I woke with a start, as from a terrible nightmare, with my heart beating wildly in my ears and with sweat on my skin. Despite the fact that the curtains were drawn, the whole room seemed flooded with moonlight. Giles Scott sat in the chair across the room, staring at me with that disconcerting gaze.
"Are you here to kill me?" I asked.
He did not answer for a moment, then said slowly, in the way people do when their thoughts are far away, "No, I am still in the process of fulfilling my promise."
Perhaps a minute passed while he continued staring at me -- in actuality it seemed more like he was staring through me. "Why are you here?" I finally asked.
He continued to stare for a moment, then smiled briefly and looked off to the side. "I am hunting for Joanne's killer. When hunting through dreams it helps to start with dreams that have certain similarities, and you also knew Joanne." The gaze returned to me. "Do not worry, your time will come soon enough."
Having so much of his stare on me made me finally realize why it was so disconcerting. It is easy enough to imagine a stare that is both savage and cold, as with some inhuman creature. One can also easily imagine one that is cold yet still definitely human, coolly indifferent and mocking. And one can easily imagine one that is savage and definitely human, like someone in the grip of a slowly building rage. But a gaze that is savage, cold, and human all at once is unnatural; the mixture of the three should be inconsistent. How can anyone look out from eyes that are simultaneously human and inhuman? How can anyone feel coolly indifferent rage? It is an impossibility. And yet there he was.
"Perhaps you could just not kill me," I said.
"Oh, that is not a possibility," he said. "You know far too much, and the wolfish side of me is sufficiently suspicious of you that it is a marvel I have not done it already."
"Have you no human sympathy?"
He considered this, his hand softly stroking the arm of the armchair. "I distinguish. Something certainly remains. Manet conscientia, manet rationalitas, the worm of remorse dieth not. The husk, the shell." Then he shook his head. "But only the husk and shell. The pure light of the moon is too harsh for human life; it burns it out, leaving only the frame. Very little remains by now."
He looked down at his hand. "I think I had a sister once," he said suddenly. "But I do not know for sure. The human mind does not stretch very well across the centuries, and I remember only shreds of most of my life. The moon does not forget, but she does not remember anything about me that occurred before I became a Wolf. Conceivably at some point long ago I remembered my sister, and could therefore find it again by searching the moonlight for the moon's memory of my remembering it, but if so it would take me decades to come across it. There was a time when I was fluent in Latin. Now mostly fragments remain, things my mind keeps repeating, or little sparks suddenly darting out. Quotations. Given time I could remember it all again, but time is scarce even for those of us who live for centuries. My predecessor, Lykaios, was so old he could not remember his original name, or his place of birth, or even how he had become a Wolf. He claimed he was the First, and for all anyone knew, including himself, perhaps he was. But if a man can become completely different in a few decades, how different will he be when he has been inhuman for hundreds of years? Lykaios could look like a man, but he was all beast and devil inside, with nothing genuinely human left. Conlocavit ante paradisum voluptatis cherubin et flammeum gladium atque versatilem ad custodiendam viam ligni vitae; rightly so, since in endless years corruption becomes endless. The human heart cannot resist temptations that never cease. And to be a Wolf is worse: human cravings come and go, but the moon burns constantly and the spirit of the wolf never sleeps."
"But if you can still feel remorse...."
"The damned feel remorse more intensely than the living, my friend, but they mean it not at all. It is the distinguishing mark, how you know that you are damned: when you can look at your life, however long you have lived, and feel remorse for nothing you have done, but only for what has happened to you. I have done things, many things, for which a man would feel remorse; but I do not feel remorse. Hence I am not a man. I am just the quotation of a man.Do not let the outer form fool you. Once I was a man, but it has been eaten away by morbid desires; now I am a monster, and what is more, I am the monster monsters fear."
"And there is nothing I can do?"
He seemed to consider this. Then he said, "Are you Catholic?"
"No."
"Orthodox? Anything similar?"
"No."
"Unfortunate. I would have recommended that you pray to the Virgin to take away my thirst for your death." He stared at me. "You have no notion of how much it hurts to stay my hand, with you so close and so easy to kill." He rose suddenly and I shrank back against the bedstead. But he did not come towards me, but simiply walked to the door.
At the threshold of the door he paused and turned. "Ah, and lest I forget. Seneca has had you watched since you first approached us, and we have intercepted a package with notes and a partial manuscript that you have tried to send someone else." His voice became icy. "Let us have none of that. You are given the time you are given simply as a boon, so that you may know that Joanne's death will be avenged. Set your affairs in order; your clock approaches midnight, when this world will fall away, and after the last stroke all will be quiet. You cannot outmaneuver me, nor is there anywhere you can run from a predator who can hunt you in your dreams. I have given you what time you have because I was impressed by your willingness to die for your friend's vindication. But if you make me regret my decision to give you additional time, you will learn what remorse really is."
And he was gone.
I did not fall back to sleep for a very long time.
****
Eric woke with a start, sweating, as from a terrible nightmare. The room was dark, but his sharp eyes could see Jolie clearly; she was sitting by the window, looking out. He got out of bed.
"Having difficulty sleeping?" he said, trying to put the nightmare out of his head.
"He is hunting tonight," she said. "Every time I close my eyes I feel him getting inside my head."
"It's just in your head. You've just been under stress; that's all. What you should do...."
Jolie, however, never heard what she should do, because she silenced him with a sharp glance. "You do not know how dangerous he is."
"So everyone keeps telling me. But in the end, he's just an old lapsed Dominican who sits around reading books."
Jolie was quiet for a while. Then she said, still looking out the window, "I had only known him for a few decades when there was a crisis among the Wolves -- a rebellion, like the one we're in now. One of his favorites, Charles-Louis, was sent as an emissary to the leaders of the rebellion, Alain and Hugh, who we knew were somewhere in the Franche-Comté and managed to find Alain, the elder of the two. Alain killed Charles-Louis and simply left the body in a narrow passage somewhere around Saint-Nizier -- throat torn out, heart torn out, a silver dagger in his temple. Quite the terror in the area. Gilles, when he heard what had happened, went cold, and called up the entire Pack, everyone who was near enough to call, and led the Wild Hunt. We hunted for weeks, systematically eliminated every rebel we could find. And finally we found Hugh, who led us to Alain.
She closed her eyes. "Gilles had us take them to an abandoned farmhouse, leagues away from anyone else. They were to be tied up and closely guarded until he had completely uprooted what was left of the rebellion. They were almost finished as it was; there were only a few scattered strays left. None of them survived, and at the end of three days Gilles joined us.
"'What do you have to say for yourself, Alain?' he said. Alain spit at him, but Gilles simply stood there with that enigmatic smile on his face. 'You have done me a great favor, helping me to cull the useless. For that I might have spared your life. But Charles-Louis was useful to me, and for that you must pay.'
"'Do your worst,' said Alain. 'Torture us as you please, and you will never have our submission.'
"'Your submission is no longer of interest to me,' said Gilles. 'You have already failed to submit to the Will of Aegidius; and I, Aegidius, consider neither your submission nor your life of any value at all now.' And at that he simply touched both Alain and Hugh on the forehead and left.
"It started slowly. The first thing we noticed was the twitching and flinching. It grew worse and worse until, suddenly, they began to scream. They screamed about spiders, and about rats eating their flesh, and about snakes writhing inside them. They were insane, raving, and they screamed without stop for two full days. Had they not been Wolves, their hearts would have given out from terror long before that. At the end of the second day, Gilles returned and killed them both in the way Charles-Louis had been killed.
"Nobody knows how he drove them mad. Nobody knows how he does most things. He is old, yes, old enough to know things about being a Wolf none of us have yet had time to learn. And he is cruel, and he is ruthless, and there is nothing human in him except an impenetrable mask. If we fail, we can expect no better than Alain and Hugh."
"Oh," said Eric, "I know his brutality; I saw him torture that one Russian, remember? I'm not saying he'll be easy. But he's got his weaknesses as much as anyone else. And who can find them better than you?" He swooped down for a kiss, but when Jolie pushed him away impatiently, he shrugged and went back to bed.
