The Book of Life (11 page)

Even after this initial wave of departures, Sept-Tours felt crowded with Baldwin, Matthew, and Marcus in it—not to mention Verin, Ysabeau, and Gallowglass. Fernando was less obtrusive, spending much of his time with Sarah or Hamish. We all found hideaways where we could retreat for some much needed peace and quiet. So it was something of a surprise when Ysabeau burst into Matthew’s study with an announcement about Marcus’s present whereabouts.

“Marcus is in the Round Tower with Sarah,” Ysabeau said, two spots of color brightening her usually pale complexion. “Phoebe and Hamish are with them. They’ve found the old family pedigrees.”

I couldn’t imagine why this news had Matthew flinging down his pen and leaping from his chair.

When Ysabeau caught my curious look, she gave me a sad smile in return.

“Marcus is about to find out some of his father’s secrets,” Ysabeau explained.

That got me moving, too.

I had never set foot in the Round Tower, which stood opposite Matthew’s and was separated from it by the main part of the château. As soon as we reached it, I comprehended why no one had included it on my château tour.

A round metal grate was sunk into the center of the tower floor. A familiar, damp smell of age, death, and despair emanated from the deep hole it covered.

“An oubliette,” I said, temporarily frozen by the sight. Matthew heard me and clattered back down the stairs.

“Philippe built it for a prison. He seldom used it.” Matthew’s forehead creased with worry.

“Go,” I said, waving him and the bad memories away. “We’ll be right behind you.”

The oubliette on the Round Tower’s ground floor was a place of forgetting, but the tower’s second floor was a place of remembering. It was stuffed with boxes, papers, documents, and artifacts. This must be the de Clermont family archives.

“No wonder Emily spent so much time up here.” Sarah was bent over a long, partially unrolled scroll on a battered worktable, Phoebe at her side. Half a dozen more scrolls lay on the table, waiting to be studied. “She was a genealogy nut.”

“Hi!” Marcus waved happily from a high catwalk that circled the room and supported still more boxes and stacks. The dire revelations that Ysabeau feared apparently hadn’t happened yet. “Hamish was just about to come and get you.”

Marcus vaulted over the catwalk railing and landed softly next to Phoebe. With no ladder or staircase in sight, there was no way to get to that level of storage except to climb using the rough stones for handholds and no way to get down except to jump. Vampire security at its finest.

“What are you looking for?” Matthew said with just the right touch of curiosity. Marcus would never suspect that he had been tipped off.

“A way to get Baldwin off our backs, of course,” Marcus said. He handed a worn notebook to Hamish. “There you go. Godfrey’s notes on vampire law.”

Hamish turned the pages, clearly searching for some useful piece of legal information. Godfrey had been the youngest of Philippe’s three male children, known for his formidable, devious intellect. A sense of foreboding began to take root.

“And have you found it?” Matthew said, glancing at the scroll.

“Come and see.” Marcus beckoned us toward the table.

“You’ll love this, Diana,” Sarah said, adjusting her reading glasses. “Marcus said it’s a de Clermont family tree. It looks really old.”

“It is.” The genealogy was medieval, with brightly colored likenesses of Philippe and Ysabeau standing in separate square boxes at the top of the page. Their hands were clasped across the space that divided them. Ribbons of color connected them to the roundels below. Each bubble contained a name.

Some were familiar to me—Hugh, Baldwin, Godfrey, Matthew, Verin, Freyja, Stasia. Many were not.

“Twelfth century. French. In the style of the workshop at Saint-Sever,” Phoebe said, confirming my sense of the age of the work.

“It all started when I complained to Gallowglass about Baldwin’s interference. He told me that Philippe was nearly as bad and that when Hugh got fed up, he struck out on his own with Fernando,”

Marcus explained. “Gallowglass called their family a scion and said sometimes they were the only way to keep the peace.”

The look of suppressed fury on Matthew’s face suggested that peace was the last thing Gallowglass was going to enjoy once his uncle found him.

“I remembered reading something about scions back when Grandfather hoped I would turn to law and take on Godfrey’s old duties,” Marcus said.

“Found it,” Hamish said, his finger tapping against the page.

‘Any male with full-blooded children of his own can establish a scion, provided he has the approval of his sire or the head of his clan. The new scion will be considered a branch of the original family, but in all other ways the new scion’s sire shall exercise his will and power freely.’

“That sounds straightforward enough, but since Godfrey was involved, there must be more to it.”

“Forming a scion—a distinct branch of the de Clermont family under your authority—will solve all of our problems!” Marcus said.

“Not all clan leaders welcome scions, Marcus,” Matthew warned.

“Once a rebel, always a rebel,” Marcus said with a shrug. “You knew that when you made me.”

“And Phoebe?” Matthew’s brows lifted. “Does your fiancée share your revolutionary sentiments?

She might not like the idea of being cast out of Sept-Tours without a penny after all of your assets are seized by your uncle.”

“What do you mean?” Marcus said, uneasy.

“Hamish can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the next section of Godfrey’s book lays out the penalties associated with establishing a scion without your sire’s permission,” Matthew replied.

“You’re my sire,” Marcus said, his chin set in stubborn lines.

“Only in the biological sense: I provided you with my blood so you could be reborn a vampire.”

Matthew rammed his hands through his hair, a sign that his own frustration was mounting. “And you know how I detest the term ‘sire’ used in that context. I consider myself your father—not your blood donor.”

“I’m asking you to be more than that,” Marcus said. “Baldwin is wrong about the covenant and wrong about the Congregation. If you establish a scion, we could chart our own path, make our own decisions.”

“Is there some problem with you establishing your own scion, Matt?” Hamish asked. “Now that Diana’s pregnant, I would think you’d be eager to get out from under Baldwin’s thumb.”

“It’s not as simple as you think,” Matthew told him. “And Baldwin may have reservations.”

“What’s this, Phoebe?” Sarah’s finger pointed to a rough patch in the parchment under Matthew’s name. She was more interested in the genealogy than the legal complexities.

Phoebe took a closer look. “It’s an erasure of some sort. There used to be another roundel there. I can almost make out the name. Beia—oh, it must be Benjamin. They’ve used common medieval abbreviations and substituted an
i
for a
j.
”

“They scratched out the circle but forgot to get rid of the little red line that connects him to Matthew. Based on that, this Benjamin is one of Matthew’s children,” Sarah said.

The mention of Benjamin’s name made my blood run cold. Matthew did have a son of that name.

He was a terrifying creature, one whose madness was of unfathomable depth.

Phoebe unrolled another scroll. This genealogy looked ancient, too, though not quite as old as the one we’d all been studying. She frowned.

“This looks to be from a century later.” Phoebe put the parchment on the table. “There’s no erasure on this one and no mention of a Benjamin either. He just disappears without a trace.”

“Who’s Benjamin?” asked Marcus, though I couldn’t imagine why. Surely he must know the identities of Matthew’s other children.

“Benjamin does not exist.” Ysabeau’s expression was guarded, and she had chosen her words carefully. My brain tried to process the implications of Marcus’s question and Ysabeau’s odd response. If Matthew’s son didn’t know about Benjamin . . .

“Is that why his name is erased?” Phoebe asked. “Did someone make a mistake?”

“Yes, he was a mistake,” Matthew said, his voice hollow.

“And Benjamin does exist,” I said, meeting Matthew’s gray-green eyes. They were shuttered and remote. “I met him in sixteenth-century Prague.”

“Is he alive now?” Hamish asked.

“I don’t know. I thought he was dead shortly after I made him in the twelfth century,” Matthew replied. “Hundreds of years later, Philippe heard of someone who fit Benjamin’s description, but he dropped out of sight again before we could be sure. There were rumors of Benjamin in the nineteenth century, but I never saw any proof.”

“I don’t understand,” Marcus said. “Even if he’s dead, Benjamin should still appear in the genealogy.”

“I disavowed him. So did Philippe.” Matthew closed his eyes rather than meet our curious looks.

“Just as a creature can be made part of your family with a blood vow, he can be formally cast out to fend for himself without family or the protection of vampire law. You know how important a pedigree is among vampires, Marcus. Not having an acknowledged bloodline is as serious a stain among vampires as being spellbound is for witches.”

It was becoming clearer to me why Baldwin might not want me included in the de Clermont family tree as one of Philippe’s children.

“So Benjamin
is
dead,” Hamish said. “Legally at least.”

“And the dead sometimes rise up to haunt us
,
” Ysabeau murmured, earning a dark look from her son.

“I can’t imagine what Benjamin did to make you turn away from your own blood, Matthew.”

Marcus still sounded confused. “I was a holy terror in my early years, and you didn’t abandon me.”

“Benjamin was one of the German crusaders who marched with Count Emicho’s army toward the Holy Land. When they were beaten in Hungary, he joined up with my brother Godfrey’s forces,”

Matthew began. “Benjamin’s mother was the daughter of a prominent merchant in the Levant, and he had learned some Hebrew and even Arabic because of the family’s business operations. He was a valuable ally—at first.”

“So Benjamin was Godfrey’s son?” Sarah asked.

“No,” Matthew replied. “He was mine. Benjamin began to trade in de Clermont family secrets. He swore he would expose the existence of creatures—not just vampires but witches and daemons—to the humans in Jerusalem, along with the information that I was afflicted with blood rage. Making him a vampire was the only way I could ensure his silence.”

“Blood rage?” Marcus looked at his father incredulously. “That’s impossible. It turns you into a cold-blooded killer, without reason or compassion. There hasn’t been a case of it for nearly two millennia. You told me so yourself.”

“I lied.” Matthew’s voice cracked at the admission.

“You can’t have blood rage, Matt,” Hamish said. “There was a mention of it in the family papers.

Its symptoms include blind fury, the inability to reason, and an overwhelming instinct to kill. You’ve never shown any sign of the disease.”

“I’ve learned to control it,” Matthew said. “Most of the time.”

“Thank God for that. If the Congregation were to find out, there would be a price on your head.

According to what I’ve read here, other creatures would have carte blanche to destroy you,” Hamish observed.

“Not just me.” Matthew’s glance flickered over my rounding abdomen. “My children, too.”

Sarah’s expression was stricken. “The babies . . .”

“And Marcus?” Phoebe’s knuckles showed white on the edge of the table though her voice was calm. “Marcus is only a carrier,” Matthew tried to reassure her. “The symptoms manifest immediately, and he’s never shown any signs of them.”

“And how did Marcus contract blood rage? Someone he fed from?” Phoebe asked.

“It’s genetic. I thought once that it was a virus, but it was in my blood and I passed it on to Marcus the moment I made him.” Matthew looked his son squarely in the eye. “When I made you, I genuinely believed that I was cured. It had been almost a century since I’d had an episode. It was the Age of Reason. In our pride we believed that all sorts of past evils had been eradicated, from smallpox to superstition. Then you went to New Orleans.”

“My own children.” Marcus looked wild, and then understanding dawned. “You and Juliette Durand came to the city, and they started turning up dead. You killed them because of their blood rage.”

“Your father had no choice,” Ysabeau said. “The Congregation knew there was trouble in New Orleans. Philippe ordered Matthew to deal with it before the vampires found out the cause. Had Matthew refused, you all would have died.”

“The other vampires on the Congregation were convinced that the old scourge of blood rage had returned,” Matthew said. “They wanted to raze the city and burn it out of existence, but I argued that the madness was a result of youth and inexperience, not blood rage. I was supposed to kill them all. I was supposed to kill you, too, Marcus.”

Marcus looked surprised. Ysabeau did not.

“Philippe was furious with me, but I destroyed only those who were symptomatic. I killed them quickly, without pain or fear,” Matthew said, his voice dead. I hated the secrets he kept and the lies he told to cover them up, but my heart hurt for him nonetheless. “I explained away the rest of my grandchildren’s excesses however I could—poverty, inebriation, greed. Then I took responsibility for what happened in New Orleans, resigned my seat on the Congregation, and swore that you would make no more children until you were older and wiser.”

“You told me I was a failure—a disgrace to the family.” Marcus was hoarse with suppressed emotion.

“I had to make you stop. I didn’t know what else to do.” Matthew confessed his sins without asking for forgiveness.

“Who else knows your secret, Matthew?” Sarah asked.

“Verin, Baldwin, Stasia, and Freyja. Fernando and Gallowglass. Miriam. Marthe. Alain.” Matthew extended his fingers one by one as the names tumbled from his mouth. “So did Hugh, Godfrey, Hancock, Louisa, and Louis.”

Marcus looked at his father bitterly. “I want to know everything. From the beginning.”