Redemption (18 page)

I’m still bitter but she seems nice enough, so I give it to her. She apologizes again before heading back inside the house.

“Let me drive you home,” Guillaume repeats.

I’m about to refuse him but I’m tired and I realize I can use this as an opportunity. “Fine, but you have to promise to answer some questions for me.”

He tilts his head when he looks at me. “So you’re ready to hear about it?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Finally,” he sighs.

27

Aude

It’s cold, but I can’t get myself to shiver, I can’t even get myself to move a hair. He feels the chill too, though, because he turns on the heat. I remain still and gather up the courage to ask him. The question will change everything. No, everything has already been changed. He’s not human, or if he is, he’s not the normal type of human. But then am I even human? If I’m to believe old man Robert, I’m some sort of half-Native shaman with an abundance of power.

Funny, since I’ve never felt quite so powerless before.

Still looking straight ahead, I can see him look at me from the corner of my eye. I’m not ready to meet his gaze. We drive in silence. The road spreads out ahead of us like a long black ribbon of asphalt. The trees on both side of the road are bare of leaves, looking like skeletons of themselves.

The stillness frays on my nerves. I have to ask.

“What was
that
about?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You spoke of being in Kahnawake with someone like me … ” I hesitate. It sounds crazy. “You met that old man’s grandfather.”

He flinches. Whatever it was he expected from me, this hadn’t been it. He doesn’t answer right away. This is where he’ll laugh at me for having an overactive imagination.

But he turns off the highway and my doubts veer in an entirely different direction. I’m dealing with secrets, impossible secrets. Who says he doesn’t guard them by death?

He parks on an empty street lined with old warehouses. I turn to face him. I have to see him, reassure myself that everything will be okay. But there is nothing in his appearance that draws out any sort of confidence. Is this how I’m going to die? My entire body shakes with fear and I try to get myself back under control.

“I can keep quiet. I can walk away, change schools even. You’d never have to see me again. I’ll disappear. I know how to keep secrets.”

“Good gracious! You think I’m going to harm you?”

Of course this is what I think. He either wants to hurt me, kill me, or scare me. There is no other reason for him to bring me here.

“Why … ” My voice is scratchy. I hate how weak I sound. I clear my throat. “Why would you stop here, in the middle of these abandoned buildings?”

There’s conflict in his eyes, maybe my fate isn’t already sealed.

“Because you asked a very difficult question to answer, and I think we’ll be having a very long conversation.” The truth of this isn’t likely. I can’t imagine a conversation that we couldn’t have in the car, on the highway, or parked on the side of a populated street. He wants to have a conversation? We’ll have one. At the very least, it will buy me time.

“What are you?” I ask.

He rests his forehead on the steering wheel and stares into his lap. I’m not sure if it makes me feel better that he doesn’t seem to look forward to whatever he has to do to me.

“Maybe it would be best to show you.”

He opens the door to leave the car and looks at me.

“Would you come with me?”

I shake my head “No.” My gut tells me I can trust him, and so did the shaman, but the facts are not in his favor. I’m not stupid. But I get out of the car because it will be easier to run away if I’m out in the open. I take my time following him to the chain-link fence. I look for a way to escape him.

He sighs. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m smarter than this. I don’t get myself in the types of situations I’ve been in these days. It’s stopping now. If you’re going to kill me, I’m not going to make it easy on you.” My voice breaks and it sounds like I’m on the verge of tears. I can’t be; I don’t cry.

“Do you think I would need to bring you into an abandoned building to kill you?”

“And this makes you less scary how?”

He laughs. Actually laughs at me. “You should know that you can trust me, Aude.”

“How can I trust you? I thought I’d known you, yet now I find out I’ve never known you at all.”

“You might not know what I am, but you know who I am. In the short amount of time since we’ve met, I’ve shared more of myself than I have to others in centuries.”

I stop walking. “Centuries?”

“About eight of them … ”

“I
can’t
believe that you’re eight hundred years old. It’s impossible.”

“Over eight hundred. And I think you do believe it, or you wouldn’t be trembling like this.”

I need to sit down. My stomach’s heaving and churning and I’m quickly losing my grip on reality. This can’t be real. I look around but quickly forget about sitting. “What are you?” I ask the question again, though I doubt I really want to know the answer.

“Come with me.” He motions to the building.

“No.” Is he insane?

He sighs and leans back against the fence. “Make yourself comfortable then, and I’ll start the story out here.”

I join him against the fence, keeping a few feet of distance between us, and slide down to sit on a cinder block. Talking is scary too, but I know I need the answers now. I can’t continue to pretend that my entire world hasn’t changed while I close my eyes and do my best to convince myself that everything will always stay the same.

Guillaume lights a cigarette.

“It was the middle of the thirteenth century and I was studying music at Notre Dame in Paris. Garnier was my best friend, even back then, but he was the type to always get himself into trouble. The funny thing is that it wasn’t until he tried to shape up and make a future for himself, that he stumbled into the biggest trouble. Or opportunity, as some would see it.”

He takes a drag on his cigarette and stares into the distance.

“Memory isn’t supposed to last that long, I guess, not even for us. It’s hard to remember sometimes. What I do remember are the things that were written in our family history journals, little else.

“I should understand your fear, I must have felt quite the same thing when I learned what Garnier had become involved with, but I don’t remember that part. I remember his employer’s daughter, Odette de Rouen, would come watch me practice on the organ. I was good even then. Great, some said. History remembers my peers and me. They refer to us as the Notre Dame School.

“She offered me immortality. The de Rouen family was rumored to be witches, and Garnier had already confirmed it for me, so I took her offer seriously. I declined.”

“But you became immortal, anyways,” I whisper.

He looked at me for the first time since he started his story and took a seat so he could talk to me at my level. “There was a lot of competition between the students and composers and I lost my temper when someone else passed my work off as his. I was sent away but I couldn’t face my parents, so instead I went to Garnier. I took the de Rouen’s offer.”

“What was the offer exactly? What did they make you?” Maybe he was just a human with a really long life. Yet something about the conversation I had overheard made me think otherwise.

“Would you please come with me?”

I nod and stand up.

“We need to get over this fence,” he says.

I begin to climb and feel Guillaume’s hands around my waist. He helps me up.

I wait for him to climb up next but he jumps, actually jumps, over the fence, landing neatly next to me. Normal people don’t jump over fences that are ten feet high. I don’t think this is an advantage that can be gained by simply being immortal.

I follow him into a large room, trailing a few paces behind, as if my hesitation could change the truth I would hear.

“Okay, turn around … ” he says.

“Turn around?”

“No, you’re right, that won’t work. You wouldn’t see me change then.”

“See you change?”

The fear that had faded away during the story is replaced by confusion and embarrassment. What if he’s crazy? It would explain why he believes me about the voices in my head. The problem is it wouldn’t explain the conversation I overheard and as far as I know, crazy people do not jump higher than non-crazies.

I walk to the corner of the room with him where a wooden crate lies against a corner. He pushes it away from the wall and walks behind it. It’s a large crate, reaching to his waist.

He strips. He actually takes his clothes off. I back up. I don’t think I want to know what’s happening, but at least he’s remaining hidden behind the crates.

I’m still debating on whether to stay or go when I swear I see the edges around Guillaume shimmer. I can’t turn away now. I watch transfixed and after some wavering, a huge shift happens and in that time, I could swear I see a large scaly lizardlike creature except nothing is in front of me. Not even Guillaume. There
is
something ahead of me but what I can see from behind the crate doesn’t make sense. I walk toward it. Hidden there is a stone creature. Similar to the weird lizardlike beast I thought I’d seen during the weird blurry transformation, but made out of stone.

I step toward it and pause, holding my hand over its head, and then I let it fall and touch the cold stone. The feeling reminds me of a giant rock that stood in a park I played in as a child.

I don’t know what I had expected, but this wasn’t it.

28

Guillaume

“Guil? Can that really be you?”

The only light came from boarded up windows and hit certain areas of the room like small dim spotlights. A thick coat of dust and grime covered everything. Her hand on my head was warmth against unmoving hard stone. So fragile next to what I was. She knelt in front of me and stared into my cold, stone eyes. I looked back into hers. Warm and brown, so alive. I saw the essence, too. It was much easier to see when I was in this form, but I’d always seen it in her. It was what had attracted me to her in the first place. I didn’t understand the implications of it, but I couldn’t concentrate. She brought her hands to my face and ran her finger along every line and crease, tilting her head as she examined me.

Years of exposure to the elements had made us impervious to a lot of sensation, but this one, the feeling of warm flesh on stone, was a rare one. It made me much more sensitive to her touch.

She stood up.

“Can you hear me? I think I have a few questions.” There was a nervous laugh in her voice.

I gathered the essence within me, and transformed back into my human form.

She let out a gasp and turned around. The transformation took a few seconds and I stood in front of her naked and laughing.

“Put some clothes on!” she said.

“Aye.” I felt in a higher humor than I had in years. I’d shown her what I really am and she didn’t reject me.

She tugged at a crate about ten feet away from mine. It didn’t budge.

“Can I ask for your help here, please? I have a feeling this is easy for you.”

I wasn’t finished dressing and only had my jeans back on at that point, but I walked over to where she stood. Our hands touched when I went to push the crate and in that fraction of a second, I felt her trembling.

I held her hand and waited until she faced me.

“Are you still scared?”

She nodded, but her eyes didn’t meet mine.

I dropped her hand.

“I’m sorry, I give up. I’ll drive you home.”

“Wait!” She reached for my hand again and this time our gazes did meet.

“Yes, I’m scared. This is crazy, Guil. I hear drumming and voices that are supposed to be my ancestors speaking to me. I have a clue as to who my father could be, something I’ve long given up on ever having. These two things alone are hard to process … but I think I did pretty well. I acted cool. Now you … well, you turned into a stone gargoyle in front of my eyes … yes, I’m frightened!”

I hadn’t expected the heartfelt speech. I freed myself from her hand and pushed the crate to where she wanted it; directly in front of mine. She climbed up on the box and a cloud of dust flew out, causing her to sneeze. I scolded myself for not having dusted it off as a real gentleman would. Not that Aude would expect me to act like one. I put on my shirt and sat on the box in front of her.

“So … ” she said. She bit at her lower lip.

“So … ”

“Is there a word for what you are? Are you referred to as a gargoyle?”

“Gargoyle,
gargouille, goji
—it’s all the same. Though technically, the term isn’t entirely accurate.”

“No?”

“Gargoyles spout water.” I grin at her.