The Wolf Esprit: Lykanos Chronicles 3

“But how?” I asked, my impatience raising my voice. I couldn’t fathom how she’d succeeded with such a rouse.

“By altering his memories,” she answered without pause.

“I don’t understand.”

“I can alter the memories of humans. I can enter their minds, just as I did to calm Aoustin, and there change the fabric of their memories of the world around them.”

Confounded, I tore my eyes from her to consider what she said.

“Have you ever done that to me?” I shot back, at once fearful the reason I sat in this fortress was on account of their diabolical manipulations. Was that to explain my willingness to leave my family? Was I now their captor?

“Not at all,” she answered, her gentle voice filled with patience. “I cannot manipulate lycan memories in the same way. Some lycan bear such talent, and that power may come to me as I grow older, but it’s quite beyond me now, as it was the first night I met Aoustin.”

From what I could tell, from what Gabrielle’s mind showed me, her words were true. But with a chill, I vowed never to forget that she might manipulate me one day.

“Go on, then. What happened to Aoustin?”

“The following day, he reunited with his beloved son. The tired older 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 ended months earlier. 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 older 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. Gratitude overwhelmed him for his son’s safe deliverance from hell back home. He thanked God with the humility of a starving beggar.

“Then Phillippe presented me: Gabrielle Von Borchardt, now Roussade. We’d been married before the last 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 son’s return but with a daughter. Not only did he find me beautiful, 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.

“Also elated were the house’s four remaining staff members when they awakened to Phillippe’s return. The young son of the baron’s cook confirmed how he had awakened to receive us in the middle of the night. Afterward, the boy 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 Phillippe, 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.”

Gabrielle went silent again, and I could sense how the memories replayed in her mind to distraction.

“And that’s it?” I asked with an incredulous tone.

“That’s it?” she countered with a slight frown. “I promise you, it was no minor accomplishment to make this life happen for Max and me.”

“Forgive me, but it seems too simple. Did no one realize Maximillian was not the baron’s son?

“No one,” she confirmed again. “We were fortunate, but as I said, there was no one who might know but Aoustin, and I severed and altered his memories.”

“And then, you and Maximillian lived here with the baron until he passed away, and the estate became yours properly? Or did you kill him? What exactly had you been running from when you found this fortress?”

A dark shadow passed over Gabrielle’s eyes, and my mind stumbled to recognize how I’d insulted her.

Without a word, she rose from her sofa and walked about the room in silence, as if to calm herself. I felt painfully remorseful for blurting out something offensive to this woman who’d captured my imagination.

Forgive me, I said with my silent voice.

“Max and I’ve agreed that my role will be to educate you and prepare you to survive this world—to survive time itself as our father did. That education will include universal academic instruction. But I will also prepare you to understand the lycan world you face. You are as safe as possible here. But never allow yourself to believe that you are truly safe. Not from our kind.”

Again, I waited for her to expand on the dangers they’d alluded to days earlier when they said I could expect to be taken and rendered into submission by any other wolf pack I met.

“I was born into blind safety, just as you have been. Coming of age at the foot of the Milanese alps—the roof of the Kingdom of Italy—the pack of Castello Palatino claimed me as one of their own. Our Father was unrivaled among every house on the continent, and his age bespoke such unfathomable power that no one dared to cross our borders without his invitation. Sempronius mons Palatinus was his given name, spoken in a tongue all but forgotten by the time I came to him. He lived for more than fifteen hundred years. He showed us how long this existence might last.”

Gabrielle paused as if lost in her thoughts, but she postured to continue.

“One of his own children betrayed him.”

“How was he betrayed?”

She exhaled at length as if unwilling to answer.

“It matters not, now,” she said. “What happened as a result was that his few children are now scattered or, more likely, dead. It was blind luck Max found me as we fled the castle for our lives. Every neighboring pack that had once been a peaceful neighbor became our mortal enemy without Father’s strength to hold our borders. I was only a girl of eighteen, but Max was well into his thirties, and he knew in far greater detail what we faced.

“The wolf packs of these lands are unlike that of our father’s hold. He was raised in the ancient world, where superstition always took a second seat to logic. Today’s packs cling to religion, a twisted version of the Holy Church you may know, beholden to the idea that lycan are the chosen of God’s creations and that humans are our rightful prey.”

The idea didn’t seem difficult for me to believe, but Gabrielle shook her head as if she found the truth to be monstrous. Were they not also monsters? Had I not seen Maximillian slaughter people with terrifying savagery in his beast form?

“Father had raised us to protect humans as siblings, to defend them from evildoers, but in the outside world, they considered it heresy even to consort with them. We did all we could to evade the wolf packs we came across, slinking through the alps and into France as quietly as we could. But sight-unseen, we were nearly as famous as fugitives in exile as Father had been in life. We’d lived here silently with Aoustin for more than a year when they found us. We’d begun to believe we were safe here, and our complacency became our ruin. The Vicomté du Chastain of Dijon sent his wolves far into his realm to search for us. His order came from a higher, Parisian authority that the Devil of Milan’s children hid somewhere in France.

“At first, we suffered the loss of every human in the hold, including Aoustin. ‘Heretics,’ they called us. But we delivered our vengeance upon them well enough. We destroyed every scout who came but for one, who we sent with a message to the Vicomté that the western-most leagues of his domain belonged now to the Heretics of Palatino.”

“And so you claimed your freedom? That’s why we live safely here now?”

Gabrielle released another sigh. She seemed distracted by a sense of dissatisfaction. This was not the first lesson she meant to teach me.

“It’s not,” she said, “but I see now you won’t allow me to tell you things in my own time. And perhaps that is for the best. Perhaps the best way for you to learn is to ask your questions. No, we are not safe here. We were far safer under Father’s protection than you will ever be here under ours. You must never allow yourself to believe that your safety is a given. Treachery runs far and wide throughout our world.”

Gabrielle returned to the sofas to sit beside me. She took my hand in hers and pressed her lips to it.

“But all who came for us here have died at our hands. Again and again, Chastain sent more to take us. And each generation that arrived met the similar fate of their elders.”

She stared into my eyes, and I felt her grip strengthen.

“You may trust I will be dead before they ever take you from here.”