The Heads That Rolled by Lucille Moncrief

Author:Lucille Moncrief [Moncrief, Lucille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moncrief's
Published: 2018-10-24T23:00:00+00:00

Pierre swallowed hard in the daylight of his draper’s shoppe as he tried to push away the memory of that horrifying night—the night he learned his wife, and neither his son, were his own. Nor were they of God: disgusting, filthy fiends and creatures of some dark corners of the shrieking night. Pierre dared not think too long of what they were, and he rued the day France stopped hunting and cutting down witches.

But, to his estimable credit, Pierre Francois Quartermayns was a calculating and patient man. He’d strategically kept distance between himself and the two people he was tasked to provide for—the witch, and the fiend’s seed—for decades now. Although, even if they had been of a godly, human origin, Pierre Francois would have hardly been classified as a warm and loving father besides.

In the silence of his shoppe, Pierre bit the inside of his cheek and grimaced at the thought of what he’d sacrificed for those two ingrates—the inhuman liars—over the years. That boy, now a man, was nothing like the one he’d dared call father.

Pierre inhaled sharply. No, he’d never give his business to Sebastien. Although, he’d led him to believe that he’d never set him free from below his watchful gaze or from beneath his iron thumb, which was really just Pierre’s far-reaching purse strings.

While Pierre had withheld his approval for any trade or woman Sebastien wished to have for himself, Pierre had insisted, somewhat duplicitously, that Sebastien was required, obligated even, to take over the drapery business. Pierre would never give his blessing nor his financial backing to him otherwise.

Pierre, a cold man, was a liar as well. And his pathological myopathy, his ironclad self-preservation, kept him from seeing the evil in himself which he so often sniffed out like a crazed bloodhound in others.

Oh, it wasn’t because Pierre actually wanted to keep the business all in the "family." No, it was because he couldn’t stand to see that Sebastien happy. His grin was the same as that fiend that visited his whore of witch wife every full moon.

Pierre’s rage got the better of him for one moment, and he spat upon the floor of his beloved shoppe. His spittle slid and dripped down into an open whorl within the black walnut floors. Grimacing harder than before, he sighed. His jowls, even more generous than the night of that fateful discovery, quivered as he rubbed his eyes. Exhaustion came over him, for almost thirty years of bitter planning was about to culminate in the ultimate denouement at that evening’s dinner.

Pierre lifted his gaze from beneath his palm and glanced out the front windows of the shoppe as the marriage clock behind the clerk’s desk struck two. Only six more hours until he was rid of those two fools. His lips twitched, vacillating between a grin and a frown, as he fluffed the curls of his peruke sitting upon the faceless display head.

He’d learned of the terrible, awesome fate which befell most vampire halflings within the twilight of their adolescence by a delightful accident.

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