, and rubbed herbs and oils into them, she said, “She is like me. She is what I am, only she did not have a great name and a great house to help her. But I am sure in her time possessed even greater power.”

Neither I nor Mother said anything and Grandmother said, “This lady,” lady she said, “did not merely have to leave home. I am sure she was driven from it. As a witch.”

It was Alice who said, “This is the Mad Woman of Essenbad.”

“You would be mad too,” my Grandmother said, still speaking in a crooning voice as now she began to wash the woman’s white hair, “if such mad things as had been done to her were done to you.”

Her name is Gisela. She isn’t mad at all, but she is tired and it takes her two weeks to recover. When she does, she goes out into the country and finds pools in the forest to wash in. She brings back the herbs Grandmother has longed for and what Grandmother had learned from books, Gisela supplements with what she learned in the woods and what she learned from the women before her. Grandmother is right, here at Uvenburg, where the sick only come to see the wealthy and saintly woman who is dressed nearly like a nun, and lives in a Catholic stronghold, she is free to do the things that Gisela, called an old witch could not, to cure the ills and bless the crops. Gisela does not wantto be seen and none but those living in the house know she is here, and the servants of Uvenburg have always been loyal to the house. My father says that men want to be treated like men and women want what is fair, so where there is no fairness and little grace, he is fairer than fair. Where servants are worked even on Sunday, works stops on Friday. Where people are paid just enough to live on and that barely, he pays well. If you want well, you must do well and if you want loyalty, loyal you must be. The law of the land is that is the prince or duke of a territory be Catholic, then so must all be, if Lutheran than that, and no room for much else. But in Uvenburg, though most attend Saints processions, many do not, and it is not looked upon. There are Jews here with their strange knowledge of what they call Cabala, and there are those who worship gods older than the arguments between Jews and the many many types of Christians. Uvenburg is a haven and so we keep things quiet and protect one another.

There is a small old church that is hunched hear the house, with a little stone cross, and it received blows, the destruction of statues during the time of Martin Luther. When the taxmen come or people from the prince, it is said to be an old ruin unlike the newer church, but most days of the week all sorts go in there, women as well as men, and all cover their heads. The women are separated from the men by a lattice which comes down, but here amidst the ruins of thr stations of the cross and the old baptismal bearded men whisper about old mysteries and where the tabernacle once held the Body of Christ it now houses old scrolls. Here, I would come and my father and grandfathers and cousins and hear the Jews speak of Cabala and how in the beginning the light of God filled all things, but it was so intense is shattered and now, in this world, it is ours to bring those pieces together.

“There is truth in this,” Gisela says, and it is one of the first things I have heard her say. “I heard, once, an old Jew say, “His name is one and his name shall be one. He knew better than he spoke. All is one, The flower and the bee, the sea and the sky, the man, and the beast.”

When I looked at her, she said ,”How do you think I escaped Essenbad?”

“The rumor,” I said, stressing the word rumor, “is that that you changed your form and slipped out as a beast.”

Old Gisela was peeling dry herbs with my grandmother. Her face changed not at all, nor did she look at me.

“There is truth in rumor,” she said. “Always.”

That full moon, I went out with Piers, not waiting for him to invite me. Outside, beneath the light of the moon, he undressed and I saw him fully, a long tall, young and naked man. As earthy as my mother and grandmother were, they’d never taught me about these feelings. He put the cloak upon himself and in moments came up out of it, changed, and I looked upon his wolf form, and then, with no need of prompting, I undressed before him, and I placed the cloak on myself and I felt the Change upon me, working itself from the inside. I had imagined the cloak changing me, but it was as if the cloak called to something in me that was reaching out to the cloak, becoming fur, becoming long sinews, becoming claws, becoming snout and teeth, becoming what I had always been, and now Piers and I were running under the moonlight. When the other wolf came I knew it was Hagano. They taught me the delight of the lope through the hills, the tireless body of the wolf, the book of the forest, all the secrets revealed in the smells of the wind and the weeds, the grass and the trees and the delight of the kill.

As morning approached, I knew another delight. I understood what Gisela meant when she spoke of a God older than God, and in the predawn darkness, when Piers and I changed form, we lay together as man and woman for the first time and returned to the house, hands linked, smiling. My face was radiant with heat and, opened by him, I was a maid no more.

We made love every night, Piers drawing me into the sort of wild wolf love we would always know and that most women never tasted. In the night, under the light of the moon, he traced my nipples with his tongue, and traced the shapes of my breasts with gentle fingers. The hand that stroked my cheek came down to the bush between my thighs, and its gentle pressures and long tender fingers awakened pleasure in me, make a wetland of the valley below. He kissed me all up and down and I ran my hands up and down his flesh in the night, feeling the soft, almost transparent hair of his blond body. Only after we had touched in every way did his tongue dart inside of me, did his mouth consume my womanhood and then, without his asking me too, I grew curious about his manhood, about the thickness of the long hard penis, and placed it in my mouth. We pleasured each other and went to the edge of desire and only then, did he enter me, the hardness of a man in the moistness of a woman. His seed had sprayed in me several times by the time the sun rose high over the hills on May Day and I came, arrayed in white, into the chapel of Saint Madeleine, and was wed to Piers in the approved way.

And so my father sent ahead my servants and dowry, but I and Piers rode alone, like Lancelot and Guinevere under the blossoms, and in the day we laughed and made merry, and in the night we changed our forms and ran over the hills. Disheveled and in love, and foolishly, on our own, we avoided Essenbad on the wishes of Gisela, but came upon the village of Eisinger, two days east of my new home. The innkeeper seemed gracious, and the storyteller told fine tales as good ale was poured for Piers and good wine for me. The people seemed kind enough, but perhaps it was because we only had eyes for each other. When we grew sleepy, we thought it was because of our long travels and this being the first time we’d stayed in the comfort of an inn, and when we went to bed early, we assumed that, being young, we might wake soon enough and be on our way.

When I woke, it was to Piers shouting, and when I woke fully, head aching, it was to Piers yelping as a cruel man with a hot poker thrust it through the bars at my husband. Piers was so young. I had never noticed that before, and he was as embarrassed as he was angry.

“Next we’ll get your bitch of a wolf wife,” I heard another say and Piers shouted, “Genevieve. Genevieve get up.”

We had gone to bed in a private room on a soft bed, and thankfully we had not undressed, for how much worse would that have been? But now we were in a prison cell with strong metal bars.

“Yes, all the wolf magic won’t get you out of here,” another taunted.

Eisinger was our Essenbad, but we were not witches with the power to change into small things, or even change very well into wolves without the cloak, and the men leering at us told me there would be no escape.

We had made the decision, without speaking, to show no fear, to be as haughty as possible in the face of enemies who had done what they did to us. This meant even no asking questions, and there were many questions in my mind, like how these people knew what we were? If, somehow, they had the rest of Piers’ family. How had this plot been made? Were these people going to look for my kin?

But as many questions as I had, in time, still half drugged, I slept and so did Piers. We were side by side, sleeping fitfully, against the wall, as far from burning pokers as we could be. When I heard the first shouts from down below, I could not help it, I grasped Piers’ hand . Two of the men rose from where they were watching us, and one went down the hall, and the other, who was the innkeeper smiled at us and said, “Don’t think you’ll be getting away tonight. Or—”

I believe he was going to say, “or any night”, but at that moment, screams came from the hall beyond and then the whole place was plunged in darkness. I heard the innkeeper give a startled yelp and all around was the whistling sound of something moving quickly, the gurgle of water or something thicker than water, yes, blood. There was a last strangled cry and then silence, and through all this I held Piers’ hand.

And then, there was, in the distance, after the darkness, one pinprick of light, and in the darkness it came nearer and nearer and then it moved so that suddenly a torch on the wall roared to life, and then another, and then a lantern on the floor. And as light dawned in that prison house again, we saw, on the other side of the bars, a woman slender and in a red gown, a blue shawl about her shoulders. Black hair fell to her waist, but most extraordinarily, her skin was dark, dark like the expensive mahogany from over the sea, and her eyes glinted blue. I noticed her before I noticed what she had done, for who else had done it? Three men, one of them the innkeeper, lay on their backs, arms flung up, eyes wide open in horror, dead, their throats ripped open, and as she smiled at us she showed us long the white teeth in her mouth. She put her hand to the lock and murmured a word and the lock clinked and gave way, and then she opened it.

“Come. Be quick. Follow me to the inn,” she said.

We never dared to question her and as we left the prison house, going down the steps and through the main floor, all about us there were dead. When we came outside, we were surprised, though we should not have been, to see that she was not the only one of her kind standing under the moon in the night.

“Madam,” it was Piers who spoke. “I thank you. I am Piers de Jacquillard. Pray tell, who are you?”

“I am Tanitha,” she said.

“What are you?” I asked.

She smiled on us, and though she was smaller than either Piers or I, she seemed much taller.

“A friend,” she said.

“Tanitha!” Owen sat up.

“Is the name familiar?” Uriah asked him. He looked all about the room and especially behind him where was the large dining room and beyond that the living room, all in darkness.

“Yes,” Owen said. “Unless there be another, and I do not think there is. Tanitha is the daughter of Kruinh Kertesz. He told me of her, and in the days when Levy has called with Lewis, they have told me of her as well.

“A vampire.”

“Yes.”

“In this account. Living in 1630.”

“It would seem so,”Owen said. “And she lives now. She is Laurie and Chris’s older sister by adoption. She made Levy cocoa.”