The Wolf Esprit: Lykanos Chronicles 3

My earliest memory of waking happened in a small, unfamiliar bedroom. The fire crackle from the nearby hearth drew my eyes open to see a man’s forearm. For several minutes, I focused on the dark hairs that littered his smooth skin, watching them twitch under the weight of my breath. With my head laid upon his upper arm, I realized I had spooned my back against the man’s bare chest.

None of this made sense to me.

Sensing I was awake, Duccio freed his arm to rise from the bed. At once, he brought a jug of water to my lips, raising my head with his hand, and I drank. The cool water was delicious, and the overwhelming thirst in my throat prompted me to gulp it down.

When I’d emptied the jug, Duccio brought a plate of meats and cheeses to feed me small bites by hand.

“Where are we?” I asked through my chewing.

Before he could answer, I shuddered. I felt so cold at once that I pulled at the blanket to ball up, desperate for what little heat I could find.

Placing the plate on a table, Duccio returned to bed and brought his body close to mine. In moments, the shared heat of his flesh helped my shivering to stop.

Go to sleep, he whispered in my mind. And in seconds, consciousness left me again.

When I next woke, the gentle swaying of a ship drew my eyes open. I lay in Duccio’s arms once more.

Where are we?

Sailing from France, he answered.

Why?

A surge of constitution filled my lungs, and I recalled all that had happened.

You’ve abducted me from my family.

I saved you from Chastain.

‘Saved’ triggered my senses. Bishop Toussaint had used the word to describe his despicable torture. I rose from Duccio’s arms in a clumsy series of movements to sit up and look him in the eye. There was nothing devious present in his relaxed gaze, but my wolf sensed malice. The rumble in my mind was the first I’d heard from the beast since arriving at the Vicomté’s palace.

“No,” he whispered and placed his hand on my shoulder. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Then why are we here? Why not return me to my father?”

The light in Duccio’s eyes faltered, and he sighed.

“Maximo and Gabriella could not overcome the palace’s defenses. In the end, Archambault executed them both.”

I scowled with an immediate jerk of negation. But the pronunciation of their Milanese names fell from his lips with such an intimate timbre I knew at once what he said was true.

“But how?” I asked.

The moment I asked, I regretted it. I didn’t want to know.

“The Marquis is many centuries old,” Duccio answered in a delicate whisper. “His strength is…”

For me, I thought. They came there for me. I called to her. I drew them to their doom.

My body trembled—first, my hands, and then my chin. I covered my face in response. I wanted to black out the cabin’s light—I wanted to be alone in the dark of my stone cell.

Duccio sat up in bed and drew me into his embrace.

We are safe for now, his mind told me as I shivered. I will not fail you.

I lost all sense of control, sobbing into his neck like the broken child I’d always feared being. Duccio lay back on the mattress, pulling me to his side so I could empty my wounded soul into his embrace. With a silent kiss on my forehead, he stroked my hair to comfort me as I wept.

I didn’t know what port the ship arrived at, just that men were waiting to receive us there.

“Don Lupofiero,” they bowed to him before showing us to a carriage.

The men were not lycan, but I sensed something strange from the lead, Giuseppe.

“He travels with you?” he asked.

The man looked at me in bewilderment. I was no longer in the black robe I’d worn for weeks in Chastain’s dungeons. During my recovery, Duccio found ordinary clothes for me to wear. But they were just that, ordinary. And Giuseppe stared at me with suspicion when I showed my intent to enter his lord’s fine carriage.

“My nephew,” Duccio clarified. “The Cavaliere Roussade. He traveled in disguise before I collected him from Nice.”

Giuseppe didn’t seem to comprehend the simple statement, as if the idea was ridiculous. But then something changed. Something more came from Duccio, working its way through his servant’s mind. As if turning the page in a book, the man’s eyes lit up, the words now making perfect sense.

“Cavaliere,” he said to me with a deep bow as I passed to enter the carriage. With another nod to the driver, Giuseppe sent us on our way up the paved road from the port.

They won’t know the name Roussade outside of France, Duccio said to me, though it was the last thing on my mind.

The days or weeks we’d traveled were almost entirely a blur. I felt healed physically, but my mind remained broken, and I trusted Duccio to guide me through those days of mourning. Why did I trust him after all Gabrielle had told me about what he’d done to her, to all of them? Because he had saved me. And now, but for him, I was truly alone.

“Where are we?” I asked once we’d set off down the road.

Genoa.

I knew the name from my studies. We traveled through a kingdom headed by this port, the source of its wealth, like Venice or Naples. It was the closest means to the Mediterranean for land-locked domains like Milan. And these scholastic points triggered another memory.

“Do we ride for Milan?” I asked. “To Castello Palatino in Como?” The names returned to me from Gabrielle’s stories—her recollections of youth. It was where Duccio slaughtered their father, the last of the ancient wolves, Sempronio.

A shadow passed over his eyes. In moments, they shot away to look through the carriage window at the passing buildings of lower Genoa.

“No, my home is here in the hills near that ridge.” He pointed to the farthest point to be seen.

“Where are the others?”

Duccio looked back with uncertainty, but then he saw my memory of Gabrielle’s story play in my mind. She described all of them to me, the Palatino pack. Most vividly, she’d recalled her conversation with Dionisio, the lycan who’d refused to have his wolf unleashed.

Laying before me was Dioniosio’s adopted lycan father. When Duccio learned of the orphan’s abuse and suffering, he slaughtered those pedophiles one by one, drawing out their savage execution as cruelly as he could. But to this moment of emancipation, the boy responded only with horror. The very sight of violence sent him into a nearly comatose silence. “Never,” Dionisio insisted when offered the dark power again and again. Instead, Duccio had watched his fourteen-year-old son age, changing in appearance as all mortal men did.

The day Gabrielle met them, Dionisio appeared to be more than twice Duccio’s age. Gabrielle’s recollection played in my mind, how Duccio embraced his fifty-seven-year-old son after they all listened to him recant the painful story of his youth. There had been such tenderness in Duccio’s embrace as he wiped away the fresh tears in Dionisio’s aging eyes. Gabrielle grew to trust both men implicitly.

“They are no more,” Duccio answered me.

“None of them?”

“Only one more survived besides Gabriella and Maximo, but we parted decades ago.”

The flash of a soldier’s sword leaped from his mind. I thought I saw his son’s slaughter, but Duccio shut the image off before I could be sure.

“Why have you saved me?” I asked. My mind raced through all the events: the way he begged me to endure the Bishop’s torturous ritual, how he whisked me from my prison cell, then cradled me against his bare skin to keep me warm while my body struggled through the pain of massive blood loss.

“Maximo was my brother—our father’s youngest son,” he began.

“The father you murdered?”

Duccio’s eyes didn’t falter again.

“Yes,” he answered. “There, I see in on your thoughts. You want to know why I did that, too.”

I nodded, making no attempt to hide it. I was the only one left to ask him, the only one who might want to know the answer.

“You are too young to understand—” He stopped and released a sharp sigh. “I hear Father’s voice in my words. It seems I’m doomed to hear them forever. But his words were as true for me then as mine are now for you. You are too young to understand the effects of time’s passage on our kind. They no doubt explained it to you, Maximo and Gabriella, but it’s not something you can comprehend until you survive its endless movement for decades or centuries. You cannot yet understand the sensation of growing in every manner but remaining the same as all the world changes around you.

“We’re not meant to be this way, Esprit. I walk in the skin of a twenty-five-year-old man but with a mind filled by two centuries of life. Despite all that time, I bear the same infantile cravings of that young man, his pathetic vices and wants. While I seldom make the same stupid decision twice, the ones I make today can be just as stupid as the ones I made in my youth. And I find that infuriating—making all new mistakes again and again, the pendulum swinging back and forth between crippling humiliation and wretched apathy.”

Duccio furrowed his brow as if giving voice to the truth angered him—as if his word’s resonance disappointed him.

“But to answer your first question, know this: I saved you because Maximo and Gabriella would’ve wanted you liberated from those wolves—our father would’ve demanded it. And for each of them, after what I’ve done to them, I will guard you with my dying breath.”