Nocturne by Louise Cooper

Author:Louise Cooper [Louise Cooper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

•CHAPTER•XI•

Forth straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. His face was the color of clay and his eyes haunted as, unsteadily, he returned to where Indigo stood a few paces away.

“I’m sorry.” He spoke gruffly, embarrassed and angry with himself for the lapse. Indigo sympathized, though she knew he wouldn’t appreciate her saying so: she had seen far worse sights than the woman’s disintegrating corpse, but for Forth the shock had been more than his stomach could bear.

She looked at the small, pitiful heap of pale dust which was all that remained of the Bruhome victim, the spark of life sucked from her as the physical flesh and blood and sinew had been drained away. Devoured, gone. And the ugly correspondence with the withering crops was final confirmation of Indigo’s belief about the demon’s nature. It was a vampire. In the real world, such legends were rife; creatures of the night, drinking blood, sucking out the lives of others to sustain their own unnatural existence. But this vampiric force drank far more than blood; it took everything. Sap, flesh, even will, until there was nothing more left for it to feed on.

Forth said suddenly, “Did you hear what she said?”

“What?” Indigo had been wrapped in her ugly thoughts, and didn’t fully take in his words.

Forth hunched his shoulders and forced himself to look down at the dust. “Just before she ...” he swallowed, “before it happened, she saw something; a vision of some kind. And she said ‘So beautiful, and so sad.’ ” He looked up at Indigo. “The day Chari took the sickness, Cour told me the last thing she said before she fell to it. You were there: do you remember?”

So sad. Memory slid into place, and Indigo recalled the wonder and pity in Chari’s voice as she’d uttered those words. And at the pool, Esty’s soft exclamation as she’d gazed into the reflected face of the denizen of the garden. So beautiful, and so sad. A heartrending sorrow that wrung pity from all who encountered it. Was that the key to the demon’s hold over its victims—was that the lure that drew them so willingly to the sacrifice?

Quickly, she looked to where the dead woman had pointed. Whatever the poor creature had seen, it had been revealed to her only at the moment of death, a lifting of the veil and a promise of paradise beyond. For a final instant she had believed in that paradise, and because of that belief the vision had been real, for her will had made it so.

Her will. Indigo raised her own left hand and studied it. There was no trace of any scar where the fire had burned her: she had willed it away, refused to believe that she was burned, and—perhaps because the pain gave her an extra incentive-belief had become reality.

“Indigo?” Forth said, his voice a little querulous. “What are you thinking? You haven’t answered me.”

She pointed, as the dead woman had done, across the moor.

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