Bastien (12 page)

When I wake up, it is still night. I am still human and the castle is dark and silent. I can’t hear what’s going on downstairs. I’m in my chambers, back in the chains, alone. I bury my face in my hands. I can still see Angelique’s dead body in my mind’s eye. I am covered in her blood, though it has already dried.

I am shaking but don’t understand why. The wind is cold, blowing in from the balcony, but the hearth fire is roaring and my own anger makes me sweat. I want to know what’s happening down there. The guards better not have let Lafarge escape. The bastard should be chained in my dungeon, locked away until the Beast wakes. I can feel him now. If he can get his hands on Lafarge, this time he won’t hesitate. It should be the Beast who ends Lafarge. He is still merciful enough to make it quick.

Suddenly I sense I am not alone. I look up expecting to see Jacques, a question already on my tongue, but it is a different presence all together.

A hunched figure swathed in a dark, ragged cloak, with one hand smooth and young, the other gnarled and old. She stands in the shadows, as much part of the night as any ghoul risen from the dead.

“You.” Can she be a ghost? No. As the clouds shift to uncover the moon, its light falls directly on her. She casts a shadow. She’s real enough. “A man can never bury his past, can he?”

I say bitterly. “No matter how much he’s been made to repay his mistakes.” I raise my hands into the light. “In blood.”

I would have expected it to be Lilith. If a phantasm from the otherworld is to witness me in this state, it ought to be the one who would derive the most pleasure from my misery. But for all I know, that narcissistic bitch has forgotten all about me. Which begs the question, why hasn’t this creature? What is she, anyway?

The hag floats closer like a vision. She glides across the floor as if her feet never touch it and lowers to sit before me. I feel her staring at me for long moments and I say nothing, only stare back. It’s strangely satisfying, this wordless communication. I remember it from centuries ago and though it led to all of this, I find I harbor no ill will against her. I even feel something like a smile pull on my lips and I nod to her in belated greeting.

The hag returns the gesture, making me feel as if no time at all has passed since our last meeting.

She produces a deck of tarot cards and places it on the floor between us. The sight of it comforts me. For a moment I forget everything that’s happening below stairs and grin outright.

“What dark portents do you bring tonight?” I ask. “Haven’t you done enough?”

The hag turns a card. The Queen of Cups. As if I need a fucking reminder. Without waiting for my answer, she flips the next one—The Hermit. And the next one—The Moon. The answers I struggled to decipher so long ago, now so glaringly obvious in what I’ve become. I would laugh at myself if any humor still lingered inside me. Instead, I wait for the next card. If memory serves, it should be Strength. I feel my heart beat faster in anticipation. I need to see her again.

Angelique’s death robbed me of any strength I possessed.

I’ve finally found a person more foul than I and was completely powerless against him. I won’t do anything as theatrical as letting it destroy me, but for tonight, at least, I cannot think of anything to do besides sit here and brood. If I didn’t have hands and feet I’d think I turned into the Beast prematurely. I need my strength back. And right now, the woman I’ve all but forgotten is the only strength I have left.

Give me a glimpse
, I plead silently, feeling that now ancient yearning for her reawaken inside me.
Just a glimpse of her.

But the card she turns is The Devil, and the hag is pointing at the door. Jean Lafarge. Does she expect me to be surprised?

“What about him?”

She turns the next card—The Hanged Man. And then there is the one I seek. Strength, with its red, red rose and not a hint of the woman I once saw beneath it.

It is reversed.

Dread fills me and I seek the hag’s gaze. She raises her head as though to look at me, but I can’t see anything of her face. A gnarled hand reaches up and rests on my forehead. A bright flash of light makes me close my eyes and in my mind I see what she is trying to tell me.

I see Lafarge running to the village of Fauve and rousing a mob. I see them marching on the castle and finding Angelique’s body, and me in my beastly form. They are not affected by the curse—they can kill the Beast and they will. And once I see myself dead and gone, and my castle weathered inside and out by decades of neglect, my Strength appears, dressed in a pauper’s rags, begging for coin on the streets of Fauve. She shivers in the cold and no one will stop to help her, not the baker, or the saw bones, not even the priest.

No one, until Lafarge, an old man already, holds his gloved hand out for her to take.

“
No,
” I gasp out. Not him! That murderous bastard cannot be allowed to touch her! I’d gouge his eyes out before I’d let him even look at her.

I force myself into the vision, bend it to my will and change what I see, make Lafarge go deaf and blind, far away from the woman I feel desperate to protect. But without Lafarge, nothing is different. She’s still kneeling in the street, still starving and freezing, and this time, she dies that way, too.

I roar in denial and my hand shoots out blindly to close around the hag’s throat. She grasps my wrist with her young hand at that very instant and pries me loose with laughable ease. Her fingers curl into my wrist and the pain is nothing compared to the searing spasm in my chest.

The vision changes and I see Lafarge running from the castle. It’s the real him, the present him, not the future. He slows and stops with a frown, looks back at the castle, then at his own empty hands. His face contorts with confusion. He walks the rest of the way slowly and somehow I know his thoughts. He doesn’t remember. Not the way it really happened. All he knows is that Angelique cuckolded him with a human man named Bastien Sauvage, and he shot her dead in the man’s castle.

The vision goes dark and I fall over, my head spinning. I pass out for the second time that night. When I come to, the hag is gone and so are her cards. All that is left of her is a blood red rose. I clutch the thorny stem, heedless of the pain, as the first light of dawn tears me asunder.

Chapter Twenty-three

The hag’s rose is wilting. If it’s even hers at all. The flower could have come from anywhere, and the Beast’s memories of that night are so distorted he no longer knows what is real and what isn’t. It’s beyond tempting to simply pretend it was all a bad dream, a figment of Bastien’s crazed mind.

But Angelique is real. Was real. Jacques and some of the women moved her body to the ice room and scrubbed the floors of her blood. The Beast can still smell it there, anyway. It is obvious no one will be coming to claim her. The bastard Lafarge probably didn’t even tell anyone she is dead. It would be just like him to feign ignorance. All he needs to do is wait long enough for everyone to assume she ran away. After a while, if she doesn’t turn up, he’ll be able to annul the union and take another wife.

There is only one thing the Beast can do about it.

He has Angelique buried in the garden next to his parents. Though his memory of them is all but nonexistent, he knows they would have welcomed Angelique as their own. The Beast couldn’t save the young woman, but perhaps he can give her, in death, the peace she deserved while she was alive.

“You say the hag showed him the woman?” Jacques asks.

“For all I know, it was a hallucination.”

“But what if it wasn’t?” Jacques says eagerly. “Surely she wouldn’t have appeared without reason. It must mean something. She must be close by. If we could just—”

The Beast laughs. “It’s been almost three hundred years, Jacques. How much longer will you cling to your hope before you realize it’s nothing but an illusion? This is it. This is what our lives will be like for all of eternity.”

“There is always a way out of a difficult situation.”

“Absolutely,” he says. “And it’s quite easy. Go and fetch one of the villagers here and watch how quickly he’ll find something to skewer me with. Go on, what are you waiting for? Only someone unaffected by the curse can break it, so the solution should be obvious.” He shudders as he says the words. His death would break the curse, true, but it would also kill the woman. That surety is there whether he wants to believe it or not. Bastien believes it and that taints the Beast’s own perception.

“We don’t know what it would do to the rest of us. It might kill us all if you were to die.”

Apparently, this is something Jacques has considered before.

“Haven’t you lived long enough?” The Beast sounds weary saying it.

“I have existed far too long,” Jacques agrees. “But it is a state not to be confused with living.

None of us have been living these three centuries. We haven’t changed, aged, grown up, had children, or died. That, Master, is not life. And, while I would be most content to... cease, I would not presume to make that choice for the others. Would you?”

He leaves before the Beast can think of anything to say.

The library is in the middle of repairs, all the books neatly packed out of harm’s way. With nothing to do, the Beast strolls aimlessly through his castle. He knows each stone, each tapestry and every painting by heart. While the west wing where he resides is bursting with life, the east wing is dusty and abandoned; there is no one to use these rooms anymore. The Beast himself hardly ever has reason to venture here.

Some faint fragment of a memory takes him to one of the south-facing rooms. The door is stuck from disuse and everything inside is covered with white sheets. A balcony, easily twice as large as his own, opens off the south wall. Glass doors let in all the best light and frame a magnificent view of the forests and mountains.

This used to be Bastien’s studio. In the absence of his parents to oversee his education, Jacques hired tutors and prescribed a wide range of subjects for the young prince to study. Art used to be one of his favorites.

The Beast tugs on a white sheet and it slides off an easel. Another reveals a table laden with dried, cracked paints. In the corner is a stack of canvases, darkened with age, but still usable. The Beast mounts one on the easel. His paw is too big to hold a delicate brush, but he can just manage to grasp a piece of coal.

He draws a curve, then another, and another, until a shape begins to appear. It’s rough, clumsy. He knows he can do better. Setting the canvas aside, he takes another and starts over. A face appears, the curve of one shoulder, but the features elude him.

Another canvas replaces that one. He takes his time, conjures his subject in his thoughts as vividly as he can before he traces what he sees in his mind’s eye onto the canvas. Yes, that’s it.

The blank space fills with an outline, then shading. It’s imperfect. Black and gray could never hope to capture what he is trying to draw.

Frustrated, he reaches for the final canvas. There won’t be any more chances unless he sends his driver to the fairs. Eyeing the dried paints and rotted bushes, the Beast drops the piece of coal and bounds out of the east wing, shouting for Jacques. “Canvas,” he tells the startled butler. “As much of it as you can find. And paints and brushes, the best money can buy. Quickly! Before the merchants leave.”

He waits around only long enough to make certain his orders are being followed and then returns to the studio and the coal.

It’s harder now, he is unsure of his dexterity. Only the lightest of strokes will do, and his heavy paw almost crushes the coal to dust in an effort to keep the lines as delicate as possible.

His concentration is so absolute he almost doesn’t notice when Bastien rouses within him. His human side can see the subject on the square of canvas as easily as the Beast.

Bastien moves the Beast’s hand over the surface, slowly tracing her eyes and nose. The waves of her hair cascade in a graceful fall around her face, caressing the line of her throat. The mouth takes them the longest. It’s soft when the coal would have it appear hard. The lower lip is fuller than the upper, lush and enticing. She is smiling just a little, with just a hint of a secret tucked into the corners of her mouth as she looks over her bare shoulder at something to Beast’s left.

It’s her...

Chapter Twenty-four

The moment I awaken I root beneath my pillow for the hidden key. Sweet little Jocelyn. She hid it so well not even the Beast could find it. I’ve been saving this for something special.

Something well worth the punishment it will incur when I unlock these shackles.

The chains that bind me fall away and I am free for the first time in centuries. There is a pair of pants set out on the chair. I dress with haste and exit my chambers. The guards shout a warning, but I ignore them and run straight to the east wing. It’s still my goddamned castle and I can go wherever the hell I please.

They give chase and rouse half the damn staff with their yelling for no good reason. I let them catch me at the studio door. They are winded and out of sorts, easy to defeat, if I should decide to do so. I don’t, and after a few minutes of the three of us just standing there while a crowd of gawkers gathers, I shake them loose. “Stay outside,” I growl, thoroughly annoyed at how long it takes them to collect their jaws off the floor and release me. I close the door in their stunned faces.

The Beast has been busy in my absence. The studio is a mess of splattered paints and canvases ruined by his heavy paw. He’s kept all of them, carefully stacked all around like the makings of some holy shrine to his talent—or lack thereof. I root around in the stacks for the one I want. There are three relatively salvageable scrawls among these. In one, she is seated regal as a queen on the settee in the library. In another, she is standing in the garden, her eyes closed as she smells a rose bloom. In the third, she is asleep in my bed, her hair spread out on my pillow, her hand slightly curled by her face.

I want none of them. These are the Beast’s fantasies, not mine.