The Melancholy of Sebastien Huxley

VI | In These Walls

          But then there was the question about what happened to Henry, Alucard's informant. He was a demon, so there was no way these undead animals could have made him sick and die. There was no sign of him around the estate, either. If there was a dead demon, Sebastien would have been able to tell before he'd even reached the house.

          "Hello?" Caleb drawled.

          Sebastien tutted as he drove out of the town and followed the long forest road. "We'll be fine. The raccoon that I suspect is responsible for Viktor's infection is dead-dead, remember?"

          "But what if there's more?"

          "Then I'll kill those, too. We know that wolfsbane kills them, so when we get to the house, we'll gather some up."

          Caleb shuffled around uncomfortably. "Okay, if you say so." Then, he opened his notebook and started flipping through it. "If we're gonna be trying to find where this disease originated, we're going to need to rule out a couple things."

          "Oh?" Sebastien grumbled.

          "Well, I was never able to find a necromancer, but I've only looked around town and not too far out in the woods. Now that we're working together, we can cover more ground. And since you said that groundskeeper man was the first to get sick, I suspect that if there is a necromancer, he or she might be out near the estate."

          "Right," Sebastien mumbled. But as he drove along the road which led to the estate, he glanced up at the sky. It was getting dark, so walking around in the woods at night probably wasn't the best idea. "We'll wait until tomorrow morning to start looking around. For now, I think we need to sit down and think. I also need to make a phone call." And then he remembered that he was supposed to call Mavis and Mathew to let them know he'd got there okay. "Two calls, actually."

          "Oh, okay. Well, good thing I brought all my notes, then."

          "Yeah. We'll grind the wolfsbane up, too."

          Caleb nodded, and then, they both fell silent.

          However, as he drove, Sebastien could see Caleb staring at him in the corner of his eye. "Stop staring at me," he snarled.

          "Can I ask you a question?" the kid requested.

          "No."

          "Are you a demon?"

          Sebastien sighed and glanced at him. "Am I?"

          "Well, I mean...you don't seem all that scared about getting sick—"

          "Neither do you, and you're human."

          "Oh, I'm scared shitless," he laughed. "But I'm trying to focus on getting answers so no one else suffers."

          Sebastien looked at him. "And why are you so dedicated?"

          Caleb adorned a sullen frown and looked down at his notebook. "My mother is sick. She was one of the first people to catch it. She was a nurse at the doctor practice, so they weren't prepared for whatever this is."

          "Oh. Sorry," Sebastien said as he started to feel a little guilty. He felt like he understood what Caleb was dealing with. After all, Clementine dealt with the same kind of pain and dedication back when they were working together to kill the Ravenblood at Aldergrove Academy.

          Perhaps he needed to stop being such an ass to this guy. Caleb was willingly going to help him get the answers he needed to deliver to Lord Caedis, and two pairs of hands were always better than one. Unless this guy got in the way...but he wasn't going to judge him before he'd seen him work.