The Wolf Esprit: Lykanos Chronicles 3

I was miserable for days, trapped in restless nights of egotistic self-loathing. The exchange replayed in my mind a hundred times, and no matter how I observed the memory, I found myself in the wrong. But that did nothing to settle my anguish, for I was also bound stubbornly to the suffering of which she’d been a part. It was as if my fruitless attempts to chastise Duccio for his behavior gave me no other choice but to berate Guccia. And, unwilling to abandon the folly of all my imbecilic emotions, I’d run mindlessly to the Palazzo Adelchi to add insult to injury.

I thought of sending her a gift. But what trinket had the slightest meaning to someone who owned everything? What bauble would she receive without feeling the height of contempt?

A vendor on the street solicited me to buy flowers from his stall. “Your lady friend will open her heart to you,” he promised. But the idea of sending Guccia blooms seemed absurd.

On the fourth day, she appeared before me, having come to Palazzo Palatino to meet her designer and review the work he completed in the main salon. Guccia didn’t acknowledge me in passing, keeping her mind on her aims until she finished.

After, as she made to leave, I placed myself between her and the front door.

“Princess?”

“I must be off,” she said with a chill, slipping into the coat Signore Vittele held out for her.

Without concern for the room’s other eyes, I stepped forward to take her into my arms. I held her to me while she protested, her limbs like stone. I love you, I said. Please forgive me.

I repeated the sentiment and opened my mind to Guccia so she would know the words were true. In time, she loosened and gave into my embrace.

“I must speak to you,” I whispered.

Without an answer, she allowed me to take her coat, and I handed it back to Signore Vittele, who excused himself from the uncomfortable scene with gratitude.

Drawing Guccia into the library, I brought her to a sofa. I all but pulled her to sit close beside me.

Guccia looked into my eyes with an expression of agitation, the same look she’d greeted me with the day after her party.

“You didn’t deserve what I said to you,” I started, “and I loathe myself for failing you when you needed me.” I sent images to her mind to clarify how I referred to Duccio’s behavior at the ball. “My suffering blinded me, and I failed you with desertion, failed our pact.”

“But why?” she answered in time. “Why did you go? I mean at the opera. Why did you flee as you did?”

I sighed, realizing she’d moved past the sting of my failure to discuss my behavior at the ball. Guccia wanted to understand how the whole debacle started.

“My lycan mother had an…ability,” I began, unsure I should call it a gift, even to this woman I trusted and treasured. “She could hear the suffering of certain humans—women or children who endured men’s violence. For leagues around, she could hear their cries for mercy. They drew her wolf to come to their aid. She and I never had the chance to discuss it, but Duccio knew of her ability and recognized it in me. That’s what happened to me after the music began—I heard the cry of a man like myself, who suffered at the hands of three men who wished him death for it.”

Guccia stared in silence, her brow furrowed in confusion. Or was it disgust?

“My grandfather, Sempronio, believed it our duty to aid such people. I know that’s not a belief most of our race share. But what happened to me that night was well out of my control. I felt that human’s suffering from across the city, just as if it were my body they attacked. His pain swept over me, and my wolf raced to his location to put down the attackers.”

“Out of your control?”

I made to answer her but slowed to consider my words.

“You did something you didn’t mean to?” Guccia prompted me again, her eyes imploring me to explain myself better.

“I didn’t mean for that man’s suffering to trigger my wolf, and racing to him was more of a need to stop the pain in my limbs because they beat him. But when I arrived and saw what they were doing, the cruel indignities he endured while half-conscious, I didn’t hesitate to aid him. I killed every one of his assailants and brought him here to nurse his wounds.”

I showed Guccia every detail of my memory, and let her smell their blood as I slaughtered the three men. She saw Pietro’s face in my bed as he winced from the agony of his broken ribs. He whispered words of gratitude and love to Michael, the mighty archangel, for his rescue.

Guccia looked up at the ceiling as if she might see through it to find him, though I knew she couldn’t. She’d never heard a human’s thoughts before, not even through her father, who kept his mind closed to all. The sensation puzzled her.

In a moment, she rose from the sofa to find Pietro. Following her, I escorted her to the second floor, where his new quarters were.

“Come,” he called when I knocked on the guestroom door.

Pietro sat on a lounge chair, the only one in which he did not feel tremendous pain when he sat. He’d told the servants that even laying in bed agitated the pain in his ribcage. The color of deep eggplant rimmed Pietro’s eyes. Hideous green welts covered the rest of his face; gifts from the shoes that broke his nose. It took a moment to find the warmth in the man’s eyes, which were still bloodshot after several days.

Nini, his white cat retrieved from his apartment, nuzzled in Pietro’s lap. The little beast had already slaughtered more than a dozen rats in the palazzo to earn his master’s keep.

“Forgive our intrusion, signore,” I whispered. “This is my cousin, Signorina Adelchi. She only wanted to meet you.”

“Of course, signorina, it’s my pleasure. I apologize for my appearance and ask your forgiveness that I do not rise for you. It would be a struggle even if my friend were not asleep.”

“Not at all, Signore.”

Guccia opened her mouth as if she meant to say more, but she only smiled and bid the man good afternoon before withdrawing back to the hall.

“You think me wrong to comfort him as I do. Stupid even.”

Guccia couldn’t disguise her preoccupation. I saw the whole thing made no sense to her.

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted. “It’s all strange. You’d be wise to keep the whole thing to yourselves. There are those who would question why you did not send all four of them to the cathedral’s kitchen.”

With a chill, I knew what she meant. I should’ve slaughtered Pietro, along with the other three troublemakers. Many would expect them to be sent to Saint Mark’s Cathedral to be processed for a sacramental offering.

I hadn’t seen such a thing done during my time in Venice. But I knew well enough from Duccio’s warning that religious ritual had its place here to some degree, just as on the rest of the continent.

But I also knew from Guccia’s hesitant tone that she questioned the wisdom of it. Hearing Pietro’s thoughts from my memory changed her perception of him.

Like many lycan I knew, Guccia saw humans as little more significant than other lower creatures. Having only a verbal connection with mortals, unable to hear their thoughts and emotions, she saw them as little more than ghosts who lived among us. But for a moment, a sensation that there was more to them stole the resolve of her confidence.

“I disagree with the slaughter of humans, not for food nor sacrifice to God,” I declared. “I consider the whole affair ghastly.”

It was a risk to utter such words among lycan kind, and to this of all women. But my words didn’t seem to anger Guccia. I read her silence as a continued inner struggle she’d wrestled with since I’d described the episode with Pietro.

“It has never mattered to me,” she confessed after a long pause. “My elders do it, and I’ve always accepted it. But it never made the slightest difference to me in any genuine sense. I’ve felt nothing like your empathy for the man in that bedroom.”

Guccia stared at me, her eyes hesitant to say more. But then I felt the last of her reservation fall away, and her mind opened once again as it had been before our falling out.

“I do not keep religion in my heart as most do. It’s always been something little more than obligation. I lead the rituals because it’s expected of me—because Father would have me do so, not because I believe what the priests instruct. Sometimes, I don’t think anyone believes in it, even the priests.”

Guccia’s omission passed over her lips with the sound of freedom, but I sensed it demanded no small measure of trust for her to speak such truths.

I took her hand in mine as a promise of my confidence. She would never need to be concerned about my friendship or devotion.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I started.

Guccia’s brow furrowed in confusion, but I sent Duccio’s guise to her mind to clarify my meaning.

“I’m not like him—I can’t find satisfaction in pleasure just for pleasure’s sake. Sometimes he seems concerned about my feelings. But then greed seizes his mind, and all concern for me disappears. He revels in those moments as if taking pleasure in my suffering.”

You are mine, his voice had whispered in my mind long after he’d said the words aloud.

Guccia said nothing in response. Perhaps she was still unconvinced of my earlier contrition, or perhaps it did not matter if I was sorry.

“Whatever the answer is, I don’t believe I can do it.”

“What choice do you have?” Guccia asked this with an almost imperceptible whisper. “What choice do either of us have?”

“I will leave. This very day, if possible. I will leave him and all this behind. I’ll go as far away as I can get. There are places I might go. Gabrielle said that in the Americas, there are those who do not worship as we do here. They may not persecute me for my family’s beliefs or our practices. They will not declare me a heretic.”

I thought I saw tears in her eyes for a moment, but she laid her head against my chest to hide them from me.

“No,” she whispered. “Please, you must not leave me.”