The Wolf Esprit: Lykanos Chronicles 3

Requiem

Two nights passed before Gabrielle and I spoke again.

She’d tried to restate the details she once told me about Duccio long ago in her study atop the Forteresse de Roussade, but after a few minutes, she stopped. Instead, she brought me a bound journal of typewritten papers.

“I finished writing this for Johnathan only last week. He’d written an account of his young life and lycan transformation on a typewriter. Because I wanted him better to understand me and the span of time between us, I did the same. But I realize now this should be for you.”

I’d taken the journal with reluctance, feeling too impatient for the answers for which I hungered. I couldn’t sit still now that I had a thousand questions burning in me. But after an hour alone in her guest room, I realized the gift I held in my hands.

She’d written everything she could remember about her mortal life and lycan awakening. I knew a few stories from her lectures when I was a teenager, but far from all of them, and none of them to such detail. Here, she exposed her mind and its every thought as she recalled the young mortal she was, a fifteen-year-old girl who struggled to understand and survive her world.

As a boy, I badgered her with endless questions, desperate to steer her answers in whatever direction interested me, and now I realized how much of each story I’d missed in my impatience. There was no evidence of distraction in her prose, and the richness of each description absorbed me.

Duccio filled so much of her story. I learned he was the one who awakened her lycan senses when they found each other by chance. Chapter after chapter exposed his triumphs and treacheries in astonishing detail. I struggled to understand the enormity of their time together, his most damning moments revealing themselves long after I fled from him in New York City.

Typed out were also Gabrielle’s recollections of her lycan father, Sempronio, who released her wolf at nineteen. He was the greatest of all wolves and master of Castello Palatino. I’d seen his face and heard his voice in Gabrielle and Duccio’s recollections. But here, I learned much more about his soul and who he was to her, the Wolf Omega. Her descriptions helped me understand the depth of Duccio’s suffering and the enormity of his guilt over their father’s slaughter. But could anyone understand the paradox of Duccio or the decisions he made both for good and evil?

But more precious to me than all these riches of insight were a hundred pages about my father, Maximilien. Gabrielle had shared most of her life with him; no one understood or loved my father more. She allowed me to know him as a young man, in his thirties when they met—their time together, its struggles, and their phenomenal love affair. My heart ached with bittersweet regret to learn so much about him, and I wept for hours as I followed the details of his life’s journey.

I also swallowed the unforgivable truth that Duccio’s hand slayed Maximilien in New York, just as he had taken so many others I loved from this world.

As if she knew, Gabrielle came to my door in the middle of the night only moments after I finished reading the last page of her memoir. She came alone, dressed in nothing by her silken sleeping gown, and crawled into bed beside me, just as she’d done when I was a boy on those nights when I couldn’t sleep. I let her hold me as if it were the most natural thing to do, and she wiped the tears from my eyes and kissed my forehead.

“Do you understand why your name appeared on none of those pages?”

Of course, I noticed how she never mentioned me in her memoir. All she’d written was about how she didn’t want to speak about other lycan who came of age near her and Father during their years in Burgundy.

“You said it wasn’t the purpose of your story,” I answered.

She sighed at length, and I sensed her struggle to speak now.

“It devastated us to lose you. But it destroyed your father. He was dead inside for so long after that horrible night that I felt alone for years. Even when laughter finally did return to his voice, Max was never the same. After so much had befallen us during the prior years, your coming into his life was the first time I ever knew him to be perfectly happy. And I couldn’t relive those moments just for Daniel’s benefit. Had I known you were still alive, I’d have forced myself to speak of them as I do now.”

I knew her words were sincere, and it was enough to learn I hadn’t been so insignificant in her vast life.

I thought of Duccio and the suffering he brought my father. Though I had once forgiven Duccio for all his crimes, Gabrielle’s memoir made me see him differently. It seemed I thought differently about Duccio whenever his memory entered my mind now.

“I’m sorry I took him from you,” she whispered.

“No,” I insisted. “I abandoned him, just as you had. I wonder now if he’d always meant for me to find you both again. Perhaps his real purpose in stealing me away was to find someone you trusted who might vouch for his worthiness. Perhaps he wanted an ally to help convince you and Father of his penitent heart.”

Gabrielle didn’t answer me. It was clear she didn’t understand what I meant.

“But take him from me? No,” I insisted. “If anything, you’ve given him back to me. You’ve helped me understand him more than I ever did during our shared time. And I understand why you chose to—

Gabrielle wiped at my fresh tears when I failed to speak of Duccio’s execution. She attended to my sorrow as lovingly as she ever had.

I’m glad it was you, I whispered silently.

She couldn’t know all that happened between me and Duccio, but I said the words to relieve any remorse she might feel because of my suffering. After another kiss, she held me in her arms and let me weep like a child until the sun rose hours later.

At dawn, I joined Gabrielle in the kitchen of her mansion, where Daniel had just cooked breakfast for each of us. There were no servants in the house, a peculiarity I would ask about another time.

Daniel had delivered tray after tray of hot food to my room over the past two days. He’d even delivered my travel cases from my suite at the U.S. Grant. It seemed he spent his days employed at that hotel.

“Fried eggs and ham,” Daniel said. He pulled back a chair at the small table where he’d plated his creation and extended his hand for me to sit.

Instead of sitting, I moved to embrace Daniel.

Thank you, I said.

I was grateful for his kindness over the past days. I knew nothing else about the man but what little I’d read of him in Gabrielle’s memoir. But she loved him, so I decided I would as well.

It didn’t matter that he’d taken my father’s place, or that he appeared so much like Duccio that I needed a double-take whenever we encountered each other. With my eyes closed, Daniel was not at all the same person. Nor did I care about how his frame stiffened with reluctance to accept a hug from another man. I was grateful to know him and would beg to read his account before this day was up.

“But you’ll stay with us, won’t you?” he asked.

The question surprised me, and I didn’t answer. I didn’t see how I could fit into the life they’d created for themselves.

“All the things I once told you,” Gabrielle said, “of my father’s view on our place in this world and our responsibility to protect the weak—his words have never resonated with me more than now. I tried to instill that purpose in you—I wanted a child just as much as Max did. But when they ripped you away from us, I all but gave up on my commitment to the duties our father left us. And you know now all the details of my wretched moral failings.”

She stopped as if the acknowledgment still grieved her, even after so much time had passed.

“I stopped trying to be what I promised Sempronio I would become. Even when the religious traditions faltered and gave rise to secularism among our kind, I didn’t lift a finger to become an elder. I let Duccio stop me from becoming anything but his slave.”

Gabrielle smiled through a humiliated sigh.

“But that’s done now,” she said. “In this beautiful place without hoards of lycan and their centuries of cruel traditions, I mean to reshape our world just as Father did. You understand now the strength time has given me. I mean to honor the tasks Father set before me now.”

The image of a crate of scrolls filled Gabrielle’s mind. Her memoir described how Duccio once sent her all of Sempronio’s journals, written throughout the ages of his immense lifetime. Duccio sent the crate of treasures as a peace offering.

“Yes, a queenly gift,” she said, lowering her head. “They inspire me each time I read them. I hear Father’s voice as if he’s still with me, and I want nothing more than to recreate the world his son allowed to be destroyed. My greatest regret is allowing my fears to paralyze me. I’ve wasted so much of my life on nothing but…”

I didn’t break the silence that followed, absorbed by the conviction of her words. Tears started in her eyes, and I sensed they frustrated her. She hadn’t meant to fall into despair.

“Please,” she implored, reaching across the table to take my hand, “even if only for a little while. Let me know you once again. Give me another chance to prove how we might make a better world together.”

I caressed her hand with my thumb, but I didn’t answer. Was I mad to believe solitude was the only home I could ever tolerate? Was my want of distance nothing more than my expectation of disappointment if I stayed? Perhaps I was afraid to live life after all.

In time, I told Gabrielle I would consider it.

When we finished our meal, I returned to bed. I hadn’t slept much in days while reading Gabrielle’s memoir, and I nodded off in moments. When I arose at noon, the house was empty. I showered and dressed, and when neither she nor Daniel had returned, I took a stroll through their house.

Theirs was a beautiful home, a large two-story Italianate renaissance-styled villa. Based on the elegant, modern finishes within and the small trees planted outside, I deemed it couldn’t be more than a few years old. The grounds were lovely, far more extensive and private than the surrounding home lots, and in the distance was a view of the San Diego harbor. Most delightful, there was a swimming pool with a diving board, and I remembered our nights in the ponds dotting the Burgundy countryside when I was a boy.

Emerald silk winged-back chairs and champagne-velvet sofas filled their drawing room, lit by the many tall windows. Paintings covered much of the papered walls. They were mostly modern works, but I recognized Ruben’s Romulus and Remus from the Forteresse de Roussade. The Flemish baroque, depicting the babes nurtured by a mother wolf, had hung in Gabrielle’s tower roof study.

My favorite in the room was a wide Chinoiserie mirrored coffee table at the center. The lovely creation was reverse-painted with exquisite white camellias. Nothing reminded me more of the woman Gabrielle had become.

On a side table under a Tiffany lamp, I found a daguerreotype of my father. He sat in a French salon wearing a 19th-century suit and sported a manicured beard. The picture left me speechless until I roared with laughter. If I must, I would beg on my knees for a copy.

Eventually, I found my way into a study. There, I found more photos of Gabrielle and Daniel. Next to her beloved stories by Aristotle sat a few red leather-bound books with Sempronius Mons Palatinus printed on the spine. Each denoted a span of many years. Also littered about were modern crime novels. I presumed they must share this office—I couldn’t fathom that detective stories were of any interest to Gabrielle.

At the center of the credenza behind the desk was a black iron typewriter, the one I presumed Daniel encouraged Gabrielle to write her memoir with, just as he’d written his own. While I’d never used one, I understood how they functioned. My business manager clacks every day on the one in his Napa office.

I found a ream of crisp, blank cream paper and rolled a sheet into the device. Using one finger at a time, then four, and soon all ten, the proper method of pressing the noisy buttons to create words opened to me. By the time Daniel and Gabrielle returned later in the afternoon, I’d written the first chapter of this story. Imploring them to let me continue, I’ve sat in this room off and on for nearly two months.

Little has meant more to me than to write all these memories. They are each for Gabrielle, the Baroness du Roussade, who took me into her home when I was a boy, became my wolf mother, and gave me her unconditional love.

Gabrielle, by your own demonstration, these pages contain little of those people you never met. As they can never read these words alongside you, I didn’t suffer to relive their stories here. I wrote each word so you might understand what befell me all those years ago and for you to know me now, just as you asked.

I don’t yet know if remaining here is the right decision for me or my hermit’s soul. But until I know for sure, I’ll stay by your side.

-The Wolf Esprit Lenoir du Roussade, 1923

THE END