“Did you kill your father because he beat you?” de Clermont asked. “I saw what he did. It was in your blood, when I took it at Yorktown. He beat your mother, too. But not your sister.”
But Marcus didn’t want to think of his mother and Patience. He didn’t want to think of Hadley, or Obadiah, or life before. He had killed his father but had always retained a small hope that he might return home again. Now that he drank blood, he knew that was out of the question. He was no better than a ravening wolf.
“Go fuck yourself,” Marcus snarled.
De Clermont rose to his feet without a word and stalked off into the darkness. He didn’t return until the sun rose. De Clermont brought him a small deer, and Marcus fed on it, better able to stomach the blood of a four-legged creature than another person.
Finally, Marcus and de Clermont reached the hills and valleys of a part of New York that Marcus had never seen before—far north, almost into Canada. It was there that they took shelter with the Oneida. Marcus recalled the spring of 1778, at Valley Forge, when news had swept through camp that the Marquis de Lafayette and his French companions had brought a troop of Oneida allies to fight the British. As the Indians who had guided them here were welcomed home by friends and family, Marcus realized that the Oneida had been ensuring their safety.
In New York, Marcus was at last allowed to hunt. He found relief running after deer and game, and pleasure in taking their blood. De Clermont also encouraged him to compete with the young warriors. Marcus might be fast and impervious to injury, but he was no match for the Oneida when it came to tracking animals in the forest. Next to them, Marcus felt clumsy and foolish.
“He has much to learn,” de Clermont apologized to a battle-scarred elder who was watching Marcus’s hapless attempts to trap a duck with ill-concealed scorn.
“He needs time,” the elder replied. “And as he is your son, Dagoweyent, he will have plenty of that.”
* * *
—
THE PUNISHING REGIMENS MARCUS WENT through with the other young men of the tribe did take some of the fight out of him. Marcus wanted to sleep but couldn’t seem to shut his eyes and rest. He still didn’t fully understand what had happened to him. How had he survived the fever? And why was he now so strong and fast?
De Clermont kept repeating the same information over and over again—that Marcus would heal from almost any wound, that he would be difficult to kill, that he would never be ill another day in his life, that his senses were now far beyond what most humans enjoyed, that he was a wearh—but there was something missing in the account, some larger perspective that would explain how all this could be true.
It was the hunting—not the fighting or the questions or even the drinking of blood—that finally brought the fact that he was no longer human home to Marcus. Every day and every night, de Clermont took Marcus hunting. They tracked deer at first, then moved on to other prey. Ducks and wild birds were difficult to capture, and contained only a small amount of the precious blood that kept Marcus alive. Boars and bears were rare, and their size and drive to survive made them formidable opponents.
De Clermont would not let Marcus hunt with a gun, or even a bow and arrow.
“You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont said once more. “You need to run your prey down, catch it with your wits and your hands, best it, and feed. Guns and arrows are for warmbloods.”
“Warmbloods?” Here was another new term.
“Humans. Witches. Daemons,” de Clermont explained. “Lesser creatures. You will need human blood to survive, now that you are growing and developing. But it’s not time to take it—yet. As for the witches and daemons, their blood is forbidden. A witch’s blood will eat away at your veins, and the blood of daemons will sour your brain.”
“Witches?” Marcus thought of Mary Webster. Had those old legends in Hadley been true after all? “How will I recognize them?”
“They smell.” De Clermont’s nose flared in distaste. “Don’t worry. They fear us and stay away.”
Once Marcus could bring down a deer quickly and feed from it without tearing the animal apart, they left the Oneida and traveled east. Along the route they met with fleeing soldiers, some wounded and others perfectly hearty. Some were British soldiers running away from the war. Others were Loyalists trying to escape into Canada and freedom now that they could see which way the fight would end. Many more were Continental soldiers who had grown weary of waiting for a formal declaration of peace and decided to go home to their farms and families.