The Blood: A Denouement

Fourteen

Witchcraft

And

Revelation

I am alone in the chamber of my tower. Rain pelts the window, a stormy night outside.

-The Black Books

Late the next morning, they all sat in the circle save Kris who sat in the center, and he wore the torque on his arm and none of them looked at the other. Owen, Drusilla, Seth and Marabeth, Jim, Loreal, and Uriah with Peter, Lewis and Augustus held hands. Jason had initially stood outside it, but it was Jim who said, “No. You belong right here. You have shared the visions. Sit with us.”

Augustus had begun murmuring words that rose into a chant. Standing together, Joyce, Chris and Levy watched.

Pi wo a, gemmed azure se

Toutouni bèl Nuit la;

Li bese nan Ecstasy pou bo

Armour sekrè Hadit.

Glòb la zèl, ble zetwal la,

Se mwen menm, O Ankh-af-na-khonsu!

Koute m ', nou menm moun k'ap soupi!

Chagren yo nan doulè ak regrèt

Yo kite mò yo ak moun ki mouri,

Moun ki poko konnen mwen.

Jou lannwit sa a anvan yo tout te ale.

As Augustus chanted, Levy looked to Chris. He knew better than to speak even in a whisper, and he was surprised when he heard Chris speaking into him.

What?

What is he saying?

It doesn’t really matter, Chris said. And it doesn’t matter what it comes from. Either. Augustus is only using sounds to—

But just then everyone stopped, for Kris Strauss, in the center of them all suddenly made a horrible noise, his back arched, and his face grimaced. Uriah stopped himself from reaching out to Chris.. Marabeth and Jim could not, but without missing a beat, Augustus slapped the floor for them to stop, and Kris, fell on the floor in the middle of them, unconscious.

Pi wo a, gemmed azure se

Toutouni bèl Nuit la;

Li bese nan Ecstasy pou bo

Armour sekrè Hadit.

The whole room was quiet, and Lewis said, “Levy, would you burn the frankincense now?’

A few moments later, the sharp, sweet smell of church wafted toward them, and the boy came forward, holding a small brass censer. Owen and then Lewis Augustus continued to chant until, with a great intake of breath, as if something had been sucked out of them all, Peter, Marabeth, Jim and Seth, all collapsed.

Joyce’s eyes went wide, but calmly, Drusilla Dunharrow said, “Leave them.”

Kristian Strauss had a feeling that he would only describe as like an orgasm, but with none of the pleasure, being suddenly thrust from his body, and standing in this wood. The ground was wet, and the air was thick with mist, the trees, dripping crystal beads of dew. They were walking toward an old house. They were following someone. Blood was dripping here too. They had passed someone. They were in the house. They looked up.

They?

Kris saw at his side, Peter, Jason, Marabeth and Jim. A bird sat on Jim’s shoulder and Kris knew without a doubt that this was Seth.

They were in the house, and the Sorcerer stood in his white, hooded robe, and Hagano came, and he was dripping with rain, his silver gold hair wet.

“It is done.”

“Done?” the Sorcerer said.

And at once, Hagano set on the table a great wolf pelt Marabeth recognized as her own, and from it he revealed the bloody and astonished head of a woman, stained by a lump of meat he pulled out of her mouth. Her hair had been blond, but it was covered in gore, and her mouth was open in horror.

“You have done it,” the Sorcerer said with no passion.

“I have.”

“And what else do you have?”

Hagano touched the meat that had rested in the mouth of his sister, and Kris Strauss realized from his days in anatomy, it was a heart.

“Well, now you have done it,” the Sorcerer said, “but did you discover why she did what she did? Did she tell you before she died?”

“Before I killed her?”

“Aye!”

“Her husband. He did take her by force, but in time she allied herself to him. She knew I would kill him in the end. She was seduced by a great treasure. They say he was as well. It was witch work. Not truly hers. It always escaped her grasp and it said, Take me Take me. It spoke to me. It said take me when you kill her. And I took it. But… you knew all this.”

“I did.”

“I wonder, could this have all been done without what I have done.”

“Without you killing your sister? No. No, I do not lie, for a witch cannot. We may twist the truth, but we cannot unmake it. And what she had is what I will need to do what I must do.”

“I can give you both,” Hagano said. “I don’t want either.”

“I only need the one, and when I’ve had it you shall have it again. The other you keep. Keep it for now. At this moment, let us not speak of treasures lost and stolen. Now, we can get to the serious work of making you into the Wolf.

The Sorcerer pushed up his hood and gave a great sigh, and Kris and all of them beheld, without a doubt, the face of Lewis Dunharrow.

Kris almost flew back into the present, but he heard the voice of Augustus Dunharrow, sharp.

“Do not lose the vision. Stay, Children of the Wolf. Stay grandson of Pamela. Hold to the witch cord. Do not lose the vision.”

And even as the Sorcerer who was Lewis took the heart in his hands, the vision swung away from him and Hagano, and they were looking at a forest with snow falling among the black fir trees, and behold, a woman with thick golden hair and the red wolf cloak and Kris said, “Rosamunde, the woman of the dream.”

Jim recognized this as the past, no vision like he’d had with Seth. The air was chill and real, the trees were thick and real, and this woman who rode on the horse and stopped before Hagano was real as well..

“You know what to do,” he told her.

She dismounted and stood before him, and gold rings were about her proud arms, and a great necklace hanging over her breasts was of gold as well. She stared at him with defiance, but what happened next was that she kissed him, and he kissed her deeply in return.

“This cannot be the only way.”

“He said it long ago, and it is so. The Gift was lost in such a way before. If you would have it you must always have me. I will be in the keeping of the women in every generation. But for this to be, you must do what I have said.”

“I cannot,” she said.

“The magic is done. I have drunk from the Cup, and it is done. There is nothing to fear. It was done when I killed my sister. It was done when I ate her heart and consumed her tongue. It was done when I lay with your mother.”

“And done again when you lay with me?”

“That was the way it must be and must always be. And it will be done now, when you have consumed me.”

They talked on and on, but their talking, their struggling and, at last, their lovemaking gave way to a scene of two wolves running, and one chasing the other down and killing it, cosuming it slowly, over the course of days. Only the pelt, white gold, which Jim recognized as his, remained.

This gave way to the woman now giving birth, bearing two squalling children. Brown hands lifted them up and she looked up into the face of Lewis Dunharrow while the midwives attended her.

“You are the King and you are the Queen,” he said, “and as long as there is a King and Queen, and as long as the two lines know each other, the Gift shall remain. When the lines are split, when the knowing is lost, the Gift will not leave, but it will lessen. It will become the Curse. The children of these children will not control it, but it will control them.”

At the look on Rosamunde’s face, Lewis continued, “That is the way of it, my girl. That is the only way.”

He handed one child and then the other to the golden haired woman.

“Will you stay?”

“I will not, but I will return to make right this work when it goes wrong,”

“When it is forgotten?”

“No,” Lewis shook his head. “When it can no longer be controlled. When the knowledge is lost. Three bloods ties us together, two lines tie you to yours. When the ties are lost, I shall return to restore them. I will restore them and take back the treasures I have placed in your hands. That I vow, and I vow with the witch’s word.”

Now Kristian Strauss stared in horror. These surroundings were familiar. He knew exactly where he was. This was Peter’s house, the old Keller house on Williams Street, and his uncle—his cousin, actually—Granger—was changing. Vanessa’s eyes had gone wild and wide. It shouldn’t have been happening now, and before Granger stood a woman with golden hair in a red cloak. Kris was sure Vanessa could not see her, and the woman said.

“Fix your eyes on me. Look upon me, and you will never lose yourself. Look upon me.”

But Granger could not. The middle aged lawyer who looked like his son Peter, the business man, could look upon nothing, and he lost his wits, and the red cloaked woman fled away on the air the same time Peter turned his head and Jim and Marabeth held onto him.. Kris heard Vanessa’s shriek, and Granger’s snarls—

.

And then they were racing along the road, making fast dashes and sharp turns, and Kris didn’t know the car, but when it came to a mad halt, he saw it was his father, throwing off his great trench coat, throwng down his satchels and running toward the river. With a roar, Nathan Strauss, grey skinned and haunted, hair graying, transformed into the black and white wolf. They watched him run through the night, taking down beasts, sniffing the air, trotting through trees. Toward the morning he encountered a wild cat. But it did not back down. The beasts did battle and blood and fur filled the vision of the Strausses. In the end the wild cat was dead, but the wolf that was Nathan, weak and bloodied, trotted back to where he had been human.

When the sun was rising, Kris saw his father lying weak and naked, a thin, greyed man in his early sixties, his side wounded. A river was rushing near by, and the coat and the discarded satchel were by him. Kris could hear the sound of rushing water, and now he could see the woman in her cloak.

“I was going back to them,” Nathan said “I was on my way back.”

And she said, “I wanted to help you. I wanted to help all of you. But you needed your Queen, and no one knew. Even Pamela only knew at the end, and it was only at the very end that she knew you needed your King.”

But Nathan could not hear her, and rising painfully on his knees, now on his feet, blood pouring from his side, he staggered toward the river as the red cloaked woman looked on, and Kris was pulled back into wakefulness

The rest of that day was quiet. It felt, to Kris, like Good Friday when they were younger and they spent all day in church after the drama of Holy Week. Peter went off to be alone, and Joyce was smart enough to let him. But they all felt raw and a little terrible.

“I’m not Peter,” Jim told Seth, “and I really don’t want to be alone.”

“Rosamunde,” Chris Ashby said.

“Kruinh’s neice,” Loreal said. “The one Laurie and Dan went to see.”

“They are not the same,” Chris shook his head, “the vampire, and that woman in the visions.”

“But linked?”

Chris looked at her.

“I cannot say. Only, it seems more is linked than we knew.”

“She was the daughter of Leinghelde,” Jason said, looking at Marabeth while he sat down.

“I didn’t know what had happened to you,” she said. “When I woke up this morning you were gone.”

“I was between times,” Jason said. “I woke in the woods. After Hagano killed his sister Signy and with the aid of… Lewis, became the Wolf, he went to Mechtild, a Burgund queen. By her he had Leinghelde. Later he slept with her.”

“And had Rosamunde,” Kris said. “The list of our ancestors shows that. Rosamunde was Leinghelde’s daughter.”

“And then he was with Rosamunde, his own granddaughter, and he had….”

“All of us,” Marabeth said.

“And Rosamunde killed him, ritually,” Jason said, “so that he would always live and you would always be… what you are.”

“Grandmother, what big eyes you have,” Loreal said.

Marabeth looked at her.

“Mechtild had the big eyes, the desire for the wolf. The wolf was Hagano. Rosamunde is Red Riding Hood. She and her mother and her grandmother were swallowed by the Wolf. They became the Wolf through birth and through mating with Hagano, and then to remain the wolf, Red Riding Hood slayed him, and made of him a cloak. Jim’s cloak, which is Hagano’s skin as your’s Marabeth is Signy’s.”

Kris took it all in, but he could not stop thinking of his father. They had seen Nathan Strauss die, and Nathan had been on his way home to them. He had not killed himself after all. If things had been different, he would have been at the door himself, and… but no, it was Marabeth who said before the rest of them, there was no point in trying to imagine an alternate story. This was the story they had, and she knew despite everything that she didn’t really regret it.