She has no idea how much power lives inside her.
A young girl's life is about to change. By her father's arrangement, Gabriella is to marry a local merchant twice her age in the spring of 1693. Though she is afraid to leave her family, the fifteen...
The next morning, Aoustin reunited with his beloved son. The tired old man woke just after dawn to find Phillippe's face hovering over him, gleaming with love. No word had come from the battlefront in a year. Worse, the Seven Years' War had been over for months. But now, without warning, his only remaining child had returned to him, robust and healthy. His beautiful golden face was as young and alive as the old man remembered. There wasn't a single mark on his skin that might describe the horror of living so many years at the front.
After tears came prayers. Still wearing his sleeping shirt, the baron took to his knees. He was overwhelmed by gratitude for his son's safe deliverance from Hell back home. He thanked God with the humility of a starving beggar.
Then Phillipe presented me: Gabrielle Von Borchardt, now Roussade. We had been married before the final battle and ceasefire. Dressed in his mother's clothes, recovered from a crate in her room, I bowed deeply to the baron before being taken into his arms. God had rewarded his faith not only with his only son's return but with a daughter. Not only did he find me beautiful, but he thought my French was perfect, with only the slightest hint of a foreign accent now and then. His boyish elation and kisses were more endearing than I could have expected.
The house of only four remaining staff members was also elated to awaken to Phillipe's return. The young son of the baron's cook confirmed how he had awakened to receive us in the middle of the night. After, the boy had returned to bed without waking the house at the young master's insistence. Aside from Aoustin's memories, the young boy's recollections were the only alteration I needed to make. None of the servants had ever seen Phillipe, each having come to the fortress after the war had begun. They'd only seen the young master in portraits of a blond youth. It delighted them to meet the tall man in the flesh, with his dazzling green eyes and handsome features, returned home with their future mistress in hand.
Within days the house took on twice the staff. Once again, receiving the proper attention, the fortress took on the gleam of earlier decades. Aoustin had his son with him, and the family's once-frozen future was alive again. The two talked endlessly about everything, recalling war stories shared only in letters and a hundred details about the estate, which the young Roussade must be ready to one day undertake.
"I will be here to help you, of course. But I am old and may catch my death any winter now," Aoustin told his son. The man's face betrayed the weight of his words with the slightest thrill of satisfaction in his eyes.
"Of course, Father."
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More than a year passed.
After slipping into our new lives with such ease, I often had trouble sleeping through the night. Startling flashbacks would wake me from anxious dreams. No matter how comfortable our lives became in Burgundy, it was impossible to go back to the blind peace of Castello Palatino.
I never sensed a single lycan in our new territory, and every pleasurable opportunity to take my werewolf form dissatisfied me. No matter how far I ran or how invigorating it was to answer the call of someone in need, I never returned to the Forteresse de Roussade without looking back into the night feeling a chill, sure we were being watched.
In the warmth of an early summer night, I returned with Maximo from just such an outing.
Before passing into the front gate, I looked back to find a man at the edge of the moat staring back at us.
He sat upon a large chestnut stallion, the man's figure imposing in the full moonlight, though he dressed as a gentleman. His mind sealed, he offered nothing but the simplest confirmation of his being lycan.
"Inside," Maximo whispered before calling forth his dark protector.
I slipped through the tower door as ordered but stood there to watch as Maximo moved back across the bridge and down the entrance road to meet the stranger. When Maximo stood but ten feet away, massive in his commanding werewolf form, the man's horse barely reacted.
"You trespass in my lord's domain," said the stranger.
"This is our home, and we know nothing of your lord."
Maximo's answer was calm and direct, but without the slightest tone of goodwill.
"You will both be gone from here by first light."
"Will we?"
With a last look of menacing certainty, the stranger ended the exchange by riding off into the dark.
"Do you think he knows who we are?" I asked when Maximo returned to the tower.
"There's no way to be sure. But we have a decision to make."
I didn't want to face that choice, but the same idea ran through my head. Faced with a nameless foe we couldn't estimate, what chance was there to bargain?
We'd only passed into the entrance hall when I became distracted and sensed something amiss.
The house was empty. Not a single person was asleep in their beds.
Maximo continued ahead of me but abruptly stopped, releasing a tremor of fear. Scrawled in blood on a wall before him was the word 'HERETIC.' Beneath the word lay the mutilated body of the cook's fifteen-year-old son in a scrambled mess. His eyes were missing from their sockets, and a cross was carved into his forehead.
Maximo raced upstairs to find the others, ignoring my calls for him to stop. I somehow knew they weren't here any longer. The boy had been left as a warning, an accusation, but the others had been taken. Instead of waiting for confirmation of my intuition, I transformed and raced out into the night alone.
I flew with fire in my veins, finding the miserable fiend's light only a quarter mile ahead of me down the country road. I pursued him faster than his stallion could dream of moving, taking him by surprise at the last second to send him tumbling from his horse.
"What have you done with my household?!" I roared, ripping at his lycan flesh.
He tumbled to the ground while the horse rode on. When he finally came to a stop, writhing in pain from the fall, he rose as a werewolf from his ripped clothes.
"You dare!" he growled.
I slashed at him over and over, landing at least two blows that broke through his hide.
"Where are they, damn you!"
From his mind, I saw a flash. The humans were already dead, their corpses being butchered nearby for delivery to his lair. I knew it was not an image he meant for me to see, but something that escaped from his mind in battle. Seeing it was true, rage overtook me, and I roared at the devil.
Perhaps recognizing his accident, he released an image of Baron Aoustin, alive but beaten and barely conscious. They had bound his hands, and he rode in the back of a wagon with blood dripping from his scalp.
Unwilling to see anymore, I leapt forward to sever his head from his body. He fell back under my weight but stopped my talons from their attempt, taking advantage to deliver blows to my abdomen as we tumbled.
Getting to his feet the same as me, he postured to attack just before Maximo flew into his side. Taking advantage of his disorientation, I cast a hate-filled burst of energy at his mind.
The stranger screamed into the night, losing control of his legs and falling again to the dirt road. He suffered lamely on the ground, reaching as if to guard his head. In seconds, blood flowed from his nostrils, ears, and eyes. His brain liquified in the boiling heat of my attack. With a final shudder, the light in him dispersed, and he lay dead in silence.
