Dance with the Devil

Chapter Fifteen

   I gasped and brought my hand to my mouth, he lived here, in this room. This was his bed, the Master Slayer’s.

   “And the stories of what happened here?” I asked shakily, remembering the thoughts I had of the manor when Luke had asked me if I was afraid to tread on its grounds. 

   “True I’m afraid,” the smile fell from his features, his expression now tinged with sadness, “all true.”

   My eyes roamed anxiously over his face, my heart clenching in my chest as I fought for the right words.

   But what could I say? I knew what it was like to have to watch as the life of someone you loved was stolen from you, and though unbearable, I only had to suffer that pain once. Not over and over as the stories of this cursed manor spoke of. I had lost a sister, a loved one true, but I knew it could not compare to that of the life of a spouse or child.

   “It was during a time when I was off duty from the ranks almost a hundred years ago. After Macario but before the girls, though it wasn’t long after that I found them,” he began before I could ask, his hand moving to push a stray curl from my face, “I had become bored of this life, wanting for just a moment to feel…human again, so I took a wife,” he smiled wistfully, “thinking a family was what I craved. She was a widow herself with two children of her late husband whom I took in as my own, but only after I disclosed everything to her. It didn’t bother her, not in the least what…my preferred diet was. She said it had nothing to do with the man I was.”

   I could certainly see that...now.

    “But I wanted, selfishly,” his brow pinched as he continued, “for one of my own from her. To hold a piece of myself in my arms, to see my own eyes staring back at me. I knew my chances were nearly impossible because of what I am but I had to try. And by some miracle, by some blessing of the fates we not only conceived but she held the baby to term,” he sighed, his eyes closing as he attempted to hide his pain from me, “but you know how that ended.”

   “They knew didn’t they, your servants, what you were?”

   “Yes,” he whispered.

   “And so they killed your child and wife, telling you it was a birthing accident?”

   “At the time I didn’t know, I wasn’t allowed in the room, but later…yes.”

   “And your second wife?”

   His eyes opened at my words but he cast his gaze to the side, away from me, “I thought I could save her the pain so I didn’t tell her of my true nature. But still she hung herself, because my servants thought she should know. They told her it was the demon inside me that killed her children before they could truly live.”

   I swallowed deeply, not needing to ask of his adopted daughter and son, I had all the answers I needed. Certainly they thought, as I would have, that the children had been tainted, led astray. He knew there was no saving his daughter, even if he turned her he knew they would find a way to take her from him. I would have. Why they let his son grow I could not be sure as that is something I would not have allowed. But he found his end too now didn’t he, they found a way to make him suffer a pain worse than death just as his father.

   I measured Harris for a moment, my gaze considering his forlorn profile. If the rest of the story was true, I wondered, then what of him taking his own life. He had already told me of his age, so surely if he had turned the gun on himself he would have survived…yes, there it was. Just above his ear was a patch of rough skin, the scar half obscured in his hair line, its pallor no different than the rest of the smooth skin on his face. He really had tried to end his life. I curled my fingers into my hand to keep from reaching for it, to feel the physical proof of his pain beneath my fingers.