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“Don’t,” I said. My voice was a rag. “Don’t touch him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Roake crouched, with the fastidious grace of someone used to kneeling on operating-room floors, and studied Maksim’s back. “The blade is silver-coated steel, not solid. It is more than enough. It will not kill him. It will hold him, for about an hour, in a state of what I believe you would call paralysis. He can hear us. He can feel. He simply cannot move.”
“You’re a monster.”
“Perhaps.” He stood. He dusted his knees. “I have thought so, on occasion. But I confess that I have never found my own conduct as troubling as that of the creature at my feet.”
I stared at him.
“You don’t know what he is,” I said.
“I know exactly what he is.”
“You don’t. You don’t know him at all.”
“Young man—” There was a kindness in it that made my skin crawl. “You are frightened. It is entirely reasonable. I would not blame you for saying anything. But I have spent six years learning what your friend is, and I would like, if I may, to tell you a story. It is a short one. It will explain why you are in that chair.” He pulled up a metal stool and sat in front of me, close, knees almost touching. “You will forgive the intimacy. I find it easier to talk when I can see a face.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I know.” He folded his hands. “Nevertheless.”
Her name was Elena.
She was a pediatric nurse. He’d met her at Boston General in 1996, when he was thirty-one and a resident and unpardonably arrogant, and she’d told him in the second minute that he was holding a chart upside down. They were married in eleven months. They had no children; she’d wanted them, he had not, and he’d never forgiven himself for that. She kept a garden. She was allergic to all of it. She sang, dreadfully, in the shower.
“She used to say I had no imagination,” said Roake. “That I could only love things that had a diagnosis.”
He smiled. It was a gentle, broken thing.
Six years ago, in October, she’d said she wanted to go camping. He hated camping. They went anyway, to the Adirondacks, a little cabin at the end of a dirt road. On the third night, he’d woken at dawn and found the bed empty.
“I found her by the stream,” he said. “Two hundred yards from the cabin. She had gone to fetch water. She was lying on her back. Her eyes were open. Her throat had been opened, precisely, in two places, and she had been drained. Not torn. Not chewed. Drained. I have seen a thousand bodies, Mr. Pendleton. I have never seen one so clean.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The police said it was a bear. There were no tracks. I told them it was not a bear. They told me I was in shock.” He looked at his hands. “So I did what a scientist does. I looked for the mechanism.”
It had taken two years. He’d read everything. Medieval treatises, Balkan folklore, hospital records, the private papers of a dead priest in Vermont. He’d learned there was a whole hidden history, a silent parallel world of creatures who lived among us and fed on us and were never held to account. He had learned the rules. He’d learned they could be traced.
“And I learned,” he said, quietly, “that the one who took my wife was a woman named Marguerite Lacroix. She died in 2021. Someone else got there first.” His eyes were pale and distant. “So I have been searching ever since for the others.”
“The others didn’t do it.”
“No. But they could. “
I stared.
“That’s the thing, Mr. Pendleton. That is what I could not make anyone understand.” He leaned forward. “They are not sorry. They are not careful. They do not lie awake at night wondering whether tonight is the night they will lose control. They are apex predators. They live among us, and they choose, when they feel like it, who lives and who does not. It is a wonderful arrangement for them. It is a catastrophe for the rest of us.”
“That’s not him.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know him.”
“Do you?” He tilted his head. “He is eleven hundred years old, Mr. Pendleton. He has lived through more wars than you have had breakfasts. He has, I am quite sure, killed more people than he will admit.”
“He hasn’t.”
