“Giving this boy a second chance,” answered de Clermont.
“You have a war to finish!” Russell said.
“Cornwallis won’t be in any rush to agree to the terms of surrender. Besides, I have to collect the mail,” de Clermont said.
Marcus finally understood why the colonial mail service was so expensive and unreliable: It was run by devils and dead men. He laughed at the image of Beelzebub, mounted on a black horse, carrying a sack of post. But the mirth split his head in two like a rotten apple, and his mouth filled with the bitter tang of blood.
Something had hemorrhaged.
“No more.” For Marcus, those three words encapsulated a lifetime of disappointment and broken promises.
“War is a hellishly difficult time to become a wearh, Matthew,” Russell said, worried. “Are you sure?”
Now Russell was asking questions, too.
“Yes,” Marcus and de Clermont said at the same time.
A sudden, searing pain at his neck told Marcus that his carotid artery had ruptured. It was too late. He would surely die now, and there was nothing that anyone could do for him.
With a deep, rattling breath, Marcus gave up the ghost trapped in his body.
Hell, he discovered, was strangely cold now that his soul had flown. There was none of the fire and brimstone Reverend Hopkins had promised, and the heat of his fever was gone, too. Everything was icy and still. There was no screaming, or howls of pain, but only a slow, stammering drumbeat.
Then that faded, too.
Marcus swallowed.
When he did, there a sudden cacophony of sound louder than Washington’s band. Crickets trilled, owls bugled. The limbs of the trees beat out a rat-a-tat-tat.
“Christ, no,” de Clermont murmured.
Marcus fell from a height and landed with a thud. His skin prickled with awareness, the night air and the rush of the wind sending every hair on his head aloft, every hair on his neck rising along with it.
“What is it, Matthew? What did you see?” Russell asked.
The sound of Russell’s voice prompted images to flash through Marcus’s mind as though they were printed on Gerty’s deck of cards and she was shuffling through them at lightning speed. He seemed to be looking out at the world through a different set of eyes, eyes that saw everything in crisp detail. At first, the images were of John Russell.
John Russell in a dark tunic, his expression bitter and hard.
A sword slicing into John Russell’s neck, through a chink in plates of armor—a death blow.
John Russell sitting, hale and hearty, at a table in a dark tavern, a woman on his knee.
John Russell taking blood from a woman’s arm—drinking it, devouring it. And the woman liked it. She cried out in ecstasy, her fingers working between her legs as Russell fed.
“His family.” De Clermont’s voice sounded like broken glass, jagged in Marcus’s newly sensitive ears.
At the word “family,” the flood of images twisted and turned direction.
A golden-haired woman.
A mountain of a man with critical eyes.
A pale, slender creature with a baby in her arms.
The dark glance of a woman in yellow, her eyes hectic and wandering.
A gentle man who reclined in the eyes of another man—this one dark and handsome.
An old woman with a round, creased face and a kind expression of welcome.
Family.
“His father.” Hands took Marcus by the arms and grasped them so hard that he feared his bones might snap.
Father. This time the word shaped the images that followed into a story.
Matthew de Clermont, his hands holding a chisel and hammer, his clothes stained with sweat and covered in gray dust, walking home on a summer night, met on the way by the same woman Marcus had seen before, the one with the child in her arms.
Matthew de Clermont, leaning on a shovel’s handle, face damp with effort or tears, his expression bleak, staring into a hole that contained two bodies.
Matthew de Clermont falling to a stone floor.
Matthew de Clermont, covered in blood and gore, exhausted and kneeling.
Matthew de Clermont fighting with a hard-faced young man not much older than Marcus, who gave off an air of bitter malevolence.
“I know why MacNeil changed his name,” de Clermont said. “He killed his own father.”
* * *
—
FROM THAT POINT on they were constantly moving, and always at night. Marcus’s delirium gave way to a desperate thirst that nothing would quench. His fever abated, but his mind was still addled and restless. Marcus’s life became a patchwork quilt of jagged impressions and conversations stitched together with bloodred thread. Russell left them to return to the armies at Yorktown. De Clermont’s Indian friends led Marcus and Matthew along paths no wider than a deer trail and impossible to follow unless you knew the subtle signs that marked the way.