“Are you all right?” asked Laurette.

Marion nodded. “Did you…did you know I wanted to leave?” Marion asked.

“No. I was worried because you didn’t come home. But I am glad you don’t want to stay here.”

“Laurette, I want my parents’ address,” said Marion. “You promised me if I asked…

Marion took out a small slip of paper and set it on a nearby barrel.

“They live in Dallas now. Your father has not changed. Neither of them has, from what Artiste has told me. I hope… I hope, cherie, whatever you decide to do, you do not go back to them.”

“My parents are hard people,” said Marion. “I know that. They were not kind to me. But they never lied to me, Laurette. Whatever awful things my father or mother said, it was the truth as they saw it.”

“As they saw it,” said Laurette. “And what do you consider the truth? How do you see us, now? As monsters? Devils? Should we be afraid?”

“Why would you be afraid?”

“Of being taken. Of being hanged or burned,” Laurette’s eyes filled with tears and her voice became rough. “I know about that Perez man, that fascist. I know he and Madame Abbot are frends. Perhaps the Generalissimo has brought it all into the modern age in Spain. Perhaps they have gas chambers and electric chairs for the likes of us.”

“No, no… I don’t… I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want that to happen at all, Laurette. I just… I’m so confused.”

Laurette let out a deep breath. “Marion, I am sorry. I am so sorry. I didn’t come here to berate you. I came here to ask for your forgiveness.”

“Please, stay with us. We love you. You may not believe that, but it is true. If you leave us, I will understand, but you have become part of us, and it will hurt. And if you do leave us, please, please, know that if you ever are in trouble, we would want to know. We would want to help.”

Marion shook her head. “Mrs. Abbot gave me a book today. It explained some things to me, things I didn’t understand. How could I trust my own feelings, my own eyes, if I came back? How could I trust any of you?”

“That is a fair question,” Laurette said. “All I can say is this…We could have confined you. We could have, with little effort, prevented you from leaving this morning. We did not.”

Laurette jerked her head towards Spotswood. “Madame Abbot set a guard on you. No, the doors were not locked, but do you think that man would have let you leave? What she could do, she did. She is like that. Your parents? No, they did not lie. But they beat you. Because they could. They are like that.” She shrugged, her face sad. “It is a little thing, a paltry thing, but I believe it is worth considering.”

“There is something else,” Laurette said. “Something you need to know before you make your decision.”

“About the family?” asked Marion.

“About you. I have known for several days now. I believe your father-in-law suspects, though he hasn’t said anything about it. Surely you have guessed?”

Marion looked at her, puzzled.

“You are pregnant,” said Laurette.

Greg felt like brooding over a drink. It wasn’t a habit he considered healthy — alcohol, for him, was for getting giddy at parties and pushing along interesting late-night conversations, but tonight he’d decided some gloomy introspection was warranted.

So he mixed himself a Gin Rickey and settled on one of Tel’s barstools. He wanted his brother back, the unbroken, wicked Telesphore whom Gregoire had so often longed to strangle.

Things were a little better. After he’d read three of Lamont’s letters, Tel’s voice had seemed stronger and his hands trembled less. It was, Greg thought, as though he could see the brother he’d known walking towards him through a mist, his outlines becoming more defined, his face more familiar. By the time Tel lowered the page he was reading, cleared his throat, and said, “So…” he was at least recognizeable again, if not entirely out of the fog.

But he was apologetic. Humble. “That’s all I’ll do now,” Tel had said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for losing my temper and waving my arms. I..I just wanted to share with you…” his eyes moved from one person to another, searching for understanding. “I know I went on for a while…”

“You know what you must do now, don’t you Tel?” Artiste’s voice had been light, casual, one man to another offering, not comfort, but a helpful suggestion. “You must get all those letters in order. They must be preserved.”

“Yes,” said Tel. “Yes, of course.” And then he’d smiled and turned towards his desk and began gathering up the papers, pushing them into a still slightly ragged stack.

Gregoire heard a brisk step. Laurette was back. “Is drinking alone a habit you’ve acquired on the mainland?” she asked quietly.

He lowered his glass. “No, sister. I assure you, I feel no need for solitary tippling anywhere but here in the land of my childhood. ”

“Marion is back.”

Greg wasn’t sure whether to be glad about that or not, so he simply nodded and said, “That’s nice.”

“She wants to talk to you,” said Laurette. “Alone.”

“Me?”

“Yes. She’s up in Lamont’s room.”

“But why me?”

“She says she thinks you’ll be honest with her.”

“I can only tell you, Greg said, “what my brother told me on Swede’s Hill that night. “Two men. First one, then the other. Tel said they were evil men, and he doesn’t use that word lightly.”

“But one came looking for the other,” said Marion. “After your brother…” She trailed off.

“Had erased him. Yes, that’s what Tel told me.” Greg shrugged. “Apparently, the memory of someone obliterated that way can remain if love is strong enough. Or perhaps it takes a certain kind of love. Who knows? Even evil men can love. That part was not written down. There’s a lot that is left out of that book Kristal Abbot showed you.”

That had been most of their conversation so far — what was not in the book. She knew the Story of the Two Travellers, but not the Story of the Treasured Daughter. She knew about the Cats Paw Spell, but not about its difficulty and rarity. She knew about Talent, but not about its limits, the need to use it judiciously. Greg had tried to explain it all to her.

Now they had reached a patch of silence, and Greg sensed uneasily that they were about to enter more personal territory.

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.

“Ah.” So that was why she came back.

“Will my child… my my baby be like you?” she asked.

“Perhaps, but not likely. Talent is a recessive trait. Neither of you have it, so I doubt it will affect the child. Chances are, your baby will be normal.”

“But Leon is not normal.”

“No. He is not. Leon is a Lycanthrope. What we call a Loup Garou.”

“In that book,” she said, “I saw a picture. It was a wolf standing upright like a man, talking and gesturing. The writer said the village had harbored a werewolf.”

“That would be old Monsieur Courtemanche. A respected citizen and the father of many sons who grew into fine men. I have no memory of our village, but I’ll tell you know what I’ve been told:”

The story is, many, many, many years ago, there was an old man named Augustin Courtemanche.

He was an eccentric fellow, solitary and bad tempered. One afternoon he was wandering in the countryside outside the village in search of mushrooms perhaps, or minerals, when he came across what he at first took to be a small stray dog.

Then he thought, no, it is a male child so filthy, so neglected that its skin is black.

Then it raised its head to look at him, and he realized what he was seeing.

He was at first frightened, expected the creature to run at him. For a moment they were both frozen, looking at each other.

Then, to his surprise, it rose and walked over to Courtemanche like any lost, trusting child who sees an adult and hopes for rescue.

“Like Silas Marner, yes? An angry, bitter old man is redeemed by a stray child. I don’t know whether old Augustin took the boy’s hand and led him to the village, or whether he simply allowed the kid to follow him back. By the time they reached Fourche, the fur had fallen away to reveal a naked, speechless, rather hairy little boy standing in a curious circle of villagers.”

“There was some debate about what to do with him. He was, after all, not Talented. Loup Garou never are. But the creature plainly had been abandoned, and allowing him to run loose in the countryside would be dangerous. If he survived and killed someone in the vicinity, Fourche would likely be blamed, as it always was when anything at all went wrong in the area. It was reasoned that the child, whom old Augustin named Emeric, was a supernatural creature, and therefore could remain in Fourche.

So Emeric Courtemanche, adopted son of Augustin Courtemanche, became a villager.

His speech returned, though he always claimed he could not remember where he had come from. I know nothing of how he was raised by Augustin. I do know the old man was supposed to have a savage temper, and perhaps that is what young Emeric needed because he was, by every account, bright, hardworking, and usually obedient. The rougher boys in the village loved playing with him.

And he was a good son to old Courtemanche.

He grew up. He prospered. He married and had five sons of his own.

Augustin, Cyril, Olivier, Thiern, and Aubert. Of those sons, none had Talent. One, Theirn, had his father’s affliction. He died at twenty, the story goes, from a surfeit of raw venison and honey.”

“But I thought werewolves could only be killed with silver bullets.”

Gregoire smiled.

“Silver is certainly poisonous to them, and Lycanthropes are pretty hard to kill, but yes, apparently they can die from other things. Like indigestion.”

“There isn’t much more to tell except that Emeric outlived his wife and all his children, becoming in the meantime a sort of pillar of the community.”

“The name carried weight in Fourche. All four of his surviving sons were big noises in the village. There was always at least one Courtemanche on the Council even though the Talent among his descendants was naturally weak. I can remember my parents talking about seeing old Courtemanche in conversation one afternoon with one of the other village elders.”

He was ancient by then, but his fur was still black and he had a red mane. My father said the old fellow was more comfortable by that time in his wolfish form. Felt younger, Courtemanche was supposed to have said.”

“In any event, he died one night in his sleep, to nobody’s surprise, since he’d grown quite frail and feeble by then, even while he was furred. Telesphore can remember the funeral, one of the biggest and most elaborate in village memory.”

“So my baby…”

“…Could be like Leon. A Loup Garou. Yes, but remember only one in five of the Courtemanche boys were. Maybe. Likely not. But still…”

Marion thought, resting one hand gently on her belly.

Greg cleared his throat. “Marion, I need to ask you something. When you talked to Mrs Abbot, what did you tell her?”

Marion looked at him. “I told her what I heard last night. What I saw.” Her eyes widened slightly and she looked stricken. “She knows you are here, Mr. Duday. I told her. I told her how you just appeared. And she told me about a priest on the island. Father Perez. She said he knew Godly men and that they would… they would…”

She looked down again. “They would make you go away. Disappear. All of you.”

For a moment, Greg couldn’t speak.

“Does Laurette know this?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse.

“I told her. Mr. Duday, I am sorry. I was frightened, that’s all I can say.”

He was shaking his head, as if he’d heard something he couldn’t quite believe. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“That Mrs. Abbot, she told me all sorts of things — She said Papa Duday was a blackmailer, and that he and Laurette, they took children and they…they used them for their potions. She said that you beat your wife, and she died young, made it sound like you’d killed her.”

She stopped talking. Gregoire realized she was waiting for him to answer.

“Yes. My brother is a blackmailer in that he uses the information he gathers on powerful people for leverage. Mrs. Abbot does the same. She hates Tel because she considers him competition.”

“Yes. He and my sister make potions. They’ve always done that. Sometimes they share recipes. But no, neither of them would ever harm a child. Tel does magic tricks for them at birthday parties and… Dear God, girl, Laurette would sooner set herself afire. At most she might get a little boy or girl to spit into a cup for a fertility potion.

“My wife and I were like any other married couple. We sometimes quarrelled.

But it would never, in ten centuries, have occurred to me to strike her.

And it always ended in love.

“She died from the flu in 1918. She was 46.

And yes.”

“That is young.”