“What if we get lost?” Marcus asked. “How will we find our way in the dark?”
“You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont said briskly. “You have nothing to fear from the night.”
During the day, Marcus and de Clermont took refuge in houses along the road whose doors opened without question when the chevalier appeared, or in caves tucked into the hillsides. The Indian warriors who traveled with them kept their distance from the farmhouses, but always rejoined them after the sun set.
Marcus’s body felt unwieldy, both oddly weak and strangely powerful, slow one moment and then quick the next. Sometimes he dropped things, and other times he crushed them with no more than a touch.
While they rested, de Clermont gave him a strong drink that had a medicinal, metallic tang. It was thick and sweet and tasted heavenly. Marcus felt saner and calmer after he had it, but his appetite for solid food did not return.
“You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont reminded him, as if this should mean something to him. “Remember what I told you at Yorktown? All you need to survive is blood—not meat or bread.”
Marcus dimly recalled de Clermont telling him that, but he also remembered there was some mention of never getting ill again, and it being difficult for him to die. And de Clermont had told him that he had been alive for more than a thousand years—which was preposterous. The man had a thick head of raven-colored hair and a smooth complexion.
“And you’re a wearh, too?” Marcus asked.
“Yes, Marcus,” de Clermont replied, “how else did you become one? I sired you. Don’t you remember agreeing to it, when I gave you the choice of living or dying?”
“And Cole—Russell—is a wearh as well, and that’s why he didn’t die at Bunker Hill?” Marcus kept at his efforts to assemble the events of the past week into something that made sense. No matter how hard he tried, the result was always something more fantastic than Robinson Crusoe.
They had reached the border between Pennsylvania and New York when Marcus’s powerful thirst gave way to different urges. The first was curiosity. The world seemed a brighter, richer place than it had before Yorktown. His eyesight was sharper, and scents and sounds made the world crackle with texture and life.
“What is this stuff?” Marcus asked, drinking deeply from the tankard that de Clermont offered to him. It was like nectar, fortifying and satisfying at once.
“Blood. And a bit of honey,” de Clermont replied.
Marcus spit it out in a violent stream of red. De Clermont cuffed him on the shoulder.
“Don’t be rude,” the chevalier said, his voice purring in his throat like a cat. “I won’t have my son behaving like an ungrateful lout.”
“You’re not my father.” Marcus swung at him, his arm whipping out. De Clermont blocked it easily, cradling Marcus’s hand in his own as if there was no force behind it.
“I am now, and you’ll do as I say.” De Clermont’s face was calm, his voice even. “You’ll never have the strength to beat me, Marcus. Don’t even try.”
But Marcus had grown up under another iron first and had no more intention of giving in to de Clermont than he had to Obadiah. In the following days, as they continued to travel farther north and deeper into the woods of New York, Marcus fought with de Clermont about everything, just because he could, just because it felt better to wrestle with him than to keep everything bottled up inside. Marcus now had three powerful desires: to drink, to know, and to fight.
“You cannot kill me, much as you might like to,” de Clermont said after a wrestling match over a rabbit left them both temporarily bloodied, the rabbit torn to pieces and Marcus’s arms—both of them—broken. “I told you that on the night you were made a wearh.”
Marcus didn’t have the courage to confess that he didn’t remember much about that night, and what he did remember made no sense.
De Clermont reset Marcus’s right wrist with the practiced touch of a skilled physician and surgeon.
“Your arm will heal in moments. My blood—your blood, now—won’t allow sickness or injury to take root in the body,” de Clermont explained. “Here. Give me your other arm.”
“I can do it myself.” Now that his right wrist was working properly again, Marcus pushed his left forearm back together. He could feel the bones fusing, his blood crawling with power. That sense that something was invading his body and taking it over reminded him of being inoculated. Marcus was thinking about what it might be in de Clermont’s blood that would make him immune to sickness or harm—when the chevalier asked the question that had hung between them, unanswered, since that night in Yorktown.