Raised By Wolves 1 - Brethren (90 page)

I retrieved the salve he liked from our bags, and began to kiss and caress him with ever increasing passion. Always in the back of my mind was the thought that perhaps, now that it had been awakened, his manhood would rise to my ministrations. It did not.

When I had touched everything I could reach while he was upon his back, I began to see to myself and slid against him. He stopped me with hands on my hips and bade me with gentle pushes to lift off of him. I complied reluctantly and he rolled onto his belly. He clutched at the bed clothes, hugging them under him, and spread his legs enough to make his offer very clear. My heart stumbled in its racing.

With trembling fingers, I rubbed the salve onto the small of his back and his buttocks. His breathing was very shallow; and curiously, I could see the strain of his trying to relax. I ran my thumb over his entry, and he twitched at the new sensation. I was so overcome with lust it was difficult to think clearly; but there was a persistent thought that I could not hurt him. If I hurt him now, it would be a thousandfold more difficult to induce him to let me do it again; and after sampling this new pleasure my desire would be a thousandfold greater. I had to progress slowly and carefully, despite my aching cock and the blood pounding in my ears.

“Will,” he whispered.

With fingers still teasing him, I leaned closer to listen.

“Do it,” he said. “It is all right. I want this.”

“I know,” I breathed in his ear. “But have patience. I do not wish to hurt you.”

He shook his head. “It is all right. I want it to hurt.”

I took a deep breath to refute him; and then I realized what he said.

He would have been kinder to hit me with a bucket of ice water, as the surprise would have been less. I was off him and at the window, before the anger hit in a great wave of red that nearly left me blind. How could he? How could he say such a thing? I was possessed of an urge to hurt him, but not in that way.

“Will?” he hissed. He said my name several times, and I finally turned to look at him. I was afraid he would come to me, and I did not know what I would do. He was regarding me over the small dune of the bedclothes with frightened and curious eyes.

“What is it?”

“That you owe me an apology for,” I growled.

“What is… What did I do?”

“How dare you? I will not be the instrument of your self-castigation and guilt!”

His eyes widened in surprise, and then he frowned in consternation; and I was forced to admit that perhaps he had not realized. For some reason, this only made me angrier, though I thought that was not possible. As a result, I felt compelled to explain.

“I love you. I would never hurt you. Ever. For you to ask me, especially…” The words left me, and I was only able to flounder in my rage and pain. I sank down the wall with a groan of frustration.

“I did not…. That was not my…” He sighed heavily.

I looked to him. He had rolled onto his side and clutched the bedclothes to him, so that he was wrapped about the ball of them at his belly.

“Perhaps it was,” he whispered so softly I had to strain to hear him.

“I wanted,” he continued, “you to make it go away. You always do.

You eclipse all in that fashion at times. This thing… This knowledge, it haunts my mind. It is everywhere. I am terrified of it. I wanted… Tonight it was not enough. Even your touch could not take my mind from it.

I wanted more… sensation. I wanted pain. And I suppose it is as you said. I feel I deserve the pain. And I think I wished for the other thing you talked of once, for the feeling of submission. I wanted to belong to you. I want to be… Will, I feel you are the only chance for redemption I possess.”

My anger could barely hold in the face of his truth. I clung to the anger anyway. I could not give up on it so easily. The anger felt good. It felt powerful. It drove the fear into the shadows. He could not hurt me if I was in the clutches of anger greater than his madness.

I did not question my reasoning. I let the rage tear through me. I roared with frustration and pounced upon the bed, startling him into casting about for a weapon, his eyes narrowed with the need to fight.

“I thought you wanted me to hurt you,” I said in English, with a voice I barely recognized as my own.

His eyes blazed with defiance for a moment; and then it left him. All the tension left him. He nodded almost imperceptibly, and he slumped back onto his side clutching the bedclothes. He closed his eyes.

I crouched over him, trembling with an overabundance of emotion.

He had surrendered. I could indeed do whatever I wished. I gazed upon his ravaged body, and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

He had done this before. When faced with his father’s rage, he had simply submitted. He had not fought. I had wondered at that, as I could not believe he would have been so easily taken and strung up for the beating with so little other damage. I had assumed he had been struck on the head in some fashion to render him unconscious. But no, he had surrendered.

If he could force himself to stand in harm’s way, then he could force himself to do other things as well. I was still angry enough not to fear him; and now I understood that, too. This was the only way. We had to be free of this thing hanging in his mind. If I sympathized with him and felt his pain I could not help him. I had to be strong.

I pushed him on his back and sat astride him.

“Look at me,” I said in English. His eyes opened obediently. “This ends tonight.”

He recoiled and started to reach for me, only to stop himself.

“Not us,” I spat. “This thing, this incident, the event that haunts you. We will drag it into the light and beat it to death.”

I leaned forward with hands braced on either side of his shoulders, and held his eyes with my own. “Let us start at the beginning. Why did you go home? You were living at the monastery, correct?”

He nodded.

“It was near Christmas? Did you always go home at Christmas?”

“Non.”

“Then why this time?”

“I do not…” he said in French.

“Aye, you do. Think. Remember.”

He frowned, but it was at his memories and not me.

“There was a letter,” he said in English. He nodded to himself and continued in my language, “She wrote me. She asked me to come home. She was ill. She was always sickly, but she had contracted consumption. There were flecks of blood on the parchment. She jested that she could have signed her name with it. She was weak, though.

They did not give her long, and she wanted to see me before she passed.

I did not believe it. She had always recovered before. Yet I went.”

He closed his eyes and battled the remembered pain; I battled the urge to hold him.

“What happened when you got home?” I asked as coldly as I could manage.

“I saw her. She was so frail. Like a bird. She could not lift her head from the pillows. They had her propped up, with her hair spread all about. They had been bleeding her, again and again, and the cuts on her arm were the only color she had. Even her eyes and hair were pale and drained. Her skin was so thin you could see the vessels, and it was as white as the bedclothes. She was in such pain. She said sometimes every breath was agony, and so they gave her laudanum.

“She was happy to see me,” he nodded. “They would not let me stay long. I promised her I would sneak in and see her later. There was a secret door in the wall of her bedchamber.

“My father had returned from hunting, and we ate together that evening. It was one of the few times I ever shared his table. He asked me a great many things about the monastery, and it was a pleasant conversation. I told him I wished to become a monk. I was afraid he would be angry, but he was not. We even discussed whether or not I had inherited my mother’s madness, and I told him I feared I had. He broached it gently, but he explained that he did not want me to inherit from him; and if I would be happy as a monk, that would be the best for all. I agreed and said I would sign papers to that effect. He had married again after my mother’s death, and his new wife gave him three children. Two were healthy boys. So he had an heir. I asked if I could gain some form of stipend to help the monastery, and he agreed to a handsome sum. I was very pleased with the outcome of that meeting.”

He frowned. “I felt at peace. Then I returned to my sister. The nurses were sleeping in the anteroom, and we were alone. I joined her in the bed, as we had done as children. We talked about death and how ready she felt she was, and how she was tired of the lingering pain. And yet she was sad that she had never had a chance to live. I told her of what I had seen since last we had been together. She told me of the books she had read.”

“She had a coughing spasm of such severity I thought I should call the nurse, but she told me where the laudanum was instead; and I gave her some, and tried some myself, as she said it made pain of the heart recede as well. Then she asked me….”

He lay silent beneath me with his eyes tightly closed, though it did little to keep the tears from leaking from them. Mine were the same even though they were open. The anger had deserted me, but as I knew what he would say next, I pressed on despite the sick feeling in my gut.

“What did she ask?”

He shook his head. I grasped his shoulders and shook him firmly but gently. His eyes opened.

“She… did not wish to die a virgin.”

I caressed his cheek. “And you could deny her nothing.”

“She was the only one who ever loved me, Will, the only one who ever understood. And I had been sent away and we had been separated after… my mother’s death. She had been left alone, getting sicker and sicker, while I had been fighting my way in and out of all those schools.”

“So you lay with her.”

He nodded. “I knew it was wrong.”

“But you meant well. And then she died?” I asked.

He shuddered and clutched at me.

“How did she die?” I asked.

“Even you cannot love me…” he whispered.

I knew. “You gave her peace, did you not?”

He was sobbing, and alternately pounding on me feebly and clutching at me. “I had never… It was easy. The knife slipped right in.

And she smiled. She smiled and said thank you. And then she left me.

She was gone. I felt her soul depart. There was blood. I did not think she had that much blood left in her. And I held her, and she got cold. And then… And then they found me in the morning. And… And… Will. Non.

Do not make me remember any more.”

I knew what happened next. We both did. I held him and let him cry.

“I still love you,” I murmured in French. “You were a good brother.

You did nothing wrong. I am sure that if she realized the pain it would cause you, she would not have asked what she did of you. I hope I have the strength to do what you did, if the need ever arose with someone I love as much as you did her.” Of course, there was only one person I had ever loved that much, and I was holding him.

He let me calm him. Eventually he slept from exhaustion. I did not sleep for quite a while. When finally I drifted off, I dreamt of waking to find him dead in my arms in a spreading pool of blood. I woke abruptly, and spent the rest of the night sitting with my back to the headboards and his head in my lap.

He found me thus when he awoke. He regarded me with sleepy yet curious eyes, until memory of the night’s events returned; and he became sad.

“Have you slept at all?”

“I dreamt poorly,” I whispered.

He sat beside me and took my hand. Neither of us spoke for a time.

Distantly we could hear the house stirring below.

“I feel as if we have completed some fearsome journey,” I said.

“Oui,” he said. “And I feel peace, but it is not the peace I expected.”

“You would not wish for death, would you?” I asked.

He regarded me somberly, and finally shook his head. “I do not want to die, not now. What would be the gain in it? I did then.”

I gave a bemused snort. “Much as I feel about Shane, I suppose.

Why kill him now if I did not then? Not that our tragedies are equal in any way or similar, yet…”

His fingers covered my lips. “Our tragedies were similar in that we were hurt. That is all that matters.”

I thought on it, and knew I did not wish to think on it further; nor did we have to, for now. I smiled. I rubbed his hair and eased over him to leave the bed.

“We should be up. I feel we need to breathe in the breeze and see sunlight and… relieve ourselves and eat, and…”

“Not dwell on anything of merit,” he supplied.

“Just so. There is much to be harvested from last night, but not now, not on a full bladder and empty stomach, and me with no sleep.”

He smiled and joined me in dressing and gathering our gear. We found the boy and inquired of food. He led us to the dining room, and shortly the Negress provided us with a sumptuous meal of bacon and eggs – and to my amazement, toast with butter and jam. I marveled on this last, and took great delight in savoring leavened wheat, as I had not tasted its like in a good eight months.

Our host and hostess had not yet appeared, and we ate alone. I was relieved in this, as I was beginning to feel positively cheerful; and I did not relish discussing matters of Gaston’s mental state with Doucette or having to negotiate any manner of social relations with anyone at all other than my matelot.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Relieved.” He paused and considered his bacon. “In that I now know, not in that….” He sighed. “I am not free of it, Will. It lurks and threatens to overwhelm me, and I know not if I should attempt to ignore it or immerse myself in it until I drown or learn to swim. Yet at the moment I feel too tired to mount the effort of the latter or manage the former.”

“Then you shall do neither and we will go and… see Cayonne. You can show me the sights. And we can inquire as to how things go with our wolves and the others. And in all make a busy day of it.”

“I was to speak with Doucette this morning,” he stated with hopeful curiosity, as if asking that I should produce an escape from that as well.